Notes

February’s Font of the Month: ECWC Standard & Slight Chance

Watching the first cable TV weather channel in Winnipeg, Canada, was a very analog experience—Videon Cablesystems simply pointed a black-and-white camera at the dials on the machines at the local weather station. Viewers would sometimes tune in and see insects crawling on the equipment!

But in 1975 (fifty years ago!) Videon replaced this antiquated approach with an entirely digital weather readout, developed in collaboration with Environment Canada, which they claimed was the first of its kind in the country. 

The layout was designed by Gary Krushen, an engineer at Videon, and featured a condensed, monospaced all-caps sans serif set against a blue or reddish-brown background, with green bands above and below. Shortly after, Winnipeg’s other cable company, Greater Winnipeg Cablevision, got in on Gary’s idea, and offered a similar service for their subscribers. It was based on the same basic design, but ran on different hardware and employed a thinner, more angular font than the original.

Last year, I was contacted by Matt Hadden and Mark J. Szymanski, weather channel enthusiasts who maintain an Environment Canada Weather Channel simulator that livestreams the current weather conditions in the style of the channel as it appeared in the 1990s. Since launching the livestream in 2021, they have reached thousands of viewers who fondly remember having the channel on in the background of their daily lives. “From what I'm seeing in the chat,” Matt says, “it’s bringing back a lot of nostalgia for a huge range of age groups. I see people in their 40s all the way up to their 70s/80s giving their stories and memories about the original channel.”

Matt and Mark couldn’t find any specifics about the make and model of the computer that was running at the time, or who might have produced the fonts that were available on that system. But they knew one thing: getting the font right was a key factor in capturing the precise look they know and love.

We presume that the original fonts were bitmap fonts, but opted to render the letterforms as horizontal bands, capturing a bit of the scanline edges that you might have seen on a CRT television set from the era. At the same time, we tried to avoid going too far down the retro rabbit hole—recordings like the image up top also show the deterioration of a decades-old VHS tape, but our goal was to have the type appear as crisp and fresh as it would have looked in the 90s on a new-ish TV with a clear signal.

Aside from that one interpretive choice, I tried to provide them with as faithful a revival as I could. I worked with the limited character set of the original, and preserved details such as the subtle asymmetry of O and A, the serif on the crossbar of G, and a 3 that looks more like a Cyrillic Э.

Matt and Mark are now using the new font, called ECWC Standard, in their livestream. And in keeping with the rest of their codebase, I made it available on GitHub under an open source license.

But wait…there’s more! After sending my revival to Matt and Mark, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more I could do with this incredible source material, so I undertook a freer interpretation of the design. In a nod to the weather reporting phrasebook, I’ve named it Slight Chance.

No longer worried about 100% fidelity to the original, I built out the design to my usual character set, made monospaced and proportional versions, and invented an accompanying lowercase for the design. 

I set aside the scanlines approach and explore different ways that I could evoke the worn, slightly-degraded texture of the letterforms as they endured cable transmissions and cathode ray tubes. I arrived at a design system that contrasts gummy, amorphous interior shapes with a harder-edged, octagonal exterior. In a weird way, it’s a distant cousin to the chamfered Grecian style of wood types.

Oh, and if you noticed that the text at the top and bottom of the simulator uses an entirely separate font with small caps, then you have an idea on where the design can possibly go from here!

January’s Font of the Month: More Ottavio!

As promised, here I am at the end of January with some new lighter weights for Ottavio! Thank you again for your patience as I worked to get caught up to my usual schedule.

I’ll keep this one quick. In the two weeks since I wrote you last, it dawned on me that I might be doing this thing I tend to do, where I make a font that sits in the valley between Display and Text. Ottavio’s namesake won the Tour de France, but should the font be a sprinter or a long-distance cyclist? Was I selling Ottavio short if I didn’t at least take a stab at optimizing it for extended text?

So I did another thing I tend to do a lot: I fired up Type-X and started using the font everywhere in my daily life...my email, my browser, notes to myself, you name it! (And yes, I styled my links as small caps, an homage to Practical Typography.)

As I used the font, I started tweaking the letter-spacing and font-weight directly in the browser until it started to feel more like something I would actually want to read. From there, I could move to my font editor and apply those changes more thoughtfully. 

Ottavio’s original Regular weight felt too heavy and too tightly-spaced at text sizes. Fortunately, now that I have an ExtraLight pole to interpolate from, it was no problem to lighten the Regular by 7% and recalibrate the rest of the weights to follow.

I liked that Ottavio’s diagonal axis and thick/thin contrast really shine through in the new Light and Extra Light weights. But, it made the Bold I did recently feel low-contrast by comparison. I didn’t want heavier weights clogging up at small sizes anyway, so I also also added a bit of contrast to the Bold and Extra Bold, on top of the weight change.

I know this month’s offering is just a small update, but I hope it is at least a little interesting to see how these minute changes add up to meaningful design enhancements.

