The main menu now includes a link to FontStruct Live, and My FontStruct, Gallery and Support now show quick links to internal pages of the FontStruct website.

The latest FontStruct news, the Top Picks gallery and your own FontStructions are now just one click away!

Of course, among all praises there are also feature requests, occasional bug reports and complaints. Interestingly, most complaints we get are targeted at one particular feature in FontStruct: the rating system.

The rating feature allows users to give grades – from 1 to 10 – to FontStructions created by other users. The idea is to have a parallel, user-driven quality control system complementary to Top Picks and Featured FontStructions (which are distributed by the FontStruct staff). We find this a useful and important feature to have; it invites participation and increases the self-organization powers of the community.

Why FontStructors complain about rating

FontStructors complaints are directed mainly to the great influence of “FontTrolls” – nasty creatures who appear to have great fun in giving very low grades to others – in the ratings. Several suggestions for improvements have been made by FontStructors (see the the FontTroll and FontMoot threads for examples), from the total removal of the rating feature to the acceptance of the rating system as it is.

Some FontStructors have also raised their voice against the recent inflation of 10s, which is as damaging to the system as the low ratings distributed by trolls – both distort the scale and take away the fine grading of intermediary values.

Looking at the rating data

We agreed that the rating system could be improved, and decided to work on it. Our first action was to look at the rating data to get a better idea of what was happening. The result of this research was very interesting, and gave us a solid foundation to plan and implement the necessary adjustments.

The following is a brief summary of our findings:

FontStructions – What gets voted?

The chart shows that Featured FontStructions get more and higher votes than Top Picks, which get more and higher votes than regular public FontStructions.

The more exposure a FontStruction gets, the more votes and the highest the ratings it receives.

FontStructors – Who votes?

Among all registered FontStructors, only a small minority (1,6%) makes use of the rating feature. Among the voters, FontStructors with Top Picks vote more than regular FontStructors, who vote more than users who registered but never created a FontStruction.

FontStructors with Top Picks are more demanding and vote in average lower than regular FontStructors, who vote in average lower than users who never created a FontStruction.

How do trolls behave?

Looking at the voting data we were able to identify three main “species” of trolls:

1. Down-voting trolls – The classic sort. We identified 9 “mini-trolls” (who have cast 10 or more votes with an average rating of less than 2), and 4 “mega-trolls” (who have cast 1000 or more votes with an average rating of less than 2).

2. Positrolls – Users who always and only award ratings of 10. We’ve found several “Robin Hood” accounts which appear to have been created solely for the purpose of spreading love and counterbalancing trollery.

3. Naughty Positrolls – Accounts used to boost the ratings of individual FontStructors. There were several of them!

* * *

Based on the data we gathered, we began to draw conclusions and think about what could be done to improve the system.

In Rob Meek’s words:

Some people get very upset by the ratings system, in particular by low votes (from “trolls”) which can seem unfair. Some people are more sensitive than others, and there are also plenty of people who are happy with the ratings system as it is. Many people have also invested a lot of time and thought in rating hundreds of FontStructions so I don’t think we should throw the current system out the window.

Looking at how people vote, it is clear that people have completely different standards and frames of reference for voting and understand the voting system differently: Some try and rate a FontStruction in terms of its value in the context of FontStruct while some rate it for its value in a broad typographic context. Some people obviously dislike the trend for high-resolution designs and vote accordingly. Others see voting solely as a way to encourage and spread positive karma. One person’s 7 is another’s 5. Many people may vote correctively i.e. they don’t just give a design the rating they feel is right, they try and “correct” the existing rating with a more extreme vote – I think this may explain some trolling. (…)

Looking at the data I think the best way to improve the system, and get meaningful ratings, is to pursue these two main goals:

1. encourage and help people to vote more often. it’s simply low vote counts that make trolling significant.
2. relativize the dominance of the linear gallery listings which make ratings so important and represent a catch-22: You need a high rating to get to the top, and you need to be at the top to get a high rating.

