FONTLOG for Publi Fluor ------------------- This file provides detailed information on the Publi Fluor font software. This information should be distributed along with the Publi Fluor fonts and any derivative works. Basic Font Information -------------------------- Publi Fluor is a digital reinterpretation of a set of adhesive letters. The Publi Fluor shop was situated in the northern part of Brussels, Schaerbeek, and founded by the father of Madame Chrystel Crickx, Raymond, who was a trained letter painter. In his day he is —it seems— the first to propose fluorescent colors for shopwindow signs. It proves so difficult to paint letters on site with that kind of unstable coating that he develops a technique based on vinyl that he fluo-colors and cuts by hand in the workplace, then sticks at clients shops. Around 1975, his health degrades quickly and his daughter is forced to step into the business. Starting to cut letters with the rounded and skilled cardboard templates drawn by her father, Madame Crickx slowly morphs the shapes by analysing how typographic niceties confuse her non-trained clients and leads to bad letters placement. She progressively removes the optical compensation of rounded tops and bottoms, straightens sides, and attaches accents for less floating parts. Those moves add a very specific orientation to this otherwise quite common bold italic sans serif display typeface. During about fifty years these craft lettres have spread across the windows of shopping streets, more and more, and after the closure of the shop in the early noughties, they seem to still hold their own to the assaults of vector vinyl cutting technology. In 1996, Pierre Huyghebaert and Vincent Fortemps started to working for the cultural center les Halles de Schaerbeek and for a series of events linked to India, were interested to mix local and distant vernacular shaped. Those letters spotted on schaerbeek's shopwindows years before seems to fit the job idealy. After a few wandering in the streets nearby, the small lettershop at the bottom of the dull Avenue Rogier shining with its fluo shapes, was finally spotted as the origin of these typographic waves... And the inside of the shop was even more amazing. First contacts with Madame Crickx, the first poster typeset letter by letter, then Pierre Huyghebaert pays other visits and it became obvious that these letters deserve more that a one-time usage, as Madame Crickx work deserve more that simply buying some letters more. For the following Halles stuff, after a quick-and-dirty vectorisation with Fontographer, called the Crickx Rush in reference of the time constrains that caracterize that kind of operation, Crickx font was heavily used. When Jan Middendorp, then Editor of the Belgian fontshop magazine Druk, order an article on the letters, it was the occasion for Pierre to try to investigate and understand better the process described herebefore (astonishingly, shortly before the magazine stops, a poll seems to have elected the article as one of the most favoured by the readers...). When Madame Crickx followed the retirement of his postman husband, the studio Speculoos (where Pierre worked) bought the whole stock of letters and dingbats and vinyle for a symbolic prize, store it in their basement of Saint-Gilles but use it for some of their funkiest windowshop displays. In 2010, Ludi Loiseau and Antoine Begon redraw letters outlines the produce a more complete and less trashy version (Regular), explore the non-italic more rare one (Droite Rush and Droite) and extend it with lower cases (SharkCut). Finally, the Crickx's cabinet regain a better place at the new Constant Variable place, Rue Gallait 80, less than a kilometer far from the original shop place. More on http://publifluor.osp.kitchen/en/textes.html Publi Fluorcurrently provides the following Unicode coverage: Basic Latin Latin-1 Supplement Latin Extended-A Modifier Letters and modifier Tone Letters General Supplemental Punctuation Currency symbol Alphabetical symbols Arrows and sup arrows Dingbats and Miscellaneous symbols Multilingual plan other than BPM Information for Contributors ------------------------------ Hand-cut by Chrystel Crickx from 1973 to 2000, wildely vectorized by Hammerfonts in 2001, published by Speculoos/Open Source Publishing in 2011, released again by Crickx research group in 2024 under Collective Conditions for re-use, CC4r https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html See the project repository for the current trunk and the various branches: https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/osp/foundry.crickx/ Visit the research associated with the history of these letters, via the extracts published on the http://publifluor.osp.kitchen website and by leafing through the specimen publication that resulted from it : http://www.surfaces-utiles.org/publi-fluor-affaires-de-lettres-a-bruxelles-letterzaken-in-brussel-letter-business-in-brussels.html This non-standard collective essay attempts to tell the life of a type model, its successive authors and their tools, all while broadening the field and exploring the interstices between the many stories that Chrystel Crickx’s practice gave rise to. ChangeLog ---------- (This should list both major and minor changes, most recent first.) April 25, 2024 Publi Fluor was the last name of Chrystel’s shop. The updating and republication of the Crickx digital font led us to question the hasty choices made in 2010, the year of its initial publication. Using Chrystel’s family name had not been discussed with her. It is her married name. This is why it was republished as Publi Fluor: in order to better embrace the context, the ecosystem, as well as her father’s work, via the physical space of the shop. While Crickx was heretofore distributed under an OFL license, the distance, the paths taken by the research project, as well as our research on open licenses led us to reposition the font’s terms and conditions of use. The new version of Crickx — now Publi Fluor (see. ↑ “From Crickx to Publi Fluor”) — is published under a CC4r license, Collective conditions for reuse. While these conditions are also based on the practices of sharing and of open modifications that characterize open licenses, they also consider it necessary to break with the conventional notion of authorship, as reflected by the very story of Crickx (see “My letters”). “The legal framework of copyright ties authorship firmly in property and individual human creation, and prevents more fluid modes of authorial becoming from flourishing. Free Culture and intersectional, feminist, anti-colonial work reminds us that there is no tabula rasa, no original or single author; that authorial practice exists within a web of references.” As can be seen in the “Polyphony,” most of the users of the font adopt a critical, engaged stance in their various practices, often operate at a local level, and are wary of appropriation. Choosing CC4r also means insisting on the notion of responsibility in terms of use. “The CC4r troubles the binary approach that declares authored works either ‘open’ or ‘closed.’ It tries to address how a universalist approach to openness such as the one that Free licenses maintain, has historically meant the appropriation of marginalized knowledges. It is concerned with the way Free Culture, Free Licenses and Open Access do not account for the complexity and porosity of knowledge practices and their circulation, nor for the power structures active around it. This includes extractive use by software giants and commercial on-line platforms that increasingly invest into and absorb Free Culture.” Finally, while the specimen-book was getting ready for printing, a related initiative extended these interrogations. The Conditions d’utilisation typographiques engageantes [Engaging Typographic Conditions of Use], or CUTE,2 being written by the Bye Bye Binary collective, define a frame around post-binary fonts, address the tensions characterizing sharing policies, while integrating the economical issue by setting a scale of donations. “Writing these terms and conditions as tools for resistance, Bye Bye Binary points toward a first framework for users, and reduces the asymmetrical power relationship that characterizes proprietary logics, offering font designers a collective means of resistance against the dynamics of extraction and of colonization of knowledge.” The trajectory of the research has led the Crickx research group to turn this book into an extended specimen of the Publi Fluor font. In the same mindset, we updated its file directory and republished the entire family with an additional set of characters and more nuances in terms of metadata. In addition to the added symbols, we chose to augment the font with a series of inclusive and post-binary characters, that is, to contribute to the visibility of a plurality of bodies and identities within the shared spaces of language and writing. The encoding and activation of these ligatures are based on the QUNI (Queer Unicode Initiative) system proposed by the Bye Bye Binary collective → typotheque.genderfluid.space The making of these ligatures began by manipulating the vinyl letters. A first approach, initiated by Leyla Cabaux within the ESA Le 75 Laboratoire de recherche-création, consisted in playing with the counterforms in order to intertwine several letters. Then, in the credits of a film (Amandine en vrai, Salomé Richard, 2022), the Crickx capitals were intermingled with Bulbe lowercase letters. The proposition included in the fonts published for the release of the present book simply uses juxtapositions and twists, evoking an improvised arrangement on a window, in two sizes, without superimpositions or hybridization. Beyond their renaming and the addition of symbols and ligatures, the outlines and letter spacing of the glyphs have not been revisited and retain their rough, unpolished dimension. Acknowledgements ------------------------- If you make modifications be sure to add your name (N), email (E), web-address (W) and description (D). This list is sorted by last name in alphabetical order.) Chrystel Crickx for contours using blades and scissors. Jules Beaufils for his contribution to the Dingbats set. Antoine Begon for his collaboration on the Crickx digital series in 2010. Sophie Boiron for the work of activating and conserving the physical archive and the nesting paths around inclusive ligatures. 2017 On Sophie's initiative, the archive is relocated in Spec uloos' (renamed with spacing inserted between the two parts of the name) new office space, 47 Rue Van Elewyck, Ixelles. Pierre Huyghebaert 1985 Without knowing their origins, Pierre Huyghebaert notices Chrystel's letters on Schaærbeek shop windows, standing out amongst other mostly-painted letterings. 1997 Working on posters for an Indian film festival, Pierre and Vincent Fortemps consider using cut-out letters that adorn many windows around the Halles, despite the progressive use of standardized types. Tracing their origin, Pierre finds the Publi Fluor shop and meets Chrystel. He orders a 4 cm high, 26 letters and 10 numbers, "normal style" set (the most widespread italic), which he digitizes and vectorizes with the Streamline software (afterwards integrated to Adobe Illustrator). With these vectorized letters, he quickly sets the poster title. Pierre then creates the first digital font, naming it "Crickx Rush." It is used for other posters, flyers, programs and logos within the Halles de Schaerbeek. 1998 Jan Middendorp, a journalist and editor of Druk type magazine, published by FontShop Belgium, writes an article about Pierre and Vincent's graphic production for the Halles. Pierre uses the font for Fréon. He shares the type with other people in his professional circle for practical reasons, without any clear specification in terms of licensing. 1999 Jan commissions Pierre for a 5-page article about Chrystel for Druk. He writes it in French, designs the layout, and Jan translates it into Dutch. When Druk issues a reader poll about its most popular articles, Pierre's essay is ranked first. 2001 Speculoos --- the studio of which Pierre is an associate with two others --- buys all the remaining self-adhesive letters, as well as the archives, for a symbolic price in order to prevent them from being destroyed. At the end of the year, Pierre orders lower case letters, punctuation marks and symbols from Chrystel in order to complete the glyph set. She produces the version that would later be called "Blobby" by OSP. Ludivine Loiseau Redigitization of the vinyl letters with Antoine in 2010 including Chrystelise's enigmatic lowercase and redrawing part of the vector traces. Encoding inclusive ligatures in 2024. “Resharpening Blobby” workshop participants (Sophie Mak-Schram, Luk, Barbara Kiolbassa, Jeanine van Berkel, Julia Wilhelm and those whose names we forgot to write down. - Ultradependent Public School, upon the invitation of Clara Balaguer and Jeanne van Heeswijk in May 2023. Stephanie Vilayphiou 05.04.2017 Festival Papier Carbone, Charleroi: Ludi and OSP member Stéphanie Vilayphiou cut an "autotrace version" of Crickx letters from vinyl sheets, offering them to the public. → Consult the key dates in the full history of Crickx http://publifluor.osp.kitchen/en/textes.html Contact ------------------------- crickx@speculoos.com