Gestalt

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by Frodo7

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Pixel font on steroid. A tribute to the Hungarian-French artist, Victor Vasarely, the pioneer of the op art movement. This work remains unfinished until some tech wizard breaks the spell. You can probably imagine how it would have looked like when completed.

13 Comments

Well, that's it. I'm stuck at D. I have tried several tricks, various incantations to no avail. Since I've invested a great deal of time and effort in this project, and it looked promising, I decided to release it anyway, as it is ere I go to another errand. This concludes my fonting endeavours for a while.

P.S. The picture is taken at an early version to show you how the main motif blends with the background. The checkered background, that gives the shiny grey metal finish in PXL view, is made of a single brick tiled all over. I suspect that's the main culprit for this failure. All the troubles started after I painted them on large surfaces.

P.P.S.: I wanted to name this font after Vasarely, or after one of his famous work, Noir et Blanc, but these names are already used for fonts. Gestalt refers to the visual effect, as the meaning emerges from the pattern.
Comment by Frodo7 12th august 2009
in-effen-credible dude! the visual effect is astonishing. and the hugeness of it all. very intoxicating. i see the direction you are going with applying the design to build a font. did you consider using the insides of the big block for designing glyphs as a variation? using the center area to design the glyphs that would bleed off into the borders. i'm sure there would be some design challenges there and it may not even work. i think you could also jettison the pixel background - for me it's the interplay of the black and white in your main design. plus i think those pixels are probably killing the file size of this thing. but this is fantastic.
Comment by funk_king 12th august 2009
It's fabulous - I'm lost for words.
Comment by p2pnut 12th august 2009
Well, just a few words now before I have to find my pillow.

@funk_king: It is not as huge as it looks. The Escher font was probably bigger. As I mentioned, I have repeated the same brick for the background, and that move alone reduced the size by a factor of 4. The problem is with the way FS generates a font, as Master Rob Meek pointed out today (see FS Live). It turned out, the problem is not merely about the number of bricks, but rather the shapes they create. FS doesn't like to compute too many separate contours, black shapes which don't touch each other. And the checkered pattern is just about that. I can only hope he doesn't bear any grudge against me. For I nearly crippled FS with a ton of bricks. Or at least it looked from my laptop: it took 2-3 minutes to move on to the next character. And I dutifully saved after every major steps. It would be comforting to know that FS is impervious to such afflictions, even though they were, doubtless, undesigned. Since Gestalt is now inaccessible, I can't continue to work on it. Cloning is no help this time. I have to go back to an early copy, or start it from scratch. I think, I will do neither. But I had a long thought about the matter, and figured out how to avoid these perils in the future.
Comment by Frodo7 13th august 2009
Do continue. =)
Comment by geneus1 13th august 2009
Wow! How did you do this sample? Was it also ready in your drawer? It must be a Photoshop action, Eye Candy, or else. As a matter of fact, I had a design very similar to that, with the central big pattern fused together to form the strokes. But that was a dead end too, because one can not make the pattern seamless using a 5x5 pixel font template and 2x2 large squares on each. the latter must be odd number, 1,3,5,... But thanks for the encouragement. It came at the right moment. I went out with a long face. I promise, I will continue to work on, if time permits.
Comment by Frodo7 13th august 2009
geneus, that is some sweet stuff. which one of your fonts is that? is it a coming attraction, because i haven't seen it before in your repertoire? inquiring minds...

frodo, glad to hear you will continue. i can relate to your situation and i've been there and really don't like to think about it. but such as it is sometimes. glad to hear you're shaking it off. Vasarely would be proud of the inspiration he has imparted.
Comment by funk_king 13th august 2009
You see, I could not merge the horizontal and vertical strokes. I have to rebuild it from the ground up.

It seems to me that FS community is full of outlandish folk, whose minds work in magic synchronicity.
Comment by Frodo7 13th august 2009
@f_k: the sample is Bevelluzian, yet another unreleased fontstruction. It seems older fontstructions that are shared appear chronologically listed in the "Everything" tab, instead of by the sharing date. This makes the font more elusive to top picks and downloads. I think I'll release a bunch just to check what happens if a font falls in the FontStruct forest, will anybody hear?

@Frodo: I connected the horizontal and vertical strokes by concentrating on creating letterforms with the largest squares first, then built the surrounding checkered outlines around them. Kudos on another massive attempt!
Comment by geneus1 13th august 2009
Can't seem to add it to my system
Mark Titan
Comment by Mark Titan 28th april 2010
@Mark Titan: This project is unfinished (hence the fragment label), and inaccessible for further editing, because its size is too large for Fontstruct to handle. As a consequence it also means that download may not work. However, I don't rule out the possibility to restart this project some time in the future. Thank you for taking interest in my work.
Comment by Frodo7 28th april 2010
With the advent of the new Fontmortar, the extended memory, or FS 2.0, this fontstruction became available for editing again. Previously it refused to open, because it was too big. Thus, almost a year after its original release I revisited this work, removed the checkered (gray) background, which caused the problem, and by and large completed the set. The label "fragment" has been removed from the title. I continue to improve and extend the set if time permits.
Comment by Frodo7 8th july 2010
Bravo for returning to this design ... and presenting it to us in its full glory. I only wish I could give it another 10 :)
Comment by p2pnut 8th july 2010

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