Författare: Nyhetsuppläsaren STG

ATF Alternate Gothic is a masterful revision in more than forty styles (ten weights and four widths, plus italics coming soon) of a century-old typeface that has been interpreted many times. This 2015 edition not only revives a fabulous classic American typestyle, but a classic American foundry as well: American Type Founders, or “ATF”. *

Alternate Gothic was first released in 1903, the work of ATF’s prolific in-house designer, Morris Fuller Benton. Van Bronkhorst and others suggest it likely got its name from the then-innovative idea of a typeface with the same style and weight in coordinated varying widths, which could be used together or alternated.

The original was one of several classic American grotesques designed by Benton, along with the noticeably similar designs Franklin Gothic (1903–10) and News Gothic (1908). All three share some design characteristics, enough that previous designers adding condensed styles to the other typefaces have relied on the letterforms of Alternate Gothic for guidance — but without keeping its most distinctive feature: straight-sided “pillbox” rounds for letters such as ‘b, c, d, e, g, o, p’. Van Bronkhorst has gone in the opposite direction, extending the Alternate Gothic look to ten weights, and four widths so far. When the italics are added, it will be a family of eighty — even perhaps one hundred if a threatened semi-extended materializes.

These classic American grotesques have long been workhorse staples, and have had quite a resurgence in recent years. We see this not only in commercial type (e.g., Benton Sans, by Cyrus Highsmith and Tobias Frere-Jones for Font Bureau), but also in open-source fonts; a revival of the single headline font style Alternate Gothic No. 2 as League Gothic (2009, from League of Movable Type), and of the News Gothic family in the form of Source Sans (2012, by Paul Hunt for Adobe) have both been very popular.

* The original American Type Founders was formed in 1892 by the merger of twenty-three cold-metal type foundries, in response to a recession and the rise of hot metal typesetting. It enjoyed great success, and was one of the world’s dominant type foundries for forty years. The 1912 and 1923 ATF specimen books — over 1000 pages apiece — remain sought-after (but not unaffordable) classics. But the Great Depression drove the company into receivership in 1934, shortly after its key design­ers and founders retired. It made a modest comeback for the next couple of decades, but did not do well in future technological transitions — to phototype in the 1960s–70s, and digital in the 1980s–90s. It closed its doors and its assets were sold off, mostly as scrap metal, in an infamous auction in 1993.⤴

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If you’ve been looking for well-crafted typefaces in the Didot genre recently, chances are you’ve come across Trianon. It will likely satisfy your appetite for a French Modern face with classic features, but be forewarned: it might end up doing a whole lot more than that.

The first time I became aware of Loïc Sander’s project was when he started posting mesmerizing videos showcasing optical sizes, as well as a blog post advo­cating the extrapolation of letterforms as an integral part of the design process. Struck by his dedication and attention to craftsmanship, I was already excited to see what the outcome of Sander’s explor­ation would be.

The result was Trianon. Weighing in at a total number of forty-two styles spread out over four size-specific families, it is certainly not another blunt revival of a Didot typeface. Even more remarkable than the size of the type system is the stylistic scope it covers, incl­uding elaborate italics, monolinear Lights, heavily slab-serif-flavored Caption cuts, and Grande styles that verge on becoming stencils — all referencing different works from the golden era of the Didots. With this pluralism of style and character, Trianon almost commands you to use it in all the “wrong” ways, exhib­iting flamboyant shapes, flexibility, and individuality.

Besides offering a diverse typographic toolbox — even chess symbols are included — the project is also a showcase of what can be done with the font editor extensions and scripts Sander wrote and published during the design process. But this doesn’t make Trianon a dull proof-of-concept or tech demo. It never feels cold or generic; instead, it leaves a modest and very artful impression.

Considering the result of the Trianon project and what Loïc Sander has brought to the table for typographers and type designers alike, I am looking forward to his next project and all the typefaces, explorations, and tools that will come along with it.

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Arabic typography has had less than a rosy relationship with technology, which has long evolved with no serious consideration for non-Latin scripts. Things are slowly changing, but the conse­quences of the lack of Arabic typo­graphic palettes are deeply felt whenever designers need to make type-related decisions. Expanding the typographic vocabulary is necessary to be able to fashion the nuances of a sophisticated modern visual language.

The Greta Arabic type system does just that. It is the companion to a humanist sans serif typeface modul­ated by the movement of the broad-nib pen. By comparison, Arabic type is still close to the calligraphic tradition which is also based on the broad-nib pen. Designer Kristyan Sarkis used this shared characteristic to develop a modern interpretation of the Naskh style while implementing careful detailing in every letter. The contrast in the letter ‘o’ mirrors the loops in the ‘waw’ and ‘feh’. The variation in the ‘teeth’ structure and angles differs from the vertical strokes in the Latin, but is necessary to retain the rhythm and structure of Arabic.¹ By addressing these issues, the typeface strikes a perfect balance between written letters and drawn letters, and between a considered Naskh and a Latin sans serif.

