During the VA301 course in Sabanci University, Elif Ayiter pointed out the repetition of script typefaces and ow that repetition defeats the purpose of the whole handwriting imitation of such fonts. This got me thinking:
As script typefaces are becoming less and less commonly used and certain script typefaces become avoided completely, I try and explain why this might be happening by using Mashahiro Mori's The Uncanny Valley hyphothesis about human-like robots as a framework for discussion.
The Uncanny Valley
The Uncanny Valley (1970) hypothesis of Mashahiro Mori takes Freud's theory of the Uncanny as a basis. Freud's 1919 essay The Uncanny focuses on the qualities that make some subjects in literature appear as unheimlich (un-homely), uncanny. Mori builds on the essay of Freud and argues that robots acting and appearing as humans breed the feeling of eerieness in humans and draws up a “valley”, describing when and in what levels the uncanny qualities of human-like robots emerge.
Charles Darwin, in his book commonly known as Voyage of the Beagle, describes the uncanny quality of a snake and explains the hideousness in terms of snake's face's proportions being in relation to a human's face.
The expression of this [Trigonocephalus] snake’s face was hideous and fierce; the pupil consisted of a vertical slit in a mottled and coppery iris; the jaws were broad at the base, and the nose terminated in a triangular projection. I do not think I ever saw anything more ugly, excepting, perhaps, some of the vampire bats. I imagine this repulsive aspect originates from the features being placed in positions, with respect to each other, somewhat proportional to the human face; and thus we obtain a scale of hideousness.
—Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle[34]
Script Typefaces and Repetition of Organic Forms
The first script typeface cut in 1557 by Robert Granjon in France and was named lettre françoise d’art de main but was widely known as Civilité because of it's use in a popular children's etiquette book La Civité puerile.(Tova Robinowitz – Exploring Type, p147).
Casual script typefaces such as Comic Sans, Brush Script and Chalkboard mimmick casual human handwriting. Because of the nature of rendering of the glyphs as single units, in long bodies of texts, the pattern is instantly noticable in repeating glyphs which defeats the whole purpose of mimmicking organic flow. Instead of looking organic, they now look as if they were robots, acting too hard to move like humans do.
Even in short texts, the repetition becomes clear quickly
Loren Ipsum in Comic Sans
It is clear that because of the mechanic rendering of such typefaces, the resulting text does not appear as human as it was intented to be. I argue that there is an uncanny quality to the downfall of such typefaces basing my argument on Mori's The Uncanny Valley hypothesis. To remedy such eerie results, such fonts can be scripted to have alternative glyphs that are randomly picked by the software while typing to replace the choosen glyph with a similar copy in real-time. This would aid in blurring the clear repetition of glyphs. Furthermore, some glyphs can have stroke errors or overtraced qualities to simulate human error if they aim to mimmick human handwriting.
Great post.
I had touched upon this issue in http://www.denizcemonduygu.com/tipo101/:
“Stay away from fonts that try to imitate hand writing, because they can’t. Typesetting and hand writing are completely different realms, and there are ways of looking cozy without becoming a cheap imitation of the other realm. Write on a paper and scan it if the design needs hand writing.”
Linking this to the concept of uncanny is a great move; I’ll definitely use it in future.
Although, I think the vocabulary needs to be adjusted: I don’t agree that the problem is with “script” fonts, nor do I think that they are becoming less popular by the way. The natural scripts that scribes create can be quite “robotic” in that the “glyphs” (of the same letter) barely differ from each other throughout. Lettering is a discipline that tries to minimize human error. Accordingly, script fonts have become very popular in the last years, especially those with the Opentype features that you talk about in the last paragraph. (A brief look at http://new.myfonts.com/hotnewfonts/ will show the current trends.)
So I think that the real problem is not with “script” fonts but those that “mimmick casual human handwriting” as you said. But again, even those ones get better and better at looking natural thanks to the Opentype features…
Aside from the stroke errors and the consistent application of “inconsistent forms”, typefaces discussed above indeed mimic the organic nature of the hand-brain coordination. However, there are designers and text artists who have spent over 30 years trying to understand this problem such as Gerrit Noordzij and Hermann Zapf. I’ve encountered a brilliant remark on Noordzij’s book “The Stroke” in which he delineated the organic nature of writing by saying “It is the state of inconsistency happening consistently”. Taking this further, one would barely realize the unknown type engineering that has been implemented on Hermann Zapf’s Zapfino font. The idea behind the Zapfino project went ahead and further created several alternative glyphs for special substitutions (swash characters). If you activate the contextual alternates panel on Adobe’s OpenType panel you would notice several different lowercase glyphs appearing in different forms such as with more elongated or extended terminals to again “mimic” the accidentally written longer or shorter strokes. Last July at TypeCon I met with Jim Wasco and had the opportunity to chat about his recent typeface Elegy, which is a calligraphic script typeface. He told me that in order to achieve something close to the natural flow of writing he had to design some of the glyphs with 5 to 15 additional versions and encode them as “contextual alternates” which would generate a less Frankenstein looking script typeface.
Thanks for pointing that out Cem, maybe ı should have said “certain casual script fonts” or just went with” casual script” fonts, narrowing it down to fonts like Dom Casual, Comic Sans, Tekton etc.
Thank you for the in-depth information, Frankenstein looking typeface calls for a link on Frankenstein Complex.
” In Ms. Shelley’s story, Frankenstein created an intelligent, somewhat superhuman being. He finds that his creation is horrifying to behold, and he abandons it. This ultimately leads to Victor’s death at the conclusion of a vendetta between himself and his embittered creation.”
I wonder if the creators of said fonts has abandoned them like Victor did :)
Great points from both of you, just to add something to the attempt in adjusting the vocabulary used previously: I would suggest using simply “formal” and “informal” scripts which were the terms consistently used and established in the writings of Hermann Zapf, John Berry and Robert Bringhurst, whom have all contributed on ATypI’s book “Language Culture Type: International Type Design in the Age of Unicode” in 2002. One would appreciate the merits of consensus in that book. For instance, chancery hand would be a “formal” scribal writing whereas the font “Curiz MT” or “Candy” would be an informal script type. The term “casual script” certainly makes sense but “natural scripts” may come across vague.