Notes

May’s Font of the Month: Megawarp

I haven’t been on top of my game this month. I know I had mentioned the italics I was working on for Lithographer Text, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through the focus-demanding, detail-oriented work of finishing them. I will send those fonts to you someday, but today is not that day.

Instead, I desperately needed a reset. I wanted to start something new, where I could lower the stakes, move fast, and have fun. And what I ended up with is a fifth entry in my Megafonts series: Megawarp!

Each of the Megafonts engages with an element of sans serif typography that has been embraced by the science fiction genre—for Megabase it was horizontal stress; for Megavolt, angularity; Megazoid, blockiness; and most recently Megascope, geometry and proportion.

This time, I’ve gone all-in on another key ingredient of the sci-fi milieu: fragmentation. In Typeset in the Future, Dave Addey’s rules of futuristic typography include instructions to “remove an entirely pointless and arbitrary segment of the text”, such as “a horizontal line from the majority of the word.” This technique is perhaps most famously used in Blade Runner’s poster art, where a line of negative space shoots like a laser beam through the upper portion of each letter. (See also Comicraft’s fun interpretation, Running with Scissors.)

If the laser beam technique can feel a little arbitrary in how it breaks letters apart, I became interested in how these slices could be integrated into a typeface more intentionally. Aldo Novarese’s Stop (recently expanded by the great Dan Rhatigan) demonstrates how letters can be broken down to the bare minimum of what is needed for communication, a concept that was further explored in other geometric stencil faces like Orientation and Svang. 

I also spent some time checking out the post-Microgramma squarishness of fonts like Earth and Corporate Image, which employ their slices opportunistically to add distinctiveness and style. I especially love how these fonts open themselves up to the interplay of uppercase and lowercase forms, something I tried to build into Megawarp’s unicase. Using stylistic sets, you can adjust the dial from standard all-caps to a futuristic uncial of sorts:

I started Megawarp using the laser beam approach, but I quickly found myself deviating from it. I developed a loose set of rules to how I would apply slices, which are as follows: 

1. A slice can’t be arbitrary—it has to happen at some “event” in the letterform, like a stroke ending or intersection. 

2. A letter must get sliced somewhere unless that slice will make it indistinguishable from another letter. 

3. If it’s possible to slice a letter in the upper left quadrant, do it. If not, slice it in the lower left quadrant. Strokes on the right side of the letter generally don’t get a slice unless they need one.

There’s not much more to it! The structure of the letterform influences the location of the slice, and the location of the slice influences the structure of the letterform. 

The design is so modular and cut-and-pastey that it was easy for me to iterate on it, try out four or five versions of a letter and see what worked best. (I left a lot of these extra glyphs in the font as alternates…I should probably pare them down eventually.)

When you look at a negative shape in Megawarp, you can never really be sure if you’re looking at a slice or a counterform. Take the default capital A above, for example. Do you see it as a typical capital A with a slice in the upper left? Or do you see it as a lowercase a, with the bottom stroke missing? 
 

This ambiguity led me to some unexpected solutions. On its face, the lowercase e zig-zags like a z, and the three-pronged a looks like a bizarre, stylized numeral 3. If you dig, you’ll find an alternate S that looks more like a backwards C. 

These characters are a bit difficult to decipher on their own, but I think they start to work in context—it’s almost as if the more conventional letters help you acclimate to the less conventional ones in real time. (I confess, I still wonder if the default a is a bridge too far, and I might consider swapping it out for a more conventional form in the future. But I figured I should go with my gut at first and pull back later if necessary!)

All of this is to say, this font is meant to be played with. The font has loads of alternates, a huge x-height, and I drew the uppercase and lowercase with the same spacing and vertical stem weights so that you can mix them together as you see fit. (The lowercase i is literally the uppercase I with a slice through it.)

And it might be a bit on the nose with the whole sci-fi theme, but I couldn’t resist including Oblique and Backslanted styles. Feel free to add outlines and drop shades to your heart’s content!

This font is a perfect example of why, nine years in, I think it is still worthwhile to make monthly fonts for you. I was treading water all month, unable to make progress on anything, but the approaching deadline forced me to toss my plans out the window and just make something. And once I got some momentum going, things really started to flow.

Is it the most original thing in the world? Probably not. But I think there are a few inspired moments in there, and I certainly hope that you have as much fun with this one as I did. Warp speed ahead!

NEW: Fit Arabic by Sahar Afshar

Stop whatever you are doing right now and go check out Fit Arabic, designed by Sahar Afshar and released this past week by Dogray Type Foundry.

