Typophile - TYPE BATTLE: Week 9 (20 March) - Comments

Ah well, 2006, 2008...same

jt_the_ninja — Tue, 2 Sep 2008 05:29:22 -0700

Ah well, 2006, 2008...same difference. I’ve never been too good with years and dates. That’s why I didn’t go into history...

Peace,
JT

This was really entertaining

jabez — Mon, 1 Sep 2008 06:02:38 -0700

This was really entertaining to read!

“If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that makes it good or bad” - Miles Davis

4 months? Check the year,

dtw — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:02:44 -0700

4 months? Check the year, JT! LOL!
______________________________________________
Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster’s stopped working.

Sorry for replying to a

jt_the_ninja — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 05:33:45 -0700

Sorry for replying to a 4-month-old thread, but as a linguist, this thread intrigued me to no end.

I’ve myself toyed with special characters for English sounds, often relying on IPA, antiquated symbols, or scripts like Shavian, although hardly with the creativity I’ve seen here.

I think what must be abandoned, though, is the notion that the sounds represented by < ch >, < sh >, < th >, and < ph > are consonant + h clusters (PH is just another way of writing F, for one). I liked most the idea of using Cyrillic character adaptations, although dtw’s looked more like the character for /ts/.

Anyway, good job all, and maybe someday we’ll get characters like þ, ð, and maybe even æ, œ, and ƿ back into common use :D

Peace,
JT

Great contrast! -_- Marty

wysong — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 21:00:10 -0800

Great contrast!

-_- Marty

This isn’t for the

William Berkson — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 06:01:25 -0800

This isn’t for the contest, but the discussion. In English we have two redundant letters—q and k—and x is used not that much. In the current romanization Chinese, known as ’pin yin’ the x is the ’sh’ sound and the q is the ’ch’ sound. And we could use k for the ’th’ sound. ’ke cuick brown focs jumps over ke lazy dog.’
However, this is not really the problem with English, as sh ch and th are really phonetic, though th has two sounds. I think the use of two letters are cleaner than all the accents in many languages.

I like Tomi’s ’th’, the others are too wide—no gain.

Here is my contribution:

Tomi from Suomi — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 01:25:09 -0800

Here is my contribution:

Many thanks to

verdiinpink — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:32:21 -0800

Many thanks to jazzsammich
... and I’m sorry with the taboo, don’t mean to be rude but this phrase just came up to my mind.

—- pinky kinky winky —-

I don’t know about the

Paul Cutler — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 07:09:35 -0800

I don’t know about the typographic approach but the message is certainly inspiring…

peace

Pinky — Take a look at the

jazzsammich — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 05:24:07 -0800

Pinky —

Take a look at the second item in the thread.

In the meanwhile, here are your images:

My tweak of Helvetica Neue

verdiinpink — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 19:56:45 -0800

My tweak of Helvetica Neue Ultralight 25. Hope you like it.

(Why can’t I post a picture, even though I saved it in .png format already and the width doesn’t exceed 600 px?)

So, please check have a look at this http://asia.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/verdi_55/detail?.dir=/dfc0&.dnm=171c....

and my scribble here at http://asia.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/verdi_55/detail?.dir=/dfc0&.dnm=1193....

It would be nice if one of you guys help me post these two pics instead so that to avoid browsing away from this wonderful thread, please please ... (*-*)

—- pinky kinky winky —-

Darrin — That’s an

jazzsammich — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 07:58:19 -0800

Darrin —

That’s an interesting point about capturing the h or k in the shape of the diacritical mark... I hadn’t looked at it that way before.

When I first learned the caron, I learned it as the hachek in the context of learning Bosnian and Croatian folk songs. For their soft ’ch’, they actually have two diacriticals, the hachek for the ch as in church, and the acute for an even softer ch, made with the middle of the tongue instead of the tip of the tongue. It’s not a difference most English speakers would identify automatically.

As to the nature of the assignment, I guess I was responding more to the “latin alphabet” part than the “sounds” part. ;) Perhaps in an alternate universe, Typophile Battle #9 is to design new characters for hard chey and unvoiced thay. :D

About the specifics of the letterforms:
Thay: There could totally be confusion between the lowercase and an oldstyle 7, but I imagine it wouldn’t be any more than we already find with 0 and O. The lowercase thay has most of its curve before the baseline, with a straight descender, where I think an oldstyle 7 would have a gentler curve to it. I’m glad you noticed the analogy with q... I envision that the backware loop on thay would work in a similar way — a viable option for script or display work, but absent from most text settings. If I had a bit more time on my hands, I’d post an example.

Chey: Chey also has analogies to Q. Q has one of the only natural uppercase descenders in a roman face (with the exception of some faces that have a long J), so I gave Chey a similar sort of tail so Q wouldn’t be so lonely. Also, I think it works well to distinguish it from J with a top bar — I think it changes the bouma enough to prevent easy misreading. I think lowercase chey should probably remain loopless, though.

Sham: Somehow as a kid I learned to do my O clockwise despite my right-handedness, so it seemed like a natural stroke to me. How is it that you do your vertical in D? Bottom-up or top-down? In my handwriting, I do a downstroke followed by an upstroke, THEN followed by the bowl. Perhaps these are the sorts of individual peculiarities that help give designers their individual voices?

