Kategori: Typonyheter

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.

Artikeln hittad här först »

Indie checklist:

• ✓ Totes vintage look
• ✓ Fetishized shadows that feel hand-painted
• ✓ Fair trade ligatures
• ✓ Made with dead stock ink
• ✓ You’ve probably never heard of it
• ✓ Gluten-free
• ✓ Reads so much better on vinyl
• ✓ Casual unisex capitals
• ✓ Pairs well with a barrel-aged Negroni
• ✓ Cray cray brush strokes
• ✓ Kerned perfectly for setting “Lana Del Rey”
• ✓ Artisanal cap height
• ✓ Decorative ligatures, cuz YOLO
• ✓ All up in your Insta
• ✓ OpenType option for skinny descenders
• ✓ Comes with a hemp co-op bag
• ✓ Whatevs

These really are all the reasons I love Indie — it’s an unabashedly hipster script that has a lively energy and solid roots. The OpenType features help the family come to life through combining alternate forms, ligatures, modulating repeating letters, and automat­ing beginning and ending strokes. It’s a fun typeface to play with that strikes a great balance between having control and not taking itself too seriously.

Artikeln hittad här först »

Before groups like Underware came along, there was Team ’77 — a Swiss trio producing type designs for the likes of Compugraphic, ITC, and Haas. In the decades since 1980, their work has achieved an almost cultlike following in certain circles. My favorite typeface of 2015 is a revival of their thirty-eight-year-old Media, now named Media77.

Team ’77’s best-known work, of course, is Unica. Recently, Unica was almost concurrently rereleased in two separate revivals — one at Monotype, the other at Lineto. Monotype’s Neue Haas Unica was designed by Toshi Omigari, while Lineto’s Unica ’77 is from Team ’77 member Christian Mengelt and Leipzig-based type designer Maurice Göldner. Unlike the Unicas, Media77 has received almost no attention in the press.

Bobst Graphic released the original Media for its photo-typesetting machines in 1977. The revived Media77 was developed by all three of the Team ’77 members: André Gürtler, Christian Mengelt, and Erich Gschwind (in other words, the band got back together). While no version of Media will ever be as popular as Unica, the original Media incarnation embodies everything noteworthy about Team ’77.

Media’s 1977 debut was accompanied by a trilingual article in Typographische Monatsblätter detailing its design process. Gürtler, Mengelt, and Gschwind examined the most-used serif faces of their time and presented Bobst with various proposals for adoption. Eventually, they agreed upon a sturdy design subtly combining elements from many serif genres. Both Media and Media77 are eminently readable. The italic styles are arguably neither true italics nor obliques, but a unique design solution falling somewhere in between. Something Hrant Papazian would love?

In retrospect, one could argue that — in order to have been better remembered by history — Team ’77 should’ve won better clients. Typefaces like Media and Unica were distributed by companies commanding less marketing power than their larger phototype-era competitors; the fonts didn’t gain a foothold during the early PostScript-era, either. However, it isn’t difficult to imagine a parallel universe in which, instead of regularly specifying Century Expanded and Helvetica, Massimo Vignelli might have favored Media and Unica. I don’t predict that Media77 will be popular with today’s graphic designers. Nevertheless, dear reader, I commend you to go forth to Optimo’s website and look at Media77 immediately!

Proving that good work is often not forgotten in the end, André Gürtler, Christian Mengelt, and Erich Gschwind collectively received the Swiss Grand Award for Design last year. And why shouldn’t they have? Team ’77 represents the most significant collaborative type design group Switzerland has produced. Their working methods were groundbreaking in the 1970s, and remain a model for today’s type designers to study. The trio designed both the original Media and the new Media77 — released almost forty years apart. If that isn’t enough of an argument for “best typeface of the year,” I’ve got nothing else for you.

Artikeln hittad här först »

Gill Sans, love it or loathe it, is a found­ational typeface of the modern world. We’ve all seen it, we’re all familiar with it, it’s everywhere, it feels like a done deal, part of the bedrock, immutable and beyond the reach of any redesign. But Monotype has done that thing — they’ve created a new Gill Sans, using the original sketches, reanim­ating the discontinued Deco style, incorp­orating custom additions as OpenType alternates.

