The second application was equally impressive, also because I actually understood all of it. MetricsMachine was announced by Tal with: “I hate kerning more than you do.” What followed was a number of functionalities that streamlined the tedious task of hand kerning type, like deriving the kerning of small caps from the kerning of the upper case. Again the application proved that Tal fully understands the power of a good interface, for example by using colour codes for the character shapes, thus revealing their similarities and differences. A nifty little detail that was met with enthusiasm was the progress bar that shows how far along you are with kerning your font.

Tal’s last application was Prepolator which allows the type designer to prepare the glyphs in his fonts for interpolation, checking numbers of node points, contour order, contour direction, start point position, etc. The fun part of this presentation was that Tal showed how step by step he gradually simplified and speeded up the process, eventually ending up with a very powerful interface that automates most of the work. Ricardo Lafuente’s witty “automagically” he uses on his blog nicely translates the feeling most of us had when witnessing the application work its way through a glyph set. This by the way is why Tal and the others make such great interfaces. When developing there is no second-guessing what the type designer might need, because they simply are type designers themselves.

Prepolator doesn’t do interpolation, because that’s what Superpolator is all about, the amazing application by Erik van Blokland who spoke next. Erik started by illustrating the fundamental flaw in classic interpolation. It uses extremes (thin compressed, thin extended, black compressed, and black extended) to interpolate the other weights and widths in a type family – the multiple master principle. Yet to obtain the best possible regular those extremes usually need to be finetuned to the point of losing their character and become quite dull. Superpolator however can work with whatever master the designer wants to, and the best possible regular weight can be used as an additional master between the thin and the black. Furthermore the designer doesn’t need to have all four extreme masters. By judiciously placing masters in the design space the software can even go beyond the designed extremes and actually extrapolate weights and widths, which had me quite baffled. Those new extremes can be generated and set as masters to further refine the design space. Superpolator is an amazing piece of software, and there seemed to be no end to its capabilities and features.

The last presentation was Tal again, explaining how he builds applications. It all seemed to make sense to me when I saw it at Robothon, but I guess it went a bit over my head. My lack of insight and hands-on experience in coding is to blame. If you want to learn more I suggest you read Ricardo Lafuente’s Day 1 - Afternoon entry.

That was the first day, which ended ahead of schedule. We had more than enough time to have dinner – I joined Peter Bruhn and Stefan Hattenbach in an Indian restaurant – and then make our way to Petr van Blokland who was throwing a party in his studio in Delft. Fortunately Peter Bruhn forgot his badge when leaving the hotel, because returning to the hotel to get it made us miss our tram. The next tram we took was the one where all the type people including Erik got on, and if we hadn’t had them to guide us we’d never have found the place. Petr’s studio was packed and there were good times all over.

Party at Petr van Blokland’s studio | photo by Abi Huynh

I talked to lots of people, including OurType’s Fred Smeijers, and two of his Leipzig ex-students Thomas Thiemich and Maurice Göldner. They designed two of the three most recent releases on OurType – respectively the super family Alto and Meran. The third new release being Lirico by Hendrik Weber, who won a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design at TDC2 2009. Fred is Professor of Digital Typography at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig, and this school is rarely included when the other two type design courses Type and Media and MATD Reading are mentioned. I think this is a bit weird, especially when you see the quality of those three latest OurType releases. Judging by their (type design) output, and the theory thesis they submit at graduation the Bachelor course at HGB looks like the real deal. HGB has had type classes for 100 years, and Jan Tschichold and Albert Kapr were there. They are in the course of publishing a book about the importance of the type classes at HGB throughout the 20 century, and its influence on German scene. I’m looking forward to its release and finding out more.