Författare: Nyhetsuppläsaren STG

2015 was a great year for Indic type: I can no longer count the number of new releases on one hand!

High-quality, Unicode-compliant Indic designs are still rare pearls in a vast ocean of fonts, but I feel like the tide is finally turning. Adobe, Tiro Typeworks, Google Web Fonts, Ek Type, and the Indian Type Foundry all published at least one new Indic design this past year, with a scope reaching eight different Indic scripts.

Devanagari, the most widely-used Indic script, saw the greatest growth, both in number of releases and in range of styles. It seems that publishers of Indic fonts are ready to move beyond the typical “safe” projects and venture into riskier territory. Several designers branched out into the display arena this year, with beautiful results.

Ek Type’s chubby Modak is by far the most fun of these releases. It’s a very challenging style to execute in a complex writing system, and they have done it very well. Kudos to them!

But I think my personal favorite of the year is ITF’s Quantum Devanagari, designed by Hitesh “Rocky” Malaviya. Quantum is an ultra-wide, five-weight family, with a matching Latin complement.

There is such a satisfying rhythm in this typeface. Instead of trying to cram the Devanagari letters into monotonous Latin-like rectangles, as designers of non-Latin “companions” often do, Rocky lets them expand and breathe, allowing each letter’s innate density to dictate its width. As a result, the balance between positive and negative spaces is just superb. The curves are so soft and serene, and result in some beautiful horizontal conjuncts that feel like the rolling hills of a landscape. The elegant vowel marks are quiet enough to let the letters tell the story. Little human moments — like the two-stroke construction of the Ra (र), and the slight upward curl of the Ta (त) — give this design a bit of humor, too.

All in all, it just feels so natural to me, so beautiful. And, rather importantly, it feels so intuitively Devanagari — not just a façade built on a Latin framework. I am looking forward to seeing what Rocky will forge in years to come!

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Imagine having only a handful of quality text typefaces available for Latin typography. Now imagine one of that handful, an essential workhorse face, suddenly removed from circulation for legal reasons. As outlandish as this scenario may sound to users of the Latin script, that’s exactly what recently happened for users of Hebrew.

As a result of a lawsuit between the heirs of Henri Friedlaender, the designer of the popular 1958 Hadassah Hebrew, and Masterfont, the largest Israeli font foundry, the latter’s ubiquitous version of Hadassah was taken off the market. The five-year-long litigation was decided in favor of the Friedlaender family in 2011. The decision was appealed and finally upheld by a Jerusalem court in July 2015, making it a watershed case in the history of copyright protection for type design (in contrast to the trademark or software protection that type designers and foundries in the US rely on).

Hadassah, named after a printing trade school where Friedlaender taught, is the Hebrew legibility typeface, interpreting the traditional “serif” letter through a Modernist esthetic. Its robust weight, low stroke contrast, open counters, simplified forms, and somewhat rigid appearance make it easily readable at small point sizes. Frank-Rühl, perhaps the most likely contender for the unofficial title of the most popular Hebrew text face, is fussy and idiosyncratic in comparison. And Hadassah’s pronounced typographic quality makes it better suited for books and periodicals than the less formal David and Narkissim (the two other contenders), which are more calligraphic.

To satisfy the steady demand for a legal digital version of Hadassah, the Friedlaender heirs approached Yanek Iontef, an independent Tel Aviv type designer, who went back to the original drawings as a basis for his design. The new typeface, released as Hadassah Friedlaender in October 2015 in two weights, is a faithful reconstruction of the original — as it was first conceived.

The resulting face represents the shape of the letterforms very well; many details that were lost in the earlier version, like the subtle curves and rounded corners, have been reinstated here. Significant improvement over the old version is a true bold design, not a digitally generated one. What the new design does not reflect as well is the finalized original type. As with any digitization, the letterfit that existed in metal needs to be recreated from scratch. As a result, kerning in a setting of Hadassah Friedlaender does not compare well to the original. In addition, a digital reconstruction based on drawings does not take into account adjustments and tweaks to the letterforms that happen in the course of punch-cutting and other stages of production of the metal type. In this case, the changes to the design after the drawings were given over to Amsterdam Type Foundry appear slight, and a careful comparison of the 1958 metal letterforms to Hadassah Friedlaender yields only minor differences. A few more departures were made by Iontef deliberately: the only ascender was shortened for practical reasons, for example, and the lining and hanging figures were completely redesigned to harmonize with both Hebrew and Latin.

One feature of Hadassah Friedlaender that comes as a pleasant surprise is the brand-new set of Latin characters designed by Iontef to harmonize with the Hebrew. Something that we may have come to take for granted with other non-Latin scripts in recent years has seldom been successfully attempted with the Hebrew script. A few Hebrew designs were made to complement an existing Latin, as is the case of Oron and Univers, but the other way around is still a novelty. The Latin in Hadassah Friedlaender is refreshingly unassuming. It mixes well with Hebrew; has similar feel, texture, and color; and its structural similarities to the Hebrew do not appear forced or contrived. Unexpectedly, this Latin does not look embarrassing when used on its own.

