In ge, M I N I S T R Y O P E N T Y P E F E A T U R E S

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Erika Hunter
5 years ago
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1 e My Siµt gde

2 A B O U T M I N I S T R Y S C R I P T Inge, the calligrapher tells you with the hint of a smile. Take these letters and make it all look worthy. Whatever it is you are doing, these letters will make it so much bigger. Attach these letters to things without which people's lives cannot be complete. What you are doing is much more than a promotion in class or value. What you are doing is telling man, woman and child what they need and why they need it. You can only do that by whispering to their eyes in the silent accent these noble forms can utter. And you believe it, just like everyone before you did. They believed it ninety years ago, and they put the letters everywhere, on everything. At first the calligrapher's words rang truer than a philosopher's wisdom, but after a while the frequency of the letters sucked the life out of them, cheapened them, made their majestic presence stark and rusty. And just when it all began losing meaning, the calligrapher appeared with a new set of letters. He used a similar stance and similar words to reaffirm his original prophecy. And we believed it again. And it was all wonderful again. For a while. Working with calligraphic and handwritten forms for a long time can plant the seeds for many theories in one's head. One of the melodramatic, perhaps even somewhat poetic, theories I have about calligraphic fonts is that each of them is a time capsule. The same argument can be extended about all the old calligraphic works, the ones made on paper, back when paper's prices almost paralleled gold. Those works were time capsules too, but of the old, costly kind. The non-transferable kind. The destructible kind. The kind that could be hidden behind glass and showcased as work of historical significance. But not today. Today we are making time capsules that everyone can possess and use, time capsules that cannot be destroyed once they are willed out of their maker's hands, time capsules that do not seek a shelter because the natural elements cannot hurt them, and their significance does not need to be shown outside of their own functionality. Over the past quarter of a century, the majority of classic calligraphy was digitized many times over, made to be tied to the existence of mankind until the very end of this world as we know it. The feeling is overwhelming. It is like we did, and are now doing, something infinite, touching the eternal mystery of the forever. It is now possible, if somewhat debatable, to claim that the whole art of calligraphy has come so very close to adapting itself to the new tools and technologies. Reaching the point where one can replicate the wrist-wrenching, finger-aching efforts of the old scribes, using nothing but an electronic device shaped like a turtle's shell placed at a considerable distance from where the effort is being poured, is a very enlightening moment. It is much

3 more than the gratification of a work finished. It is much more than the relief of a milestone reached. It is somewhat like the feeling one gets when an atmospheric wall is crossed, as temperature changes, visibility clears and realization dawns. The realization in this case is that the initiation has ended, and the new existence has begun. We are crossing over, we tell the scribe. We have all the spoils of your history right here and now, and there is no reason whatsoever to leash ourselves. We will experiment like mad scientists. We will merge your history with our technology until we're drunk with decadence and culture exists within us individually. We will take your torch and carry it in many a mold of many a substance until we reach many an end. And by the time we get to the closing point of the full circle, the scribe will not recognize our work for his, but it will be just the same. This mad scientist of the twenty-first century, this spoiled brat of decadence, can now barely conceal his pleasure at being able to introduce to you the art of pushing the envelope, the way of the maximum, the very Freudian gloat of bigger and better: Ministry Script. As you read through the other pages of this booklet, you will come closer to understanding my earlier reference to decadent intoxication. It really is a work of obsession, and a strive for a perfection everyone knows cannot be attained. Ministry Script has its roots in the American 1920s ad art. The urban parts of the continent were flourishing with an industrial revolution riding high on mechanical engineering, punch clocks, fixed incomes, new ways of leisure, and promises of much more yet to come. During that time, the publishing business was enjoying a major inflation in demand. Books and magazines were being printed in unprecedented volume and frequency. The advertising business was following suit and homing in on the tools of publicity. The Linotype and Monotype machines, along with their minute competition, were the standard equipment that took care of setting type, but advertisements, for the most part, had to be done with letters made by calligraphers. Some of those advertisements may seem incredibly inadequate to the intellect of these days, but even in our current state of intellectual evolution we simply cannot deny the power of the calligraphy that was used back then. One can even argue, though purely from a designer perspective, that those advertisements show so many parallels with today's ways of marketing, in fact, that current publishers of design and advertising books cannot resist the temptation to print thick multi-volume hardcover mementos containing nothing but replicas of the print advertisements of those days. Today's graphic designers buy these books and marvel at how similar with now things were then. The product manufacturers were always exaggerating, just like they do now. The magazines where the product ads were published could be ethically suspect for publishing such exaggeration, just like they can be these days. And, of course, the fantastic quality of the design and lettering was what made the ads such historic pieces worthy of keeping to gaze every over now and then. Today there is little to say about current print ads outside of their design merits, simply because there are too many products that do the same thing,

