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Not Gill(ty)

Education · Tools · Type · March 11th, 2011 · OSP

For the second day of the Royal College of Art workshop we paid homage to Eric Gill’s typographic work. What better place than London to revisit his classic Gill Sans.

We worked from several different sources and ended up creating three very unique versions of Gill Sans. The first version was generated by vectorizing a bitmap specimen of the digital version of the monotype Gill Sans. For the second version we used early sketches of the typeface made by Gill (see image). Finally we took advantage of the letterpress workshop at the Royal College and we printed a specimen from the original lead font.

The three versions of RCA Guilt Sans were made using Gimp, Fonzie and Fontforge.

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  • 8 Comments ↓

  • 1. nitrofurano

    Mar 12, 2011 at 3:21 pm

    please share when possible! :)

  • 2. nitrofurano

    Mar 15, 2011 at 10:09 pm

    and where from can Fonzie be downloaded?

  • 3. OSP

    Mar 16, 2011 at 8:13 pm

    Hi Paulo
    you can find it here
    http://www.oep-h.com/fonzie/

  • 4. nitrofurano

    Mar 18, 2011 at 5:10 am

    thanks! :)

  • 5. nitrofurano

    Mar 18, 2011 at 5:17 am

    just a question: how can i compile and install? :)

  • 6. nitrofurano

    Mar 19, 2011 at 8:15 pm

    since i can’t compile Fonzie, and it seems to use Potrace just like Inkscape uses, and i can’t get Potrace from Inkscape results as accuraced as the screenshot here, i started to code my own tracer accuraced at the pixel level – but it is a very simple code, only traces squares inside the shapes, which we need (on Inkscape) to do ‘menu:path/union’ on each glyph – http://pastebin.com/S6dW4Y9b

  • 7. nitrofurano

    Mar 19, 2011 at 8:29 pm

    (the script above runs from sdlBasic, and needs imagemagick installed (for reading the picture size as .png file as bytecode) – only tested on Linux (i’m running Mint-Debian now))

  • 8. OSP

    Mar 20, 2011 at 1:39 pm

    Can’t help you with that right now but I will try to write back to you about compiling Fonzie

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