It was decided to invalidate votes from “Naughty Positrolls” (accounts used to boost the ratings of individual FontStructors). Votes from mega-trolls were left untouched, since they vote differently from each other, and most importantly they do sometimes vote high (they just seem to have a very strict criteria for quality). We also decided not to filter out statistically aberrant votes (i.e. the one low voter when everyone else votes high), as this would be plain censorship.

* * *

Ladies and gentleman — Without further delay, here are the long awaited changes to the rating system:

Vote indicator

The first visible change for voters is a grey check mark next to the ratings bar (the stars visible on FontStruction pages and in the gallery), meaning that the FontStruction has already received a vote from you. This helps to avoid repeating votes and stimulates users to rate different FontStructions.

New balancing formula

Balanced rating is probably the most important new feature being introduced today. The average rating values of a FontStruction are now calculated with a new balancing formula, which “pulls” ratings towards the system wide average. FontStructions with only a few votes can have neither very high nor very low ratings. As they get more votes, the balanced rating gets closer and closer to the true average. In general, for high-rated FontStructions, the “balanced rating” will be lower than the true average. For low-rated fonts with only a few votes, the “balanced” rating will be higher than the true average.

The old average rating is still there for comparison — it is displayed via mouse-over on the ratings, and appears as an alternative sorting parameter in the gallery.

Vote breakdown

The new vote breakdown is an alternative representation of the votes received by a FontStruction, showing the distribution of grades in graph. It can be accessed by clicking on the rating of a FontStruction.

The sample image shows the typical distribution of votes in a Top Pick – an overwhelming amount of 10s, but also several low votes from trolls or critics.

Hidden gems

Last but not least, the gallery now has a new category: Hidden Gems.

Hidden Gems are special FontStructions which are asking for your attention and your votes. Accessible from the main Gallery menu, Hidden Gems are a random selection of FontStructions which (A) you have not voted on and (B) seem to have been neglected in some way – maybe they’ve been downloaded frequently but have few received votes, or they are a Top Pick with a low rating.

Like FreeTags, Hidden Gems bring an element of surprise to the browsing of FontStructions.

* * *

Conclusions

We are excited to launch the new features and to pass the result of all this work to you.

We hope that these small adjustments will make it more fun to vote and increase the percentage of voting users. With more users voting and the new balanced formula, the quality of the rating data will only get better.

Finally, we have plans to add further ways of celebrating good designs, and involving the community in that process. Have fun & stay tuned!

FontStruct is not just another font editor – it is special because it is built around the idea of sharing. FontStruct is a tool, but it is also a rich and lively community of designers who exchange ideas about type design and give feedback to each other.

The “Share” button

Today we are introducing a new “Share” button to make it even easier for FontStructors to share their creations with people outside the FontStruct community.

Popular social networking services – Facebook, Twitter, delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg – are now just one click away, integrated into individual FontStruction pages.

Your friends and family are curious about what you have been doing all this time since you joined FontStruct? Now it’s easy to show them.

The “Remember me” check box

Preparing the ground for upcoming changes in the rating system, we are also introducing a small “Remember me” check box to the Sign In page.

Regular FontStructors can now use this feature to enter the website and start FontStructing (or voting ;-) right away, without having to sign in each time again. Note that we don’t recommend doing this on computers which you share with others — unless you want to share your account with them.

* * *

Enjoy, and let us know what you think.

Today we are happy to announce three small but important updates: integration of Flickr and tweets from other users into FontStruct Live, expansion of the arabic character set and the long awaited implementation of copy & paste between different FontStructions

Integration of Flickr and Twitter into FontStruct Live

FontStruct Live has transformed the FontStruct experience. One month after its release, it is hard to imagine how we managed to keep track of all the updates in the community without it.

With a better communication infra-structure, FontStructors have been able to focus on what matters most: FontStructing. Every new week has brought more and better FontStructions, and we had to augment the capacity of Featured FontStruction from one to several fonts to acommodate all the amazing new work produced by the community.

Last week Rob silently plugged the FontStruct Flickr pool into FontStruct Live, so new images and comments on Flickr are automatically displayed on the feed.

