The high-contrast lettershapes in this old Renault chrome nameplate have a stripe pattern similar to the one in Atlas.

K.H. Schaefer’s Fatima Versalien AKA Atlas, as published by the Fonderie Typographique Française in 1933. Image courtesy of the Musée de l’imprimerie de Lyon

The history of this Atlas goes back all the way to 1933 (eight years after the publication of The Great Gatsby), when it was designed by K.H. Schaefer for the German type foundry Schriftguß AG vorm. Brüder Butter as Fatima Versalien. In the same year, Fonderie Typographique Française published their version of Fatima Versalien under the name Atlas (and marketed it as a decorated complement to their simpler Art Deco sans-serif Apollo). Schriftguß later added a related oblique typeface, Ondina (Karl Kranke, 1935).

From Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway) …

… and Joel Edgerton (Tom Buchanan) …

… to Elizabeth Debicki (Jordan Baker), …

… Isla Fisher (Myrtle Wilson), …

… Carey Mulligan (Daisy Buchanan) …

… and Leonardo DiCaprio (Jay Gatsby) – The Great Gatsby stars quite a few big names.

In 2001, Harold Lohner digitized the 6-line typeface, added a Solid style and made the fonts freely available. On the FontBros site, Lohner writes:

Atlas is based on a classic analog Art Deco font of the same name. My first version of it – the one with stripes – was originally named Farouk, but I’ve changed it to conform with period sources I have since found. I’ve also recreated the companion Solid font; both are completely redrawn with very clean edges.

Both the free and the optimized commercial version keep it true to the source and feature a very narrow ‘G’ and a rather wide ‘K’ and ‘M’. These glyphs – and maybe others – have been modified and normalized for this use, at least in some instances. Also has the number of lines been reduced to four.

In the trailer, the striped and the solid styles of Atlas are taking turns on a per-character base, and thereby intensify the metallic feel.

The official website for the film uses Newport Classic SG as a webfont for navigation (though a web license doesn’t seem to be available), and the slightly clumsy Governor for the Monogram Creator interface. Governor also serves as the “GREAT” in the film logo, but it’s not so great. Perhaps the more refined Mostra Nuova would be better for both of these uses.

The main title from Jackie Brown. The small type appears to be based on Imperator Script. Image via Christian Annyas, whose Movie Title Still Collection has more from the opening credits.

Jackie Brown original movie poster. Image via IMP Awards.

The basis of the Jackie Brown logo is ITC Tiffany, designed by Ed Benguiat in 1974. (More of ITC Tiffany can be seen in the Collector’s Edition DVD packaging.) But the swash ornamentation that gives the logo its funky distinction (see ‘k’, ‘B’, ‘r’, ‘w’, ‘n’) is inspired by other exaggerated display serifs of the phototype era. The chief reference is likely another Benguiat design, Caslon Black Swash (AKA Benguiat Caslon), which was used for the Foxy Brown promotional material (below). Incidentally, the prolific Ed Benguiat is also the artist responsible for the lettering of the famous Superfly logo.

Below the Jackie Brown title, “a Quentin Tarantino Film” is set in Goudy Heavyface, Lanston Monotype’s response to the popularity of Cooper Black.

Posters for Foxy Brown (1974). Logo at left was mechanically stretched, as was often done in phototypesetting. The poster on the right is one of my favorites of all time — dig those rainbow action cutouts. Images via Una Pagina de Cine.

Various online sources mistakenly identify the Foxy Brown type as Cabernet, but that’s not accurate as Jason Walcott’s face is purely digital, a 2003 interpretation of Benguiat’s Caslon. This kind of misattribution is commonly made these days, overlooking metal or photocompositor typefaces that haven’t been digitally released under their original name. I’m as guilty of this as anyone and I’m gradually wising up as I learn more about analog type. Still, from a practical view, it’s certainly useful to know what fonts can be used today that emulate the pre-digital work.

This image from Daylight Fonts is labeled as Benguiat Caslon but appears to be Cabernet, with its additional swashes created by Jason Walcott. Some of these were probably inspired by the custom modifications that PLINC made to order.

Seeking to keep Benguiat Caslon as close to the original as possible, restorer Christian Schwartz digitized everything on the film font source and added very few new glyphs. This means it lacks many of the extra swashes (particularly lowercase) found in Cabernet. Most of these appear to be Walcott’s own inventions inspired by the custom modifications that were often made by PLINC lettering artists upon their customers’ requests. Another, less refined, digital tribute is Emfatick NF.

Benguiat Caslon Swash in Alphabet Thesaurus, Volume 3, the 1971 catalog from Photo-Lettering. Note that the second line in each sample is the original drawing. Other lines are mechanically scaled or slanted, a technique facilitated (and encouraged) by phototypesetting technology. Photo by Nick Sherman.

Update: The initial version of this article asserted that the Benguiat Caslon available at PhotoLettering.com was not complete. Christian Schwartz, who was responsible for that digitization, corrected me and reminded me that custom modifications to film fonts were common:

Caslon Swash (Arriola) as shown in the 1980 catalog of Phil’s Photo. The design is not credited.

At PLINC, the films were really just a starting point, and the lettering artists there would modify and add alts and swashes as they saw fit, or as the art director speccing the type would request. The ‘r’ from the Foxy Brown logo, for example, was probably drawn just for the logotype.

I’ve updated the article to reflect this.

It’s also possible that the designers used a font from another provider. Knockoffs and followers were as common in phototype as they are today. At right is a scan of a very similar font called Caslon Swash (or Arriola) from the 1980 catalog of Phil’s Photo, Homage to the Alphabet. It includes all the variations found in Foxy Brown and Cabernet, and then some. That’s not to say that all of the wacky extensions are good ideas, or even very well drawn. The alt ‘O’, for example, is particularly shoddy. I can hear someone from the back of the room yelling, “Fo-cus!”.