Fit is a typeface that is primarily focused on filling space, a quality it shares with the Square Kufi style of Arabic calligraphy. In her interpretation, Sahar was able to build on this rich calligraphic tradition, without being constrained by it. The result is an inventive and modern take on the Arabic script that deftly employs Fit’s design language of curves and divets to make the bold, brash letterforms extra flavorful (and hopefully extra legible, too).

I could not have asked for a better partner on this project, and I am absolutely thrilled with the result. You can (and should!) license the font at Dogray, and you can also find it on Adobe Fonts, Fontstand, and Type Network.

I hope you make great things with it. (And please let us know if you do!)

April’s Font of the Month: Baby Condor

So…I know I said I was going to send you more Lithographer Text this month, but the universe had other plans. (In other words, I boneheadedly overwrote a bunch of my work on it earlier this week, without backing it up.)

I debated sending you what I do have, but it’s just not quite ready for primetime. I always struggle with how “beta” club releases should be. My goal is to send you a slightly doughy cookie each month—something underbaked enough to be nice and chewy, but not so much that you end up with food poisoning.

So while Lithographer Text sits in the oven for a little longer, I’m sending you a little something that has been in the slow-cooker since 2010. This is Baby Condor: a cut of my sparkly, contrasty typeface Condor that is, well, less sparkly and contrasty.

It’s always easy to complain about “blanding” and the ubiquity of corporate sans serifs (and believe me I do!). But I certainly understand the appeal of a one-size-fits-all typeface that works as well on a smartwatch as it does on a billboard. 

I would love for a stylized design like Condor to be a viable alternative to these branding sans serifs, but I know it is not. Condor is a really finicky design, especially when it comes to size. If you set it just a bit too small, it gets tough on the eyes very quickly. A separate small-size version is the only way for a family like that to even try to compete.

I first imagined a small-size version of Condor shortly after its release in 2010, and I drew it following the approach taken by Font Bureau’s Reading Edge Series. In addition to the lower contrast, it also has a bigger x-height and looser spacing. Its weights, particularly the difference between Regular and Bold, are tuned for harmonious paragraphs instead of punchy headlines. 

I remember the talk that Peter Biľak gave at Typographics about the unexpected sales trajectories of fonts, and Condor certainly fits that bill for me. It didn’t get much traction after its release, but in the past few years it has taken on a second life, showing up on packaging, in superhero films, and even on Jeopardy! And earlier this month, the Canadian Space Agency used Condor on the Artemis II mission patch for astronaut Jeremy Hansen, who recently took it on a 10-day voyage around the moon and back. Wild!

Even though it follows the small-optical-size playbook, I still think of Baby Condor as a text-ified display font, rather than a true text font (if that makes any sense). I’m not hoping to read any books set in Baby Condor, but I can see it doing a lot that the original Condor could not.

For example, the Canadian Space Agency also uses Condor for supporting text in a lot of their videos, and have wisely tracked it out when it gets on the small side. My hope is that Baby Condor will offer a more robust alternative to Condor in situations like these, while still preserving plenty of the family’s distinctive flavor.

March’s Font of the Month: Lithographer Text

While my wife Emily was getting her master’s degree at Dartmouth College, I often found myself on campus with time to kill. I spent most of it in Dartmouth’s iconic library building, which housed a massive mural, a letterpress studio, and plenty of beautiful spots to sit and work.

Virtually every visit to the library included a stop at the Evans Map Room. There was always something interesting on display, but the real attraction was the discards pile in the corner. The library was constantly circulating maps in and out of the collection, and discarded maps were free for the taking. It turns out that “If we don’t take this, it might get thrown away!” was a pretty convincing argument for Emily and me to grab maps that we didn’t need and had no space to display. 

During the two years that we lived nearby, we collected over a dozen large-scale maps, all mounted on fabric and hung from a wooden rod—the kind of thing you might see in an old-fashioned classroom. They are mostly from the first half of the twentieth century and made in Europe, and feature locales across the world. Rolled up and standing on their side, many are taller than I am.

Recently, I’ve spent a long time staring at a German map from our collection entitled “Geologie der Erde” (“Geology of the World”). It was produced around 1921 by the Justus Perthes Publishing Company in Gotha, Germany and illustrated by Dr. Richard Rein. The photo above doesn’t do it justice…its beauty is all in the details.

I’ve been asked before if I have a dream custom typeface project, and I think my answer might be to work on a typographic system for maps like this one. It requires such an elegant balance of density, variety, and legibility, cramming so many different kinds of information and styles into one unified design. I mean, this map has got everything: serif, sans serif, low contrast, high contrast, upright, italic, a backslanting contra-italic, and even a connected super-italic!

