Författare: Nyhetsuppläsaren STG

This review is about Kazimir. (It might also discuss or allude to: the state of Russian creativity. Bleached denim. Saint Petersburgian architecture. Gopniki. Poll taxes. Funhouses. “In Russia, Kazimir reviews you” jokes.)

Chances are you already know about stroke weight or text color. You appreciate type. You know at least the basics of how to look. The gorgeous specimens you see here will guide you through the specifics of feel and mood. Thus, the most valuable light I can shine on Kazimir is to ground it within certain contexts.

Like many other Peter the Great innovations, the contemporary Cyrillic alphabet was created through brute force, against natural inclinations, via a crude pantomiming of the West. Maxim Zhukov states that “in Cyrillic type, the chirographic aspects take a backseat to invention and engineering”. This immaculate conception, whatever its downsides, provides a treasure trove of play and opportunity for designers working with Cyrillic, and I’m enlivened by authentic, talented, knowledgeable hands painting and pushing the alphabet into new and old corners of refinement.

Russian type, like Russian culture, has an interesting relationship with the West. Before sitting down to write this, I brought up the font and its place in the canon with anyone willing to engage. An excerpt from one Moscowite: “Being Russian to the bones, Kazimir clearly thinks of itself as European, with obvious French influences”. Where so much of Russian (type, fashion, architecture, urban planning) seems to come out as a fun-house mirror take on the West, because of the mirror’s lack of traditional laws of physics and gravity, the effects can often reach beyond and fly atop the heavier limitation of the original. Thus resulting in a creation both uplifting and inspiring, and very much its own.

And Kazimir, a gold plaque along that journey. Historically inspired, Kazimir fits in an area of type that goes almost unrepresented in the digital landscape. It contorts the glyphs into positions that feel at ease, reaching their final setting via a route that knows the rules, and exactly when to break them. Look at the horizontal bar atop that ‘k’! The connecting stroke on the lowercase ‘ы’! Those forked snake tongues that are so accurate historically, yet commonly swept under the rug! The fact that both the ‘R’ and the ‘Я’ in the irregular set feel reversed, yet seem balanced! Reverberating an oft overlooked typographic time and place, it transports me to the gardens and palaces of my hometown, with its self-serious flourish, and manages to vibe both historical and fresh.

Artikeln hittad här först »

I chose Vito to highlight this year because it manages to provide a typographer with a much greater range of expressive possibility and functional versatility than is typically available within even very large font families.

Some of this is the result of the clever choice to limit the weights we might expect and offer a range of widths instead. The widths are used to allow Vito’s personality to shift in useful ways. A puckishly confident and vital quality is common to the whole family. But the widest extended styles have a self-possessed, certain, and unhurried quality. This contrasts substantially with the breathy, giddy excitement of the compressed styles. When the two widths are set together, they both match and contrast in a way that fine typographers might speak about in the context of a successful matching of two separate type families. Because the family as a whole offers this contrast in feeling across two additional widths, however, it is possible to tune the degree of contrast for expressiveness, or to indicate textural status or hierarchy in a layout.

With Vito, Thomas Gabriel offers the users of his type a particularly thoughtful tool. And he pushes his fellow type designers toward a new and welcome approach to modulating personality in type families.

Artikeln hittad här först »

“If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page.” — Adrian Frutiger

Frutiger’s words come to my mind as I review Fernando Mello’s FS Brabo.

Being an author and the designer of my own books, I feel that creating a layout turns my research, thoughts, and writing into a visible form. It is the summing up of each project. For me, the layout phase starts with selecting a suitable typeface. The ideal typeface for my application needs to support the content, and should assist the reader in taking “information off the page” without feeling distracted. At the same time, I love to work with details, giving my audience something to discover.

Mello studied historic metal typefaces archived at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, and the tradition of the Garalde style becomes apparent when applying FS Brabo in running text. Set in a small size, the typeface appears calm and balanced. It gently supports the continuous flow of the reading eye.

