Notes

October’s Font of the Month: Lentiform

Earlier this month, I had the honor of giving the Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture at St Bride Foundation in London. I spoke about my experience with Font of the Month Club, taking some time away from the club’s go-go-go schedule to reflect on why I’m still doing this. I spoke about how it still helps me bypass uncertainty and self-doubt, and endless questioning of when a typeface is finished or why it exists. And I spoke about the peace that I feel when I can set aside all other tasks and just focus on producing an email, a PDF, and some font files. (I believe St Bride may post the recording at some point; in the meantime they have many other talks to explore.)

This trip gave me a chance to see lots of letterforms and letter-people—in the St Bride Library, at the University of Reading, and at the inaugural Typography Theory Practice conference in Leeds. And I got to explore a little too. On the drizzly morning after the conference in Leeds, I went for a stroll up the canal and stumbled upon the Leeds Industrial Museum. I had a bit of time to kill before my train back to London, and my supposedly-waterproof shoes were starting to soak through to my socks, so I decided to pop in.

The museum is an old mill building packed with machinery from the Industrial Revolution, and, unsurprisingly, a healthy amount of Victorian lettering. I snapped a photo of this plaque in a stairwell—I was initially drawn in by the De Vinne-syle lettering, but found myself appreciating the tasty typographic hierarchy at play here…a blackletter, a sans, that De Vinne-esque serif, more sans, and…a Lombardic?

In contemporary typography, ornamented fonts are used mostly for Display, and rightly so. But here, the Lombardic caps in red play a decidedly supporting role. They offer a lowkey blast of flavor for what would essentially be a <h4> or <h5> if this were an HTML document, setting themselves apart while not drawing undue attention. It’s like the spicy ketchup that comes alongside the fries that come alongside your meal—a side for a side dish.

On my journey home last Tuesday, I started drawing. I still don’t really know what I’m doing with this font, or what I expect you to do with this font for that matter. But in the spirit of the WIP ethos I spoke about in my lecture, I decided not overthink it and just keep drawing. And now, after nine days of steady work, I’m sending you what I have so far on Lentiform, named after its distinctive lens/lentil-shaped O.

When I hold old type specimens in my hands, as I was able to do earlier in the month, I am always shocked by the small-size ornamental typefaces that foundries were willing to produce. As an example, here is Two-Line Pearl Caslon’s Italian, which is about 10pt. 

I tried to channel some of this display-but-not-big energy into Lentiform, sticking with a fairly low contrast and a regularized system that contrasts convex curves with angular cuts, and spiky serifs with curling ball terminals…the R is a good example of all of these in action.

If you look closely at that plaque, you might notice that I replaced the double-strike crossbars on A and E with simpler ones, and the blackletter-style T with a symmetrical Roman-style one. These were casualties of my process of simplification and systemization, but I thought they were fun so you can still find those original forms as OpenType alternates. 

There is a growing number of expressive digital Lombardics out there, from the techy segmentation of Minotaur Lombardic, to the striking contours of Ready Bygone, to the softened, worn edges of Kyrios. These contemporaries make me wonder if I should push Lentiform further—part of me wants to turn this into a true Micro, adding inktraps and eliminating the tight counterforms and clearances that prevent it from being truly legible below 10pt. Another part of me wants to push it towards a more traditional display face…narrower, curvier, contrastier, kind of like the line beginning “THE LORD MAYOR…” in the sample above. And a third part of me wants to just put it down and get back to other, more pragmatic projects!

I rarely start a font in the same month that I send it out, so I hope that it is at least a little interesting to see a design in its primordial stage.

September’s Font of the Month: Job French Clarendon

The horizontal-stress slab serif was my entry point into type design, and I can’t seem to stop myself from going back to this particular well every year or two. It’s not a bestselling genre, but for me it perfectly embodies the central struggle of type design: balancing the needs of each character with the needs of the typeface as a whole.

Every letter needs to look a certain way in order to be legible, while the typeface needs the shapes arranged a certain way to act as a cohesive system. Nowhere is this struggle more evident than in the French Clarendons of the 19th century, where letters are distorted, warped, and smeared in order to satisfy the unique distribution of weight imposed by the system, as if they were flattened by a steamroller. As Bethany Heck puts it, “The goal of these designs was to create more boldness in the typeface without sacrificing horizontal space.”

While we were working on Job Clarendon, Bethany would occasionally send me scans of French Clarendons from her extensive research into nineteenth century wood types. She encouraged me to think about a horizontal-stress slab that could serve as a kind of B-side for Job Clarendon. This month, I am sending Job French Clarendon, a celebration of the bracketed horizontal stress slab serifs from the heyday of letterpress printing.

As with Job Clarendon, my goal was to capture the charming variety of shapes in these nineteenth century designs without reinventing or reimagining them. Essentially, I’m trying to draw the letterforms as I imagine the original designers might have drawn them if they had used a laptop with some font software installed. This involved modernizing details that were byproducts of the wood type production process, such as the lack of overshoots, kerning, and other typographic niceties. I also chose to make the uppercase serifs thicker than the lowercase so that they are closer in density.

Many of the early French Clarendons were beefy and low-contrast, but Bethany and I found ourselves really appreciating some of the examples that we found at the tail end of the wood type era, around the turn of the 20th century. They were sharper, more consistent, and more refined, with big bracketed serifs. We thought they could be an excellent jumping off point for a contemporary French Clarendon type system.

