Welcome to another roundup of what’s new in type. If you missed the interview with French type designer Alice Savoie, then be sure to take a look. Alice’s next typeface, Capucine will be released through the Process Type foundry. Follow them on Twitter, and you’ll be informed the moment it’s released.

Not quite sure how I failed to mention this before. Chester Jenkins & Kris Sowersby bring us Galaxie Copernicus:

the seriffed sister of Galaxie Polaris. And speaking of Kris Sowersby, I received this stunning KLIM type foundry specimen in the post. KLIM is Kris’ foundry. The specimen is really a well-designed book. (There should be a photo of it here, but I couldn’t find my camera’s USB cable). There are few foundries that actually produce good printed type specimens. H&FJ is one of the exceptions; Typotheque another. Can you name a few more? There are some. A limited number of Kris’ specimen books will be available on vllg.com.

Right now, Kris is on a speaking tour of Australia. Dates and venues can be found on the AGDA Web site. And here are the tour posters:

Designed by the talented Duncan of The International Office. The poster is set in National (Kris Sowersby) and Exotique (Kris and Christian Schwartz) for House Industries’ photo lettering collection. I’d love to get my hands on these posters.

If you like your type tight, then you might like this t-shirt:

Via @fontbureau.

New fonts

First the eagerly anticipated Anonymous Pro:

I’ve been using Mark Simonson’s Anonymous for coding, for … a long time. The updated Anonymous Pro is a family of four fixed-width fonts. Oh, and did I mention, it’s free! (copyrighted freeware). Be sure to take it for a spin. I think you’ll be impressed.

Discovered this absolute gem of a script from @stwef. Linotype Gneisenauette. Here used in NewWork Magazine:

Fantastic, isn’t it. Available through FontShop.

The Axel family from FontShop AG comprises four fonts, and displays exceptionally well on screen.

The four fonts are just US$19. That’s a limited-time offer, so be quick. Also, see what Dan of TypeOff has to say about Axel. Also featured on the FontFeed.

Typonine Sans from Nikola Djurek:

A double offering from award-winning SuitCase. First up is the slab serif Kulturista:

And Nudista, proffered as an alternative to grotesques like DIN.

Rolet by Simon Page:

Not available as a font file, but available as vectors. There are many more interesting type treatments in Simon’s Typography is everything Flickr set, and on his blog. Via Paul D. Hunt on WLT.

Stefan Hattenbach has completely redesigned his Web site:

I’m still a big fan of Stefan’s Anziano and its lovely set of ornaments:

(The ornaments either side of the RSS feed count are Anziano).

Computer Arts devotes an entire issue to typography:

Be sure to visit Darren Scott’s Typographics blog:

Cyrillic typeface competition

ParaType announces the 2009 International Type Design Competition — Modern Cyrillic.
Open to Cyrillic typeface projects and completed typefaces created and/or
released after January 1, 2006. No other restrictions. No admission fee. Deadline is August 24, 2009.

Typographic sins

Meet — yes, I’m not joking — Helvetica Pointed:

I shall say no more.

Type talk

An interesting discussion on Typophile — initiated by Matt & Aaron of RBtL — on a donation-funded, non-profit, free font foundry.

Web fonts

Since the announcement of TypeKit, the Web has been awash with talk of Web fonts. The following will bring you up to speed:
Typekit blog:

Examining TypeKit
Why TypeKit will change everything
TypeKit — another layer of complexity

My thoughts (briefly):
I’ll be outlining my thoughts about Web fonts in my upcoming (yes, I know it’s been a long time coming) Why type matters article. Right now there really isn’t that much information available. We don’t know how many foundries will be involved, and we have no idea of the pricing structure, so I’m ‘waiting and seeing’. What I am happy about, is that the years of hot air are finally beginning to condense. That someone has the gumption to actually make this happen — that impresses me. Ultimately, if you don’t like the idea of paying for an additional or extended license for Web embedding, then the solution is pretty simple: don’t buy it.

And it looks as though Typekit already has a competitor (though at this stage they are merely competing ideas, rather than competing services). It will be interesting to learn more about Richard Rutter’s solution. In all of the discussions about Web fonts, the only thing that annoys me (and I don’t lose any sleep over it), is that some feel that they somehow have a right to use fonts for Web embedding. I think it’s important to put oneself in the shoes of a type designer who makes his or her living from selling fonts. Type designers should be no more obligated to give away their fonts, than Lexus should be obliged to give away their cars. Anyway, this year could prove to be something of a watershed for type on the Web. All in all, very exciting.

iPhone

After an initial ban by the silly Victorian prudes at Apple, Eucalyptus is now available from the app store. It’s an iPhone e-book reader with access to some 20,000 English-language titles. The text displays beautifully:

At $9.99 it’s not cheap, but I do think it provides the best reading experience for the iPhone. Pocket Picks has a good review. 20% of gross profits from Eucalyptus are paid as a royalty to the non-profit Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.

TypeDrawing is another iPhone app:

Not revolutionary, but for $.99, it’s fun. There’s a Flickr group too.

Type links

Typography’s Role in the Newspaper Recession
Register for TypeCon
Type for the Web — RBtL podcast
Fresh & refreshed — FontShop news
MyFonts — Rising stars
Keith Morris
Royal Mail’s Royal Insignia
Eurostile vs Bank Gothic: This Time It’s Personal

Other news

WLT’s co-creator, Kari is working on a raft of new and brilliant features. Our aim is to get more people involved. But rather than open it up to everyone (which invariably will dilute its strength), we’ll be enabling a secondary kind of contributor account. Stay tuned for more news on that. And while I’m the subject of WLT, here’s my WLT pick of the week:

My first ILT poster should go on sale some time next month. A fairly simple affair. A screen-printed poster, set in Restraint, and printed on A2 black Plike paper. Limited edition of 150. This is not the final design, but it will resemble this:

I’ll also be giving two of them away. My second poster will be of my own lettering. There are still several of Seb Lester’s Mightier posters available from the ILT store. More designs coming soon.

I’ll soon be launching ILT’s gargantuan give-away. 40 wonderful prizes from the likes of Veer, FontShop, and House Industries, plus books, t-shirts, software, posters, and much more besides. 30 of the 40 prizes will be distributed via Twitter, so be sure to follow ILT. You can always unfollow afterwards. I won’t be offended.

Have a great week.

Alice Savoie started out with a foundation course in Applied Arts and then studied graphic design and typography for four years in Paris. She then set sail for the UK to follow the MA in Typeface Design at Reading University. Upon graduating in 2007 she relocated to London to work as a graphic designer. In March 2008 Alice joined Monotype Imaging as a full-time type designer.

I think at every stage of my studies I was taught by people who were very fond of type, so it turned out to be quite an obvious path. During my first years of graphic design studies in Paris I had a teacher who was absolutely passionate about letters. He was crazy about Zuzana Licko and forbid us to use Helvetica! He gave us a real eye and interest for type. From there, I decided that I had to learn more about letterforms. I had the opportunity to follow a course that combined both typography and typeface design, and again I was taught by passionate people. Among them was Franck Jalleau, a very skilled stone carver and type designer of the French Imprimerie Nationale. The course was a bit old-school with endless hours of calligraphy and hand-drawing on tracing paper. It was great. When I graduated, I knew I wanted to work as a type designer, but did not feel confident enough to get started professionally straight away. This is why I went to Reading. The approach there was quite different from the one I had experienced in France, but it was complementary.

All together I feel that I came to type design rather naturally. I started by using type in graphic design projects, until I realised that what I really wanted to do was to design the type itself!

You’ve already designed several typefaces. What do you like most and least about designing type?

The beginning of designing a typeface is always very exciting. At that stage it is impossible to know what the typeface will look like eventually. Experimenting with weights and italics is also a lot of fun. On the non-Latin side, I really enjoy drawing Greek.

And what I like least… I find kerning a bit tedious, although it’s always satisfying once you’ve done it well and your typeface is well spaced and kerned.

How do you usually start designing a typeface? Can you describe the process? Do you start from a specific letter?

When I sketch or start a design in FontLab I always start with the letters ‘a’ and ‘n’. I think they are nice letters to start with, through them you can express a lot about a design. Then I expand to letters such as b, e, h, o, s, d, r, p, and uppercase H and O. The next stage will be to write “Hamburgefontsiv”. I think it is better to keep a rather limited set of glyphs to start with, as the design will be changing a lot and it can be time-consuming to implement the changes in a wider character set.

Fairly quickly I will also experiment with weight and width variations to see how it could work as a family. I think it is important to do that, it can quickly give you an idea of the things that can and cannot survive in a design. Working on extreme weights can be very inspirational too.

How long does it take to create a typeface?

4 months, 3 days, 8 hours and 20 minutes! No, this is a difficult question; it can take a couple of days for a simple display face with a small character set, up to a few years in some other cases. In fact most type designers I know work on a few different projects at the same time — you rarely work full-time on one typeface. Type is a long, slow process, occasionally you need to take a bit of distance with what you produce and then come back to it with a fresh eye.

