Simon Garfield’s “Just My Type” aspires to be one of those books. But it is not.

“Just My Type” reads exactly as if Garfield proposed “a book about fonts,” and then, upon securing a publishing deal, set out to learn enough about fonts to write a book about it. The result is a well-intentioned but sloppy book that focuses on anecdotes and personalities, instead of providing an organized introduction to the world of type.

A generous analysis of “Just My Type” is that Garfield hoped to lure in readers with gossip, and didn’t want to bore anyone with facts and fundamentals. Even if this is the case, the opportunities he misses are impressive. Garfield mentions the fundamental difference between a “typeface” and a “font,” but then gets bogged down in the origin of the word “font” and finally claims that “in common parlance, we use font and typeface interchangeably,” followed by one of my favorite lines in the book: “Definitions should not cloud our appreciation of type … ”.

Certainly not, and in Garfield’s world, the appreciation of type is crystal clear, unclouded by such troublesome “definitions”. In the few pages following this statement, the author then offers some definitions, but, perhaps in fear of those clouds, swerves into a story about a newspaper hoax involving the island of San Seriffe. It’s all very jolly, but, in my estimation, more clouding than crystallizing — if the point is to teach the meaning of serifs and their uses in type design. Similarly, Garfield attempts to discuss basic type anatomy and classifications, but, again, claims that type will “resist absolute categorization until it is worn thin”. Yet any design teacher could helpfully describe a few basic classifications that would aid in the understanding of typography through the ages. Surrounding these vague claims of un-classifiability are a series of unhelpful, poorly labeled diagrams attempting to show things like x-height, ligatures, descenders, and ascenders. If you already know this stuff, you’ll be able to tell what Garfield’s talking about; if you’re actually reading this book with the intention of learning something, you’re out of luck. Again.

It’d be easy to tear this book apart, and it must seem like I’m warming up to give it a right rending. But Paul Shaw has already done this, eloquently, in his review for Imprint and on his own blog, both of which are well worth a read, and it’d be redundant to repeat all of that here.

I’ll keep it simple: If you are interested in typography, and learning more about typefaces, and how type works, don’t bother with “Just My Type”. There are many well-written books that provide beginning and intermediate typographers with a foundation of information, using systems, classifications, beautiful examples, excellent diagrams and art, and, yes, even a sense of humor.

For an excellent introduction to typography, get your hands on “Stop Stealing Sheep, and Learn How Type Works” by Erik Spiekermann and E. M. Ginger. Robert Bringhurst’s classic “The Elements of Typographic Style” provides instruction as well as the history of typography and fine typesetting, and is an indispensable resource for book designers and typographers. For an in-depth, workbook-style look at typesetting, read Carolina de Bartolo’s “Explorations in Typography” (or just visit the book’s terrific website). And Ellen Lupton’s “Thinking With Type” is a good all-round introduction for students, or for teaching oneself the basics.

The amazing thing about typography is that you can go your whole life never thinking about it (or so I’ve heard) yet once you begin to study it, you discover a vein of material so rich enough to mine for a lifetime. Typography is about the way we form language into pictures. It is where the literary and visual arts rub together and make sparks. And those sparks are visible to anyone who wants to see them.

The field remains open for a book that will appeal to the casual reader with a genuine interest in learning more about fonts. Those who fit that description would do better to watch Gary Hustwit’s film “Helvetica”, a fun and engaging introduction to typography and graphic design; and this is the first book review I’ve ever written that suggests you go see a movie instead. Rather than dwell on that, I’ll extend my welcome to readers who come to Typographica wishing to learn more about type. And to those readers with more experience and knowledge, an invitation to suggest typographically splendid books and websites in the comment area below.

Patrick Barber is a graphic designer and photographer living in Portland, Oregon.

What is Robothon?

Robothon is a font technology conference that takes place every three years at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (Royal Academy of Art) in The Hague, the same school that organizes the Type and Media masters degree course in typeface design. Type design education at KABK is particularly influenced by Gerrit Noordzij, the Dutch designer who taught at the school for decades. This year’s Robothon even included a short presentation about Noordzij and Type and Media, for those who might be unfamiliar with them. In recent years, the Academy has organized a Gerrit Noordzij Prize and, since 2006, Robothon conferences coincided with awarding the prize.