C D Moorby of UK fashion blog Stitched & Stitched used this image to post his new year’s resolution, declaring, “I will be a better blogger in 2013!”.

The deepest rabbit holes of type research often open up from a simple font identification request. I fell into one of these on Thursday when David Corti of September Industry sent me the image at right. It presented one of those troublesome ID challenges: type that feels so familiar but every guess is slightly off. I immediately thought of Times, but the details here are sharper (‘S’), more dramatic (‘E’), with wedge-like serifs. The whole thing is more narrow than Times, with stronger contrast, indicating that this is a variation designed specifically for display use. After online sources failed me, I went to the big yellow book. And there it was: Times Modern.

Times Modern compared to condensed and extra bold styles of Times. Besides its compact stature and sharp details, Times Modern also differs in its angled terminals on the stems of letters like ‘b’, ‘h’, ‘n’ and, most strangely, the bottom of the ‘u’.

The reason this thing was so tough to locate is that it is a font that was available digitally for years, but then silently yanked from the market, and thus the web — meeting the same fate as fonts like Haas Unica and ITC Didi. Complicating research even further, there are multiple designs known as “Times Modern”. Most articles we find today refer to the typeface designed by Luke Prowse and Neville Brody in 2006 for a redesign of The Times of London. And later, Eduardo Manso created Sunday Times Modern, an unrelated family for The Sunday Times.

This Times Modern, on the other hand, is a pre-digital design (published digitally by Scangraphic, then Elsner+Flake as “SH Times Modern” or “EF Times Modern”). But it’s unclear just how old it is. The history of Times New Roman is, of course, a very long and thorny one, and there’s no need to go into that here. Suffice it to say, this Times Modern appears to me to be entirely separate from Times or Times New Roman. My guess is that it was produced in the 1960s or ’70s, as it has the flavor of those off-kilter, high contrast headliners of the phototype era. Those who mourn the disappearance of EF Times Modern can still find like-minded eccentricities in type like Denver, ITC Grouch, Grumpy, Caslon Graphique, Benguiat Caslon, Cabernet, and Troover Roman, Hawthorn, and more.

Willy Fleckhaus’ 1970s covers from Suhrkamp’s Taschenbuch Wissenschaft (science paperback) series. Umlauts are placed to the side of capital letters to accommodate the tight linespacing.

Perhaps Times Modern’s origins can be traced back to its most iconic use: the taschenbuch (paperback) series from German publisher Suhrkamp. Simple and striking, the covers stick to a strict template of tightly spaced Times Modern Black in just two sizes centered at the top. The title and author are large; the subtitle and imprint immediately follow in smaller type on the next line.

The system was developed by legendary German designer Willy Fleckhaus and Rolf Staudt, beginning in 1971. Some reports claim that the designers developed this customization of Times themselves for these covers. But Carsten Wolff, co-author of a 1997 Fleckhaus monograph, disputes that, telling us that Fleckhaus used classic phototype faces originating from suppliers like Linotype, Stempel, and Bauer, and did not design his own.

The 1001 years of yearning (2002). Suhrkamp maintained the paperback identity for over 30 years, but it got watered down over time, with looser type and full-bleed imagery.

Another departure, this special edition of Amerika (1997) got foil stamped type. Still, the template was more or less intact until about ten years ago when Suhrkamp replaced the Fleckhaus system with a new design using banal left aligned type and four color blocks. Sad.

Fleckhaus also used this face (or one very much like it) even before, for his work at Twen, a sexy magazine for “people in their twenties, from 15 to 30”. The cover below suggests that the font existed as early as 1970.

Twen magazine, December 1970. Photo via Eye magazine.

The Acne Jeans logo process as suggested by Zachary Ohlman on Typophile.

I am still quite curious to know more about the origins of this typeface. Did Fleckhaus really create it? Did it debut with only this “Black” weight? I did find two weights of a very similar typeface in a 1980 phototype catalog. The design, called “Times Bold Modified”, is not as condensed but has many of the same unusual details — with the addition of some goofy swash add-ons that were so prevalent in fonts at the time.

I also wonder why EF Times Modern is no longer available from Elsner+Flake. My hunch is that Monotype, the trademark owner of the “Times” typefaces, revoked their right to sell it, but that’s only speculation. I have some emails out to Elsner+Flake and people who worked with the foundry when the font was still available. I’ll update this article if and when I hear back. Failing that, I’m relying on you, dear readers, to shed some light on this mystery.

Danke to Indra Kupferschmid and Florian Hardwig for their insight and assistance with this post.

Update: Elsner+Flake wrote to say the removal of their font from the market is due to a complaint from Times Newspaper Ltd. who claimed that the name was too close to Times Classic and Times Millennium. Sigh.

Update, Mar 18, 2013: I contacted Albert-Jan Pool, who worked at Scangraphic from 1987–91. He did not remember Times Modern and didn’t find it in his catalogs. But adds this:

Brendel Informatik [now TypeShop Collection] (Walter Brendel used to be customer of Peter Karow at an early stage of the development of Ikarus, part of their data were in some of the more obscure IK archives of URW) seems to have had some kind of “Times Serial” called Riccione with 7 weights. Maybe E&F derived Times Modern from there by generating a condensed version of the bold weight?

Indeed, the bold weights of TS Riccione do come closer to Times Modern than anything I’ve seen in digital form (besides E+F’s now unavailable version). Riccione is clearly a different design, though — more cleanly drawn, with balanced counters. This can be a great thing for users, and the XBold is particularly nice, but it does miss the compressed wackiness of Times Modern if that’s what you’re seeking.