What are you working on now / future plans?

Recently I’ve been helping Robin Nicholas on a new addition to the Monotype library, a serif type family named Ysobel that should come out soon.

I worked more specifically on the display faces. I’m also working on custom font projects for Monotype Imaging that I can’t really develop here, and that are keeping me pretty busy. More personally, I am still working on finishing Capucine, the typeface I started developing when I was studying in Reading.

Your favourite type designers / typefaces?

It’s hard to choose! I really like the work of Cyrus Highsmith, my personal favorite is Prensa. In a different style, I think František Štorm produces great typefaces; I am always looking forward to his new releases. I am also very much attracted to script typefaces, and being French I can only admire some of the things that came out of France between the 1930s and 1960s: typefaces by Marcel Jacno, Roger Excoffon, Joan Trochut Blanchard… I’m a big fan. I also love the work of Alejandro Paul.

Every year The St Bride Foundation holds a lecture in memory of Justin Howes, a great typographer and historian who was instrumental in supporting the St Bride Printing Library. He re-established the firm of HW Caslon, published books, organised exhibitions, delivered lectures and worked with the Type Museum in Stockwell, finally moving to the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp before his death in 2005, aged 41.

Previous lectures have been popular, but demand was so high for this year’s lecture that all the tickets were booked up in two hours and it had to be moved to Conway Hall to allow more people in, and still there was a waiting list. Given that Matthew Carter was giving the lecture and he would be talking about his views on type revivals, it was perhaps not so surprising so many people wanted to go. For an hour he talked through the development of some of his typefaces and his philosophy not just on revivals but on type design in general. I suspect it’s this philosophy and thinking that interested a lot of the attendees, including me, so I’ll focus more on that here.

‘I’m not a nostalgist […] more of a ‘presentist’ given to typographical regressions’

Throughout the talk, and right from the start, Carter emphasised how he was presenting his own views on the subject and not advocating a particular approach, stating, ‘I’m not a ‘nostalgist’, I don’t believe type should look like it did in the 15th and 16th Centuries. You could describe me more of a ‘presentist’ given to typographical regressions’.

I found one of the earliest bits of work he showed rather interesting. He had recreated a missing ‘ragged r’ for a blackletter font used by Oxford University Press, and I must admit such a thing was new to me. I must have seen (and traced) that form of the letter thousands of times and in context actually read it as an r, but hadn’t thought much on it. To explain, a straight ‘r’ is used after a straight-edged character, and the ragged form is used after a round-edged character. The book in question was on the history of printing, and so the missing character would have been somewhat embarrassing for the OUP. You learn something every day…

Carter spoke often of the help that St Bride Library has been throughout his career, with various anecdotes of sneaking books out of the library to get Photostats done round the corner on Fleet Street. Later, I assume, the Library must have got a photocopier of their own because Carter said that its work would play a starring role in the talk through the examples on his slides.

One of the fascinating copies he showed were those of Ambrose Heal’s History of English Types, showing the mechanics and geometry you should follow to reproduce the lettering.

Carter remarked that for a student armed only with a quill the instructions must have been terrifying indeed, but for a type designer the detailed diagrams were an absolute boon; from them he eventually created Snell Roundhand. He also said that revivals and re-creations like this are only possible with digital type - looking at the incredibly beautiful but very deeply kerned double-f ligature, you realise why. Kerning as deep as that ‘would be impossible in metal type’.

He showed some preliminary sketches for the script, which he cheerfully admitted were entirely bogus, saying, ‘Almost all of the preliminary sketches you ever see for a typeface are bogus, created after the fact because a reviewer asked to see them’. So if you ever wondered how these sketches were always so neat and perfect, that’s why. One genuine piece he showed though was the ‘D’ which only exists because someone at Linotype spilled paint on it and it was sent to him to clean up. He promptly forgot about it and it remained in a desk drawer until long after Linotype had decommissioned their Photostat machines and, incredibly, destroyed all the production drawings with them. Carter thanked the clumsy printer for damaging the drawing and ensuring its survival!

Next he showed some of the development work on Big Caslon, and showed some samples of larger sizes of the original Caslon, and some from the recut of 1880.

At this point he provided some more insight on his philosophy, in that to recreate the original exactly would be to create a pastiche, something of limited use and of interest to very few people.

He likened historical types to musical scores. We can replay them by reviving them, but we can never recreate the original perfectly, as it was a product of its time and place. Each era has its different needs, its different fashions and different typographical conventions. He said to be a type reviver, you need to be an amplifier, a translator, to adapt the original ‘score’ to its new ‘performance’. It’s an interesting approach and I completely agree — just resurrecting an old type isn’t enough, you need to restore it, breathe new life into it.

So for Big Caslon, Carter based much of his revival on the recut of the 1880s, it was, in his words, ‘a revival of a revival’. He recreated swashes that had been introduced in the Victorian recut, admitting that they weren’t quite right for the face but that it was necessary they be included because the Caslon that people were familiar with had them, and they would be missed.

From there Carter spoke on the development of Miller and Century, both of which are pretty well documented elsewhere so I won’t reproduce it all here. He did make a comment on the cliché of Didot-esque faces in fashion magazines which ‘refuses to die’, saying, ‘Perhaps it’s because the hairlines are so anorexic, they represent some kind of ideal for a fashionable typeface?’

One other comment here caught my attention as it fits closely with my own philosophy. While describing the development of the Newsweek typeface, he said he’d come across some font samples produced by Figgins Foundry, and digitised them himself: “To understand something, take it apart and put it back together again. Digitise it.” I couldn’t agree more!

The last revival project he talked about was for Yale University. He had the job of creating two faces for them; one for general use in print, downloadable and usable by everyone associated with the university for use on everything from PhD theses to invoices; and another for use on the University’s signage around campus.

The latter was apparently the most urgent, as Yale had virtually no signage whatsoever. The signs that did exist were carved into the stone on various buildings, usually in heavy blackletter or other medieval forms to match the Gothic-Revival architecture of the University itself. None of it was particularly readable, so something had to be done.

He explained a little of the background to the project: Yale has an original copy of Aldus Manutius’ De Aetna, which was the inspiration for Bembo, and the high point of Venetian Roman type. Bembo was the face that Yale were using already for their official documents, so Carter designed the new typeface as a revival directly from De Aetna, which (I would think) meant he could spend lots of time worshipping studying the original manuscript.

This is an example of both faces together. You’d expect looking at these that the top one is for print use, and the bottom one for signage — after all, signs are basically display type, right? In fact it’s the other way round. Signs, Carter explained, have much in common with captions; they tend to get viewed from a distance, under less than ideal lighting conditions and from various angles, so are often at the limit of what the eye can perceive.

In the end, the Yale signage face was far more successful than Carter imagined. Since 1701 Yale had virtually no signs on campus, but after the face was designed there were signs everywhere. In his own words, the typeface effectively ‘went viral’, appearing not only on buildings but sprinkler valves and recycling bins. Everything that could be labelled, was.

Carter wrapped up the talk at this point with another good point on his philosophy on revivals, for which I shall have to paraphrase as I didn’t write down his words precisely, ‘However gigantic the giants upon whose shoulders we stand, by virtue of your additional height you can still see, however slightly, further than they could’.

And then we had some questions, which raised a few other interesting points.

Q. Is all old type worth reviving?

According to Carter, no. ‘The only reason most old types have survived is because someone was too lazy to throw it away’.

Q. What about new technology? Does that make it easier? Too easy?

Carter: The technical part of type design is not the difficult part. OpenType will not make you a good type designer. He said he sees students producing 800 characters really quickly, where by the same point he would still have been working on type pairs such as na, nb, nc and so on. He said that it’s easy to race ahead without having got the basics sorted, and that on his courses students aren’t even allowed to kern until they’ve got to a fairly advanced level, as kerning can mask fundamental problems in the design of your type.

He commented that OpenType is revolutionary and useful but has far greater relevance to non-Latin scripts, that writing systems that couldn’t be digitised before now can be. I would say that this is going to be one of the interesting typographic developments of the 21st century, as more writing systems become available online, how will the Anglo-centric internet develop and change? Will it break everything? After all, even now we have character encoding problems online, and that’s often with pages written in English!

Q. What is your methodology on producing type?

Carter said that he doesn’t draw well, so as soon as he didn’t have to, he stopped. He now draws directly onto screen.

One final, and very good point he gave was that when teaching he tries not to be doctrinaire; so many type designers are self-taught, there are so many routes into the discipline that there are many more valid approaches than the one he uses.

Pretty informative, and highly inspiring all round. Thank you Matthew Carter, and St Bride!

Aegir Hallmundur is a UK-based designer, and author of Ministry of Type.

This July, the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading is offering a week-long, condensed version of the MA Typeface Design course it has been offering for the last ten years. It may only last 5 days, but it promises to give a small group of participants a chance to spend all of that time getting some insight and feedback from the core staff at Reading — Gerry Leonidas, Fiona Ross, and Gerard Unger — along with some brief sessions with a few more of us who work with the department.

According to the course description, “We will work very closely with a small group of people to build an understanding of context and perspective in design, both on the theoretical level and through feedback on participants’ work. Our feedback will concentrate on how participants make design decisions, and how they identify quality in their design work. There’s no hand holding: we will expect people to work quickly, be independent learners, and expect their questions to be asked with more probing questions.”

It sounds intense, in a really good way. Those of us who have already done a year (or more) in Reading have all learned (the hard way, more often than not) that doing the MA is a very self-driven process that ultimately comes down to your ability to soak up everything you can and then figure out how to make sense of it all in our own work. That year was spent taking in the different perspectives of our instructors, our classmates, visiting designers and historians, and examining the treasure trove of specimens, books, ephemera, and artefacts that the department made available to us.

A week-long course may not give you the same luxury of time to digest all that material and produce an entire typeface family, but it sounds like an incredible start, or an invaluable addition to what you may already know. (Luckily, you won’t need to write a dissertation, either.) At £1,540 plus food and accommodation for the week, a course like this is no frivolous undertaking, but the opportunity to get so much expert advice and to inspect the material in the department’s collections is easily worth it if you’re serious about type. I can’t claim total objectivity about this stuff: I’m tremendously grateful for the experience I had at Reading, and for all the things I’m still learning from the people there. Not everyone is able to take a full year out of their lives to get that experience, though, and this sounds like a great chance to take advantage of some of the most valuable parts of it.

There is more information about the course in this PDF overview, if you’re tempted to attend.

Dan Rhatigan is a typeface designer, graphic designer, teacher, and long-time blogger at ultrasparky.org. He received an MA with distinction in Typeface Design form the University of Reading in 2007, and he’s now working with the Typography Department to research and design non-Latin typefaces for Monotype Imaging.

I will soon announce ILT’s gargantuan give-away. There are 40 prizes, from vouchers to buy type, and books, to posters and Helvetica Moleskines. As soon as ILT hits 40,000 RSS subscribers, I’ll run the competition. Basically, I’ll do it like this: 20 prizes for the best-submitted type tips; the remaining 20 prizes will be distributed randomly to those who follow me on Twitter. If you haven’t already subscribed, then all it takes is a mere click.

Let’s get started with something free — a free font. A product of the inspired FontStruct, Sessions, by John Skelton, is a free modular display typeface that really is quite special. The specimens are particularly creative, and demonstrate how this face might be used:

You can download the font from FontStruct. There are more samples on Behance.

I’d like to see it released as an OpenType font with features like those available in Linotype’s Madame.

I’m feeling left out. These were sent out by Brazilian design studio, ps.2 arquitetura + design as gifts. Perhaps they’ll send a set to me (not-so-subtle hint):

Via Iain Claridge.

Something for the body. New from the Typography Shop, the sans and serif tees:

Never quite sure how to crop these.

And new from ISO50, is Vuela:

In the very unlikely event that you haven’t seen Scott Hansen’s posters, then do take a look, I recently bought Svenska.

Love this little book from Brighten the Corners. Meet Stanley & Marvin:

If you like this, then you’ll also like The Serif Fairy.

Lots of good work from A2/SW/HK. I particularly like this custom type for Foreground:

I like this work by Brazilian ps.2 arquitetura + design, and for the Museum of Image and Sound:

I also like some of the spreads, and the internal repetition of the cyan from the cover. The typeface set on the cover is the monospaced Simple by Norm, that was later developed as a set of proportional fonts for the Köln-Bonn airport in Germany.

And, talking of monospaced types and Lineto, their typewriter typeface, Valentine (a faithful digital reproduction of the type designed for the Olivetti Valentine) is worth taking a look at:

This is one of many decorated initial caps from illuminated manuscripts, photographed by Eben Sorkin. Absolutely beautiful, isn’t it:

What’s more, be sure to take a look at Eben’s Letters in old books collection. Here’s a little Jenson to whet your typographic appetite:

From decorated type to wood type. The online museum of wood types. Thought I’d mentioned it here before, but discovered I’d only tweeted about it:

Thanks to Antonio for the reminder.

For those seeking a fine start to the blissful[?] institution that is marriage (I’m tempted… but will say no more), look no further than 100 Layer Cake. This piece by Hammerpress:

What do 18,000 nails and the word enjoy have in common. This, by Juan Camilo Rojas:

On a lighter note

Kern in Space is fun game from Veer Ideas. It’s also from whence I borrowed stole this article’s title:

Type links

Oh No! Not More Web Fonts!
Typography tools for Linux
E-book design, and typography
Congress on type — via.
42 typography resources — via Peter van Impelen.
Mayflower Smooth Pro — P22
FontShop welcomes three new foundries
An interview with Ray Larabie
Helvetica & Univers
Printing terminology
Web font embedding, points missing
Web fonts now (how we’re doing with that)

I really want to like these new covers from Faber & Faber, but I just find them incredibly dull. I want to like them because they are an attempt at a purely typographic design; I don’t like them because I can’t see the design; I’m just seeing text slapped on a cover. Perhaps you see something else:

Or perhaps my judgement is prejudiced by my antipathy for Beckett. Of these covers I’m reminded of the words of Vivian Mercier who wrote that Beckett (semi-coincidentally the author of the above books),

has achieved a theoretical impossibility — a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What’s more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice. — Irish Times, 18 February 1956, p. 6.

Sidetracked there for a moment. What next? Ah, yes…

Another free display font. Cube from Font Fabric:

This does not come as a font file, but rather as vectors in an eps.

Read about the Dollar Redesign Project on the exceptional Ministry of Type:

Video

An epic battle. Helvetica vs Arial. Doesn’t do anything for me, but it might for you:

Click here to view the embedded video.

By contrast, this one made me chortle. Partly because, to my surprise, I make a brief (2:01), subtitled appearance in it:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some very pretty animated type from Madrid-based Cocoe:

Click here to view the embedded video.

New releases

Whereas the relatively recent slab serif Archer, is the product of numerous historical sources, Sentinel takes the Clarendon, dusts it off, refines it, and makes it so much more useable (twelve weights & their italics). What most surprised me is that no-one else had really attempted to fill the Clarendon gap.

I’ve always found Clarendon to be a little claustrophobic for my taste; just a little clumsy too; and I always imagined that it had something to do with those small apertures. Guess I was wrong. I haven’t spent enough time with Sentinel to quite figure out why it works so well. I suspect some kind of magic. I picture Jonathan taking the fonts out of the oven; a solemn nod in Tobias’ direction, and he dusts the freshly-baked glyphs with something that resembles star dust. Anyway, the great thing about Sentinel is (whether or not you’re a fan of the Clarendon) is that H&FJ has reinvigorated or even resurrected the ‘genre’. I really think that Sentinel will come to be the go-to Clarendon.

Neutraface Slab from House Indistries, accompanied by the quality type-related merchandise that we’ve come to expect from them:

New from Linotype is Libelle, a Copperplate Script by Jovica Veljovic.

Comes replete with all the OpenType features that one expects to find in a good script — contextual alternates, discretionary ligatures, initial & final forms, etc.

We love typography

If I were to list all my favourite picks from WLT, I’d be forced to start another post. So, I’ll just feature this drawing by artist Jason Manley:

You can see more of Jason’s work on jasonmanley.com.

And this spread from the Rare Book Room:

And a third from Gig Posters, and designed by Salvador López:

ILT shop

I have the last remaining prints of Seb Lester’s beautifully screen-printed Mightier. These are the last available anywhere, so if you want one, hurry. Moreover, I’ll be printing a couple of my own posters; and, I’ve invited several designers to design new and exclusive posters for ILT. Ideally I’d like to offer two versions of everything: not everyone can afford a limited edition poster or letterpress print, so I’m hoping to offer a standard, less expensive, offset version for all designs. I’m discussing the details with my printer, and will let you know more soon. If you’re a type designer, and would like to design a poster for ILT, then let me know. Stefan Hattenbach is designing the first in the series of posters by type designers.

And, finally…

It’s no exaggeration to say that ILT wouldn’t exist but for the support of The Deck. They’re running a little survey, so if you have a couple of minutes, then please let them know what you think. It’s the most fun you’ll ever have with a survey, I promise — though question #21 is something of a challenge.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s roundup of all things type. Have a brilliant weekend.

If you’ve ever been to the Library of Congress and seen the Gutenberg Bible and the Giant Bible of Mainz, you will understand the sheer joy that one can find from looking at a page of quality-set blackletter.

Or, if you’re less Bible and more Necronomicon, nothing less than the most wicked blackletter will work for that black metal album cover you’ve been contemplating.

