Typographic Portfolio
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Dr Wouter Soudan type design portfolio 2019.01.14 http://scriptorium.blog @rhythmvs Typographic research & design since 1997 I’m always researching: printing techniques, typesetting, page layout, information technology and text encoding, geometry and computer vision, linguistics and paleography, epigraphy and numismatics, illumination, the art history of lettering — papers, books, and books about books. I’ve been collecting too, metres of shelves loaded with books, antiquarian books, private press editions, and hundreds of books on typography and type design. And then there’s my computer: dozens and dozens of font licenses, hard drives stuffed with thousands of files, piles of type specimens (which I scanned in high-res, to study), research notes, bits of code, drafts for papers, sketches and schemata of harmony canons and type metric analyses, .ufo source files… Always busy, often at night, at my keyboard, surrounded by my books, pondering about, for one, where to put the crossbar of the A, ideally that is, reasoned about, from first principles. For I am an acolyte of Plato as well: ’t Is not what the eye beholds that matters only, what matters most is immaterial understanding… * Here is a very brief anthology of my typedesign related work only. My academic bibliobiography looks quite different, and so do my graphic design, web and app development portfolios. No place for my purely typographic work, like typesetting, magazine and book design, either. Some of my software programming contributions are on Github; but do have a look at my typographic start-up: http://textus.io. My curriculum vitae in a few lines: 2017 — Proud dad to Winter Faust 2015 — Co-Founder Textus.io, typesetting automation 2010 — Lecturer of typography and graphic design 2009 — Post-doctoral research fellow, computational linguistics 2008 — Doctor of Philosophy (theory of art) 2007 — Postgraduate Plantin Genootschap, summa cum laude 2003 — Bachelor of Philosophy, magna cum laude 2002 — Master of Art History, egregia cum laude 1999 — Bachelor of Philology, Latin and Greek, cum fructu 1979 — Born in Leuven, Belgium $ tree . ├── Read_µe.txt ├── Scholar.fla ├── Ismini.pfa ├── Keystroke\ map 1998. Scholar Greek │ ├── Keymap.gif │ ├── Tekenset.bmp I went to college to study classical languages. Latin still is my darling; Greek however │ ├── bckgrnd3.gif │ ├── charz.wpd was new to me—and intimidating with all those accents! Back then, way before Unicode │ ├── keymap.cpt was a household name, it was near impossible to set polytonic Greek properly. As the │ ├── keystrokes.cpt hacker was just awakening in my sophomore self, I set out to devise my own codepages │ ├── tekenset.cpt │ └── testblad.wpd and develop an easy-to-use font, for me and my fellow students to typeset our bachelor ├── Nieuwe\ map assignments. A bric-à-brac of system fonts, yet a fruitful first acquintance with font │ ├── Acrobatfiche.p65 engineering. Plus, a new universe opened up for me, as soon as I got my hands on │ ├── SCHOG___.PFB │ ├── Scholar\ Greek.fog (pirated :-s) copies of Fontographer, PageMaker, and CorelDraw… │ ├── Scholar.fla │ ├── Scholar.swf Not much to show here, but faded memories. After all these years, it’s all dissolved into │ ├── cptees.zip │ └── ttefs.zip digital dust, unreadable, except for the README file and the directory tree. A reminder ├── SCHOGI__.PFA of why I have become a fervent proponent of open standards and non-proprietary file ├── SCHOGI__.PFB formats. And of what drives me in my vocation as a typographer: ├── SCHOGI__.PFM ├── SCHOGI__.PFM$ ├── SCHOGI__.TTF Ars artium omnium conservatrix est Typographia… ├── SCHOG___.PFA ├── SCHOG___.PFB ├── SCHOG___.PFM ├── SCHOG___.PFM$ ├── SCHOG___.TTF SS CC HH HH OO LL AA RRRR ├── Scholar\ Greek\ Italic.fog SS SS CC CC HH HH OO OO LL AA AA RR RR ├── Scholar\ Greek.fog SS CC HHHHHH OO OO LL AAAAAA RRRRR ├── Vorige\ schog.zip SS CC HH HH OO OO LL AA AA RR RR └── Website SS SS CC CC HH HH OO OO LL AA AA RR RR ├── Bronbestanden SS CC HH HH OO LLLLLL AA AA RR RR │ ├── Background.cpt │ ├── Background2.cpt GG RRRR EEEEEE EEEEEE KK KK │ ├── Background3.cpt │ ├── Bckgnd.gif GG GG RR RR EE EE KK KK │ ├── Header.cpt GG RRRRR EEEEE EEEEE KKK │ ├── ODYCCEIAC\ OMHROY.cpt GG GGG RR RR EE EE KK KK │ ├── meander.cpt GG GG RR RR EE EE KK KK │ ├── meander.gif GG RR RR EEEEEE EEEEEE KK KK │ └── meander2.gif ├── advant.htm ├── bckgr2.jpg 1998 (c) Louanij, ex officina W. Soudan. Omnes jures. ├── bckgrnd.jpg ├── charz.htm ├── guest.htm ├── header.gif This version of the accompanied font is the bèta-release ├── keymap.gif which was designed for the greek-students of K.U. Leuven ├── keymap.htm (= Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium). ├── keystrok.jpg Please leave your comments in order to enhance this ├── other.htm product at: ├── print.htm www.student.kuleuven.ac.be/~m9708825/scholar.htm ├── scholar.htm ├── scholar1.htm