Remote

heikki

@gdc@typo.social

mastodon 4.6.9

Designer-in-residence (2025–26) at the Centre for Text Margins.

tool making | glyph drawing club | modular type design | type pictures | type ornaments | ascii art | textmode | text art | pictorial typography

544 Followers

84 Following

34 Posts

Joined November 10, 2022

Pronouns:

He/him

heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 3mo ago

My pre-ASCII art / pictorial typography / text art archive site is out now! People have been making ASCII-like text art on letterpress for over 300 years, building pictures entirely out of metal type, ornaments, and rule. The practice has often been dismissed as "tasteless", "wasted effort" and "nothing to do with art", which is why I think it's gone largely undocumented. So, I've spent the last 8+ years collecting ~2500 of these works into an archive. Thanks to @adelfaure@mastodon.art, who developed the site, it's now online for everyone to browse: https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/ or read more about it at https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?essay

garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 2mo ago

Working on a new editor (again)! This one simulates letterpress where you make digital layouts with cut-outs from old scanned type specimens, all in type size so the images could be recreated in with real type on real letterpress! It supports all point sizes and shapes, so it's not restricted to square shapes.

This image is made with ornaments from the 1880 Fonderie typographique Gustave Mayeur type specimen, using type ornament I call "ivy combination".

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 3mo ago

New tool: POLYARC DRAW is free online vector graphics drawing tool based on my research on polycentric arcs. I've also included around 1300 old school textures that you can drag&drop onto shapes! https://hlnet.neocities.org/polyarc-draw/

hlnet.neocities.org

Polyarc Draw

Polyarc Draw is a free online vector graphics editor based on drawing with polycentric arcs.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 4mo ago

Welcome to Tekstin talo (in Helsinki) on Monday 25.5. at 18:00 to a joint talk & performance by me and @adelfaure@mastodon.art

The talk will focus on how ASCII art can act as a theoretical & practical foundation for two completely different yet strikingly similar design practices of me and Adel.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 4mo ago

In February I had the pleasure of hosting a one-week **Unconventional Graphic Design Tools** workshop at the Institute Digital Communication Environments, HGK FHNW during the Fasnacht carnival in Basel.

The question asked at workshop was: could one be a graphic designer WITHOUT Adobe Software? The participants had a week to produce two spreads for a collective zine, using anything but Adobe tools. The zine is printed with a risograph by the students.

Here's some of them, but the full zine (64 pages) and description of tools used can be found here:
https://tekstien-marginaalien-keskus.aalto.fi/residenssi/heikki/blog/006-february-2/

tekstien-marginaalien-keskus.aalto.fi

February — Unconventional Graphic Design Tools -workshop in Basel

On hosting the Unconventional Graphic Design Tools -workshop in Basel.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 8mo ago

My new visual poetry and experimental typography tool is out now in beta! It lets you drop letters on a canvas with collision detection.
https://hlnet.neocities.org/il-verse/

Let me know what you think!

hlnet.neocities.org

IL—VERSE v.0.3.

IL—VERSE is an experimental visual poetry and typography tool that lets you drop letters on a canvas with collision detection.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 8mo ago

Added animation, timelapse and red color today!

https://hlnet.neocities.org/il-verse/

hlnet.neocities.org

IL—VERSE v.0.3.

IL—VERSE is an experimental visual poetry and typography tool that lets you drop letters on a canvas with collision detection.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 9mo ago

Replying to

More collision fun

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

Here's a detail view of the letter "a". Zoomed in it looks strange, but when I make the font size small, stroke it, then print it with an inkjet (and the ink spreads a bit), the result is very readable!

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 7mo ago

Good progress on my experimental web-based font editor! I'll publish a beta online soon.

Some features:
— Design type & typeset at the same time
— Pixel (PNG), vector (SVG), and font (OTF) exports
— Specialized in single stroke vector fonts (OTF export just reverses the paths and closes them)
— Two curves not found in any other program (afaik): polycentric arcs and g-conics (rational beziérs)

The UI still needs work!

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

Some early tests

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 9mo ago

Working on a new autokerning script.

It's based on a simple idea: fit glyphs as close to each other as possible based on the actual vector shape, so they're just about touching, but don't collide. Then add tracking.

But, depending on the desired effect, this can create too much overlap in combinations like "C-" where the dash would go completely inside the C shape. This is fixed by add a big bounding box that's some percentage of the original shape, and acts as a minimum bounding box size. This works quite nicely, so that combinations like AT, LY, etc. are not overkerned.

