Författare: Nyhetsuppläsaren STG

In the midst of a MyFonts oversaturated with twee weathered monoline scripts punctuated with silly swirly-doo underlines and swashes (on sale for 80% off, please pin us in your Pinterest wedding album along­side your glittered Mason Jars) is a true beauty: Roland Hörmann’s Gloss Drop.

Working from Vienna, Roland has quietly built for himself a lovely little portfolio of script faces that are completely unexpected in rhythm and movement, and Gloss Drop is my favorite of those. It’s a loose, hand-painted thing with nervous, stuttery letters drawn with a thick wet brushstroke, with so many alternates for each that you’d never know this was a digital typeface.

If you look at Gloss Drop’s letters separately, you might be inclined to say, “This is one ugly, lumpy mess of a typeface.” That would be a fair assertion — but only if you look at a single letter.

The beauty and rhythm of the face come together with context, much like a jazz composition does in sound. It’s a hard task to make dissonance work with har­mony, especially in a visual context, and Roland does so expertly with this fiery experi­ment in thicks and thins. The font’s OpenType features are plentiful, and remind me a lot of the ideas we see in Burmese and Arabic letterforms: clusters, leading forms, medial forms, and final forms, depending entirely upon cont­ext. It’s a delight to see such complexity in our own (usually) simplistic and boring Latin-based typography.

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FF Hertz is one of the best typefaces of 2015. This statement has a number of reasons: First, it is a great-looking design. Second, it is technically superior to many of the typefaces that came out last year. Finally, the release in 2015 is a beautiful coincidence.

Jens Kutílek, designer of FF Hertz, has talked about its attributes; it is, as he says, “scholarly, scientific, a bit dusty (in a good way)”. Indeed, I think that FF Hertz looks a little like something we’ve seen before — usually a good sign for text faces. Describing the shapes of FF Hertz, I would say they are somewhat angular and a little idiosyncratic. The construction of the letters is static, and follows the model of the pointed pen. Appropriate to a Modern/Rational design, FF Hertz has some chunky ball terminals, a feature I appreciate.

The spirit of FF Hertz can be found in Hermann Zapf’s Mergenthaler Antiqua, which was designed for typesetting scientific publications. It is atypical for Zapf, carrying fewer of the calligraphic traits usual to his designs. In fact, working on that project seems not to have been an easy task for Zapf, who described the design process as “torturous”. Mergenthaler Antiqua is virtually unknown because it was unsuccessful in its day, and therefore never moved to technologies that followed hot metal (Linotype) typesetting.

The story of Mergenthaler Antiqua could have ended here, had it not been for Jens. He took note of the features he liked and used them as an inspiration to create something completely new. FF Hertz is not a revival; it amalgamates various sources, some of which can be traced back to Zapf. One can read more about the inspiration behind FF Hertz in David Sudweeks’ excellent interview.

The huge amount of creativity Hermann Zapf had in the world of typeface design is impressive. Maybe without intending it, Jens has created an homage to Zapf’s work, and the result is far from nostalgic or cheesy. Hermann Zapf died in 2015 and didn’t live to see the release of FF Hertz. I’m sure he would have been happy to serve as an inspiration for some of the best typeface designers today. In my mind, many of the details in FF Hertz are a nod to Zapf, such as the old-timey “German-style” alternate ‘w’ in the Italic, a variation often found in Zapf’s earlier designs.

The typeface’s name is ingenious. Naming it after Heinrich Hertz, the German Physicist who first conclusively proved the existence of electromagnetic waves, describes the typeface well — scientific, precise, German, no-nonsense. The symbol for Hertz as a unit of frequency is ㎐ — which in turn are Hermann Zapf’s initials. Isn’t that an amazing coincidence? (Also, who said naming fonts was hard?)

Why is FF Hertz technically superior? Simple: Jens knows what he’s doing. He has worked as a font engineer with FontFont for many years, and has produced countless quality fonts. He certainly knows what is needed to make a typeface family perform flawlessly. Jens’ persistence and meticulousness are impressive; evidence of this might be the amazing pedigree of his (yet to be released) Magnum Opus, Comic Jens.

I trust Jens to go above and beyond to make his fonts a joy to work with even for the most discerning users, but he doesn’t stop there. FF Hertz is also a well-balanced typographic toolkit.

For example, there are two sets of small caps — one to be used for abbreviations, and then slightly smaller “Petite Caps” at x-height, more appropriate in the context of a text face. The family has very finely graded weights, which helps to get the density of a page “just right”. On top of that, FF Hertz is a uniwidth design, which means that that changing weights won’t reflow the text.

