I can't recall the date that I came up with the idea of creating a font out of On Kawara's Date Paintings. I vaguely remember that I learned about his work at the end of the 90s, when I was in art school in Groningen, the Netherlands. Though a lot of my fellow students could not appreciate this type of conceptual art, I fell in love with it.

I cannot recall either when I have seen my first Date Painting, but in the past years I have seen them in Washington DC, the Kroller-Mollermuseum and many other museums.

The idea of creating a font face based on the Today Series is a hommage to the works of On Kawara in general and to the series in particular. I started creating the font face as a journey into font creation. But it also drew me closer to how On Kawara formed his letters.

I am still surprised about where he drew his inspiration from for certain letters and numbers. Some are very specific, like the 5. The form is a bit dissonant with the other numbers, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Also, the U is quite remarkable as it is relatively wide. The R is also a bit weird, it has a big upper part with a somewhat short leg.

I have been researching a lot of date paintings in order to find as much characters from the alphabet as possible, but I was not able to find the H, Q, W and X characters. I have made them up myself.

Since the 'Today series' is only in upper case, I have decided, for now, to only support upper case characters, and that all lower case characters just render its upper case equivalent.

There is still a lot to be done. I am currently working on kerning most characters, which is a hell of a job. After that I would like to add additional glyphs to enlarge the characters in the font. For now, you have to accept the basic latin alphabet, numbers and the , ' and .

Join me on extending the amount of characters. The font will soon be available on Github.

back

About