Presented here are some recent thoughts about the development of the Jetsonville font, my capstone project for the Master of Arts in Graphic and Web Design (MAGWD) program at Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD) in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Some of these miscellaneous ramblings, in spruced-up form, may eventually find their way into the project’s website. But these thoughts will first be presented here in all their half-formed, off-the-cuff glory.
A warning about How the Sausage is Made
You know the old saying about eating sausage: Just enjoy the taste and don’t think too much about how it was made or what went into it.
The intention of this progress blog is to show how the sausage is made, or in this case how the font is made. I hope that, unlike sausage, knowing the design underpinnings of this font will make the reader appreciate the design of the font more—or at least won’t make the reader lose their appetite.
What I am striving for as I design the Jetsonville font: Uniform typographic color
The goal of font design, and the spacing and kerning that is part of that design process, is even or uniform typographic color. Kerning and spacing can accomplish a lot, but if a font is poorly designed, it’s hard for kerning to overcome that.
Even or uniform typographic color is defined as a lack of white holes or black spots— just a nice, uniform gray—when one looks at a block of type. Sometimes it helps to squint to see if the typographic color is even.
Gallery of Inspiration
The final website will probably contain a Gallery of inspiration. This gallery will show, among other things: the Theme building at LAX; the Gateway Arch in St. Louis; the Space Needle in Seattle; the TWA Terminal at JFK in New York; many buildings at the 1964-65 New York World‘s Fair; and examples of Googie coffeeshop architecture in Los Angeles.
Designing individual letters vs. designing a typeface, or Optics vs. Mathematical Precision
Jetsonville was originally designed around the concept of a parabolic arch, seen on the Jetsons television show and in many mid-century buildings like those shown in the gallery described above. But originally the parabola used to construct the letters of the Jetsonville font fit into a square: the arch was as wide as it was high. Different letters were created by rotating this parabola and adding other strokes. All the letters were basically square, and basically the same width.
This seemed to work fine where individual letters were concerned. I really rather liked the letterforms I was creating. However, once I started setting the letters next to each other, I saw problems with typographic color, as defined above.
The color of the type seemed to look better, and the letters seemed to sit next to each other more attractively, when I condensed the width of the capital letters to 80% of their height. But I did not want to just condense the letterforms, because that would alter and distort the stroke widths of the characters, and that would destroy the typographic color I wanted. Therefore, I decided to redraw all the capital letters.
Originally the lowercase letters were to have been the same width as the capitals, built from the same arch. When I tried doing this, however, that looked even worse than the square uppercase letters did. The lowercase letters seemed to look best at 70% the width of the capitals.
So, my original idea of “Wouldn’t it be great to use the exact same arch for all the letters,” while it would have been novel from a concept standpoint, turns out not to hold up in real life. In real life it’s better to use an arch that is taller that it is wide for letters where the arch is vertical (such as A and V), and it’s better to use an arch that’s wider than it is tall for letters where the arch is horizontal (like C and D). On the website I plan to show how and why it’s better to use these different arch proportions for the horizontal and vertical arches that are part of letterforms. In a nutshell: In font design, optical appearance wins over strict mathematics and novel concepts.
A bit about me and my typographic credentials
I am a “type guy.” I have been working with type, typography, and fonts since I was in high school. That’s a really long time.
I am in the final weeks of the Master of Arts in Graphic and Web Design (MAGWD) program at Minneapolis College of Art & Design in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I started the program in January of 2018. (Insert here a list the other classes I have completed in this program.)
I have worked in a lot of places that had Linotype and other typecasting machines, although I have never worked with them. My first job was at the local newspaper (the
Chaska Herald in Chaska, Minnesota) running the newfangled Compugraphic 2961 phototypesetter.