By just watching the conference videos, one misses Robothon’s laid-back feeling. The main activities only lasted for two days, and although the program started early each morning, presentations ended early, too. The schedule included several long breaks, giving attendees the opportunity to discuss the applications, ideas, and scripts presented during the lectures.

Organized by Erik van Blokland and Paul van der Laan, the lion’s share of Robothon work was undertaken by the current Type and Media class. These students dedicated about a month of their short (about ten months’) time at KABK to work on Robothon and the Gerrit Noordzij Prize festivities. This included the design of an exhibition and catalog to honor the previous prize winner, Wim Crouwel.

RoboHint

My favorite Robothon presentation was Petr van Blokland’s Building a TrueType Hinting Tool. It seems to me to be a general consensus, based on reactions in The Hague and online, that this was the highlight of the conference. Petr’s ideas also point directly at the kind of designer that Robothon is aimed at. For instance, during his talk, Petr asks the rhetorical question: why is auto-spacing considered not OK, but auto-hinting is? Why should a designer surrender the way work appears onscreen? Controlling the rendering of a typeface is a much better tactic than surrendering to a mechanism one did not create.

Robothon primarily speaks to an audience convinced that spacing and kerning are part of the design process. While there were attendees present that rely on services like iKern, the more popular solution is to tackle kerning oneself via class kerning in FontLab, Glyphs, or Metrics Machine. Writing scripts to speed up the process is a great timesaver; but relying on an “auto” tool is a step too far.

Since 2009, with the broader adoption of webfonts, TrueType hinting has risen in our parlance. More graphic designers, type designers, and web designers talk about it now than ever before. Unfortunately, most industry discussion of hinting seems to take one of three paths at the moment. The font maker may:

1. develop one’s own TrueType hints in FontLab, or in Microsoft’s VTT application. While some font developers see these as the ideal solutions, many designers claim to not have the resources or knowledge to undertake this step for themselves.
2. make use of an auto hinting tool. These tools generally take a TTF file, analyze its settings, generate hints, and write these into the font. Auto-hinting tools may be part of a font development application, or be a proprietary resource of a single company, or take another form, such as ttfautohint or the FontSquirrel web font generator. Depending on the amount of preparation, as well as the quality of the “auto” programming, widely varied results may be achieved.
3. choose to not hint one’s fonts at all. Here, one either hopes for the best, or is certain that the font will be used only (or primarily) in an environment or a size where hinting isn’t necessary. Certainly, things seem to get a little better on this front, if one considers improvements in rendering like the Retina display iPad, DirectWrite in Windows 8, or MacOS ignoring TT hints by default.

All of these solutions present a problem — one that Petr wants to solve. In these scenarios, TT hints are applied via a process that typically begins after the design of a typeface is finished. Except for TT hints added to FontLab’s VFB files, these hints are instructions that are written into final TTF files, not into design source files. TrueType hints are attached to points on TrueType outlines; if one edits a glyph’s design further in a font editor, one will lose the hints. This is bad.

Microsoft’s VTT — the current heavy-hitter among hinting tools — uses a vocabulary that is separate from what a designer uses while drawing glyphs in a font editor. While RoboHint has not yet been released, it seems from Petr’s presentation that the still-in-progress application (or RoboFont add-on) will allow you to add hints to source files in a way that is more malleable; your application should convert what you do into the hinting instruction language. This conversion should take place in the background. Should one make changes to the glyph later, the application should re-hint the glyph on the fly. You still have to define hints yourself, of course, but your font editor should understand what they are, and be able to adapt them to reflect your changes to glyph outlines. This would make hinting part of the design process, rather than a production step. Fonts could be TT-hinted from the design of the very first glyph onward.

If you care about the way that your typeface rasterizes, it should be important to you to determine how hints are placed. This kind of application-sensitive decision-making should be the same as every other decision, like what your stem thicknesses are in the first place, or how wide your letters should be, how much contrast they should have, and how much space comes between each pair of letters.

UFO Recap

At the beginning of the Robothon conference, Tal Leming was proclaimed “Benevolent Dictator of the UFO for life”. You can see this at the end of Erik van Blokland’s “the State of RoboFab” presentation. This article is a good opportunity to touch on the UFO format again: UFO — and the RoboFab Python library, another Tal and Erik collaboration — were the foundation for most of the ideas presented during Robothon. It is difficult to imagine font development today without their work.