4 which ultimately makes the vast majority of them too easily forgettable, whereas the design remains of historical value to future generations. This last thought is probably what pushed me to do what I did with Ministry Script. For all everyone cared, I could have just as well revived some old ad art calligraphy and unleashed yet another digital script onto the populace. But I couldn't chase the thought from my head that reviving calligraphy from the 1920s, as doable, casual and usual as it is today, keeps the value of that calligraphy in the 1920s. So in reality nothing would have been accomplished except for a simple technological retooling, which is pretty common these days. In spite of such retooling, the time capsule this script were to represent would have been the 1920s. This was fine in my digitizations of the Charles Bluemlein scripts, since that was the precise task to accomplish with them. This particular calligraphy, however, was bigger than that in my eyes. This is in partly due to the overexposure to both calligraphy and new type technology that made a modern mutant out of me and many people I know, and partly because with this particular calligraphy I had to create so many letters that weren't visible in the original material. The decision to make this time capsule two-thronged was the next logical step for me in this situation. So Ministry Script became a time capsule that marks both the American ad art of the 1920s, and the current early new millennium acrobatics of digital type. As you will soon discover by looking through the rest of the booklet, the initial idea was to make as many possible variants of each letter as I could possibly handle. Soon after I started, I disappointedly found out that what I could handle didn't really matter, and I had to reduce my efforts to what the technology itself could handle. Since Adobe's products, InDesign and Illustrator, are currently at the forefront of design programs that can handle the OpenType technology, I had to do the glyph math in concert of how many different ways those two programs could handle letter variations. The Open Type palette in both InDesign and Illustrator is a really powerful way to interface with high-tech fonts. This palette provides access to four different variants of each letter. More access can be acquired via the glyphs palette in both programs, but I decided to stick to the interface kind of push-button accessibility. This decision made it much easier to put together the technical part of this booklet, which I stubbornly insisted should be very user-friendly and easy to understand. Ministry Script really goes overboard with the ligatures, which aggressively overflow into the programmable standard, discretionary, contextual, and even swash features of the font. Going overboard in this case didn't turn out to be a bad thing. I have never seen such flexibility in a script font. Ever. At one point during the long, long testing phase, I found myself looking at twelve noticeably different visual instances of the same word, all set with this same font. I believe this sort of flexibility is not currently offered in any single script

5 font on the market today. If you've reached this far in this text, you must love reading about compulsions. So here is one for you: Ministry Script contains 99,814 kerning pairs. This, of course, is the result of having so many alternates and ligatures, and wanting every single one of them to be kerned properly with the base character set as well as with each other. The process of building Ministry Script took four months, if one calculates the working time in eight-hour days and five-day weeks. The design of the font took roughly five weeks. The programming took two weeks. Testing, reprogramming, redesigning, bug elimination, and documentation consumed the rest of the time, which was about nine weeks. During this time I was a man possessed. It was a religious experience, a following of an invisible but somewhat calculable ideal. This is why I named it Ministry Script. I am quite happy with the result, and am quite relieved that I reached the other side of this massive work. My initiation is now officially finished, and I await you on this side of the river with this time capsule, this totem, in my hand. Indulge. Alejandro Paul July, 2005 Buenos Aires

6 How OpType w a Map

7 T h i s e x a m p l e s s h o w s h o w O p e n T y p e w o r k s i n A d o b e i l l u s t r a t o r S T A N D A R D g C O N T E X T U A L A gl T E R N A T E S T Y L I S T I C A L T E R N ga T E S W A S H g

8 T h i s e x a m p l e s s h o w s h o w O p e n T y p e w o r k s i n A d o b e i l l u s t r a t o r S T A N D A R D L I G A T U R E C O N T E X T U A L A L T E R N A T E D I S C R E T I O N A R Y L I G A T U R E S W A S H

9 St & Hu Vtage Moviemusik D E L U X E E D T O N

10 S T A N D A R D S W A S H S A L T * A A B A B A C C D D A E E F F G G G A H H H I I I J J K K K L M L M L M * S t y l i s t i c A l t e r n a t e s

11 S T A N D A R D S W A S H S A L T * N N N O P P Q Q Q R R R S S T T U U U V V V W W W X X Y Z Y Y Z * S t y l i s t i c A l t e r n a t e s

12 S T A N D A R D S W A S H S A L T * C A L T * g a b a b a b a b c c c c d d d d g e e e e f f f f g g h g h g h g h i i i i g j k j k j k j k l m l m l m l m * S t y l i s t i c A l t e r n a t e s * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e s

13 S T A N D A R D S W A S H S A L T * C A L T * n n n n o o o o p p p p q q q q r r r r s s s s t t t t u u u u v v v v w w w w x x x x y z y z y z y z * S t y l i s t i c A l t e r n a t e s * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e s

15 Swash

16 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * B + e B + e + l B + e + n B + e + r B + e + s Б C + h C + l C + r E + l Л E + l + l E + r Р E + r + r E + s С Рr * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

