The Publi Fluor shop was situated in the northern part of Brussels, Schaerbeek, and founded by the father of Madame Christelle Crickx who was a trained letter painter. In his day he is—it seems—the first to propose fluorescent colors for shopwindow signs. It proves so difficult to paint letters on site with that kind of unstable coating that he develops a technique based on vinyl that he fluo-colors and cuts by hand in the workplace, then sticks at clients shops. Around 1975, his health degrades quickly and his daughter is forced to step into the business.

Starting to cut letters with the rounded and skilled cardboard templates drawn by her father, Madame Crickx slowly morphs the shapes by analysing how typographic niceties confuse her non-trained clients and leads to bad letters placement. She progressively removes the optical compensation of rounded tops and bottoms, straightens sides, and attaches accents for less floating parts. Those moves add a very specific orientation to this otherwise quite common bold italic sans serif display typeface.

During about fifty years these craft lettres have spread across the windows of shopping streets, more and more, and after the closure of the shop in the early noughties, they seem to still hold their own to the assaults of vector vinyl cutting technology.

In 1996, Pierre Huyghebaert and Vincent Fortemps have just started to work for the cultural center les Halles de Schaerbeek. For a series of events linked to India, an interest to mix local and distant vernacular takes shape. Those letters spotted on Schaerbeek’s shopwindows years before seem to fit the job ideally. After a few wanderings in the streets nearby, the small lettershop at the bottom of the dull Avenue Rogier, shining with its fluo shapes, is finally spotted as the origin of these typographic waves… And the inside of the shop proves to be even more amazing.

First contacts with Madame Crickx follow, the first poster is typeset letter by letter, then Pierre Huyghebaert pays other visits and it becomes obvious that these letters deserve more than a one-time usage, as Madame Crickx’s work deserves more than simply buying some letters more. For the following Halles assignments, after a quick-and-dirty Fontographer vectorisation, the Crickx font is heavily used. This font is called the Crickx Rush in reference of the time constrains that characterize this kind of operation. When Jan Middendorp, then Editor of the Belgian fontshop magazine Druk, orders an article on the letters, it is the occasion for Pierre to try to investigate and understand better the process described herebefore. (Astonishingly, shortly before the magazine stops, a poll seems to have elected the article as one of the most favoured by the readers…).

When Madame Crickx follows the retirement of her postman husband, the studio Speculoos (where Pierre works) buys the whole stock of letters and dingbats and vinyle for a symbolic prize, stores it in their basement of Saint-Gilles but uses it for some of their funkiest windowshop displays. He ask Madame Crickx to cut lower-cases for her letters as with other accented and diacritics to cover more or less the Latin-1 codepage, by trying to give her just enough sample to distinguish the characters but not much to influence the way to draw them. As answers, she cut a completely new and fantasy set of letters (called the blobby in the pack)… After a discussion, she propose new lower-case, more in sync with the upper cases classical ones, but not sharing exactly the same low contrast. After years of sleeping on hard-drive and archives, in 2010, Ludi Loiseau and Antoine Begon uplift the work to redraw the outlines to produce a more complete and less trashy version (Regular), explore the non-italic more rare one (Droite Rush and Droite) and extend it with lower cases (SharkCut). Finally, the Crickx’s cabinet regains a better place at the new Constant Variable place, Rue Gallait 80, less than a kilometer far from the original shop place…

More :
- Pdf of the article in Dutch (translated by Jan Middendorp and French (original).
- Text by Femke Snelting

The three Sans Guilt fonts have been produce during “Read The Fucking Manual”, an OSP workshop at Deparment 21 (Royal College of Art), using Gimp, Fonzie and Fontforge. They are different versions of Gill Sans based on three different sources.
Sans Guilt MB: Based on a rasterized pdf made with the Monotype Gill Sans delivered with Mac OSX.
Sans Guilt DB: Based on early sketches by Eric Gill
Sans Guilt LB: Based on lead type from Royal College of Arts letterpress workshop.

Logisoso is a reinterpretation of the Delhaize logo lettering.
Drawn during a signage work for the Zellik logistic center.
It was used to identify different buildings.
The font was later completed with Inkscape and generated with FontForge.
For more detailed information: http://www.mathieu-g.be

Capital letters are currently rounded, not the lowecases letters.

Logisoso currently provides the following Unicode coverage:
see font info in FontForge for details.

Univers Else is an experiment, a first attempt to escape the post ’80 era of geometrical purity that is so typical of Postscript vector based font drawing. The shapes of Univers Else were obtained from scanning printed textpages that were optically composed by cheap phototypesetting machines in the sixties and seventies. Some of Univers Else beautiful features are: round angles, floating baselines, erratic kerning.

