Words of Type
Most modern terms and notions related to type and typography are English-speaking and mainly describe design of Latin-based type. Yet there is a huge amount of elements in CJK languages that don’t exist in Latin, which means there are no English words and language to define them.
A graduate of TypeMedia and Type Cooper Lisa Huang, together with her former classmates and professors, is creating a typographic glossary that introduces such terms and systematises those already existing. The project is still getting ready for launch, but its contents have already been translated into Chinese, Korean, German, French, and Japanese. (The German translation was done by Mona Franz, a co-author of the Grato and Gratimo collection.)
An article in English
An article in French
An article in Chinese
An article in Japanese
An article in Korean
Fontra
Fontra is an open source font editor made by Black[Foundry] and DrawBot founder Just van Rossum. As opposed to, say, Fontlab and RoboFont, Fontra exists as a web app and enables live collaboration of a design team on the same typeface at the same time.
Fontra bills itself as a variable native editor tool and promises to facilitate handling variable elements and expedite the process of producing fonts supporting CJK languages.
The first versions of web and desktop apps are now available for free, but after 2023, when Google Fonts stops financing the project, the tool will probably become commercial..
Missing scripts
Missing Scripts is a joint initiative of Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT) and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz design lab. The project aims to identify as many writing systems that have ever existed as possible.
The ANRT students study the surviving written artefacts and create typefaces based
The Missing Script is currently processing over 130 scripts, most of which are
Bye Bye Binary
Bye Bye Binary is a French-Belgian initiative studying inclusive writing. They are now focused on building a library of fonts that contain gender gaps
haracters used to refer to several genders at the same time. For example, German typographic convention used to indicate gender inclusion is a ‘gender
As of today, according to Bye Bye Binary, there are 60 additional glyphs. All of them are in the Unicode Private Use Area (Unicode values in the Private Use Area can be assigned to any glyphs, and glyphs with the same codes from this area can be different in different fonts), and you can’t typeset them in your keyboard.
Any designer can join Bye Bye Binary — all they need to do is to read the instructions on the website, make any open source (or their own) font inclusive and send a font file to the project’s email.
Inclusive fonts from ByeByeBinary repository
Inclusive ligatures example. Set in Baskervvol
AIZI
Suiss students of Chinese origin Shuhui Shi and Weijie Wang point out that Chinese type designers (unlike European and American designers) are reluctant to create small independent foundries or become freelance individuals. The reason is that a Chinese extension includes at least 6,760 commonly used
This fact is why Shi and Wang initiated developing an artificial intelligence that might help optimise the process of designing Hanzi characters. They put together a database of over 90,000 of hieroglyph components and are currently training the
You can download Shi and Wang’s database on their research webpage and use it either for training AI or doing your own type projects.
