This project originated from a collaborative impetus when Cecilia and I graduated from Typemedia in 2024. Planning to work on something together as a next step after the Master’s degree, our initial idea was to draw something sans serif and rounded, that could potentially morph between a standard sans-serif with angular edges, and rounded ones. Throughout our research, we found a wealth of specimen material that served as a basis for inspiration.

Using the material we found, we started sketching ideas, quite intuitively, to find something that might turn into THE idea. This was quite a new process for us, figuring out how to combine our ideas and to work remotely.

As we were talking about starting something together, it was clear that we would try to combine Cecilia’s calligraphy with my coding abilities. Already during Typemedia, I used one of Cecilia’s sketches to try and replicate a code-drawn version of it for our class with Just van Rossum. This was our first attempt at fusing the very digital with the very analog – a challenge that is often attempted by Typemedia students in a plethora of ways.

Throughout the Typemedia program, I was also investigating COLR v.1 technology. With Just’s help, I was able to produce a sort of filter through which I then pushed my final project, transforming it into a variable colour font. This helped me understand a bit better how this table works.

In other coding experiments, I was trying to clothe skeletons made of a single line with an interesting outfit. This took different shapes as I iterated but it was with that fundament that one day, the idea of combining it with COLR v1 came up. Amongst more general inspiration from computer aided design, where repetition becomes very easy, Vera van der Seyp’s graduation project from MIT Media Labs was very central to the idea I started to develop. To describe the idea formally and very simply: placing ellipses, coloured by a gradient, along a path and rotating these ellipses, each with a slight offset, is at the core of this idea.

During the time I worked at Erik Spiekermann’s letterpress workshop p98a, I discovered a typeface that impressed me quite sustainably: Calypso, by, Roger Excoffon, is a beautiful “trompe-l’oeil” of a typeface, painstakingly drawn by hand using halftones to give the letters a semblance of depth when looked at from a distance.

The essence of the concept stayed with me, as BEAM Neon clearly treads on the path made by typefaces like Calypso, using the technologies we have at our disposal today.

Thinking about materiality in more broad terms, I regularly come back to a key learning from my studies, where Erik van Blokland would tell us to think of our typefaces in terms of materiality. By adding colour and patterns to this typeface, the materiality becomes a lot more complex: We now have letters that seem tactile. 

As mentioned before, BEAM Neon was drawn entirely with code, as opposed to with bezier curves and a mouse. This brings a whole new set of problems to solve that are not part of the “regular” design process. Next to the process itself, which feels about as complicated as drawing an alphabet of halftone letters by hand, a few visual adjustments had to be made to the shapes in order to improve their shapes as much as possible. By using a simple tapering algorithm, I could control the parts of the letter that needed to be reduced in size, like the connection point of a curve to a stem. Another function takes care of minimally (0.5% – I realised this could have been towards the end of the project) reducing the diameter of the ellipses based on the tangent of the path at the point of their location. This optically corrects the impression that horizontal elements appear larger than vertical ones. 

At some point, the idea of adding an italic version to the typeface was interesting and for a while, an oblique version did exist. However, when it became clear that the file size would already be an issue with a simple static font file, that consequence, mixed with the additional amount of work this would produce, became a quite deterrent thought. One day in the future. Maybe.

As I was developing the core script for this project and focusing on the tapering function, some interesting visual results occurred, by accident. Although these might not have a direct application, they are what I love most about experiments.

Another exploration that was a lot more fruitful was that of the possibilities the COLR table offers. Currently, the font you can test uses a Sweep Gradient with no extensions. The Extension mode is a parameter that defines how the gradient should behave beyond the boundaries defined by the designer. Throughout the process, different modes of display were tried and interesting visual effects were created indeed. 

At some point, the idea of adding an italic version to the typeface was interesting and for a while, an oblique version did exist. However, when it became clear that the file size would already be an issue with a simple static font file, that consequence, mixed with the additional amount of work this would produce, became a quite deterrent thought. One day in the future. Maybe.

As I was developing the core script for this project and focusing on the tapering function, some interesting visual results occurred, by accident. Although these might not have a direct application, they are what I love most about experiments.

Another exploration that was a lot more fruitful was that of the possibilities the COLR table offers. Currently, the font you can test uses a Sweep Gradient with no extensions. The Extension mode is a parameter that defines how the gradient should behave beyond the boundaries defined by the designer. Throughout the process, different modes of display were tried and interesting visual effects were created indeed. 

Would I do this kind of project again? It depends. It was a very interesting process to explore, but also quite complex. A note to myself for next time is to really keep the code for the project modular and expandable, as towards the end of the project, I found myself with a massively interwoven machine that had become too rigid to change or develop.

When it comes to colour fonts and experimental fonts in general, the key issue is how well supported the font will be. With the hope that colour font technology gets more widely adopted in the next few years, BEAM Neon is currently limited to only a few browsers and barely any desktop applications, except Word, Powerpoint and Textedit. Illustrator has also started supporting variable colour v1 fonts but is still struggling with BEAM Neon.