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Architectural font digitisiation and design

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Architectural font digitisiation and design
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Typographic pipeline with Graphviz, Inkscape and Fontforge
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611
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CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Production Year2017

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Abstract
Numerous works of architecture, furniture, sculptures, illustrations andtypography were made during the 1920s by a modernistic style called theAmsterdamse School. A lot of these works are not easily accessible and, eventhough preservation efforts are being taken, many are deteriorating over time.This talk will elaborate on how FOSS design and typographic tools weredeveloped and used to digitise and extend a century old font under an OFL. To aid the effort of preserving and reuse minimalistic – though often playful– designs from the early 20th century, Stichting z25.org ran a project wherean sculpted incomplete typeface was digitised and made available as a font.The focus of this case study was on typographic design, FOSS development andco-funding. This project used contemporary cultural entrepreneurship by combiningcrowdfunding and public funding to finance this project. As a side-effect, thecrowdfunding campaign contributed to local awareness about the existingcultural heritage and more insight to the amount of work required fortypographical designs. After completing a study of the original artist's works, a pipeline of severalFOSS design tools was set up to meet this challenge. Graphviz was used tocategorise and divide the design workload in infographics which also showcharacter interdependencies. Additionally, we show how design work andcollaboration can be managed more in Agile environments. The individual glyphdesigns were done in Inkscape and the font files were generated by usingFontForge. FontForge offers sharing guides (lines supporting and accelerating the designprocess) amongst glyph designs, however Inkscape has no such facility as theindividual SVG files are not synchronised for this. We developed a tool inPython to selectively synchronise guides. In this presentation, z25.org will talk you through their adventure offunding, developing, digitising, designing and sharing. The result is apreserved and revitalised typeface called Neude that lay dormant for over ahundred years on impressive statues in the former post office in Utrecht, theNetherlands.