Clem Robins
06-12-2007, 04:31 PM
i had to show a list of names and phone numbers for BPRD today, but the letters and especially the numbers had to be unreadable. you've probably had to do this sort of thing before.
today i figured screw it, i'll design an indecipherable font. i used a pretty common sans serif font as the basis for it, and started dragging nodes around until it looked sufficiently confusing, and installed the font. i called it Greektext.
strangely enough, it was sloppy and strange, but still very readable.
so i went back and made a new version of it, with nodes dragged clear to hell and back. it looked like what you get if you try to write with a fountain pen on a piece of facial tissue. this, i was sure, would work. i generated the font and called it Greektext Indecipherable. and i lettered the page.
they sent back the page and said it was too readable. and they were right. i think i know what crooks felt like on the old Superman show, when after emptying their guns trying to shoot Supes, they'd end up throwing the gun at him.
i have spent the past hour designing Greektext Very Indecipherable.
i hope it works. but there's a lesson in this. the design of our alphabet, and the design of any well-crafted font, is so familiar to all of us, almost from birth, that anything even approximately resembling the 52 letters of the alphabet (upper and lower case), and the ten number characters, will be instantly recognized as such. the moral of the story is that you can go a long, long way in manipulating these characters, and still retain readability.
try it yourself, see what you can get away with. you can get away with practically anything. try adding a fourth horizontal bar to an upper case E. try changing the shape of a lower case p so drastically that it looks like a dead goldfish. the alphabet is virtually bulletproof. no matter what you do to it, it still looks like what it is.
i wish i could post a sample sheet of these three fonts, but i don't have privileges of including attachments on this thing.
today i figured screw it, i'll design an indecipherable font. i used a pretty common sans serif font as the basis for it, and started dragging nodes around until it looked sufficiently confusing, and installed the font. i called it Greektext.
strangely enough, it was sloppy and strange, but still very readable.
so i went back and made a new version of it, with nodes dragged clear to hell and back. it looked like what you get if you try to write with a fountain pen on a piece of facial tissue. this, i was sure, would work. i generated the font and called it Greektext Indecipherable. and i lettered the page.
they sent back the page and said it was too readable. and they were right. i think i know what crooks felt like on the old Superman show, when after emptying their guns trying to shoot Supes, they'd end up throwing the gun at him.
i have spent the past hour designing Greektext Very Indecipherable.
i hope it works. but there's a lesson in this. the design of our alphabet, and the design of any well-crafted font, is so familiar to all of us, almost from birth, that anything even approximately resembling the 52 letters of the alphabet (upper and lower case), and the ten number characters, will be instantly recognized as such. the moral of the story is that you can go a long, long way in manipulating these characters, and still retain readability.
try it yourself, see what you can get away with. you can get away with practically anything. try adding a fourth horizontal bar to an upper case E. try changing the shape of a lower case p so drastically that it looks like a dead goldfish. the alphabet is virtually bulletproof. no matter what you do to it, it still looks like what it is.
i wish i could post a sample sheet of these three fonts, but i don't have privileges of including attachments on this thing.