In classic ‘that’s not a bug, it’s a feature’ mode, the article goes on to say ‘how much simpler the metric grid is in “PowerPoint centimeters” than in actual centimeters’. Or centimetres even. So much for convenient internationalization then, eh – one wonders if Microsoft’s fans at the European Commission might have something to say about this…

In the end, I wrote a lengthy study of the euro symbol (subsequently published in Baseline), but almost a decade later, I still think the topic is worthy of further exploration. After all, aside from the cost and environmental benefits achieved through streamlined design, directory typography is a perfect demonstration of both typographic choreography (the letterforms and the space around them), and period methods of font creation.

However, as everything moves towards electronic format—who looks at a phonebook when it’s so easy to call Information or reach for Google these days?—perhaps this is a topic reaching its twilight years. (Indeed, a study of mobile phone typography might be more timely.) Still, there’s no harm in sharing some of the collected references, is there?

Ring my Bell

The first directory-specific typeface was created by Chauncey Griffith in 1937. A commission from the Bell Company—on the strength of his previous work in the area of newspaper legibility—Bell Gothic was the result, and it continued to be used widely until the 1970s. By that point however, with so many changes in typesetting and printing technologies, Bell Gothic had started to exhibit all manner of problems. And as a result of this, in 1974, Matthew Carter was contracted to redesign the face. The four year design process—which resulted in the Bell Centennial family—was thoroughly documented in Type & Technology Monograph Number 1 (New York: The Center for Design & Typography, The Cooper Union, 1982). Much of the same material was published in TypoGraphic 38/9 (London: International Society of Typographic Designers [ISTD], 1990) and repeated in TypoGraphic Writing (from the same publisher, 2001).

Nick Sherman’s article provides a good overview of the Bell Centennial story, and itself points to a number of useful sources, notably an article for Linotype by my former colleague Andrew Boag. And interested readers might also refer to Margaret Re’s exhibition catalogue Typographically Speaking: the Art of Matthew Carter (Baltimore: University of Maryland, 2002), which includes a detailed section on the genesis of Bell Centennial.

Before the prancing ponce

In 1989, after three years of development, British Telecom (BT) published reworked directories for the London area, using a revised grid structure and custom space saving fonts. The typeface, dubbed Phonebook, was designed by Colin Banks and Eiichi Kono at Banks & Miles, and though it borrowed heavily from the preceding Bell Centennial work, was in fact an entirely new set of fonts, drawn from scratch to different criteria (this predates today’s more malleable outline font technologies, obviously). Banks published the story of Phonebook’s development in the ISTD publications mentioned above, and a comparative story of Bell Centennial and Phonebook can be found in ‘Rediscovered design: phone directory’, reprinted in July 1990 from a Japanese publication entitled Evolution 1.

Ladislav who…?

The positive environmental impacts of the BT initiative were covered in Andrew Boag’s ‘The greening of BT’ (London: Graphics World, Sept/Oct 1989). That same article also mentions Ladislas Mandel’s Galfra, created in 1975 for the Italian telecom utility SEAT (and subsequently used in other directories on both sides of the Atlantic). Mandel was a prolific creator of directory-specific typefaces during his career, and wrote extensively on the topic – ‘Il nuovo carattere Galfra per gli elenchi telefonici italiani’ (Italy: Graphicus, no. 9, 1978), for example. Curiously though, he is usually absent from the type design honour roll; this student dissertation is as close to a monograph as I could find, and interested readers may also want to refer to Olivier Nineuil’s very thorough (though French language only) profile of Mandel from the October 1999 issue of Étapes (no. 55).

A Romanian who lived and worked in France for most of his life, Mandel was also the designer behind the Colorado face for US West Dex in 1978, which, in collaboration with Richard Southall, was noteworthy because it was one the relatively few real-world uses of the Metafont font description language. Southall documented the project in ‘Metafont in the Rockies: the Colorado typemaking project’, itself included in Electronic publishing, artistic imaging, and digital typography (Berlin: Springer, 1998). He also covered it in his later book Printer’s Type in the Twentieth Century: Manufacturing And Design Methods (London: British Library, 2005).

