Författare: Nyhetsuppläsaren STG

One of the contradictions in typography and type design is between the anonymous and the noticeable. The struggle between making things that are without any taste that leave the message unnoticed and making things that are too flavorful and swamp the message with an overwhelming taste. It always comes as a delight to find something that has real flavor, yet seems entirely appropriate.

Of all the typefaces of the past few years, Infini (designed by the graphic and type designer Sandrine Nugue) is one of the best examples of a new typeface that fits into this category. Nugue shows the continuing renaissance of French type design; Infini, designed for the National Centre for Visual Arts on the occasion of “Graphisme en France 2014”, seems to reflect an incredible Gallic sophistication, which we might associate with masters like Roger Excoffon. Showing also the influence of Wolpe’s Albertus, Infini is an audacious typeface, managing to capture the spontaneity of the hand and craft that type design so often boils away to the bland.

Ganeau, Nugue’s first design completed at Ésad in Amiens, showed great promise and potential, and Infini delivers on this. (Ganeau in its caption form is clearly a precursor to Infini.) It is a typeface that shows a designer confident in her talents and her freedom to express ideas. As a design, it truly deserves the highest compliment. We wish we had designed it.

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One of the things I’ve always admired about Underware is the trio’s ability to move type design out of the digital realm and morph it into a real-world spectacle. Akiem, Bas, and Sami are not just type designers. They’re totally dramatic!

I have fond memories of many Underware-fueled happenings. I once crowded into a Toronto hotel bathroom with a bunch of half-crazed TypeCon attendees, shower running full blast, as we waited impatiently for the hot steam to coax invisible letterforms from the pages of the Sauna book, Read naked. I watched the Underware guys effortlessly slice big, saucy, juicy connecting script letters out of foam core at a workshop in San Francisco (a 3D precursor to Bello, perhaps?).

There are Underware letters etched on a sandy beach, awaiting high tide’s deadly kiss … and letters truly, madly, deeply carved into wood and stone (solid things that will undoubtedly outlive us all). There are Underware typefaces made into pillows and keychains and cast bronze dingbats, and screaming in Dutch from the most ridiculously huge banner I’ve ever seen.

And then there are stencils! Who doesn’t love to play with stencils!? Which brings me (at last) to the protagonist of this tale: Tripper, a type family in 24 acts — er, fonts.

Tripper came about by accident, literally: as legend has it, Bas fell out of a tree and snapped his right collarbone. Ouch. (Whatever were you doing in that tree, Bas? Inquiring minds want to know.) Since Underware always starts typeface designs with hand sketches before moving to the computer, it appeared at first that Bas, a natural-born righty, was destined to spend some time on the typographic bench. It’s diff­icult to sketch pretty letters with your non-dominant hand; it’s nigh impossible to draw bezier curves with a trackpad when your favorite wing is in a sling.

Beziers be damned, Bas persevered, clickety-click, drawing straight lines on the laptop. Thus, Tripper came into this world as a curveless wonder. But its non-curvy nature is not immediately apparent; Tripper’s clever construction and powerful voice almost camouflage its angularity. Letters like ‘Q’, ‘S’, ‘M’, and ‘a’ are replete with funky character traits, and the ‘%’ is northing short of astonishing. And when you reach the Rough variants, the spray effect casually drapes the skeleton with seemingly random splatters.

If a typeface made in the ether could have heft in the third dimension, Tripper would be forged by a punch-cutting Vulcan, driving alphabetic black holes into the matrix of the universe. Even the light weight has a solid presence, and the black is nothing short of supermassive. And those delicious ornaments! A japering skull and crossbones, pointing hands with extendable sleeves, a cut paper-style heart, and a little puffy cloud, again, magically built without benefit of curves. Divine.

As usual, Underware was not content to leave Tripper to the sterile environs of the computer. Embracing their tactile style, they produced a set of shiny metal stencils designed to be fondled by human hands. @TheRealTripper is perfect for decorating your office or facilitating illicit graffiti action. Too legit.