Finally, FF Hertz doesn’t get caught up in being functional. It looks confident rather than boring, it is proud to be from Berlin-Wedding, and it is obvious that its designer poured a lot of love into it. A quirky celebration of FF Hertz is its Twitter account, which is awesome and (I am sure) fully automated. Pure nerdiness, pure joy!

Those are all reasons why I have come to the conclusion that FF Hertz is one of the best typefaces of 2015 – I am sure you agree!

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Designers have shown an increased interest in information design and graphics over the last ten years or so, but that has not been much reflected in type design.

This might be due in part to the fact that it took type designers some time to fully explore the potential of OpenType in practical designs. It may also have taken a while to imagine what information, exactly, designers needed from type other than legibility, a useful range of weights, styles, and adjustments for size, and proper hinting for the screen.

That’s not to say that there weren’t plenty of pi / symbol / label fonts released during this time period, many of them quite useful or interesting, or at least providing important updates to the forms found in Wingdings or Zapf Dingbats. Think of Tobias Frere-Jones’s Whitney, and Martin Friedl’s Poppi (both released in 2004), or Johannes Erler’s (and later, his and Henning Skibbe’s) FF Dingbats (1993/2009). But it wasn’t until the arrival of Travis Kochel’s Chartwell in 2011 (subsequently acquired by the FontFont library and expanded as FF Chartwell in 2012) that a font really took advantage of OpenType to provide designers with a powerful and flexible tool — in this case, not for labels or icons, but for generating the graphics themselves.

Chartwell relies on OpenType’s stylistic sets feature to combine numbers into, well, charts. The advantage to doing this with live type is that a designer can create graphics that can be edited without having to be redrawn from scratch. And on the web, of course, the more type you can keep live, the more searchable and accessible your site is. Aegir Hallmundur was right to say that Chartwell inaugurated a new category of such fonts. Symbolset’s releases, for example, are webfonts that rely on ligature features to convert words in live text into icons for navigation, actions, and web and social media links.

Ceremony is essentially a label and icon font family that also uses ligatures, and contextual alternates, to generate its glyphs. It’s technologically less clever than Chartwell, perhaps, but more exciting in other ways.

The font was designed by Joost Grootens, the well-known book and information designer based in Amsterdam. His studio has been using and refining Ceremony in-house since around 2008 (according to the their website) to use in their award-winning and internationally recognized atlases, as well as maps and diagrams included in their other books.

In response to the many multiple layers of information the studio’s designers have included in their graphic work, SJG (as the studio calls itself) has been expand­ing the range of shapes included in Ceremony’s repertoire. Not content with the square, circle, and diamond shapes typically included in such fonts, SJG includes no fewer than fourteen container options, adding shields, pentagrams, hexagrams, open books (or bow ties?), crosses, columns, book covers, arrows, ribbons, trapezoids, and sun shapes to the mix — all easily distinguishable, all in both filled and outline forms, and many of the simpler shapes in a partial-outline form as well: in all, seventy-seven different containing shapes. What’s more, these shapes can contain not only alphanumeric glyphs (all of them in each shape variation, by the way) but also numbers in combination to one hundred, punctuation, math symbols, icons, and even a set of geometric textures. (The family also includes a sans and mono sans font with all the outlines included, to allow designers to improvise where they still need to.)

That the result is effective, and pleasant to look at as well, is undeniable — one needs only to review the work the studio has produced with Ceremony to gauge its success. Its overall impression is one of cleanliness without sterility, attention to detail without fussiness. The pi/icon set is, to be sure, an interesting reflection of the studio’s preoccupation with geography and architecture, but SJG also included icons that reflect a sensitivity to gender stereotypes and same-sex relationships, as well as a wheelchair-user icon that, like Otl Aicher’s version in the icon set he designed for the Frankfurt airport in 1971, positions the user properly: in an active position directly above the axle of the large wheels, and not passively behind it, as so many other versions do.

Ceremony’s public release was a long time coming — the first video promising it was on the way appeared on Vimeo in January of 2013, but it wasn’t released until last fall. It was worth the wait. Ceremony represents the same challenge to designers as does the excellent work of the studio that created it: to embrace old forms of information design — maps and diagrams — but to think more expansively about what we can do with them, what categories and levels of information they can include while still remaining functional and inviting.

