Notes

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! 😜

March’s font of the month: Dattilo DJR Expansion

One of the most common questions I get about Font of the Month Club is, “Do you actually start and finish every font within the span of a single month?”

The answer, of course, is no. Instead, I’m constantly juggling a bunch of projects in the air at once. Some are mere ideas with a few glyphs sketched, while others are nearly complete but in need of some polish. Then, it’s just a matter of choosing something that I think I can whip into shape by month’s end.

I’ve always had a hard time looking at the same font week in and week out, so I love being able to bounce back and forth between different projects. When I return to a font after some time away, I get to see my work with fresh eyes, and I do my best not to forget where I left off.

Dattilo DJR is one of several projects that I’ve left in the air for way too long. I sent you its lightest weight fifteen months ago, and I’ve hardly touched the family since...until now. 😉

Dattilo DJR is a revival of Dattilo, designed by a committee of prominent Italian designers and released in the early 70s by the Nebiolo foundry. I think of it as the slab serif cousin of Forma, which I digitized under the art direction of Roger Black and released in 2016.

This month I’m sending you a beta variable font that covers the heavier end of the Dattilo designspace, as well as four static weights: Regular, Medium, Bold, and Black.

This “Banner” cut of Dattilo DJR is spaced for large display settings, leaning in to the tight-but-not-touching ethos typical of display type in the early 70s. I tried to keep the essential shapes true to the original, and then drew them with rounded corners and slightly-tapering serifs to keep them the same imperfect, ink-blotted world as my digital Forma.

In many ways, the slab serifs turn Dattilo into a much more specific design than Forma is. With a higher contrast of thick and thin strokes, its heaviest weights are perhaps the most individualistic of all. While many contemporary typefaces in this style would warrant a “measure twice, cut once” mentality, I tried to trust my eye a bit more than my ruler in order to prevent the typeface from feeling too pristine or overly-manicured.

I am happy I finally found the time to return to this Dattilo revival, and I hope you find an interesting way to put it to use! (And don’t miss that alternate two-story a!)

Even today, it feels like something of a rarity to find a slab serif built on a neo-grotesque model (like Forma or Helvetica). It’s more organic than geometric; it’s more clean and soft than it is harsh or industrial. To me, it just feels like a breath of fresh air.

February’s font of the month: Megabase

Most typefaces strive to set text with an even color. Of course, by “color” I don’t mean red or blue or purple, but rather the “typographic color” that describes the overall texture and density of text on a page or screen. Essentially, even color is what enables a typeface to remain more-or-less consistent regardless of what words are being set.

If even color is the measure of a typeface’s success, then Megabase fails spectacularly. While the horizontal-stress fonts I’ve made in the past use their serifs to balance out the light and heavy parts of the letterforms, this month’s design has no serifs to fall back on.

I forced myself to embrace Megabase’s uneven color, allowing top-heavy, bottom-heavy, and diagonal forms to stick out like sore thumbs and interrupt the flow of reading. Some words will have unsightly gaps in them, and others will feel way too heavy. The overall texture is punctuated by black bands at irregular heights, like the music roll from a player piano.

Typeface designers have been trying to solve the puzzle of the horizontal-stress sans since the early days of sans-serif type; examples of “Italians” with the serifs removed go back as far as 1840. I love these 19th-century designs such as Gothic Bold (pictured above), and how clunky and uneven they dared to be.

The genre truly hit its stride in the late 1960s and early 1970s, taking on a new space-age resonance with typefaces such as Sintex, Strada, and Zipper. I don’t think I’m 100% satisfied with any of the individual faces from this era (except maybe Jackson), but I definitely sought to capture some of their funkiness in my interpretation.

Interest in the horizontal-stress sans continues to this day. Recent releases include Anouk, Maelstrom Sans, and Signal Compressed, and just the other week, we learned that Cheee began as an interpretation of Sintex.

I’m not entirely sure what I’m trying to do with Megabase, but I think I’m interested in synthesizing the lumbering unevenness of the 19th-century designs with the slick sci-fi curvature of the 20th-century ones.

While most faces in the genre compensate for their thick tops and bottoms by thinning out the middle strokes, Megabase lets all horizontals remain thick. And unlike its forbears, Megabase uses different thicknesses depending on how busy the letter is: T (one horizontal stroke) is thicker than C (two horizontal strokes), which in turn is thicker than E (three horizontal strokes). This sacrifices horizontal alignment between letters, but adds a nice little bounce as the eye travels across the different heights.

The most volatile part of the design is the diagonal strokes, which abruptly break up the system of thick tops and bottoms. The default diagonal forms follow the example of 19th-century designs, reversing the thick-thin contrast of the modern Roman. These thick vertical and diagonal strokes are super disruptive, but I like how they add a bit of chaos and energy.

I’ve also included several alternate sets to give you some control over this volatility. The round forms are more consistently horizontal, and have more of that 70s vibe. The wavy forms take that even further by echoing the designs of the Copacabana sidewalks and the MUNI worm logo. Meanwhile, the streamlined forms go in the other direction, introducing hard corners and asymmetry that feel a bit darker and more severe.

Before I sign off, I want to say thank you to Nick Sherman for coming up with the name Megabase, and André Mora for the helpful critique of the typeface.

I hope that you enjoy Megabase, and that it gives you an excuse to explore all of the other wacky and wonderful designs from this little corner of the typographic universe.

Megabase was supplemented by Megabase Open in October 2018 and is related to Megavolt and Megazoid.