Notes

August’s Font of the Month: Job Clarendon Wide

I hope you’ve had a good August! Over here, my wide streak continues with Job Clarendon Wide, following up on the Narrow width that I sent you back in April.

I’ve been playing with wider versions of Job Clarendon since 2023, when I worked with co-creator Bethany Heck and designer Sophia Tai on a custom extension of the typeface for a client (the same project that yielded Job Clarendon Text). Sophia worked a lot on the wider end of that project, and her contributions are still evident in the fonts I am sending you today.

There is something kinda perfect about a wide-set Clarendon. I wish I could explain exactly why I feel this way, but I think it has to do with it sitting at this fascinating intersection between wood type clunkiness and mid-century modern elegance. It somehow manages to convey grace and sturdiness, workaday charm, and forthright boldness all at once…and it can be disarmingly cute as well!

I think because this style hits such a sweet spot, I struggled to produce a Wide cut for Job Clarendon that I was happy with. Bethany and I knew that we wanted to follow the tradition set by typefaces like Craw Clarendon and Volta. And we knew that we wanted to keep it low-contrast and slabby, and avoid letting it slip from Slab Serif into Modern territory (as Clarendons occasionally do). But early versions felt a little too clean and contemporary, and this month I’ve been working to pepper in more of the 19th-century grit that Job Clarendon attempts to capture.

Job Clarendon is getting to be such a big family that I now think of it in two chunks: the central core and the outer ring. The central core sets the “rules” of the type system, and is more-or-less predictable as it traverses the moderate weights and widths. In the outer ring, these rules are forced to bend as the typeface contorts to meet the demands of extreme weight and proportion.

I see Job Clarendon Wide forming the wider edge of the family’s inner core, in other words, this is the widest I think the typeface can get before it should start to get weird. And now with this Wide in place, I have the freedom to explore a funkier Extended width (maybe with flat tops and bottoms?) without worrying about it seeping into the central core of the family, thus avoiding the “pee in the pool” problem I discussed in April.

This Extended width is what I hope to explore next time. Until then, sending you my absolute best!

July’s Font of the Month: Gimlet Sans Wide

I’ve decided that I don’t have enough wide fonts in my library. Sure, I have stuff like Fit and Megavolt, but what I want is something less stylized. So for the rest of my summer, I’m taking a walk on the wide side.

With stretchiness and elasticity baked into its drawing style, Gimlet Sans already had one foot out the door. The typeface began as a single Black weight back in 2020, and that’s also where I chose to start the new Wide, Extra Wide, and Extended widths that I’m sending you today.

This is just a quick update (for now), and I honestly don’t have a lot to say about it. But in a way that’s kinda the point of a wide font — you can fill a lot of space without having to say very much.

So on that note…here ya go! 😁

June’s Font of the Month: Pennyroyal DJR

One of the most important courses I took in college was “The Book: Theory and Practice”, taught by Barry Moser at Smith College. (I did not attend Smith, but as a student at one of the Five Colleges, I could take courses there.) 

It was in this course that I first set Bulmer in metal, which directly led to my admiration of that style and eventually to Warbler. And it was there that I first learned to love wood type, as I trawled the fire-damaged type drawers in the art building’s basement that would crumble as I opened them. But this was not just a letterpress course…we spent time in InDesign too! We were learning about the building blocks of typography, whether those blocks were metal, wood, or digital. 

In 2017, ten years later, I moved back to Western Massachusetts and reconnected with Barry. When we met at Jake’s diner in Northampton, he surprised me with a pitch. In addition to being an educator, Barry is an accomplished book designer, illustrator, and engraver—much of which he publishes through his Pennyroyal Press. And in the great tradition of the private press movement of the early twentieth century, Barry wanted to commission a book face to call his own.

Over the course of the next year, Barry and I met up for lunch every once in a while and looked at proofs together—his preference was to use Moby-Dick as our sample text. He wanted his Pennyroyal typeface to be sparkling, spacious, and bright. Within a couple weeks, we quickly settled on a design with long, wedge-shaped serifs that are softened by sweeping curved brackets. 

We kept things pretty loose, reference-wise, relying instead on Barry’s preferences and whatever felt right to me in the moment. Of course we discussed private press faces like the Doves Type, but I tried not to look too closely at them. 

Even though this typeface could be classified as an oldstyle, it doesn’t lean into the chunky, inky, angular side of the genre (as opposed to Fern, for example). I worried that something too Kelmscott-y would compete with the intricate textures and heavy chiaroscuro of Barry’s engravings, and tried to keep the letterforms feeling rational, smooth, open, and airy. This is also true of the Italic, which is drawn at a subtle angle and avoids the narrow, choppy texture that is typical of the genre.

This was a dream commission for me, and Barry has been an incredible partner. He first used the typeface in Pennyroyal’s 2020 printing of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, accompanied by his engravings. Because the book was printed letterpress from photopolymer plates, we actually ended up producing a slightly lighter version to compensate for the inkspread. 

Recently, I’ve been working with Linh Nguyen to expand the typeface into a full series of weights, from Light to Black, each with a companion Italic. I’ve toyed with a titling style as well. And I have been thinking about what else (if anything) should change as this transitions from a custom typeface to a retail one. 

I like the idea that a typeface can simultaneously be so personal and specific in origin, but general and versatile in function—something made to address one need can take on a second life solving other typographic problems. I’m excited to see what happens in Pennyroyal DJR’s second life, now that it is travelling out of our hands and into yours.