17 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H E + s + s S + b S + h S + i S + i + m S + i + n S + i + r S + k S + l S + u S + u + l S + u + m S + u + n S + u + r * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

18 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H S + v S + v + e S + w S + w + i + n S + y a + b a + b + e a + b + e + r a + h a + k a + k + y a + m a + n a + n + n * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

19 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H a + n a + r a + s a @ a + t + h a + t + r a + t + t b + e n б b + e + l b + e + m b + e + n b + e + r b + e + s + s * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

21 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H b + i b + i + n b + i + r b + i + s b + i + s + s b + l b + u b + l b + y c + h c + k c + k + y c + l * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

22 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H c + r l c + t c + t + h c + t + l c + t + r d + d d + d + h d + d + l d + d + u d + d + y d + h d + i d + i + n * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

23 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H d + i + r d + i + s d + o d + o + r l d + o + x d + o + y d + u d + u + i d + u + l d + u + m d + u + n d + u + r d + u + s * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

25 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H d + u + s + s d + y e + i e + l л e + i + n e + i + r e + i + s e + m м e + m + n e + n н e + n + n e + n + s e + r e + r + r р * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

26 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H d + u + r s d + u + s с d + u + s + s d + y f + f ff f + f + i ffi f + f + l ffl f + i fi fi f + k f + l fl fl f + r f + s g + h * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

27 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H g + r g + t i + m i + m + s i + n i + n + g i + n + n i + n + s i + r i + r + r i + s i + s + s k + s * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

28 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H k + y l + l ll ll ll ll m + n m + s n + g n + n n + s o + i ƣ o + i + m o + i + n o + i + n + g g o + i + n + s o + i + r * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

29 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H o + i + s o + l o + o o + r o + r + r o + r + s s o + s o + u o + u + l o + u + n o + u + r o + u + s o + x o + x + y * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

30 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H o + y p + p q + u r + r s + b s + b + e s + b + e + m s + b + e + n s + b + e + r s + b + e + s s + h s + k s + k + y * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

31 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H s + l s + p s + s s + t s + t + b s + t + b + e st s + t + h s + t + k s + t + k + y s + t + l s + t + r s + t + t t + a + b * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

32 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H t + a + c + k t + a + h t + a + k t + a + l t + a + n + k t + b t + b + e t + b + e + r t + c + h t + e + b t + e + d t + e + k t + e + l * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

33 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H t + e + s + t t + h t + h + a + n + k + s t + h + e t + h + e + l t + h + e + m t + h + e + n t + h + e + r t + h + e + s t + i + b t + i + c + k t + i + k t + i + l * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

34 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H t + k t + k + y t + o + b t + o + c + k t + o + k t + o + l t + o + o + l t + r t + t t + t + k t + t + l t + u + b t + u + c + k * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

35 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H t + u + d t + u + d + y t + u + k t + u + l u + l u + l + l u + m u + n u + n + n u + r u + r + r u + s u + s + s u + y * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

36 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H v + e v + e + l v + e + m v + e + n v + e + r v + e + s v + e + s + s v + i v + i + m v + i + n v + i + s v + r w + e w + e + m * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

37 S T L I G * C A L T * * D L I G A * * * S W A S H w + e + n w + e + r w + e + s w + e + s + s w + i w + i + n v + i + r w + i + s w + l w + p w + r x + y x + y * S t a n d a r d l i g a t u r e * * C o n t e x t u a l A l t e r n a t e * * * D i s c r e t i o n a l L i g a t u r e s

38 S T A N D A R D !? # % 7 8 9!? # % Æ æ Œ œ fi fl Æ æ Œ œ fi fl $ Ñ ñ $ Ñ ñ Á Â Ä À Å Ã Á Â Ä À Å Ã π Ø ø Ç ç Ž ž ª Ø ø Ç ç Ž ž Ł ł Þ þ Ð ð Š Ł ł Þ þ Ð ð Š š µ ± š µ ± { } [ ] ( ) { } [ ] ( ) ß * + = - > ß * + = - > ª º ª º þ : ;. þ : ;. & & & & & & + s w a s h & + s a l t & + c a l t

39 Expl font e

40 M I N I S T R Y E X A M P L E S Gather G P l a i n v e r s i o n + S t a n d a r d L i g s G Ga + a t h & e r C o n t A l t + G s w a s h a n d t h l i g Ga G S t y l i s t i c + t h e r C o n t e x t u a l A l t

41 M I N I S T R Y E X A M P L E S Ate Mist Rid e

42 M I N I S T R Y E X A M P L E S Cigs wh e c wow! New Yk ocol@e H y! Z@a f go!

43 . w w w. s u d t i p o s. c o m

font faq HOW TO INSTALL YOUR FONT HOW TO INSERT SWASHES, ALTERNATES, AND ORNAMENTS

font faq HOW TO INSTALL YOUR FONT You will receive your files as a zipped folder. For instructions on how to unzip your folder, visit LauraWorthingtonType.com/faqs/. Your font is available in two formats: