One periodic table that will continue to expand as the name periodic suggests as glyphs grow in Typographic design. Its inspiration from the abbreviated typographer isn't bad either, another gem from the Fontshop.       Good use of colour to visually organise  with otf's and ttf's at the top corners.   'An evolving project by Jürgen Siebert inspired by Yves Peters’ The Abbreviated Typographer. Featuring FF Unit. Suggestions welcome.   PDF Download » Learn more typographical terms in our newly expanded Glossary » '   Found in:  Design: A gallery curated by Mehmet Ulga on flickr.  The inspiration was this The Abbreviated Typographer    'This post was originally written for FontShop Benelux’s Unzipped, by Yves Peters. Learn more typographical terms in our newly expanded Glossary. And be sure to check out Jürgen Siebert’s Periodic Table of Font Elements.      Table set in FF Hydra and FF Hydra Extended (quite a nice font btw, looks very DIN inspired)   A while ago I explained on The FontFeed what the suffixes SH and SB – found in Scangraphic Digital Type Collection fonts – meant. Yet there are a lot more abbreviations which are commonly used in the world of typography, and especially digital fonts. Some relate to glyph sets and font formats, others to design traits and foundries, and so on. Their meaning may be obvious for the seasoned type user, but I can imagine that many type novices – and even regular users – can be confused by a good number of them. Here’s a comprehensive overview*. I think I’ve got all of them, but if you encounter any that aren’t included please feel free to contact me and I’ll add them to the list. Abbreviations of type styles and weights will be covered in a FontFeed post. (*) If you are looking for a specific abbreviation scroll down to the bottom of the post for an alphabetical list.'   

Glyph Sets

    'Thanks to Unicode 5.0 and the OpenType format nowadays fonts can accommodate up to 65,535 graphic characters. The PostScript Type 1 format – the previous professional standard – on the other hand is limited to 256 glyphs per file. This may seem sufficient, but actually is just enough for the alphabet in upper and lower case, numerals and punctuation, accented characters for a number of European languages and a number of specials like currency and mathematical characters. So no refined features like small caps, oldstyle numerals, additional ligatures, swashes, ornaments and so on. Those have to be stored in additional font files, which are identified by specific abbreviations. All abbreviations below are found in PostScript Type fonts only.   Exp | Expert Set   Depending on the foundry Expert Sets can hold different configurations of glyphs. The naming implies that those fonts provide all the characters missing in the standard fonts that a typographic expert may have need of. Originally Expert Sets included only small caps, oldstyle or hanging figures, additional ligatures, often super- and subscript letters and numbers, plus some additional special characters and sometimes swashed characters. Normal height capitals were absent, and their slots were occupied by other expert characters. This made Expert fonts rather unwieldy, as converting capitalised words to small caps meant one had select the lowercase characters separately and switch them to the Expert fonts.   SC | Small Caps | OsF | Oldstyle Figures   Small Caps and Oldstyle Figures fonts were the solution to this problem [...]'. Many more in the glossary. Learn more about fonts with Type & Typography by Baines& Haslam (great general reference), A Type Primer by John Kane (very detailed and clear) & The Art of Looking sideways by alan fletcher (mass of inspiration)   Want to make your own font for free but dont know how to digitise it, use this http://www.yourfonts.com/  Get your font for free with this coupon: Happy2010 coupon valid until January 6   a great critique of periodic table style was done by robert here: http://eagereyes.org/blog/2009/visualization-is-not-periodic.html   http://www.flickr.com/photos/fontshop/4134128747/ http://www.fontshop.com/blog/?p=1184

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