Design Concept

Plotter is a massive type family that explores the world of technical drawings and architectural plans. Each subfamily reflects the characteristics of the various tools that inspired the project, tools from an age when technical diagrams were drawn and lettered by hand, and draftsmen needed a simple, efficient way to produce legible text that met established norms. Plotter has the simplified monolinear strokes with round terminals produced by technical pens, its letters reduced to their most basic stencilform elements: stems, arms, curves and diagonals.

Plotter super family

The family consists of two main versions: Plotter, using round curves, and Plotter Liner which restricts itself to straight segments for rendering curves. Both subfamilies contain Basic version, Monospaced, Stencil, Monospaced Stencil, and Display version with five filling layers. Separately there is also a Plotter Hand, with irregular shapes as a result of manually using architectural stencils, and Plotter Wave, a smart letter substitution version which contextually orders letter-shapes according to the angle of slopping. All in all, there are 47 fonts available either as 12 separate packages or all together as Plotter Suite

Slanted styles

While many scribing devices produced letters are often inclined, Plotter’s upright forms can be inclined mathematically to any angle, including backslants. The playful Plotter Wave, the latest of Djurek’s explorations of smart OpenType substitution, shows this off to great effect, creating words with an unusual rhythm and structure as the letters progress from extreme backslant to extreme right slant.

Numerals

All weights of Plotter include six different kinds of numerals. Default numerals are proportional Lining numerals. The typeface includes also Tabular lining figures, Superior and Inferior figures, and Circled and Circled inverted figures.

OpenType features

Plotter has no Small Caps and limited OpenType features, providing however two Stylistic Sets to access alternative forms of ‘a’ and ‘I’.

Author

Plotter was designed by Nikola Djurek, and Gustavo Ferreira wrote the intelligent OpenType GSUB features used in Plotter Wave. Plotter was published in 2017.