sarajw, 29 days ago

One of the slides included an image that reminded me heavily of cross-stitch. I wonder if any cross stitch patterns informed early digital fonts?

#typography

@ferdinandulrich @ferdinandulrich

CTD, 29 days ago

@sarajw Heh. Cross Stitch is essentially pixel art, so perhaps it did. Early screen fonts were super low-res. My eyes remember them.

sarajw, 29 days ago

@CTD right? This talk is more about digitising the existing print fonts, so not quite the same story - but like, pixel art and cross stitch patterns can just jump mediums!

sarajw, 29 days ago (edited 29 days ago)

I asked! The wife of one of the people (argh already forgotten the name) who was brought in to consult for some of this early bitmap font work was a textile designer, so a lot of her sources were used as reference!

Edit: I asked again! The typographer was Gerard Unger and his wife was Marjan: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjan_Unger

airwhale, 29 days ago

@sarajw @ferdinandulrich @ferdinandulrich

That makes perfect sense.

I also think that cross-stitch is a great metaphor to explain digital concepts like image size, resolution, DPI and colour spaces.