Hessian is a brand without a product, or service, or any kind of business at all … and it’s for sale. If that cart-before-the-horse concept makes no sense to you, it might help to know a little more about the guy who thought it up, Ben Pieratt.

At the maddeningly young age of 30, Pieratt is most recently known for founding a much more serious venture: Svpply. The social shopping site was so successful it caught the eye of eBay who acquired it in September 2012. He is also celebrated by designers for creating tools like Lookwork and The Book Cover Archive, an effort to which Fonts In Use itself owes a lot, in both concept and source material.

But I first came to know Pieratt around 2008 when he revealed himself to be the man behind a great design prank. Schtock was a blog filled with inventive stock photo mashups, often amusing and always beautiful. The site was said to be concocted by an anonymous employee at a major image supplier who was disillusioned with his job. Word spread and the site gained an impressive following, especially in the days before the viral effects of Twitter hit the mainstream. A few weeks later, Pieratt disclosed the truth: he was the mysterious creator of the artwork and the whole act was a publicity stunt for his new studio. It worked. In fact, it worked so well he picked up a new client: Corbis, the provider whose preview images he was using for his collages.

Futura and ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

With that context in mind, the enigmatic, tongue-in-cheek qualities of Hessian make perfect sense. This trick has Pieratt art and humor painted all over it. Perhaps it’s just a joke. Maybe it’s a satirical commentary on designers who have their pet favorite motifs and typefaces and apply them to whatever project is at hand, regardless of brief or context. But the $18,000 price tag and list of included goods and services (such as the name, URL, Twitter and Tumblr accounts, patterns, icons, brand book, etc.)? That’s utterly real. Pieratt has the guts and the talent to follow it through.

ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

The type used for the various Hessian materials is an odd plurality within a narrow class of geometric sans serifs. They range from Aperçu and Raissonné (by fashion conscious designers’ darling Colophon), to the obvious Futura and ITC Avant Garde Gothic, to Century Gothic (a slightly clumsy system default that is often maligned and neglected these days, but can still be serviceable, especially in bold).

Century Gothic.

Aperçu.

Futura and ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

For Hessian’s supplementary info page, Pieratt uses the quirky modernist Raisonné as a webfont. The typeface is described by its designer, Benjamin Critton, as “parodic-serious”. Perfect.

Why this mix of six geometric families when one would do? That could be part of the enigma. Or it could be simply another option in the list of offerings: “Pick your favorite sans … or upgrade for $19,000 and we’ll throw in the lot!”

Century Gothic.

As a partner at Font Bureau, I welcome the use of Antenna as the basis of the new logo of The New Republic. We haven’t seen the magazine yet, but they sent out an e-mail with a sneak peek of the logo and a link to an offer for a free copy of the first redesigned issue.

Politico talked to Dirk Barnett, the Newsweek evacuee and new creative director of TNR. “We decided to break out of The New Republic’s heritage and create something fresh and new,” Barnett said.

He was referring to a long history of new logos with serifs, including one that I did back in the ’90s in UBEC, Ultra Bodoni Extra Condensed. That one didn’t last long.

The New Republic in 2000 with a logo designed by Roger Black. The illustration of Al Gore is by Mark Hess.

Perhaps the longest-running logo in the magazine’s history was a superb flag in Zapf’s Sistina, with startling black ears bleeding to the sides. Forgotten the name of the designer, but still love that spacing. (Note, the magazine was printed newsprint on off-white, uncoated book paper in those days—with Palatino text and headlines (then an unfamiliar typeface in the United States!)

The New Republic in 1967.

The New Republic’s new logo compared with different settings of Antenna.

Speaking of spacing, that is one potential quibble (if you ignore the odd “New” and the chopped right side of the “C”) an old typographer might have with this design. Note the way the “NE” smashed together. That just blurs together in small sizes. I ran up some alternatives in InDesign, starting with the spacing Cyrus Highsmith designed into the font.

Oh, well. When I retire, I will go around fixing letterspacing to my own preferences, and hacking into web sites to replace them, like Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson who go around correcting typos on signs. In the meantime, I wish TNR the best. The magazine has been quickly improving since Chris Hughes (the Facebook founder who managed the social network campaign for Obama in ’08) took over. Let’s hope Barnett’s logo has a long a run and builds a place in our hearts for Antenna like that ’60s logo did for Sistena in mine.

Update: The New Republic’s blog has more about the new logo in an interview with Creative Director Dick Barnett.

On a recent trip through Germany I had to change trains in Frankfurt. As in every concourse, there are several booths where you can get yourself a coffee or other refreshments. I was drawn to one by Traffic Snack, because the brush script on its display had caught my eye. Studio Sable is part of the award-winning Studio Lettering series by House Industries.

All three styles of this stunning set — Sable, Slant and Swing — emulate mid-century scripts, as they were practiced by commercial lettering artists before there were digital tools with myriads of fonts to choose from, in order to add a personal touch to store signs, package designs or advertisements. Thanks to their elaborate OpenType features, the fonts succeed at preserving the natural rhythm and animated flair of hand lettering, including its charming inconsistencies. This is achieved not so much with ligatures, but rather with alternates for repeated letters which fluctuate in size. Further, there are special initial and final forms, i.e. contextual variants that are automatically inserted when the letter is at the beginning or the end of a word. To give you an impression of the level of thoroughness: Studio Sable contains nine different glyphs for the ‘sch’ trigraph alone.

The antiqued serif that is used alongside Studio Sable pales in comparison, aesthetically and technically. It is Dieter Steffmann’s freebie extension of an earlier digitization by Walter Kafton-Minkel, which in turn references the Ben Franklin typeface as found in Rob Roy Kelly’s Wood Type Alphabets.

