Notes

September’s Font of the Month: Kuhlman

Roy Kuhlman: Reluctant Modernist is an upcoming monograph about the graphic designer Roy Kuhlman. It will be published November 4 by Fantagraphics, an excellent publisher of comics, graphic novels, and books about visual culture (not to mention a frequent user of my typefaces!). 

I had the privilege of working with Steven Brower, the book’s author, and his collaborator Craig Welsh to design a typeface that celebrates Kuhlman’s designs and commemorates the book’s publication. And with the blessing of The Kuhlman Archive, I am delighted to be able to share the Kuhlman font with you today.

According to Brower, Kuhlman’s cover designs for Barney Rosset’s Grove Press in the 1950s were “at once, illustrative, abstract, conceptual, comical, serious and revolutionary.” Some of Kuhlman’s covers featured his distinctive hand-lettering style, which Brower describes as “conveying the ‘beat’ sensibility of the times.” He created this lettering using cut paper or Rubylith/Amberlith, a masking film on acetate. Brower continues, “Kuhlman would remove this film after cutting with an Exacto knife, leaving the desired forms in place.”

Brower and Welsh sifted through Kuhlman’s covers and compiled contact sheets of the letterforms in alphabetical order. Seeing the letterforms assembled like this really demonstrates the variety of weights, widths, and contrasts that Kuhlman employed across his covers. But at the same time it also exposes how consistent his other stylistic choices were: octagonal rounds, clipped diagonals, opportunistic horizontal stress, wobbly edges, and not-so-subtle misalignments. I knew a prefabricated typeface could never replicate the inventiveness of a designer with an Exacto knife, so my challenge with this font was to capture a bit of Kuhlman’s particular blend of chaos and consistency.

Never before has a typeface of mine called out so desperately for OpenType randomization. Kuhlman contains three separate alphabets that the font automagically cycles through. Because randomization sequences cannot extend across multiple lines, you can use the “Random Seed” variable axis to alter the starting point for randomization in each line of your text block and avoid repeating shapes.

My hope is that these automatic alternates will act as a baseline for randomization, and that you, the designer, will add your own playful spin on top of that.

To that end, I have also included a variable width axis that allows you to traverse the expansive range of Kuhlman’s work, from the broad, squarish letters of Little Peter in War and Peace to the slender letters of Black Skin, White Masks. (I’ve also started to rough in a third pole that gets closer to The Jewish Wife & Other Short Plays.) The width axis can also come in handy when justifying a text block—you can either apply your own randomness by mixing widths in a single line, or you can simply widen the entire line until it fits.

At the risk of it feeling a bit “autotracey”, I resisted the urge to clean up the vectors too much. Brower, Welsh, and I discussed how rough the font should feel, and settled on a middle ground where the crumpled edges preserve the rawness of the original design but are not so obtrusive that they distract from the letter’s essential shape. And in the whole typeface, there is nary a curve to be found.

I hope that, if nothing else, this font encourages you to explore Kuhlman’s work and maybe even get out your Exacto knife and do some cut-paper lettering of your own. And I probably don’t have to tell you how important preorders are in the book business these days, but they are. With that in mind, I encourage you to check out Brower’s book and consider ordering a copy!

Wishing you a wonderful month!

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.