Here's debug images showing how the collision is actually detected. I parse the SVG path and create a binary tree of bounding boxes based on it. Then just do simple rectangle collision checks.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

(Here's the font editor view)

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@greenman@fosstodon.org The layout process is still somewhat convoluted to be shareable to others. I'll make it public when it's at a good condition. The font editor is online & useable at https://hlnet.neocities.org/hershey/

hlnet.neocities.org

Hershey font editor

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@xaxalxe@sunny.garden @neauoire@merveilles.town My initial idea was to just send high resolution bitmaps to the printer. It works, but so far with my testing, vector data just produces much crisper results, which matters a lot for the readability of body text. For certain zine purposes where the quality is expected to be a bit rougher and type size can be a bit larger, bitmaps should be just fine. But for me, producing PDFs is good enough because I know I can potentially send that to a professional printing house and face no issues, while the idea of trying to tap straight into the printer drivers / rasterizers sounds like a a lot of work for little reward. On the other hand, that's also exactly why I'm experimenting with the single stroke fonts, so that I could use plotters instead.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 4mo ago

@DerGuteAlteHerrSchwarz@freiburg.social
More like 1960s, my direct inspiration for this was Hershey fonts & formats (https://archive.org/details/hershey-calligraphy_for_computers/)

freiburg.social

DerGuteAlteHerrSchwarz (@DerGuteAlteHerrSchwarz@freiburg.social) - freiburg.social

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@xaxalxe@sunny.garden @neauoire@merveilles.town Looks promising! Straight lines is all you really need, the rest follows quite naturally (like beziers). What's your goal with this?

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@lukeharby No, that's another editor I made recently. I'll try to put it out this week though!

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@t36s Hah glad to hear that! If you make anything cool, please share! I haven't even used it myself much yet, so its latent potentials are still very much unknown.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 9mo ago

Replying to

@behdad That's a smart way of doing that! Seems to produce really good results too.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 9mo ago

Replying to

@lowtech Hmm, I've never noticed anything like that in any font data I've inspected, but maybe I haven't dug deep enough. Do you remember where you've seen something like that? Kerning pairs, bearings and advance widths is how I understand kerning typically works. But anyway, I made this because it works with any vector shape, wheter it is a font or not. I already use a version of it in my experimental font editor and text layout tools to skip the manual kerning process.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 20mo ago

Replying to

@jhilden@vis.social https://github.com/hsfzxjy/handwriter.ttf Although probably not what you're looking for, but you should check out the handwriter.ttf project. The font has an embedded recurrent neural network that synthesizes a handwriting-style font at runtime, which makes it a clear winner in the complexity. It's a neat proof-of-concept (but of course not very useable)!

GitHub - hsfzxjy/handwriter.ttf: Handwriting synthesis with Harfbuzz WASM.

Handwriting synthesis with Harfbuzz WASM. Contribute to hsfzxjy/handwriter.ttf development by creating an account on GitHub.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 9mo ago

Replying to

@nicksherman @ANRT I forgot to ask, what browser were you using when taking the screencast? The spacing is bugging out, but it looks as intended in my testing with Safari, Chrome and Firefox on Mac.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@caizoryan Thanks :) btw, your feed page is very inspiring!

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 9mo ago

Replying to

@Okay That's true! Forgot about bubblekern. So mine is like bubblekern but fully automatic.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 9mo ago

Replying to

@timahrens That's true, still thinking what's the best solution to that. Maybe some kind of adaptive tracking based on how occupied the edge area is or something.

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@neauoire@merveilles.town @xaxalxe@sunny.garden Hmm, not sure how well, but maybe older formats like RIPscrip or WMF?

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@QuentinJuhel@post.lurk.org Would be happy to contribute! Send me an email? hlotvonen@gmail.com

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heikki @gdc@typo.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@xaxalxe@sunny.garden Oo, interesting! What kind? Here's two WIP fonts: https://hlnet.neocities.org/hershey/singlex.json https://hlnet.neocities.org/hershey/font2.json I wrote a bit about the editor here: https://tekstien-marginaalien-keskus.aalto.fi/residenssi/heikki/blog/003-november/ and https://tekstien-marginaalien-keskus.aalto.fi/residenssi/heikki/blog/006-february/

hlnet.neocities.org

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