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If you’ve ever tried your hand at designing a Devanagari typeface or studied one closely, you will appreciate that part of the challenge is to fit complex forms in limited space — a challenge that is amplified when you’re dealing with heavy weights. Far from shying away from it, Modak Devanagari makes this challenge its very bread and butter. Sarang Kulkarni and Maithili Shingre haven’t dabbled in a formal experiment to make a one-off instance of lettering; they’ve pushed their idea far enough to create a complete working system.

Modak Devanagari is as far as it can be from a text typeface. But this over-the-top display design is a breath of fresh air and a new kind of arrow in the quiver of any designer with a limited number of Devanagari typefaces. It is chubby and adorable; hell, I’ll go as far as to call it cute. The incisions in the design are more like marks made in the sand with one’s fingers rather than cuts made with a sharp pair of scissors. Still, they add liveliness and movement to this very heavy typeface. And by cleverly overlaying the part of a glyph that is most essential to its recog­nizability over others, Modak Devanagari makes the most of what little space it has to play within.

Of course, the typeface couldn’t be more aptly named. Modak, a traditional Indian sweet filled with coconut and jaggery, and the elephant-headed, pot-bellied Hindu god Ganesh (who is said to have considered Modak his favorite food) are just the things you want to associate with a typeface that isn’t just fat, but unabashedly portly.

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I have chosen to write about Hoefler & Co.’s Obsidian because I gasped when it came out and I still gasp — or at least breathe heavily — whenever I look at it.

Typographers will appreciate its extensive glyph set (highly unusual in a display face of this complexity), made only marginally easier by being the offspring of Surveyor Black. It’s been sharpened up a little from Surveyor, most notably in the spurs, but of course what makes it so utterly gorgeous are the dimensional lines.

The story of the development of these lines by H&Co designer Andy Clymer’s ingenious programming involves “lighting” each letter with multiple light sources to accentuate its curves, and generating a rough version, ready to be hand-corrected. The genius behind this is detailed in an H&Co blog post and is well worth the read. While this saved a million hours of painstaking drawing, I am simply amazed by how many additional thousands of hours must have gone into bringing each letter to perfection. The endless tweaking and nudging! The interminable enlarging and shrinking and adjusting! It is simply mind-boggling to understand what must have gone into this, and not for naught as the result is luscious dimensionality.

As if that weren’t enough, they repeated the process for a racy italic, and provided solids and highlights for making two-color letters.

This is the typeface you want to sit next to at a dinner table; it is so worldly, paradoxically old-fashioned and modern. It will never make small talk but instead will regale you with tales of high-seas adventures, late-night trysts, duels, discoveries, and back-door politics. It is, in short, adventurous: built to go boldly, to wax philosophical, to steal your wife.

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Dear Viktor,

As we approach Valentine’s Day, and there is so much love being declared over at Alphabettes, I got carried away by emotion and decided to tell you I love you!

When I first saw your shapes, they already made a good impression. Then we got closer as I touched your software. You have a very nice rhythm, swinging along with smooth OT features. But when I got to know you better, reading your profile more carefully, that was it: I was in love. And it’s not only because you’re hot … You wouldn’t know it, but we have a lot in common.

We’re all about a genuine quirky lettering fetish. Many designers collect pictures of hand-painted street signs, and are inspired by them, but I find it particularly interesting when they not only make you sketch a few letters just for fun but actually affect how you draw in general.

It took two talented people to design you; the Erik Marinovich / James Edmondson collab­oration was definitely successful. I don’t care that you only have one weight — that was enough to charm your way into my font files.

You already had all the glyphs you needed, yet you went overboard and included funky dingbats in your character set. Some of them aren’t exactly my cup of tea, but they still make me laugh, so that’s a good thing. But I hold a special place in my heart, not only for your caps, but also for your ampersand. It makes me wanna marry you, just so we can have that in our wedding invitation.

Don’t be afraid of what people might think. There will always be a place for a script like you in this world — or at least in mine. 😉

Love, M.

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