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.
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 theFive 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.
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.
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.
One year ago, I sent you my first draft of Indoor Kid, the collaboration I have been working on with comics writer/editor/publisher Ellis Bojar. It attempts to fulfill his vision for an expansive designspace in the comic book lettering style: variable axes for weight, width, and slant, plus a special emphasis axis that enlarges letterforms from their vertical center without affecting the stroke weight.
It has been so rewarding to see uses of Indoor Kid pop up over the past year, most recently in the latest run of DC’s Harley Quinn lettered by Lucas Gattoni. That gave me some momentum to dive back into the font, and now Indoor Kid is back with a shiny new lowercase!
Traditionally-speaking, lettering in American comics is all-caps. Various explanations are offered for this convention—due to the lack of ascenders and descenders, capitals appear larger, require fewer alignments, and allow lines to be packed closer together. There’s also an argument that distinctive shapes of capital letters can withstand the poor print quality of early comics far better than the repetitive gestures of lowercase would.
Ellis first remembers seeing mixed-case text in Kevin Nowlan’s expressively angular lettering from Moonshadow, as well as in underground comics like Art Spiegelman’s Maus. In Maus, it is frequently used to set the narration apart from the dialog, and there is similar precedent for using lowercase in captions, whispers, and gasps.
In 1987, Todd Klein used mixed case to set apart journal entries in Batman: Year One, which Ellis considers a turning point for the style in mainstream American comic books. Wider adoption of the style followed in the ’90s, culminating in the use of lowercase throughout Marvel Knights after 1998, with lettering contributions from Richard Starkings and John Roshell of Comicraft Fonts fame.
In keeping with Ellis’s love of the pre-digital era of comic books, Indoor Kid’s lowercase is a blend of the above influences, and more. It strives for a middle ground between the angular, handwritten captions of Willie Schubert and the rounder, looser style of John Workman’s oeuvre. We attempted to mitigate the small size and repetitiveness of the lowercase with a large x-height and a fair amount of dynamic asymmetry in the gestures—for example, see how triangular the counterforms of b/d/p/q get!
We spent a lot of time in the Bold Condensed corner of the designspace, where the smaller shapes of the lowercase tend to get a bit closed in. A physical pen would produce the same stroke thickness in both uppercase and lowercase, but after some debate we introduced some optical correction so that the counterforms in the a, e, and s didn’t alter the typographic color too much.
LTTR/INK attaches adjustable ovals to each point on the skeleton, allowing me to fine-tune how the thicks and thins fall around it.
In theory a typeface is an orderly system of rules, but in the end it is really just a bunch of individual drawings that happen to look good together. With 24 sources anchoring the designspace and three variants per letter to give text a bit of bounce, I feel the entropy in this system more than in any of my other typefaces. Again I must credit the LTTR/INK tool for doing much of the work that a pen would do in the physical world, enabling me to think less about shapes and more about the skeletal structure of the letters.
The other thing that helped me was working with Ellis. Being able to lean on his judgement freed me from having to interrogate my own vision about what this typeface should be. It is a relief to only worry about what one person thinks, rather than about what everybody thinks!
There is always more kerning and cleanup to do, and Ellis really wants me to try a reverse italic next, just in case the designspace wasn’t big enough. 😜 But my hope is that Indoor Kid is on its way to a full retail release within the year!
