====[ EDUCATIVE INTRO ]====
At a time when making books was a very time-consuming and labor-intensive process, an increasingly literate 12th-century Europe required more and more books. To keep up with the increasing demand for the spread of literature was a ongoing struggle. Writing materials such as inks, dyes and parchment were very expensive. And it wasn't until the 15th century, when parchment was largely replaced by paper, along with the arrival of the printing press, for it to gradually became cheaper, faster and less labor-intensive.
So it made perfect sense to find other ways to help with this process.
Simplifying a script and cutting back on the decorative calligraphy was the most effective way of doing this.
This led to the development of simplified variations to pre-existing bookhand scripts. One of such forms is littera textualis, categorizing within the Textualis/Textura or simply Gothic bookhand scripts group.
Littera textualis is the simplest and least calligraphic form of textualis. It was developed with just two main goals in mind, to save time and costs. The simplified letterforms could be written much quicker than the more calligraphic and luxurious variations. It offered a more cost effective and faster version to the script. It was often used for less important literary works and academic papers.
It functioned as the standard bookhand script in the Netherlands during the 14th & 15th centuries.
====[ ABOUT THIS FONT ]====
TEXTUALIS BATAVICUM - A calligraphic inspired Blackletter/Gothic bookhand script. Essentially a Textualis/Textura inspired work.
The design mainly follows the concept for a traditional form of littera textualis bookhand script as was described in the intro written above.
It remains a work in progress and I will add update info for this font in the comment section bellow.
Some character still need slight adjustments, but so far I am very pleased with the result. As you can probably notice, the uppercase characters have slight more weight than the lowercase has.
More characters follow soon.
I hope y'all like it
What began nearly 8 years ago as an experiment in multi-stage, multi-resolution pixel serif type drafting (starting smallish then manually upscaling x4), took on the robust character you see here after countless edits and some tricky lessons learned along the way.
The initial weight was on the light side (cloned privately for posterity), so I took a leap into this bookish weight by fattening each glyph copy-pasted 1 pixel shifted both up and to the right. A rudimentary technique, by no means novel, yet almost wholly effective. I saw fit from here to only make a handful of corrections, keeping the slightly rounded and slanted serif shape that resulted as well as the subtle reenforcing of a pen-nib construction.
More intriguing is the 1-bit “anti-aliasing” scheme I found myself progressively guided toward while finding the lines of these curves developing the initial light weight. Implied diagonals and said curves – as well as refinement of contrast – are substantially more granular and specific than had I taken a black-and-white posterized, or stairstepped approach.
At half-resolution, the resulting smoothness is acceptible. This type of hinting will be useful in developing a substitution rule set consisting of subpixel slanted or curved bricks to produce a “vectorized” version.
Indeed, such a process could be purely automated by a proficient developer or properly trained neural network (this would be a really interesting future feature for fontstruct pro – rather than hinting a font after painstaking vector construction, why not reverse the process by way of en vogue ai-assisted upscaling?).
Basic accented charaters and numerals are being added as I churn through the extended character set...
First try.
This design was created as part of the TwentiesComp. Too bad, due to lack of time, it was not finished. I realize db Pontus still needs a bit of time and patience to be ready (glyphs, kernig etc...) However, I just want to introduce db Pontus in this context already ; )
2020 Vision. It's ironic because 20/20 is supposed to represent clear vision. But this is what the vision of 2020 looked like. Nothing was clear. Except for the intuitive astrologers. As a group, they predicted things that were going to happen months before anything happened. Maybe we should start listening.
This is a cloneA non standard stencil/piano-like font, using an experimental "guides + nudging" kerning process and a lot of smooth curvy shapes. Some soft alternates (for A, W, w, X, x, Y and y) are in the ligatures area at the More Latin section.
This is a clone042718. Thor Ragnarok is the funniest of all the Marvel films. I can watch it over and over. There is so much respect for Jack Kirby’s art style all over land of Sakaar. Growing up I never really appreciated Kirby’s artwork, as I leaned toward more graphically detailed artists. It wasn’t until much later that I recognized his great contributions to the entire language of visual expression in sequential art. I’m sorry I didn’t create this for the opening, but here it is for Avengers Infinity War.
Out of 111 bricks used, only ten are from existing bricks; all the rest are custom bricks. There would have been a lot more bricks if most weren't rotated or flipped.
3 bricks tall.
Originally intended to be a reversal of my Blokula font. Ended up looking more like swimming pool tiles with recessed text.
Uppercase contains variable widths, lowercase is monospaced to facilitate vertical typing.
This is a cloneA font formed out of Truchet Tiles.
Truchet tiles are formed by taking a single tile composed of opposing quarter circles, then applying its inverse in a random fashion. Here, I've inverted the tiles to create outlines, then developed the negative aspects of the letters, thus creating a reversal of a reversal of a reversal! Boom! Now you're in the third dream level of Inception.
This is a cloneiCollect.it®️ is a barcode (and text) version of the "Code 39 Barcode Specification" which can be read by most modern barcode scanners. I added lowercase characters for more readable labels even though they scan as uppercase. *Notes: Use an underscore instead of a space (as space characters are always blank in a fontstruct). Place an asterisk before and after your string for it to be recognised by barcode readers. Additionally, bracket pairs can be used for more stylish ends for labels etc: () [] <> See the examples. Happy scanning! As of Dec 2022, iCollect.it is a registered trademark of iCollect.it Ltd (UK).
This is a clone