☞ Creating a Typeface: Humanist Computer

Type Design as Hobby and Tool Creation

Mandelbrot set in Python, set in Humanist Computer.

I love typefaces. I find their details and broad strokes intriguing and beautiful. A year ago or so, I began to try my hand at designing my own typeface. This is something not for the faint of heart and, to be clear, I am still far from good at this. I am not only very much an amateur but also self-taught (I recommend the Foundations of Type Design as a great resource). But it is something that I have wanted to do.

And I had an idea for it: I wanted to construct a monospaced typeface—where the width of all glyphs are the same—that is ideal for writing code, but that would also have certain features of handwritten manuscripts that make it feel a bit like working with an old and mysterious text. I wanted programming to mingle with dusty tomes or spellwork. If programmers have been talking about the similarities between coding and magic for years, maybe we need a font that tries to make this more manifest.

Reasonable people can disagree, but I find humanistic—or Venetian—typefaces (typefaces based on the early days of printing, with a more calligraphic feel) to have the features that I found most evocative of the books of sorcerers:

Venetian type example.

Centaur.

But there aren’t really serif humanistic typefaces that are monospaced and I wanted to try to make something myself (here are a few typefaces that are either inspirations or some nice monospaced fonts worth looking at: Triplicate, Inconsolata, Monaspace superfamily, Fell types).

With that, I created Humanist Computer (the name is inspired by Donald Knuth’s typeface of Computer Modern).

I began with the “n” and then iterated from there, spending more effort on some glyphs than others:

Here’s an early take on the “e” that I found in my notes:

There was a calligraphy marker involved, along with lots of Glyphs Mini. But over many months I succeeded in developing glyphs for the basic ASCII characters.

Am I done? Not really. But now I can at least live with Humanist Computer on a daily basis. I can work in it, coding and playing with files:

Excerpt from the MacPaint source code.

I’ve even changed my Terminal font to Humanist Computer:

So, do I feel like I am coding in a spellbook? A little bit (here’s a comment I found that is interested in the same idea). It’s fancy and weird and also computational. I love this font.

And I love it not just because type is fun or beautiful, though I think it is certainly these things. But type can also help frame a user’s work, change how one thinks about something. It’s a kind of tool for thinking, in the same sort of way that a well-designed pen or notebook is as well. And I got to build my own!

Given that this typeface is still very rough and very much not a finished product—and it might never be—I am not currently releasing it. But Humanist Computer is something that I live with on a daily basis, allowing me to see the results of my effort, and keep on tinkering with. Is the font good? Maybe. Is it mine? Yes, and I’m proud of it.

It is typeface as continuing hobby. ■

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Advance Reading Copies of “The Magic of Code”!

The book is becoming more real…

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The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 A Mathematician in a School of Art: an interview with Edmund Harriss: “Within the intersection of mathematics and art lie beautiful creations to delight mathematicians and artists alike. Mathematics may be the muse that inspires art or serves a more fundamental role alongside a brush, lathe, or loom. To gain greater context on this field, we interview Dr. Edmund Harriss, a mathematician, artist, and assistant professor at the University of Arkansas.”

🝳 How to Measure Molecules: “A 19th-century physicist, Lord Rayleigh, was the first to experimentally measure the size of individual molecules. He did it using little more than oil, water, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation.”

🝤 The Arecibo Message, Earth’s First Interstellar Transmission, Turns 50: “In 1974 we beamed a radio transmission into space that changed the way we think about our place in the cosmos”

🜹 A Revolution in How Robots Learn: “A future generation of robots will not be programmed to complete specific tasks. Instead, they will use A.I. to teach themselves.”

🝊 The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

🜸 Public domain works done for NASA: “These are some of my works commissioned by various NASA facilities. They are offered here to provide something like definitive digital versions of such images, and unfortunately the NASA centers can rarely do this. You paid for them and they're yours.”

🝖 Why did clothing become boring? “An investigation into when, how, and why everyone started dressing the same — and what it was like when they didn’t.”

Until next time.