‡I might have found a pro­per solu­tion to design a font that would pay the right homage to R. Excoffon’s Calypso.

On-going expe­riment.

So Far From Your Wea­pon – The Dead Wea­ther
[Dzr]

‡I’m a vic­tim of librus eter­nus, the syn­drome of the unfi­ni­shed sketch­book, the one that sees the others being star­ted when he has met no end.

‡To put it sim­ply, I have at least three serious (but not too much) typo­gra­phic pro­jects on the go, inclu­ding Fen­gardo obviously. I haven’t the time now to pur­sue them as I’m busy with ‘real’ work (i.e. paid one), which isn’t a bad thing. This being, I still mana­ged to find some time to plant a new idea in my spare hours, the idea of an exer­cise around my inter­est for the twen­tieth century’s adver­ti­se­ment typo­gra­phy, huge and brutal.

‡As biting at any hook of my ins­pi­ra­tions of very une­ven qua­li­ties would be dan­ge­rous for my men­tal health, I chose to limit the exer­cise in time.

‡In doing such, I would fol­low the path of the guy (or girl) who inven­ted the chea­pest pres­su­ri­zed blow­gun ever, made from a scho­lar ink era­ser and the top, trans­pa­rent, part of a ball point pen (to which you had to asso­ciate a brush handle for the pushing action, paper and your saliva for the pro­duc­tion of ammo). The idea was extre­mely simple but very effi­cient, and soon was to serve the class­room cause of maxi­mum disor­der. Loads of secon­dary school fell for it.

‡Far from me the idea of pro­mo­ting disor­der, nor inven­ting any­thing, I’m sim­ply thin­king of these exer­cises as an ephe­me­ral ground for expe­ri­men­ta­tion which might, at occa­sion, pro­duce some­thing useful.

‡The idea is expres­sed, I’m eager to see if it’ll hold.

‡I wrote quite a lot for such a tiny inten­tion. In fact I was sim­ply willing to intro­duce my new typo­gra­phic attempt, simple, fat and capi­tal. It cost about 6 hours this far (over 5 days), and I’m not plan­ning to lend it more than 4 to declare the expe­riment over.

Ok, I must admit.

I drew those let­ters for a neighbour-cursing purpose.

‡I was on board of a train rol­ling through the coun­try­side and had the firm inten­tion of giving a book back. As I knew the land­scape quite well, I deci­ded to give the men­tio­ned book ano­ther look : it was a fac­si­mile of Geof­froy Tory’s Champ­fleury, prin­ted in 1529.

‡The book had been lent to me by the typo­phile col­league I was paying a visit to, typo-colleague who must have thought my typo­ma­nia was a rea­son good enough for me to enjoy its content. The exact title, in french, is: Art et science de la vraie pro­por­tion des lettres, or in english: Art and science of the tru­th­ful pro­por­tion of let­ters. Even for someone accus­to­med to old prints, the type­set­ting and ortho­gra­phic irre­gu­la­rity are quite deman­ding to read. And before the author goes on the sub­ject of what makes per­fect let­ters to his mind, he tries to demons­trate how the french lan­guage has all the attri­butes of a per­fect expres­sion of excel­lence, which must be quite natu­ral, obviously.

‡This mar­ve­lous demons­tra­tion can be read with some irony as the french wiel­ded by the author, for which he him­self has great esteem, can look a bit anar­chic to contem­po­rary eyes.

‡To his defense, we can add that the Aca­dé­mie Fran­çaise (an ins­ti­tu­tion entit­led to give, adapt and pre­serve the rules of french lan­guage), to which Riche­lieu has given the autho­rity to resolve the pro­blem of irre­gu­lar typo­gra­phic and ortho­gra­phic wri­ting, was foun­ded only a cen­tury later. Confir­ming the role Riche­lieu had dreamt for this ins­ti­tu­tion, it is not unu­sual to read in french books prin­ted bet­ween 1600 and 1800 that french has to be the right­ful heir of latin, as the French nation is sup­po­sedly des­cen­ding directly from the Roman Empire. A very old fan­tasy that was a foun­da­tion to most of the wars France has been impli­ca­ted in until the end of the nine­teenth century.