The most spectacular feature of the Studio Lettering fonts, however, is what House calls “culture-specific stylistic sets” — alternates that reflect stylistic preferences of native users:

The appearance of written language is often affected by regional customs […] Designer Ken Barber based “colloquial” letters on forms found in writing, textbooks and historical models, in addition to interviews with local artists and speakers.

Reviewer Adam Twardoch was thrilled about the technical implementation:

The variants have been linked to the OpenType language selection mechanism, so assigning a different language in InDesign automatically gives the text the appropriate local flavor. Bloody awesome!

Line 1 shows Studio Sable with its default (i.e. American) forms. Assigning German language to it triggers the local alternates. Line 3 juxtaposes American and German school scripts.

Most of these local preferences can be traced back to the ways how letterforms are introduced to children. School scripts vary from country to country. American Cursive typically has an enlarged minuscule form for ‘M’ and ‘A’. In German Schreibschrift, the bowl of ‘p’ is open.

No school handwriting model features the ‘d’ without downstroke, as seen in the “German” set of Studio Sable. This trait is not derived from primary scripts, but was popular in Central-European lettering. It is also present in many classic script typefaces made in Germany.

Of course I was curious to see how Traffic Snack makes use of this unique feature. Did they choose the local variants, being based in Germany? Or do they showcase the American and, to German eyes, slightly more exotic forms? After all, the Frankfurt station is an international place, and the shop’s name is in English, too.

What I found was disillusioning — both were true, or neither: Apparently, the designers were oblivious to the font’s extraordinary capabilities. Sometimes it’s the default shapes, sometimes the local alternates, applied haphazardly. Alkoholhaltige Getränke is “German”, but Apfelschorle is not. The style guide has the local alternates on the cover (most notably the ‘u’ with hook), but the character set showing makes no mention of them. No conscious choice was made. The typographic outcome is randomized, depending on whether the language attribute was set in the layout application or not. Likewise, all the effort that went into creating the contextual alternates was wasted here, as the compositors didn’t always bother to switch them on.

The devil is in the details: not only are these not apostrophes, but single opening quotation marks. On top, in German spelling apostrophes are unneeded and unwanted for marking possessive cases.

For type designers and font engineers, it certainly is frustrating to see their cutting-edge work ignored. On the other hand — is it really the graphic designer who is to blame? Can foundries expect users to read through a manual first? Is there a demand for such smart fonts, or are they simply too intricate, and the added value not appreciated? I am eager to hear your opinions.

One thing is for sure: Layout applications do a terrible job at making font features accessible. InDesign hides away Stylistic Sets in a sub-submenu of a flyout menu of a palette. Photoshop still has no glyph palette, right? I am looking at Adobe, but then again, it is not like other software makers offered a solution of striking simplicity.

All lament aside: Studio Sable is a beautiful typeface even without the extras. The identity still is inviting and thus functional. And the coffee tasted good, too!

Launched in August 2012, Medium is a new publishing platform conceived by Ev Williams and Biz Stone, the minds behind Twitter and Blogger. With their most recent venture, they aim…

to rethink how online publishing works and build a system optimized for quality, rather than popularity. Where anyone can have a voice but where one has to earn the right to your attention. A system where people work together to make a difference, rather than merely compete for validation and recognition. A world where thought and craftsmanship is rewarded more than knee-jerk reactions. — medium.com/about

As if the spirit of collaboration was also guiding the selection of fonts, Medium uses two typefaces that don’t have a single creator, but emerged from teamwork: FF Meta Serif (Erik Spiekermann with Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowersby) and Myriad (Carol Twombly and Robert Slimbach with Fred Brady and Christopher Slye).

Meta Serif is used as the main typeface, at carefully determined sizes and line-lengths, with headings in the distinct Bold. It is wonderful to see how mature webfont typography is already, and how self-evident and almost incidental it can look.

It stands to reason that her older sister Meta is the best sans-serif to pair Meta Serif with. And while superfamilies come in handy for complex editorial design tasks, these all-round carefree packages are rarely applied as intended. Many typographers feel that such serif/sans siblings harmonize all too well. They rather take up the challenge of putting together a good team themselves, with a little more friction between the players.

Myriad is a dynamic sans with open letterforms made in the early 1990s, just like FF Meta. It does without the idiosyncrasies in the details, though: no angled entry and exit strokes, and more conventional shapes for ‘g’ or ‘y’. This toned-down choice was a good one for the way the sans is deployed on Medium: smallish text for buttons, navigational items and meta information in headers, often in all-caps.

In larger settings, e.g. on user profiles, category indices or the 404 page, a bolder weight of Myriad sets itself apart from the (photo)graphic backgrounds. In the very large sizes, it is tracked negatively for more impact, by 0.05em. That equals 50 thousandth of the point size, but, in many browsers, looks like 40, due to rounding.

The designers also looked into other typefaces, before settling on Meta Serif and Myriad. The shortlist included Freight Sans, FF Tisa, Adelle, and URW’s Franklin Gothic. At least this is what is revealed by peeking into the stylesheet, where these unused fonts still are referenced.

The makers of Medium are aware that long passages of all-caps text are inadvisable, and they can very much tell the difference between straight quotes and curly ones. On the Terms of Services page however, they had to surrender to the lawyers’ specifications — but not without taking a dig at judiciary and its twisted ideas of readability. I love it.

Great care was taken with the letterpressed and die-cut material, which was produced by Studio On Fire.

Debossed merchandise cards, info cards, and leather details in harmony.

A 3D-logo with the same felted feel as the mobile case, along with a pair of AIAIAI’s TMA-1 headphones.

