Bringing an idea from imagination to fruition on a computer screen while staying within the parameters of the assigned task is just one of the many challenges facing graphic design students.
Courtesy of fontfont.com
FF chartwell, a typeface that easily converts data into charts, can produce various forms of graphs.
This can be especially difficult when students are asked to create charts and graphs using the most common graphic design programs—Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator.
“InDesign can be a good tool for chart-making if you can set up a system for yourself,” said Cielle Charron, a graphic design student at Portland State. “I always feel like the margin of error is very high, and the process is time-consuming.”
Travis Kochel, an adjunct professor of graphic design at PSU, is trying to solve this problem. He has created a typeface that provides students with an easy-to-use alternative for creating charts.
“FF Chartwell” works within the design program so that the designer can quickly input data and produce a chart without spending too much time creating styles (fonts, spacing, alignments, etc.). He borrowed the name for the typeface from a street sign in Wellington, New Zealand.
“Chartwell is a typeface and font file you can install on any computer,” Kochel said. With this typeface, once the designer inputs the numbers they want to see on the chart or graph, they turn on the ligatures and the typeface will snap that text into the chart, he explained.
A ligature is a glyph within a font that is particular to certain combinations of letters, such as “fi” or “fl.” Kochel said that ligatures are traditionally only used within the text, but he had heard of other type designers using the technology in a similar way to produce icons.
While Kochel worked on honing Chartwell, he and his partner, Lizy Gershenzon, were working as designers for various clients. Together they run a graphic design studio in Portland called Scribble Tone.
Scribble Tone’s website includes a straightforward video and instructive images that demonstrate how to use Chartwell in InDesign, which underscores Kochel’s interest in making the graphic designer’s life easier.
Rather than frustrate and discourage, Chartwell’s colorful elements are more likely to inspire the designer to explore the graphic elements, Charron said.
Lorna Nakell, a graduate student and book designer in PSU’s publishing program, was also impressed by the typeface.
“What gets me excited about Chartwell is its potential for using the abstract shapes the typeface creates for logos, background images or possibly a pattern for end pages,” she said.
Kochel said the chart-making problems that designers often run into were what inspired him to create this typeface.
“It’s a weird overlap of things that I do,” Kochel said. “I do a lot of typeface design and…web design, which brings more analytic and a problem-solving approach [to design].” The making of Chartwell was a good combination of his skills, he said.
Kochel’s efforts were recently rewarded when he was given the Innovation By Design Award (in 2-D Design) by Fast Company, a magazine that promotes new thinking in design and technology.
Kochel intends to continue his work at Scribble Tone and as an instructor at Portland State. His current typography project is to take a “traditional type design” and make from it “a super-wide sans serif.”