The problem with blackletter is two-fold. First, other than diplomas and newspaper nameplates, the general population has difficulty reading it because of its archaic forms. Second, because of the perceived connotations of blackletter, many people consciously avoid using it. (Which is a shame, really, because it can be quite beautiful when used properly.)

Which brings us to Moyenage, a blackletter typeface system(!) by František Štorm that is part Bible and part Necronomicon, equally adept at setting traditional and modern works alike. At first sight I was in love with the typeface, so I decided to find out more about the typeface from Štorm himself.

Let’s see what he had to say.

An interview with František Štorm

To start, in your own words, will you describe Moyenage for us?

Moyenage seems to me like an alternative blackletter. Its feeling is serious and powerful; I can imagine sounds of heavy distorted guitars, or a walk in a dark forest during twilight. Its shapes are dynamic, although they are tightly fixed within a strict rhythm of line. It may be successfully combined with any script font, even with some emotional calligraphy, where Moyenage can provide a contrasting counterpart.

When did you first conceive of Moyenage, and how long did it take to go from initial sketches to finished product? Were there any specific issues that needed to be handled in the design that were different from your other Latin derived scripts?

Last gloomy autumn, just before I left for India, I was contemplating about a black metal album, so the idea raised to make a suitable typeface for its design. The music isn’t recorded yet and it probably will never be, but the letters are here.

I have not sketched for many years—I use a laptop instead of sketchbook—but this was an exception. There were a couple of pages drawn by pencil and pen. Every traditional blackletter is based on calligraphic principles. I was never good at calligraphy, but this time I had to recall my school skills.

(Another aim, although not substantial, was to offer a writing specimen so painters could make pub-inscriptions on walls just by brush.)

A particular issue was traditional blackletter uppercase, which is illegible for today’s reader. It had to be made Latin-like.

Moyenage is quite possibly the first ever blackletter designed as a full system, consisting of 25 different numerical variations between ultra-narrow, ultra-thin (Moyenage 11) to ultra-wide, ultra-bold (Moyenage 55), all with small caps, alternates, lining and non-lining figures, full Cyrillic support, etc. Underware’s Fakir was extraordinary at 8 regular cuts plus two small caps and an ornament font. Considering that typical blackletters have at most 4 variations, can you explain how, and why, you developed such an extensive system?

I love Fakir; it’s a wonderful family. The PDF (download) tells stories from Varanasi, India. I was there two years ago, so I know what kind of inspiration Underware took from India… But Fakir is extraordinary in many different ways, regardless of the number of fonts: it’s a contemporary looking alphabet, 99% original; it only shares some indirect breath with “blackletter” in common meaning. I can feel some hints of cubism, graffiti, linocut, expressionism…

Moyenage is rather traditional, as I am. The interpolated instances only illustrate a huge potential of textura principles. I confess—only several of them can be seriously used. We typographers sometimes do such useless experiments just to demonstrate what’s possible beyond real needs.

What were the historical inspirations and influences that informed your design decisions concerning Moyenage?

I took inspiration from handwritten French medieval textura trying to deconstruct the alleged German monopoly on blackletter.

Did you look to any contemporary typefaces for inspiration when creating your typeface?

Only routine—as we must check if anybody hadn’t already done the same thing.

On the MyFonts blog, Adam Twardoch commented: “What is so phenomenal about Moyenage in my eyes is that it is a blackletter typeface that includes a Cyrillic character set. Historically, the Cyrillic alphabet never was written in the blackletter style.” You also mention on your web site Stormtype.com that Moyenage symbolizes “the lovelorn union of Germans and Russians in the 20th century.” Will you explain the design and process of creating the Cyrillic characters, since blackletters don’t have a historical antecedent to work from?

Adam is nice. Well, I’m not a political person, but I was always curious what kind of emotions a typeface can evoke: some of my countrymates get angry every time they see a blackletter because of Nazi association, although there is no historical evidence of that link.

Blackletter had no specific nationality in the process of its development in the Middle Ages, but the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Ed. note: The non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) was real, so why not illustrate it by a typeface which shares both German and Russian features? Remember too the recent Putin-Schroeder friendship, not to mention the notorious servility of Czech politicians.

There were several attempts at Cyrillic blackletter mostly at the end of the 20th Century, as a romantic flashback—all of them were poor. I know some Russian from primary school; it’s writing is quite easy. Just take a flat-nib pen, make the shapes slightly rectangular, and voilà!—you have Moyenage.

What is noticeable to me is that unlike other modern blackletters like Fakir, Moyenage seems like it could be used very successfully in traditional settings. And yet, similar to Fakir, it is clearly a very modern interpretation. Given that Moyenage was clearly designed to be usable in a wider range of applications than a typical blackletter, where would you personally like to see it used?

I’m happy again to see Moyenage mentioned next to the great Fakir, which is far more interesting and innovative.

Obviously, a type designer has no influence on where he sees his typeface used, and that’s alright. Most probably one could be pleasantly surprised.

Moyenage, as well as any blackletter, suits very well to black metal music covers, posters, t-shirts, and perhaps on bottles, invitations or diplomas… I would only frankly not recommend it for highway traffic signs or subway orientation systems.

I’ve used it several times in magazines for some ads, and yes — for a cover design for my colleague Laudatio, at the occasion of his successful conferment, I’ve made a song for him.

One last question: Can the stereotype be broken?

Of course yes, if we try.

More information

Moyenage PDF specimen

Recent discussion about less condensed blackletters on Typophile

A web developer and designer, Dan Gayle has a few unfinished typefaces sitting in the drawers, waiting for the day when they too can be featured on I Love Typography.

Let’s get right down to business, and start with something really beautiful. Seb Lester, who I’ve mentioned on these pages before, recently released a new poster. The picture below really doesn’t do it justice. The silver print on gorgeous Plike paper is absolutely stunning:

In fact, I don’t like to call this a poster. Flames is a work of art, deserving of a frame. Hand-pulled screen print, A2, metallic silver ink on black 240gsm Plike paper; a limited, signed edition of 100. And, you can now buy it from ILT. These won’t be around long, so hurry if you wish to own one. I’ll soon been posting more of Seb’s prints to the ILT shop. I’ll announce them via Twitter.

Love the work of artist Steve Lambert. Where signage meets art. Wonderful:

Like this piece by Luis Vicente Hernandez, from Madrid. Kind of Art Deco meets wood type:

Like this woven geometric lettering from Jordan Metcalf:

Wear some glyph with one of these MyFonts t-shirts. Which would you wear?

Design Observer scores another hit with this great post on Printers’ marks:

In fact, some of my personal favourite printers’ marks are to be found in Swedish books. Perhaps I’ll write about that some day.

Your message in the sky with SkyTypers. The video on the home page shows how it’s done:

Just pretend you didn’t see the typeface used to set the captions.

What to do with all those old CDs? Well, you could try something like this:

Helvetica Neue Bold, but not as we know it. Sign constructed from 640 CDs.

Thanks, @steveavery.

Fire Type from You should like type too:

This is a great exercise. Take a movie, any movie, and create a poster for it; only using the title and the bare minimum of ornament. A wholly typographic poster:

If you decide to have a go, then be sure to show me.

This next one elicited a wow! These photos are stunning:

What’s even more exciting [deep, shallow breaths] is that you can buy the letters:

Must resist the urge, must resist …
Thanks to David Brown for the heads up. Also mentioned on the Ministry of Type.

Here’s something else I found via Ministry of Type. The Berlin Museum of Letters:

The World Digital Library is definitely worth taking a look at. Pan, zoom, download, enjoy:

Oddly enough, I discovered this Web site in my newspaper.

Really like the work of Japanese Commune Inc; especially this piece, and how it constructs kana from elements of the Latin alphabet:

I’ve seen this type of treatment before, but most make a pig’s ear of it.

Great Flickr set of covers from the Spanish magazine Nuevo Mundo:

Beautiful signage by fokusform:

Some nice branding/identity from Hook:

Just in case you haven’t seen the work of Alison Carmichael:

Smashing Magazine compiled a list of 30 typefaces for corporate design. I usually sigh when I see these lists; however, this is a good one. Here’s one of my favourites from the list:

I’ve been playing with the new Gotham Narrow, and I love it. If you’re a fan of Gotham (and who isn’t), then the new narrow is a welcome edition to the family. And, if you can’t stretch to buying all the new Gothams, then I’d recommend starting with Gotham Condensed.

New Faces

Lots of new typefaces released recently. Here are my top picks:

TDC2 2008 winner, National, from Kris Sowersby, now comes with light and thin weights, with respective italics. Fantastic:

Be sure to take a look at the PDF specimen. The Village specimens are excellent. Would love to see more foundries publishing such comprehensive specimens. A word of warning, however: if you print the specimen, you’ll then be consumed by an overwhelming desire to buy it.

