Wow - I love Marcel Script!

Talented Twin Cities-based designer Carolyn Porter has designed a fantastic typeface, with a riveting back story. The typeface is called Marcel Script Pro, and is available from P22 Type Foundry. 

I love this script! It has extremely comprehensive OpenType support which can be accessed in InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. The font consists of more than 1300 glyphs that capture the texture of ink on paper. 

Along with the usual OpenType support such as discretionary ligatures, contextual alternates, swashes, and stylistic sets, Marcel Script Pro contains some unusual OpenType features:

A “www” ligature is included, to make that pesky and ugly world-wide-web acronym more attractive:

You can add swashes before and/or after almost any glyph by typing @ and # one or more times to adjust the length of the swash:

With Stylistic Set 11 applied, some cool things happen:

Typing ink* creates an ink spot. The font cycles through different spots each time you press the asterisk key:

Typing “orn!” creates an ornamental swash. Each type you press the !, a different swash from a list of about 20 appears:

The font has such a great back story: Here’s a short summary from the P22 Web site:

The font Marcel is named in honor of Marcel Heuzé, a Frenchman who was conscripted into labor during World War II. During the months Marcel was in Germany, he wrote letters to his beloved wife and daughters back home in rural France. Marcel’s letters contain rare first-person testimony of day-to-day survival within a labor camp, along with the most beautiful expressions of love imaginable. The letters — stained and scarred with censor marks — were the original source documents used by designer Carolyn Porter to create a script font that retains the expressive character of Marcel Heuzé’s original handwriting. 

In fact, the story is so compelling that it prompted Carolyn to write a book titled “Marcel’s Letters”. Read more about Carolyn's fascinating book project here.

I can’t imagine the labor of love this font must have been, and the countless hours that Carolyn put into researching and crafting the font. Good work Carolyn!

HWT fonts on Typekit

I really enjoy exploring the Adobe Typekit font library for new fonts. Remember, Typekit Desktop Fonts are a benefit for Creative Cloud subscribers. This is a quick and easy way to find a new face for your next project.

Recently I was searching for a font, and I stumbled across the fonts from the Hamilton Wood Type Foundry are available for desktop use on Typekit. I love the serendipity and discoverability of browsing fonts on Typekit. Here are a few examples of some of these fonts:

 

Adobe is steadily growing the number of fonts on Typekit that are available for desktop use. As of this writing, there are 286 font families available for desktop syncing. Font Families contain multiple fonts of different weights and styles. 

News from Adobe MAX day 1

I'm at the Adobe MAX conference this week. At the keynote session this morning, Adobe made a LOT of announcements. If you are interested in Adobe's vision of the future of graphic design (and you should be) watch the recording of the keynote here.

I'll no doubt be writing much more about this here in weeks to come. But here are a few hightlights of particular note to readers of this blog:

CS6 is the final version of Creative Suite

Future versions of InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and other programs will be named InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, Photoshop CC, etc. The only way to stay up to date with these programs will be via a Creative Cloud membership. Many of the Creative Cloud revisions will be rolled out in June.

Previous versions

When CC versions of programs are released, CS6 versions will also remain available for download as part of your Creative Cloud subscription.

Fireworks is dead

Adobe has ceased further development of Fireworks. They will continue to sell Fireworks CS6, and it will remain downloadable for Creative Cloud members.

InCopy is part of Creative Cloud

At long last, InCopy, the editorial version of InDesign, will be part of your Creative Cloud subscription.

Typekit fonts for the desktop

Typekit, Adobe's platform for serving fonts to Web sites, is being extended to make many of the Typekit fonts available for desktop use in InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. With a technology called "Sync fonts" you can locate a Typekit font, sync it to your system, and it will be available immediately for use.

Upgrade for CS6 users

There will likely be a variety of upgrade paths and offers to Creative Cloud, but a $19.95/month "first year" price for owners of CS6 was announced.

Free font resources

Here are some font resources you should be aware of:

Source Sans Pro

Source Sans Pro is Adobe's first "open-source" type family. The free sans serif type family is available in 12 styles, and includes a number of OpenType features such as fractions, old style numerals, and stylistic sets. As an open-source typeface, it is completely free to use for any private or commercial purposes. You can read more about the development of Source Sans Pro here.

Source Code Pro

Source Code Pro is a monospaced version of Source Sans Pro, available in 6 styles. You can read more about the development of Source Code Pro here. This is a free open-source font.