‡So proud are we, french­men, of our Repu­blics, our Senates; ano­ther dwarf even reins­ta­ted the roman title of Tri­bune, shorly before inven­ting the Legion of Honor (a deco­ra­tion still pined on proud citizen’s torso nowa­days). All this has become quite com­mon to us, thanks to a quite Frank edu­ca­tion, but the way this book’s author demons­trates this rela­tion bet­ween french and latin is even brigh­ter than that. With the cre­dit of some faith-worthy authors, he explains that the Romans, and even the Greeks, were nice people but they could only be simi­lar to cheap wine when France has natu­rally the qua­lity of a Saint-Émilion. And to give weight to this decla­ra­tion, he refers to the myth of Hercules.

‡I’ll spare the details on why Her­cules a dee­ply wise & rea­so­ned man is, thus having to be french, and I’ll sim­ply point the fact on which the demons­tra­tion is based, that is to say that Her­cules, when named by latin & greek authors is always cal­led Her­cules Gal­li­cus, and not Her­cules Lati­nus nor Her­cules Græ­cus. Anyone has to admit this is a proof that can’t be doubted…

‡Per­son­naly, I’m quite amu­sed by such details, and I can bear to be the only one in this case. Such ele­ments high­light some roots of a french men­ta­lity and pride that often exas­pe­rates me but that I mostly laugh about.

‡And to those that His­tory les­sons haven’t killed yet, I sug­gest a lit­tle com­pa­red rea­ding to see what lin­guis­tic and typo­gra­phic changes have hap­pe­ned throu­ghout five hun­dred years.

Good­night Bad Mor­ning – The Kills
[Dzr]

‡{ Puy des Gouttes, Puy Cho­pine, Puy de Lou­cha­dière, Puy de la Coquille.

Fuori dal mondo – Ludo­vico Einaudi
[Dzr]

‡En terre cis­al­pine, j’ai res­piré l’air du chan­ge­ment, vu quelques fan­tômes d’Histoire et pris un plai­sir par­ti­cu­lier à fuir la rôtis­se­rie. Je trouve le brun sale, fieffé roya­liste que je suis. Mais même sans fuir les bancs de la crè­ma­tion, je n’aurais craint aucune peine solaire puisque par bon­heur les nuages avaient l’avantage et pre­naient à cœur leur rôles d’ombrages sino­philes, orfèvres d’une lumière généreuse.

‡D’abord en mon­tagne, j’ai pu me recueillir sur un lieu d’incarcération du légen­daire homme au masque de fer et de Fou­quet, qui est cer­tai­ne­ment res­pon­sable de toute la débauche qui règne en France depuis qu’il a déplacé la vir­gule sur son compte en Vaux, aux dépens du contri­bué royal.

‡Après cette larme ver­sée sur la for­tune de Maza­rin et l’héritage de Louis Soleil que ça n’a pas trop gêné, il a fallu rejoindre les eaux et là s’est pro­duit ce qui me sur­prend presque chaque année : un anniversaire.

‡Le jour amor­çant ma vingt-quatrième année a débuté à l’aurore, sur un orage d’été. Mon esprit était dans ses affaires, mon cœur ran­geait sa cel­lule et la pluie sur cette terre plus cou­tu­mière de l’astre qu’elle chante était un cadeau suf­fi­sant. Après avoir gagné mon niveau, j’ai passé deux jours dans une bonne auberge afin de déci­der à quelles carac­té­ris­tiques j’allais attri­buer mes cinq points: ( 2: typo, 1: vais­selle, 1: nor­rois 1: assi­mi­la­tion des vitamines ).

‡Puis je suis allé voir la mer, pour la seule rai­son qu’elle était furieuse. Ras­sa­sié d’embruns je suis retourné à la bonne auberge, je me suis entraîné au saut à l’élastique en salle et j’ai emmé­nagé dans un palais de marbre, mais pas n’importe lequel puisque c’est celui de David et que lui-même n’est plus tout jeune.

‡Ensuite, ou avant je ne sais plus trop, j’ai pris la route de Parme, j’avais un peu faim. La visite fût brève mais riche en émo­tions. J’ai enfin trouvé une Flo­rence modeste, avec –90% de tou­ristes; bon, David n’y a jamais été, ce qui est quand même dom­mage. En plus de cette décou­verte qui vaut son pesant de car­re­lage, j’ai appris en entrant dans une église – l’eusses-tu cru – que je fai­sais mal­gré moi un pèle­ri­nage sur les terres glo­rieuses de Giam­bat­tista Bodoni, détail car­to­gra­phique qui m’avait échappé jusque là. J’en fus fort ému et je dû mou­rir sur le champ – enfin, sur le sol de la nef – d’où la fin de ce récit, immédiate.

