Counter
Alt EXPERIMENTS
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Counte
er Alt
Introdu Introduction
Negative space is the space that surrounds an object; in typography we use negative space for the word and line spacing, composition and many other things. When looking closer at a letter it makes use of shapes that are either positive and negative, the positive shape is referred to as the form and the negative shapes is referred to as the counterform. What would happen if we try to create entire typeface where we reverse the negative and positive space, would we still be able to recognise these first as letter form, and furthermore 4
could we decipher and read them? To find this out the answer I developed the CounterAlt experimental font, a font based on the counterforms of letter shapes. I was not interested in a highly readable font that could be used for common use but rather one that can test readers ability to decipher new letter shapes based on familiarity with counterforms. CounterAlt was developed through a series of sketching and researching before I moved it onto the computer where using tools like Adobe illustrator and Fontlab, I
created the finished CounterAlt font. The font is based off the counterforms and negative space of the Clarendon LT std roman font, this font makes use of several different counterform glyphs for each letter and will circle through the different glyphs with the help of some opentype coding. The typeface was then used to help create a series of experiments. These experiments were then used to test a selection of peoples ability to decipher letters that a based primary one the letters counterforms.
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The Fon The CounterAlt font
CounterAlt is the font created by myself for the purpose of this experimental project. the font reverses the negative and positive space to create the shapes needed for the experiment. The shapes created where done by using the Clarendon typeface as its basis, Clarendon was chosen because it is a well good slab serif that has a lot of bulk but a nice contrast in stroke weight that have given the negative space a nice amount of vary shapes and left a decent amount of new positive space. The space created is split into three different 6
sections, using the space found on the left, right and then the letters counters. We now have four different glyphs for one letter, in Fontlab we set the main letter as the whole form which resulted from reversing the positive and negative space, after this we create three new glyphs for each of the left, right and counter sections. We can now just put in each of the different glyphs manually by hand through the glyph menus found in programs like Adobes indesign but I didn’t want to have to reply on the human brain to try and randomise which
glyph for each letter as the human brain will always try to pout some kind of structure to the process. I wanted a more random glyph selection effect for this experiment and I solved this problem with the use of the contextual alternates opentype feature. By putting the four different glyphs into four different classes (groups); whole, left, right and counters and then using some coding that was created by Thomas Phinney with some slight changes by myself. This would create an opentype font that would cycle through the four different
nt classes of glyphs when you typed following the pattern the coding had set, in this case it would go class 1, class 2, class 3, class 4, class 3, class 1, class 4, class 2 and then reset the cycle again. Now when you use the CounterAlt font to type out a sentence each letter in the sentence will use one of its four optional glyphs depending where it is in the coded cycle and make it look a lot more random than the human brain could do. By doing this it allows us to create a sentence made up out of different counterforms which we can then use to
create a series of different reading tests to see how long it will take a person to be able to decipher the letters and if they can will the results of what they read be correct.
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Complete letter forms
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ? ! , . 8
Left letter space
� � � � � � � � � � �� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 9
Right letter space
� � � � � � � � � J � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 10
Letter counters
� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 11
The tes Decipher tests
The CounterAlt font is a byproduct from the experiment but it creation does serve the purpose of this project to be used in a series of tests. The tests will test peoples ability to decipher new letter shapes based on familiarity with counterforms as apart of the overall experiment. Using the CounterAlt font the ‘decipher tests’ have been created to collect data to help us fulfil the purpose of the experiment and come to a conclusion. The tests have been designed to be as straight forward, simply and as quick as possible, I didn’t want people 12
to struggle or just give up on them. An important factor was keeping the tests fun but also interesting and caused the person to engage with the tests and want to ask questions afterwards. The ‘decipher test’ consists of four different tests which get a little bit harder with each one, the first being four similar words, the second and third phases are simply sentences with the fourth phase being a small paragraph for people to try to decipher. The test have been designed to have no set rules or time limits, the person doing the test can
simply spend as much time as they need and use any methods they think are best to complete the three phases of the test. Data collected from doing the tests will be the overall time it takes to do all three phases and total sum of how many are deciphered right or wrong and I will take into account which was more or least likely to be wrong and right. The complied results data can be found on the results section of this book following on from that is my overall conclusion that came from the experiment.
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Test one
Than Then There Their 14
Test two
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog 15
Test three
Not all those who wonder are lost 16
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.� Test four
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Results
Test results
I asked 5 different people to take the 4 different tests and made sure I observed all five of them taking the tests. While making sure cheating was one reason for to observed them, I also wanted to watch the process they took to work out the answers to the test and even take consideration there mood when trying to do them. The average time for completion of the tests is 15 minutes with the quickest person doing it in 12 minutes and the longest person taking 18 minutes. The longest person also got the most correct (3) and the quickest person 18
giving up by the time they got to the last test and got the lowest amount right (1). While this results where interesting and gave me the basic facts of the tests the most interesting results was how people would go about solving the tests. There seems to be 3 basic methods of doing this, the first being done by about 50% of the people who took the tests. That method involved working out what the tests said in the there heads by picking out letters they thought they might know from the overall sentence then filling in the rest, while this worked on the first
two tests OK it just was not that easy with the second two tests. This lead to increased frustration which caused them to either guess the whole sentence or just give up on the third or fourth test. The second method of solving the problems that was used was almost the same as the first but instead of looking at the tests as a whole the person would work it out word by word. They would pick out the letters from each word and then they would work the word out from them but they did not look at the letter shapes of letters they did not know and
s try to work them out. The third method was only used once but was the most logic and the one I would personally have used. The person decided to look at the thing as a whole but work out each letter, they would take what letters they knew and then look at the letter forms they didn’t know and work them out. They also made use of the paper and pen and would write down stuff as well as working it out in there head, on top of this they would also rework whatever they thought was wrong rather than just give up and leave it. 19
Example test results one
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Example test results two
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Conclusi My conclusion
While my theories and the experiment for this project were not directly a success, the tests did give me some interesting results. While there are some familiar shapes created by the use of just negative space and counter forms for letters, even more so when they are put into a working word, sentence or paragraph structure. There is still not enough familiarity created for a person to be able to decipher what a letter or set text my be or say, even after applying various methods most people I tested still found it hard and often couldn’t
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decipher the tests. This along with the other information provided from the tests has made me from the opinion that the tests where not a complete failure but rather succeeded in providing me with new views and ideas. These views and ideas come from the interesting results of the methods people had used to solve the tests. One of the most interesting methods to me was one where people would try and rebuild the forms based on what they already had, kind of like filling in the gaps, the idea that by filling in the gaps would create what
was missing wasn’t the best idea in the world but it was a great way forward for myself. By creating the parts around the letters, inside the letters and more I could create a set of components that could be used as parts to create letter forms, by using these components in the same way a chromatic typeface does I could create a unique or at least slightly different view on not just a chromatic typeface but how we see fonts and typefaces in general, that is what I plan on doing next.
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SANALITRO EST. 2013
SANALITRO Design & Typography