Damp in the Nethers

Most designers’ knowledge of Dutch directory typography starts and stops with Wim Crouwel‘s 1977 all-lowercase setting – a wet dream for all the Modernist/neo-modernist wannabees and revivalists out there. In actuality, it wasn’t a style-oriented design decision at all, but a limit on how many different instructions the typesetting system could execute for each entry in the directory. Insertion of capitals was thus deemed a lower priority than the insertion of tabs or changes in weight.

In the ISTD publications mentioned above, Jolijn van de Wouw provided a more thorough history of Dutch telephone directory typography, covering both layout and type design. Martin Majoor’s Telefont family was released subsequent to this review, in 1994, and, in concert with revised page layouts, was in stark contrast to the Bell Centennial work of twenty years earlier. Created by a team of two on everyday desktop equipment (Bell Centennial had been labouriously encoded from ink-on-paper drawings), Telefont needed none of Bell’s severe inktraps, proffered a distinctly humanistic letterform, and exemplified the Dutch penchant for large x-heights and reduced ascenders/descenders. Majoor’s site offers up a number of qualitative assessments of Telefont, as well as his own brief overview (which can also be found in Made with FontFont [Amsterdam: BIS, 2006]).

Not so mellow Yellow

Debuting in Johnson Banks‘ 1999 redesign of the UK Yellow Pages, the Yellow typeface combined aspects of both Telefont and Bell Centennial: some of the latter’s severity, built upon some of the former’s structure, providing crisp, open letterforms with sufficient heft to function well at small sizes on low quality paper.

Yellow was attributed to Freda Sack and David Quay at The Foundry in London, although it would appear that Jürgen Weltin was also involved. It (well, the whole redesign) was lauded and awarded widely, although the only article I can locate now (without a St. Bride nearby, that is) is Helen Walters’ ‘A brighter yellow’ from Creative Review (London: Centaur, November 1999).

So… by way of non-conclusion

This list doesn’t claim to be comprehensive by any means, and by conspicuously excluding images of the typefaces, doesn’t really attempt any analysis or qualitative comparison either. Rather, I’ve simply tried to provide some small insight into the richness underlying this most utilitarian of typographic applications.

Well, not quite. Typography is a language, with its own grammar and syntax. And as with any language, fluency comes with in-depth study and regular practice, making communication as fluid and efficient as possible. And as communications channels both proliferate and converge, command of the language is a vital component in creating the most functional and efficient vehicles for communication. Type matters – read on and find out why.

[If you've read this far, I should probably point out that this was originally written in 2003, as a promotional exercise for my then-employer, MetaDesign (hence the 'we' and 'our' references). Some of the material is dated or seems rudimentary now, but most of the examples and arguments are still relevant, so I've resurrected the article and, with a light nip and tuck, it lives again.]

Desktop software does not produce quality typesetting

Skilled users do. Garbage in, garbage out goes the adage. And in the case of desktop publishing, most users simply do not know any better. Default spacing—both around the letters and between the lines—is usually far from optimal, and, since there are few limitations and algorithmic processes determine everything, uncomfortable line lengths and questionable hyphenation (or lack of it) are often the norm.

By ‘quality typesetting’ we’re really talking about comfortably readable text, where successful communication relies not only on a careful blend of good writing and appropriate hierarchy, but also the shape and structure of the words – the typography, that is. We read by assimilating word shapes, not by piecing together individual letters, and the space around the letters is therefore particularly important: it helps bind the letters together – too much or too little and words aren’t properly formed.

Often those (professionals) who think they ‘get’ typography actually don’t. And even those who’ve worked in renowned studios or been formally educated in typography (which is increasingly rare) sometimes founder. For instance, when a leading consumer computer magazine in the UK launched a redesign in 2001, the designers trumpeted their attention to the typography and carefully considered type selections. However, their generous grid structures and lack of hyphenation resulted in some very awkward layouts that were uncomfortable to read and made poor use of the already limited space.

In addition to this lack of knowledge, many digital fonts are or were poorly produced. ‘Are’ because the creators have insufficient knowledge (somewhat akin to the typesetting issues above, type design is largely a plug-n-play desktop affair); ‘were’ because many early desktop typefaces used inappropriate source material that yielded less than ideal font data. Historically, physical fonts existed in multiple sizes, subtly adjusted to appear the same in each instance (small sizes were, for example, noticeably heftier than their larger siblings); a single digital font, however, scales to fit as required. Times New Roman, for instance, a default font in almost every desktop system in the world, was initially digitized from a large master, resulting in weak and slightly cramped output at text sizes.