December’s Font of the Month: Ottavio Bold and Italics

Last July I shared the story of Ottavio Bottecchia, two-time winner of the Tour de France. I loved the response from the cycling enthusiasts among you, seeing photos of your Bottecchia brand bicycles, and hearing about your excitement for the sport and Bottecchia himself.

Bottecchia won his yellow jerseys in 1924 and 1925, which means we are now entering the second year of the centennial celebration of his achievement. So I figured it was a good time to keep things rolling with Ottavio, the font I designed for his great-granddaughter, Caterina Piatti. After all, a typeface inspired by family should be available as a family!

In this update (Ottavio v0.2), I’ve added three new weights (Medium, Bold, and ExtraBold), small caps, and Italics. The immediate reason for this expansion is to give Caterina more to work with in her designs commemorating the anniversary. But I also wanted to use this opportunity to feel out this design, put it through the paces, and see how Ottavio’s loose, dynamic shapes react to being emboldened or italicized.

It’s tricky to find the perfect moment to expand a single style into a family. On one hand, I want to keep things small and agile for as long as I can, so I can make changes quickly and easily and firm up the core design before blowing it up into thousands of glyphs across multiple variants—I know all too well the feeling of inertia that can set in once a family gets big and every small change becomes a heavy lift.

On the other hand, I know how instructive the experience of drawing a bold or italic can be (small caps maybe not so much 🙃). Moving towards the extremes of weight, width, or slant requires exaggerating certain design features until they reach a breaking point, which can reveal what is working and what isn’t in the core design.

With Ottavio, I navigated a delicate back-and-forth between expansion and retraction. I started with the Regular, took a little detour to try out a handful of glyphs in different weights, and then set those aside and went back to the Regular again. A while later, I did a quick foray into Italics, quickly slanting and condensing the letterforms to get a sense of what it might feel like. Then I scrapped that and went back to the Regular again, and so on. The key was to not invest so much time in any of these detours that I would be sad to delete them later!

The Italic you see here is probably the fourth or fifth iteration that I worked on, and it might not be the last. Since sending you Roslindale Variable Italic way back in 2019, I’ve gotten in the habit of separating cursiveness and slant when I draw italics.

I started by drawing alternates in the Regular that are upright shapes with italic features, such as the cursive shoulders in m/n/u, the single-story a and g, and the descending f. After that, I made everything narrower, mechanically slanted it, and made the italic alternates the default glyphs. As a final step, I cleaned up the curves to account for the distortion of the slanting process. This makes it easy for me to delete the italic knowing I can somewhat-painlessly reconstitute it from the alternates later on. And it allows the italic to exist in the same interpolating designspace as the upright, combining a fluid transition in slant with an abrupt transition in cursiveness.

I feel that there is a perception that a type designer goes through the alphabet, drawing each glyph as a perfect outline, one at a time. For me, the reality is much looser and messier, with much more trial and error, roughing in and cleaning up. Maybe this is too nerdy of a metaphor, but my family-building process is less like a JPEG image that loads from the top down, and more like a Progressive JPEG where a blurry image gradually gains detail. And for Ottavio, I think the picture is starting to become clear.

Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest choice to work on a big family expansion when I’m already behind on my monthly schedule, and I do appreciate your patience as I work to get caught up. If you don’t mind, I think my plan will be to keep pedaling through Ottavio and send you some lighter weights at the end of January, and then something new in mid-February. Then I can try to get back to sending you stuff closer to the beginning of the month…I will feel a whole lot better about my life once that happens!

November’s Font of the Month: Fit U&lc

Fit is a font that marked a turning point in my career. It is the narrowest font I’ve ever made, and the widest font I’ve ever made. It was the first variable font I put on the market, and I had so much fun making it that it led me to start this club in the hope that I could keep making more stuff like it. It was the font that made me realize that I wanted to take novelty typography seriously, and give it the same attention and prominence in my library as the workhorsey stuff. 

It has been an unexpected delight to see other designers translate Fit’s simple design vocabulary to different writing systems: Hebrew by Oded Ezer; Armenian by Gor Jihanian; Devanagari by Kimya Gandhi, and most recently, Tamil by Aadarsh Rajan. We can also expect to see Fit expand to more writing systems in 2025—Boom, Promphan Suksumek just posted a sneak peek of her upcoming Fit Thai the other day.

I drew Fit as an all-caps face so that I didn’t have any ascenders or descenders to worry about—filling up all of the available space was the name of the game. But new writing systems present new challenges. I recently had Boom’s Fit Thai file open on my computer to take a look at possible solutions for Thai’s ascending forms. It made me wonder what I would have done if I had been forced to draw a lowercase for Fit…and before I knew it, I was drawing one.

My first thought: why the heck didn’t I try this earlier!?

I think originally I was just too fixated on Fit being an “experimental” design that fits the allotted space. I never considered how much more usable it could be if it functioned a bit more like a conventional blocky sans (Nickel Gothic, for example).

The new lowercase retains Fit’s system of corners in the southwest/northeast and curves in the northwest/southeast, but the texture feels subtly different and the ascenders and descenders give the word shapes a playful bounce. I was also pleasantly surprised by how much more readable it is now! Relatively speaking, of course. 😜

Most of the ideas in Fit’s lowercase have a precedent in the original all-caps design. The lowercase r? Well that’s like a shorter, upside down version of the uppercase L. The lowercase e? That’s a flip of the a, which in turn is a shorter version of Fit’s unusual capital Ð. 

Fit’s x-height finds its precedent in Fit’s compact accents, which duck down to create room for the diacritical mark above. Because I had already drawn shorter letters to accommodate those accents, I was already halfway to a lowercase! They also served as the starting point for a full set of small caps, which you can use to mix upper- and lowercase forms in a single word.

Fit is an extremely “editable” font, so I hope you find a lot to play with here. You can convert it to outlines, select a bunch of points, and drag them around. And since all of the counterforms are the same, it’s easy to add a stroke to your text to get the exact form/counterform balance you are looking for (you can see a subtle example of this in the “Hello” image at the top). 

I also must shout-out Gor Jihanian—in addition to designing the aforementioned Fit Armenian, Gor has been working on a parallel track to create a multiaxis concept font designed with animation in mind. In the process, he did a lot of cleanup in Fit’s source files, which made drawing the lowercase a whole lot easier for me! This included converting the curves to corner components and making the design more modular so that letterforms align more precisely to a grid. At wdth=1200, the capital H is a square, at 600, it’s half a square, at 300, it’s a quarter-square, and so on.

October’s Font of the Month: Lentiform

Earlier this month, I had the honor of giving the Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture at St Bride Foundation in London. I spoke about my experience with Font of the Month Club, taking some time away from the club’s go-go-go schedule to reflect on why I’m still doing this. I spoke about how it still helps me bypass uncertainty and self-doubt, and endless questioning of when a typeface is finished or why it exists. And I spoke about the peace that I feel when I can set aside all other tasks and just focus on producing an email, a PDF, and some font files. (I believe St Bride may post the recording at some point; in the meantime they have many other talks to explore.)

This trip gave me a chance to see lots of letterforms and letter-people—in the St Bride Library, at the University of Reading, and at the inaugural Typography Theory Practice conference in Leeds. And I got to explore a little too. On the drizzly morning after the conference in Leeds, I went for a stroll up the canal and stumbled upon the Leeds Industrial Museum. I had a bit of time to kill before my train back to London, and my supposedly-waterproof shoes were starting to soak through to my socks, so I decided to pop in.

The museum is an old mill building packed with machinery from the Industrial Revolution, and, unsurprisingly, a healthy amount of Victorian lettering. I snapped a photo of this plaque in a stairwell—I was initially drawn in by the De Vinne-syle lettering, but found myself appreciating the tasty typographic hierarchy at play here…a blackletter, a sans, that De Vinne-esque serif, more sans, and…a Lombardic?

In contemporary typography, ornamented fonts are used mostly for Display, and rightly so. But here, the Lombardic caps in red play a decidedly supporting role. They offer a lowkey blast of flavor for what would essentially be a <h4> or <h5> if this were an HTML document, setting themselves apart while not drawing undue attention. It’s like the spicy ketchup that comes alongside the fries that come alongside your meal—a side for a side dish.

On my journey home last Tuesday, I started drawing. I still don’t really know what I’m doing with this font, or what I expect you to do with this font for that matter. But in the spirit of the WIP ethos I spoke about in my lecture, I decided not overthink it and just keep drawing. And now, after nine days of steady work, I’m sending you what I have so far on Lentiform, named after its distinctive lens/lentil-shaped O.

When I hold old type specimens in my hands, as I was able to do earlier in the month, I am always shocked by the small-size ornamental typefaces that foundries were willing to produce. As an example, here is Two-Line Pearl Caslon’s Italian, which is about 10pt. 

I tried to channel some of this display-but-not-big energy into Lentiform, sticking with a fairly low contrast and a regularized system that contrasts convex curves with angular cuts, and spiky serifs with curling ball terminals…the R is a good example of all of these in action.

If you look closely at that plaque, you might notice that I replaced the double-strike crossbars on A and E with simpler ones, and the blackletter-style T with a symmetrical Roman-style one. These were casualties of my process of simplification and systemization, but I thought they were fun so you can still find those original forms as OpenType alternates. 

There is a growing number of expressive digital Lombardics out there, from the techy segmentation of Minotaur Lombardic, to the striking contours of Ready Bygone, to the softened, worn edges of Kyrios. These contemporaries make me wonder if I should push Lentiform further—part of me wants to turn this into a true Micro, adding inktraps and eliminating the tight counterforms and clearances that prevent it from being truly legible below 10pt. Another part of me wants to push it towards a more traditional display face…narrower, curvier, contrastier, kind of like the line beginning “THE LORD MAYOR…” in the sample above. And a third part of me wants to just put it down and get back to other, more pragmatic projects!

I rarely start a font in the same month that I send it out, so I hope that it is at least a little interesting to see a design in its primordial stage.