Culminating more than three decades of work, faculty from UW–Madison’s Font And Knowledge Experience Department announced Saturday that they have produced a complete set of Motion Letters.
According to Professor Al Fabette, director of the university’s Serif Lab, the final breakthrough came this spring, as his team was able to produce Motion A, Motion E, Motion I, Motion O, and Motion U. And sometimes Motion Y.
“The Motion Vowels complete this font,” Fabette said during a press conference, sternly reminding reporters that the new additions are to be referred to as Motion Vowels, not Vowel Movements.
The UW astounded the font-science community in 1990, when it announced the development of the Motion W, which quickly became a symbol of UW–Madison. The university’s pride in the Motion W was so strong that it placed it on buildings, T-shirts, mascots, and even sporting equipment. At the time, most font scientists assumed that the remaining 25 Motion Letters would quickly follow, opening a golden age of the Motion Font. However, Fabette says that his lab soon ran into obstacles.
“M, I, C — we saw them real soon. But K? E? Y?” he says, shaking his head in consternation. “Y. But I do like U.”
The Motion Vowels proved most difficult. Motion Y, with its aggressive descender, is unstable even in the hands of a seasoned fontasist. Motion O, lacking any serif or other adornment, remains stubbornly inert.
Although there is now a full set of 26 Motion Letters, Fabette says there is still work to do. His lab is already pursuing a Motion Lower Case. “Imagine the tittles on our Motion i and Motion j,” he says. And he’s applied for a $10 million federal font research grant to support the effort to develop Motion Numerals and Symbols. “You can’t spell $10 million without Motion 0, Motion 1, and Motion $.”
After 33 years of working in font science, Fabette is nearing retirement, but he has trained many classes of graduate students to carry on his work. Ella Mennope PhDx’25 says that she looks forward to new Motion Font discoveries.
“How bold will Motion Bold be? Will we find a true Motion Italic or merely a Motion Oblique? These are the questions my generation will face,” she says. “No. Those aren’t rhetorical questions. Why do you ask?”
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