1 March 2010

Nobody excluded, everybody welcome?
Edo,
you say "the Khatt site is put on the web as a tool to meet and to exchange ideas. There is nobody excluded from any sort of contribution to the site. In contrast, all comments and contributions will be received with the warmest welcome."
Is the "nobody is excluded, everybody is welcome" policy the same as the one applied by your wife during the organization of the Kitabat 2006 conference in Dubai, the very policy which led to the withdrawal of the support of Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) for the conference, to the withdrawal of some speakers and co-organizers? Is it perhaps the same policy that made your wife, who was part of the organizing committee, use her political influence at the American University of Dubai to insist that Thomas Milo be dropped from the speakers list at that conference even though he had been initially invited?
Contrary to what you've written above, what kind of pluralism of opinions can one expect from a website that, when leaving comments under an article, has two optional buttons: "I am a fan" and "Throw flowers". That is, of course, extremely impartial.
From Berlin,
Adam

To the matter
Edo,
Having voiced my opposition to the tone and the partiality of your contribution, I feel that I should add a few lines to comment on some of your assertions, which simply are not true.
It is absolutely right to say that type design should evolve in different directions. But you're trying to create an impression that there is only one direction that is "right". With Latin type, fortunately enough, your authoritarian approach never flew. The tradition of the Latin letter has been formed by the very play of "push-pull", the back-and-forth interaction of hand and machine. On one hand, you've always had the perfectionism and organic nature of the inscriptional tradition, on the other hand, the advances in technology have created opportunities that offered another kind of perfectionism: the ability to reproduce the same shape cleanly and in absolute repetition. On the other hand, you've had the traditionalist conservatism of the calligraphic masters but you've also had technological restrictions and limitations that came with technology. In other words, both the hand and the machine had its strengths and its weaknesses.
The development of Latin type was never monodimensional, never monodirectional. It was always multidirectional and operated on several dimensions. Signpainters and poster artists worked alongside of printers, reproduction of the typographic letter by means of cut-and-paste or photography went hand-in-hand with hand lettering, and today, the computerized clean and repetitive sanserif letterforms are used at the same time as dirty, organic, photographically enriched lettering. In the digital age, it's bitmaps and vectors – which have the same parallel relationship as hand and machine "in the old days."
When reading your words "In Latin typography there is also a small niche that occupies itself with digitising the typographic glories of the past. But this is more like a nostalgic hobby. Not to be taken too seriously. Because nobody would select these typefaces for everyday use," it sounds like you've been living on a different planet. Have you never heard of Jan Tschichold, one of the 20th century's greatest book and typeface designers, who started his career by publishing "Die neue Typographie", a manifesto of Modernist typography, in which he condemned the use of all typefaces except minimalistic sanserifs, but later actually condemned his earlier views, adopted a strongly Classicist design style, and developed Sabon, a typeface which one can safely call "a digitisation of the typographic glories of the past," namely of Claude Garamond's roman and Granjon's italic.
I throroughly recommend you a trip to the Frankfurt book fair (this autumn) or the smaller Leipzig book fair (which actually starts today). You may be astonished to discover that roughly three quarters of literature published in Germany is set in Sabon or in Stempel Garamond (yes, another Garamond). The Garamond letter is what the average German reader gets to see by default when opening a book.
There is certainly an abundance of other typefaces in use on the internet, in print advertising, flyers, brochures, newspapers and on mobile phones – but they never really caught on in book design. Well, perhaps with the exception of Robert Slimbach's Minion, which seems to be the third favourite among German book designers, next to Sabon and Stempel Garamond. Minion is another design that draws heavily from the classic Renaissance Latin letter.
I hope that if Jan Tschichold's name doesn't ring a bell with you, at least Robert Slimbach's name will. Apart from designing the hugely-popular Minion (which by the way pairs beautifully with DecoType Naskh, much better than your Civilité mockup), Robert has made "a digitisation of the typographic glories of the past," namely of Garamond's type. Actually, he's done it twice. In 1989, he designed Adobe Garamond, a version that became hugely popular but which never satisfied him entirely, so a few years later, he began to work on a second, much more monumental, project, which he only completed in 2005. Needless to say that Robert based all the optical sizes of the Garamond Premier Pro family on the separate design size cuts taken from the original Garamond specimens, found among others at the Plantin-Moretus museum in Antwerp, which Robert visited when researching this project.
Did I mention that Garamond Premier Pro is also on its move to become a popular book typeface – joining Minion and the other Garamonds. But then, perhaps you simply consider reading books "a nostalgic hobby" as well.
Further, you say "Also no one would ever consider making complicated Ôcalligraphic engines' to automate Latin calligraphy." I don't know about you, but I like to do a little research before flooding the internet with the product of my brain. This usually saves both the writer and the reader some embarrassment.
Had you done some research, no doubt you would have encountered software applications such as Kalliculator [1] by Frederik Berlaen, a graduate of the TypeMedia type design program at the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in The Hague, or DTL LetterModeller [2] [3] by DTL/URW++, created by Frank Blokland, one of the highest-regarded Dutch type designers and one of the teachers at that very academy.
Had you done some research, I'm sure you would have noticed that as much as 40% of the most popular retail Latin fonts sold by the large font distributors such as MyFonts [4] are calligraphic fonts, and for some font distributors such as Veer [5], it's even 80%.
Had you done some research, you would have found out that among the winners of the Type Directors Club typeface design competition of the past few years, highly complex calligraphic fonts were highly regarded, such as Alejandro Paul's Adios Script [6], his Burgues Script [7] or Ken Barber's Studio Lettering script suite [7]. Had you ever looked at those fonts, you would know that their authors have gone through a lot of trouble of utilizing the contextual alternates mechanism of the OpenType font format to create, in essence, "complicated Ôcalligraphic engines' to automate Latin calligraphy". In fact, other technologies such as the DecoType ACE font engine would have allowed them to achieve this even easier than the OpenType font format, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if at some point we will see an even more sophisticated emulation of Latin calligraphy done outside of OpenType.
Since you have skipped the research, let me help you and assure you that – based on my ten years of experience in working for and with various font distributors, font foundries and type designers – there has been and continued to be a very strong interest in fonts that emulate Latin calligraphy, and that people are constantly trying to push the technological limitations in order to allow them more flexibility, more organic quality, more randomness etc.
This is not to say that it is the only direction. Of course, as I wrote at the beginning, the trend to clean up, minimize, idealize and polish exists as well – but it does so in parallel with, not in opposition to, the calligraphic direction. No flower throwing this time either,
Adam
[1] Frederik Berlaen, Kalliculator: www.kalliculator.com/
[2] DTL LetterModeller download: www.fontmaster.nl/english/demo_rdrct.html
[3] DTL LetterModeller in use: www.flickr.com/photos/fabioaug/3147806901/
[4] MyFonts bestsellers: new.myfonts.com/bestsellers/
[5] Veer: www.veer.com/products/type/
[6] TDC2 2009 winners: tdc.org/tdc/tdc2-2009-winners
[7] TDC2 2008 winners: tdc.org/tdc_site/tdc2_2008_winners.html

Tasmeem "Tsunami"
Edo,
since you mentioned that there was a Tasmeem "Tsunami" project under way, I guess you were referring to this:
www.winsoft-international.com/en/store/fonts.html
As you can see, Tasmeem-compatible fonts represent a wide range of Arabic styles, not at all restricting themselves to just historical script revival. DecoType's own interest in type design certainly revolves around revival of historical Arabic scripts (Ruq'ah, Naskh, Nasta'liq etc.) and that to the extent and quality that is hardly found in any other digital products. But the other Tasmeem fonts prove how easily this technology can be applied to other styles.
Vladimir,
you seem to be right on one thing: the Typophile special interest group for Arabic Typography and Type Design seems to be a much more impartial place to discuss issues related to the topic: typophile.com/forum/366
Regards,
Adam

How pitiful
In the best Smitshuijzen tradition, not only has one of my two postings removed from this thread (Vladimir's reply obviously indicates that he has read "both my posts above", yet there is only one remaining). On top of that, my login has been "banned" from being able to post here anymore.
Quoting you: "the Khatt site is put on the web as a tool to meet and to exchange ideas. There is nobody excluded from any sort of contribution to the site. In contrast, all comments and contributions will be received with the warmest welcome."
Way to go, Edo, way to go. You liar.
Adam Twardoch
(using an alternative login because I am banned from posting using my real one)

Repost: To the matter
(I'm reposting the text that has been deleted by the administrator. I truly wonder what the reasons for removing the post was, and what the reason for banning my user account was. I'd appreciate some clarification. (Of course you're free to remove this post again, and we can play the same game indefinitely.)
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