Notes

October’s font of the month: Megabase Open

After the big Roslindale update I sent out in September, I figured I would go easy on myself this month and cross off something fun from my to-do list. Megabase has been one my favorite projects to work on this year, and ever since I sent it out in February, I’ve been dying to give it an inline companion.

Megabase Open involved relatively little drawing; I used some tools to help me carve out the space inside the thick strokes while matching the weight of the existing thin strokes. Then I manually cleaned up a few shapes (those tricky corners on A and M, for example), and voilà, it was pretty much good to go.

I could have stopped there; maybe I should have stopped there. But even the most straightforward project provides opportunities to trip and fall into a typographic rabbit hole, and fall I did.

It irked me that Megabase Open doesn’t distinguish between the counterforms of the letters and the interior “cores” of the horizontal strokes. They are all just negative space. I felt I needed something more complex than black and white could offer, and I looked to color fonts to help fill the void...both literally and figuratively!

My first instinct was to make a a color font with no color at all. Megabase’s “Fade” style shown above simply plays with the opacity of the interior shapes, letting whatever is behind the type show through the letterforms veiled in a semitransparent grey, simultaneously interacting with the background and sitting on top of it.

Then, a couple weeks ago, longtime club member Agyei Archer happened to mention gradients to me during an unrelated chat, and it struck me that they could be the key to taking Megabase Open to the next level.

There’s a big problem with gradients, though: color fonts come in a few different flavors, and not all of them support gradients. For example, I know it is possible to include gradients in a SVG image and then embed it into an OpenType-SVG color font, supported in some Adobe apps. But I don’t know of a way to specify a gradient in a COLR/CPAL fonts that builds up layered glyphs by stacking up a font’s native glyph data. (There is a proposal to add gradients to COLR/CPAL, but it has not been implemented.)

COLR/CPAL could really use a catchier name, but it’s the only flavor of color font supported by all modern browsers, and as we’ve discussed in the past, it’s the only flavor of color font that can also be variable. I got a bit carried away running experiments on how I could approximate a gradient in a COLR/CPAL font using only outlines and flat colors.

I settled on an approach that effectively rasterizes the gradient, turning it into a series of narrow stripes of subtly varying colors. With every tiny stripe now stored in the font as an alternate glyph, a font with 800 glyphs turned into 8000. And then, in the spirit of just trying things out, I added a variable slant axis (and I actually kinda liked it).

Was all of this a good idea? Probably not, but you never know until you try. Even though I probably won’t include these styles in the final Megabase family, I’m excited to share them.

Chris Lewis helped me build a demo where you can try out the color variable gradient font, and users with the fonts can use my Color Font Customizer to download their own versions. The randomize button (↺) can yield some pretty intense results! 💈

September’s font of the month: Roslindale Display Widths

I’m learning that this club is a great way for me to start new projects, but way-less-great for finishing them. The final stretch of a typeface’s development involves a decent amount of drudgery that doesn’t exactly lend itself to monthly installments. After all, type design doesn’t follow a traditional narrative arc; there’s no exciting build-up to the climax.

During the early stages of type design, I’m figuring out a system of shapes through exploration and trial and error. Once things begin to solidify, my process becomes more about managing the execution of that system through interpolation. This is essentially where I’m at with Roslindale, so I figured it was as good a time as any to send the club an update of the newly-expanded Roslindale Display (v2) and see what they think.

Interpolation is just math… it’s easy enough for a computer to interpolate between a Light outline and a Bold outline and spit out a Medium. Whether or not that blended result looks any good is a totally different story, and much of my time is spent futzing with outlines trying to get the different parts of the space to play nice with each other.

For me, a large interpolating family like Roslindale is a circus tent: a massive canvas propped up by tent posts in order to cover a certain amount of space. Math is the canvas, the connective material that unites the space, but it’s the strategic placement of the tent posts (not to mention their structural integrity) that keeps the tent aloft.

Up until recently, Roslindale Display was anchored by three tent posts: Condensed Bold from June 2017, Condensed Light from May 2018 (subsequently pushed further to Extra Light), and Ultra from last November. In anticipation of this month’s mailing, I’ve added three more: Extra Light, Bold, and Condensed Ultra.

Fewer tent posts means less work, less complexity, and (for a variable font) less weight. But it also means that the fabric can start to sag in the middle, where the result is rarely catastrophic (barring a technical error) but it can get soft and gummy and just a bit “meh.”

