Saturday, August 29th, 2009
Stuart Sandler, Font Bros: «Having designed display typefaces since 1996, I was extremely skeptical about the ability for any automated process to be able to replace what I knew to be quality spacing and kerning. Clearly Fontographer and Fontlab cannot perform this, so how could iKern? Out of curiosity I felt the need to determine if Igino’s service would be even close to the demands of display type which requires much more complexity due to the lack of consistent forms compared to a basic Roman typeface. Turns out I was totally wrong! Ikern not only did as good a job as I’ve seen, but did it without ‘cheating’ by adding tons of kerns as I had expected … The spacing was meticulous and dead-on and the kerning was kept minimal to what was necessary to make the font display well without being loaded with unnecessary kern pairs … Not only do I continue to recommend iKern to other type designers, but I’m happy to keep Igino busy!»
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Michele Patanè, Cinetype, tutor at the Corso di Alta Formazione in Type Design, POLI.design, Consorzio del Politecnico di Milano: «Font design must regard idea and development, two essential aspects of the design process, both necessary and with different time implications. How many typefaces will never be used because designer don’t have enough time to develop them? We can’t forget how important is spacing and kerning correctly a font, and how much time it requires. In my recent experience with iKern I can say without any rhetoric that this a turning point of the typeface design process. Now we can test different spacing, quickly, for different application or any kind of use dimension; we can save time and be sure that we won’t occur in errors caused by repetitive operations. I believe blindly in eye function as a meter of judgement, but I am sure that my eye need time to understand things and to refresh attention. With iKern now I can pay more attention to the little shades and be sure that everything is going for the best result.
And I’d like to focus again on the design process because I think It is necessary for typeface design to find the right way to produce high quality font at the right price. If we save time we can cut costs increasing quality because we can pass most of the time on designing and testing the font instead of on repetitive jobs that a computer can do better than us.»
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Jan Schmoeger, Paragraph: « The sans-serif typeface Frutiger was everywhere in 1980. In the late eighties it was replaced by Stone Sans, then Myriad came along in 1992. In 2008 I attempted to rejuvenate these great typefaces. I analysed the proportions and spacing of Frutiger and used the principles as a base for my own typeface, Mentone. There were only a very few kerning pairs in the original, so I thought it will be fine if I’ll do the same. By the time I added the Central European, Baltic and Turkish characters, I was way out of my depth. Eight fonts in the family, each requiring individual spacing and kerning adjustments, would have added months of work to the task. Then Igino Marini and iKern came to the rescue: the number of kerning pairs went up tenfold (from 135 to 1345), the spacing and kerning from bumpy/simplified to smooth/comprehensive. Now, I cannot imagine designing new typefaces any other way.»
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Mugur Mihai: «After spending about two weeks trying to space and kern my first typeface I have come to the conclusion that this task will take me forever. So, I decided to try Igino’s iKern service. I was amazed to see that after three emails in a couple of days I got my font back properly spaced and kerned, exactly as I was intending. Incredible service that saves you a lot of time and money. I will definitely use it again.»
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Hannes von Döhren: «The work with Igino was a nice cooperation. I had to kern a 12 font family and in this case I hadn’t a multiple master as a basis. Although you can interpolate some steps it would have been still a huge effort of time to space and kern these family members perfectly. So I decided to give the files to Igino. I think he and his iKern program did a great job.»
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Jos Buivenga, Exljbris Font Foundry: «It was kind of a remarkable coincidence that Igino contacted me with a reworked version of (my first) Anivers just at the moment that I was working on extending it to a complete family. The example he send me looked stunning. It made music to my eyes and I was instantly convinced of the fact that iKern could save me a lot of time. Igino and iKern did a wonderfull job on Anivers and also on the recently released Fertigo Pro. I hope our collaboration will last a life time, because I wouldn’t want to design type any other way». And then followed Museo Sans, Calluna, Museo Slab …
Me and Jos Buivenga
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Nikola Djurek, Typonine: «The font projects we’re involved in become more complex every day. Even if the technological progress is here to help, we’re mainly asked to have ideas and let them become curves and spaces. And then typefaces. The iKern service helped us to make this path an effective and controllable process and we’re satisfied.»
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Peter Biľak, Typotheque: «Our fonts grew overtime from 200+ glyphs to 2000+ glyphs. This brings a new level of complexity for font development, and it is no longer possible to create by hand thousands of metric data. iKern helped us especially with expansions of character sets.»
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