Notes

Pappardelle!

You might have wondered about the condensed slab serif on your Font of the Month Club membership card, so maybe you saw this one coming. But to celebrate six months of this club’s existence, I decided it was time to let Pappardelle loose and see what the club will do with it.

Pappardelle is a twentieth century take on the French Antique genre, following in the footsteps of faces like Playbill, Figaro, and Pro Arte. The direct inspiration for this typeface was Herbert Matter’s branding for the Knoll furniture company. Like its exemplars, Pappardelle has less of the Wild West in it, and is more of a modernist appreciation of the formal game that horizontal stress can play with the Latin alphabet.

You might have been taught that it’s never a good idea to add letter spacing to lowercase, but here is the exception. I love how this typeface looks with a generous heaping of tracking, big and small(ish), uppercase and lowercase. Some space between the letters really accentuates the stacatto rhythms of the design.

And, in commemoration of the recent release of the first shipping browsers to support OpenType variations, Pappardelle also comes in the new format. It has a variable axis that controls the contrast between the thicks and thins. A font of the Month Club first!

Note: This post is backdated so that it appears in the correct sequence on this blog.

Building Bild

As September winds down, I wanted to jot down a few notes on Bild, the chunky, narrow sans that I distributed to Font of the Month Club. (There are two more days left in the month, so sign up now and get your own copy!)

If you look at Jackson Burke’s seminal Trade Gothic family, you will notice that a couple of the weights don’t quite fit in. They are clunkier and more condensed, with echoes of Alternate Gothic and ATF Railroad Gothic.

I originally started drawing Bild in 2012 when Sam Berlow suggested that I check out these weights to use as source material for a new design. I kind of took the freeform approach, but without much in the way of scans or specimens. Bild, the typeface that emerged from these sketches, builds upon the stylistic features of these outliers in the pursuit of a singular goal: to set dense, punchy headlines.

Sure there are already a lot of condensed sans serifs out there, but what I like about this one is that it walks the line between structured and organic. For every straight-sided curve or rigid shape present in the typeface, there is also a grotty detail to liven things up. Curvy shapes like the S or the bowl of the a break up Bild’s mechanical regularity. The closed-in terminals vary in length, and not one of them ends on a true horizontal.

Bild’s Black Compressed style is part of a larger series of widths and weights that has been sitting on my desktop for far too long. I’m hoping that my work on this preview weight will give me the kick in the butt I need to work on more of the typeface.

Oh, and one last thing: the name Bild isn’t a typo; it means image in German. Thanks to Indra Kupferschmid for suggesting it!

On our road trip back from ATypI Montreal, Jill, Kent, and I had the pleasure of visiting the World’s Tallest File Cabinet in Burlington, Vermont.

My ATypI 2017 talk: How NOT to draw accents

This past week, I was happy to give this lecture at the ATypI conference in Montreal. Some resources and notes are below.

Here are links to the resources I mentioned in the talk:

• The Insects Project
• The Diacritics project
• On Diacritics
• Language as Design Criteria, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• Vietnamese Typography
• Polish Diacritics: How To?
• Thorn and Eth: how to get them right
• Context of Diacritics
• Fancy Diacritics on Flickr

I should also correct myself by saying that even though that “Münstermann” sign shares the u/n identification issue found it Kurrentschrift, it is not actually done in that style. Sorry about that!

Also, multiple people approached me after my talk and mentioned that in some languages/regions, one might see accents simplified due to the lack of availability of type supporting those accents. And of course, some simplifications that I showed will make sense in some languages but not in others.

Finally, huge thanks to ATypI for this opportunity, and to the folks that helped provide images and insights, including: Rui Abreu, Marina Chaccur, Florian Hardwig, Indra Kupferschmid, Albert-Jan Pool, Nick Sherman, Grzegorz Rolek, and Donny Troung.

A couple Font of the Month fonts used alongside some Pyte Foundry favorites in this poster for a block party by Studio Het Mes. Matthijs was kind enough to let me post this photo: