Frankenstein meets Frankenfont

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, reinvented from fragments of PDF fonts by the team at Fathom Information Design in Boston.
A team of visual storytellers from Fathom lead by data-viz wiz Ben Fry, recently recreated the entire text of Frankenstein using characters and glyphs from over 64,000 PDF documents obtained through internet searches. Precisely 55,382 different glyph shapes were extracted from 347,565 fonts in the PDFs, which were then coded and sequenced to fill all of the 342,889 individual letters found in the Frankenstein text. What emerges from this DNA-like sequencing is a new Frankenfont creation formed from font fragments by Fathoms' Fry and friends.
      The story opens with the display of the most common characters such as Arial, Helvetica and Times New Roman. As the story of the Frankenstein monster evolves, so does the text which is coded to completely devolve into grotesque shapes near the end. Familiar glyphs and fonts merge into obscure scripts; non-Roman fonts begin to appear; and even typefaces morph into pictograms. This Frankenfont transformation becomes the perfect metaphor for Shelley's classic tale of the deformed monster Frankenstein. 

While most books are typically designed to interpret the authors' words with little fanfare and with an obedience to convention as Stanley Morrison once put it, Fry's new Frankenfont edition plays with our sense of order, and the traditional design principles such as consistency, navigation and readability go entirely out the window. As a teacher of book design and typography for many years, I strongly advocate these principles of convention to my students. Afterall, books have been successfully published in this manner for over 500 years. Despite this endorsement, I'm also a big fan of innovation and experimentation in books. In Fry's edition of Frankenstein, a hallmark of book design and innovation has been reached with this conceptual approach to text layout.
      As a timely sidenote to this story, the topic of a frankenfont came up in my classroom just 2 weeks ago when Kevin Larson from the Advanced Reading Technologies Department at Microsoft, was speaking to my students about readability studies of various typefonts and individual characters. Larson is a text enthusiast and has published many studies on the science of word recognition and legibility of characters. The suggestion of a frankenfont was mentioned in jest as one which could build upon the best characters of many fonts in order to achieve greater legibility. The next day, my student Susan Schumacher added a post on our class Facebook page with a link to Fathom's new Frankenfont edition of Frankenstein.
      Copies of the Frankenfont project can be purchased in paperback or hardback editions on Blurb with all profits given to Donors Choose to buy books for students. Incidently, Ben Fry was recently awarded a National Design Award in Interaction Design in June from the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. 

All of the nearly 5500 unique words to be found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (Click image to expand). The key to any great novel is to put them all in the right place ; )
:: Thanks to James Gaddy of Co.Design for packaging this story so nicely.

Festival of the Book Poster

Missed out on the 2011 Montana book festival, but caught the poster on a recent visit to the Exile Bibliophile site. Host Benjamin Clark tells me it was designed and illustrated by Joana Yardley. I just want to be inside this Montana poster, and reading by alpenglow beside the lake. Very dreamy! 

Time to Get Busy Reading

no no no no no no no yes no...
::Via the Letterology Archives

Just my Type of Book

Just My Type from Pentagram on Vimeo.

Released in the UK last Fall, Just My Type, by Simon Garfield will be released tomorrow, September 1st, in the US. I love this book (cover design; not so much). It is indeed a great read—like a pleasant walk through the long corridor of type history! Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings, just included it in a great post on her list of the 10 Essential Books on Typography. You can also read more about it in my earlier Letterology post here which has some cool links.

Any Book in a Storm

Recently seen at WORD bookstore in Brooklyn NY.
::Via ShelfAwareness

Reading for Pleasure

Donald Brun poster, 1966

Oliver Jeffers Book, 2004

Don't miss Shelley Davies' recent post on reading as seen through the eyes of designers, artists and illustrators. These 2 selections are just a sneak preview of her entire archive of readers. It is such a pleasure to see them all in one place. Delightful! 

Read! Read! Read! Read! Read! Read!

In early 1971, a city librarian in the town of Troy, Michigan wrote to dozens of actors, authors, artists, politicians, writers and musicians and asked them to write a letter to the children of Troy about the importance of libraries and books. These 3 letters above were among 97 letters she received in reply. Read the full story here. As usual, these images are always clickable.
:: From the Troy Library Flickrstream.

Summer Reading

Dames in dunes. From Jan Willemsen's Flickr page.

Early 20th century image of man floating in the Dead Sea. You can see the stereo version of this photo on Thiophene Guy's Flickr page.

Who Doesn't Like Books?

          





















Top: Bookplate from Library Mistress' Photostream. Middle: From Los Angeles Public Central Library, Bookplate Collection. Designed by "Binner".  Lastly: Ex Libris from Los Angeles Public Central Library, Bookplate Collection. Design by A.R., 1919.

Reading While Walking

One of the best promotions for reading I have seen. Designed for Get London Reading by KentLyons, London. Do mind the pavement cracks!

Late Night Cult Classics From Bookmans

Designers & Books, o-my!