Google Web fonts

Google Web fonts is a directory of "hundreds of free open-source fonts optimized for the web". However, as my friend Bob Levine pointed out recently, the fonts can also be downloaded in TrueType format for use in print or digital projects. To do so,

1. Visit www.google.com/webfonts, browse the fonts, and add one or more fonts to your collection.

2. Click the Download your Collection link in the upper-right corner of the Web page.

3. Follow the on-screen instructions to download the fonts in your collection as a zip file. You can then unzip the file and install the TrueType fonts on your system.

Source Sans Pro, Source Code Pro, and all the Google Web fonts are all licensed using the SIL Open Font License.  

Scary Typographic Education

Just in time for Halloween, the FontShop Blog contains a series of 6 blog posts about "Typographic Horrors" such as faux bold, rivers of white, fake small caps, etc. Recommended reading if you want to sharpen your typographic skills!

(via Peter Gold)

Copyfitting InDesign text

I'm in Abuja, Nigeria this week doing InDesign and InCopy training for one of the media companies here. One of the things that I've taught is the various ways to make text fit a fixed amount of space in InDesign.

Here's a list of the ways that I can think of to adjust body text so that it will become slightly shorter or longer to fit a fixed amount of space...

1. The best way to copyfit, (without affecting the typography) is to edit the text. An InDesign-InCopy workflow makes this really slick, allowing a copy editor to edit the text to fit the space in the context of the InDesign layout.

2. Select all the text, and apply a tiny tracking adjustment to the text. Do this with the control panel, the character panel, or the following shortcuts:

Macintosh:

option-left arrow/right arrow (to adjust tracking by the amount set in preferences)

command-option-left arrow/right arrow (to adjust tracking in 5x greater increments)

Windows:

alt-left arrow/right arrow (to adjust tracking by the amount set in preferences)

ctrl-alt-left arrow/right arrrow (to adjust tracking in 5x greater increments)

3. Select all the text, and adjust the word kerning by a tiny amount. Do this with the following shortcuts:

Macintosh:

command-option-delete (to remove space between words)

command-option-\ (to add space between words)

(add the shift key to multiply the amount by 5)

(command-option-q will reset the tracking and kerning values back to the default)

Windows:

ctrl-alt-backspace (to remove space between words)

ctrl-alt-\ (to add space between words)

(add the shift key to multiply the amount by 5)

(ctrl-alt-q will reset the tracking and kerning values back to the default)

4. Select all the text, and adjust the horizontal scaling by a tiny amount. Use the fields in the control panel or the character panel to do this.

Obviously, you could also adjust the type size or the leading, but both of these affect the appearance much more that the 4 methods listed here.

Keep in mind that doing a couple of these things in small amounts, rather than just one of the things in a large amount, will usually be less noticeable. In a perfect world, you wouldn't need to do any of them, but in narrow newspaper columns, under tight deadlines, these measures are often inevitable.

Free back issues of U&lc

From 1974-1999 International Typface Corporation published a tabloid-size, flamboyant publication dedicated to typography, typographic design, and new ITC typefaces. Many of us eagerly anticipated and treasured each issue. I still have a stack of issues from 1991-1997 that I haven't been able to part with.

Monotype Imaging bought the assets of ITC, and now, on the fonts.com blog, they are making high-resolution scans of back issues of U&lc available to download.

These are worth looking at if you want to get a sense of cutting edge design and typography in 1974, or if you want a historical perspective on where we've been and how we got to where we are today.

You can find more information about the history of U&lc here.

Typography education

FontShop has created a nice Education page, which contains four nice (free!) downloadable PDF files including a 52 page Field Guide to Typography and Erik Spiekermann's Typo Tips: Seven Rules for Better Typography. Check it out!

Typography on the iPad

Stephen Coles wrote a great piece on the FontFeed blog about typography (or lack thereof) on Apple's new iPad, and also covers some points about the iPhone and Mac OS X.

Justified type without hyphenation in iBooks?

iBooks don't recognize embedded fonts?

No widow-orphan control?

Ouch.

See also Liz Castro's great posts about the iPad, the ePub standard, and InDesign.

Interesting OpenType statistics

Ran across this chart today on FontShop's 20 year anniversary page:

I found it interesting that it wasn't until recently that OpenType font sales surpassed the sales of PostScript fonts. The OpenType format was announced in 1996 and major applications and operating systems have supported it for a number of years now. Makes me wonder who is still buying PostScript (or TrueType) fonts and why?