The type follows suit: Ole Schäfer’s FF Zine Serif Display is employed in the wordmark, grafted at the serifs to form bespoke ligatures. Playing counterpart to this masculine, square-jawed logo is our whimsical friend FF Mister K from Julia Sysmäläinen. Of a less European pedigree, Hoefler & Frere Jones’ Sentinel appears in print splash images, with New Century Schoolbook as the webfont stand-in. Futura plays the neutral (yet still European) tone on headlines in the site. And, as these two founders have their fingers on the pulse of the Hypebeast, the recently fashionable Orator is used for splash metainfo. (The Futura used as a webfont is a questionable digitization called Function. It does not hold up to the task nor does it fit with the otherwise impeccable attention to detail.)

Hand-drawn details playing well with FF Mister K.

Broad assortment, narrow aesthetic. See a full-size view of Hard Graft’s product line.

Hard Graft could be criticized for using too many typefaces (or praised for their typographic eclecticism?), but much like their product line, the texture of the typography gives a richness that grey and brown can’t shoulder on their own. Personally, I would axe either Orator or Futura, and would be quick to upgrade Schoolbook to Sentinel once H&FJ webfonts are available.

Patch Hofweber is a young multidisciplinary designer living in southern Sweden. His latest work is the typeface Trim Poster in collaboration with Göran Söderström and Letters from Sweden.

W is turning 40 this year, which prompted me to take a closer look at the magazine. I’m glad I did. Perhaps it is part of their anniversary celebration, or the fact that it’s the “Big Fashion Issue”, but September was particularly typographically rich — filled with interesting type choices that reach beyond the usual grasp of “mainstream” fashion glossies. Of course, it’s probably owed to the direction of Anton Ioukhnovets, who was always playing with type in his designs for GQ.

“Who” section opener using various optical sizes of Benton Modern and Graphik. See below for more info about the type.

Table of contents.

Three optical sizes of Benton Modern Italic compared: Display, Titling and Banner. The thin strokes (hairlines) get thinner, spacing gets tighter, and shapes get narrower as the intended size increases. Click to enlarge.

With ultra thin hairlines designed for extra large settings, Benton Modern Banner is put to good use for this anniversary feature.

Benton Modern Display in use for a deck (between text and headline sizes).

A pair of department pages. Click to enlarge.

 

Besides Benton Modern, the only staple typeface used throughout the issue is Graphik, a fairly rigid Grotesk that has the necessary, unadorned plainness to contrast with Benton Modern’s spike-heeled glamour. Together, the two expansive font families offer enough variety, weights, and widths to facilitate text-heavy pages like those of W’s departments, where multiple short articles need to be distinct, readable, and attractive.

Benton Modern and Graphik Narrow set a series of blurbs in the “Most Wanted” section.

Each of the features in the September issue showcases its own typeface that suits its subject perfectly. Let’s start with the cover story…

FF Pitu for a feature on Penelope Cruz. The two pages on the right are cropped. Click to enlarge.

Penelope Cruz wears FF Pitu, a strikingly sharp and assertive number that not only fits her well, but also happens to be a nice pairing with the thick-thins of Benton Modern. It’s a showy accessory, the well-placed hat or scarf that caps a thoughtfully assembled outfit. The W designers set it unabashedly huge for the opening page, letting it break in a way that emphasizes the rhyming title.

W gets medieval with LTC Goudy Text. Click to enlarge.

For a delightfully dreary fashion shoot set in the Dark Ages, an English Blackletter like LTC Goudy Text is an obvious choice. But some of the shapes of this particular Textura even have the same wilting posture as the models, who stand slack, as if held up by marionette strings. The whole look is inspired, I suppose, by the nodding heads and lifeless bodies of medieval folk art.

P22 Bifur. Click to enlarge.

Fast forward to modern times where the hard edges of retro-futuristic ensembles are introduced by P22 Bifur. The design originates in the ’20s, a digital interpretation of A.M. Cassandre’s first typeface, but for today’s audiences it is a flashback to the mechanical geometry of the techno 1980s.

A feature opener using Neutraface Slab and an uncredited illustration.

One more feature that is worth a mention opens with Neutraface Slab and a typographic illustration (spelling out “Large”) that immediately reminded me of Stefan Kjartansson’s absurd and amusing Cumulus and Foam. Whoever drew this strange and lovely lettering for W (likely Ioukhnovets himself), with its hairline slab serif letters ballooning into abstract amoebas, could have been inspired by C&F. The fashion is strikingly reminiscent of the typeface, too. So much so, that I felt compelled to add my own comparison (below).

The fashion styling of Edward Enninful paired with a typographic interpretation in Cumulus & Foam.

Deutsche Guggenheim is a collaboration between Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Berlin exhibition hall on the Unter den Linden boulevard opened up in 1997. For 15 years, it has been a member of the international Guggenheim network that consists of the original museum in New York City and spin-offs in Venice, Bilbao, and — from 2017 — Abu Dhabi. The Berlin branch, however, will be closed this winter, as the two partners agreed to end their liaison. The final exhibition, Visions of modernity, features works by Paul Cézanne, Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and others. It is on display through February 17, 2013.

Both languages are set in the same weight and size. German text is in black, English in a lighter grey. The division is sometimes horizontal (in columns), sometimes vertical.

The Deutsche Guggenheim Magazine has been published on a quarterly basis since late 2007. Each of its 21 issues make for a useful bilingual specimen of Verlag. As you would expect from such a prestigious institution, the design is not exactly adventurous, but very tidy and flawless, and supported by top-notch imagery. Verlag started life as a commission for the NYC Guggenheim museum. Its elegant geometric shapes are based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Art Deco lettering on the facade of the building.

In 1996, when designing the Guggenheim magazine, Abbott Miller (of Pentagram) approached Jonathan Hoefler (of Hoefler & Frere-Jones) to create a custom typeface for the publication. Hoefler referenced Wright’s iconic lettering and designed the custom typeface in various weights and italic and bold versions for exclusive use in the magazine.—idsgn.org

Ten years later, the original six styles were expanded into a complete family spanning five weights in three widths, and made available for retail.