Virtuosa, one of Hermann Zapf’s first typefaces gets an OpenType overhaul, and much more besides. Meet Virtuosa Classic:

From Fountain Type, the new Meadow, drawn by Swedish type designer Göran Söderström:

Catacumba, again from Fountain Type. This one designed by Rui Abreu. Comes with two distinctive titling sets:

Not convinced? Then watch this wonderful little video short from Rui:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next up is a display face from James Puckett. The nomenclature set to reflect the present global economy. Meet Downturn:

It’s quirky in its intended unevenness, quite square, blocky, no-nonsense, industrial.

Matagrosso, a new rustic calligraphic script from Sudtipos:

I guess this next one shouldn’t be listed under new faces, as it’s unfinished, and therefore unreleased. But it coming along nicely. Read more about Nick Cooke’s work in progress over on Typophile.

Looking forward to its release.

Type links

Can Good Design Save Our Newspapers?
Real fonts on the Web
25 logos with hidden messages
Educational printing workshops in the home of Gutenberg
The romance of printing
Type Nesting — thanks Ivan.
The art of the grid
Slammer app — customizable grid overlays
Comic Sans Hairline — well, made me smile.
40 examples of typography in advertising design
Lots & lots of posters
Typography for Mobile User Interfaces
Arabic light calligraphy
MyFonts April rising stars
Font Police
The H&FJ Institute for Unapplied Mathematics
Web font embedding, points missing
Tal Leming on Web fonts
Letters, logos, & sign systems
Type Camp 2009 — Galiano & India
Jason Santa Maria interview on RBtL

Envelopes for Font Geeks:

OK, let’s take a breather. Got a few minutes (hours) to kill? Then try the type-themed Pong from Hype for Type:

If you’re looking for a WordPress theme that honours your type, then look no further than Thematic:

In fact, it’s not so much a theme as a framework. Whenever I create a new blog, I now start with Thematic. Incredibly easy to work with, and requires minimal edits to get it working with your design.

Letterpress

I have a big soft spot for this kind of over-printed wood type letterpress. This is a piece by Matt Busher from the London College of Communication.

And this piece is one of the very best examples of this method. The work of Nick Sherman:

For a veritable wood type feast be sure to check out Nick’s wood type Flickr set.

Parachute has a great interview with printer Justin Knopp of Typoretum:

Featured face

Here are two of my most recent purchases: first is a type that was originally commissioned by Nancy Harris Rouemy for the New York Times Magazine. Owing to popular demand, it’s now available for us mortals. It’s called Memoriam:

Gorgeous, Isn’t it.

The second is described as an ornament font which happens to contain letterforms. Restraint, the font-child of Marian Bantjes and Ross Mills, is such a pleasure to play with.

What else can I say about Restraint? Buy it.

News & new

For Print Only (FPO) is s great new blog from Under Consideration:

Plenty of proof that print is alive and kicking.

FPO is a blog dedicated to both the visual stimulus and the detailing of the development and production of printed matter.

One to subscribe to.

While we’re on the topic, another great little site from Bryony and Armin is Wordit. A simple idea: they select a theme word each and every month, and invite us all to create an image about or around that chosen theme. This month’s (May’s) word is flow. Why not have a go.

Adobe launches a new type site:

Check out their Font Finder too.

WLT

Now serving more than 3000 type-related images, WLT is proving insanely popular. I have to limit the time I spend on the site; it’s quite addictive. I was going to list some of my favourites here, but this post is already quite long, so just click on over to WLT, and take a look for yourself. Remember, you can now submit your own recommendations via the Repositorium. Kari and I have lots of new features planned. I’d like to thank the contributors for all their posts. Remember, you can naviagate between pages using the left and right cursor keys!

OK, just one pick. This beautiful letterpress piece by the incredibly talented Jessica Hische:

Posted here on WLT. You can read more about Alison over at Creative Review.

Gargantuan give-away

You may have heard me mention on Twitter, the 40-prizes give-away. I have 25 prizes thus far. If you’d like to donate something, then please mail me at johno@ilovetypography.com. Why 40 prizes? To celebrate ILT’s 40,000 RSS subscribers. We’re not there yet, but as soon as we hit that number, then I’ll launch the give-away. More than anything, it’s an excuse to say thank you — to all of you. There are some really great prizes. More details coming soon.

And finally …

A few of you have asked whether WLT will replace the week in type. I hope the above answers that. I have several articles ready to post — a rare luxury. What shall I publish next. I’ll surprise you. Thanks for reading. Have a fantastic week.

If you’re a designer and haven’t already heard about Typographica’s relaunched site and Favorite Typefaces of 2008 list, chances are you’ve been stranded on a desert island, far away from any relevant news sources. And even then, the list has received considerable attention beyond the usual design and typography blogs, getting mention in sources that wouldn’t usually have much to say about type.

With all that coverage already out there, what’s left to say that hasn’t already been mentioned? Stephen Coles has written and spoken about the history of Typographica and the reasons for its redesign; Joshua Lurie-Turell (Typographica’s founder) has bestowed his blessing on the new site; and countless other sources have heralded, congratulated, and approved via blogs and Twitter updates.

An element of Typographica that I think deserves to be noted—and indeed has contibuted to the site’s fine reputation—is how it is purely about type for type’s sake… type for the joy of type. Consider the following, from a “font industry” point of view: Both Stephen Coles and Chris Hamamoto (the site’s editor and designer, respectively) are employees of FontShop (a major font distributor). Knowing that, one might assume that the content is biased accordingly, that the opinions expressed are not objective. However, Typographica’s vast archive is evidence to the contrary.

For instance, despite my own employment with MyFonts (another major font distributor), I was  honored with being invited to write the introduction to this year’s Favorite Typefaces list. Also note that Stephen has written fair commentary on numerous other topics in the past, despite a direct relation to his professional circumstances.

Historically the site’s contibutors also come from every facet of the type world, presenting views from about as many “competitors” in one place as is possible. I use the term in quotation marks, because—regardless of politics—a mutual passion for typography in some shape or form will bring people together as the best of allies. Typographica embodies that spirit perfectly, where the only thing that matters in the end is the love of type.

Notes:

Listen to Stephen on the RBtL podcast.

One can never have too many books about type and typography. One of the most recent additions to my own library is Theodore Rosendorf’s The Typographic Desk Reference or, if you’re in a hurry, simply TDR.

From the outset it’s worth stressing that this is not a how-to book. It does not compete with Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style or Felici’s The Complete Manual of Typography. It is, as its title makes quite clear, a reference book. Think of it more as a dictionary or rather a pocket encyclopedia of type terms.

Comprising four main sections, it’s pretty easy to find your way around — something essential in a book of reference.

Section one, TERMS

A collection of the most important type terms. Definitions are clear and concise, and accompanied by illustrative examples in the margin.

Section two, GLYPHS

A listing of the standard ISO and extended Latin character set glyphs. Everything from a-acute (á) to z-underdot (ẓ). Each entry is accompanied by its respective Unicode reference (code point).

Section three, ANATOMY & FORM

Everything from definitions for the familiar ascender and descender to the less familiar like beard and double struck.

Section four, CLASSIFICATION & SPECIMENS

A tricky one. There’s really no consensus as to how type should be classified. The system used in TDR is loosely based on ATypI-Vox.

The specimens are generally representative, and all the usual suspects are there, though great to see John Hudson’s excellent Constantina (Garalde) and Peter Noordzij’s Caecilia (slab serif), plus some relatively recent releases like FontFont’s Meta Serif (transitional).

A great deal of work has gone into this little book. Standing at only 136 pages, it is nonetheless a little gem. Handsomely hardbound with an embossed cover, set in Adobe Caslon, on pencil-friendly stock, the pages are well-designed, the typography uncomplicated and airy. I would have preferred to see something other than Adobe Caslon — an excellent text face, but one I’m a little tired of. The only negative thing I have to say about this book is regards its inner (gutter) margins. A little on the narrow side; but that’s a gripe I have with about 99% of all books. I also hope they publish a paperback version in the near future.

Information on ordering, along with a number of PDF sample pages is available at typedeskref.com.

I’ll conclude with an excerpt from the book’s foreword, penned by Ellen Lupton:

These pages reveal an admiration for typography’s long history as well as an awareness of its current concerns and anticipated evolution. A book such as this belongs on the shelf of anyone who works in the service of typography.

If you have a copy, then let me know what you think in the comments below. Oh, and you can follow Theo on Twitter, @theorosendorf.

I’ve been a little quiet here of late. Now you know why. I’ve been working days and nights on a new site, something I see as a natural extension to this one. Meet WLT — welovetypography.com, a collaboration between myself and Kari Pätilä. It has been great fun to create, and I really hope that it inspires.

Rather than spend paragraphs explaining how and what it is, just take a look for yourselves. It’s like an FFFFound for type-related content, a type-themed delicious for the eyes.

One of the features that I’m particularly fond of (Kari’s handiwork) is the search by colour.

You can learn more about the site on its about page, and more about its contributors on the, um, contributors page. They’ve been busy bookmarking some 1000 images and videos!

To share, just add #WLT to your tweet, and see what others are saying. Enjoy!