While the Latin was originally conceived as a system of related styles (a concept pioneered by Adrian Frutiger with his typeface Univers, designed in 1954), the idea of weights and extended/compressed proportions does not exist in Arabic. In fact it is the size of the pen alone that controls both the thickness of the stroke and the dimensions of the Arabic letter. In this respect, Greta Arabic is novel in that it pushes the letters outside of their expected widths. One example of this novelty is maintaining the triangularity of the loops even in extremely compressed spaces. Another one is increasing the heavier weights’ contrast and finding new ways to redistributing the darkness while maintaining appropriate optical sizes.

Greta Arabic is the largest Arabic type system to date, with thirty-nine fonts drawn in ten weights ranging from hairline to black, and four proportions from the compressed to the extended. This versatile toolbox gives designers the unprecedented ability to fine-tune their choices and create a visual landscape where structure and hierarchy go hand in hand. Still, the most interesting aspect of Greta Arabic is that it exposes the flexible anatomy of contemporary Arabic letterforms while maintaining readability, even in extreme proportions.

Notes

1. “Tooth” belongs to the anatomy of Arabic letters; teeth indicate any of the short upward strokes.⤴

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It’s easy to sort typefaces into broad categories of useful text faces on one hand and exuberant display faces on the other. One group is designed for small sizes, the other for big; everyday workhorses versus once-in-a-blue-moon spectacles.

Commercial Type’s Druk clearly fits into this scheme as a display face: Tânia Raposo’s review last year appropriately centered on the word “extreme”. But the new additions to the Druk family, Druk Text and Druk Text Wide, are outliers. They are named “Text” and yet, in an apparent contradiction, Commercial Type’s specimen states that “Druk Text is a display face designed for small sizes…”

My first impression was how extremely condensed and extremely extended these typefaces are, and I found it hard to imagine using them below headline sizes. Com­paring them to the original Druk, however, I was struck by how drastically their designer, Berton Hasebe, has moderated their proportions.

Druk Text is shockingly easy to read for its width, thanks to its ample spacing and relatively open aper­tures. Setting a whole page in it might wear out its welcome, but it could thrive in many briefer contexts, aided by four weights and italics. Druk Text Wide pursues the same strategy, but works better for labels and subheads than captions. The Wide is easiest to parse at very small point sizes, when the eye can see more of a word at one time.

This type family made me reconsider my assumptions about what faces I should consider for a particular role. Instead of seeking a transparent small type experience, prioritizing readability at all costs, should I contemplate typefaces with far more flavor? Must “display” mean that a typeface only works at large sizes? Or should I use the term to identify a tone more than a size, referring to the outsize impact such a typeface has on a website or magazine design? Druk Text is the rare new release that provokes questions about how we practice typography.

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It’s curious to me that in a global type scene, my two favorite releases of 2015 are both Brazilian: Rodrigo Saiani’s Tenez and Fernando Mello’s FS Brabo. The relative lack of type tradition in Latin America could be considered an advantage for designers, who necessarily create typefaces that express their present time and surroundings.

Like a Brazilian megacity, the design of Tenez brims with vitality. The typeface family had a sound launch campaign: it coincided with Wimbledon, and Saiani created a web specimen featuring the tournament score in real time.

The typeface takes its inspiration from Didone models, but Tenez contains much more life than Modern / Rational types. Saiani selected ingredients from different styles and mixed them successfully. The elegant extreme contrast in the Black weight can be seen in other Didone designs like Lust. And the wavy baseline and round stroke endings are reminiscent of typewriter faces. This surprising mixture of references is what makes Tenez unique.

The roundness of the letterforms and the long curved endings in the italic cuts give an unusual calm to the movement of the strokes. These playful shapes have a reference in cursive typewriter letters, which enthusiasts of the machine still use for typecasting.

Every typeface family has “spoiled children” — glyphs that make you love a design and not just like it. The charm of the uppercase ‘R’, with its almost horizontal tail, is visible at first glance, but Tenez is full of beautiful curves and subtle design details. To mention a couple: the italic lowercase ‘f’ is music to me, and the folded spur of the numeral ‘2’ marks the peak of this typeface’s organic shapes.

Tenez is a crafted typeface family. The letterforms are not constructive structures, but rather shapes that have been molded like clay figures.

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