Lyon Poster/Specimen
When Kai had finished the type]media master programme in The Hague with an early version of his Lyon typeface family, we wanted to make a small specimen for the graduation show. But not a specimen that simply shows a number of attratcive but empty words. So we made a poster showing the typeface in a way that also tells something about type design and typography. It spells out the pangram ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ in Lyon’s regular weight, but in an unfamiliar view. Only the normally hidden components a typeface — character width and the kerning, stem hints, on-curve points and coordinates, control handles – are made visible. In this poster you’re looking ‘under the hood’ of the letters.
We also wrote some small Python programs with Robofab tools to make these special features visible directly as new typefaces: all graphics are generated directly in the typeface editor by these scripts, allowing us to make continuously updated versions of the poster as the typeface was being developed.
The back of the poster is a specimen booklet that, again, shows the typefaces by talking about typefaces, typography and type design.
42×58.5 cm, Self-initiated, 2006
