Why this exists
The text on a Magic card is set small and read constantly, and few people stop to look at the shapes of its letters. Those letters are printed in ink on card stock, so every copy is a little different. Ink spread rounds the corners, paper fibre roughens the edges, and the halftone screen breaks each stroke into dots.
This project scans real cards at 1200 ppi, stacks many printed copies of each letter, and traces what the stack shows. The aim is to record the printed shape, not to match the designed font. Where one copy differs from the others, that difference is part of the record.
The result is meant to become a typeface, Nomicon Rules, in regular and italic. This site shows how it is made: how a halftone scan becomes one clean letter, and how the outline settles as more copies are stacked.
- How one letter is cleanedTen steps from a halftone scan to a traced shape.
- Stack the lettersTrace a glyph from more and more printed copies.
- The numbers and the limitsThis is a pilot of 7 cards and one scanner. The data page has the detail.
The letter e behind this page is the trace of 107 printed instances from 7 cards.