I’m a geek. No way around it. Worse, I am a flighty geek — one day I get all riled up about astrophysics and the next it’s typography. Today it’s typography.

VSCA is working on a couple of new games and part of the process (for me, anyway) is to start visualising the book it will be. This means test pages for layout and type, partly to get a head-start but mostly to keep my enthusiasm up. Enthusiasm fall-off is a big problem for me. I have to polish things to keep them shiny enough to attend to.

So, anyway, one project is called Soulscape and it’s a fun layout problem to solve. The current idea is to construct it according to some very old-school typographic rules — somewhere between 12th and 18th century. The thing is, it matters which specifically we choose, and any choice comes with constraints. I love constraints. Constraints are the single most effective way to make me get creative. I draw with a crow-quill (not literally — it’s a kind of steel nib) and India ink and then scan it rather than use a graphics tablet — I want there to be things I cannot do when I start out.

For simple reasons of economics I started by going through my own library of fonts and an immediate choice is Garamond.

Garamond (Adobe's version -- not exactly what I am using but close)

Garamond is a nice choice because it’s from a useful period for this project (16th century) and so suits the effort to try to echo a book from that period. It’s also extremely effective as a book face — it’s very much like what an audience expects from a font when they pick up a book and so there’s no shock. It has a native italic that’s very elegant, so that gives us two states to knock around, allowing us to clearly present fiction, say. It also has medium, light, and bold faces which is nice though anachronous. We can make some modernisations and they can even be sly or funny if used in context. So this is a pretty cool choice all round. It means that if we select historical (and public domain!) artwork, which would be awesome, we should select from this point onwards to around 18th century and that gives us a lot ot work with. And looking at art from this period pretty much guarantees that it’s public domain, so we score double. Lots of great things follow from this choice.

And the Toph brings up this other idea, one which I had already discarded when reviewing some Carolingian miniscule variants. I discarded them because they are too limiting — in 13th century and earlier books (mostly written, mind you) there is no font variation in the sense that we use it today. Italics are not used for emphasis and bold faces do not exist. Differentiation is either avoided or accomplished through colour, illumination, or changes in size. It also means we would probably not want the columnation I was playing with for use with Garamond. Too strict.

Toph offers me Silentium.

Silentium would force the book to make choices from 9th to 12th century. That means we would avoid italics and bolding and just use this in a couple of sizes. It means we would want to look for artwork from this period which dramatically changes things from the classic Gustav Doré etchings for Danté’s Divine Comedy we were looking at previously. Instead we are diverted towards much more stylized “middle ages” artwork. We would probably want to look for emphasis through adding a colour — a single colour — so that instead of italicizing we would use a rich printer’s red or blue.

This is exciting. It changes everything. And this is what I adore about thinking about typography in ways that run deeper than “does it look cool” — it creates a vision of a completely different book. And at this stage I am not interested in refinements because it’s just too early to think we’re “done” enough to refine. We need to look at several very different ideas, and changing the typeface significantly can do this — drive us into some new space to consider. In this case some very courageous new space. Well, old space, really.

–BMurray