Letters
Font creation is always a fun blending of rule following and rule breaking, specificity and ambiguity. I like fonts
that follow convention enough to be readable but I love fonts that sacrifice a little readability for whatever purpose.
In my olando logo the sacrifice is for the repeated shape of the half capsule through the word. The sacrifice for
my knitted letters is the available letter size.
The issue with knitted letters on a punchcard operated machine is that any pattern is limited to 24 stitches wide,
repeating across the garment. Large detailed letters can be made vertically on the garment. But I wanted to write
words horizontally and so I made the smallest knit text I could
First attempts
I chose to start with lowercase letters for simplicity but these still come in different widths and heights. I chose
to make the majority of letters 3 stitches wide. With i and l a single stitch wide. In terms of height there are
standard height letters acemnorsuvwxz, tall letters bdfhkl, and medium tall it. There are letters with a tail
underneath the letter gjpqy. And finally j, medium tall with a tail below.
For standard height letters like e and s, there must be at least 5 stitches to contain enough information to be
readable. So 5 rows is my standard height. With 3 rows above and below for the tall and tail letters
Dealing with floats
The issue here is the long floats between tall and tail letters. Letters therefore must either be uniform in height
like Unicode font or the blank space must be filled in somehow. The uniform height means all letters must be 11 rows
tall, the problem is solved but I’m not particularly thrilled by the solution.
There are now no long floats between letters but there are still issues if short words leave space between the repeats.
This could be solved by using all 5 letter words as below. This seems like it goes against the spirit of what I was
trying to make, I would prefer to make a font which is independent of word choice.
I already used the checkerboard pattern as a background in previous projects. It acts as a pseudo third colour in the
pattern and removes the issue of long floats. This allows for very compact letters but sacrifices a lot of readability
up close. I think it is interesting, especially knit in a fine yarn, this would be quite small text