Notes

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.

March’s Font of the Month: Indoor Kid Lowercase

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.

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!

February’s Font of the Month: ECWC Standard & Slight Chance

Watching the first cable TV weather channel in Winnipeg, Canada, was a very analog experience—Videon Cablesystems simply pointed a black-and-white camera at the dials on the machines at the local weather station. Viewers would sometimes tune in and see insects crawling on the equipment!

But in 1975 (fifty years ago!) Videon replaced this antiquated approach with an entirely digital weather readout, developed in collaboration with Environment Canada, which they claimed was the first of its kind in the country. 

The layout was designed by Gary Krushen, an engineer at Videon, and featured a condensed, monospaced all-caps sans serif set against a blue or reddish-brown background, with green bands above and below. Shortly after, Winnipeg’s other cable company, Greater Winnipeg Cablevision, got in on Gary’s idea, and offered a similar service for their subscribers. It was based on the same basic design, but ran on different hardware and employed a thinner, more angular font than the original.

Last year, I was contacted by Matt Hadden and Mark J. Szymanski, weather channel enthusiasts who maintain an Environment Canada Weather Channel simulator that livestreams the current weather conditions in the style of the channel as it appeared in the 1990s. Since launching the livestream in 2021, they have reached thousands of viewers who fondly remember having the channel on in the background of their daily lives. “From what I'm seeing in the chat,” Matt says, “it’s bringing back a lot of nostalgia for a huge range of age groups. I see people in their 40s all the way up to their 70s/80s giving their stories and memories about the original channel.”

Matt and Mark couldn’t find any specifics about the make and model of the computer that was running at the time, or who might have produced the fonts that were available on that system. But they knew one thing: getting the font right was a key factor in capturing the precise look they know and love.

We presume that the original fonts were bitmap fonts, but opted to render the letterforms as horizontal bands, capturing a bit of the scanline edges that you might have seen on a CRT television set from the era. At the same time, we tried to avoid going too far down the retro rabbit hole—recordings like the image up top also show the deterioration of a decades-old VHS tape, but our goal was to have the type appear as crisp and fresh as it would have looked in the 90s on a new-ish TV with a clear signal.

Aside from that one interpretive choice, I tried to provide them with as faithful a revival as I could. I worked with the limited character set of the original, and preserved details such as the subtle asymmetry of O and A, the serif on the crossbar of G, and a 3 that looks more like a Cyrillic Э.

Matt and Mark are now using the new font, called ECWC Standard, in their livestream. And in keeping with the rest of their codebase, I made it available on GitHub under an open source license.

But wait…there’s more! After sending my revival to Matt and Mark, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more I could do with this incredible source material, so I undertook a freer interpretation of the design. In a nod to the weather reporting phrasebook, I’ve named it Slight Chance.

No longer worried about 100% fidelity to the original, I built out the design to my usual character set, made monospaced and proportional versions, and invented an accompanying lowercase for the design. 

I set aside the scanlines approach and explore different ways that I could evoke the worn, slightly-degraded texture of the letterforms as they endured cable transmissions and cathode ray tubes. I arrived at a design system that contrasts gummy, amorphous interior shapes with a harder-edged, octagonal exterior. In a weird way, it’s a distant cousin to the chamfered Grecian style of wood types.

Oh, and if you noticed that the text at the top and bottom of the simulator uses an entirely separate font with small caps, then you have an idea on where the design can possibly go from here!

January’s Font of the Month: More Ottavio!

As promised, here I am at the end of January with some new lighter weights for Ottavio! Thank you again for your patience as I worked to get caught up to my usual schedule.

I’ll keep this one quick. In the two weeks since I wrote you last, it dawned on me that I might be doing this thing I tend to do, where I make a font that sits in the valley between Display and Text. Ottavio’s namesake won the Tour de France, but should the font be a sprinter or a long-distance cyclist? Was I selling Ottavio short if I didn’t at least take a stab at optimizing it for extended text?

So I did another thing I tend to do a lot: I fired up Type-X and started using the font everywhere in my daily life...my email, my browser, notes to myself, you name it! (And yes, I styled my links as small caps, an homage to Practical Typography.)

As I used the font, I started tweaking the letter-spacing and font-weight directly in the browser until it started to feel more like something I would actually want to read. From there, I could move to my font editor and apply those changes more thoughtfully. 

Ottavio’s original Regular weight felt too heavy and too tightly-spaced at text sizes. Fortunately, now that I have an ExtraLight pole to interpolate from, it was no problem to lighten the Regular by 7% and recalibrate the rest of the weights to follow.

I liked that Ottavio’s diagonal axis and thick/thin contrast really shine through in the new Light and Extra Light weights. But, it made the Bold I did recently feel low-contrast by comparison. I didn’t want heavier weights clogging up at small sizes anyway, so I also also added a bit of contrast to the Bold and Extra Bold, on top of the weight change.

I know this month’s offering is just a small update, but I hope it is at least a little interesting to see how these minute changes add up to meaningful design enhancements.