Coudal Partners linked to this rather nice toy by Morisawa & Company. My Japanese knowledge is rather woeful, so I don’t have very much more information than; it’s pretty, it’s fun, it has a very nice interface, and it appears to be promoting the sheer loveliness of Morisawa’s fonts, so please buy some. I was told by a Korean colleague that there are relatively few fonts available for East Asian languages compared to Western ones because of the sheer number of glyphs that need to be designed, so I would guess a new one would elicit at least a moderate fanfare. Maybe. Anyway, have a play - here are a few screenshots:

I’ve been pondering this article for a while, since coming across Jonathan Hoefler’s posts (and here) about Glagolitic script in my RSS reader. It’s a script I’d never heard of before, and I’m always fascinated by writing systems, so I followed some links, sent a couple of emails and did some research on it.

First off, I have to say thank you to Typonine for sending me the font used for some of the illustrations in this post, and specifically Nikola Djurek who designed and developed it, based on the first Croatian printed book in the script: the ”Misal po zakonu rimskoga dvora”, printed in 1483. A page, and details, from that book are shown below.

One of the things I noticed when looking at examples of Glagolitic is the way some characters appear and disappear; I was trying to set some text in it, and whichever bit of text I tried had some extra characters that weren’t in the font or in any other examples - each one seemed to have characters unique to it. Of course, this isn’t a deficiency of the font (or of the language), but more a sign of the evolution of the written language and of the strong influences on it from Latin, Cyrillic and Church Slavonic over the years. Croatian was written in all three systems in parallel, and as a local system not widely known outside of the Balkans (despite being the oldest of the Slavic alphabets), the form of written Glagolitic has perhaps been more influenced than influencing; In some written examples there are Cyrillic characters, while in others the characters are presumably the original Glagolitic ones, or newer hybrid forms.

Some ligatures in Glagolitic script.

This leads on nicely to arguably the most interesting feature of Glagolitic (for a typographer at least) - the sheer number of ligatures. This interesting PDF states that in one work alone, the Brozić breviary, there are 250 ligatures - a number you’d more expect to find in a hand-written work from a top scriptorium rather than a printed book of over a thousand pages. Also unique to Glagolitic among printed languages are the broken ligatures, where half of one letter is joined to another letter, adding thousands of apparently new glyphs to the language. Of course, for anyone (like me) trying to set some text in Glagolitic, it all appears rather confusing and frustrating - but the reason why I tried (and why I’m always tracing things) is to learn more about something, and in that it’s certainly succeeded. If you’re interested in finding out more, for further reading there are a few articles out there, including (of course) Wikipedia, and this introduction to the history of the script.

So after all that I didn’t get to set some text properly in Glagolitic. I think to do so I’d need to spend some time learning a lot more about the language - so it’s added to ‘the queue’ of Things That I Must Learn More About. In the meantime, for my own pleasure and so you can see how attractive the glyphs are in Nikola Djurek’s font, I’ve created a pattern using it.

Now, if reading across the circles spells anything rude or inappropriate, let me know, OK? The contact form should be working again after the server move.

The Denver Egotist sent me a link to this rather nice piece of work, for Crawley Library in West Sussex. The new library is due to open in January 2009, so I might have to go up and have a look - I’ve not been to Crawley in years. There’s some more info on the Crawley Borough Council website, and some pictures on the Crawley Library Flickr set.

I can only hope that their new library gets a better logo than the one for Brighton’s, which is a typographic abomination.

I’ve been enjoying The Superest for a while now (since it started I think) after following a link from Chris Glass (I think), and while every post on it is good, it’s the ones by Kevin Cornell that I look forward to the most. Apart from the fantastic illustration, there’s often gorgeous lettering to look at. His site, Bearskinrug, is a joy to visit as well.

I’ve nabbed some of his work from The Superest to illustrate the point - I put them on a cards for my own amusement, as the site reminds me of Top Trumps (and because I think you need to visit the site to see the full ones). Go and visit this, and his main site.

I’ve had these covers saved on my desktop for a while now, and I keep meaning to link to them. I saw the first set of Great Ideas books when visiting family last year, and was struck by the variety, creativity and humour of the cover designs. It turns out that there are two more sets, all done to the same standard. You can find the first set here, and the second set here. The third set seems only to be viewable on Flickr for now. I tried to find links to the boxed sets on Amazon but they appear to be unavailable - seems you can only buy the individual books. I like all the designs, but here are a few of my favourites:

These are from the first set. The ampersand on Confessions of a Sinner is quite special, the Meditations cover looks like it uses every ligature in Jupiter, and The Inner Life cover is just lovely - I’d like it as a large print.

English may not be Chinese, but when using monospace type, and with the right subject, you can get away with columnar type. There are some very nice typographic designs in the second set.

I have a couple of other favourites from the third set too, but these three are great.

I found a link to this preview of The Illustrated Ape magazine the other day. Such fantastic lettering! I don’t know whether I’ve been completely unobservant or my local bookshops are just crap, but I’ve never seen a paper copy of the magazine before. I’ll keep an eye out for it now though - I just love the lettering. I’ve cropped together some bits from the titles in the preview:

I was browsing through Bibliodyssey last night and found this poster in an article about Lorenzo Homar. I love the beautiful and lively lettering, especially the dramatic swash on the 9. I’ve (as usual) traced it with trusty beziers (I love bezier curves) and sketched out a very rough alphabet, which I might take a bit further at some point - redrawing the numbers from scratch, I think, as I’m not very happy with them.

To create a font based on this would be quite a project as the original lettering was clearly done by hand, though I’m sure with a deft application of Opentype rules you could create something that has much of the rhythm and charm of the original. However, I think I’ll create a stock of basic letterforms and apply variants and tweaks as I need them - I doubt I’ll be setting much body type in this. The lettering doesn’t look like it would suit a standard set of uppercase glyphs, but having ornamental lowercase forms in their place would work rather well - the swashed 9 shows what direction to take.