You may try and use this font freely, untill our defini- ├── scholar1.zip ├── scholar2.htm tive version will be released (by the end of July, ’99). ├── scholar2.zip ├── scholar3.htm └── version.htm [email protected] 2005. Avant la lettre... Before I even dared to try my hand at type design – an art I held too venerable to spoil – I did some lettering, once in a while, especially when preparing my plates. And I remain a platemaker and a printer, still. True to my first love: the graphic brutalism of wood and linoleum cuts, in a sixteenth-century fashion, or early expressionist, like in the finest editions of the interbellum private press movement. Or the subtle tones of etched stipplings and hatchings—such a contemplative thing to do! In doing, I learned a lot of the transformative effects of aquaforte, ink, pressure, and dampening, on the looks of letters. * (*) ‘L.M. Solzen’ was my nom de plume back then… 2007. Cornet Antiqua / Rilke Kursiv Incited by reading Max Caflisch’s startlingSchriftanalysen , I cautiously ventured to draw letters of my own and turn them into a font: my firstling. I admired the italic to Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse’s Diotima, but found it was too calligraphic still. I wanted something more clear-cut and rigid, yet with some of the chancery flair preserved. I also felt tickled to do something of a hybrid, something inbetween a cursive Fraktur and the humanists’ cancellaresca. Something that would be the perfect type for the bibliophile private press edition of Rainer Maria Rilke I was planning to do, in letterpress. — Some day I’ll finish my translation… 2012. Post-doc: converting medieval documents into a searchable database From 2009 to 2012 I was engaged as a post-doctoral researcher, for a project some- Thinking up Unicode-compliant text encoding solutions for Bernhard Bischoff’s what out of the scope of my official curriculum. The promotor had been looking to recommendations for paleo graphic transcription, was something right up my alley. hire a scholar able to read medieval archival records in Latin, preferrably a classical The project did not require the design of a new typeface, but some thorough font en- philologist, who also was handy with the computer—a white raven. Little did he know gineering all the more. Web fonts were very new back then, UTF-8 still widely under- his project’s success would however very much depend on arcane acronyms like TEI supported. Getting PHP’s RegEx engine to work with Latin flection and scribal XML, UTF-8, MUFI, and RegEx. As a digital humanist with a huge appetite for paleo- breviatures was tough, for example, OpenType mark positioning quite a challenge… graphy, I happily took up the challenge and committed to working out an implemen- tation of faithful electronic diplomatic transcriptions. https://web.archive.org/web/20161231113759/http://rhythmus.be/anthroponymical-lexicon/ 2009–’13. Teaching: theory of typography For four very happy years I had the opportunity to convey my passion for typography to students (who indeed loved me as an enthusiastic teacher, they said). I also was very lucky that at the school were I was engaged, typography had in fact been embarrassingly absent from the graphic design curriculum, so that I could fill in my teaching hours fully at my own discretion, from scratch. Since I was academically trained myself but also am a maker, I decided to offer both theory classes and workshops. Being able to put my typography research and years of thinking and tinkering into a coherent course, was great! Thousands of slides, loaded with carefully designed diagrams, are waiting on my backup drives, to once be used again, repurposed, or published anyhow… 2009–’13. Teaching: theory into practice Even more satisfying than lecturing ex cathedra was it when students showed they had truly understood the principles of ductus and (broken) letter construction, of symbolism and semantics, figuration and abstraction, which all I so scrupulously had been trying to explain with perhaps all too difficult diagrams. An excercise I especially loved to assign: Take a sign from the zodiac and ‘translate’ its symbol into a writable glyph, as if it never had been done before, so as to re-invent a new character from a pictogram. But beware of Gerrit Noordzij and translation: Thy broad nib shall never go up! 2015. Typographic river detection Besides graphemes and typesetting, I love geometry too for how it underlays graphics and traditional printmaking techniques. It only follows naturally that I got fascinated by the physics of optics and computer vision as well, and non-photorealstic rendering, hoping to one day find the philosopher’s stone to crack the mystery of ancient shading techniques like manière ciblée, stippling, mezzotinto, and hathcing, algorithmically. — When typography and computer vision meet, I really get maniacal. Here’s my proof of concept for programmatic typographic river detection.