This week we are introducing another addition to FontStruct Live: now not only our own FontStruct tweets, but any tweet including the magic #fontstruct tag is displayed in the feed. We hope this will bring even more integration to our community and bring FontStruct to even more people out there.

FontStructors on Twitter – say hello!

Arabic glyph sets

Being online and free, FontStruct can be used by anyone anywhere in the world to build fonts. We are well aware of the importance and the challenge of supporting alphabets other than latin.

Today we are happy to announce the expansion of our arabic character set to support initial, medial and final variations necessary for high-quality arabic typography. This still doesn’t mean full support for arabic (read notes below), but it is an important step in this direction.

A few notes about current support for arabic in FontStruct:

• The FontStructor uses fonts installed on your system to display the glyphs in the Character Selector bar. Users who don’t have unicode fonts installed on their systems might experience empty glyph slots, or slots filled with a placeholder glyph. We recommend users willing to access the full extended arabic character to install the free arabic unicode font Scheherazade.
• There is currently no support for right-to-left text in the preview window.
• Fonts generated by FontStruct don’t include OpenType shaping features for the arabic script (but these can be added with other tools such as FontLab Studio or MS VOLT).

We would greatly appreciate feedback from arabic designers – let us know what you think.

Copy and paste between FontStructions

And finally, the feature that all FontStructors have been waiting for – copy & paste between different FontStructions is finally possible!

It works as expected: simply open two FontStructions at once (in different tabs or windows), select and copy bricks from one glyph in the first FontStruction and paste them into another glyph in the second.

We believe this little feature will greatly improve the productivity of work with FontStructor – Enjoy!

Note: This update involved changes in the way FontStruct uses a sort of “cookie” that saves user preferences like palette positions, zoom factor, last letter edited etc. These changes mean that users will lose the current workspace snapshot.

We gave this issue some thought, and starting today we have not just one, but several rotating Featured FontStructions at once.

We think that this little change will make Featured FontStructions more efficient in communicating the stylistic diversity and the creative power of our top FontStructors.

As the size and productivity of our community increases, keeping track of all these different things was becoming increasingly difficult. We started to think about ways to improve the FontStruct experience and came up with FontStruct Live, a new website feature which we are proudly launching today.

FontStruct Live is a super-feed that shows all recent activity in the FontStruct community in one single place. New and updated FontStructions, comments on FontStructions and on the blog, updates on Twitter, Top Picks – everything is there. Users can individually select which types of activity they want to view, and can go multiple pages further back in time to see what happened since their last visit.

Another new feature on our homepage is the Tag Cloud, an alternate entry point to the available collection of FontStructions. Having trouble finding that cool FontStruction? Try searching with tags!

We are very excited about these two new features –  everyone visiting our website can now have a taste of how it feels to be a FontStructor.

As always, we look forward to hear what you think.

Today I’m going to write a little bit about the past, present & future of FontStruct and the new plans for “Brick by Brick”, the FontStruct blog.

FontStruct so far

FontStruct was released on the 1st of April 2008. Since then: 167,144 users have registered, 167,305 FontStructions have been created, 7,371 FontStructions have been made public and 317,770 FontStructions have been downloaded.

We have also collected several success stories of FontStructions out in the world, from the use of FontStructions in a huge LED display at the TU Darmstadt to the recent appearance of Sessions in an article on Grain Edit, or the Communication Arts Interactive Annual we received (more about it on The FontFeed).

These are fantastic results for one year of hard work. But we want even more.

FontStruct as an educational resource

So far we have been blogging mainly about FontStruct itself: improvements to FontStructor, examples of FontStructions in use, messages to the FontStruct community etcetera. For the curious and/or mobile FontStructors we now even have a FontStruct channel on Twitter.

But we want you not only to be up-do-date, we want you to be inspired. For this reason, the FontStruct blog’s mission has been re-defined to cover all things related to modular alphabets. Among many possible topics we are specially interested in the use of FontStruct for education in type design.

