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lunch break
Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
Fonts + Design
Snellen Optotype Font with Upper and Lowercase characters
In the process of designing my Snellen Eye Chart typographical posters, I came across the Snellen font by Andrew Howlett. I wasn't happy with all the letters, so I made attempts at giving the font an update.
Not being a font designer, I will likely get myself into trouble.
snellen chart posters
While making my Snellen chart series, I entered the rabbit hole of optotype fonts ... and I can't get out!
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The charts don't necessarily use the latest version of my Snellen font design, which fluctuates as my mood about some of the letters changes.
optotype fonts
The optotype requirement is that letters be designed on a 5 × 5 grid, and have constant stroke width. This means that both lower and upper case letters need to share the grid and stroke. To stay compatible with the eyechart paradigm, letters should be as obvious as possible.
Lorrie Frear's article What are Optotypes? Eye Charts in Focus is a great read about optotypes and eye charts.
Snellen Optotype Letter Design
uppercase
The uppercase letter design uses Herman Snellen's original chart as inspiration.
I have modified the design by Andrew Howlett (see below) for some letters. All the changes are relatively minor: more serifs and consistent stroke width for bars on R and K.
lowercase
The lowercase characters should be considered experimental.
The progress of my redesign is shown below. I would greatly appreciate feedback and suggestions!
Download Snellen Optotype Font
The distribution contains both Andrew's version and my redesign.
v7.1 4-jun-2018 — Download Snellen optotype font
version 7.1 — 4 Jun 2017
Tidied all letter forms with Fontlab 6.
version 7 — 6 Feb 2017
Fixed g and e. Thanks to Makeesha Fisher for suggestions.
version 6 — 5 Feb 2017
Adjusted serifs on f, j, l, o, t to extend the full width of the grid. Added a lot more symbols.
version 5 — 4 Feb 2017
Added lowercase, digits and symbols.
version 4 — 23 Feb 2017
Adding digits.
version 3 — 22 Feb 2017
I'm exploring the lowercase characters. I don't know what I want to do with them. Make this into a more standard font in which lowercase letters are smaller, so that letters can fit their roles clearly when text is set in sentence case, or fill out the full optotype grid.
version 2 — 22 Feb 2017
Flushed out some inconsistencies in the uppercase characters. Added serifs to more letters.
Now all the letters occuppy the full 5 × 5 grid, including the I, whose serifs were widened to allow this. While this new uppercase I isn't as pretty as the old one, it makes the entire typeface more consistent to its optotype roots.
Still struggling with the G. In the original version, the descending stroke was cut off in the middle of a grid, which I didn't like.
The S has been fixed—thanks to Elanor Lutz for feedback.
I've color coded the characters slightly differently, drawing attention to ones that I feel need more thought.
The lowercase characters aren't color coded (yet) because ... most of them need help. Primarily, I'm vacillating between making them fill the full size of the 5 × 5 square, just like the uppercase characters, and keeping them confined to a 4 × 4 square, which incurs loss of legibility. If I make the letters the same size, it will be impossible to distinguish lowercase and uppercase characters some cases (e.g. c, i). Perhaps this is desired?
version 1 — 22 Feb 2017
First attempt at lowercase characters.
news + thoughts
Optimal experimental design
Customize the experiment for the setting instead of adjusting the setting to fit a classical design.The presence of constraints in experiments, such as sample size restrictions, awkward blocking or disallowed treatment combinations may make using classical designs very difficult or impossible.
Optimal design is a powerful, general purpose alternative for high quality, statistically grounded designs under nonstandard conditions.
We discuss two types of optimal designs (D-optimal and I-optimal) and show how it can be applied to a scenario with sample size and blocking constraints.
Smucker, B., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2018) Points of significance: Optimal experimental design Nature Methods 15:599–600.
Background reading
Krzywinski, M., Altman, N. (2014) Points of significance: Two factor designs. Nature Methods 11:1187–1188.
Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2014) Points of significance: Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and blocking. Nature Methods 11:699–700.
Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2014) Points of significance: Designing comparative experiments. Nature Methods 11:597–598.
The Whole Earth Cataloguer
All the living things.An illustration of the Tree of Life, showing some of the key branches.
The tree is drawn as a DNA double helix, with bases colored to encode ribosomal RNA genes from various organisms on the tree.
All living things on earth descended from a single organism called LUCA (last universal common ancestor) and inherited LUCA’s genetic code for basic biological functions, such as translating DNA and creating proteins. Constant genetic mutations shuffled and altered this inheritance and added new genetic material—a process that created the diversity of life we see today. The “tree of life” organizes all organisms based on the extent of shuffling and alteration between them. The full tree has millions of branches and every living organism has its own place at one of the leaves in the tree. The simplified tree shown here depicts all three kingdoms of life: bacteria, archaebacteria and eukaryota. For some organisms a grey bar shows when they first appeared in the tree in millions of years (Ma). The double helix winding around the tree encodes highly conserved ribosomal RNA genes from various organisms.
Johnson, H.L. (2018) The Whole Earth Cataloguer, Sactown, Jun/Jul, p. 89
Why we can't give up this odd way of typing
All fingers report to home row.An article about keyboard layouts and the history and persistence of QWERTY.
My Carpalx keyboard optimization software is mentioned along with my World's Most Difficult Layout: TNWMLC. True typing hell.
McDonald, T. (2018) Why we can't give up this odd way of typing, BBC, 25 May 2018.
Molecular Case Studies Cover
The theme of the April issue of Molecular Case Studies is precision oncogenomics. We have three papers in the issue based on work done in our Personalized Oncogenomics Program (POG).
The covers of Molecular Case Studies typically show microscopy images, with some shown in a more abstract fashion. There's also the occasional Circos plot.
I've previously taken a more fine-art approach to cover design, such for those of Nature, Genome Research and Trends in Genetics. I've used microscopy images to create a cover for PNAS—the one that made biology look like astrophysics—and thought that this is kind of material I'd start with for the MCS cover.
Happy 2018 `\tau` Day—Art for everyone