FS Brabo is a small family, with only four weights. To me, this is a positive invitation that enables me to stay focused in my design. Mello does offer a set of ligatures, swashes, and other ornamentals; and this set of glyphs — especially rich for the italics — provides a graphic designer with several options. It is my freedom to decide, to choose: perhaps the slanted capitals to set text in italics, or the flamboyant capitals for an italicized subhead, or maybe letters with eccentric endings for a playful sensibility.

FS Brabo is truly like a thoughtfully designed spoon that enhances the gusto of a creation.

Artikeln hittad här först »

The lot of monospaced typefaces has improved considerably in recent years, but still, too many are little more than the utilitarian servants they were apparently born to be.

Flat and flavorless, their design reveals more techné and much less poiesis: their characters queue up duti­fully, albeit inharmoniously, as they pay primary heed to the pitch constraint. In these faces, the norm­ally slender ‘i’ and ‘l’ appear emaciated; the fuller-figured ‘m’ and ‘w’ squeeze themselves in as best as they can. The result is an unhappy marriage of warp and weft, and so dullness is compounded by discordance.

But for a handful of monospaced faces, designers have turned the pitch constraint on its head, leveraging it in deft explorations of stroke and space. Fifteen years ago, with his first monospaced face (FF Eureka Mono), Peter Biľak vanquished this constraint via letter­spacing: he gave his glyphs ample room to breathe. With his recent Greta Mono (produced with Nikola Djurek), Biľak takes an even more elegant approach: stroke contrast.

Witness the upright, wherein (particularly in the heavier of its ten weights) contrasting strokes impart a vitality seen in few faces, much less monospaced ones. A geo-humanist mélange of arcs here, right angles there, it does its job, and it looks beautiful to boot: monospaced, but certainly not monochrome. The italic, with its cleaved curves and asymmetrical twists, is cheeky and a just a touch scary, its dynamic letterforms taut and ready to spring. Take note: this Greta Mono is a step change from its prototype seen for a time on the pages of Dwell. Unlike its prede­cessor, this new face shares more with Greta Sans than with its seriffed counterpart, Greta Text.

The coders, musicians, scientists, and transcriptionists I know will love this font. They say they’re on a quest for the ideal monospaced face, and with Greta Mono, I can tell them to stop searching. With over 1000 glyphs — including Cyrillic and Greek, and even circled numbers — it comes with all the fixins, and is very much a product of now. You don’t need anyone to tell you that Biľak is a brilliant designer; his work speaks for itself. With Greta Mono, it’s the same simple story: he’s done it again.

Artikeln hittad här först »

As its name perhaps implies, Clone feels familiar at first glance. The roundness of the letters with strong crossbars lends itself to that notion. The monospaced ‘i’, symmet­rical ‘w’, and smooth ‘s’ fit the description. Upon further inspection, though, the type­face has a number of unique characteristics that make it enjoyable to read and set.

Looking at unique combinations of letters and words that people don’t often see, the combination of ‘z’ and ‘o’ came top of mind for me. Within seconds of typing the name “Zoë”, I noticed a really cool rogue serif on the ‘Z’. The serif balances the roundness of the other letters to make it feel natural in a way that I haven’t often seen with similar typefaces.

I was drawn to using Clone for its flows and balances; from word to word, how it scales from sentences to paragraphs. Taking a closer look at why I found the scalability worth mentioning, I realized it was often due to the bookending nature of the first and last letters of words. They created a scaleable unit that locked the word together quickly and pleasurably. The entry point of each letter, both vertically and horiz­ontally, made it extremely easy to read.

As I used Clone, I sensed that Lasko Dzurovski spent a lot of time meticulously crafting the flow of each letter. There’s a lot readability magic happening. Over and over, I discovered fascinating letter combinations that made words sing in ways I hadn’t noticed before. Words like “benchmark”, “currently”, and “question” produce the locked-down bookend effect I described earlier. “Breaking” is a thing of beauty. It’s as though Dzurovski took every combination and gave it attention that others don’t take the time to consider.

Artikeln hittad här först »