Notes

November’s Font of the Month: Rustique

Sending the club monthly fonts has taught me a lot about the ebb and flow of my own productivity. Some months, I have tons of energy, everything flows smoothly, and projects just click into place. Other months, like this one, I’m hardly able to focus on making new fonts, the gears start to grind, and all of the previous momentum evaporates. It’s hard not to panic when this happens, but I’ve been through enough cycles of this that I’ve come to accept it as a natural part of the way I work.

My focus has definitely been elsewhere recently: life stuff, teaching, a little custom typeface design, and a lot of strumming my mandolin in outdoor music jams. Sensing that I’m in an ebb time with no energy to start something fresh, I paid a visit to my “bottom drawer,” the folder of half-baked typefaces that I’ve discarded over the years. And at the very bottom of my bottom drawer, I uncovered one of my first typeface designs (from 2007!), an abstracted take on Capitalis Rustica that I call Rustique.

I think of typefaces on a spectrum ranging between figurative and abstract, from marks that feel like they were made with a certain tool to those that feel like they were simply imagined (I say “feel like” because, as Matthew Carter points out, they’re all just a bunch of digital outlines regardless 🙃). 

There are plenty of typefaces that play across this spectrum, taking the the pen-formed shapes of historical calligraphic styles (say, blackletter) and translating them into “raw” typographic shapes (Totally Gothic/Glyphic, Fakir, and Blaktur come to mind). But you won’t find nearly as many contemporary designs revisiting the distinctive Rustic capitals that were used in Rome during the first several centuries of the common era. 

At first glance, these Rustic capitals felt shockingly dissimilar to their predecessor, the Roman Square Capital of Trajan’s Column fame. But upon closer inspection, I learned how calligraphic efficiency transformed these letters: their simplified structures were quicker and easier to write with a pen, and a steep pen angle led to narrower letterforms that took up less space on expensive writing materials like parchment or vellum. (This steep pen angle also made Rustic caps the original use of horizontal stress in the Latin alphabet!)

I drew Rustique during my final year in college to be used on the poster for a sci-fi-infused production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, staged by the theater department at my school (no, I can’t find an image of the poster I designed, and yes, that’s probably for the best 🙃). The unfamiliarity of the Rustic style seemed like a good fit for this retrofuturistic production; it somehow feels stuck in the past and the future at the same time. But like all of the other typefaces I designed in school, I abandoned it as I went on to pursue more practical designs and begin my career at Font Bureau (from that year, only Manicotti made it out after it was cleaned up and released in 2010).

My original design for Rustique stayed fairly close to the rhythms of Rustic calligraphy, with modest thick/thin contrast, a high waistline, and generous spacing between each letter. In the image above, you can also see small inconsistencies, where I was experimenting with sharp corners (as opposed to blunted ones), a flatter baseline, and tall caps, all of which I adopted in the version I’m sending you today. I was happy with letters like H and E that were made up of all straight lines and tapered gently from bottom to top, but they felt disjointed from any letter with curves like O and B and diagonals like A and V that weren’t allowed to taper as much.

Picking up the design again this month, I tried as hard as I could to unify these elements and minimize the tension between curved and straight forms. The diagonals proved to be an especially tough nut to crack; with the theoretical pen held at such a steep angle, they are the only elements of this hand that get very heavy for a very long time. Of course, this is a feature that makes Captialis Rustica distinct, but it also makes them stick out like a sore thumb when you’re looking at more than a few words at a time.

In the past few weeks, I made some last-minute changes in order to make it better suited for contemporary display typography. First, I amped up the horizontal weights so it is now less of Regular weight and more of a Bold. I also tightened up the letter spacing significantly and introduced more “swing” into the curves, imbuing the design with more chaotic energy. It’s amazing how much of a difference spacing makes: if you add some tracking (+25–50, maybe?), you’ll chill things out and give the design more of a historical flavor.

