To reach his goal of releasing a weekly typeface, he devised a system that makes heavy use of components.
Flipping, rotating, and scaling simple shapes can produce amazing results in relatively little time — the alphabet, after all, is a modular system. As Ellmer states on his website, the process is not new: William H. Page used a modular approach for producing wood type in the early nineteenth century. (One feature not found in wood type is nested components, which allow a simple shape to be used to build more complex shapes, which in turn can be reused to create even more intricate ones.)
Ellmer told me that his friend Johannes Langencouraged him to use this workflow on a grander scale, and Lang is credited for helping out with “Python-powered transformations” for various releases. Reflecting on the experiment, Ellmer sees many more “Pytography” possibilities:
In the aftermath, I even feel that I did just scratch the surface of that component-based approach — massive potential still to be realized. I guess at some point I will revise the setup…
Design modules lend themselves mainly to uppercase letters, which are more uniform than lowercase letters. That’s why most Pyte releases either contain only capitals, or use the lowercase slots for cap alternates. In my opinion, that is a totally legitimate approach.
