Författare: Nyhetsuppläsaren STG

So you’re at Crate and Barrel, browsing that wall of little things like spaghetti measurers and strawberry clamps and scissors that slice a banana so very evenly. And you know you don’t need them but you’re looking at them because it’s not like you could afford anything else at Crate and Barrel and why do you even come in here anyway. Does anyone else really, really hate those highly specialized kitchen tools? Those things that can do only one job each?

In case you are still reading: by my own logic, I should have something against typefaces that aren’t very versatile tools. But no! And I happen to particularly enjoy Blesk by Samarskaya and Partners. I’m compli­cated that way.

The typeface was inspired in part by the cover for Book of Words, lettered by Hans Tisdall in the ’40s, which has kind of a jumble of things going on. As you might know from its cool microsite, the font neatly parses that mix into four styles that are called something like, “just monotone,” “monotone with lil lightning knockouts,” “duotone with lil lightning knockouts,” and “duotone with lightning contours but no knockouts”. I don’t want to pick a favorite (please cast your votes in the comments), and what intrigues me is how you don’t have to. You could set a single word in multiple styles of Blesk, letter by letter, and no one would bat an eye. And that even brings it kinda full circle back to looking like the lettering that inspired it!

Blesk is only trying to be itself. The forms can be unwieldy, yet not clumsy. They have a motion that makes them look like they’re dancing with each other. It’s gutsy, at least in my small small world, to make something that doesn’t have a lowercase, but that frees its uppercase up to do more fun things than an uppercase that needs to match a lowercase normally could. Maybe once you’re hooked on its charm you won’t be able to help but want to commission a lowercase. That’s some advanced marketing tactics right there. Blesk has unconventional forms like the double-stemmed ‘U’, and especially the backwards ‘Y’, which for about the third time in recorded history just looks more balanced that way.

Blesk is such a specialized tool. But my employers tell me that the magical thing that happens when you make a font that only does a specific kind of job is that since it’s so competent at that one thing, people undoubtedly find other work for it. That’s how I see Blesk. Ksenya, I’m sorry I made this so much about kitchen tools but now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to see what else a carrot spiralizer can do.

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I’m a sucker for ethereal super-light and in-your-face super-bold types; the extremes of the typographic spectrum sound a siren call to my inner rebel. Give me a hairline and an ultra black to play with, and I’m a happy camper. Vinter is one of those delicate creatures that satisfies my craving for ultra-fine letterforms.

Designed by Monokrom’s Frode Bo Helland, the Vinter expansion is a reworking of a single light weight and italic released in 2012. Now comprising five weights with companion italics, Vinter is a modulated sans serif built on a geometric skeleton. And “skeleton” is indeed the key word here. The lightest weight is so incredibly fine that it fades away in ghostlike fashion — just look at the dainty terminal on the ‘J’ — but the stroke contrast remains evident, keeping the face anchored in the real world.

Vinter is a wee bit schizophrenic. Its capitals are lovely but fairly straightforward, although letters such as the ‘R’, with its jauntily hyperextended leg, and the ‘M’, which looks like a spindly daddy longlegs, stand out with good cheer. These caps would look right at home on a high-end beauty website or etched on the frosted glass door of a fancy spa. The lowercase, on the other hand, is full of wit; as Vinter goes up in weight, its charms become plain in forms like ‘a’, ‘c’, and ’g’. The ‘i’, ‘j’, and punctuation sport delightful diamond-shaped dots, or tittles. Don’t you just love that? It’s so Goudy-esque. The figures are to die for — they’re bouncy and more than a little sassy.

Helland pulled off a sweet trick in pairing perfectly formed circles with severe angles in Vinter. His ‘O’, ‘G’, and similar forms maintain perfect integrity throughout all weights and in the italic variants. Although joins can look a bit odd in solo italic forms such as ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘p’, and ‘q’, the quirky connections play nicely when surrounded by their alphabetic brethren.

A word to the wise: Vinter is a display design. Its delicate nature and refined modulation require large settings and plenty of breathing room for optimal appearance.

