DI A R Y˚ 1 : P E NTA G R A M
WIDENING THE TYPE WITH MATHS PETER BIL’AK EXPLAINS HOW HE WORKED WITH PENTAGRAM TO CREATE DIFFERENT TYPEFACE DIMENSIONS Pentagram wanted to play with different widths of my Irma typeface I took that idea forward and made it a bit more extreme making the wide font wider for example We then redrew all of the glyphs to follow the same kind of logic as the original typeface Any geometric characters such as Hs and Es are very simple to stretch However characters with diagonals – As Ks or Ws for example – tend to be more problematic They are not as easy to stretch so we looked at different ways to do this We tried to find a balance of how sophisticated or straightforward this stretching should be* in the end we decided somewhere in the middle I proposed an algorithm that would control the logic of how the widths would be applied – I don’t like the idea of it being arbitrarily chosen With the help of Karsten Lücke who wrote the script we created an algorithm that cycles through the available widths making sure that two of the same widths are never next to each other This is pure mathematics but the maths alone will never look fantastic We realised there were some undesirable combinations so we overruled the algorithm in some instances The last stage was looking at how the font could be maintained on the web In a year or two the web browsers will catch up with its built-in features
Peter Bil’ak created an algorithm to control the logic of how the three different widths of all le erforms would be applied
One of the biggest challenges in creating the Neue typeface was characters with diagonals
Le ers such as ‘W’ are not as easy to stretch and the team tried different approaches
The typeface is also built to work online currently working be er on browsers such as Chrome
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