More precisely in this case, George Maciunas of the Fluxus group used an IBM composer (probably a Selectric typewriter) for most of his own work, and as a former designer, for all Fluxus work. In the 1988 book ‘Fluxus Codex’, kindly given to Pierre Huyghebaert by Sylvie Eyberg, the body text is typeset in a charmingly rounded and dancing Univers that seems to smile playfully at its dry swiss creator. As if it was really tempted, trying to provide a beautiful warm up to this old modernist classical. Along with a free, open and libre version!

A book about contemporary architecture in Wallonia and Brussels provided an ass-kicking opportunity. Three weights were needed. We were not sure that we’ll have the time to finish the fonts in time before having to send the pdf file to the printer. So we laid out the publication with the standard Univers family, and replaced it at the last moment with our version. Suddenly, the 286 pages book jumped out of the ice!

Different scans were assembled by Grégoire Vigneron following different grids. These huge bitmaps were processed with appropriate potrace settings by the Fonzie software* through a .ufo font format as a working format, and an OpenType as output. Some testing and fine-tuning was done by Pierre Marchand, Delphine Platteeuw and Pierre Huyghebaert in FontForge and the font was ready, in a finished state enough to typeset the book. The oblique versions was simply slanted on the fly.

* Fonzie has been develop by Pierre Marchand after a combined push between, among others :
— The need for a convenient way to produce handdrawn fonts for translated version of comics, using Opentype features to automatically switch between different versions of each glyph that try to emulate variations typical of hand drawn lettering. It has been developed and used to produced a lettering font for Manu Arenas via Francois Dispaux* and the Nemoto font for an Eve Deluze*’s lettering job. *These two persons partly financed fonzie’s development.
— An osp installation system called Nancy, deploying the Dingbats Liberation Fest at the gallery My.Monkey in Nancy, France and then at Make-Art Festival in Poitiers, France. This system is semi-automated process of scanning of cardboard-cuted dingbats and inclusion of these shape in a collaborative font. It turn the simplest design into a complicated process involving Fontforge, Subversion, Scribus Python scripter, PoDoFo, glue and good wills…
— The 20 years Pierre Huyghebaert’s desire to be produce more easily 20th century font revivals based on cared vectorization.
— A straightforward version is now enthusiastically used in workshops, starting at the Erg by Ludivine Loiseau and followed by other schools like La Cambre.

Univers Else currently provides the following Unicode coverage:
Basic Latin: U+0020-U+007E – 95 glyphs on 95
Latin-1 Supplement: U+00a0-U+00FF – 95 glyphs on 96
Latin Extended-A U+0100-U+017F – 2 glyphs on 128
General Punctuation U+2000-U+206F – 14 glyphs on 107
Currency Symbols U+20A0-U+20CF – 1 glyphs on 22

In Wrocław, we set out to produce a typeface based on these photos with a group of 20 courageous collaborators. We used Inkscape, Gimp and FontForge, and we were helped by open font community activists Dave Crossland, Alexandre Prokoudine and Nicolas Spalinger.

This is the outcome of the adventure.

We have named it W Drogę On Our Way / En Route.

http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/education/local-universal

This font was made for a poster to support nine people accused of “criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity”. They were arrested the 11th of november 2008, in France. They and others are the victims of a witch-hunt where the word “terrorism” was applied to any idea or practice which challenges the status quo. An international movement is emerging in their support.

For the poster, we re-mixed an open font, the Free Sans (think of “Free Avec” as Pierre might say) from Free UCS Outline Fonts.

Even if the license is a bit unclear:

From FreeSans font:
Copyleft 2002, 2003, 2005, 2008 Free Software Foundation.

We did a version with A, R, a, and t glyph modified. The general aspect of the font completely changed. There’s only the regular weight yet, but other may follow. Other versions as well…

Those “terrorists” were arrested in the Goutaillou Farm, in Tarnac, Corrèze. Corrèze is part of the Limousin region. This is why we called it Limousine.
It is also referred to the Limousine car, or limo, which may come from this etymology:

Le nom limousine viendrait du Limousin, la région de Limoges, dont les habitants portaient une vaste pélerine pour se protéger de la pluie, ou en référence à Charles Jeantaud, né à Limoges (1843-1906), l’inventeur de ce type de carrosserie appliquée aux premières voitures confortables. L’origine la plus probable est celle du véhicule hippomobile appelé limousine.

The Alfphabet family is based on the Belgian road signage system in use from 1945-1975. It came from Minneapolis to Brussels with 3M, an American company working for the Marshall plan after the end of world war II.

