Notes

September’s font of the month: Lautsprecher DJR

Lautsprecher DJR is September’s installment of Font of the Month Club. Sign up this month to get this revival as well as two mystery fonts for as little as $24!

This club has explored many typographic genres in the past couple years, but there is one that I have conspicuously neglected: cursive scripts. I don’t have a lot of experience working in this genre, and I’m honestly not sure I’d be any good at it.

I mention this only to acknowledge that this month’s revival of Lautsprecher is the ultimate connected script cop-out. The typeface fills the role of a connected script, but is actually a curious hybrid of cursive capitals and an italic sans-serif lowercase.

Lautsprecher (German for “loudspeaker”) was created by Jakob Erbar, a German professor and designer active in the early part of the 20th century. He is best known for his eponymous Erbar-Grotesk, a prototypical geometric sans published by Ludwig & Mayer in 1926 and recently reimagined as Dunbar by CJ Dunn in 2016. (CJ is also the person who taught me how to skateboard, but that is a whole other story!)

Ludwig & Mayer published Lautsprecher in 1931, and unfortunately, I don’t know much about the life of the design after that. Erbar died in 1935, and Ludwig & Mayer’s foundry in Frankfurt was destroyed in 1943 during World War II. When the company re-emerged after the war, Lautsprecher was nowhere to be found in its catalog.

In 2015, a specimen for this funky pseudo-script made its way to Letterform Archive in San Francisco as a part of the Tholenaar Collection. And thanks to some cheerleading from Stephen Coles, that is where it caught my attention.

It has been said that not every typeface needs to be revived, and I don’t disagree. Even though Lautsprecher may not be the greatest typeface of all time, I think is just too damn charming too ignore.

I love its details, like the itty-bitty serifs, the hooks on the L and J, and the distinctive diamond terminal on the r. I love its subtle bottom-heaviness and how it incorporates both geometric and organic forms. And I love how Erbar dealt with the constraint of the metal block, chopping off letters like S so that they did not need to hang over the following letter.

I am someone who was taught that a typeface is “a beautiful collection of letters, not a collection of beautiful letters.” But Lautsprecher’s little idiosyncrasies are a helpful reminder that there is some flexibility in how systematic a typeface needs to be.

After Crayonette in 2017 and Bradley in 2018, Lautsprecher is the third summertime revival I’ve done for the club. I’m thinking about making it a tradition!

Of course, many thanks to Stephen and Letterform Archive for providing these resources and for encouraging me to take on the revival. I encourage you to pay them a visit the next time you are in the Bay Area, and if you have a few bucks to spare, you can consider donating to their new home so they can continue preserving and sharing great design.

Congratulations to the winners of Font Family Feud, who are taking home Font of the Month Club subscriptions!

Lure is Amazing

I spent the past week at the Rencontres de Lure conference in the south of France. What an experience!

August’s font of the month: Map Roman Compressed

What follows is an abridged version of the Font of the Month Club’s August mailing:

Last August — exactly one year ago — I released Map Roman, a typeface based on the cartographic lettering of MacDonald (Max) Gill. This month I decided to return to the design with Compressed and Extra Condensed widths.

As you might recall, Max Gill is famous for saving the London Underground with his 1914 “Wonderground” map. But when I first encountered Gill’s work in La Jolla, the map that struck first most was actually Wonderground’s 1922 successor, “In the Heat of the Summer.”

As a rule, titling caps will feel elegant because we allow them to take up the space that they need. So what impressed me about the capitals on this particular map is that they managed to retain so much of their elegance despite being so aggressively crammed together.

You might notice that I added a handful of Discretionary Ligatures (HE, MP, TT etc.) based on the “Summer” map. And I also had the chance to add a few alternate characters based on suggestions by Caroline Walker, Max Gill’s great-niece and curator of a website dedicated to his work. I was very excited to get feedback from someone so close to the source material, and I hope she enjoys the new round-top &, round-top 3, and curled 7 (and that you do too, of course!).

Map Roman Compressed is August’s installment of Font of the Month Club. Sign up this month to get Map Roman Compressed, as well as two mystery fonts, for as little as $24!

Roslindale in use: Haus

“We wanted the Haus brand to feel simultaneously modern and timeless—and Roslindale captures that duality. It’s both old and new, elegant but indisputably bold.”

Haus is a new low-alcohol aperitif created by Helena Price Hambrecht and Woody Hambrecht that was launched in June 2019. The identity was designed by Kelsey Lim at Gin Lane and prominently features Roslindale.

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