Study on the typeface basenine.

9Base

table of contents

Introduction

About the designer

Challenges in designing basenine

Revival & Recast

Charateristic features

Comparisons

Numeral comparisons

Applications

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

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Gylph set of Basenine

Introduction

Basenine is the first truly multimedia typeface distributed by the foundry Emigre in 1995 in California,

USA. It is a sans serif typeface and it is nearly grotesque kind of sans serif font. Basenine belongs from

the family of base where it consists of other typefaces like base twelve serif and sans serif,base 900 and

base monospace. Basenine consits of only two weights i.e medium and bold.

The Base 9 screen font was

designed on a grid of nine

pixels high, and had its roots in

the Lo-Res 9 Narrow bitmap

font. The font Base 9 has an

even stroke weight, and shows

no slant in the stance of the

character at all. There is not a

lot of stroke variation between

one character to the next

and the font is more modern

in aesthetic. The font seems

bolded, and has a larger

x-height than most at the

same point size. All these

chactoristics and the fact that

it is without serifs classify this

font as a sans serif font.

About the designer

Her father, a biomathematician, provided her with access to computers and the opportunity to design her first typeface, a Greek alphabet, for his personal use. She entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1981 as an undergraduate. She had planned to study architecture, but changed her major to visual studies and pursued a graphic communications degree.

Zuzanna Licko who is one of the first type designers to exploit the potential of the Apple Macintosh in

its pre-designer days. Zuzana Licko transformed the pixel from low-resolution imitation to high-style original. She and her husband Rudy Vanderlans founded Emigre in 1984 , and together they produced the critically acclaimed Emigré journal, which included Licko’s digital typeface design. Licko was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in 1961, and moved to the United States at the age of seven.

When Rudy VanderLans, her partner, launched Emigre, she began to contribute fonts to the fledgling ‘magazine that ignores boundaries’. Rather than replicate (on a dot matrix printer) typographic forms already adapted from calligraphy, lead and photosetting, Licko used public domain software to create bitmap fonts. Emperor, Emigre and Oakland appeared in the magazine and were soon advertised for sale when VanderLans and Licko co-founded the Emigre foundry.

Cover pages of some of the EMIGRE magazines.

Her early Emigre fonts not only revolutionised digital typography but also opened up the market for the smaller foundries whose quarter-page ads populate today’s design magazines. LIn 1986 she created Citizen, which approximated the smoother bitmap printing of the new laser printers. Base-9 and Base-12 originated as screen fonts for Emigre’s website in 1995, and then evolved with a companion printer font.

Emigre’s development reflected the evolution of digital technology while questioning conventional ideas of legibility

and layout. Licko’s highly structured typefaces counterbalanced VanderLans’ organic compositions. The graphic

design establishment has since recognised Licko and VanderLans with a 1994 Chrysler Award, the 1997 AIGA gold

medal and the 1998 Charles Nypels Award for Innovation in Typography. She has designed more than two dozen typeface families and oversees the Emigre foundry, which currently offers 300 or so typefaces.

Emigre magazine was published between 1984 and 2005. A total of 69 issues were produced, sometimes on a quarterly basis, but more often irregularly. The title of the magazine means immigrant and it was dutch immigrant, Rudy Vanderlans and his wife Zuzana Licko who founded Emigre.

Vanderlans was the editor, while Licko designed the famous Emigre fonts.Although showcasing work of unheard of artists, immigrants, and new graduates, the aspect of Emigre that truly made waves in the design world was the layout and type choices that rejected traditional grid structures, ideas of legibility, and aesthetics.

As Emigre began publishing more design theory, Licko developed more ‘classical’ fonts; her designs Mrs Eaves and Filosofia were based respectively on Baskerville and Bodoni. And with issue 60 Emigre’s latest music-oriented incarnation, Licko and VanderLans have found yet another format in which the publication can continue to be a testing ground and type specimen for Emigre typefaces.

Zuzanna licko and Rudy vanderlans

The greatest challenge in harmonizing the legibility of screen fonts with printer fonts was that of spacing. Although some existing printer fonts had companion screen fonts that were quite legible on screen, they tended to have two shortcomings.