The eszett in Erbar Grotesk accentuates the provenance from long s (ſ) plus descending z (ʒ).

The Berlin museum will live on as “Deutsche Bank KunstHalle”, without participation from Guggenheim, and hence very likely without a magazine set in Verlag. That’s a pity. I find that German words look especially good in this typeface, with its eszett that nods to 1920s Erbar Grotesk.

The headline is set in Verlag Bold, 66 pt., followed by a subhead in the Book weight, 22 pt. The body text is in 9.6 pt. Verlag Book. Note the short lining figures which blend well with the low x-height. They are also perfectly suited to integrate the many figures in image captions.

In this closeup view, two pecularities can be observed: Apart from the aforementioned eszett (regelmäßig in line 6, and große in the fourth-to-last line), there are also examples for „German quotes“.

I like this paper a lot, especially after its thorough redesign by TiedgeDulfaqar in 2007. Almost two years ago I wrote a post for this blog about it, but never published it because my photos were so poor. Of course I didn’t get around to make better ones. Now facing the potential end of my favorite newspaper, I’ll post it anyway. For those who don’t want to read it all but rather discuss the current state of newspapers, please jump to the end of the article.

Comparison of old (left) and new (right) design in 2007. The former headline face was Linotype Compatil, now Farnham and Fago. Click to enlarge. (Photo fontblog.de)

In 2007, the masses were in uproar and I was also skeptical when Frankfurter Rundschau was the first nationwide German newspaper to change its format from traditional broadsheet to the half as big tabloid format. This was introduced in the course of a major redesign and restructuring, and those are always difficult to get regular readers to approve. All changes, how tiny and for the good they might be, are a bad thing for the inured eye. Hardly anyone spoke about the excellent, improved typography and the clear, unraveled layout. Most concerns heard were about the newspaper not to be taken seriously anymore in the smaller format, with rich use of photos, graphics and four-color printing throughout. Is this correlation still true — the bigger the format the more respectable the newspaper?

Size comparison of common German newspapers. Click to enlarge.

Coincidentally I started traveling a lot around the time of the redesign and I learned to really love the smaller format, the shorter articles, distributed over five narrow columns, with cross headings easy to grasp, quotes and graphics breaking up the gray. This all sped up the process of quickly informing myself. I guess very few read every article in a paper word for word. We rather scan a whole spread, look at pictures, read headlines and captions, check info boxes and tables. Of course, a newspaper should still be something you choose based on quality of content and journalism (Frankfurter Rundschau is said to be liberal as opposed to its more conservative local counterpart Frankfurter Allgemeine). But I can’t negate being a visual designer. So here, I admit it, I read Frankfurter Rundschau because of Farnham.

Designed by Christian Schwartz and published in 2004, Farnham is a Rational typeface based on the work of German-born punch-cutter Johann Fleischmann. It combines open, legible forms with peppy sharp details and some compelling ball terminals. Generous notches where straight lines meet curves are supposed to act as ink-traps in small sizes but become striking in headlines, which shape a newspaper’s face most considerably. Although the family consists of 25 fonts, including very readable text styles, only the Display variants are used for headlines, subheads and occasional quotes — the Bold, Regular and Light for news, and the Italics for the op-eds and opinion pages. (The typeface plays an even more prominent role in the iPad edition of the paper.)

All body copy is set in Charter, a highly legible family designed in 1987 by Matthew Carter for low-resolution output and other demanding printing conditions. It is less refined than Farnham but partners well with the headline face since both have square serifs and share the same general proportions and form model.

As a third counterpoise to the two serifs FF Fago is used for less formal, but “gripping” headlines in the sports and magazine section, but also for shorter reports, deck, boxes and side notes. The calm, economical humanist sans by Ole Schäfer from 2000 is a good pick for newsprint and small sizes. I once set a book in Fago and was not happy with the outcome. It is almost too loosely spaced and narrow for sharp offset printing in regular reading sizes. Here though, even the dense TV guide, stock prices and compact, all-caps headlines stay legible. The typeface’s open, regular forms are a good compromise between “stiff” and “informal” and complement the more serious, newspaper-ish style of Farnham and Charter well. All three together make for a contemporary and elegant look of the paper.

To conclude a note on the very top of the newspaper: the masthead. Unchanged for years, it remains set in an iconic customized version of Memphis Bold Condensed, for which there’s no digital retail font available. The closest alternative is Karnak Condensed Black, the analogue design by Ludlow.

Back to today and the sad news. Being the target group for this paper — the “young, female”, educated, flexible, independent, globally thinking, liberal academics — I have to ask myself why I let it die. I could afford a subscription of the print edition but have none (I’m hardly at home). I could buy single issues at the newsstand but don’t (I hardly get to newsstands). I’m online and read from screens almost all the time, but only bought their iPad edition twice (it’s really good, I wrote a post about it too). It’s not Frankfurter Rundschau’s fault, I don’t read any printed newspaper anymore. The only thing that makes me feel a tiny bit less horrible about this is that I did not contribute the waste of an enormous amount of paper.

But many of us read more than ever before in our lives. So what do we read? For current information, I have to admit that websites, social media, and read-later services won me over. For all other content, I still love books.

What about you? When did you last buy a printed newspaper?

Under the direction of Richard Turley, the new Bloomberg Businessweek is having a pretty good run, winning the hearts of designers with their direct typography and inventive infographics. The magazine takes a lot of design chances, especially noticeable as it’s sitting on the shelf next to much more conservative financial titles. Turley talked about this in an interview with Business Insider last year:

We have this thing when we’re talking called “noble failure”, where we really try and kind of press an idea and not be pissed off if it doesn’t make it. We experiment and just see if it happens, and I guess 50–60% of the time that ends up in the magazine.

