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Women with baskets full of fish are old postcard clichés from the past. The cosmopolitan Lisbon is one of the last Western European capitals awakening from its deep slumber. In this three million metropole an uprising age group resists stereotypes of battered monuments and picturesque paved alleys and looks nervously to the future with a steady attempt to catch up on lost time.

Other Portuguese cities pass through a similar renaissance. Slanted’s journey took them from Lisbon to Porto with a stop in Coimbra, visiting all in all 27 studios. Some people said that Lisbon was the woman while Porto was the man. The first one more smooth and emotional while the northern one is more kind of direct and rational. For both of them, old and new seem to clash with tradition and avant-garde.

Historic factories such as Viúva Lamego (tiles) and Viarco (pencils) proved that they were able to redefine themselves without losing their souls. Same goes for the new energetic generation of designers that grew up with the financial crisis and unemployment: time has come to redefine the dramatic change of their country, influencing all aspects of cultural life.

The issue is thematically complemented by illustrations, photography, interviews and essays.

Visits and authors: Rui Abreu, Aka Corleone, And Atelier, Atelier d’Alves, Emanuel Barbosa, José Bártolo, Bolos Quentes, Bürocratik, Tiago Casanova, Joana Correia, Studio Dobra, Júlio Dolbeth, Dino dos Santos, DROP, João Drumond, Epiforma, FBA., Luis Fernandes, Charlotte von Fritschen, José Guilherme Marques, Studio Andrew Howard, küng design bureau, André Letria, Lara Luís, Ian Lynam, Dermot Mac Cormack, João Machado, Mantraste, Joana Monteiro, Mother Volcano, Musa, Inês Nepomuceno, non-verbal, Márcia Novais, Inês d’Orey, Oupas!, Pedrita, R2 Design, Mariana Rio, Violeta Santos-Moura, Ana Seixas, silvadesigners, Sonja Steppan, Studio Chris Steurer, The Royal Studio, Thisislove, Tomba Lobos, Viarco, Rui Vitorino Santos, Viúva Lamego factory, White Studio, Aaron Winters, Xesta Studio

The booklet “Contemporary Typefaces” presents fourteen recently published high-quality typefaces: FS Brabo (Fernando Mello / Fontsmith), Centro (Panos Vassiliou / Parachute), Ceremony (Studio Joost Grootens / Optimo), GT Cinetype (Rafael Koch, Mauro Paolozzi / Grilli Type), Clone (Lasko Dzurovski / Rosetta), Contemporary Sans (Ludwig Übele / Ludwig Type), Enfantine (Jean-Baptiste Levée / Production Type), Escritura (Ricardo Santos / Vanarchiv), Kairos (Terrance Weinzierl / Monotype), Logica (Dino dos Santos / DSType Foundry), Mila Script Pro (Georg Herold-Wildfellner / FaceType), Vita (Nikola Djurek / Typotheque), Vyoma (Joana Correia / Indian Type Foundry), Weissenhof Grotesk (Stefanie Schwarz, Dirk Wachowiak / Indian Type Foundry).

http://www.slanted.de/shop/slanted-27-portugal

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This long-awaited monograph documents the work of world-renowned typographer, designer and letterpress practitioner Alan Kitching.

Spanning over fifty years, this lavish volume leads us from Kitching’s first typographical experiments under the auspices of mentor Anthony Froshaug to his most iconic creations at The Typography Workshop. It covers his years designing alongside Derek Birdsall, as well as his time teaching letterpress at the Royal College of Art, and showcases his most colourful and expressive pieces, including his prolific work for The Guardian. Kitching’s work hangs in private collections and galleries but it has also featured on everything from magazine and book covers, postage stamps and theatre posters, to wine labels, billboards and signage.
Author: John L. Walters

Art director: Simon Esterson

Designer: Jon Kielty

Photographers: John Bodkin and Philip Sayer

Publisher: Laurence King

Available here

 

 

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Tremolo is a typeface family that does not leave you indifferent. That’s how I always feel about Nikola Djurek’s work. His ability to explore new territories and styles in every new project is one of the things I most admire about him. (That ability, by the way, appears to be endless.)

In the case of Tremolo, I was captivated by the plasticity of the proposal and the quality and warmth conveyed by its execution. If I were to try to “classify” it, I would say that Tremolo Text’s single weight is based in cursive calligraphy, mixed with the spirit of a condensed blackletter and brush lettering. The Stencil version emphasizes this brush style, and I find the treatment of characters like the lowercase ‘o’ just brilliant. Both are extremely readable, in perfect balance. Both have their Italics, where the slope is only applied to the lowercase.

The Display and its Stencil are monolinear — like skeletons of Tremolo Text — but they radiate great rhythm and warmth, with a touch of handwriting. The accompanying Shadows, A and B, which can be colored separately, emphasize the “sign painting” flavor.

The grand finale is Tremolo Gradient. It simulates the stroke of a thick flat brush, and includes three different levels of gradients with upper and lower parts of the letter that can be assembled together in different colors, allowing the designer to control and play with the decorative effect.

I feel a sense of solidarity with Nikola in this playful side of type design, a kind of author’s caprice that seeks the complicity of designers who are also willing to play.

