Earlier this week a brand new web­site entirely ded­i­cated to a single type­face family went live. Erik van Blok­land’s FF Trixie OT – a major upgrade of the sem­i­nal rough type­writer type­face – can be accessed on trix​ie​font.com. After metaserif.com this is the second microsite pub­lished by FontShop San Fran­cisco. I used the occa­sion to inter­view Erik van Blokland.

The microsite fea­tures five sections.

• The Story of FF Trixie recounts the origin of the design and explains how it was upgraded to the new version.
• Tech­ni­cal Spec­i­fi­ca­tion includes all you need to know about the tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tions: Open­Type Layout Fea­tures, Pack­ages, Lan­guage Support.
• In-​Use Gallery allows you to submit your designs cre­ated with FF Trixie or pic­tures of FF Trixie spot­ted in the wild.
• Spec­i­men show­cases the dif­fer­ent ver­sions and grades of FF Trixie.
• In Free Down­loads you’ll find a wall­pa­per and poster, FF Trixie spec­i­men PDFs, a fea­ture overview, and a “Top Secret” Russ­ian Doc­u­ment Spec­i­men by Ilya Ruderman.

Fur­ther­more a cool little trailer pro­duced by Erik with music by Just van Rossum can be found on the FF Trixie home page. It is also hosted on YouTube and Vimeo.

FF Trixie OT por­trait of Erik van Blok­land gen­er­ated with Image to HTML/ASCII
Source image: Marc Eckardt

I’m always inter­ested to find out why type design­ers revisit one of their cre­ations, so I decided to con­duct a little inter­view over e-mail with Erik van Blok­land. The first ques­tion was self-​evident:

What made you decide to revisit Trixie?

A new Open­Type ver­sion made sense, and I had an exten­sive list of desider­ata – first and fore­most the expan­sion of the sup­ported lan­guages: a larger char­ac­ter set, inte­grat­ing the Cyril­lic ver­sion, and adding the Greek characters.

The orig­i­nal ver­sion of Trixie was a com­pro­mise between detail and tech­nique. Back then print­ers and com­put­ers had cute little mem­o­ries, and Trixie was skim­ming their limits. But now those prob­lems are a thing of the past. Fur­ther­more there was some­thing about the char­ac­ters them­selves. I saw a number of appli­ca­tions where the let­ters were used really big, some of them in the movies. The coarse­ness, the fact that you clearly noticed those long straight lines that render the rough­ness started to irri­tate me. More detail­ing was required, and design­ers should have more options when using Trixie.

How exactly did you pro­duce the enhanced Rough ver­sion and the new Trixie HD?

A system for Font­Lab Studio, writ­ten in Python and Robo­Fab. It was the only way to achieve the right amount of detail­ing. Not only size and posi­tion­ing of the details were impor­tant, the “budget” was also lim­ited to 3000 Bézier node points per glyph that needed to be allo­cated opti­mally. The ren­der­ing of the fonts even­tu­ally took up the most time because the code and the para­me­ters needed tweak­ing for every font.

Basi­cally the Rough ver­sion is the same as the orig­i­nal Trixie, but with a layer of moss grow­ing on the letter forms. This means the new ver­sion can be neatly inte­grated in exist­ing designs with­out caus­ing text to reflow. But with the advan­tage of having more detail, and of course an extended char­ac­ter set that’ll take you a lot further.

The High-​Definition ver­sion needed more work. Com­pared to the Rough the HD ver­sion also adds detail­ing within the char­ac­ter shapes. The char­ac­ters are com­posed of count­less spots cre­at­ing that greasy, gritty effect. On screen those spots pro­duce real­is­tic grey tints (actu­ally it is a kind of halftone). But when used in large sizes it looks like the impres­sion of a type­writer ribbon. A gen­uine impres­sion of a type­writer has no blacks nor whites, but exists of grey smears on the paper. Although this is not pos­si­ble with fonts, not even with Open­Type, the halftone method of Trixie HD mimics this effect convincingly.

Because the char­ac­ter shapes were gen­er­ated auto­mat­i­cally it was pos­si­ble to create sev­eral alter­nates per glyph. The HD fonts each have seven ver­sions for every char­ac­ter, some lighter and some darker. Open­Type fea­tures then pro­duce a pleas­ing random mix.