This cover must be the result of one of those bold experiments. While the country is reeling from the effects of Hurricane Sandy, Turley takes the opportunity to simply declare what everyone else is hemming and hawing about: “IT’S GLOBAL WARMING, STUPID.”

Because I am maladjusted, the first thing I thought when I saw it was, “Hey, why such a tiny wordspace between IT’S and GLOBAL? Next to the gap created by the apostrophe it almost makes the two words read as one. Was it sacrificed merely to make the type as large as possible? Or maybe it’s all supposed to look as raw and unfinessed as possible — pounding you over the head with a plain fact.”

Of course, I was thinking too much. It doesn’t matter to normal readers, who will only see the statement: bare and brash. It’s a perfect cover. How can you see anything else on the newsstand with this brutal truth staring you in the face?

The type is Bloomberg’s staple Neue Haas Grotesk, the revised Helvetica that goes back to its roots and offers warmer readability in the Text fonts and cleaner precision in the Display. One of NHG’s distinguishers is a straight-legged ‘R’ that was once available in the metal Helvetica but lost in digital releases. Businessweek normally uses this alternate but it opted for the curved leg here, presumably because it’s more like the “default” Helvetica, adding to the raw, undesigned effect.

A nice finishing touch: the “p6” acts as a period while leading you directly to the story.

As expected, the article is illustrated with one of Businessweek’s signature charts. This one by Jennifer Daniel illustrates the financial cost of increasingly expensive natural disasters in the U.S. since 1996. You can see it bigger at the Tumblr blog generously provided by the magazine’s design department where they often add some insight about their process.

“Colorful! Sexy! Funny!” Guided by these keywords, Blotto Design has developed a new visual identity for the Komische Oper, the cheeky Berlin opera house. The typographic main actor is Brandon Grotesque (2010), a fresh and unpretentious geometric sans by Hannes von Döhren. Blotto put it on stage together with Genath. What looks like a peculiar display cut of a Fleischmann at first is actually “a free interpretation of a baroque type based on a 1720 specimen likely showing Johann Wilhelm Haas first design for the Genath Foundry in Basle, Switzerland”, designed by François Rappo and published in 2011 with Optimo.

All photos: Blotto Design

The various stationery items, flyers and brochures are united by the use of three bright colors, a curtain-like zig-zag border – and the two corporate typefaces, of course.

Ian Warner of Blotto Design shares some insight in the criteria determining the typeface selection:

We decided on using Brandon Grotesque at a very early point in the development. It was a fit from the start, because the new identity was supposed to be rather an evolution than a revolution: Brandon’s underlying geometry shares a lot with Futura, which is the typeface that was used before. Furthermore, Brandon is inspired by magazine designs of the 1920s and 1930s, a defining period both for the Metropol-Theater (as the Komische Oper was known back then), and the self-image of the house. The font family is also very well equipped, spanning 12 styles and supporting Turkish as well as Central and Eastern European languages. Latter is crucial in the communication of the opera house.

The logo, a red dodecagon with white type on it, marks the building on Behrenstraße/‌Glinkastraße. With an extra dot in its counter, the round O of Brandon Grotesque looks like a target or a geographical marker. Another off-center dot breaks up the symmetry.

Two spreads from the programme for the current season exemplify the richness of the typographic application: There are numbers arranged in a triangle, big centered type, titles in all-caps on an angle, and words on an arc. Blotto demonstrates how variegated a page can look like, even when only one typeface and one color is used.

Ian Warner continues:

Genath came in later. We wanted to work with fresh, new fonts. In the end, Genath won us over with its strange hybridity in the details: The display cut is full of character and has the thin serifs and high contrast of a Didone, while the other styles combine the sweeping forms of a Transitional Serif with very fashionable and almost chunky serifs. At the same time the Regular is a true workhorse, easy to read and to use. That was a perfect match with the unconventional appearance of the Komische Oper: cocktail dress paired with hiking boots – everything’s possible.

As Genath’s contrast is a little too delicate to render well on screen, it is replaced with the less swank Droid Sans as Brandon’s sidekick for the website.

Three weights of Brandon Grotesque are used as webfonts, mainly for headlines and rubrics. As the designers didn’t want to dispense with the element of letters arranged on an arc, and as CSS browser support is still not good enough to do that with live text, these kinds of headings are rendered as images. It only shows when zooming in, though: Fonts stay crisp, pixel images become blurry.

Brandon Grotesque popped up here before, in an article about the Comedy Central rebrand, which leaves me wondering if there is something inherently comical about its curves. Anyway, Brandon and Genath are excellent typefaces, both highly serviceable and, especially the latter, hardly used. Give it up for Blotto Design, their sagacious font choices, and an overall successful new identity for the Komische Oper!

© Oscilloscope Laboratories

As someone who loves both movies and typography, I often feel a pang of disappointment when a decent film is let down by a deceptively simple artistic choice: the typeface for the titles.

A recent case in point: Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, a transgressive take on Emily Brontë’s eponymous novel, delivers a sensory feast of such distinctive purpose that its title deserves to be rendered with due care and consideration. Sadly, from the film’s opening titles through to its various posters and DVD covers, a chain of inappropriate font choices portrays the film in progressively confusing ways.

© Oscilloscope Laboratories

Shot by Robbie Ryan with an agitated handheld camera that renders everything in murky yet gorgeous tones (Ryan won the Golden Osella award for cinematography at the 2011 Venice Film Festival), Wuthering Heights tells the story of the doomed relationship between childhood friends Cathy and Heathcliff against the backdrop of the punishing Yorkshire highlands, a place that feels so far removed from the traditional image of the lush English countryside — let alone civilization — to be virtually prehistoric: its mountainous landscapes are shrouded in sinister fog; its plains soaked by piercing bullets of rain; its inhabitants routinely splattered in dirt and mud.