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When Gerard Unger’s Demos was initially released forty years ago, it was composed of dots. Eventually the letters were converted to vector outlines; by 2001, a refined Neue Demos became the face of the German federal government for over ten years. In 2015, the typeface returned fully refurbished, extended to several weights and equipped for multiple languages as Demos Next.

Demos has exciting lettershapes from a typographer’s standpoint and yet it might also be the type historian in me who selected this face for its revealing design process. In 1975, Demos was part of the first generation of commercially available digital typefaces for a type setting machine, called Digiset, from the Kiel-based firm Hell AG.¹ The electronic composition process was based on a cathode ray tube (CRT) and created letters using vertical lines, which were then exposed on film. Letters were beamed by spots of light, the type itself had been dematerialized — a notable development in the history of type.

The design of typefaces for Hell’s Digiset was a meticulous process that demanded a lot of patience. Original drawings were made on a CRT grid with 120 horizontal positions and 100 vertical positions per em to produce type sizes between 8 and 16 pt (Didot). For Unger, designing Demos was “the result of technical as well as aesthetic considerations.”² This statement points to a well-known issue: the balance of a desire for aesthetics and a sensitivity to the necessary restrictions of technology.

Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of Demos is its smooth appearance, which is rooted in the absence of sharp corners — a technical consideration. In some project documentation, Unger later pointed out: “The design of Demos rests on the principle that a halftone dot is usually underexposed and tends to shrink. Then, on the offset plate as it is overdeveloped the dot tends to regain its original size…”³ Similarly, sharp corners turn blunt in various stages of the process — something that particularly concerned Unger. However, by rounding those areas off in advance, they retained their shapes instead.

With programs to produce digital outlines of letters, such as Ikarus, which had been around since the mid-1970s, Demos was soon freed from the rigid grid of the Digiset. Along with Praxis (another typeface designed by Unger for Hell), this duo shaped the visual identity of the German federal government for over a decade. ⁴ In 2011, Unger started with the redesign of what became known as Demos Next, with the assistance of Dan Reynolds (early in the process) and Linda Hintz (later on).

While most of the letters look untouched at first glance, subtle refinements have been made to details such as the subtly more softened terminal in ‘c’ and ‘e’ — overall the letters appear a bit more rounded — and the dots of ‘i’ and ‘j’, as well as punctuation, were redesigned in an almost superellipse-like manner. The most obvious change is the new concept in weights: they’ve expanded from the original regular, italic, and bold to six evenly balanced weights (light, regular, medium, bold, heavy, black) with respective italics. The regular weight is now slightly lighter.

Some final thoughts: compared to the capital letters, the original Demos had an unusually tall x-height, making it quite suitable for newspaper text. In the “next” version, however, this ratio between caps and lowercase has been slightly reduced. Keeping in mind that Demos was once designed for a low-resolution output device, its screen compatibility was literally predetermined — a plus for the complementary webfonts. In a Demos type specimen from the late 1970s, the possibilities of early electronic distortion are displayed; the horizontal stress of the letters allows for a convincing “Demos condensed” result, generated by 20 pt type on 16 pt width. While I hope to see Demos’ old pal Praxis in a similar redesign some time in the future, perhaps proper condensed weights are worth a thought? Historical models are already out there.

Notes

1. Other digitizations based on historical models had been made at Hell, but were not commercially available. The first generation of original type designs for the Digiset included Marconi in 1973, followed by Edison (both by Hermann Zapf), then Demos and Praxis by Gerard Unger, as well as Napoleon and Monanti developed by Hell’s in-house type department. ⤴
2. Gerard Unger: “The design of a typeface” in Visible Language, vol. 13, no. 2, Cleveland, OH 1979, p. 134 [PDF] ⤴
3. Ibid., p. 136 ⤴
4. Then known as Neue Demos and Neue Praxis, licenses of the fonts could be acquired from Linotype only by service providers of the federal government. ⤴

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I’m just going to say what we were all thinking: everyone was excited for Mallory’s debut. And while I would never have been able to guess what he’d make next, Tobias Frere-Jones has again managed to make something necessary. It’s like he handed it to us and said, “Ahem, I think you were looking for this.”

I once met a guy at an AIGA event a bunch of years ago who, upon hearing that I was involved with type, declared that he redesigned Gill Sans for a type class in college. “WHY” I asked rhetorically. It’s not that I couldn’t see the good qualities of Gill’s eponymous sans, it’s just that I don’t see how that system goes together. Frustratingly, it’s one of those distinct faces that can affect those around it, so that when you see a hint of it elsewhere, you immediately label that font as one that “has Gill-like [glyph].”

But Mallory — which sought to “build a new design with British and American traits” — doesn’t have a Gill glyph. It simply has the spirit of Gill — the spirit we all enjoy until that ‘R’ comes along and ruins everything, or someone tries to set it in body copy. In fact, Mallory has just a light mist of Gill across the caps, while the lowercase reckons with Metro in scale and form. Despite this important handshake between Eric Gill and William Addison Dwiggins, Mallory’s spacing, counterforms, and expressive variation within its weights are what make it a high-five for modern type. It’s one of those faces that makes designers excited to page through the PDF specimen, imagining the broad and fresh potential we’ve come to expect from a Frere-Jones typeface.

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