What will one do with a library of VFB files if something were to happen to FontLab Studio? What happens to all digital data as technology and software move on? Sure, font files exported from FontLab — TTFs and OTFs, etc — should be openable by future font drawing applications, just like files from older apps are. However, your native work files may not be readable by future programs, as FontLab Studio’s VFB-format is proprietary, and currently only supported by FontLab products. This could mean having to accept the loss of outlines you saved in other layers, not to mention placed images, or guidelines. What if one wants to be able to access these in 10–20 years? If you are part of a company with a library of dozens, or thousands, of fonts to manage, you may need to be able to reopen older projects in years to come. Surely OpenType and webfonts won’t be the last format shifts for which legacy typefaces will need to be converted.

The UFO format tries to solve this problem. Tal discusses the evolution of UFO in his presentation on the recently published UFO3 format. The format stores your font in a human-readable manner, rather than in binary code. Already, FontLab Studio supports UFOs with the help of the RoboFab script libraries. But, because they are not native to FontLab, users have to actively install these tools themselves. Glyphs has UFO support built into the application. With RoboFont, work files are UFO files.

Although the UFO format was first introduced in 2004, I first began to take serious notice of it in 2009, at the previous Robothon conference. All of the presentations from Robothon 2009 may be downloaded as video podcasts from iTunes. While I had already used a small bit of the UFO-based applications Metrics Machine and Superpolator, seeing presentations on Tal’s Area 51 and ufo2fdk resources, as well as apps like RoundingUFO from Frederik Berlaen, finally woke me up. Using the UFO format opens up a whole new ecosystem of font development possibilities. Already at that conference there was talk of the “missing UFO font editor” — whoever would program this would enable an entire circuit of design and PostScript-based OTF font production on OS X, bypassing FontLab Studio altogether (Glyphs had not yet been publicly released). That “missing UFO font editor” came to market in 2011: RoboFont.

Don’t Stop Here

As I come to a close, I’m already worried about having cherry-picked my way through the conference. My best advice to readers is to work your way through the online Robothon 2012 talks on your own. If Robothon 2009’s media is any guide, these will probably stay online for quite some time. Several of the videos are good references to return to later, if you are looking for a specific way to bring scripting into your workflow, or if you want to work with a specific tool, like Superpolator or Speedpunk (video not yet available). The PostScript hinting information presented by Miguel Sousa is always relevant to font production, whether it is just to get your designs looking right onscreen in PDFs or Adobe Applications, or to use as a step on the way to auto TrueType hinting. Finally, for those considering whether or not to switch from FontLab to Glyphs, there is a 50-minute Glyphs demo that you can check out, too.

The Gerrit Noordzij Prize 2012

Gerrit Noordzij Prize winners receive their exhibitions at the end of their three-year tenures. This year, the prize was passed on from Wim Crouwel to Karel Martens, the renowned Dutch book designer. Previous winners include Tobias Frere-Jones, Erik Spiekermann, Fred Smeijers, and Gerrit Noordzij himself. The award ceremony took place immediately following the end of Robothon’s second day of program. On the day afterward, the Gerrit Noordzij Prize festivities went on to include an afternoon lecture series of its own, whose speakers included Jost Hochuli. Jost traveled all the way from St. Gallen, Switzerland to rock the house with his lecture on the roots of Swiss Typography, which he read in perfect English.

Dan Reynolds is a typeface designer and typographic researcher in Berlin. He studied graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design and typeface design at the University of Reading. After several years with the marketing and font development teams at Linotype, he founded his own design practice in Berlin.

Photos by Tânia Raposo. More on her Flickr »

In the words of designer Christian Schwartz, Zizou is his attempt to “draw Antique Olive from memory”. The name Zizou is a clever and witty reference to the city where Excoffon was born: Marseille.

When Antique Olive was released in 1960 it was regarded as the French answer to the rise of the highly successful neo-grotesques of the time, most notably Univers and Helvetica. It is interesting to notice that this style, and in particular Helvetica, has seen a gigantic re-appreciation (or rather over-appreciation) during the last five years.

Will a similar thing happen to Antique Olive? Probably not, since it is too outspoken in comparison to its contemporaries. A prime characteristic of Antique Olive is its play with balance and imbalance thereby breaking conventional rules for stroke contrast. Excoffon believed that by deliberately thickening the most important parts of a letter it would gain legibility.

