Soquili TG - A new collaborative font project.

[Gare]

This has little to do with the typeface at the moment, but as Rik has requested, here's what one needs to create a glyph in a typeface:

• I realize it's hard to count, but ideally, a glyph should have no more than 200 control points. More, and it just slows the user down when they type with it. Understand that fonts are little runtime programs and the operating system needs to run the fonts.

• A glyph should be one shape, not two, not groups of shapes. You'd use the Shapes>Combine Shapes menu item.

• Lines aren't valid. All areas in a gylph have to be a shape, so if you designed a glyph with lines, you need to Convert line to Shape.

• Color makes no difference. I'll take a brown or a red glyph. The black you see when you type is the shape and white is clear, the absence of a shape in any given area.

I think those are the "biggies". If there are minor problems, I can fix them when I compile the font.

You know, those basketweave patterns looked quite handsome and would be useful in certain design situations. If I had the time, I'd play with the patterns, and see if there was an ideal style that lent itself to a glyph in a typeface. I've seen Rococo, Venetian, French-inspired from Art Nouveau, but I've never seen a Native American pattern glyph. I'm certain the Cherokee Nation has produced some visually stunning pattern work.

-g

[zaphodeist]

I don't know whether you've seen the Cherokee Font - expect you have. I remember Bill posting something about this a couple of years ago.

[Gare]

I myself have never seen it before John posted the link; thank you, John. But I recommend that we don't go anywhere near an actual tribal alphabet to honor Bill, because we'd need to research the context of not only the glyphs, but also the native language. Here's an example of the Digohweli typeface; I've entered some characters from the Unicode extended range. They are cast in a Roman style, but the non-English characters are wonderfully artistic and remind me a little of Saxon runes and alchemy symbols.



No, I feel strongly that to honor Bill Taylor with a font that represents some of his heritage, we need to go symbolic, generalizing what we present, and proceed with a hunility based on the fact that none of us will really understand what was in Bill's mind and spirit any better than we did the day he passed on.

My Best,

Gary

[Gare]

Barbara had an excellent idea for creating and dedicating a typeface to Bill Taylor’s memory.

She’s thinking outside of the box.

Instead of patterns or Cherokee glyphs…Bill’s nym on tg is “Soquili”…”horse”.

One of the most famous series of horse pictures is Edward Muybridge’s motion study of a jockey riding a horse. The images are Public Domain (this study is over 100 years old, 1878), and what I did with this animated GIF is just take the guy off the horse. I think the imagery itself has a sort of majesty and magic, a fitting dedication, I feel.



So what about we re-render this motion study as vector art, and make each frame into a font character? Make the mane flowing, remove the saddle, make the artwork free and untethered.
And then we show people how to type each character on a frame in Xara to recreate the motion study?

I feel strongly that overall, it would be an inspired effort that matches Bill’s tireless spirit.

My Best,

Gary

[angelize]

I love this idea!

[wizard509]

Very cool idea. I like it. This would be like no other font that I know of.

[Gare]

Our Administrator has a unique vision here. ;)

"Soquili.otf" might be not simply a stencil font of different horse postures as it goes through a gallop, but each gylph would be a frame in a potential animation.

So it's more than a typeface, just as Bill was more than a tg Moderator to all of us.

I can help make this happen, but I'd like my role to be the guy who evaluates the project from an animation point of view: how well the gylphs work together both as artistic glyphs you can use to make patterns and borders and also how easily the glyphs can be used by the average Xara artist to make a swf or AVI file.

I PM'ed Frances that I have the highest resolution files from Edward Muybridge’s early photography. If we all agree, I can begin by cleaning up the frames for manual tracing.

I have some, but not an extraordinary amount of time between Christmas and New Year's Eve'.

Votes, all?

My Best,

Gary