I did say at the outset that Vinter makes me happy in a light and airy kind of way. But I’m still seeking the giddy joy derived from heart-poundingly heavy type. Perhaps Helland would indulge me and take Vinter over to the dark side. I would love to see what wonders he would work in shaping this design into a real heavyweight.

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A lot has already been written about San Francisco, including the fact that its name is not always San Francisco. So I’ll try to bring to light a few things I think are inter­esting about the font family, while not break­ing my pledge as a developer to use it “strictly for evaluation of its quality and func­tionality as an OS font for use by the applications and other software I am developing”.

OS fonts are the font family, or families, an operating system uses on screen for buttons, bubble captions, file listings, short and long texts, and all the scripts the OS supports. These fonts are usually employed by the applications the OS maker develops, as well as by most of the applications developed for any given platform. So, short of going into an authoring or graphic design application that offers a variety of fonts, the user of any OS is bathed in the OS font family on the desktop and mobile devices.

Starting out in the 1980s as bitmapped fonts for Xerox, IBM, Apple, and Microsoft, OS and application fonts and, up until recently, operating-system font families, were all sans serif — no apparent contrast between vertical and horizontal strokes, no significant emph­asis on the terminals, and consisting of a single master each of sans, italic, bold, and usually bold italic. Aside from the single master, these rather plain design characteristics suited the needs of low resolution, the task of international font design, and were right for efficient storage and processing of fonts.

None of this got any simpler when outlines replaced bitmaps for the desktop OS and their associated applications, or when the desktop became the web, or when the web brought all the scripts in the world into very close contact with billions of users. It has become harder to change the plain regular sans monoweight “look and feel” users had been bathing in. So, what I like about San Francisco is that Apple changed first to a lighter face than the other OS, with their adoption of the three lighter weights of Helvetica, and then to a squarer face than the other OS fonts as part of the introduction of multiple-size masters for the new OS.

This has been a somewhat brave multistage process that has welded together their old and new desktops, with the exception of Lucida, as the smaller sizes of San Francisco and Helvetica become similar, while the larger designs of San Francisco take on their own distinct squarer and more modern appearance. All of this happens without disturbing the OS visual relations with the non-Latin scripts already supported. Many of the latter, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese font dev­elop­ers, including Apple, as time has passed, have created fonts with interpolatable weight axes that now allow lighter fonts and size mastering to achieve better control over type color, across scripts.

Most digital publishing relies on large color contrasts to bring attention to type across various media. Though 95% of content of the web, it is said, is typography, type sometimes needs to grab eyeballs when it is large and among competing media like photos, video, and site navigation. But it also needs to massage the eyeballs just right when the type is small, providing no distraction or crowding for longer reads. That’s not what Apple is publishing, though. Up above all that digital media and everyone else’s fonts is the OS font family, and the quieter that gets, the easier it is to design with, among, and around, where required.

San Francisco’s size masters are the real revolution. Having size masters around for 500 years was great, but finally having an OS allow—even encourage—size masters might be better.

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Hobeaux is James Edmondson’s modern-day homage to Hobo, the curvy, quirky, descender­less, Art Nouveau-inspired typeface released in 1910 by American Type Founders.

Since its debut, Hobo has suffered from mostly tacky usage on cheap signage, packaging, and advertising. After the revival of Art Nouveau aesthetics for psychedelic graphics in the 1960s and ’70s, Hobo became a common choice for ham-fisted or lazy attempts at “groovy” design. Such poor use (not to mention crude digitizations from the early days of desktop publishing) has given Hobo a dispropor­tion­ately bad reputation, yet it’s managed to retain a cult following among many type enthusiasts who appreciate its unique qualities and peculiar charm.

