First version of GGD

The first version of Mokum GGD is ready. The lettering was taken from sevaral old pictures of a building that is no longer there. It used to ne on Waterloo Square in the middle of Amsterdam and it housed the Municipal Health Dept. In Dutch that is the Gemeentelijke Geneeskundige Dienst, or GGD for short. Hence the name Mokum GGD. The texts that were painted on the walls of the building are not, as I first thought, from the same "font". So I'm playing around with the two styles, and try to produce something that is rather wild as well as pleasing to the eye. Clicking on the small image will bring a largers version on your screen.

It's surprise #1

What I already suspected, the typographers from 1920 have prepared a nice surprise. It can be seen on the picture which shows the lettering on both sides of the building. My guess is, that the sign with Gemeentelyke (Municipal) is older than the sign with afd zuigelingenzorg (Baby Care Dept.) on it. Or, the second sign had to be put up in a hurry. Anyway, the nice E with the white stripe on only the upper part got transformed to an E with a larger white stripe on the other side of the stem. This means I'll have to do some serious experimenting.

Promising new Deco-font

On the imagebank of the Municipal Archives Amsterdam I found a picture of a wooden building that was meant to give medical care to babies and toddlers. The building was run by the Health Care Department of the city. The lettering on the facade was - I guess - specially made for this building and it is striking in its simplicity.

I'm sure that trying to recreate this font will give some surprises, but I'm used to that. I see it as a nice challenge to widen my Mokum series of fonts. As always, you be the judge.

Trying to recreate Medieval texts

I got a question whether it is possible to transform Medieval handwriting into a ttf-file, to use on a PC. Having such a tool can simplify the transcription of a text. The person transcribing the document can guess what a word is, type that into the computer and then compare the result on the screen with the actual manuscript. It remains to be seen if this is indeed possible, due to different forms of characters (depending on their ppsition in a word) a bit like Arabic script, where there are three different letterforms (start, middle and end). The picture shows a sample of the handwriting, a collection of sentences pronounced at a local court in 16th century Netherlands.