Other news

There’s now a more mobile-friendly version of ILT at m.ilovetypography.com. The clever people at mobify.me created it. It certainly loads incredibly quickly, and supports dozens of mobile devices. Would love to hear what you think.

I’ll now be back to posting more frequently here on iLT. Coming up is a packed-to-bursting the week in type, a book review, a wonderful essay from a great type designer, a couple of interviews, and lots more besides.

It’s a beautiful sunny day here! Wherever you are, and whatever you’re doing, or thinking of doing, have an exceptional week.

I had intended to publish my review of Theo’s The Typographic Desk Reference today. I’ll publish that next week. And, I missed out on April Fool’s. I had so many ideas, from the new and free Adobe fonts with embedded ad glyphs (the humour’s in the execution!) to the … well, I’ll save that for next year. In the meantime, here’s plenty to keep you busy. Everything from new typefaces, interviews to … well, you’ll see. A little later than usual owing to days and nights spent on a soon-to-be-launched type-related site that I’m pretty excited about, and hoping will inspire.

OK, let’s get started with some seriously gorgeous book covers from Louise Fili Ltd:

Where type meets art. The Dreamweaver from Nina Jua Klein:

New fonts & typefaces

FF Seria Arabic by Pascal Zoghbi:

Good to see that FF Milo and FF Balance have been exapanded to support more languages. Nothing more frustrting than finding the right type, only to discover it doesn’t support the languages you’re setting in. For more, see the April FontShop newsletter.

Updates to Typonine’s Tempera Biblio:

A new microsite devoted to FF Dingbats:

Some beautiful spread and covers from IL magazine:

The typeface is Christian Schwartz Publico. Be sure to take a look at the other wonderful spreads and covers on Flickr.

Love these pieces from Stefano Lionetti’s Portfolio on Behance:

Set with Seb Lester’s wonderful Soho. Great display face.

Some wonderful letterpress minature books:

Architecture meets typography in these clever Ikea ads:

Typographic bling, anyone? From Amsterdam-based tjep:

Like this packaging concept from Hattomonkey studio:

No counters, please. Drop poster from Jonathan Looman, AKA Lowman:

Type-related videos

Intro for Web09 from John Ballinger:

Thanks @bboybri.

Love this kind of experimentation. Shadow type. Pretty complex to actually set this up:

Learn more about the project here. Thanks, Max.

Next, a promotional video for James Puckett’s Black Monday, demonstrating the wonders of OpenType:

A forceful political message through the medium of kinetic type:

Thanks to @marcocardenas.

The making of a letterpress poster:

Via Inspire Me. And it was the discovery of Inpsire Me, that led me to this lettering by illustrator Daren Newman:

There are also many other videos from Robothon 2009, especially useful for type designers. There’s even a video on the joys of kern table overflow issues — fascinating.

And from video to audio. Type Radio interviews type designer Kris Sowersby at TypeShed11 in Wellingtonon. Do be sure to check out all the other interviews there. Should keep you entertained and informed for weeks to come.

I mentioned the brilliant Book Cover Archive some time ago. There’s now another great book cover resource in Faceout Books. This is one of the gems I discovered there:

Cover design by the very talented Helen Crawford.

Like this rather elegant use of H&FJ’s Gotham in this identity piece for Cruet & Whisk. Designed by Allison Newhouse:

Tobias Frere-Jones presented this stunning enamel sign to Wim Crouwel, winner of the 2009 Gerrit Noordzij Prize:

It features numerous styles of Gotham. Jonathan Hoelfler writes that the sign features 64 of the 66 styles of Gotham. I wonder who can name the two styles that are omitted! Thanks to H&FJ for permission to use the above photo.

Johnson Banks was comissioned to turn crop circles into lettering. For Quaker Oats:

Came across this on one of my favourite type blogs, Ministry of Type:

If you haven’t already subscribed to Ministry of Type, then do. The Cooper Typography blog, from which the above image (Alfred Mahlau) was sourced is another to add to your feed reader.

Type links

Keyboards for typographers
Arial is everywhere
A natural history of the @ sign
The Palatino story
Metrics Machine 4 (video)
Smoking type
Love, romance, and a little controversy?
The Alphabet: A Dramatic Reading
26 symbols
Downloadable font formats for the Web
The most beautiful alphabet?
Wood type collection for sale (373 fonts +)
White space — how to get it right
Letterpress Things — equipment & resources
Interview with Font Bureau’s Dyana Weissman

On a lighter note

Looking for a theme for your next party. Follow Anne Ditmeyer’s lead, and make it a type-themed birthday party:

And if you’re wondering what to do for entertainment at such a party, then why not steal some sheep with Erik Spiekermann.

Gems from the archives

Fred Smeijers on legibility
I hate ITC Garamond

Featured faces

Bohemia available through Linotype:

From a great serif to a great sans: Apertura, a rounded geometric by Christian Robertson of BetaType:

A great PDF specimen too.

Since my interview with RBtL, I received several emails about Comenius, a crisp and lovely text face from Hermann Zapf. Someone asked where they can find a good example of Comenius in use. One of the best examples is to be found in Type & Typography: Highlights from Matrix — The Review for Printers & Bibliophiles. Besides looking beautiful set in Comenius, the handsomely bound book is a wonderful read.

Perhaps MyFonts wins the April 1st prize with its Interview with Eric Gill. It is, however, worth reading! Both funny and informative.

And finally …

Apologies if you have mailed me recently, and I haven’t replied. Each week, the number of mails I receive through iLT is growing. Be assured, I read everyone, but it’s now impossible to answer them all. I will be creating an FAQ page; perhaps that will help.

Thanks for reading, and have a great, great week.

I remember clearly the day I was waiting for the 6 train at 33rd Street and Park Avenue in New York. I had taken pictures of type on the street for some time, but there was something here that caught my eye. There was a plastic sign on a door with letters and numbers routed out of plastic, and I noticed a couple of characters in particular: the way the 8 curved back into itself, the charming tail of the a. And then I realized that the lowercase e’s were all different. This had been done by hand and therefore wasn’t an existing typeface. I knew then that I could actually make this into a font.

This moment of inspiration in a subway station was the beginning of the year-and-a-half process of designing my first typeface, and the start of an obsession that would permanently change the way I experienced the world. I thought I knew a lot about type as a graphic designer, but I soon realized that the art of typography went much further and deeper than I could have imagined.

Diving in

Having photographed the subway sign, I fired up Illustrator, and later FontLab, and started putting down points and pulling away at the beziers. One thing that really helped early on was opening up some of my favorite fonts in FontLab. I would look at how the points were arranged and the forms were constructed, and would flip and rotate the drawings to see what sort of optical corrections had been made. I found it intriguing to see that many glyphs that appeared symmetrical, like the O in Gotham, were subtly lopsided.

Though I was learning a lot on my own, I needed something more structured. I enrolled in a type design class at Cooper Union, but just days before it was to start it was cancelled. So, I contacted the instructor, Hannes Famira, and started taking private lessons. Hannes had studied at the Royal Academy in the Hague, where he was exposed to the Dutch school of type design. He taught me about Gerrit Noordzij’s Stroke of the Pen theory, the idea that there are two fundamental categories of lettering based on the broad-nibbed and pointed-nibbed pens and that serifs are just an expression of contrast. I did calligraphic exercises based on these ideas as well as drawing experiments with Frank Blokland’s Lettermodel modular type system.

This is how I first learned to evaluate drawing in type design. I went to Hannes’ once a week for the better part of a year, spending two and a half hours with him at a time. Every week I would show Hannes the progress on my typeface, which I was calling Router. He’d get out his red pen, and we’d go through and mark up the drawings. We’d talk about the things he was seeing, and the things I was trying to do. I was initially focused on some of the quirkier aspects of the subway sign, like the narrow f and t, and the strange r. I eventually abandoned those elements as I realized that Router was about something else. As other type designers have noted, self-editing is a crucial part of the process.

But then a funny thing happened. I kept correcting and correcting, and all of a sudden I had sanitized the font and there was almost no personality left in it. What I was left with might as well have been VAG Rounded. In a very early draft, I had played with the idea of exaggerating the swellings in the strokes from the original sign. Now I resurrected that, and found the true character of the font.

Submissions

In addition to working with Hannes, I reached out to other type designers whose work I admired. One of the first people I contacted was Chester Jenkins at Village. I liked that his company was set up as a co-op, run by designers who all did great work.

I also posted my designs on Typophile, and was encouraged to submit my font to FontFont. I worked feverishly toward their May 15 submission deadline, preparing the book weight in roman and italic. I also showed Chester where my work was heading, and he suggested that there might be a home for Router at Village. The royalty percentage at Village was higher, but total sales would probably be less. I heard back from FontFont, and they were interested. I took a few days to think about it, but then let them know that I was going to proceed with Village and release my font in their new foundry, Incubator.