The result of all this? Workable output that looks okay, but simply doesn’t match the quality of previous technologies. Perhaps this is good enough, and perhaps this lower standard is the new standard. But there is still a place for those who can recognise the type of issues mentioned here and who know how to address them appropriately. When we recently reviewed a large corporation’s typography, for example, we found significant improvements possible in readability simply through adjusting certain preferences in the typesetting software (typically, a desktop layout or word processing application). Since controlling such details over a large user base would be extremely difficult, the decision was made to produce custom typefaces that addressed these issues and also provided something more unique than a simple off-the-shelf solution.

Type is technology: upgrade or suffer

Prior to the advent of desktop publishing systems, only the most deep-pocketed of organisations could afford custom type solutions. Development was restricted to certain large manufacturers with their proprietary systems and formats; vendors such as marketing and communications agencies would then be tied to that manufacturer’s infrastructure.

The creation of custom faces for AT&T’s telephone directories in the mid-1970s, for example, involved a designer mapping hundreds of black dots (by hand) to describe each character – for subsequent transfer by technicians to the manufacturer’s output system. By contrast, a similar project in Holland some 20 years later involved two designers producing near-final type and layouts using equipment available at most computer superstores; a cost effective and immediate result.

The type-making process was democratized by the introduction of desktop applications for typeface creation and graphic design during the 1980s. A single format—Adobe’s PostScript—levelled the playing field for those making and using digital fonts on high and low resolution printers, and this was joined in 1991 by Apple’s TrueType. With Microsoft’s subsequent careful nurturing, it has come to set the standard for screen display (while continuing to allow high resolution output if required).

In 1997, a new format called OpenType was announced. A collaboration between Adobe and Microsoft, OpenType is a wrapper for either PostScript or TrueType font data that incorporates greater levels of intelligence. Fonts support many more languages (by referencing Unicode specifications), and can include thousands of alternative characters in order to do this (65,000 as opposed to the 256 limit of PostScript). Theoretically, then, a single OpenType font file could contain characters to support Western, Greek, Cyrillic, Eastern and Central European scripts, variants such as small capitals and alternate numeral styles, and any number of dingbats or optional glyphs. Added to this, the format is cross platform, meaning this single file could replace the dozens that previous formats would have required. For multinational organisations with operations spread across Europe, this will obviously benefit overstretched system administrators.

Demonstrations of OpenType fonts usually focus on the formal advantages that the format offers: contextual glyph substitution is the easiest to grasp. In a typical scenario, typing the phrase In 64BC, Caeser commanded the field would see the ae in Caeser automatically replaced by a single æ dipthong, the fi in field substituted with a proper fi ligature, and the BC rendered in small capitals. Other replacements could happen too (a decorative initial capital C, perhaps, or mid-height numerals), had the preferences been set to do so. But perhaps the most important aspect of this example, is the minimal workflow impact. Where previously these substitutions would be made manually (and required alternate fonts), OpenType-savvy applications retain the integrity of the original text string; that is to say, the form and content are separated. In today’s multi-channel, mixed platform environments, this means content can be redeployed with none of the intervention required with previous font formats.

Compliant applications and operating systems are (of course) required to fully exploit OpenType, and it has still yet to fully impact the desktop. Adobe has spearheaded the push, ensuring their programs make the most of the format, and Windows XP and Mac OS X fully support OpenType (older systems will accept it under certain circumstances). As with any developing technology, there are of course bugs and incompatibilities—and production of the fonts is far from easy—but OpenType offers much to those willing to adopt early.

We will always need more typefaces

Do the means justify the ends – do we really need more typefaces? With tens of thousands already available, it’s a valid question, and if quantity was the main criterion, then the answer would probably be no. However, that’s a simplistic view, because there may be legitimate functional needs that require the creation of new typefaces. The previous case of our client with poor settings is just one example.

Each new technology brings new sets of associated problems, and in the typographic environment this often results in new typefaces. Times was originally designed as a custom typeface for The Times newspaper of London; subsequent changes in printing methods have seen several major reworkings of the face to maintain legibility, changes which remain virtually unnoticeable to all but specialist observers.

And from the low resolution of your monitor to the high speed (as it were) of highway signage, there are countless other areas that have benefited from specialist typographic consideration too. Indeed, as (information) technologies continue to evolve—handheld devices are starting to gain higher resolution screens and electronic ink formats are approaching maturity—there will continue to be similar needs.

Custom type is pricey – but priceless

Though a custom design may begin with functional requirements in mind (the Meta typeface, for instance, began life specifically for use on German post office forms), the result is ultimately both proprietary to the client and free of subsequent licensing and distribution issues. It is, quite literally, the face of the company, and for a corporation to be able to own the look of the very words it prints is a powerful position indeed. This association can be replicated across whole product ranges, providing unity and building brand equity – all without a corporate name, logo, or tagline in sight.

For example, London’s mass transit system—the ‘Tube’ and the buses—has had a custom typeface in place since 1916. This wasn’t produced with functional requirements in mind, but rather as an attempt to make a consistent customer experience, long before the notion of branded environments had even been thought of. To this day, (a revised version of) the same typeface appears on signs, maps, uniforms, and all points in between, providing validation for every piece of information that the customer sees.

Typefaces created for specific applications can also live out a meaningful life elsewhere. Whether they’ve outlived their usefulness (Times) or the usage scenario changes (Meta was passed over by management), opportunities abound for enriching the typographic landscape through ongoing retail sales. The Frutiger typeface, for instance, was originally commissioned in 1968 for signage at Roissy Airport in Paris (now Charles De Gaulle). It’s simple clarity and clean, approachable forms have subsequently made it a highly successful text face in its own right; it even formed the typographic underpinning to our design system for the Berlin public transportation system in the early nineties.

Considered typography can save more than money

At MetaDesign, we have often described our process as ‘design from the word up’; considering how the micro can impact the macro, so to speak. Typography isn’t just about visual impact and immediacy of communication though; it can have significantly broader impact. And in terms of typography, this can sometimes have directly quantifiable results.

For example, when AT&T introduced custom typefaces for US phone books in 1978, the space-conscious designs meant roughly 20 extra entries per page. Multiplied over hundreds of pages and thousands of directories, this resulted in significant savings. (And as an aside, it’s worth noting that the previous design had to be over-inked to get sufficient density on the printed page. This not only degraded legibility, but also added to production costs and time as the presses had to be stopped and cleaned more often.)

Similarly, when London phone books were redesigned in the late 1980s, a systematized approach (space-saving type, considered information design, and new page structures) meant only three directories for the entire London area instead of the previous four. Along with the obvious savings in paper and ink, economies were made in gluing and binding, transportation and storage, all of which saved £2.4 million almost immediately and more than offset the development costs.

And lastly, 1993 proposals for new Dutch directories projected a 25% reduction in production, distribution, and (ultimately) recycling costs, simply through a more rigorous page structure and space-saving typeface designs. A more conservative final design in 1994 saw 12% savings instead, still significant nonetheless.

And so, in conclusion…

As these examples have hopefully demonstrated, type is about both function and differentiation. Sure, it may be easier to use ‘what came with the computer’, but that’s exactly why every PowerPoint presentation you’ve ever seen looks identical. Command of typographic language brings practicality and personality to the most basic level of communications, and it should not be overlooked.

Where Mockups really wins is by striking a clever balance between utility (it contains pre-built versions of just about every UI component you could ever realistically need), fidelity (meaning even a quick sketch looks polished enough to convey quite detailed aspects of an interface), and hierarchy (that quick sketch has sufficient structure to indicate meaning and intent). Every component is editable to some degree, so, for example, switching from tabs to dropdowns is a simple copy-and-paste. Wireframing therefore becomes a snap, and yet there is still enough of a handdrawn feeling to convey a sense that, while things are certainly considered, they are not yet set in stone.

A screen grab of the Mockups interface

Mockups has a decent pedigree—it’s an Air application developed by an ex-Adobe engineer—but it’s not without a few quirks (and bugs) either. Some things that could be added or improved upon include:

• Direct export to PDF, although licensing PDF would no doubt inflate the price of Mockups;
• Visibility of the Inspector palette – it only displays when necessary, but this results in a lot of on/off flickering, which can be a bit distracting;
• Manual layer control – I’ve got used to Illustrator’s infuriating habit of putting every single thing on a new layer, but even just having an editable palette like InDesign would be good;
• Preferences – there aren’t any, but those two previous items could be user controlled, perhaps.

