The current release is the standard character/glyph complement, which contains an extended Latin character set – that is, the letters that we use in English and most other European languages. A later release will include full support for “all American languages,” including the writing systems used for Cherokee, Cree, and Inuktitut. Those beautifully designed glyphs are shown on the type specimen alongside the English text.

Although the unit system used is unclear, it appears that the Roman design administration had a thoroughly worked-out system for the measurement of inscriptional letters, which allowed them to cut inscriptions in matching lettering styles and in consistent sizes throughout the extremely widespread area under Roman rule.

“It was part of a visual identity that shouted ‘Rome!’,” said the Institut’s vice-director, Robespierre Danton, waving his arms enthusiastically at the partially excavated site. “They projected their power and their brand through a coordinated system of graphics that was instantly recognizable anywhere in the Mediterranean world.” The manual’s threadbare pages, according to Danton, specify exactly how the visual system should be implemented, with hints (barely legible) of extreme penalties for misuse of the empire’s intellectual property.

Although the fragments are in a poor state of preservation, one intriguing supplementary find has excited the interest of Dr. Giambattista Farben, a color researcher with the Institut. “This broken tablet, made of baked and polished tufa,” he says, “was found in close proximity to the manual itself. The tablet shows traces of a pattern of varying colors in lead-based paint, and scratches that may be notations to identify the different colors.” Dr. Farben was cautious, but he said that one theory of the colored tablet was that it constituted a color chart for painters who would turn the Romans’ marble walls into a panoply of colors. “It could be the earliest Pantone matching system,” admitted Dr. Farben.

Scholars from the University of Northern California dispute the primacy of the Roman identity system. Professor Chien Su-ma of UNC says that he has spent more than twenty years cataloging a collection of inscribed tortoise shells found under a pile of Han-dynasty tax receipts at Dunhuang, on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, in China’s Gansu province. “The Han Dynasty had a clearly defined visual identity,” claims Prof. Chien, “and I believe these fragments, which were preserved at a major entrepot and outpost of empire, are a key to the system in its earliest form. They certainly predate this Western find by at least a century.”

[Photo: Detail of the lettering at the base of Trajan's column, in Rome.]

The letters are clearly a heavy, wide variation of Helvetica (or something modeled on it very closely), but someone has given these precise Swiss letters little tails, joining them up into a connected script. Nobody re-drew the letters; that’s obvious from the mismatch between the curl of the “t” and the much narrower joining stroke. (My guess is that the capital-L is really a cap-I with the joining stroke added.) It’s clever, even it’s mechanically rendered. And it’s certainly a strange juxtaposition of cultural tropes, all in a few letters on a shop awning and a delivery truck.

Typ09, the 2009 ATypI conference | Mexico City | October 26–30, 2009

If you’re in Seattle, it’s worth visiting the atrium gallery at SCCC and checking out the show.

[At left: the letter C.]

As successive photos reveal more of the underlying letters, and the visible part seems to be “ypo,” I find myself fantasizing that it will turn out to be spelling “Typography” – or perhaps the little-known Washington town of Typopolis. It is, however, “Keyport.” Oh well.

[Photo: Distributed by WSDOT under Creative Commons license.]

Since the Microsoft Typography team, along with the rest of Windows International, was moving to a new building on the Microsoft corporate campus over the weekend of December 12, it seemed only appropriate to make a visible statement about the importance and ubiquity of type in the visual environment. Through the use of six-inch-square pixels cut out of sticky-backed black vinyl (a technique used previously for an installation at the Design Commission during TypeCon Seattle), these large-scale representations of bitmap characters from the Verdana and Georgia type families appeared without warning on the walls of the new building. This was reportedly achieved without a single X-acto-based industrial accident.

Verdana and Georgia were originally commissioned by Microsoft for onscreen reading of text. The way they were designed was the opposite of the usual process of designing type for the screen. Instead of creating outlines and then hinting the outlines (giving them rules to follow when turning into bitmaps at small sizes), type designer Matthew Carter started by designing the bitmaps – the end result that he wanted to see at each size – and then worked with hinting wizard Tom Rickner to create outlines and hinting that would achieve those shapes. The letters of the wordlet “typo” on the wall of Building 9 are taken from the bitmaps of 10pt Verdana and Georgia (in a mix of styles) at 96dpi. (Can you identify which letters are from which font, and in which style?)

The first versions of Verdana and Georgia were released in 1996; they now represent an early stage in the development of digital type at Microsoft. What will it look like when the MST commandos attempt to represent grayscale hinting and ClearType subpixel rendering at wall-size scale?