This is precisely what happened between my new Display Extra Light and the existing  Display Ultra, which I needed to create for the lightest + widest corner of the space. The thick parts of the letters got thick too fast, and the thin parts of the letters didn’t get thick enough fast enough.

My solution was twofold: first, I went back and subtly overhauled the way strokes taper in the Ultra weight. Next, I stuck another tent post in the middle (Display Bold), which gave me the additional support I needed to manage the progression of thicks and thins.

Interpolation doubtlessly involves compromise… it is, of course, a literal compromise between different outlines. But I try to draw shapes in a way that every instance within that interpolating designspace “pops” as if it is the only one.

Even if all of this interpolation talk was a bit dry, I still hope that you enjoy the circus that is Roslindale Display! (I’ll be curious to hear if you think the new Wide styles retain enough of their De Vinne flavor.) I plan to keep working on these right up until the family’s full release, so feel free to re-download the fonts here at any point if you want to make sure you have the latest.

Roslindale Display is September’s installment of Font of the Month Club; this month only, you can get all 24 styles sign up for as little as $24.

July’s font of the month: Pomfret

I’ve never been able to resist a good titling face. “Display typography” is a general term that can describe anything with big letters, but “titling” describes something much more specific (book titles, essentially), which tends to imply a certain dignified, inscriptional style—capitals that feel special, but not showy.

This month I have a titling face for you called Pomfret. It is modeled after the Arts & Crafts-style lettering of Bertram Goodhue, particularly his 1892 cover of the short-lived literary magazine, The Knight Errant.

I’ve been familiar with Goodhue’s work for most of my life, just not his typographic work. When I was growing up, my parents worked in downtown Los Angeles, just blocks away from the LA Central Library designed by the very same Bertram Goodhue. I remember visiting this distinctive Egyptian-revival building as a kid, and recall it being one of the first places where I thought “Wow, so THIS is architecture.” It is still on the list of places that I recommend to first-time visitors to LA.

Even if he was better-known as an architect, Goodhue was an accomplished graphic artist as well as the designer of the popular Cheltenham typeface (famously used in the New York Times). I never paid attention to any of his other work until Roger Black encouraged me to try something in this style, sending me a bunch of images including the Knight Errant cover, shown above.

The detail that first drew me into this design is definitely the distinctive leg on the R (see also the K). It’s not brazenly expressive like the R in Map Roman, the other true titling face I’ve done for the club. It kinda just dangles off that flattened, high-waisted bowl, but it manages to do so with a measure of confidence and restraint.

This established the guiding principle for this typeface: it’s okay to do weird things, but do them with restraint. The C and G have subtle but distinctive underbites, and the bottom of the S gets far larger than the top. I also took the liberty to add details that were nowhere to be found in the source material: for example, the high-waisted N, the looped 2, the asymmetrical Y, and the overlapping vertices on the A and V.

To give Pomfret a little extra edge, I pumped up thick/thin contrast to point that the forms are extremely brittle. I would consider adding lower-contrast versions later, but for now this typeface is really only suited for large sizes.

And while most titling caps call for a bit of letterspacing to underscore their monumentality, Goodhue’s lettering was surprisingly tightly-packed. I followed this approach in the font, which was pretty easy to do thanks to those short, stubby serifs. To cluster the letters together even more, I even added 175+ ligatures; many are implemented by default, but some of the fancier ones are available through the Discretionary Ligatures feature.

And perhaps most importantly, this is the first typeface I’ve ever created where the W is literally two V’s copy/pasted. I don’t know why, but I’m really proud of this little lifehack.

Pomfret is July’s installment of Font of the Month Club; as always, you can sign up for as little as $24.

May’s font of the month: Gimlet Sans

When I’m working on a serif typeface and I get a little bored or stuck, I’ll often do a save-as and start sketching a sans serif version of it. You already got a glimpse of my Nickel Sans last year, and sitting buried somewhere on my hard drive are the beginnings of a Roslindale Sans, a Trilby Sans...even a Bradley Sans!

This month I’m sending you something that started as one of those sketches, a sans serif companion to my “quirkhorse” serif Gimlet that dates all the way back to April 2016. Let’s call it Gimlet Sans—for now at least.