From a typographic standpoint, it’s notable that Mockups makes exclusive use of the universally-vilified Comic Sans typeface. This is probably the first time that the font has been used in a somewhat similar manner for which it was first intended, and as a result, it actually looks pretty good. Yes, unbelievable but true: Comic Sans, in this context, actually looks good.

And, for what it’s worth, I wasn’t paid for this review; I bought Mockups based on other positive commentary that I read, and have subsequently recommended it to anyone who’ll listen.

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I designed a typeface called Platelet. Having been Internationally schooled (ie. how to be dexterous with just one or two of the classics, most notably Univers), it was my first experience of creating letterforms, and there’s no denying that it was a naïve effort in many ways. Notwithstanding that however, the nice people at Emigre took enough of an interest to put it on the market (in July 1994), and the rest, as they say, is history.

Yves Peters’ article about license plate fonts prompted me to resurrect some collected materials about the typeface, which follow here.

How it came to be

Platelet grew out of a 4-day workshop given to students—most with no type design experience—at CalArts in October 1992. The brief, from Phil Baines, asked for an original alphabet to be designed for a specific outdoor purpose, taking into consideration the context for usage, appropriateness and meaning, and traditional notions of good typography.

Consequently, Platelet is based directly on characters and figures found on the car license plates in California. Its original character set comprised only a single lowercase alphabet and non-lining figures, ostensibly to complement the existing all-caps characters on the plates. For its commercial release, however, the set was extended to include alternate, small capitals and other commonly used text characters – somewhat ironic considering the original brief had principally been to create specific display faces that weren’t just scaled text faces. (The irony comes full circle in fact, with this stonecut version of the font.)

The typeforms originally matched the character widths, stroke widths, and spacing of the existing California license plate characters. Within the short timeframe of the original project, research was limited to quite literally taking wax crayon rubbings from license plates around the parking lot and measuring them by hand. Forms were interpretations of what a lowercase for the license plate might be, based mostly on the existing numerals.

As the face(s) developed however, it became necessary to bolden the strokes and stray from the all-lowercase model that had been the conceptual framework to start with; some characters just looked forced. The final type family comprised three weights, each with a full set of 236 character outlines and four sizes of edited screen fonts.

What became of it

Since its release, Platelet has appeared on London storefronts and French stamps, been moulded into the soles of Spanish shoes, and been put through its paces in numerous American publications. Dubbed by observers as ‘tough and uncompromising’, ‘sparingly conceived’, and ‘perfectly postmodern’, it has also been used by PBS, and was added to London’s Conran Foundation Collection in 1996.

This limited edition Platelet brochure (Emigre, 2001) can also be viewed full screen.

And what others have made of it

There have been a few curiously similar faces appear on the market since 1994, and one can only guess at what their creators were thinking during their development. Imitation is, apparently, the sincerest form of flattery – although perhaps not when innocent buyers are paying for those imitations.

Sample of F Condition typeface

First, there was F Condition by Tom Hingston and Jon Wozencroft, one of the fonts released as part of FontShop’s experimental typography publication FUSE. Included in issue 16, entitled Genetics, the font enabled the user to key precomposed words instead of individual letters. Somewhat bizarrely for something as innovative as FUSE initially was, I’ve been unable to unearth any decent online repository of the series, so I have no idea of what the concept for this font was about. But it’s easy to see from these examples just what the genesis of those words was.

Separated at birth? Isolated outlines from F Condition are shown in pink; Platelet outlines are in blue

Then there was Alex Kaczun’s Extreme Sans, released in 2002 by Galápagos Design Group with accompanying codswallop like “…edges are rounded like the high-tech routed parts of precise machinery. The overall look says technology and innovation.”

Sample of Extreme Sans, displayed on MyFonts.com

Another font worthy of note here is VSV Melon, released by Vasava in Barcelona. The numerals and caps bear less resemblance to Platelet than the small letters, but regardless, these popular French book jackets demonstrate how similar the faces are.

Sample of VSV Melon Light and Bold

But consider the task at hand and what your output is. For example, I can spend hours pushing the same thing around in a so-called creative app (and still not get anywhere) but bash something usable out from Word or Excel in a fraction of the time. Perhaps this is because of Word’s inherent restrictions or Excel’s grid structure – one cannot muck about with positioning, only structure and hierarchy.

