Atoms, Typography, and Trigonometry
Atomic Type
This is one of the many reasons I love typography and typographers. Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler and Frere-Jones found an article in Science Magazine about a group of researchers who created an “Atomic Pen” that selectively swaps atoms of silicon with tin.
Their technique, documented in today’s issue of Science magazine, makes use of an earlier discovery: that within a certain proximity, individual atoms from the silicon tip of an atomic force microscope will exchange with tin atoms on the surface of a semiconductor. “It’s not possible to write any smaller than this,” said researcher Masayuki Abe, which sounds like a challenge to me: I can already think of one way to make letters that are 8% smaller, using the team’s own technique.
In his next post Hoefler goes into detail, discussing the history of small type, space efficiency, and trigonometry.
Just as the hypotenuse is always the longest side of a right triangle, an angled letter I will always be longer than an upright I of the same height. This can be a nuisance when designing type families, since an especially slanted italic will have ascenders and descenders that feel too long, and shortening them would undercut a fundamental visual relationship with the matching roman. But where there is no matching roman, as in Aldus’s case, these strokes can be retracted at will, offering the additional benefit of shortening the alphabet’s overall height. And it’s this technique that suggests a solution to the atomic alphabet challenge: by reckoning letters on a rotated grid, in which there are upright vertices instead of horizontal ones, it’s easier to make letters that can be both shorter and more tightly fitted. A final benefit of the rotated grid is the ease with which it can render horizontal strokes, which are crucial to the Latin alphabet, and otherwise impossible in a hexagonal matrix. —JH
Click through for the full story complete with scale diagrams of Hoefler’s solution.
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