OpenType fonts have several big advantages over PostScript or TrueType fonts, including:

• A single file per font: makes distribution and installation easier more trouble-free
• Cross platform: the same font file works on Macintosh or Windows
• Support for large character sets: wonderful for multilingual projects
• Special extended features in some fonts and applications: support for alternate characters, fractions, oldstyle numerals and more

There's no reason that I can think of for most designers to be purchasing PostScript or TrueType versions of fonts any longer. So the next time you buy a font, think OpenType!

Also of interest: A pie chart on FontShop's 20 year anniversary page claims that 25% of the Fontshop.com support requests are about fonts on the Macintosh platform, and 75% are about the Windows platform. No surprise there!

How to identify a font in a PDF

Have you ever received a PDF and wanted help identifying a font used in the file? If you have Acrobat 9 Professional, here's an easy way:

1. Open the PDF, and choose Advanced > Print Production > Output Preview

2. Select "Object Inspector" for the Preview.

3. Click on the text you're wondering about, and the font that was used should be displayed in the Output Preview panel.

If the font isn't displayed, then the type has been converted to outlines or is a raster image.

If several objects are stacked on top of one another, the lowest object in the stack is listed at the top of the dialog box.

Sorting the Glyphs panel display

InDesign's Glyphs panel (Window > Type & Tables > Glyphs) is indespensible for locating and inserting foreign-language characters, alternate characters, symbols and dingbats. Yesterday I noticed a strange thing about the display order of the Glyphs in the panel. The default sort order is to sort the Glyphs by their Unicode value. Here's what the Glyphs panel looks like for Adobe Caslon Pro Regular, sorted by Unicode value. (Click the graphic to enlarge.)

Note that the various ornaments in the typeface are scattered throughout the panel, making them difficult to locate. But if you choose Sort Glyphs > By CID / GID from the Glyphs panel menu in the upper right corner of the panel, the panel changes to look like this:

This view may be more useful for some fonts. Depending on the typeface you are using, and what you are trying to do, one sort order may be better than the other. Give it a try!

By the way, Illustrator also has a Glyphs panel (Window > Type > Glyphs). But the Glyphs panel in Illustrator is always sorted by CID/GID and cannot be sorted any other way. Also, both InDesign and Illustrator allow you to choose a subset of glyphs using the "Show" drop down menu in the upper-left corner to display just the currency or symbols for example.

Font identification help

Have you ever run across some text set in an interesting typeface, and wondered what font was used? Gone are the days of poring through font specimen books or endless font samples on web sites. Instead, try WhatTheFont.

This free tool from Bitstream lets you upload a scan of a type sample, and then it automatically tries to identify the font from the sample you've uploaded. Depending on the quality of the sample you've scanned, it works amazingly well.

If the automatic recognition doesn't work, you can submit the image to the WhatTheFont Forum, where real live actual people will help you solve the case.

If you have an iPhone, you can just snap a photo of the font in question and use the WhatTheFont for iPhone app to quickly identify it, no scanning and web uploading required. Near instant gratification!

As an alternative, Identifont and Fonts.com both help identify a font by asking you a series of questions about the appearance of certain characters in your sample.

Fontscape helps you choose a typeface by organizing typefaces into many different categories, such as appearance, dimensions, mood, etc.

A new way to read the news

I have worked with a variety of newspaper clients over the years, so I've been watching with great interest as newspapers struggle to find a business model that works in this time of rapid economic and technological change.

The New York Times just released a really cool application called Times Reader 2.0. You've got to try this. It's an application that allows you to read the each day's edition of the New York Times with print-like typography and layout features, either on- or off-line. You can read front page stories and a few other items at no cost to get a feel for how Times Reader works. A subscription is required to read the full content of the paper.

I'm really impressed by the thought that went into the user experience by the New York Times. The interface is clean and obvious, the layout dynamically adapts to different window sizes, the typography is excellent and navigation is easy.

A few notes about the technology behind the product: Times Reader is an Adobe AIR application, which is what makes it cross-platform and able to work off-line. Adobe Flex was used for the code, and the amazing typography and dynamic paragraph composition is provided compliments of an underlying Adobe technology called the Text Layout Framework (TLF). TLF is the result of Adobe incorporating much of the composition and typography technology from products such as InDesign and making it available to Flex programmers. There are several interesting articles about the design and technology behind Times Reader in Issue 04 of Adobe's online publication Inspire.

