Under Consideration
Under Consideration is a collaborative publishing effort by Nazli Ercan and Eric Li. It is a container for an exchange of ideas between the Ercan and Li. Each new entry on the website is a response to the previous entry by the other author; it is the next thought of a continuous conversation. In this regard, the entries themselves become the medium in this unending collaborative process.
Under Consideration is also an experiment in form giving. Thus, the website evolved into other forms, which include an unbound and continuously expanding book.
Although the form of Under Consideration is continuously changing, the typeface choice in each of these various iterations stays the same and is FreeUniversal, which is a typeface in the style of Adrian Frutiger’s Univers.
1 Comment on “Under Consideration”
Can you comment on why you chose to use FreeUniversal? I’m asking because this font is of poor quality and dubious provenance.
Some background: In the 1990s, SIL developed the Encore Font System. In version 3.0, this fonts series supported over 1,600 phonetic characters and linguistic symbols. One of the fonts was SIL Sophia, which was modeled after Adrian Frutiger’s Univers, with only some minor differences (j, y). Unlike Univers, its outlines are appalling. This was in a time when there was hardly any other specialist font option available for linguists. In 2009, one Stephen Wilson took this old obsolete Univers knockoff, reintroduced the Univers shapes for j and y, and released the modified version as “FreeUniversal”, licensed under the SIL Open Font License. Wilson didn’t improve the poor drawing quality of SIL Sophia. Also, FreeUniversal doesn’t include the 1,600 specialist characters, which was the raison d’être of Sophia.
The sample attached shows Univers 55 (top), SIL Sophia (middle), and FreeUniversal (bottom). Note the deformations in the latter two fonts. This is another prime example for “you get what you pay for”.