Alphabets, graphemics, linguistics, polyglot studies, typographic software, type design and research
Hello world! I am Wouter Soudan*, independent scholar and typographer. My hard disks are stuffed with a life’s worth of articles, notes, sketches, and bits of code. It ought all come from under the dust and be released, here, at Scriptorium.blog, where I’ll publish about my typefaces in progress and my ongoing typographic research work, as a sample of what I can offer. I am available for hire and would love to take your book design, lettering, typeface development, and typesetting commissions! Get in touch by e-mail or Twitter, and subscribe to my RSS feed.
Graphemics. Type theory and miscellaneous theoretical pieces on paleography, the history and evolution of the alphabet; issues concerning calligraphy, type design, and character encoding.
Read my introductionary paper.
My largest type design project: a true workhorse, with support for Armenian, Coptic, Cyrillic and Church-Slavonic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek, Syriac, and of course (extended!) Latin, including medieval and phonetic characters, maths and miscellaneous sorts. Add a galore of unobtrusive ligatures, contextual and stylistic alternates, titling capitals and small caps for everything, with dozens and dozens of smart OpenType features.
Dodecaglotta: Polyglot Bible typography, my biggest side project. What more suitable dummy text to show off multilingual typography other than the most translated book of all time? If you’re into dead languages and traditional typography, you’re in for a treat! More info at Dodedaglotta.com →
A study of proportion. My take on the eternal letter: the Roman capital. A variable font with master axes ranging from the classic 1/11 stem weight to extra fat stout, and from unmodulated sans over glyphic lapidar to didone-style high-contrast. Plus a layered chromatic version in the pipeline!
An exploration of national handwriting traditions, a case-study in ligatures, and an excercise in ductus. A synthesis of the script genre as a polyvalent variable OpenType font family, with stylistic sets for queer historicisms like Civilité and Sütterlin!
An inquiry into the similitude of gothic blackletter and the renaissance italic. All while honoring the heritage of the 1960s’ greatest Dutch lettering artists’ masterful calligraphy.
Towards the ideal console/typescript font. A hommage to Adrian Frutiger, his Documenta and OCR-B typefaces, and to his foundational ideas on readability and micro-typographic proportions. A true monospace console and a duo-space prose version. Add some dozens of ligatures which enhance software source code through smart OpenType substitutions.
Proof of concept for programmatic typographic river detection. A summary in screenshots. (Spoiler alert: Nicolas Jenson indeed performs best in typesetting for even text color…)
Textus is my startup. It’s the company where I would love to be type designer in residence. For the time being, I must only be it’s CEO. We’re building a typesetting engine for the Web age.
Request you beta access today, at Textus.io! →
These are just a few samples of what I have in my drawers (I don’t scroll newsfeeds and never watch the telly ;-). Only just started uploading my output into the Interwebs Überbrain; more to come soon! Stay tuned: subscribe to my RSS feed, and follow me on Twitter.
(*) I’m into type and typography for over twenty years now. First as a student of classical languages procrastinating in font addiction (Greek letters, duh!), then as an autodidact graphic designer (CorelDraw v.7), typesetter (PageMaker v.6.5), and occasional TrueType hacker (Fontographer v.4.1). Besides getting late early DTP skills into my digits, I also wanted to get my hands dirty with the beauty of the analogue. I acquired an Original Heidelberg platen jobber, a KSB cylinder and a small hand-operated etching press to learn the noble craft of printing, both letterpress and intaglio.
In 2007 I graduated in typography at the Museum Plantin Moretus, Antwerp, summa cum laude. Meanwhile I did a PhD in Art History (dissertation) — my primary literature (18th century art theory) was almost all in 𝕱𝖗𝖆𝖐𝖙𝖚𝖗, and I loved it, way more than the metaphysics of the texts. Next, I did a post-doc in Computational Linguistics, but rather indulged in digitizing medieval paleography. I continued freelancing as a book and graphic designer with my one-man graphic design studio Rhythmus.be. From 2009 to 2013 I was a lecturer of typography; it were my happiest years, teaching my passion for type to equally enthusiastic students. Sadly, higher education politics kicked me out of academia. From 2013 on, I have been working on Textus, converting my expertise and know-how into software for typographic automation. In the autumn of 2016 I allowed myself a sabbatical leave to set up one of my major side projects, which combines my love for (dead) languages and keen eye for typography: Dodecaglotta, the Polyglot Bible Typography Project and its Pan-Unicode font family Plantijn.
I’ve never been a good netizen and a worse marketeer of personal branding.† Nobody knows my work. And that’s a shame, I think, for there is a lot of interesting stuff I got to share. Some may remember my contributions to the PPLetterpress newslist, or those on Typophile, Hacker News, Twitter, and the Glyphs Forum. Anyway, here, at Scriptorium.blog, I plan to finally gather all my type related work. You can read my personal ramblings over at WouterSoudan.be.
(†) Oh, and if we’d ever meet: don’t be put off by my angry resting face. True, I’m the serious intellectual type. Which also means I can get very passionate about letters, and surely we’ll do some animated shop talk over a cup of medium roast robusta, while enjoying silly font geek jokes.
P.S. This blog is being typeset with Textus.io, the startup I am working on with my brother Pieter. Textus is a typesetting engine as a service, implementing the know-how of meters of literature on typography, multilingual copy-editing, and editorial practices. With Textus, publishing your papers is as easy as dropping a file into your Dropbox folder or pushing to a .git repository. You can even have complete books perfectly typeset as gorgeous print-ready PDFs, in the blink of an eye!