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Book covers challenge

April’s font of the month: Polliwog

Font of the Month, 2019/04 PDF Try Buy $24
Polliwog

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

Conventional wisdom tells us that text typography and display typography have opposite goals: a typeface should never catch the eye in extended text, but on a poster, being eye-catching is kind of the point.

I’ve always been intrigued by fonts that occupy the space between text and display. Subtitles, decks, introductory paragraphs, and text in children’s books are all pretty niche use cases, but they all lend themselves to a certain category of typeface. This typeface can be distinctive and eye-catching on a structural level, but must be drawn plainly enough to be suitable for reading in short bursts. (It’s sort of the counter-approach to last’s month’s font, Gimlet Banner, which features a relatively conventional structure drawn with eye-popping contrast.)

Polliwog display

I’m not sure if there is an agreed-upon name for this genre; personally I think of them as “novelty text” typefaces. I also like the term “advertising text,” which I first heard from from David Berlow when describing intended uses for my typeface Trilby. The term recalls midcentury advertising that featured a paragraph of copy, much more than we typically have today.

It’s kind of a weird impulse to take a super-interesting idea and then execute it in a boring-ish way. But I think it can be a useful typographic exercise to distill a style down to its essential elements in order to truly understand how a system works. This is what I have attempted to do this month with the whimsical Jugendstil lettering of Max Joseph Gradl.

Lettering work from Gradl
Lettering work from Gradl
Examples of Gradl’s lettering, large and small. From Schriften-Atlas, courtesy of Jason Carne’s Lettering Library.

Active around the turn of the twentieth century, M. J. Gradl was a German artist whose diverse body of work in the Art Nouveau style covered jewelry design, wallpaper design, and advertising. There have been various typographic takes on Gradl’s imaginative alphabets in the past, including an early digital version for Microsoft by the aforementioned David Berlow.

While existing digital interpretations celebrate Gradl’s work in all of its wavy grandiosity, Polliwog thinks small. (The name “polliwog” is actually a synonym for “tadpole.”) The typeface suggests that all you need to create a compelling rhythm in a block of text is a single drop of Gradl’s proto-psychedelic Jugendstil energy.

Polliwog text

The core of Polliwog’s interesting texture comes from the juxtaposition of straight stems and broad, swinging curves. Even though letters like A, U, and V are distinctively asymmetrical, there is a great deal of symmetry in the overall design; curves are just as likely to swoop to the left as they are to the right.

Outer curves flatten out abruptly as they hit the tops and bottoms of letterforms, causing the weight to clump up momentarily and emphasizing the horizontality of the line. This unevenness in weight is echoed in the softened and tapered stroke endings, giving a bit of wobble to an otherwise-skeletal design. The font includes a handful of alternates, giving you the opportunity to fine-tune the flavor of your text.

Alternates

Polliwog is available this April for members of the Font of the Month Club; memberships go for as little as $6/month, so do yourself a favor and sign up today!

M

March’s font of the month: Gimlet Banner

Font of the Month, 2019/03 PDF Try Buy $24
Gimlet Banner

Gimlet is one of my most extensive type families, released in 2016 in three optical sizes, four widths, and five weights. Many large serif families use thick/thin contrast to create dramatic tension, especially in display sizes, but Gimlet is different. Gimlet’s contrast remains relatively low throughout the series, owing mainly to the slabby roots of its inspiration, Schadow, designed by Georg Trump in 1938.

My interest in Schadow started with Nick Sherman, who suggested that I use it as a jumping-off point for a new design. Gimlet has always had an unusual relationship with its predecessor; rarely do my typefaces owe so much to a single source, yet strive to be so different from it. Gimlet isn’t really a “revival” even in the loosest sense of the word, but it draws so much from Schadow that it’s also hard to think of it as an entirely original design (in John Downer’s helpful classification, I think/hope it would be considered an homage).

Following in Schadow’s footsteps, Gimlet’s serifs aren’t quite slabs, but they’re not too far away from slabs either. But in my mind, Gimlet was never supposed to be a slab serif. I’ve always wondered what would happen if I took the design one step further from its source material and started to amp up the contrast.

comparison between Schadow, Gimlet Display, and Gimlet Banner

This month, I’m sending you an exploratory style of Gimlet Banner, a font intended for very large sizes that eschews Schadow’s low contrast in favor of razor-thin serifs and hairlines. I use the word “exploratory” to describe this exercise because, in a family as large as Gimlet, it’s nice to dip my toe in the high-contrast waters before committing to the development of 40 new Banner styles.

I’m not sure I’m 100% sold on this yet, but I’m warming up to it. The extreme thins are inherently brittle, and I might have gone a little too far. But I do like how the Banner style exaggerates the unusual thick/thin/thick transitions between stems and arches in letters like n or d.

Gimlet Banner

Interpolation has been a crucial part of Gimlet’s development (as it is for many large families); I was able to generate many variants from a relatively small set of master designs. But for this exploration I’ve chosen to work in the Bold Condensed style precisely because it is not one of the original masters.

This may seem counterintuitive at first. I’m creating extra work for myself, and should I choose to pursue Banner styles for the entire family, I’ll probably have to discard this version and redraw the family in a more systematic way.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about how easy it can be to rely too much on interpolation, and how difficult it can be to maintain a sense of individuality and specificity at any given point in a large, fluid designspace. (This is especially apparent in Gimlet, which has already taken many style-specific quirks from Schadow and ironed them out into a more unified family.)

So despite the inefficiency, this exploration has forced me to spend some time drawing in a less-familiar area of the designspace. And hopefully I’ve learned something in the process.

Gimlet Banner is available this March for members of the Font of the Month Club; memberships go for as little as $6/month, so be sure to sign up today!

Alternate ampersand