>> thalamic’s description (with edit)
Permutation: The act of changing the arrangement of a given number of elements.
One font, two different brick combinations.
Picking any two bricks from the 169 available gives a total possible combinations of 14196 (169C2) different fonts. Counting a certain kinds of bricks as one--all four 45degree, for instance--gives 36 unique bricks, resulting in 630 (36C2) unique combinations or fonts.
In this font, if the bricks are swapped with each other, the result will be a different font. Hence order of the bricks matter. In which case, nCr (combinations) is not the right choice. What's needed is nPr (permutations). 169P2 gives 28392 permutations and a 36P2 gives 1260 permutations.
So, at a minimum, 1260 fonts are possible with the current implementation of FontStruct, with just this particular layout of bricks.
This whole permuatation thing is so fun and easy to play around with. The original fs Permutation series worked with just the bricks that were available by default. Since then, the FontStructor has evolved, allowing for, in part, custom bricks. This new permutation was not possible before. This one is created just to show that custom bricks can be dragged and dropped on top of the existing ones replacing the standard bricks. The bricks used here are [edit:1/4 brick staggered identical custom composites] .
Clone it and play around.
Instructions
1. Select a brick from the standard bricks or create your own custom brick.
2. Click and drag it to the brick in the first position in My Bricks until that brick turns gray.
3. Release.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 for the brick in the second position in My Bricks.
Learn. Enjoy. Share your permutation.
Please enjoy a private clone to see how I dealt with contrast, curves, bracketing, variable letter width and the difficult-to-achieve emboldening of the capitals’ vertical strokes within a minimal fontstruct matrix (and If you like what you see, please download for personal usage and vote kindly! :)
Intaglio’s amazing recent work makes similar strides (see the excellent rounds, for example), offering a solution before me to several of these long-standing impasses of the medium.
More characters to come... :)
This is a cloneNarrow and heavy, ultra bold Piano key designs once required fractional brick scaling to generate their distinctive slit-like counter forms while working with maximum curves. Composite stacks provide a more elegant and versatile solution to this old problem. In this way, they can be seen as an important milestone on the road toward individually scalable bricks...
Letterspacing is kept tight in this fontstruction, but still needs a great deal of manual kerning especially around all the character lacking serifs on one or both sides.
72+ initial downloads done during testing and troubleshooting. More characters to come. Enjoy, and please vote kindly. : )
This is a clone