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Random Font – a typographic experiment exploring randomness [pdf]

ilcovile.it

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Re: Random Font – a typographic experiment exploring randomness [pdf]

#2

Post by misone »

A printed essay where each paragraph is rendered in a different, randomly selected typeface. Found on Il Covile, an Italian publication exploring typography, philosophy, and design. The text is presented in both Italian and English.

The text is presented in both Italian and English.

The authors also created a LibreOffice extension that applies random fonts to any document, allowing users to experiment with the same generative approach directly. It's called "Patina": https://www.ilcovile.it/V3_p_patina.html

Re: Random Font – a typographic experiment exploring randomness [pdf]

#3

Post by MultifokalHirn »

misone wrote: post #2

A printed essay where each paragraph is rendered in a different, randomly selected typeface. Found on Il Covile, an Italian publication exploring typography, philosophy, and design. The text is presented in both Italian and English. The text is presented in both Italian and English. The authors also created a LibreOffice extension that applies random fonts to any document, allowing users to experiment with the same g…

cool, thank you!

Re: Random Font – a typographic experiment exploring randomness [pdf]

#4

Post by rgovostes »

misone wrote: post #2

A printed essay where each paragraph is rendered in a different, randomly selected typeface. Found on Il Covile, an Italian publication exploring typography, philosophy, and design. The text is presented in both Italian and English. The text is presented in both Italian and English. The authors also created a LibreOffice extension that applies random fonts to any document, allowing users to experiment with the same g…

The technique applied is not randomly selecting a different typeface per paragraph, but tweaking the glyph shapes when a character is repeated. Glancing at the LibreOffice extension, it seems to slightly vary CharScaleWidth by 90–110% and CharEscapementHeight by 97–100% of the base height.

Re: Random Font – a typographic experiment exploring randomness [pdf]

#6

Post by rgovostes »

mock-possum wrote: post #5

Delightful! I wonder whether I could achieve this effect in pure css…

I made a brief attempt of splitting each character into a separate , )">c, but it doesn't look good because the transform is applied after the glyph is rasterized. I didn't see a way to scale the font size itself in two different axes, and applying a single scaling factor of 97-100% does not perfectly recreate the effect. text-rendering: geometricPrecision probably helps.
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