† Mare Liguria

† Carrara

† Parma

‡« I was born in a sum­mer storm, I live there still. »

‡…to down­load.

‡Today is just ano­ther day, except today, I am tur­ning into George Strait and I Give It Away !

‡I had a dif­fi­cult pre­gnancy. It will have requi­red my sun­day per­fec­tio­nism to come to an end and the wise voices of some friendly peers, for me to decide this font is fini­shed and ready for a (first) release.

‡By ‘release’ I mean giving away for free and there are seve­ral rea­sons for that. The first of all is that I’ve always felt like a typo­gra­phic Mitch Buchan­non, a pro­ba­bly nice bloke but crip­pled by ambi­tions too grand for his capa­ci­ties. Then, I’m from this shitty all-free gene­ra­tion which never unders­tood that music, movies and even typo­gra­phy have to be paid, as they are the result of much fuss and hard work. Indu­ced by my condi­tion, I have lit­tle faith in most of the usual eco­no­mi­cal models going on in the type world. The one that convin­ced me the most this far was tried by Jos Bui­venga, who releases the basic weights of his fonts for free and gives the rest for a few bucks away. I find it’s use­ful for the trial pur­pose it ful­fills, the user can prac­ti­cally start to explore the type family which might ease the buying of the whole, even­tually. This being said, I’ve no idea how good this method has tur­ned out to be and I thought hea­ring he didn’t try to make a living out of it, at first. This last point is inter­es­ting to me as I’m not trying either. Any­way, I’m not saying I can pro­vide type design work of pro­fes­sio­nal qua­lity, espe­cially regar­ding the high stan­dards that can be expec­ted in mat­ters of ker­ning and hin­ting, for instance.

‡I had first ima­gi­ned I could release a light­weight ver­sion with a basic cha­rac­ter set contai­ning only the strict mini­mum for most usages. And then I rea­li­zed how absurd this idea was as I had drawn all the rest, plus, I would have had to clean the Open­type func­tions, which I’m far too lazy to even start thin­king of.

‡So here comes the heal­thy lit­tle baby, weigh­ting 400+ glyphs, basic set, old style figures as default, lining figures (tabu­lar and pro­por­tio­nal), small caps, some his­to­ri­cal variants, tit­ling variants, etc. Just for the fun part of a list, the font can be used for the fol­lo­wing lan­guages:
alba­nian, basque, cata­lan, danish, dutch, english, esto­nian, færoese, fin­nish, french, gali­cian, ger­man, greek, indo­ne­sian, irish, ice­lan­dic, ita­lian, male­sian, manx, nor­ve­gian bokmål, nor­ve­gian nynorsk, por­tu­gese, somali, spa­nish, swa­hili, swe­dish.
The lan­guage before last is my favo­rite, as it allows the Lion King to woo his future wife with Fen­gardo, in his native language.

‡Lin­guis­tic and mediocre joke set aside, I have to thank the silent actors of this pro­duc­tion, star­ting with my tea­chers who where kind enough to ino­cu­late the typo­ma­nia into me, my friends who suf­fer me, the ones who edu­cate me, those who kindle my typo­gra­phic verve and the beta-testers who liked the type­face even in the time of it utter ugliness.

‡Ok now, let’s not pay the bill:

[ Down­load Fen­gardo ]

Fen­gardo by Loïc San­der is pro­vi­ded under the terms of the licence Crea­tive Com­mons BY-ND 3.0. If you need any autho­ri­za­tions beyond this licence, we can dis­cuss it, fol­low the sign: loic (a) aka­lol­lip (dot) com

<black tea­ser>

> Radio extract (Dzr)

…devient plus que possible.

Ça se passe par là.

Boom Boom – John Lee Hoo­ker
[Dzr]

{Moer­dijk Brug}

‡The pic­ture & sound of the road to The Hague, fol­lo­wing the dis­co­very of one of the most well-preserved inhe­ri­tance of typo­gra­phic His­tory; presses, books & punches for proof.

{Ant­wer­pen, Plantin-Moretus Museum}

{Breda, out­sides early}

‡And concer­ning the Gra­phic Desin Museum and fes­ti­val, I used my eyes more than the camera. Remains only the hint of a swift theft that could have gone unnoticed.