Thanks for the insightful commentary, Darrin! This has definitely been my favorite battle so far. It seemed to bring a lot of thought and debate to the surface in ways that the others haven’t. Good work, everyone! ^_^

Jazzsammich: Yes, you’re

DiSH — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 14:35:13 -0800

Jazzsammich:

Yes, you’re right: there would be no phonetic difference in say, Czech, between the caron and esteso I drew. I believe they even call the caron the hacek (pronounced soft ’ch’), no?

But, formally, I think the visual difference is significant in that the upper bowl of the added ’h’ is diagrammatically captured, as if the ’h’ were hiding behind the altered character and baseline-raised so as to be slightly visible.....but now that you mention it, there might be an interesting option to use the esteso ’c’ to represent soft ’ch’ in church since it relates to ’h’, but then use the caron ’c’ to represent hard ’ch’ in choir since the caron relates to ’k’?!!

I like your letters by the way.....They are unique enough to be distinguished from other alphabetic characters, and they don’t capture awkward counterforms (see my complaint about my characters).

But, have you gone perhaps too deep in designing new letters as opposed to just new characters to represent specific sounds?

The more I read the careful wording of the question and the comments by Jongseong, the more I think the problem is simply to design characters that have a direct and unique correlation to these three sounds as stated (and clarifying which sounds exactly you’re designing for: voiced versus unvoiced, etc.). They would probably only ever be used in analytical settings and not in daily writing as letters. Letters are more general than that; most letters can represent multiple sounds in different contexts and when combined in multiple digraphs and trigraphs.

For example, we still haven’t solved Jongseong’s complaint that your new ’chey’ would need two characters to represent the ’ch’ sounds in “choir” and “children” and ’thay’ would need two characters to represent the ’th’ sounds in “they” and “thistle”.

My thoughts on your letterforms:

1. Thay: Would there be potential confusion between the lowercase and an oldstyle 7 with a descender? Why not include the backward loop on the lowercase thay descender as shown in the uppercase and make it a formal cousin to q? (it’s there in the medieval english too...)

2. Chey: The turn in the uppercase descender not appearing in the lowercase descender seems odd. It’s apparent in both cases of medieval english. In fact, I wonder if the uppercase chey needs a descender at all (other than to distinguish from a J with top bar)?....perhaps just cut it flat at the baseline and leave the lowercase descender flat too, further distinguishing it from the backward curled descender of lowercase thay?

3. Sham: speaking of the chirographic qualities of the strokes - it seems that both the Greek and Medieval characters are drawn by first establishing the verticals and then adding a horizontal stroke with a downward curve. Your new letterform makes a change in this order by requiring one stroke to establish the second vertical and downward curve, a stroke that may be awkward to produce? Most bowled characters are drawn counter-clockwise (to wit: O is awkward for right-handers to stroke clockwise). The ones that are stroked clockwise (b,B,D,p,P,R) only require the right half of the circle to be stroked before connecting to a vertical stem. It’s the drawing of a vertical line upward instead of stroking it downward that causes you to break a pencil lead.....

Fun stuff to look at, and thanks for the generous letterform etymology diagram to reveal your design thinking!

Re: the proposed

jazzsammich — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 16:46:25 -0800

Re: the proposed esteso...

Darrin,

What I’m having trouble understanding is what the esteso would accomplish that the caron doesn’t do already. What is the difference between the caron letters and the esteso letters?

Here’s my entry into the

jazzsammich — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 14:24:25 -0800

Here’s my entry into the fray:

The letters Sham, Thay, and Chey.

In preparing these, I thought back to the last time that our alphabetic heritage had separate characters for these sounds, and attemped to retrace their evolution as if they had remained in use (or split into two separate letters, as with the case of Chi becoming Chey/X.)

As I was designing these characters, I paid special attention to their chirographic qualities. That is to say, in order to be successful, the character had to be easily scrawled and still fit fluidly in the normal handwriting scheme, without being misinterpreted as any existing letters or letter combinations.

A couple summers ago, I was preparing myself to do a series of art projects designed to investigate the question of what helps the brain recognize written non-ideographic language as being language vs. abstract symbols or squiggles. The project was based primarily on the creation of pseudo-alphabetic or pseudo-abjadic writing systems: nonsense characters or scripts. The project was put on hiatus due to financial constraints, and I haven’t looked back at it since then. I’m curious to look back now and see how these new characters compare with the older explorations. I suspect I probably came up with similar solutions back then.

TYPE BATTLE: Week 9 (20 March)

Christian Robertson — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 07:37:22 -0800

TYPE BATTLE: Week 9 (20 March)

Here’s your chance to stretch your type muscles on a weekly basis. Each game kicks off on Monday with a new challenge, and closes at midnight PST on Friday. Anyone may submit a design response to the challenge. You may enter as often as you wish. Post anytime. Critiques and comments are welcome throughout the game, from participants and spectators alike. Smack talk is encouraged.

Winner take all, no holds barred. May be the best designer win.

Link directly to this thread: http://www.typophile.com/battle09

Requirements:

- Size: 600 width x 400 height. 72 dpi
- Color: Black and white only
- Format: Please save your graphics as PNG
- Only respond with the characters posted in the challenge.

// THIS WEEK’S CHALLENGE:
Design three new characters for the latin alphabet representing the sounds ’ch’ ’th’ and ’sh’. We’re looking for new characters, not ligatures. Show the characters in context.