A new blog is on the block. It's called Designers and Books and their mission is to foster conversation that will challenge students, stimulate emerging designers, energize established designers, and be of value to all members of the design community. Beginning with a website designed by Pentagram and a rough-cut list of 50 multi-disciplinary designers from several countries, it asks each esteemed designer to identify specific books which are meaningful and formative to their lives. Beginning here, you will find a list of 677 books to review to date. It's an embarrassment of reading riches which I will never live long enough to complete, but it is nice just knowing it is there. Next, they need the Designers & Books CliffNotes site with all the condensed versions of these great books.

Who Knew Reading was a Competitive Sport?

Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen are a crack-up in the new series Portlandia, which premiered January 21st on IFC. The Executive Producer is Lorne Michaels. Watch the opening song and more clips including a fun segment about the owners of a feminist bookstore in Portlandia here.

Don't Read While Sledding

WPA poster library project for Illinois. Via Book Oasis

Happy New Year Reading

Victorian greeting card via The Private Library.

Reading Glasses for the Horizontally Inclined

Invented in England in 1936. Via LukeTechTips.

Story Time

A Hell of a Good Time via PopKulture.
The Evil of Time via S.Wallace.
The Time Machine (Classics Illustrated) via Michael Vance.
The Time Machine via Austin Gullixson.
Gift of Time via Christian Montone.
Cover and page spread from How Long is it? via Hillary Lang.

Bringhurst on Reading

Reading, like speech, is an ancient, preliterate craft. We read the tracks and scat of animals, the depth and lustre of their coats, the set of their ears and the gait of their limbs. We read the horns of sheep, the teeth of horses. We read the weights and measures of the wind, the flight of birds, the surface of the sea, snow, fossils, broken rocks, the growth of shrubs and trees and lichens. We also read, of course, the voices that we hear. We read the speech of jays, ravens, hawks, frogs, wolves, and, in infinite detail, the voices, faces, gestures, coughs and postures of other human beings. This is a serious kind of reading, and it antedates all but the earliest, most involuntary form of writing, which is the leaving of prints and traces, the making of tracks.

:::Robert Bringhurst::: A Story as Sharp as a Knife (1999), p.14.
Via: Greg Kindall over at Seven Roads.

Visual Storytelling

Publishers sell stories, yet they are seldom the topics of them. This is not the case of a new British publisher, Visual Editions, nicknamed VE. Visual Editions was born in 2009 out of a joint love for books, when owners Britt Iversen and Anna Gerber wondered why there was such a large divide between text-driven literary books and image-driven art and design books. They now edition beautiful, smart and well-crafted books which are nearly theatrical experiences. They consider this amalgam of text and image as visual writing, and see a rich literary heritage of this kind of writing. Their vision is to make great looking stories—where the words and pictures meld and the act of reading becomes an experience. Here is a glimpse of Tristram Shandy, their first editioned book.



You can also see some of their favorite examples of visual writing (including some of their own) in their Flickr group.

Take a look at a short video of some reactions to VEs second book, Tree of Codes, just released in the UK on November 15th:

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer - Public Reactions from Visual Editions on Vimeo.

In Tree of Codes, author Jonathan Safran Foer uses an existing manuscript and carves out an entirely new story by die-cutting out portions of the text. The original book is one of his favorites—The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and Foer claims it is a completely different story with a different arc and characters even. In the process of producing this unconventional book, Visual Editions got turned down by every printer they approached—the stock line being the book you want to make just cannot be made. Their luck turned when the Belgium printer, die Keure rose to the challenge of making a book with a different die-cut on every page. This book, or paper sculpture, defies all literary and design conventions, took over a year of writing, cutting and proto-typing and it was not without production perils. The book's designer is London-based Sara De Bondt Studio. De Bondt is also a teacher at The Royal College of Art who co-curated The Form of the Book conference at St. Bride Library in 2009. The paperback cover of Tree of Codes was designed by Jon Gray of Gray318. A remarkable acheivement all! I cannot wait to hold it in my own hands to experience the reading myself. Note to self...add to wish list. It will be available in the states soon!





Listen to what Jonathan Safran Foer has to say about the concept of his new book and the process of reading it:

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer from Visual Editions on Vimeo.

Honey, I've Shrunk The Declaration of Independence

Ken Perlin, Professor of Computer Science at NYU Media Research Lab, claims to have developed the smallest readable screen font, called Tiny, which is designed specifically for LCD screens. As an experiment, Perlin reduced our 500 word Declaration of Independence to fit a small 320 x 240 pixel QVGA display using his closely-leaded 2 pt. Tiny font with a justified setting. Surprisingly, it is still somewhat readable. The circular magnification inside Perlin's example below provides some hint of Tiny's resolution, however I would dare him to try and letterspace this text any tighter! At best, he would have to answer to the Type Police. And does he have any clue what the Tea Party crowd might do to him when they see how our Declaration of Independence is being further reduced? Just sayin'...














Via Makezine