The Franken-font

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1606881 (Table of Contents)

Today, the digital font system provides a standardized infrastructure for publishing and utilizing fonts with great versatility; such as simulating ligatures and specialty fonts for custom uses. Although the current fonts are able to provide solutions for almost any use case, everything they are capable of depend on the fact that font files are large prefabricated [1] letterform libraries, governed by a set of complex rules. Therefore, it is fundamentally impossible to create fonts, which generate the letters on the go. This would provide a solution for a scenario, where each instance of the same letter should be almost the same but slightly different, while maintaining an overall visual consistency, such as the handwriting. The Franken-font is a two-phase project. The first phase focuses on whether or not the human visual perception rejects a font with constantly changing letterforms and the second phase focuses on providing a new kind of font system, which is capable of generating letters instead of just fetching them from a library. This thesis project covers the first phase. The hypothesis of this thesis is that as long as the letterforms are consistent, the human brain should not marginally reject the font. To test this, a custom application is developed to interpolate between Helvetica and Syntax, which creates letters carrying characteristics of both typefaces. An online survey will be executed to see the preference rate of the Franken font. Consequently, the findings of the survey should show whether or not the phase two is feasible.