And so—somewhat unbelievably for a career designer—I have to say that I quite like using Office applications – but only on a PC. Yes, there’s that infuriating bubble thing constantly telling me that Windows wants to update itself again, and PowerPoint thinks it’s a better typographer than me, but the simple fact remains that I feel, well, productive when I work in Office on a PC. That last bit (‘on a PC’) is key of course, because the same cannot be said for Office on a Mac, which groans or crashes at the first sight of anything too involved. Windows and Office just work together, it’s as simple as that.

For example, there were the chart and graph templates I completed for Telephia, using PowerPoint. A lot of detailed fiddling and formatting, and the kind of thing the Mac version of PowerPoint would just not be able to handle. More recently, I did a little database project for my son’s preschool. Despite some clunks here and there, I was able to smoothly import material, format it, and get something out again. By comparison, how many times has even a simple copy and paste just not quite worked on a Mac, resulting in a big sigh and a whole load of manual intervention.

Presumably, we just get used to what we have, rather than question what we need or could have. Dear Adobe is one example of (mostly) intelligent feedback about how the user experience could be made better. (And by that I mean the actual functionality as opposed to the look ‘n’ feel, which can often become the focus of so-called experience design.) Michael Johnson’s recent article about the continued popularity of Freehand in the UK struck a chord here too, since it’s a case of an arguably better piece of software being slowly left behind due to the developer’s, rather than user’s, preference.

Conversely, there are lots of small, highly targeted, applications out there – and I find myself turning to them more and more. Mostly they’re utilities, for day to day admin tasks. But the current crop of home-grown type development tools are a great example of inter-operable lightweight utilities that do specific tasks very well. And they don’t leave you stuck with proprietary data formats that can’t be used elsewhere. The recent Robothon09 Conference showcased some of these tools very well; full video coverage is available, and I’d recommend Erik van Blokland’s intro in particular.

Having ranted this far, I guess I should say that discussions about programmes, platforms, and experiences can be very boring. But I think I’ve made my point, so I’ll stop for now. And for the record, I always preferred Freehand. Once I left college though, I could no longer call the shots and had to capitulate to my Illustrator-loving colleagues.

Discussions of web typography are usually about the frustrating inconsistencies and paucity of decent fonts likely to be available on a user’s machine. But when a client recently made a very sobering comment concerning cross-platform display, I got a rather rude reminder of how easily it is to forget more fundamental issues. Namely, anti-aliasing (or ‘smoothing’ in Microsoft-speak).

According to Wikipedia*, Windows XP is still the predominant OS (with about two-thirds of the market), and it does not anti-alias fonts by default (though the feature can be enabled in the OS settings). Windows Vista does smooth type by default, although it only accounts for about 20% of the overall market (despite being available for more than two years now). Macs account for about 5% of the market.

Meanwhile, 48% of web users are using IE7 & IE8, which anti-alias type irrespective of the OS settings. IE6 does not though, and accounts for another 19% of the market. (Firefox, with about 20% market share, and other browsers such as Safari, obey OS smoothing settings.)

So what does all this mean? That only about half the user population definitively views anti-aliased type. Which means that—duh—the other half might not. There’s no way of knowing how many XP users have turned on their smoothing, but its probably safer to assume that many haven’t. I turned mine on a long time ago and never thought about it again, but it’s not necessarily the kind of thing most people would think to do and it’s also not the easiest thing to locate amongst the Windows Control Panels either.

For further reference, here are three composite screenshots: one showing Windows core fonts (plus Mac-only Courier) with ClearType smoothing enabled (a 96dpi PNG from IE7); one without (also a 96dpi PNG, this time from IE6); and one showing the same font set in Firefox on Mac OS X (at 72dpi). There are obviously too many subtle details to point out, but one key thing to keep an eye on is how differently the smaller bold weights display with and without smoothing enabled, especially in the italic styles.

(*Since the stats quoted above will no doubt change quite quickly, these are the Wikipedia references for browser and OS market share.)

Update: there’s some worthwhile explanation of smoothing behaviour to be found on this Typophile thread.

So, just as the blogging steamroller appears to have run out of, er, steam, here I am stoking the fire again. We’ll see how far I get before running out of puff.