“Typographica’s Best Typefaces of 2015: 48 reviews of Hobeaux”

— André Mora (@andremora) August 24, 2015

Edmondson cites this je ne sais quoi as what led him to reimagine the typeface for contemporary usage. His design for Hobeaux (pronounced ho-BO) deviates notably from the original, with the goal to be “more of a modern interpretation rather than a steadfast revival”. The overall feeling is more contemporary, with better weight distribution and a less wobbly/droopy feeling. Compared to the existing digitizations of Hobo, Hobeaux’s contours are less lumpy. Sharper features have been softened for a smoother overall style. The proportions are a bit wider across the board and the x-height is slightly taller in relation to the caps, allowing for use at smaller sizes. The high-waisted structure of the uppercase forms has been pulled down considerably, entering the realm of low-waisted caps that are more typical of Edmonson’s informal lettering work. Generally, Hobeaux polishes out the most wonky/​distracting features of Hobo and strengthens the qualities that make it interesting.

Beyond stylistic alterations, Hobeaux also introduces a wide array of functionality that makes it much more usable in contemporary settings. Edmondson went all out with the original Hobo concept of eliminating descenders, adding modified forms of less-common characters with descending elements, like ‘μ’ and ‘ç’. For those who can’t live without descenders, an alternate set of descending glyphs is included. For numerals, three sets are included: lining/​uppercase, mid-height, and descenderless oldstyle/lowercase. To improve spacing issues that pop up with the crossbars of the ‘f’ and ‘t’ or the egg-shaped ‘O’, contextual alternates are built in for automatic glyph replacement as needed. Top it all off with a fun set of arrows and ornaments and Hobeaux can be used for a surprisingly wide range of applications.

As one of the two typefaces that launched with Edmondson’s new type studio, OH no Type Co. (the other being Erik Marinovich’s Viktor Script), Hobeaux gives a promising indication of other things to come. Seeing all the experimental variants like rococo, dripping (animated and chromatic), script, stencil, chrome, log, and snow makes it clear that Edmondson takes his fun seriously. In a design landscape full of bland corporate typefaces and modernist trendism, it’s refreshing to see a new company that embraces a decidedly alternative approach to marketing type while also maintaining a high standard of quality. Like most of the best record labels or film studios, the OH no Type Co. brand won’t appeal to everyone, nor does it try to. Edmondson makes that brutally clear in his own description of Hobeaux, saying: “To the designers that scoff at such audacious curves, and prefer the sterile rigidity of geometric sans serifs: go suck an egg”.

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I’ve been asked repeatedly to write reviews of my favorite typeface releases of the year, and always wince, as I’m barely aware of any new releases, and tend to use a small handful of tried and trues, and am a bit confused by the endless flood of new designs.

So as I was composing my thanks-but-no-thanks email reply, I was shocked to find not one but two new faces that I not only liked, but actually loved. (One review will come later this year.)

Who’d have thought Today Sans would get taken in, bathed, shaved — and remastered by the technically solid foundry Elsner+Flake? Meritorious!

My favorite typeface to hail from the middle-German hamlet of Wernigerode, Today Sans is a gentle humanist face that arrived in 1988, before the nineties humanist sans influx of Scala, Thesis, and Legacy. It was an improvement over the Gill Sans / Frutiger / Syntax trifecta then commonly in use and possesses more delicate nuances than, say, Gill, which was born during a more geometric (blunt?) period. It was also unusual among sans serifs in that it included 2 subfamilies drawn and spaced for text or headline sizes.

Despite its special qualities, Today Sans was difficult to find in the early years because Scangraphic didn’t have the best distribution in the world. Since then, the solid but punily promoted digital versions snoozed deep in font libraries, hidden from contemporary users. This new OpenType-savvy version not only adds Cyrillic and new weight options between its bolds, it introduces a classic to a new generation of designers.

Its designer Volker Küster studied calligraphy under the great Albert Kapr, and it shows. Today has beautiful stroke endings and the variety of weights seems natural and effortless, unlike in many sans serifs, whose heavier weights often feel forced or unrelated. Today also has a very beautiful and unique italic, with many characters subtly revealing Küster’s background in hand lettering. Some may find it overly humanistic or old-fashioned, but I admire its delicacy.

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