This might go without saying, but I have absolutely no idea what you’re going to do with this typeface! I hope it at least piques your interest in Rustic capitals, and makes you think about how you can somehow incorporate their unique flavor into your designs. This is one of the trickiest designs I’ve worked on in a while, and I could probably keep tweaking it forever...we’ll see what it looks like in another 14 years!

October’s Font of the Month: Output Sans v2

September 14 marked the fifth anniversary of the introduction of variable fonts. I didn’t see too much in the way of fanfare, but it feels like this is a good opportunity to reflect on how far they’ve come, and to appreciate what folks have done to make variable fonts easier to make and use. (If you played a role in that, THANK YOU!)

It’s also a moment to consider what comes next for variable fonts. In my perception, they’re in a bit of an awkward phase right now. Support in browsers is great, and designers are using techniques such as animation to push the limits of the technology — after five years we can hardly think of them as a shiny new toy. But at the same time I don’t think they’ve fully left the “experimental” realm and entered the day-to-day workflow of the average designer.

As I pondered what zany, over-the-top, variable display face I could send you to commemorate this half-decade, it occurred to me: if I really want to help variable fonts get over this hump, maybe it’s worth taking a step back and thinking more about how I want to see them used in practical, everyday typesetting. And that’s why I’m sending you a beta variable version of my practical, everyday sans serif, Output Sans.

Output Sans is the closest thing I have to a “personal default”...how letters look when I shut my eyes and picture them in my head. It’s a matter-of-fact design that’s a little narrow, with curves that are a little tense. And it has a slight techy flavor, which makes it especially well-suited for user interfaces and in a supporting role alongside more decorative designs. 

It has been kicking around on my desktop since 2014 when Mac OS changed their UI font to Helvetica and people were hungry to customize their UI appearance. I think I’m happy with the overall design, but with all the sans serifs out there, I lost the confidence to say that it was different enough, or special enough, to ever declare the family “finished” and give it a formal release.

This month, I decided to remake Output Sans with a variable-first approach, a maximalist spin on a minimalist design. Part of this is admittedly a psychological shift...I tried to stop thinking of it as a family of individual members and instead as a single tweakable design. And I tried to shut off my type designer brain that worries too much about smooth curves and internal consistency, and instead focus on mapping out all the different ways I’d want to adjust the design. In addition to the weights and italics from the original version, I’ve now roughed in width, size, grade, and terminal openness.

So here’s the catch: this is very much a proof-of-concept, and parts of the designspace are ROUGH. Typically I send out these club fonts once I have reached a good stopping point, but with Output Sans I am still in the thick of it. If you hang out around the default Regular style, I hope you’ll find this to be quite usable, but just take a little more care the further you venture away from there.

One of the stated goals of this club is to give you a view into my process, and my process is this: a constant cycle of roughing-in and refining, as opposed to just drawing one perfect glyph after another. So even though I’m a bit nervous to share something in an unpolished state, my hope is that the excitement (and embarrassment) of my lumpy curves will propel me to keep improving the design in the coming year. I won’t bug you every time I do, but I plan to make updates early and often...the latest version will always be at the download link at the top of this email. So feel free to give this a fresh download/install if you use it for something, but note that you may get some reflow of your text between versions!

Meanwhile, I hope Output Sans provides an opportunity to think about the role of variable fonts in your everyday workflow. Do they slow you down? Speed you up? Is this what the future of font families should be, or am I better off whittling a big, flexible system like this down to something more specific? I’d be happy to hear which of these axes seems like overkill, which of these seem worth cleaning up and finalizing, and what other tweaks you’d want to make to this design (square dots, maybe!?).

I realize that not all of you do your work in environments that support variable fonts, and that is not your fault. I’ll mention two things: Dinamo’s excellent Font Gauntlet has a “Generate Static Font File” feature that lets you export static font files from this variable font, which you are totally allowed to do under the modifications clause of my license. And maybe it’s worth taking a moment to send an email or (re)post a feature request to the makers of the app you’re using...after all, it has been five years. 😉

September’s Font of the Month: Roslindale Extended

One of the hardest things about making a type family is, like all creative endeavors, knowing when to stop. There is always another variant to explore, another alternate to try, another character to add. 

Roslindale has been the most popular typeface I’ve produced for the club. Of course I’m very excited about the possibilities for this family, but I’ve also consciously tried to avoid letting this become a Roslindale of the Month Club. I really try to strike a balance between stuff that *I think* designers will like and use, and stuff that *I hope* designers will like and use.

It has now been an entire year since I’ve issued any new styles of Roslindale. In that time, I’ve been working with Jaimey Shapey to fill out the existing grid of weights and widths, adding the remaining italics, symbols, and small caps in order to complete the designspace (whatever that means). And just as the family felt like it was finally approaching a stopping point, I couldn’t help but throw a wrench in the works: Roslindale Extended.

As you might recall, Roslindale follows in the footsteps of Central Type Foundry’s De Vinne, a clunky faux-oldstyle produced in several widths and variants starting in the 1890s. Each one of them had an uneven, blotchy texture, but De Vinne’s Extended cut was perhaps the ugliest duckling of them all. The qualities that makes these shapes particularly grotesque also makes them kinda compelling, and I became curious to see what that might look like in Roslindale...and you never know until you try!

For the record, I don’t think of Roslindale Extended as a finished design, and I’m definitely not committing myself to drawing this in all weights/italics just yet. It’s more of an exploratory sketch like Gimlet Banner, possibly a non-canon entry in the Roslindale Extended Universe. 

You really don’t see too many extended oldstyle serifs like this out there, and maybe there’s a good reason why. When thicks and thins are oriented on a vertical axis, it’s easy enough to widen them by spacing out the thick verticals and broadening the thin horizontals between them. But when the axis is diagonal, the distinction between verticals and horizontals are blurred and bits of thick start to creep into the horizontal strokes. When those get stretched out, it puts the round shapes even more at odds with the straight shapes and things get really weird really quickly!

You were probably taught that you shouldn’t mechanically stretch type, and that’s generally good advice since it throws the whole vertical/horizontal relationship out of whack. But I’ll also admit that stretching Roslindale Display’s Bold by 150% was the very first thing I did. 😇 

From there, I attempted to preserve the newly broadened proportions while undoing all of the stretching’s unfortunate side-effects: verticals that are too thick, horizontals that are too flat, serifs that are too long, and a diminished diagonal axis. The trickiest part by far was figuring out how letters like c/e and p/d/b/q should throw their weight around the curve, but I think I found a way to get some thickness back into the tops and bottoms of those letterforms.

These tweaks capture a little of De Vinne Extended’s bounce, but without too much of the lumpiness and unevenness. Shapes so wide are going to be inherently stretchy, but if I keep going with this style, I’ll see if I can refine them even further.

I don’t think this is the most utilitarian cut of Roslindale, but I hope you understand why I just had to try it out! You’ll also find an interpolated Wide style and a variable font in there for good measure. And if you’re able to use it for something, do let me know...I’ve now made it my official policy to offer a free back issue to anyone who submit uses of my fonts to Fonts in Use!

New: Forma DJR Cyrillic by Jovana Jocić

I am excited to announce Forma DJR Cyrillic, designed by Serbia-based designer Jovana Jocić.

Forma DJR is a revival of Aldo Novarese’s slick neo-grotesque. Working together with Roger Black and Indra Kupferschmid, I studied the original metal type and interpreted the design as a large family with optical sizes, rounded corners, and tapering stems.

Jovana picked up where we left off and took care in translating this design to the Cyrillic script. The design is thoroughly modern, but never severely so. It maintains the simplicity and warmth of Nebiolo’s original design with its single-story a, and echoes them in the softly-draping curves of Д and Л and the simplified form of K and Ж (it’s not the same as the Latin K!) .

Jovana’s expansion adds several languages to Forma’s repertoire, going beyond the Russian alphabet and including localized forms for Bulgarian, Serbian, not to mention a ligature to handle Ukranian’s tricky ЇЇ pair.

And, perhaps most impressively of all, Jovana found a way to harmonize the design with Forma’s super-tight spacing. I found this to be tricky enough in the Latin, but Cyrillic has more straight-sided characters than Latin (which let in very little negative space) and more overhanging characters that (which let in a ton of whitespace). I think Jovana did a great job balancing these out!

Forma DJR now supports Cyrillic in its core weights between Extra Light and Bold (300–700) in all of its optical sizes. A variable font covering that range is included in the family pack as well!

Since the Italics and extreme weights are not done yet, I am keeping the Forma DJR Cyrillic family separate (for now) in order to avoid confusion. But if you’ve already purchased a license for Forma DJR’s Latin and would like to use the Cyrillic, you can contact me to upgrade to the Cyrillic at no additional charge.

To see more, feel free to check out Forma Cyrillic’s web page, grab the PDF specimen Jovana designed, and take the fonts for a spin. We are excited to see what you do with the fonts!

August’s Font of the Month: Megazoid

On a conceptual level, geometric shapes endow letters with a timeless beauty, transforming them from handmade marks into emblems of mathematical ideals. But on a practical level, building up letters out of circles and squares is just really, really awkward.

In most geometric sans serifs, the job of the type designer is to smooth out that awkwardness, introducing optical compensations and refinements in order to achieve a unified result. And in the past decade, “geometric sans” has become a catch-all term for clean, general-purpose sans serifs with disparate influences (including humanist and grotesque) and varying degrees of connection to pure geometry.

I’ve never felt like I had much to add to this genre, and over the past fifty (!) months of the club I’ve mostly steered clear of it. But this month I’m psyched to send you Megazoid, a chunky geometric sans serif that feels equally at home on a guitar amp as it does on an interstellar satellite. And while I’ll concede that recent trends have made the geometric sans feel a bit safe and boring, Megazoid is here to remind you that geometry can be raw and weird and anything but.

Megazoid pits square and circle against each other, contrasting blocky exteriors with counterforms that are mostly circular and cylindrical. This juxtaposition recalls the classic Radio Shack logo and its distinctive retro-futuristic vibe, but Megazoid leans towards corners over curves maybe 25% more often. This gives Megazoid a distinctive squarishness that sets it apart from the more figurative, stroke-based designs in this genre (I’m thinking Blippo and Pump, or recent entries like Bonkus, Marvin Visions, and Nichrome.)

At the same time, Megazoid avoids going into complete abstraction by not getting as heavy or extreme as designs such as Baby Teeth, Ginger Snap, Morro, Shotgun, and Strand. Instead, it bridges the gap between figurative strokes and abstract shapes, essentially functioning in the space between the super-literal Futura Extra Bold and the hyper-stylized Futura Black.

I really enjoyed playing with the tension between slick and clunky. It was a challenge to puzzle out how to make the more figurative shapes like s and o play nice with weirdos like a and e, even when their texture and color are totally dissimilar.

And you won’t find much in the way of triangles in Megazoid. Rather than introduce more symmetry, I took a page from Avant Garde and drew A, V, Y (and alternate M and W) as asymmetrical trapezoids that add a touch of off-kilter dynamism to the otherwise static design.

I didn’t plan this, but I’m really happy that Megabase, Megavolt, and Megazoid have formed a family of sorts, each one exploring a different mode of sans serif with heavy science fiction connotations. They all have plenty of non-sci-fi potential as well, not to mention a link to the phototype and dry-transfer typefaces of the 1970s.

A glance at any Letraset or Photo-lettering catalog is enough to tell you that this style lends itself to outlines, shadows, and textures. So I totally encourage you to go all out! Outline it, inline it, and offset it to create groovy drop shades à la Papirtis Pink Mouse. I held off on making a tricked-out color font (for now) but I did include Fill and Shade styles to give you a little head start.

You’ll also find that I was particularly indecisive this month and left in a slew of stylistic alternates for you to explore. And last but not least, I also explored a Cyrillic version of this design which I found to be particularly fun. Many thanks to Jovana Jocić for critiquing the Cyrillic, as well as to Eben Sorkin, Mathieu Triay, and Donny Truong for their comments on this design.