Alfphabet IV was redrawn by Pierre Huyghebaert and Ludi at Speculoos studio in 2007.

—

2011/9/17 Benoit Brunel <xxx@gmail.com>:
> Justement ça concerne l’article, j’ai besoin de quelques informations
> et je sais que tu as les réponses.
> Tu me disais que Michel Olive avait proposé un système de fonts pour…
> la SNCB ou la STIB ?
> Pour les deux, quel est le système en place? D’où vient-il? Belge?

—

2011/10/2 Pierre Huyghebaert <xxx@speculoos.com>
Michel Olyff a répondu à un appel de ce qui s’appelait le fond des routes, national, vers 1975.
Ils utilisaient jusque là des caractères que les planches appellaient Alfabet ou Alphabet selon la langue.
Il y avait le type I, II, III, IV et V soit des chasses différentes en majuscules et une “police” juste pour les minuscules!
Son nouveau système signalétique une fois au point, très moderniste type Frutiger, il a fait produire une étude comparative de lisibilité, sur un mode scientifique typique des années 70.
Mais le fonctionnaire cadre en poste à l’époque, que j’ai rencontré à la fin de sa carrière et juste après le démantèlement régional de son institution fin des années 90, m’a expliqué avoir reculé devant le prix demandé par Olyff, pourtant raisonnable : 800000 francs belges soit 20000 euros, qui à l’époque devait bien valoir le double. Il a décidé d’opter pour la SNV suisse, gratuite…
La SNCB continue parfois a utiliser l’Alfphabet, vaille que vaille, dans des versions très mal vectorisées, et mélangées au pire, type Arial.
La STIB l’a aussi utilisé mais à depuis longtemps varié ses choix, largement vers l’Helvetica dans la métro, et depuis quelques années avec son changement d’identité, une fonte custom transitionnelle à la hollandaise.

A font developed for the 2009 edition of the Verbindingen/Jonctions Festival. The images on the festival’s posters were text files. A font may be a set of black blocks!

It is based on Linux Libertine. Once the measurements have been made, these instructions apply to any glyph:
pen.moveTo((left,desc))
pen.lineTo((left,asc))
pen.lineTo((right,asc))
pen.lineTo((right,desc))
pen.closePath()

Le projet de fonte collaborative Dingbats Liberation Fest propose de redessiner les caractères Dingbats et Symboles Divers de la liste Unicode.

Les Dingbats et Symboles Divers font partie de quelque chose qu’on pourrait appeler un bien commun. Ces symboles se sont infiltrés dans la plupart de nos ordinateurs. Ils font partie des différents systèmes d’écritures comme l’alphabet romain. Reste à les localiser sur votre disque dur.

Après 2 premiers workshops à Brussels et Utrecht en novembre et décembre 2009, 70 caractères habitent déjà cette police de caractères.

Les blocs Casseau et Symboles Divers contiennent 303 caractères actuellement (Unicode version 5.2.0).

http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/nancy/

The collaborative font project Dingbats Liberation Fest focuses on the Miscellaneous Symbols (U+2600 – U+26FF) and Dingbats (U+2700 – U+27BF) blocks of the Unicode standard.

Dingbats come from a something that could perhaps be called a Commons. They have sneaked into most computers nowadays. It’s just a matter of locating them in your hard disk.

After two initial workshops in Brussels and Utrecht at the end of 2009, the font has grown into a collection of 70 characters.

The current version of the Unicode Standard (5.2.0) allocates 303 characters to the Miscellaneous Symbols and Dingbats.

First cut of the open source DIN, from drawing of 1932.

http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/news/osp-full-scale-in-beaubourg

There are 27 variations, one for each letter of the Latin alphabet + the ‘Full’ version, containing all modifications.

Every section of the book was assigned one font variation. The book reflects on the growing relationship between Free Software ideology, open content and digital art.

NotCourierSans is a re-interpretation of Nimbus Mono whose design began in Wroclaw at the occasion of the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008.
For more detailed information explore the files included in the font package (FONTLOG.txt) or go through the Font Info section (FONTLOG and Comment) in the font (open the font file in FontForge and go to Font Info in the Element menu).
The 1.1 version has been expanded by a work on cyrillic glyphs by Paulo Silva aka nitrofurano.

NotCourierSans 1.1 contains 2 ornamental glyphs encoded in the private use characters:
- in U+E000, the OSP frog mascot
- in U+E001, the 75 ligature added during an OSP workshop in Le 75, École Supérieure des Arts de l’Image, on Wednesday 17 December.
These sugars are accessible through the Ornament Open Type features.
You can test it in Fontmatrix.