© Oscilloscope Laboratories

The aural setting too is rendered with such vividness, punctuated by country silences and ferocious storms, that the ambience becomes a character in itself, seemingly channeling the desire and rage of the characters who solemnly traverse those epic Yorkshire plains.

In short, Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is anything but a cosy, polished rendering of Brontë’s classic tale of love and revenge: this is a troubled love story set in the raging elemental soup of prehistory. We half expect the elements to break through the screen at any moment and lash us with its sombre rain. It feels like the dawn of time except the people wear better clothes.

Yet, for all of the considered stylistic choices, the film’s opening title card sends a strange, confusing signal about the tone of the film:

Wuthering Heights Title Card

The title is set in ITC Bauhaus Heavy, a font with a particular personality that is varyingly modernist, bulbous, camp, or futuristic. Pleasant in its neat, rounded geometry, it suggests either flying cars or roller discos. It’s not for everyone, but it has its purpose. The question is: what does a typeface with these traits have to do with Arnold’s beautifully mucky and primal film?

Though some might defend it on the grounds that it’s consistent with the film’s bold defiance of the book’s classical signatures, the pitch of ITC Bauhaus is too discordant to be either an intelligent or beautiful choice. And while it would certainly be too obviously hackneyed to use a classic old-world serif like Trajan, using a typeface that screams — boldly, heavily – of sci-fi movies and ’70s throwback flicks reveals a high degree of fuzzy design thinking.

Unfortunately, the same thinking seems to have spread to the UK theatrical poster:

UK Theatrical Poster

ITC Bauhaus Heavy makes way for the less vulgar ITC Avant Garde Gothic, an improvement of sorts, but not a significant one. The problems persist: the mechanical geometrics of ITC Avant Garde don’t reference the aesthetics of the film; it fails as a piece of ironic visual commentary; and it’s not neutral enough to allow the imagery to speak for itself.

Type-savvy people might also notice the couple of lonely lines of text on the poster that are inexplicably set in other slightly different sans serifs: the actors names in a typeface similar to ITC Avant Garde and “Based on the novel by Emily Brontë” in Akzidenz-Grotesk.

To that end, it remains unclear how the poster was intended to market the film: the type is poorly set in a style suggesting middle-of-the-road fashion magazines, while the imagery (which, incidentally, uses a shade of brown that doesn’t even appear in the film’s glorious colour palette) has the kind of giant-head heroism that makes Wuthering Heights look more like a war movie than the brooding drama that it is.

That last problem seems to have been corrected with the UK DVD cover:

UK DVD Cover

The anonymous head is replaced with portraits of the film’s stars. However, the shift to more relevant imagery barely disguises the odd hodgepodge of fonts in play.

Casual observers might not notice the typographic disaster unfolding before their eyes, but the chaotic use of three similar fonts when, really, just one would do, contradicts the consistent and deliberate style of the film.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Across the Atlantic, the US theatrical poster ranks as a marked improvement on its UK counterpart:

US Theatrical Poster

While it’s not an especially masterful work of design, the US poster’s simple layout and direct use of film imagery is effective in capturing the hazy, melancholy mood of the film. But, curiously, some (unidentified) futuristic type remains. While the treatment here is less severe than either the ITC Bauhaus or ITC Avant Garde versions, the influence of the film’s opening titles seems to have handicapped the typographic possibilities as the film made its way around the world. It looks better now, but is it right? I’m inclined to say, “No”.

And that’s a shame, because the film is blessed with such beautiful imagery that it didn’t need to be hindered by the poorly crafted and overly elaborate typographical misfires in evidence here. In fact, Wuthering Heights should have made for an easy design brief: with images like these, there really wasn’t much the designers needed to do except focus on choosing the right type. But, as we can see, that can be more difficult than it looks.

David Nguyen is a multidisciplinary graphic designer originally from Melbourne and now based in London. He is also the co-founder of design studio Temple.

“Familienmacher” (Family Maker) was an exhibition held at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in Vienna from November 12, 2011 through March 25, 2012. Its subtitle translates to “To Hold on To, to Connect, to Get Rid Off”.

Who are you related to? Who takes the family pictures? How many of your kin are in your phone? Where do you store unloved heirlooms? Where to put the photo of the baby-bump? Whose picture to put into the frame? Does a family have a nationality? The exhibition is based on ethnographic research in the 8th and 16th district of Vienna.

Wolfram Wiedner studio created the identity and the exhibition graphics together with Johannes Lang. The exhibition interior and installations were designed by Kathrina Dankl. In 2012, “Familienmacher, Ausstellungsmachen”, an accompanying exhibition catalogue was released.

The exhibition logo is a purely typographic representation of the concept of family. The word Familienmacher is assembled of five diverse pieces, each of them set in a different and idiosyncratic typeface. None of them share a baseline, still all of them are united by the color red.

The selected typefaces include several of my favorites, many of them underused. Reporter is an energetic dry brush script from 1930s Germany. The marvelously angular Scriptek Italic is inspired by Russian Construcivism. While Goudy Sans hearkens back to the 1920s, the Bold Italic that is used here is a much younger addition. Trooper Roman is a high-contrast display face from the 1960s, digitized under many names including Troover Roman and Toledo. The last typeface does not only have the weirdest look, but also the weirdest name: Gneisenauette Black Alternate.

For everything else, the designers chose a very neutral face: Theinhardt is a revisited and refined Akzidenz-Grotesk by François Rappo.