FontStruct is great for education because it’s free, it’s simple and it’s a lot of fun. It can be used on any computer with a modern browser and Internet access, independently of platform and without installation of additional software. FontStruct stimulates sharing and collaboration, while respecting the creator’s right to decide about it. Users are presented with a set of flexible and familiar Creative Commons licenses to choose from. Peer-review, user votes and the sought after Top Picks complete the package that makes of FontStruct not just a tool, but an exciting environment for learning how to build fonts and design typefaces.

Here are some of the topics we are planning to blog about:

Modular classics

One of the best ways to learn about type design is by looking at samples of work done by masters. We want to select famous modular alphabets – think of Josef Albers’ Kombinationschrift, Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet or classic bitmap fonts such as Susan Kare’s Chicago – and examine them closely. What are the ideas behind the designs? How were the forms constructed? With which modules, on a grid of how many units? In what kind of real-life projects were those letters used?

Modularity in type-design

Type design deals with patterns and repetition of shapes, so it’s natural that there is a lot of modularity in it. A typeface can contain many different types of glyph shapes: different alphabets with upper- and lowercase, numbers, accents, symbols. Each of these groups has its own development history and construction principles. For example, while the typical modulation of latin uppercase characters is based on basic geometric shapes (circle, square and triangle), the typical modulation of lowercase characters is based on more irregular/organic forms produced by the hand. The spacing of a typeface is also generally highly modulated to create a legible and pleasant rhythm for reading.

Each particular style of type – roman or italic, humanist or modern – has its own rules and patterns for standardization and simplification of letter forms. We can also find many examples of modularity when we think about the choice of type sizes, the organization of text and images on a page and the proportions of the page/canvas.

Tips & tricks

While FontStruct is extremely simple and easy-to-use, some of the type designs produced with it can be quite complex and sophisticated. In this section we plan to invite master FontStructors to talk about their tips & tricks to get the most out of FontStruct.

What would you like to read about?

These are just some of our ideas — there is a lot more to come. But we would also like to hear what you think. Is there a topic you would like to read about, and which is not included on our list? We look forward for your suggestions and comments.

It’s a pleasure to know the people and the ideas behind the modules. I look forward to the next post of the series!

During the first year of FontStructing, as the bricks piled up, our servers buckled a few times under the load. This sometimes happened without warning and for days at a time, and caused some understandable annoyance. We’re doing a lot of work at the moment to try and avoid this in the future. A large part of this work is now complete.

What’s changed? Hopefully nothing noticeable ;-)  but let us know if you spot any glitches.

Download Problems

Many of you will have noticed problems with downloading more complex FontStructions recently. We’re aware of this and it is next on our list of things to work on.

Update 12. April: Everything should be pretty much back to normal. We’re on a new hosting platform now which should allow us to increase capacity more easily in the future. Thanks for your patience everyone.

P.S. Especially for French users of FontStruct, and thanks to Francine from Brussels, we added a “no-break space” character at the end of the “More Latin” character set.

Update 5. April: All “invisible” FontStructions should now be visible. No data was ever lost, it was just a problem with displaying some larger FontStructions. There are however still some teething problems generally with the performance on the new hosting platform. You may have noticed pages loading slowly. We’re working to improve this as fast as we can.

Original Post 2 April

If you’ve visited FontStruct in the last few days you may have experienced one of the following unpleasantries:

• The site doesn’t load.
• The site loads with a “FontStruct is under maintenance” page.

Fear not. We’re on it. We regret any downtime, but some of these conditions are symptoms of a hardware failure related to our old servers and others are inevitable issues caused by our recent move to a new, more reliable hosting platform. The short story is: everything will get much better very soon.

Some users have expressed concern that their FontStructions are not loading. Let us know if you’re in this camp. We do have backups of all data and we’ll do our best to bring your work back to the most current version possible.

Otherwise, the site is safe and operational. Go ahead and resume regular FontStructing and let us know if you encounter any unexpected behavior. We’ll bring you more info as soon as our tech folks get back from under all the cogs and wires.