No Letter Is An Island

Regard­ing the design of char­ac­ters, I believe it is espe­cially essen­tial to do so by hand, where one can observe the cal­li­graphic char­ac­ter. […Work­ing dig­i­tally] lim­its of the very vision of the designer. In any case I believe that the design of char­ac­ters is a com­plex issue and should be [evo­lu­tion­ary, so as] not to over-​​design. In design­ing courses I choose a spe­cific topic, but very wide and with just a mod­er­ate amount of restric­tions and para­me­ters to be met, because vio­lat­ing the rules is eas­ier than cre­at­ing alone, and the most orig­i­nal fol­low the oppo­site path. [–Trans­la­tion via Google, with some cleanup. Orig­i­nal.]

I’ve spent the evening search­ing and turned up very lit­tle English-​​language infor­ma­tion on this face, much less exam­ples in use. Com­mis­sioned by the Uni­ver­sità Iuav di Venezia, and designed by Luciano Per­ondi in 2004 for use in Venice’s wayfind­ing sys­tems, it’s not read­ily appar­ent to me if this face was ever actively used for way­far­ing in the pub­lic realm. That said, I’m awfully enam­oured with Min­io­type‘s char­ac­ter at large sizes, and sur­pris­ingly del­i­cate grace when set small.

We think of signs–the task is to bring a per­son from one place to another but can be [visu­ally] very strong, even evoca­tive. Per­haps we need to reas­sure the user of a dan­ger, or sim­ply make them feel com­fort­able in an ele­gant place. [These are] mes­sages that are not attrib­ut­able solely to writ­ing, but also to a form of rhetoric of another type; a sec­ond level of read­ing. [–As before.]

I may be late to the party, but I’m will­ing to sug­gest Luciano Per­ondi, and his type­faces, just gained a new fan.