I do these sketches not because I believe that every family should be a superfamily (I don’t), or because I think the results will be useful or worthy of publication (most aren’t). But I find it to be a helpful exercise in distilling the core idea of what the typeface is supposed to be, separating the details that become crucial to a typeface’s identity from the superfluous details that only serve to dilute it. Serifs in particular get repeated so often that they instantly become central to that core idea, and Gimlet’s distinctive slabby wedges are no exception. That’s why I find it so interesting to see what’s left after they all get peeled away. 

Type designers are always eager to tell you how creating a sans serif involves so much more than simply chopping off serifs. But that’s how some of the earliest sans serifs got made, and it turns out that it’s a pretty good place to start. 

Even without its serifs, Gimlet Sans owes a lot to Georg Trump’s Schadow. I love how Schadow manages to be rigid and clunky and somehow simultaneously organic and spontaneous, and I hope that Gimlet Sans has captured a bit of that tension. If you look closely, you can see it in the bowl of the p, which starts with a pinch and some bounce on the top of the curve, but transforms into a squarish superellipse by the time it reaches the bottom. And you don’t have to look too closely to see the closed apertures, exaggerated underbites of letters like C and e, and the distinctive water-faucet r or potbellied a.

If this kind of constructed sans serif exists on a spectrum, with Eurostile on the sleek-verging-on-sterile side, and Ad Lib on the fun-but-a-little-too-goofy side, my hope is that Gimlet Sans lands right in the middle. 

I’m still not sure whether I want to develop this into a whole family, or if this should remain a one-off experiment. I’ll be excited to hear what you think, and I hope this font proves to be a useful asset to your designs, or at least a welcome distraction!

April’s font of the month: Roslindale Deck

Roslindale Deck is April’s installment of Font of the Month Club. As always, you can sign up for as little as $24!

So...I’m in a bit of a slump at the moment, creatively-speaking. And with everything going on in the world right now, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.

I try not to get too worried about slumps; I’ve been working from home for over a decade, and I’m familiar with the way my productivity ebbs and flows. Usually, I find that the best way to deal with this kind of thing is to just keep working through it, focusing on tasks that are more time-consuming but less creatively-demanding so that I can still get things done as I try to find ways to refresh.

Right now, I’m in spring cleaning mode, revising and expanding some families that I’ve started but then left for too long. (I haven’t done a full-family release since January 2017, so it’s probably about time I get to work on some of this stuff!) And as part of that spring cleaning, I’m sending you one of the more recent additions to the Roslindale family: Roslindale Deck. It’s maybe not the most exciting Font of the Month I’ve ever sent out, but I hope it can make up for that by being a genuinely useful and usable addition to your font library. 

My work on Roslindale Deck began several months ago, when Stephen Coles used Roslindale Text for the body text of Typographica’s Favorite Typefaces of 2018 (a worthwhile read, by the way!). We thought that the text font looked nice and sturdy at smaller text sizes (say, 10–12pt or 14–16px), but started to look really clunky in the introductory paragraph that is set slightly larger (15pt or 20px). But this size is far too small for Roslindale Display, which is really optimized for headlines more than twice that size. The solution? Something in between.

Deck (or Dek) fonts have long been used by editorial designers for subheads and short summaries that sometimes appear directly below the headline of an article. They are optimized to cover the nebulous middle ground between text (extended reading at small sizes) and display (short bursts of reading at large sizes).

Roslindale Deck is narrower and tighter than Roslindale Text, with a higher contrast between thicks and thins. Most of my time was spent making small tweaks to the pre-existing Text and Display families until I was happy with the interpolations between them.

Deck optical sizes are still relatively rare outside of editorial design—something that I hope will change as variable fonts with an Optical Size axis become more widespread. Even though they may have started with a relatively specialized use in print newspapers and magazines, it seems to me that there are numerous use cases for medium-size-optimized fonts in contemporary typography, from the large text sizes used in many single-column blogs to blurbs, embedded tweets, and advertising copy.

The overly-complicated family map above shows how I am working to expand Roslindale’s irregularly-shaped designspace. The goal of having a family that travels across weight, width, and optical size (also with italics!), but without widths or weights that I don’t feel are necessary. If you have the Roslindale Display and Roslindale Text back issues already, I’m happy to send you a demo variable font if you want to try it out.

As far as that slump goes, one of the other things I try to do is to focus my creative energies elsewhere for a little while. And right now, that elsewhere is the mandolin, which I have been learning how to play over the past year—I’m taking lessons, even now, via video chat. I’m still pretty bad at playing it, but at least I have my future album cover taken care of! 😜