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Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Spawned by my Noiseless

On Christmas Eve, I was driving down 40th Street in Oakland, California when I had to pull over and snap a picture of a building across the way.



That sign for the Integrative Wellness Center looked very familiar.



Yes! It was made with my own Remington Noiseless font.







As I write in my book:

     Even as a kid, I was fascinated by the typeface of my Remington Noiseless Portable Model Seven. I liked typing it, copying it by hand, and noticing its little imperfections, such as the missing right foot on its lowercase m. That disabled m has now appeared on blogs, games, books, packaging, and ad campaigns—because I turned it into a digital font and shared the soul of my typewriter with the world. I’ve now created over a dozen typewriter fonts that I give away on The Classic Typewriter Page, and I didn’t need to know anything about font design to do it.
     Here’s how. First, find a website that offers to make a font from your handwriting (there are several). The system works via a template that you print, write on, then scan and upload to the site. Of course, the template will work with typing just as well as with handwriting. You can either type directly on the printed template, or use an image editing program to work with a high-resolution scan of your typewriter’s typing and paste it into the digital template. Extra characters can be created through some image manipulation. The results won’t look just like real typing, but it’s a kick to see the soul of your typewriter manifested on a screen.

Remington Noiseless was the first of 17 fonts that I've created so far using this method.



The font has been downloaded over 110,000 times from dafont.com.

You can find it along with more typewriter fonts on The Classic Typewriter Page.


4 comments:

  1. Immortal machines make immortal impressions :D

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  2. Maybe your font will live on for Centuries like a typewriter. Congratulations on its popularity.

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  3. Wow you are like the mother penguin that can pick out her baby’s cries out of hundreds. So amazing

    ReplyDelete