Notes

June’s Font of the Month: Job Clarendon Compressed Hairlines

How condensed is too condensed? 
 

I love it when a type family is allowed to cross the invisible threshold between expected, practical proportions and something that bumps up against the limits of what we can read and perceive. 

Job Clarendon is already a narrow typeface. But with the encouragement and art direction of Bethany Heck, I’m sending you some new Hairline weights that are so narrow, they make the original version feel like Hellenic Wide! 😜

In the nineteenth century, job printers relied on wood types in an electric array of widths to fill up their flyers and broadsides. Bethany and I are super curious how contemporary designers can translate this playful approach to typographic proportions to variable fonts, navigating between conventional and extreme proportions to find a sweet spot for each particular project, or perhaps even each individual headline within it. (Unfortunately, I am omitting the variable version for now because some outlines are so brittle they don’t survive the conversion...yet 😅)

As the horizontal widths condense, it’s funny to see how many other aspects of the design need to change as well. The straight sides of round letters get straighter, the overshoots get smaller, descenders get smaller, and the rhythm of black and white shapes gets more regular overall (resulting in more of a picket fence effect).

The extremes in horizontal proportions are echoed in the vertical proportions as well. Following patterns we found in Job Clarendon’s nineteenth century predecessors, elements like the top of g the and the belly of a grow wildly, forcing these letters to feel like funhouse mirror reflections of the original.

I typically gloss over (or don’t even mention) alternate forms in these write-ups; I tend to think of them more as easter eggs that you can uncover as you spelunk around in the fonts. But Job Clarendon’s alternates, especially the “Square Terminals and Dots” are worthy of another mention. This is partly because it was a lot of work to manage all these extra glyphs, but also because they completely change the character of the typeface. In the new Compressed and Extra Compressed, I might actually prefer these to the default ball terminals!

I believe Job Clarendon is destined to be one of the most versatile titling faces in my library, and I’ve been frustrated with myself for letting it sit for over a year already! (Sorry, Bethany!) You can let me know if you think I’m doing too many updates for the club in general, but I really appreciate the opportunity to pick up projects like this and give them some renewed momentum.
 

In other news, my month is off to a good start—this week, I am finally getting to visit with some of my family for the first time since the pandemic. I’m also looking forward to Typographics later this month. (At least as of today it’s not too late to propose a talk for the TypeLab...just saying!) I hope your month is off to a great start as well!

Pokémon Super Extra Deluxe Essential Handbook

What a Super Extra Deluxe use of Bungee in the Pokémon Handbook!

I wasn’t able to ID the other typefaces used, but fortunately the Fonts in Use staff was there to help me catch ’em all. See the post on Fonts in Use »

I was particularly intrigued by the page below that lists the various Pokémon types. It seemed to me that this would also make a better typeface classification system than most!

To put that theory to the test, I attempted to apply some of these classifications to fonts from Font of the Month Club. Here was my first attempt:

Nickel Color demo

In addition to setting predefined color palettes, I made a Nickel color font whose open forms respond to the current fill color of your document. And it even responds to dark mode! 🔡🌃

Who said Color Fonts have to be in color?

May’s font of the month: Nickel v2

Exactly five years ago, I published the inaugural edition of the Font of the Month Club. I thought I’d be ready to celebrate this anniversary with some big, insightful retrospective on how the experience has redefined my process (which it has) and transformed the way I think about making and releasing type (which it did). 

But that’s the thing about working this way: the months pass by so fast that it’s hard to pause and reflect. And if I have to choose between writing a thinkpiece or reinvigorating one of my lesser-used fonts with a superfluous 3D highlight, I’m always gonna choose fonts! 🤷

Hot on the heels of Nickel Gothic’s expansion, I’m sending you an expanded version of Nickel, the original font of the month (May 2017). Like last month, I started by adding a lowercase, and like last month, it was a pretty clear-cut transformation that turned out even nicer than I had hoped. The imposing vertical serifs (essentially the jaws of a staple remover) get even larger than they were in the uppercase...what can I say, I like tall vertical serifs!

Like Forum, Augustea Open, and other midcentury outline fonts before it, Nickel’s Open Face variant plays with the tension between 2D abstract shapes and 3D optical illusion. Coming back to it now, I added optical correction to the open shapes so the horizontal lines no longer feel too thick.

I also “forked” the base layer, so there are different versions for using alone and in combination with the open shapes. This allowed me to make specific accommodations, most visible in the pinching counterforms of the lowercase. When used alone, I wanted those pinches to feel sharp and incisive. When used with the open shapes, I needed them to shrink or disappear to make room for the inline shapes.

Last but not least, I drew the aforementioned highlight layer to add a little extra oomph and gave Nickel the full color fonts treatment: it now comes as layerable fonts (Nickel Layers) and color fonts (Nickel Color). 

On the technical front, there’s been recent progress in support of customizable color palettes in Safari and Chrome, which I hope will make my color fonts easier and more fun to use. I’d love to see color palette selection in Desktop apps, but in the meantime you can always use my Color Font Customizer to tweak the color palettes embedded in the font file. 

And for the first time, I’m including a version (Nickel v2 Color Regular) that doesn’t rely on predefined color palettes and instead uses the primary color of your text. It doesn’t seem to work in Adobe apps, which is a bummer, but I think it’s still pretty nifty.

Maybe someday I’ll sit down and write that retrospective, but for now let me just take this opportunity to thank Font of the Month Club members for supporting my work! Five years later, I still think this club pushes me to make more interesting work than I would be otherwise, and it’s hard for me to imagine what my life would be like without it. Whether you’ve been a member since the start or you just joined last month, you made that possible. 💜