Zizou appears to have swapped this radical idea for a return to a more conventional stroke contrast. Some critics might argue that means the design was watered down, but that’s too easy. Zizou immediately conveys this very specific Antique Olive atmosphere in a manner that is unique and highly suitable for today’s design. It does its job beautifully and admirably in the tightly tracked headlines of FastCompany which has exclusive rights to the typeface.

Now let’s hope 2012 will bring us more spiritual successors to Excoffon’s legacy executed so well.

Paul van der Laan is a professional type designer and co-founder of Bold Monday. Since 2002 he has been a regular teacher at the Type & Media masters course at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague.

Cala has the low stroke contrast and sturdy bracketed serifs characteristic of Venetian Oldstyle types but not many of its idiosyncratic letters. The ‘E’, ‘H’, and ‘Z’ are not overly wide; the ‘M’ does not have double serifs at its apexes; the leg of ‘R’ ends in a serif; and the ‘e’ has a horizontal eye. The head serifs on lowercase stems are flatter and less beak-like than those of Jenson. The counters are larger and more open and the x-height is slightly taller. All of this makes Cala feel contemporary rather than musty.

Fifteenth-century Venetian printers did not have italics. Unlike most Jenson revivals, which have Arrighi-based italics grafted onto them, Cala Italic is a pure Hofrichter invention. It is more French Oldstyle than chancery cursive, though with less inclination. Furthermore, the inclination is consistent throughout the glyph set – another indication that Cala is a contemporary design.

Like most OpenType fonts today, Cala has a large glyph set, which is notable for offering ‘Th’, ‘ty’, ‘ct’, ‘sp’, and ‘st’ ligatures; long ‘s’ and long ‘s’ ligatures; and beyond the usual set of fractions, including 1/5s. There are no alternate forms of letters, other than the long ‘s’. The italic has no swash characters. In other words, Hofrichter has eschewed frivolity in favor of sobriety.

Cala is a quiet design, one that does not call attention to itself. This, coupled with its strong, even color, makes it a perfect typeface for books and other texts requiring a “crystal goblet” approach.

Paul Shaw is a designer and a design historian. He is author of the book “Helvetica and the New York City Subway System” and a contributing editor for Print magazine for whom he co-writes the “Stereotype” column.

In general, geometric typefaces can be really boring and many of them are so incredibly easy to produce with simple copy and paste techniques. So, neither their shapes or their handicraft can easily impress. But Julien is different and I think it’s due to his passion and a strong will to explore the possibility of creating something original – not merely producing a revival.

I love the way Peter pushed the concept to its limit and made something really new and playful. I dont know if I should call it “art” or “type”, and it’s almost ridiculous how many different shapes and variants this typeface has for each letter, but it’s ridiculous in a good way. I almost get the feeling that the whole process of making Julien was an experiment to see how far he could take the concept, and I’m impressed with how far it went.

Julien also takes advantage of one of the most exciting of OpenType features: contextual alternates. By using a pseudo-randomization script, different letters are combined to give the typeface a unique flow. I’ve never seen geometry have this much fun.

Göran Söderström is co-founder of Letters from Sweden and has been designing type since 2006. He is self taught (hence the occasional Autodidakt moniker) and has work published by Psy/Ops, Fountain, and Font­Font. He develops custom type for various clients at Pangea design. In his spare time he cooks a mean curry and spends time with his daughter Siri, who is expected to be the youngest type designer ever. Or curry chef. Time will tell.

In the roman it appears an elegant, sartorial slab, somehow holding itself above all others of its kind, with a bit of typewriterly officiousness, like a crisp, upper-level spy in MI6. But under the cloak of propriety in all of its seven weights, is Outsider’s surprising décolletage: a flamboyant, beautiful italic. Quelle surprise – Outsiders is gay! … or perhaps, more insidiously: French. Yes, during the day Outsiders may be sipping tea and filing precise reports, but at night it takes the Eurostar to Paris to kick up its heels along the Champs-Élysées.

All this to say that Outsiders is versatile. In all seriousness, I have used this font and find that it sets well and creates a block of text that I find very pleasing. But the italic is so pretty, so delightfully charming, that it begs to be used extensively – perhaps as one of two parts in a Q&A, or integrated where both roman and italic play together in a bibliography!