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In Arabic type design, novelty rules. This is understandable given that for too long, little was happening in terms of stylistic and conceptual exploration. Recently this has changed; now you get the extensions, the superfamilies and the like, and they attract. It might appear as if in Arabic type design there is only space for development in breadth, not depth — but in fact the opposite is the case.

This is where Bustani comes in. Superficially, it doesn’t try to be new. It aspires to do better than existing type in a genre that is hopelessly under­appreciated because it’s harder to come to informed opinions about it: type for continuous reading. In this sense, Bustani is situated on a level similar to the informed revivals of Garamond-like types. If Arabic type design discourse were as mature as Latin type design discourse, Bustani would be seen as an interpretation of a classic in line with current ideas and technology; as a design that does for Arabic what Smeijer’s Renard, Slimbach’s Garamonds, and Blokland’s Van den Keere do for Latin type. But we are not there yet, and so it’s generally perceived as a “calligraphic” typeface — which is utter nonsense.

Bustani exemplifies Arabic type design craft in combining an appreciation of classical type forms with excellence in drawing, historical research, and a technical tour-de-force under the hood. Because even though you don’t see it at first, Bustani is utterly novel in the way it uses OpenType to render Arabic text.

Indeed, all of these characteristics also express qualities of the designers Patrick Giasson (concept and drawing) and Kamal Mansour (concept and shaping logic). Skilled, diligent, and endowed with expertise, they are craftsmen whose products are of the highest quality, but who don’t seek the limelight. Bustani demonstrates all of the above; you just have to learn about Arabic type and look closely to appreciate it. It’s worth the effort.

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Neue is a daring design — less in how it looks than in how it behaves.

Paula Scher commissioned the design from Peter Biľak as part of her rebranding of The New School in New York City. The all-cap display styles, the most visible part of the family, come in one weight and three widths, plus a “Random” style that mixes all three proportions in an unpredictable order. The result is a kind of pulsing rhythm, a driving-ahead force. Drop whatever you’re doing and look over here. OVER HERE.

Both tradition and psychology tell us that compact and super-wide shapes do not go together, but Biľak sneaks through anyway. Such a jarring mix can make the weights appear to be mismatched, but he tamped that problem down, and that is no small trick. The speeding up and slowing down doesn’t feel like noise, but energy. Scher’s sensitive use makes it better still, like some dart game played with sledgehammers.

The rebranding left many bewildered, furious, or both — with much of the anger directed at the typeface itself. One cranky detractor said, “It looks like Helvetica on crack,” and Scher responded beautifully: “I always thought Helvetica needed a little crack”.

The text styles have a more conventional structure, with three weights and italics. They can’t help but get overshadowed by their theatrical display siblings, but they’re exquisitely balanced pieces of work. A few shapes (‘B’, ‘S’, ‘Z’) feel like they’re a moment away from flipping upside down. Letter widths vary at the same time, too brash to be classical and too syncopated to be modernist. Instead, Neue just feels human.

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There are so many Garamonds. True Garamonds, misattributed Garamonds, modern Garamonds, Italian Garamonds, German Garamonds, American Garamonds, silly Garamonds. It’s practically a type category of its own.

Of all of them, ATF Garamond, designed by Morris Fuller Benton, is by far my favorite. I know, I know. It’s not a true Garamond because it’s really based on the types cut by Jean Jannon, blah, blah, blah.

I don’t care.

I just love how it looks. I think it’s one of the most beautiful typefaces ever. It’s filled with warmth and character. The details are irregular, almost whimsical. It feels hand made. And yet, as you build it up into words, sentences, paragraphs, it looks perfectly balanced, with that understated polish that Morris Fuller Benton brought to all of his typefaces.

Until now, there were only a few digital Garamonds that were even similar. Garamond No. 3 was the closest, based on the ATF version by way of Linotype back in the 1930s, but it’s flat footed and crude by comparison. Then you have ITC Garamond, which is to ATF’s Garamond what Baby Looney Tunes is to Looney Tunes. Then there was Lanston’s Garamont, designed by Frederic Goudy, which cranks the quirkiness dial up to 10.

ATF Garamond, when it was released in 1917, was not an emulation of 16th century type. It’s a 20th century creation made for modern readers and modern designers. Although the original was created for letterpress, the new digital ATF Garamond does a great job of capturing its look and feel.

It’s a solid release with an extensive character set that includes everything that was in the original and more, with OpenType features to support it, a nice range of weights, and three optical sizes (a Display version would be awesome, please).

Kudos to Mark van Bronkhorst, Igino Marini, and Ben Kiel for bringing ATF Garamond into the digital world. It’s about time.

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