What made the difference was that Chester was willing to work with me and give me the time and attention to help make Router the best it could be, offering drawing feedback and sharing production tips. FontFont is a much bigger organization with a lot more releases, and they would have put me on a much faster timeline.

Production

Once I had decided to release with Village, I started working toward a full draft of the family. Chester sent me files of Apex to show me the character sets they required. At first I was overwhelmed. I didn’t think I could possibly draw a font with about 1000 glyphs in each style. Fortunately, a lot of those are accented characters which can be created through components (linked references to other glyphs), but there are still several hundred original drawings in each of the styles. I had a lot of fun drawing some of the peripheral characters and finding ways for everything to follow the rules of the font, asking questions like “How can a triangle be routed?”

I spaced the font using the control characters ‘H O n o.’ Once I had the correct sidebearings for these characters I applied those values to all the glyphs that have straight or round sides (with some adjustments). Then I placed each character in the string ‘HHAHOAOO’ for uppercase and ‘nnanoaoo’ for lowercase, where ‘A’ or ‘a’ is replaced with the current glyph. Spacing the italic was a counterintuitive mystery — the only character that has the same sidebearings on both sides is the lowercase o, and you build everything off that.

In order to generate the in-between weights (extralight, light, and medium), I made interpolation tests. I did all of the drawing of the thin, book, and bold in Fontlab and then used Robofab (python-enabled Fontlab) to generate UFO masters (Unified Font Objects). Then I opened the UFOs in Prepolator to make sure all of my characters were interpolatable and used Superpolator to do the actual interpolation. Finally, I re-imported the UFOs back into Fontlab and checked each glyph for errors. It’s a lot of steps, but it’s superior to using either the Multiple Master or ‘blend’ action within Fontlab because it’s much more flexible and precise, capable of generating instances that require minimal redrawing.

During this time I kept showing my work to Hannes, as well as having meetings with Chester. I also got great feedback and guidance from Village member Christian Schwartz.

Time to deliver

I could have kept fiddling with it forever, but a date had to be set. I was moving to Providence, R.I. in the summer and didn’t want to take an unfinished font with me.

The last minute drawing and spacing changes were very important. The final steps were to build the accented characters, and then use Metrics Machine to kern the six masters (thin, book, and bold in roman and italic). I finally sent the files to Chester. There was some back and forth over the next week — he caught some mistakes and I rethought a couple of things. Then he mastered it and launched the Incubator foundry on Bastille Day, July 14, 2008, coinciding with Village’s three year anniversary.

A year and a half after I first started, and a world away from my first draft, I had finally published a typeface.

What’s next

I’ve worked on a few custom type commissions since Router’s release as well as projects with my friends at The Design Office, a collaborative office of independent designers here in Providence. Most importantly, I am working on more uncommissioned designs that will eventually become commercial releases. But it hasn’t been as easy as I thought it would be. Just because I have an idea doesn’t mean I can pump it out right away. As Chester told me, “you still have to go through the same snakes and ladders.” The production side of type design is much easier though, because I’m not figuring it out for the first time.

I’m trying to push myself and expand the ways I think about letterforms. In addition to drawing type, I’m taking a calligraphy workshop and later this year a stonecutting class. I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Providence Public Library where they have D.B. Updike’s collection of type specimens and books on printing. And I’m still taking lots of photos of signs and things I see on a day-to-day basis, and reading all the books I can find.

But no amount of research or theory is a substitute for the most important thing: drawing as much as I can.

Bonus: links & thoughts

Several designers have told me how important it is to have a specific use and point size in mind. The idea is that if you try and design a font that’s good for everything, it might not be REALLY good at anything. But if the font works really well for one specific use, then it can probably work well for lots of others. I’ve heard the example of J.K. Rowling writing her books for her daughter. If she tried to write books that everyone would like, they might be too general to connect with anyone.

When you’re drawing a character and it’s taking up the full size of your screen, it’s easy to forget how it will look when you print it at 12 pt. In order for your decisions to have a real impact, the drawing has to be a caricature. It’s okay for details to disappear in text. But only by printing specimens at different sizes can you see the real effect of your actions. And only by looking at the individual letters in words, sentences, and paragraphs can you understand how all of the glyphs work together.

Draw the black and the white shapes. Many designers will say that the white shapes are more important to the overall harmony of the letterform. Just like turning the glyph upside down or looking at it sideways, concentrating on the white shape lets you understand the form from a different perspective. And balancing the white with the black helps you with the spacing and understanding the overall weight of the forms.

Optical corrections are key. It’s been said that type design is the art of making unequal things appear equal. Noordzij’s theory of the Stroke of the Pen is apparent even in monoweight sans-serifs. Flip Helvetica’s A, V, or W sideways, and you’ll see that the diagonal strokes are slightly unequal. Rotate the O in Futura, which I was always told was a perfect circle, and you’ll see why that’s not true.

Resources

The most helpful sites for basic type info:
Underware’s typeworkshop
Briem’s Notes on Type Design (disregard the site design — the information is great)
Hannes Famira’s www.typedu.org

And the most informative (and often out-of-print) type design books:
A Book of Type and Design, Oldrich Hlavsa
Counterpunch, Fred Smeijers
Dutch Type, Jan Middendorp
Fontographer: Type by Design, Stephen Moyer
Adrian Frutiger — Typefaces
The Stroke: Theory of Writing, Gerritt Noordzij

Many thanks to Chester and Tracy Jenkins, Hannes Famira, Christian Schwartz, and everyone else who helped me along the way.

Last week, Linotype released my newest typeface family, Malabar. With six fonts for the Latin script, Malabar is a sturdy oldstyle serif. Designed for extensive reading, Malabar was originally part of a larger design project conceived for Indian newspapers, and a Devanagari addition will be released at a later date. After that, who knows?

I began work on Malabar about 17 months ago, as a postgraduate student on the MA Typeface Design course at the University of Reading in the UK. Back then, it had the working title Martel. My brief was to create a Latin and Devanagari newspaper face for the Hindi press.

The above sketch is from November 2007. I had been looking at a lot of Hendrik van den Keere, and a little bit of Miklós Kis, and it was time to start drawing Malabar’s first letters in FontLab. I should point out that I don’t work out all of my ideas on paper before I begin drawing digitally, but I do use my sketchbook to record thoughts about letters, and to occasionally try out a few shapes. I don’t expect these sketches to be pretty or accurate; my sketchbooks—when I keep them—are much more stream-of-consciousness.

So what are we looking at here? This is my observation of some van den Keere-y display type, or at least the sixteenth-century book equivalent of display type. The relatively high x-height and the combination of the chunkiness of the letters with a high level of contrast captured my attention most. There is some degree of angularity in the letters, especially the a. The letters’ terminals are on the heavy side.

Above are the same letters from Malabar’s released version. What happened from there to here? Well, the terminals became even heavier, and the serifs have changed, too. There has been some reduction of the angularity, but I’d still say that this has a sharpness to it. Certain characters are much wider, particularly the s; the lowercase s is just expected to be wider now than it was during the Renaissance.

Is 17 months a long time for a typeface like this? I spent about nine of those months working on the typeface as a student, plus another two after I returned to Germany. There were a few months in between where I was working full-time on other projects, and did not touch this typeface at all. And then the necessary production work gets added in…

iLoveTypography.com accompanied me along almost every stage of Malabar’s development. The site launched in August 2007, about two months before I began my MA course. I can’t exactly recall the first article that I read on iLT, but it was probably the Decline and Fall of the Ligature, from the beginning of that following September.

As John pointed out recently, we tend not to offer detailed PDFs of our typefaces at Linotype.com, although every font does have a basic PDF that may downloaded and printed. Malabar, however, is one of a few exceptions. Also, at the Reading MATD Alumni site, there is a detailed PDF that may be downloaded for Martel. Note, however, that the Bold and Heavy weights have changed significantly since that Martel PDF was published. Bold Italic and Heavy Italic fonts have been added to the family, and none of the Malabar fonts have Devanagari character sets.

Malabar received a Certificate of Excellence at the Type Directors Club of New York TDC2 2009 competition in 2009.

Interested? Go buy Malabar now, at Linotype.com!

About the author:
Dan Reynolds is font engineer and typographic specialist at Linotype in Germany. You can see his personal blog at www.typeoff.de

Later than usual, but it’s here. I’ve been devoting some considerable time to several iLT-related projects, so a little behind on posting here. I hope to tell you more about those projects in the near future; if I can get around the coding problems. OK, so let’s start with something fun:

An addictive and challenging font game, the Deep Font Challange:

Some of the samples are a little too small (well, that’s my excuse for not achieving the high score), but it is fun.

What does the Soprano’s logo and the Watchmen logotype have in common?

Read LetterCult’s interview with Corey Holms to discover the answer.

Berlintypes has some really wonderful Flickr sets, including photos of covers of Typografische Monatsblätter and Specimen books, and lots more:

Skin type. Ouch:

via @arroncupid.

More fun in this poster:

Thanks, @inspirationbit.

