What is a good letterfitting? Probably there could be many ways to answer. But everyone seems to agree on this: «something that I recognize when I see it». Not too much but there’s everything inside: the work and its evaluation. Some define letterfitting as art, some acknowledge a systematicity in the operations involved that can justify the existence of methods. I think there’s no real antithesis between these points of view if the object, the aim of the work, is the same: a good typeface, an appropriate setting. And if the final judge is the same too: the observer’s eye. The only difference is the way: intuitive guessing or precise knowing. Whatever done, letterfitting remains a series of choices and tasks. I made iKern so to differentiate choices from tasks, deal with the former in a smart way and automate the latter. A tool for evaluating the appropriateness of choices by way of the quality of the results: «something that I recognize when I see it».
The iKern’s model is based on a detailed cataloguing of many possible relations and interactions of specific typographic relevance: those that define shapes as letters. The iKern’s algorithms identify properties and, in this sense, we can talk of an automatic tool since most of these are directly computable and may be derived from the shapes of characters themselves. This way the model exposes properties that are intrinsic to the shapes of the glyphs: I call this «to follow the nature of the glyphs». The properties that can’t be derived become parameters and represent the minimum choice an operator is required to make to guide the process towards the desired result. Acting on parameters implies a different way of thinking: sidebearings and kerning pairs have to be found and not created. From this point of view iKern is an interface for a system of global decisions where the machine is put in charge of obtaining:
- Coherence: the initial choices are globally and indiscriminately inherited by glyphs and kerning pairs;
- Consistency: the same algorithms and the same parameters produce both autospacing and autokerning;
- Accuracy.
Requiring the user’s input mainly satisfies contextual needs. Every glyph is defined not only by itself but also by the other glyphs in the typeface and by the script for which it is intended. The rhythm and the texture have to be designed as well as the result of a study of balancing visual tensions that the designer has merely triggered.