Rather than deriving the screen font from the printer font, Licko decided to derive the printer font from the screen font. The first step, therefore, was choosing the most appropriate screen font point size. For various reasons, the 12 point size proved to be the most useful as 12 point is the default size for most applications and Web browsers.Later on in the development process, she added a family based on the 9 point bitmap to facilitate the other popular sizes, 9 and 18 which came to be known as basenine.

Base-9 Sans: 9 point screen font enlarged 4x to 36 point, with 36 point comparison shown below.

Challenges in designing Base

The other problem was that of spacing inconsistencies at text sizes due to fractional widths. In traditional fonts, the width of a bitmap character is a rounded off measurement, calculated from the corresponding outline character.

The first problem was that traditional screen fonts were adjusted to fit the shapes and widths of the printer fonts, and therefore had some inherent spacing and character shape problems, since the printer font inevitably forces unnatural widths or shapes in the screen fonts.

9

The next challenge was that of making the proportions of the screen font and printer font the same. In order to modularly relate the screen font character widths to the printer fonts, Licko made the Em-square of the scalable printer font divisible by 12. Licko chose an Em-square of 1,200 units, thereby making each pixel equal to exactly 100 units in the printer font. This solved the fractional-width problem described earlier.

Base-12 Sans: 12 point screen font enlarged 3x to 36 point, with 36 point comparison shown below.

Base-12 Serif: 12 point screen font enlarged 3x to 36 point, with 36 point comparison shown below.

Since the widths of the printer font had to exactly match those of the 12 point screen font, the printer font character outlines had to be adjusted to fit into predefined character cells. Like the size of the Em-square, the size of the character space includes the space around the character; not the measurement of the character itself. The character cell width is the horizontal measurement around a character, including breathing space left to right.

The breathing space of one character, when added to the breathing space of the adjacent character, creates the space between those particular two letters. If this is done correctly, words will look recognizable and the typeface will be legible. In the case of the Base-9 and Base-12 typefaces, the spacing had to be optimized solely by adjusting the characters shapes otherwise the kerning pairs would destroy the modularity of the spacing.

The Base 900 family is a high fidelity adaptation of the Base 9 design, a

comprehensive family of screen fonts with companion printer fonts designed in 1994. The resulting Base 900 fonts still convey a modular, geometric style, reminiscent of the early computer technology era, but with an updated, more refined look made possible by a high resolution grid. Base 900 normalises the original design but maintains the unique character of basenine because the redesign still had to look like Base.

Improvements were made to glyph outlines, spacing, and kerning, and three extra weights were added. To retain its character, the most distinguishing element that was carried over from Base 9 is the triangular spur detail which originated in the Lo-Res 9 Bold bitmap. To give definition to the cusps in the bitmap font, a pixel was removed to open up the area where the rounded stroke meets the stem. This open square area evolved into the trademark triangular wedge shape in the Base 9 printer font.

The extra narrow m is another example of a unique design element that resulted from the bitmap. When redrawing the typeface, the initial impulse was to draw a corrected m with a more common, wider proportion. Base 900 also retains the original non-descending J and serifed I to preserve the character of the Base 9 design. The alternate descending J offers symmetric spacing within all caps settings, and the alternate I without serifs offers a more discreet look, which may be preferable in certain situations.

Revival & recast

Base9 TO

Revival & recast

Base9 TO Base900

Due to the coarse resolution of the screen,

the Base 9 bitmap and printer fonts were designed in only two weights: Regular and Bold. Because the weight could be increased only in whole pixel increments, the single pixel stem served for the regular weight, and the two pixel stem served for the bold weight. Without these restrictions, Base 900 introduces three additional weights: a lighter weight than the Regular; an intermediate Medium weight between the Regular and the Bold; and a Heavy weight.

Certain design details that are directly related to this restriction are the different solutions for some of the same characters in each of the two original weights. The narrow lower case m and overlapping w in the Regular weight were the result of having to squeeze the glyphs into a narrow width. Whereas the m and w in the bold weight, due to a wider available space, have a more standard dimension and design. In Base 900, these characters are regularised so that they appear more consistent throughout the five weights.

Similarly, the widths of the individual characters in Base 9 could vary only by whole increments of a pixel limiting the subtle width variations necessary to accommodate all characters. This meant that many characters shared the same size space, leaving some with extremely narrow or wide proportions.