Also, note, that Henrik Kubel makes the best ‘K’s, both upper- and lowercase, in all of his fonts, all weights and styles. Could he be biased?

Marian Bantjes is a designer, typographer, writer and illustrator working internationally from her base on a small island off the west coast of Canada, near Vancouver.

The design has just the right amount of character to be memorable and unique but also restrained enough to remain thoroughly useful. Bypassing the polished rationality of Neo-Grotesques, it builds upon the hearty solidity of 19th-century faces, a heritage revealed in the curled-in jaws of glyphs like the ‘C’ or the faucet-shaped ‘r’. While some details seem quite charming, the design never gets coquettish. With its blunt inktraps, tight curves, and solid weight, Supria is ready for work.

Despite this crafty atmosphere though, its rolled-up sleeves don’t get uncomfortably sweaty. Apart from older roots Supria also appears informed by recent, softer approaches to sans-serif design, and steers clear of the sharp, sometimes clumsy vintage chic recently en vogue. With its idiosyncracies tamed just enough, this design is firmly anchored in a contemporary context. There is definitely no smell of mothballs here, but rather a fresh breeze of menthol. I’ve found Supria to feel decidedly fresh, especially when set in text, and more clear and angular than its details might suggest in large display settings.

A design that harmoniously balances such diverse stylistic factors promises to be excitingly versatile. This, along with Supria’s impressive range of styles, including a Condensed variant and the all-too-rare choice of two italics (a curly Italic – likely too cute for some applications – and a more rigid Oblique), makes it an attractive candidate for more complex typographic projects too. A winner at the 2011 TDC2 competition, Supria Sans altogether strikes me as a convincingly versatile, mature, and well-conceived face.

Nina Stössinger is a graphic/typographic/type designer based in Basel, Switzerland. She spends her days writing and designing for web and print at her own studio and many of her nights designing typefaces.

After a long hiatus (inexcusably skipping 2009 and ’10) we’re back with our annual review of the year in type.

The idea is simple: I invite a group of writers, educators, type makers and type users to look back at 2011 and pick the release that excited them most. The reviews range from the academic (like Paul van der Laan on Zizou or Jens Kutilek on FB Alix) to the theoretical (such as Jan Middendorp on Agile) to the personal (like Carolina de Bartolo who reviewed Calibre and Periódico after firsthand experience with a redesign of WIRED magazine) to the playfully unexpected (Microsoft’s Si Daniels praises Apple Color Emoji) to the exclamatory (Matthew Butterick on Neue Haas Grotesk).

This is not a juried contest. The result isn’t necessarily the “best fonts of the year”, or even those most used or ballyhooed. But these 50 selections do capture a pretty accurate snapshot of where type design is now, and where it’s headed.

If 50 seems like a lot, consider the thousands of new releases that didn’t make the list. The general public’s interest in typography continues to grow, and with that comes hundreds of new designers who are dabbling in or starting new careers in type making. Our list of honorable mentions represents only a small slice of the new fonts published in 2011.

As always, the other clear trend is new technology. By the end of 2008, we could finally declare OpenType the default font format. Three years later, in the wake of the @font-face declaration, there are new formats and new substrates as destinations for type design. Yet, in contrast to OpenType’s glacial adoption rate, webfonts are poised to take hold quickly, sparked by intelligent delivery platforms (pioneered by Typekit in 2009), early adoption by major foundries (led by FontFont), and screen-specific font design (like Font Bureau’s RE series).

The unexpected benefit of the new webfont era for an effort like this one on Typographica – it becomes easier to judge a typeface more fairly. Despite type’s long history in print, a font made today will likely be seen on screen far more often than on paper. I’ve always lamented that critics and users usually judge typefaces only on screen, not in their “proper” medium. But in an age in which we read more on screen than in print, maybe this isn’t a universal problem anymore. Of course, now font makers need to rethink the way type is made and rendered, but we’re already seeing progress there.

This year’s list wouldn’t be possible without Chris Hamamoto’s enduring design, Billy Whited’s proficient coding, Laura Serra’s image wrangling, able proofing by Matthew Coles, and, of course, all the contributors. We’re also grateful to FontFont for the newly updated FF Quadraat and Process for Anchor, typefaces that make writing and reading on the web a pleasure. Thank you!

The “Typefaces of 2011” image uses Salvo and Acta.