Most of the rest of my phototypesetting career continued to be on Compugraphic equipment: the ACM9000 (8 fonts at a time, 12 sizes to choose from, very temperamental mechanically and electrically); the Unisetter (same basic idea but much improved); various versions of the Editwriter (basically a Unisetter with a keyboard and screen); and the 8600 and 8400, Compugraphic’s first digital typesetting machines. (The 8600 was Compugraphic’s first typesetter, and maybe THE first typesetter, to use fonts constructed with the now-ubiquitous Bezier curves.)
I later worked at shops that used Mergenthaler/Linotype typesetting equipment: the Mergenthaler 202 and the Linotronic 300 and 500. It was at that point in my career that Macintoshes, laser printers, and “desktop publishing” took over the industry; typesetting and keylining were consolidated into the singular task of page makeup; type shops basically disappeared; and phototypesetting morphed into imagesetting and platesetting, something that was handled by printers, not typesetters.
After the industry shift described above, I worked with Quark Xpress for many years until it was replaced by Adobe InDesign, which is the current state of the page-layout art, and its companions Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
I am proud that I have attained Journeyman status as a typographer/typesetter in two unions: Graphic Arts International Union (GAIU) Local #229 (later Graphic Communications International Union, or GCIU), and the International Typographical Union (ITU, now part of the Communication Workers of America or CWA).
Some things to ask my mentor, Chank Diesel, about
- Font distribution
- Legal considerations, copyright considerations, Jetsons name
Some other topics I could write about in this progress journal and include on the project’s website
—Choosing font-development software: I have decided to go with Fontself because, of all the font-development software packages I looked at, it has the lowest learning curve. Other font-development software has more capabilities but a higher learning curve. I still might decide to use some other font-development software in conjunction with FontSelf. (List other font-development software package under consideration, explain pros and cons)
—Describe further details of my personal history with fonts and typesetting technologies (strips of film and how they got damaged; width tapes; width plugs; what happens when you set type with the wrong widths; the coming of digital fonts; Penta, Bedford, Quadex, Magna, Ventura Publisher, and various other front-end typesetting systems and the dawn of the computerization of the graphics industry; early microcomputer typesetting systems pre-Macintosh)
—Show how each letter or character in Jetsonville was arrived at or evolved and from what (possible subject of motion graphic using morphing/tweening?)
—Discuss arches, especially the parabolic arches used in the architecture seen in “The Jetsons” and in other mid-century architecture
—Discuss the mathematics of arches and parabolas
—Discuss the engineering aspects of arches and parabolas
—Discuss “The Jetsons” television show (with links to a Smithsonian article about why the show is still relevant today)
—Discuss the mid-century, jet-age, space-age aesthetic as it applies to buildings, architecture, cars, consumer products, and furniture (as “hairpin legs” and in other ways, the arch turns up even in furniture of the period—the design of the arch connotes weightlessness). Even McDonald’s Golden Arches are from this time period.
—Maybe use Javascript to plot parabolas and even to create letters that could be the masters for font characters
—Discuss the use of a single arch line of varying thicknesses vs. a double arch line: one produces letter designs with non-weighted strokes while the other produces letter designs with weighted (thick and thin) strokes
—Detail the arch that is the starting point for both the uppercase and lowercase characters in Jetsonville. Show why and how the uppercase characters condensed 80% look better together than the squarer characters. Also show how the condensing was done so as to maintain the stroke weights. Describe further the importance of stroke weights to typographic color.
—In the future, maybe create an extended version of the Jetsonville font using the square (100%-width) letterforms
—Possible bonus (if there’s time): Jetsonbats or Jetbats. These could be alternate (dingbat) characters on the number keys or elsewhere:
- Jetsons flying car
- TWA terminal at JFK
- Gateway Arch
- General arch used to construct letterforms
- Space Needle
- Space platform under buildings in “The Jetsons”
- LAX Theme Building
- Rocket
- Sputnik
- Futuristic TV screen
- Beanie with floating rings around antenna
—A sidebar called “Type Design Runs in My Family” about Ernst F. Detterer, an American type designer from the early to middle twentieth century who was my distant cousin.