I was dis­cussing FF Trixie HD with Kris Sow­ersby over iChat – “17 mil­lion points!? F**********!” – and he wanted to know how many times Font­Lab died on you during the process. :)

The ren­der­ing was actu­ally very stable. The tex­ture engines stayed away from FontLab’s rough spots and ren­dered for days. Rather than import­ing a huge number of points from an exter­nal source – for instance Illus­tra­tor – Font­Lab gen­er­ated the shapes. So it was pos­si­ble to stop before things went wrong. The 17 mil­lion is the total in all weights and ver­sions. I think the max­i­mum for a single source is 6.5 million. :)

When inter­view­ing Erik Spiek­er­mann it soon became clear that the design and pro­duc­tion of FF Meta Serif was a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort. Did you too work together with other type designers/technicians on the new FF Trixie? 10,824 is an insane amount of glyphs after all.

The number of glyphs sounds more impres­sive than it is. The extended Latin, Greek and Cyril­lic do add up, but it’s the seven iter­a­tions of each glyph in the HD series that really adds to the total. Gen­er­at­ing those alter­nates was mostly auto­mated.
Christoph Koe­ber­lin at FontShop Inter­na­tional did a seri­ous amount of test­ing and check­ing. The detail makes the fonts rather large, and we had to make sure they would rea­son­ably behave in var­i­ous appli­ca­tions and on dif­fer­ent platforms.

For­give me this fanboy moment, but together with Just van Rossum – under the guise of Let­Ter­ror – you are respon­si­ble for a number of inno­va­tions and orig­i­nal con­cepts in Post­Script type, like Ran­dom­Fonts, truly hand writ­ten script, Bit­Pull, real­is­tic instant types and type­writer fonts, etc. A whole slew of followers/imitators walked in your foot­steps. How does it feel to “reclaim the crown” with the ulti­mate type­writer font? After all you’ve con­sid­er­ably raised the bar.

You’re being silly. Mind you, I’m always pleased to see Trixie in use, and I thought it would be nice to offer more choice in tex­ture and an extended char­ac­ter set.

The thing about type­writer fonts and hand­writ­ing is that it seems to be an easy way into type design. Find an old machine, type some let­ters, a bit of Pho­to­shop and Font­Lab, and you’re done. It’s easy to make such a font, but they’re really dif­fi­cult to do well. If you look through the dirty type­writer fonts online there aren’t that many remark­able ones. The prob­lem with type­writ­ers is that the actual imprint in the paper is not a black and white shape. It’s a grey smudge and some defor­ma­tion of the paper. Fonts can only be black and white, so you have to draw a line some­where. But if you auto­trace these smudges they become totally arbi­trary shapes which do not work as a typeface.

I learned as much when I drew the orig­i­nal Trixie; the edit­ing and bal­anc­ing of the tex­ture took most of the time. But I’m glad I did it because I think that the tex­ture is one of the rea­sons folks pre­ferred it. It just looked more authen­tic. Still the col­lec­tive expec­ta­tion regard­ing res­o­lu­tion and detail changed as com­put­ing power increased. Even the orig­i­nal Trixie shapes began to look dated. By bump­ing up the points it was pos­si­ble to top off the detail.

Ini­tially I gen­er­ated over 6000 points per glyph. That was too much. None of the tools could gen­er­ate bina­ries, it was too slow. But because the tex­ture is syn­the­sized and para­met­ri­cally con­trolled, it was pos­si­ble to budget the point counts, and still main­tain the detail. It’s a subtle process of adding struc­tures and remov­ing unnec­es­sary bits, and a lot of tweak­ing. Some of the final font sizes seem quite unset­tling, which is why we tested the fonts exten­sively in most appli­ca­tions and plat­forms. It is a lot of data, but the machines can handle it. And if you need to take it down one notch, you can always use the Light and Heavy weights, the originals.

Like the orig­i­nal, the new Trixie fonts can be used in a broad range of design. Brand­ing, pack­ag­ing, print, broad­cast. But Trixie is also used in all sorts of con­texts and styles, from silly to pro­found, his­toric and hip. The new lan­guage sup­port will make it an inter­est­ing choice for big brand­ing exer­cises. The new tex­tures will make it easier to find a Trixie that fits the job.

Tags: automatic, Erik van Blokland, FF Trixie, FontFont, FontShop, interview, Just van Rossum, LetTerror, microsite, trailer, Trixie, typewriter