Other improvements in the Base 900 family include a more subtle use of curves in the outlines. The original Base 9 contained many shapes based on simple geometric circles and ovals in keeping with the bitmap grid. Even the thickness of horizontal and vertical stems, which also corresponded closely to the bitmap were kept uncorrected. This resulted in some uncomfortable visual effects whereby horizontal strokes looked thicker than vertical strokes. In Base 900, all these characteristics have been upgraded.

Base 900

Base 9 printer font

Base 9 screen font(Lo-Res 9 narrow)

“This background has given me a different perspective, and perhaps this is what gives me a tendency to ask questions”.

-Zuzanna Licko

A G

Q W IK

E MCharateristic features

V5 3Uppercase A has a rounded apex with straight sides.

Both medium and bold weights of 3 and 5 have serifs.

Bold uppercase and lowercase v has a flat base.

Central junctionNarrow aperture with tail curling down.

Overlapping W in medium weight.

uppercase i has slab serifs.

All the arms of uppercase e are equal.

Angeled spur central junction lies above the baseline.

t

m

ag

e r t1 6

Triangular spur at the ends of a, b, d, g,m, n, etc.

dnumerical 1 has a slab serif base. single storey g with a

narrow counter.

Single storeyed small a.

circular counter of 6 and 9; ascender and descender of 6 and 9 is angled at 60°.

semi-circular bowl. extra narrow lowercase m with spur.

cross-stroke of t is longer on the the right side.

broad and straight terminal in lowercase r which is flat at the end.

broader apex in lowercase bold t.

broader terminal in bold weight.

r

Comparisons

aakK kK

qQ qQLl Ll

t t

Futura also has a single storey A but basenine A has triangular wedge shaped spur at ends of its stem.

K of futura and basenine looks similar; the only difference is that k has an angled junction in futura but the arms of k in basenine meets at the mid-point of the stem.

Basenine L has a shorter stem than futura both in lowercase and uppercase.

Uppercase verdana and basenine have similar q with the tails curved down. Basenine q has a triangular spur whereas it is flat in verdana..

Similar looking t in verdana. The stem of t in basenine is little broader.

i i i

b b bd d d

Oo Oo Oo The O of basenine, verdana and franklin gothic appears to be similar because all of them have a oval counter but basenine o is narrower.

Sans serif b and d of basenine is disticnt can be differentiated from verdana and futura because of its unique spur at the end of the terminals.

the tittles of i in basenine sits little above than in verdana and futura. Also futura has a square shaped tittle.

f f Height of the stem of F in basenine is longer in size and also it is broader than that gill sans of the same point.

Numerals comparison

1234567890 12345678901234567890

Some of the similarities between the numericals of verdana, futura with basenine have been highligted. It is quite different from the other typefaces; one the most distinct feature is the triangular spur 3 and 5 which sets it apart from the other typeface numericals.

Applications

Basenine is the first truly multimedia typeface. It is mostly used in onscreen and multimedia purposes.

Acknowledgements

First of all i would like to thank our guide Tarun deep girdher for guiding us through this whole process of making this booklet and also through out the typography course. We learnt a lot about typographic terms which i was never aware of. In this our very first booklet he gave us full freedom to explore on our own styles of layouts which was fun and also little tricky as we had take care of lots of things. But that was easily solved because we had an amazing guide like tarun to help us with. I’d also like to thank my friends for the feedbacks they kept giving while working on this booklet. They helped me in choosing the color of this booklet. Also my seniors who guided me in working on the right track. I’d also like to acknowledge Mahesh bhai and youtube for making indesign easier and familiar to use otherwise this would not have been possible.

Bibliography

http://alyssapassmoreblog.blogspot.in/

http://erinzingre.wordpress.com/

http://www.emigre.com/EFfeature.php?di=216

http://www.typotheque.com/articles/20th_century_type

http://www.emigre.com/EFfeature.php?di=79

http://www.100besttypefaces.com/

http://typedia.com/

Websites

Bookemigre journals

Daisy Dutta

GDPD Graphic Design

Sem 3, 2012-13

Typography

Guide: Tarun Deep Girdher