Corpid developed out of a commission from Studio Dumbar in The Netherlands for the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management and Fishing.
Due to expansion, and the need to 		  update its communications structure, the ministry was faced with the expensive prospect of purchasing licensing for the Frutiger typeface for all of its computers.


Studio Dumbar suggested that it would be more interesting to produce a new font to replace Frutiger. It would give the Ministry a unique and strong identity.

 

 

Indeed, when you put the two faces next to each other, it suddenly becomes obvious that Frutiger is from a past era. Part of the assignment was to make the regular weight similar to Frutiger, roughly the same text color, widths and sizes, so   that the vast amount of existing documents could be transferred to the new font without too much stress. The money wasn’t that great, less than they would have spent licensing Frutiger,
but I liked the assignment.”

 

Image above shows the proportions of cap height, x height, ascender and descender.

 

Tension

The design part was really modifying curves, and getting tension all over the font. Tension is how the inner curve relates to the outer curve. I tend to put a bit more diagonal contrast into the fonts.   Even in a very neutral, sans serif font like this, it brings a bit of a humanistic, calligraphic touch.
Much, much more subtle here than in Thesis, it’s almost invisible here.’

 

 


PostScriptFont

“We had to make six fonts, three weights plus italics. The first part of the job was getting it to print with Postscript, so that the design bureau could start using it. Then we began optimizing it for screen. This turned out to be the hardest part.
It took me about 2 years. The Ministry hired a third party to test the font and provide a report. They rated the quality as being ‘very good’.		   Corpid has been available for licensing by the public since 1999. Several new weights and variants have been added in the interim. There are currently five weights, light through to black, with Caps, Italics and Condensed versions for each weight, as well as the Corpid Office. Corpid Pro will be available by the time most desk top applications can deal with Open Type fonts.

 


TrueType

Luc(as) had to work out a lot of TrueType issues with the font. “The technology behind TrueType is a bit different.
The rasterizer, which is built into the operating system is very dumb. Because of this, you have to put all of the intelligence into the fonts. You have to tell each character for each size how it’s going to be displayed. By comparison, on the Mac things are easier.

  Mac users mostly use PostScript fonts, the ATM PostScript rasterizer is for free, and keeps on getting more intelligent.The PostScript fonts only need a relatively simple set of instructions to look good, and you can always add some hand optimized bitmaps for small sizes. Optimizing bitmap fonts for me is probably the easiest thing in type design.”

 

‘If you just make a standard conversion from a PostScript font to a TrueType font it looks horrible; you get very bad display quality.

  

This is what Agrofont looked like after autohinting’ – what Luc(as) describes as ‘dirty' and ‘unusable in an office’.

 

 

The same font after a lot of hinting hours ...

Each character is a little Puzzle; you have to find little tricks to “solve” it in the most convenient way. It works best if you have good “global” tricks, then you won’t have to do a lot of “delta hints”. When you have done all your global tricks,

 

if there’s still a pixel too much you add a delta to make a little bump in the outline to get rid of it.
The better you do your global tricks, the fewer delta hints you need.’

 

'When I thought it was pretty good I sent it off to the ministry. The difference was that I have a pretty big monitor and the ministry uses fairly cheap, small monitors, and when I was satisfied on my monitor they were not satisfied - that's why it took such a long time. They had it tested by ergonomics people and they

 

said, "Arial is still better". It's a built-in PC font which is always taken as a comparison, and the reason is that a few guys at Monotype spent months hinting Arial, so it's perfect in all sizes. If you want to make a font that's as good as Arial, it really takes a long time.'

'In many display sizes Agrofont is better than Arial, because it's an open font: the lowercase e, c and s are very open. If you look at an Arial font, it is very closed, especially e, c and s. These closed characters don't work as well in small sizes. This is true not only for small sizes

 

on screen but also generally, for example if you drive at night and read characters on a road sign.
The same is true for faces like Helvetica or Arial - it's less readable in small sizes than more open characters like Frutiger and Agrofont.