Linotype FontExplorer updated

Linotype FontExplorer X for the Macintosh has been a free download for a long while. Like many other users, I switched to it awhile back and have been pleased with it, especially considering the price. LinoType has now revised FontExplorer X, giving it a new name (FontExplorer X Pro), adding a server version, offering support and documentation...and deciding to charge for the product. I can't blame them for charging. It's awfully hard to make money on a free product! Linotype is selling the "Pro" version for an introductory price of $39 through 2/28/2009.

You can still download the free version, but it will not be developed further, and at some point I assume an OS X system update will come along that will make this version no longer function properly.

Font management for the Macintosh has come a long way in the last couple of years, with capable font managers available from Linotype, Insider Software (FontAgent Pro 4) and Extensis (Suitcase Fusion 2). You really can't go wrong using the latest versions of any of these products. Each one has a slightly different focus and strengths and weaknesses. All three companies offer a server version to help manage fonts in workgroup settings also.

Grid resource for designers

The Grid System, "the ultimate resource in grid systems" is the place for anyone who likes to design with grid systems, or anyone who wants to learn more about grid systems.

The site is a treasure trove of articles, tools, templates and examples of how to effectively use grid systems in both print and other media. See the templates section for free InDesign and Photoshop templates of grid systems based on the Golden Mean.

Typography humor

I laughed when I read this cartoon that ran in the papers this weekend:

The reaction from many people was probably "Huh?" but us typography freaks love it! See more of Scott's humor at www.theargylesweater.com.

Three great typography videos

There are hundreds of typography-related videos on YouTube and elsewhere. Here are three that I really like:

This video about Typography from the Vancouver Film School is a nice explanation of the mechanics of typography in a brief under-two-minute format.

The Typolution video features an amazing use of typefaces as graphics.

ABC is in Spanish, but its still largely understandable for English speakers, and very clever. It animates the Bauer Bodoni typeface to make the alphabet memorable.

Enjoy!

Aligning columns of numbers

A reader wrote to me last week with the following question:

"I am working on a financial report. The client has requested to have all commas line up as well as $ signs and keeping numbers right justified. I can't seem to do all three. I can get the number data right justified, and the dollar signs to match on a column but not the commas. Any suggestions?"

Upon further investigation, what she was encountering was this:

The commas don't line up because the typeface (Cambria Regular) is an OpenType typeface that supports proportional numerals. In other words, each numeral is a different width (the numeral one is narrower than the numeral eight for example). Most typefaces contain only tabular (equal width) numerals, so this isn't usually a problem.

Luckily, some OpenType fonts contain both proportional and tabular numerals, and InDesign and Illustrator allow you to choose which numeral style you want. Use the proportional numeral style to improve the spacing of numbers wherever possible, and switch to tabular numeral style to make columns of numbers align, as shown below.

To switch between tabular and proportional figures in InDesign, select the text with the Type tool, and choose OpenType > Tabular Lining/Proportional Lining from the Control panel menu. In Illustrator, display the OpenType panel (Window > Type > OpenType), and choose either Tabular Lining or Proportional Lining for the "Position".

To align the dollar signs in the example above, I inserted a "Figure Space" (Type > Insert White Space > Figure Space) in InDesign after the dollar sign on the last line. A figure space is the same width as a numeral when you are using Tabular figure alignment.

En dashes and line breaks in InDesign

Whenever you have a range indicated in your text, such as "pages 130-176" or "Dec. 12-Jan 4", an en dash should be used instead of a hyphen. An en dash is a bit longer than a normal hyphen. En dashes are inserted in InDesign CS2 by choosing Type> Insert Special Character> En Dash, and in InDesign CS3 by choosing Type> Insert Special Character> Hyphens and Dashes> En Dash.

There is a difference between the way InDesign CS2 and CS3 break lines containing en dashes. In particular, if you have a range such as 130-176, CS2 will break the line after the en dash, if necessary, but CS3 will never break the line after the en dash. In other words, the "130-176" will always be kept together on the same line in CS3. For most usage, this is preferable behavior. But what if the project you are working on needs to allow line breaks after en dashes in InDesign CS3? Here is one workaround:

Insert a "discretionary line break" character after the En Dash by choosing Type> Insert Break Character> Discretionary Line Break. This will cause the line to break ONLY when it is necessary to do so, and will not cause any extra space to be added when the line doesn't break. The Discretionary Line Break appears as a vertical blue line when Type> Show Hidden Characters is selected.

To further automate this, you could assign a keyboard shortcut to the Discretionary Line Break to make it easy to enter, or use Edit > Find/Change to search for en dashes and replace them with en dashes followed by discretionary line breaks.