Overall, the original has been cleaned and tidied and made into a fully functioning and integrated digital whole. Goodbye to the “eccentric” mess of styles and variants and hello to the bright new dawn of Gill Sans Nova. It’s pretty good, and I’m glad it’s been done. The spacing is a whole load better, and using it at display sizes isn’t the tedious job of manually resetting most of it that it once was. The bolder weights still have their original design and the lowercase ‘e’ and ‘a’ still make me twitch a bit — two lumpen henchmen from a children’s cartoon. I’m sure plenty of people love them, but not me.

Joanna, less well known but also widespread, is the unfussy, useful, and dependable book face, the kind of typeface you read without noticing and close to being that proverbial crystal goblet. It’s been compre­hens­ively and beautifully remastered as a fully functional digital typeface. Previous digitizations felt flimsy and inconsistent, never quite matching the clarity and (importantly) the ink density of the metal type, so Joanna Nova is a massive improvement. Joanna Sans Nova is a new design based on what Gill might have done, and is a solid and classy humanist design. It appeared first as an e-reader typeface and, unsurpris­ingly, works perfectly on low-resolution displays. Although it is quite beautiful, it very much feels like the support role for Joanna Nova, designed as a good choice for typographic contrast and variety rather than as something you’d go out of your way to choose on its own merits.

The Eric Gill Series is a fantastic thing by George Ryan, Ben Jones, and Terrance Weinzierl. They’ve done some important and admirable work to respect Gill’s original designs, and the typefaces now feel integrated and usable as a whole system. Previously specifying Gill in a brand felt risky, since the whole family of weights never quite felt like a coherent design — extending the brand was a process hedged with caveats and warnings. Now it feels genuinely usable.

My problem with the series is with Gill himself. As much as I can truly admire his art, his design, his brilliance, I can’t deny my sense of disgust toward him and his crimes. I understand, of course, that no work of art exists in isolation; how many died in wars commemorated in great sculpture and painting, how many starved as resources were diverted to create great palaces, how much talent was squandered to pamper the egos of the rich and powerful? But they’re not things we use; they’re safely roped off or sanitized by touristic propaganda: we can identify them as history. How do we use a modern, revitalized tool both named for the victim and the perpetrator? Surely, only with care, understanding, and an awareness of what is appropriate. When we write about them, when we promote them, we need sensitivity. We need, however gently and tactfully, to warn.

Disclaimer: I only reviewed the Latin. It’s a terrible omission for which I can only apologize. If you need the Cyrillic or Greek, be careful to review the quality of the character set: it may not match the Latin.

Artikeln hittad här först »

Inka is a perfect book and editorial typeface, crafted with attention to even the tiniest details. It will certainly work well in books, newspapers, or magazines; and thanks to the large repertoire of styles and huge glyph set, it can be of use in scientific publications or school books as well. Relatively narrow lowercase letters make Inka quite economical, too.

A very large family of sixty-four styles, Inka is divided into two subfamilies (A and B). Inka A has standard proportions, while Inka B has more compact ascenders and descenders. Each subfamily consists of four grades with descriptive names: Small, Text, Title, and Display; these are further subdivided into four weights. The difference between grades is not exaggerated, so the combinations look natural.

The diacritics harmonize perfectly with the letters. The accents of the text styles are heavy enough to be legible in small sizes, while the display ones are crispier and more delicate. Samuel was very serious about the details: The ascenders of Croatian ‘đ’ and Maltese ‘ħ’ miss the head serif (in Inka B only), certain ligatures have accented variants (fí, fľ, cť or sť), and on top of that, there is one cool contextual feature: letters with ascenders following ď, ľ and ť lose their head serifs to avoid collision with the vertical caron.

The fonts contain a very generous repertoire of 1113 glyphs, including small caps. Some letters have alternates, namely ‘a’, ‘f’, ‘g’, ‘Q’ and ‘&’. And not only are superior and inferior figures available; there is a complete set of lower- and uppercase letters available in their superior and inferior forms respectively (including alternate shapes of ‘a’, ‘f’, and ‘g’). Apart from the standard sets of figures, Inka offers small-cap numerals together with their tabular versions, and positive and negative indices. There are many other symbols and decorative elements available, too: arrows, basic geometric shapes, and manicules.

After spending some time with Inka, I can say it is an ideal multipurpose serif family, beautiful in large sizes and “invisible” in text sizes, with an unusually considerate treatment of Central and Eastern European characters.

Artikeln hittad här först »