68f - Ornamental Box-drawing

During this past summer and my last semester at UMass I read a few good books:

Tall Trees and Wild Bees

Stewart Coffin writes about growing up in Amherst.

The Last Man on the Moon

Astronaut Eugene Cernan's biography that he wrote with coauthor Don Davis.

Wise Blood

My suggestion for the Page to Screen book club, a novel by Flannery O'Connor.

As I Lay Dying

1930 novel by William Faulkner, set in Mississippi.

Hadji Murád

Leo Tolstoy's story as translated by Aylmer Maude.

Also during the semester I wrote an SVG to stylize the initials of the recreational math club. It's supposed to look similar to Escher's Circle Limit series, and is based on the surface of a mucube with a repeating pattern. The thinly outlined quadrilaterals are distorted square faces.

Granjon Boxes

I started working on a font which will recreate some of the typographical ornaments designed by Robert Granjon. A few years ago, in an essay by Elliot Offner, I was introduced to the following set of six pieces of moveable type which can serve as the building blocks for complex printed arabesques.

Offner published The Granjon Arabesque, which is a book showcasing thirty arrangements pressed using these characters. The glyphs that I've added to the Granjon Boxes font so far are based on photos I took of the book's pages.
╺┑┏╸╺┑┏╸╺┑┏╸╺┑┏╸
┨┝┫├┨┝┫├┨┝┫├┨┝┫├
┖╴╶┘┖╴╶┘┖╴╶┘┖╴╶┘
The arrangement of Unicode box-drawing characters above is my recreation of a design featured on page 105 of Granjon's flowers by Hendrik D. L. Vervliet. The characters were traced in Inkscape, creating an SVG file, which was converted to WOFF2 using FontForge. The 2025 version of Granjon Boxes contains the characters ┑┘┖┏╺╸╷╻╴╶╹╵┝┫┬┰┨├┻┷ and the space character U+20. The fonts directory on this website will include the latest version licensed under the SIL Open Font License.

If you're reading this on my website, you should be able to click on the arrangements and reveal the typical box-drawing character designs by displaying them in the Kreative Square font.
┬┨├┰┬┨├┰┬┨├┰┬┨├┰
┝┻┷┫┝┻┷┫┝┻┷┫┝┻┷┫
These designs have been digitized before. The much more comprehensive font Graveur by Juanjo López is based on the work of Robert Granjon and also includes some of the same decorative characters. Another book of arrangements, Kleines Spiel mit Ornamenten by Max Caflisch, was digitized and translated from German to French by Jacques André and published online: Petits jeux avec des ornements.

Found on home.6t.lt

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