Yesterday with Patrick we discussed about how to fit as much information as possible in a tiny icon (16×16px). The idea was to put the name of the band (it is for Kitsune) on display on the icon.
We came trough a range of ideas including tiny micro type from the end of the 90’s developped for on-screen reading for and by flash designers; we also thought about the work of Louis Emile Javal (wikipedia notes on Javal work). Javal was an ophthalmologist who worked on character differentiation to increase legibility; he worked on the mainly on the counter-form of the letter, the shape created by its absence. the work on the lower case “o” is quite remarkable: it is a simple middle dot which helps draw the circle of the letter just by opposing contrast to surrounding letter-forms.
Interestingly, my quick searches lead me to a nice blog post Typographie Font Minuscule introducing a typeface designed by Thomas Huot-Marchand (of 256tm); he re-worked the principles developed by Javal according to contemporary technologies.
I read about an article in the Typographisches Monats Blätter covering this font but i couldn’t get my hands on it - this page mention a pdf, i would love to see more of the specimen; i really like the intelligence of the demonstration below:
Bloody smart, isnt’it?
Finally, there a few more resources on the subject:
* Typophile has a node about the Javal, and mention the work on the Minuscule typeface as well.
** Patrick came back this morning with the idea of using QR code (or something similar) which is brilliant: it lets you embed more information than a simple surface could ever contain. That’s all the Meat Data thing! I love this idea…
*** writing this post reminded me of our own attempts with Pierre Terrier at designing a small size characters which remains legible: the Jawut; a mix between the Javal and the Newut from André Baldinger. This typeface has been designed for the Analog Information Books projects documenting the installation Analog Information: 2 computers talking to each other using speech to text and text to speech technology.
**** Some forms of this Minuscule typeface are analogous to the one we developed for the typographic experiment we developed for our Futura Domus, a contribution to Domus 917 (September 2008) - it’s really nice to see the sphere of influence a non designer production can have on a wide variety of practice…