May’s Font of the Month: Megavolt Narrow

A few years ago, designer Julia Fletcher made excellent use of my Megafonts in a series of posters for the band Sextile. Julia specializes in making daring and playful poster art for musicians, and I am a big fan of the way she uses type, color, and pattern in her work.

But you might have noticed something about the poster for the Brooklyn show, displayed above. Megavolt is by far the widest of the megafonts, and the way that Julia made it work for her design was to horizontally scale it by 43%.

Now you might be thinking…don’t type designers hate it when their fonts get stretched and squished? And yeah, a lot of times it does look pretty bad—squishing tends to distort curves and muddle the relationship between thicks and thins in the typeface.

But Megavolt has the benefit of being 100% curve-free, and Julia squished it so much that it actually retains three distinct stroke weights: thick horizontals, thin verticals, and an even thinner diagonal on the E. So even though it became horizontal stress in the process, it still feels typographically sound to me.

Julia’s use of Megavolt got me thinking. Why did I made the typeface so wide in the first place? I probably did it because I thought it looked cool. But in a design that is already so stylized, isn’t making it super-wide kind of a hat on a hat? It’s not a very usable design to begin with, but wouldn’t it be that much more usable at a more conventional width?

And this is why this month I’m sending you Megavolt Narrow.

I started out by following in Julia’s footsteps and squished the heck out of the original design. Megavolt was built around a consistent angle (54° in the original) that is used to form right trapezoids in many of the letters. In this new version, it is a much steeper 19°. I then restored the vertical stress by making the vertical strokes significantly thicker and the horizontal strokes a bit thinner.

I also took this opportunity to significantly beef up Megavolt’s offering of OpenType alternates. In my original write-up, I compared the experience of making the typeface to playing with puzzles and tangrams. With these new alternates, my hope is that the experience of using the typeface will have that same sense of play. If the user can mess around with a bunch of combinations of verticals and diagonals, they can find the right balance for their headline or wordmark.

Playing with toy blocks often involves flipping and rotating them to find the right fit. The original Megavolt only contained right-leaning (ascending) diagonals, but this new version has a set of new stylistic sets to introduce more left-leaning (descending) diagonals into the mix. This means that there are now four O’s, representing the four possible orientations of that trapezoid.

You’ll also find more square forms, more unicase forms, other random alternates, and a set of descending swash capitals that can be used at the beginning and end of the word (a.k.a. EndcapS or MetallicapS). 

I’m still playing with these alternates, and have yet to make accents for all of them or explore every permutation....when you get into alternates of alternates, the glyph set grows quickly! I’ve roughly organized them in OpenType Stylistic Sets, but honestly, you might be better off just pulling them from the Glyphs palette or tooltips, like pulling blocks from a bin of toys.

I was taught that typography is a relationship between type maker and type user, and I like the idea that we type designers can do better than scolding users when they squish our fonts. A squished font is an opportunity to reflect on the limitations of what our typefaces can do, and what we can add or change about them to meet our users’ expectations and needs.

April’s Font of the Month: Job Clarendon Narrow

In my career, most font development hold-ups were borne of indecisiveness. I wasn’t sure how to move forward, so I just…didn’t. Job Clarendon, my collaborative effort with Bethany Heck to reinterpret the 19th-century style as a flexible contemporary family, has been quietly growing over the past couple years. But I’ve kinda put the brakes on releasing most of the new styles.

Here’s what has been bugging me: In the majority of the published family, the typically-round letters (C, G, O, etc) have straight sides. But in March 2021, we introduced Bold–Black weights where those sides go completely round, and last year we doubled-down on those round sides in the wider Job Clarendon Text. But in the interpolated styles, this roundness has started to trickle in from the wider, bolder corner.

I call this the “pee in the pool” problem. If I introduce a new design element into just one section of the space, it will begin to seep into the rest of the family and affect it in unexpected (and often undesirable) ways.

This month, I’m sending you Job Clarendon Narrow, a series that should have been a very straightforward interpolation because it’s situated smack in the middle of things that were already complete. But because it sits awkwardly on the fault line between straight sides and round sides, it ended up requiring a bit more TLC than either Bethany or I expected.

Clarendons look good when they’re confidently straight-sided, and they look good when they’re confidently round—there’s plenty of historical precedent for both. But the midpoint, between straight and round, feels a bit indecisive, and I don’t know of many Clarendons that have attempted to bridge the gap. Craw Clarendon Condensed is great, but it’s essentially a squished-down version of the normal width with completely round sides, and no hint of straight-sidedness.

For Job Clarendon, we could have done what most Clarendon families do and simply avoided this width altogether. Or we could have engineered the font with a tipping point where straight forms would magically snap into round forms, bypassing the awkward moment of transition between the two. 

But Bethany and I decided that maybe this is not the pee-in-the-pool problem we thought it was. We wondered if we could add additional drawings in the middle of the space to help manage the straight-to-round transition as elegantly as possible. Ultimately, we went with our guts about how much roundness felt right for each weight from Hairline to Black, trying to preserve some of the rigidity and wooden-ness of the original Condensed styles.

For example, below you can see a spectrum from straight-sided to round options, and where we landed for the Regular weight marked in pink:

Still, I’m excited to hear what you think of this addition! And honestly, I’m equally as excited just to be on the other side of this decision. This was the pain point that was holding us back from incorporating Job Clarendon’s wider widths into the larger designspace, which is the next item on our to-do list.