Today I am happy to announce latest addition to Fit: Fit Armenian!
Designer Gor Jihanian designed this mesmerizing, interlocking alphabet to fill space with maximum impact, inspired by the inscriptional forms of Armenian gravestones in India. He also built an incredible minisite to showcase this bold new expansion and to tell the story behind it.
Visit the Fit Armenian minisite »
I hope you enjoy this look back at some hyphens I drew in 2018 for Font of the Month Club.
Ilia from Workspiration recently published an interview with me where I share some thoughts on fonts and sandwiches.
There are also some worthwhile interviews with other type designers such as Masha Doreuli and Jackson Cavanaugh that are worth a read.
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of sending out Roslindale Variable Italic to the members of the Font of the Month Club. Try it on v-fonts.com to get a feel for what it does. Here’s a little bit more about the design.
As you may remember from previous months, Roslindale is my take on the style of De Vinne, a typeface attributed to Gustav Schroeder and Nicholas Werner and released by the Central Type Foundry in 1892. The family grew over the following years to include De Vinne Italic, which was essentially a sloped version of the original Roman design.
But I didn’t feel like a sloped Roman was enough for Roslindale. Like De Vinne before it, Roslindale combines a rational structure typical of the Victorian era with echoes of historicized “oldstyle” shapes. And because Roz has a foot in both the “modern” and “oldstyle” worlds, I felt that its Italic should as well. (I should say that I have no problem with sloped Romans in general...in fact, I’m particularly proud of Gimlet’s funky Italics that juxtaposed sloped Roman letters with exuberant swashy forms.)
Compared to type family extensions like weights or widths, Italics can have an especially complicated relationship with their companion Romans. This is because they can differ from the Roman not only in slope, but can draw (to varying degrees) on an entirely separate calligraphic tradition of cursive forms with different letter structures, densities, and textures.
The recent(ish) introduction of OpenType Variations has made this complicated relationship more apparent: even though a variable font file can theoretically contain an entire family, it is often more pragmatic to maintain separate variable fonts for Romans and Italics if the designs are just too different to combine.
Variable Fonts also gives us an opportunity to rethink the role that an Italic plays in a type family. Could there, or should there, be a space between Roman and Italic? What would that even look like? Would it actually be useful to fine-tune the “italicness” of a font?
I honestly don’t know the answers to these questions, or if taking the time to explore them makes any practical sense. But there is some precedent for this kind of thinking in families like Auto and Arietta and even Dwiggins’s Electra that were drawn with multiple italics, I figured it was something worth playing with. With a sloped Roman in its DNA, Roslindale seemed like a suitable playground.
So, in addition to issuing the self-explanatory Roslindale Display Condensed Bold Italic (which I hope club members find useful, by the way), I also issued an experimental variable font called Roslindale Variable Italic. This font allows you to manipulate Roslindale’s “italicness” independently from its slant. Rather than drawing separate Roman and Italic masters, I drew alternate cursive-style forms in both upright and optically-corrected-oblique configurations. These are available as OpenType Stylistic Sets and also begin to appear (in a somewhat-logical progression, maybe?) as the variable Italic axis gets more and more Italic.
In addition to being able to customize the “italicness” of the Italic, this font also gives you the ability to incorporate Italic forms into the upright Roman as well. I was excited to see this part of the experiment dovetail with the upright cursive forms of ITC Bernase Roman, a 1970s interpretation of the same De Vinne style.
Roslindale Variable Italic is available to members of the Font of the Month Club; memberships go for as little as $6/month. If all goes according to plan, I’ll also send out a bonus version of Roslindale Variable that will incorporate all of the extensions that I’ve offered so far (Weight, Optical Size, and Italic), but only to those members who have also received Roslindale’s previous installments. So make sure you grab those back issues on the signup form!
Last summer, I received a big envelope in the mail from Roger Black. You might already know that I worked with him on a revival of Forma, the sans serif published by the Italian type foundry Nebiolo in 1968. But what you might not know is that Nebiolo also produced a slab serif counterpart to Forma in the early 70s called Dattilo. And what Roger’s envelope contained was a handful of original specimens of that design.
Forma and Dattilo share an interesting history as the product of a committee of eight prominent Italian graphic designers led by Nebiolo’s art director, Aldo Novarese. The struggling foundry assembled this committee to create a new “universal” typeface that would compete with the likes of Helvetica and Univers. Indra Kupferschmid documented this unusual tale of design-by-committee in an article that accompanied Forma DJR’s release, and even more detail can now be found in a pair of recent articles by Alessandro Colizzi. Just like Forma, Roger has admired the design for decades, even commissioning a phototype version from Jim Parkinson for a 1977 cover of Rolling Stone when the original metal was unavailable.
With our revival of Forma published in 2016, a complementary revival of Dattilo seemed like a natural next step for the design system. And this month I’m happy to share with you a preview of the lightest weight of the largest size of the new in-progress family: Dattilo DJR Banner Extra Light.
Picking up where Forma DJR left off, my interpretation of Dattilo is guided by the things that Roger loved about this era of typesetting: the meeting of lofty ideals of universality and perfection and the realities of working with ink, metal, and paper. Rather than trying to achieve the most beautiful or perfect shapes, I was focused on conveying some of the design’s physicality. So you can see slight variations in stroke contrast, as well as blunted corners and ever-so-slightly tapered serifs...but no tapered stems this time!
One of Forma’s defining characteristics is its super-tight spacing, which is a bit harder to achieve in Dattilo with all those serifs in the way. But that additional space endows Dattilo with an interesting rhythm and a typewriter-influenced personality distinct from its sans serif counterpart. And the spacing still prioritizes closeness over a steady rhythm, giving text a 70s vibe.
A few of Dattilo forms diverge from Forma’s design, and instead borrow from Forma’s set of Swiss-style alternates, including the R with a curved leg and the bearded G. And while Dattilo retains Forma’s trademark single-story a, it does come with a two-story alternate.
Now that I’m sending the Extra Light to you, I’m going to use this as an excuse to spend some more time with the heavier side of the family, which diverges even more from Forma in its look and feel.
Dattilo DJR has already been used to great effect by Roger in the latest issue of Type Magazine (pictured below), as well as by Mark Porter in his recent redesign of Domus, the Italian architecture and design magazine. Now I’m excited to see what you do with it!
Dattilo DJR Banner Extra Light is available this month to members of Font of the Month Club. You can join for as little as $6/month, and gift subscriptions are available!
