UNBELIEVABLE IMPLEMENTS OF THE PREPIXEL ERA

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ELLIPSE-MAKING. "Describing" an ellipse, as they used to
say, was simple providing one had a hammer, two nails
and a piece of string! Above right, two additional ellipse-
drawing methods involved matching up portions of compass-
drawn perfect circles. Creating perfect matchups of line seg¬
ments is indeed difficult, especially if the final result is to be
inked, but it can be done. After designers spent years strug¬
gling to draw ellipses, any child can now instantly draw a
flawless ellipse in a computer drawing program. What a
pity that within today's design aesthetic, ellipses, now
so easy to "describe," are totally passé.

THE ELLIPSE TEMPLATE. Purchased singly or in a set, the
stamped plastic "guides" came in a wide range of con¬
venient dimensions from extremely anemic to positively
rotund, comprising every imaginable ovoid contour—
except the exact one you needed at the moment! To avoid
having ink from a technical pen bleed under the edge of the
template, I often would select a second template and use
one of its larger-size ellipses to place under the ellipse I
wanted, thereby raising it off the surface. Bleeding and
smearing the ink was still usually inevitable.

SCANNER. This ancient ver¬
sion of the modern scanner,
called "proportional dividers," did
not actually take pictures. It offered
only enlargement or reduction by measur¬
ing segments of a drawing, line for line,
enabling the user to transfer them from one set
of points to those on the opposite end of the device.

The VICTORIA ELLIPSE-O-GRAPH.
Fresh out of string? Try this device
which was considered high-tech in
1937. At a cost of only $8.50 (pencil
not included), you'd made back your
investment after just a couple of ovals.

ÜOd a31

L$d

LOGO, FONT a LETTERING BIBLE

69

The French "Curvier,"
Pierre Bézier

Modern designers can hardly imagine
the squareness and humdrumnityof a
world without curves. And such a
world it was ere a young Pierre Bézier
(pronounced "Pea-air Bez-zee-ay"),
discoverer of curvature, wandered
into a Paris music hall one afternoon
and, inspired by a lusty cancan perform¬
ance, promptly hailed a cab back to his
atelier and thereupon commenced to discover
the mathematical formula ("pie are round, cake are
square"); that is the foundational basis of modern-day curvalineature and
which made Bézier curve a household word, like Bibendum and beesknees. (In
actuality, Pierre Etienne Bezier [1910-1999] was a brilliant electrical and
mechanical engineer with a degree in mathematics. He enrolled to study
mechanical engineering at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers and received his
degree in 19Ì0. In the same year, he entered the Ecole Supérieure d'Electricité
and earned a second degree in electrical engineering in 1931. In 1977, forty-
six years later, he received his DSc degree in mathematics from the University
of Paris. His research in CAD/CAM [design/computer-aided manufacturing] for
the Renault firm in France led to his most famous innovation, the means by
which curves are defined in today's computer drawing programs.)

(True story from Сотриш-Шеа Design, Vol. 22, No. 9.)

(a). Traced off French
curve at left.

THE FRENCH CURVE. Matching French curves, segment by segment, to similar hand-drawn pencil curves was how letter¬
ers of yore attempted to achieve smooth inking of complex, curving characters. French curves came in a variety of styles
comprising every qpnceivable arc and ogee—except the exact curve you needed at the moment! Incredibly, many of these
templates, stamped from translucent plastic, were often quite flawed, as my analysis, above right, demonstrates. But how
did the manufactur ;rs originally design the curves for a French curve prototype? Maybe they used French curves.