What I’ve included today is a modest range of widths for you to play with, ranging from a Condensed (roughly comparable to the example above) all the way down to a Skyline that really crams things together.

Bethany and I hope that this is just the start of an “anthology” series like Job Clarendon, one that traverses a range of widths and weights, pulling from disparate historical sources from across the genre and unifying them into a cohesive family. Job French Clarendon will never be as versatile as its A-side companion, but that just makes it all the more striking when judiciously deployed at the largest possible size.

Forma DJR Mono

Love Forma DJR but hate all the kerning? Then Forma DJR Mono is for you!

In Forma DJR Mono, Italian designer Ruggero Magrì has taken my revival and brought it in harmony with the limitations of the monospaced grid. On its own, it excels at conveying technical data with clarity and poise; paired with its proportional cousin, it is the perfect option for charts, graphs, and tabular data. It strikes a distinctive tone, preserving the warmth of Forma DJR with inky, rounded corners, while never making you feel like it was produced by a typewriter.

Visit djr.com/forma-monoto see more specimens, download the free trial and free student license, and purchase discounted or full licenses for your professional work.

August’s Font of the Month: Megabase v3

Megabase is my personal favorite of the Megafonts, even if is not as widely used as Megazoid and Megascope. I am a sucker for horizontal stress (as you might know) and I appreciate its space-age funkiness and the playful up-and-down of its vertical alignments. 

But I’ve been feeling some regret about a few decisions that I made back in February 2020 that I worry limit its usefulness (at least to the extent that one can think of a typeface like this as “useful” 🤪).

In particular, I’ve been concerned that Megabase’s thin stems and high stroke contrast made it too delicate, and therefore too difficult to work with in anything but the largest sizes. Don’t get me wrong…this is a display font, and the contrast is kinda the whole point. But I’ve found myself wishing that I hadn’t strayed quite so far from its chunky ancestors like Gothic Bold and Sintex.

So this month I’m sending you Megabase v3, complete with a weight axis that adds some sturdier, meatier options.

I don’t have a ton more to say about this design, so I hope you don’t mind if I keep this one brief. After all, this new addition was a simple transformation—take the thin vertical stems and make them thicker, and everything gets a little wider in the process.

I also chose to remove the rounded edges that were present in the original design. The softness felt unnecessary; the shapes are more expressive if they remain stark and abstract. Unfortunately, I didn’t save a version of the font before I added the corners and I couldn’t find a way to reliably automate it, so I had to remove them manually from every corner of every glyph. It took forever!

Finally, I added the same weight axis to Megabase’s Open style and accompanying color variable font. Like Nickel, it uses the primary color of your text for the base shape, and then a customizable color palette for the fill. By default, the fill is a semi-transparent shade, so it will react to whatever color or image is behind it.

You can play with Megabase’s variable axis, color palettes, and numerous OpenType alternates over at my new online typesetter (developed by Miniware, a longtime club member). I think this feels closer to what I’d like to eventually offer as a retail release for Megabase, but I’m certainly curious if there’s anything else you’d like to see.

July’s Font of the Month: Roslindale Compressed

Memory is an imperfect thing, and it can sometimes be jarring when my mental picture of a typeface doesn’t align with the real thing. I’ll never not be shocked by how different Times’s Bold is from its Regular, or how much narrower Helvetica’s f, j, and t are than my brain expects them to be.

I’ve now been making fonts long enough that I even experience this with my own designs. My typeface Roslindale started off in 2017 as a single Bold Condensed weight. In my mind’s eye, it was fairly narrow, maybe something along the lines of this:

But then I take a look at the font file and am surprised to see that Roslindale at its narrowest actually looks like this:

I could have sworn it was narrower!

I’ve spent a fair amount of time making this typeface wider and wider, but clearly my subconscious demands that I push it in the other direction and really put the squeeze on this design. So this month I’m sending you my first stab at Roslindale Display Compressed Bold, which goes as narrow as this:

I’ve also thrown in an intermediate Extra Condensed Bold for good measure, which leaves us with an array of widths that looks something like this:

Like the rest of the Roslindale family, this design takes major cues from the Victorian-era serif De Vinne. Narrow, space-saving versions of De Vinne began to pop up shortly following its release in 1890, including an Extra Compressed from Barnhart Brothers & Spindler, a separate-but-related typeface called Howland from Dickinson Type Foundry, and finally an Extra Condensed style offered by the newly-amalgamated American Type Founders (pictured below).

For me, the trick was to balance the funkiness of these historical sources with the smoother, slicker vocabulary of shapes that I’ve already established elsewhere in the Roslindale family.

Compressed fonts tend to take on a picket-fence regularity, with little room for oldstyle-influenced diagonal stress. I sought to preserve and even exaggerate that diagonal stress (see the sagging curves of c, d, and e and the sharp shoulders of m and n) at the same time that I was smoothing out out all of De Vinne’s lumps and bumps.

In other Roslindale news, I’m delighted to announce that the retail type family has a brand new web specimen! It was designed and produced by Typetura, and features interactive specimens, a breakdown of the family’s designspace, in-use examples, and a deep dive into the history of the Elzevir / De Vinne style (thanks to writing and research by Florence Fu and André Mora).

Wishing you a wonderful month!