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One of the fonts used on the Becker Cascade in-car satellite navigation system. This is the large font mainly used in media mode for song name display. Original font remains © Harman Becker Automotive Systems GmbH.
Redrawn by hand/eye. I've created characters that I had reference material for and created my own variations of characters that can be deduced from the rest of the set.
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I've added a handful of characters and fixed what I think are a couple of stray errors in the original. In that respect my contribution is about 5% of the original design, at a guess.
However, to get all the characters was quite a process! I created a bunch of mp3s with song titles made up of all the ISO-8859-1 character set, put them on a memory card and loaded them into the sat nav. I then took a bunch of photos as my source material. Only then was I ready to start on this fontstruct!
I'm happy to change the Eszett character, if you're sure it's the wrong character? It has the descender in fontstruct (More Latin, "Small Sharp S", Unicode: 00df). You can see the original in the photo below.
Click the photo to see it on Flickr:
I've fixed the Eszett and cloned a new version that has the filtered effect. Personally, I prefer this solid version, but I appreciate others may want the original OLED vibe. Choice is a good thing.
The pixels on the original device are slightly wider than being square, but I can live with the difference.
I have done two other Becker fonts, and a reworking of my old Block Out design (which has a link to a great back story on my typophile blog). Check them out.
As for italic, blackletter, and most fonts with a calligraphic bent – they very often sport eszetts with descenders. It makes sense when you consider the origin of ß as a handwritten script ligature. For legibility reasons, eszetts may even vary in construction when comparing different weights of the same typeface!
The really salient visual difference between β and ß is the closed vs. open counter of the beta vs. the eszett.
Finally, I must say that these Becker Navigation devices are second to none! Worth every penny.
In context it even makes quite a bit of sense. Viewed on a small LCD screen from driving distance, legibility for a letter sharing characteristics with so many other glyphs and glyph combinations would simply require such an exaggerated feature. Good choice on the part of the original designer, then.
And by the way, this really is a beautiful pixel font you’ve shared with us. Thanks!
I use the device all the time and the font family it uses really has been well thought out. I had no other choice than to share the love. :)
@will.i.ૐ: There are exeptions, as always. And no rules of typeface design are carved in stone. I know, that some cursive versions have a descender, but I didn't want to complicate the picture. Becker Large was not cursive after all.
I used to have the same view about the Eszett/scharfes s, and designed a few fonts with descenders in the "ß" until I was told by a professional designer that it was not correct. Actually, I didn't invent anything, I merely followed the traditional German handwriting learned in school. But we all know, cursive letters are a different story.
For more information on this topic see the following book: Designing Type by Karen Cheng, pp. 212-213.
My initial suspicion is confirmed: the use and retention of ß, and consequently its belated [re]insertion into the majuscule character set, is felt in Germany to be bound up with national identity.
Did the designer who labelled your type creations incorrect perhaps speak in part from such strong place as feelings of national identity? Regardless, it remains that s/he oversimplified their case. The various cursive forms of ß are only some of the conventional examples which contain descenders.
As far as I can tell, gingerbeardman hit the nail on the head regarding the concerns addressed by his source material’s designer. Legibility, itself an evolving phenomenon, often trumps all else in professional type designs; gestalt, historical reference/revival, and juxtaposition with handwritten forms follow closely behind.
On the other hand, national identity, spelling reform, and bona fide typographic litigation – which all come into play when discussing this unique ligature - are admittedly way off my radar when it comes to consecrating the geometry of type. I can see how such considerations might lead someone to come down hard on one side of a multi-faceted design problem.
gingerbeardman: Hey, I just noticed what appears to be a forth font in the sample you posted from the Becker Cascade GUI. Do you have any way to capture and expand the “TMC” sample which is both shorter and wider relative the other three?
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