For this reason, Ceremony is in my view the most significant typographic development in information design since Chartwell’s release — conceptually, perhaps even more significant than Chartwell. I hope it finds its way into many designers’ toolboxes, and I hope that Optimo and the Grootens studio continue to expand and refine it.

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Irrlicht comes to haunt us like a mad ghost in the night.

First credit goes to the naming: Irrlicht is a beautiful German word at the edge of extinction. It’s not used much these days, sadly; it even has a verb — irrlichtern means something like wandering or running around or, as I just discovered, “to flit about” (in a state of shock or disarray). It contains irre, which means lunatic, crazy, mad, funky, freaky, insane — comprising all sorts of moods outside the so-called “normal”.

Irrlicht is deeply rooted in German Expressionism. The rough and somewhat brutal shapes of the letters recall a basic craftsmanship. They feel like carving and woodcutting, make us think of shaping things in a hell-bent manner, an outburst of creative energy driven by mere necessity. No wonder: Expressionism was the dominant style in German art and literature after World War I; it reflects the postwar atmosphere of alienation, disillusionment, and danger. Artists reacted against materialism, mechanization, urbanization. Their spontaneous and highly emotional ways of working and living were followed by several art movements in the 20th century, like Abstract Expressionism, for instance, or Neo-Expressionism.

(Thus, “hinkypunk” is a translation of Irrlicht that seems too nice and fun — I’d rather go with “friar’s lantern” or “ghost light”, or maybe “jack-o’-lantern”.)

Some facts: Irrlicht is based on C.H. Kleukens’ typeface Judith from 1923 and comes as Dunkle Irrlicht (dunkle means “dark” in German), extended by the bright Lichte Irrlicht. The Lichte style was first planned as a stand-alone stencil version, but the styles work perfectly together. Irrlicht comes with upper- and lowercase ligatures, contextual and stylistic alternates, fractions, superior and inferior figures, extended language support and a few extras.

Alas, Irrlicht does not call for facts. It calls for fiction. Think of the book covers and movie posters it would ideally adorn. Think of Expressionist-experimental novels; go see paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and other Die Brücke members (Erich Heckel, Otto Müller et al.), recall The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (filmed by Robert Weiner in 1920), Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and find out more about the Weimar Cinema; indulge in those old-school horror films, slow movements of dark gestalts with pale faces followed by their gigantic shadows flickering on some huge wall behind them, in threatening, unfathomable urban surroundings …

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Custom type for newspapers tends to live in the realm of the so-good-it’s-invisible. It’s like the subtle, calm speaking voice of a respected news anchor. But I guess nobody told Jean-Baptiste Levée about this.

And aren’t we lucky to see the result. Libé is a family of a wide array of sans serif fonts and a set of stubborn typewriter fonts with a slightly sloppy underline style. The sans part of the family is a hybrid Excoffon, nineteen-seventies, tight-but-not-touching fever dream. If the spirit of Excoffon is alive, it has possessed Libé Sans. The Typewriter styles are a typographically successful, if unexpected, match. Despite what the name implies, it’s a proportionally spaced set of fonts. The bold is especially flavorful. But the Libé family, despite a typewriter font inspired by Frutiger, is mainly defined by its sans serif designs.

That it works at all is a credit to both the Production Type team, Jean-Baptiste Levée and Yoann Minet, and art directors Yorgo Tloupas and Javier Errea. And the effect is stunning, like tuning into the radio in the middle of a song. For a few moments, it sounds like a horrible mess, but three measures in, you suddenly recognize a favorite song you haven’t heard in ages. This for me is the most significant achievement of Libé: every time I look at it, even now, I think for a split second that it’s ugly. That feeling is immediately foll­owed by thinking it’s beautiful. It gets me every time.

From the high-contrast joints in otherwise low-contrast letters to the tight-but-not-touching spacing, Libé Sans and Libé Sans Rounded are a feast for the eyes. The shared vertical metrics, which seem relatively reasonable in the normal widths, become extravagant statement pieces in the extended widths. The extra condensed styles put to mind other recent condensed sans releases, such as Commercial Type’s Druk and Action, but only Libé Sans takes it this far. When the styles are mixed, condensed to extended, they evoke unicase type. When they stand on their own, they vary in a range from Victorian playbills to Swiss poster design. It’s the enthusiasm of wood-type attention-grabbers combined with the excitement of photo lettering. See? When I put it like that, it actually makes a lot of sense.

In full power, Libé Sans is a kaleidoscope of headline grotesques. It is a complicated flavor, but every part works together to make something wonderful. Rather than just a new voice for Libération, Production Type wrote them a symphony.

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