These days all our digital maps use a few weights of a UI-ish sans for everything…that was not always the case (full image), and it does feel like something has been lost. So I could wait for the perfect cartographic client to come along, or I could just start drawing.

What I’m sending you this month is less of a usable typeface and more of a promise. The character set and features are limited, the kerning is sparse, and the drawing is rough, especially on the bold end. For next month’s edition, I hope you don’t mind if I continue to refine this design, while adding small caps, lining figures, and italics.

I think the font I’m sending you today as the foundational text styles for a larger upcoming family. I’ve tried to capture some of my favorite quirks from the map’s lettering and make them palatable for extended reading. I’m talking about the long serifs, the huge tail on the a, the horizontal stress of the g and its playful antenna, and the moments of abrupt flatness that come from a pointed pen, such as the high shoulders of letters like n and the flat top of the a. 

Typographers will often eschew “Modern” Bodoni-esque typefaces for extended text because the contrast can be overwhelming. I tried to soften things up here, so hopefully it’s not too hard on the eyes. I’ve been using it for my email and web browsing over the past month and I don’t think it’s half bad!

Longtime club members may recall that I have another long-serifed, pointed pen-inspired font in my library called Club Lithographer. (For more on that font, see also this recent review of the design and its origins by Katerina Grushka.) Club Lithographer is italic-only, and I’ve wondered whether it should get an upright companion someday.

At some point in the process of making the font I’m sending you today, it dawned on me that I was kinda-sorta drawing that upright companion, albeit one for text, without any of the maple-syrupy, display-ish details. So I’ve started to think of this design and Club Lithographer as two antipodes of the same type family. You can convince me otherwise, but for now I’m simply calling this design Lithographer, and I hope that you enjoy it very much.

February’s Font of the Month: Buckridge

This month, I’m sending you Buckridge, a contrasted sans serif inspired by the lettering on the cover of a trigonometry textbook. I encountered this book at Nancy Dole Books & Ephemera, a lovely used bookstore in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts—it’s actually the same shop where I encountered the boy scout manual that led me to make Merit Badge.

The book is the 1952 edition of Plane and Spherical Trigonometry published by Ginn & Co. (See also this post of Dwiggins designs from the same publisher.)

Anyway, here’s the cover:

I wasn’t able to find out anything about the book’s designer (please tell me if you know anything!), but I absolutely fell in love with this cover. The lettering on a geometry textbook could have easily gone in a more geometric direction, but instead the designer chose to introduce deco-humanistic elements. They create a compelling contrast with the illustration and add so much life to the design.

Naturally, the swooping curve of the R and the round form of the E were the first details to catch my eye. But there’s a lot of subtle forces at work here as well: the slight angle of the A in “AND”, the gentle flaring of the horizontal and diagonal strokes, and an intriguing mix of Art Deco and humanist features. Take for example how the S with diagonal stress and flared endings sits alongside a P which has none of that stuff and whose bowl is 100% vertically symmetrical. This doesn’t make any logical sense, but I can’t deny that it works!

The original designer leaned towards a more conventional K (see “MIKESH”). But in my interpretation, I thought it best to embrace my favorite elements and just run with them.

With this choice, I ran the risk of letting the R and K be a little too interesting for their own good. A typeface is always going to have more interesting letters and less interesting letters, but I try to avoid making fonts where there are a couple of letters that are SO MUCH more interesting than the rest…it’s essentially putting all of your typographical eggs into one basket. It’s great when they happen to be sprinkled evenly throughout the text, but it can be overwhelming when there are too many of them too close together. And when there are too few, it’s like eating the part of the burrito that is only rice.

After the designs of the R and K were settled, my job was to modulate the volume of the other letters so that a word without R or K doesn’t feel disappointing after a word that has them.

All of this talk about R and K got me interested in what this typeface would look like in Cyrillic, which has related letters such as Я and Ж. Buckridge’s Cyrillic uses a more conventional form of E to distinguish it from the Ukranian letter Є. I am grateful to Jovana Jocić (designer of Forma Cyrillic and Roslindale Cyrillic) for giving me incredibly helpful feedback on this design. You’ll also find the starting point for a Greek in there, but I just started that a couple days ago, and haven’t been able to solicit feedback from a native speaker quite yet.

I don’t know what else to say about this typeface except that it just makes me very happy. I wanted to work from this source material because I feel that it radiates with lightness and energy, and I hope I’ve captured that in my interpretation.