Dexterity with a pair of scissors and incredible patience. The work of Aoyama Hina:

More photos on Aoyama’s Flickr.
Thanks to Jack at Horrorwood for the link.

You can get Pantone just-about-everything these days; so, why not a Pantone typeface:

Letterpress

Nice cards printed on coaster board (think beer mats) for Jeff Cerise:

Thanks, @jeremyjaymes.

Type links

Spiekermann on the Rupee (audio)
India seeks rupee status symbol
Bond book covers
Tips for using scripts
Creative uses for paragraph rules — InDesign
Wood type photos
French vocabulary shower curtain
Establishing a good relationship with your printer
RBtL design podcast, episode 5
50 Stunning Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials:

This must have taken an age to compile. The Periodic table of typefaces:

Web typography

Have seen the CSS text-shadow property abused a lot of late. Here’s an example of it used to good effect:

And the code:

text-shadow: #bcbcbc 0 1px 1px;
color: #171717;

Works best when the colour of the shadow contrasts with both the text colour and background colour. FireFox users will have to wait until 3.1 for text-shadow support. Thanks to all those on twitter for enlightening me.

Video type

FontShop did it with FF Trixie. I’m surprised more foundries/resellers aren’t taking advantage of video in promoting their fonts. Here’s another promo video for Agostina:

Some interesting work — especially if you’re into 3D type — from SerialCut:

Love this kind of experimentation. Take Univers, rotate it, model it, and you have Univers Revolved:

It never ceases to amaze me, what people do with type. More experimentation, please.
Thanks to Andy Sherman for the heads up.

Tipografia Paraguay (t’py) is a collective of designers interested in the development, study, and promotion of type and typography:

Only available in Spanish right now. Perhaps they’ll add Guaraní and English later?

Events

The TDC holds some great events, and really has me wishing I lived closer to NY. An evening with Ed Benguiat.

The Louvain and Roman Irish Types of the Irish Franciscans
March 2009 Thursday 12th March – 7.30 p.m.
Location: Dublin, Ireland [map]
By Dr. Dermot McGuinne

… an illustrated account of the 17th century printing types prepared for use in the Irish language publications of the early Irish Franciscans working in exile in Europe and their influence on later designs.

Robothon 2009 has passed, but there’s some good coverage over at youshouldliketypetoo.com:

Recognise anyone?

Featured face

Router by Jeremy Mickel, and available only at Village:

And Village is now on Twitter: @vllg

New type

Jeanne Moderno from Steve Mehallo. An interesting blend of Bodoni italic, two spoons of Fat Face, and a dash of something else:

I’ve also used Jeanne Moderno to set this article’s masthead.

Muscle from TypeTrust:

Download the Muscle PDF specimen.

Opal from Hannes von Döhren, and available from Linotype:

Like those gargantuanly exaggerated ink-traps. At display sizes it’s a nice feature, though I’m not sure about them when it comes to extended text. Interesting in that it comes with a Script — could be used as an alternative to the italic (though for shorter stretches of text, I think).

The woefully inadequate PDF specimen is here. Come on Linotype! Nice type deserves a nice specimen.

Euroglory 2 from Stefan Hattenbach:

Desktop wallpaper

Something to brighten up your desktop. A wallpaper set in Ale Paul’s beautiful Kewl Script:

1024 by 640 & 1920 by 1200.

And finally …

Hello to the host of new iLT followers on twitter. And, thanks for reading. Have an especially great week.

I always write this introductory paragraph last. As I’ve been working on this post all day, my eyes are now burning, and I’m flagging; so, let’s just get started. Loosen your belts — this is a big one.

I’ll start with a beautiful photograph of a beautiful thing:

There’s not much that’s more inspiring than to see young people (I’m not that old) talking about design and type. Aaron Heth and Matt McInerney recently launched a great new podcast, Read Between the Leading. Intelligent and enthusiastic discussion; and, I think, if they keep at it, then this show will be big.

So whether you’re a student, or an old-timer like me, then subscribe to Read Between the Leading. They’re very open to suggestions, so leave them comments, or tweet @rbtlshow. The most recent podcast features an interview with Antonio Carusone (aisleone & the grid system), and they even have a prize for the best call-in. And, you can even subscribe via iTunes.

Resources

Another alternative to sIFR comes in the form of cufón a Flash-less text replacement generator. It’s all pretty clever using what is basically FontForge to create an SVG font:

However, I can’t stress this enough: check your EULA, your font license. It MUST permit Web embedding. The documentation is comprehensive, and the actual font generator allows you to select sub-classes of glyphs; e.g. only convert, say, uppercase; a great way to reduce file size.

Another sIFR alternative is FLIR (Face Lift Image Replacement), and there’s a comprehensive podcast tutorial on its implementation over at CSS Tricks.

Good use of sIFR and H&FJ’s lovely slab serif, Archer:

Flickermood 2.0, type in motion, by Sebastian Lange:

Thanks, Matthew.

Inspiration

Love this cover for Uppercase magazine:

If you’d like to get involved with the magazine, then simply click on over.
Be sure to check out Uppercase’s Flickr too, with experiments like this:

Was rummaging through ISO50’s archives and came across the work of Jeff Carham. Can’t believe I’d never heard of him. Fantastic sign-writing:

Would love to get my hands on this (sold out) Exhibition catalogue from Blanka. 48 Posters:

Photo of the cover here.

Clever little Letter Boxes from The Design Office:

Via swissmiss.

The type pantry by Samir Zahran:

Great poster from Mr and Mrs M (Tim & Tom Muller):

Via WhyWeRock.

Typographic tree sculptures by Gordon Young:

Thanks, Peter.

Web typography

TweetCC shows off some Palatino. Works pretty well at large sizes on screen. Though the letterspacing in the title is too tight (-2px). However, good use of text-shadow to give the white text that extra brilliance. A very fine looking site.

Seeing more Cambria (one of the new-ish typefaces to ship with Windows Vista) referenced in style sheets these days. For example TypeChart:

An interesting resource too. Allows you to compare type on screen, and then grab the resulting CSS. But what is it with Windows’ (not so) ClearType. It still looks dreadful when compared to Apple’s ATSUI:

Thanks to Frank and Gabe for the Windows screen grabs. For more on this topic, see Jon Tan’s Display Type & the Raster Wars.

Letterpress

Compassion from Studio on Fire:

FF DIN now has its own micro-site:

Type links

An interview with Khoi Vinh
Matthew Carter in Washington Post.
Tips on choosing type for text
Type quotes
Designing grid systems for Flash
Fonts for coding
FontShop’s February newsletter
Inspector Phinney — font detective
Unix font manager
Depression press Flickr
A font by any other name?
InDesign CS4 Smart Text Reflow screencast

A great interview with Font Bureau’s insanely talented Cyrus Highsmith.

New releases

Glosa Display by Dino dos Santos, and available through TypeTrust.

Angel Script by Neil Summerour:

Fiasco by Frederico Antunes, and available through youworkforthem:

Bree Oblique by Cabinet, and available through Veer:

Featured faces

Lagarto from Kimera:

Soon available through FontShop.

Bodoni Script Pro from Parachute. Comes replete with 144 ornaments and 120 frame parts:

Karmina & Karmina Sans, a fine serif/sans pairing from TypeTogether:

I’ve never purchased a Harry Potter title, but if they looked like this…

M.S. Corley’s wonderful reinterpretation of the HP covers, in the style of the beloved Penguin classics. Beautiful. In fact, these aren’t the first covers he’s redesigned. Here is my favourite:

TTTType

I’ve recently started a ilovetypography FFFFound page, where 99% of the stuff I post is type-related. You might want to take a look.

Competition

The Type Directors Club is kindly offering a free copy of Typography 29, a fantastic tour de force of the year in type, and an inspiration to all.

To win a free copy, all you have to do is answer these two simple questions:

1 In what year was the Type Directors Club formed?
2 Name 3 recipients of the Type Directors Club Medal awarded for achievements in the art and craft of type and typography.

Send your answers to competitions@tdc.org. The deadline is Wednesday March 18th, 2009. A winner will be drawn from winning entries at the March TDC board meeting, Thursday 19th, 2009 by TDC President, Charles Nix. If you’re not the lucky winner, then I recommend you get hold of a copy. It’s a must have.

The second give-away is a copy of FontExplorer X Pro, the font management app:

All you need to do to be in with a chance of winning a license, is simply append #font to a tweet. It might be a tweet about your favourite iLT post (but it needn’t be about iLT at all). I’ll announce a winner on Wednesday, March 4.

And finally…

Apologies to those who missed out on the Helvetica Moleskines. They all sold out in about 4 minutes! More are on the way.

I’m working on a number of iLT-related projects. Progress is slow (owing to work comittments, and too few hours in the day), but I’m quite excited about them, and hope to share more news about them soon.

Hope that’s enough to sate your typographic appetites for now at least. Thanks for reading, and ave a great week.