Kategori: Typonyheter

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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Many will wonder if this is lettering or typography. I think that doubt (or trick) lies at the heart of this project designed by Yani Arabena with Guille Vizzari and Ale Paul.

The script style from Quotes is fresh and has a deter­mined ductus that shows Yani’s passion for calligraphy. She is always experimenting with different tools to sketch letters, but ink and paper are constant­ly present in her projects.

The pointed brush is a tool that allows Yani to explore and try multiple potential forms, creating unique strokes and avoiding repetitive shapes.

The Quotes project arose from rescuing a number of unused sketches made for a client. Yani and her partner Guille decided to open the drawer they had been relegated to and give those drawings a second chance.

Quotes Script has a casual spirit with an elegant and dynamic rhythm, while the Caps style has a slightly more formal structure. Both complement each other and you can find letters connected or not, special ligatures, swashes and endings, a whole set of elements that increase the “lettering feel” of the word. In both styles you can see the personal touch where handmade brush lettering is given value and becomes very special.

Quotes was created in Buenos Aires, where the culture of poetic phrases, sayings, and aphorisms painted in the fileteado style became an emblematic artform for the city. They could be the offline version of the concept behind this project.

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Although I don’t design typefaces for my native script professionally, I can’t simply ignore it. And as primarily a Latin type designer, I always contemplate how a Latin companion to a Japanese typeface should look. Janko FY might not be among the typefaces that received the most praise last year, but it is one of the best examples I was seeking, and was most relevant and impressive to me.

CJK calligraphy uses a pointed brush. It is a common mistake to treat its tip shape as a circle whose radius increases as it gets pressed deeper into the paper, as exemplified by “brush” tools in numerous drawing applications. In fact, the object that comes closest to doing that is a rubber ball with ink. The actual pointed brush is more like a very flexible flat nib at a mirrored angle from that of traditional Latin calligraphy.

Pointed brush exists in modern Latin calligraphy, too, but because of its mirrored angle, the stem angle is often slanted in order to preserve the normal Latin contrast axis, and often used to write script styles. And if you want to design a Latin counterpart to a Japanese typeface (especially a calligraphic one) with the same brush, there is no good model because of its nib angle.

And this is where Janko FY comes in. It is a moderately slanted italic typeface with a reverse-stroke axis that looks totally natural. It’s brush-shaped only where it needs to be, and it does not rigidly toe that line. It is a beautiful marriage of brush calligraphy and type design, an unintentional Jeanne d’Arc of Japanese type design, in my opinion (a slightly more upright stem angle may be preferred for that purpose, though). As for application in the Latin community, it is suitable for Asian restaurant shopfront signs and food packaging where Frutiger’s Ondine would be the typical choice. I hope it will eventually have a Greek alphabet, since the axis is perfect for it, and a bold weight for display use.

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Ross Milne’s Echo, a complement to his seriffed Charlie, is rather sensibly given its own name rather than merely inheriting offspring status. This is not Charlie “sans” anything. In Echo, we do not get a pared-back derivative. Instead, we meet with an equally interesting sibling.

Bearing a family resemblance, but with enough good looks and charm to hold its own, Echo avoids the blandness of the neutral sans by allowing the calligraphic influences in Charlie to gain more traction. The swing of the outstrokes at the baseline seems to speak more loudly in Echo, thrust into center stage without serifs for company; the subtle notches in the strokes carefully add interest to the forms while never becoming overwhelming or distracting.

The speed in the forward lean of letters like the uppercase and small-cap ‘B’s and lowercase ’t’ hew to the rhythm established in Charlie, although this energy is somewhat calmed in Echo. With the slow, wide curves of the ’s’ and the stabilized lowercase ‘w’, Echo has a more relaxed and pragmatic aura than its seriffed sibling. In the italics, I do miss the jolt of energy from the cursive ‘k’ and ‘x’ in Charlie, but these simplified forms again ultimately contribute to the sense that this family is more about being straightforward and speaking with crispness and authority than about creating a neutrality that risks rigidity or sterility.

With its narrow proportions, low-contrast open forms, and five durable weights in two styles, Echo provides a consistent, friendly, and legible visual language. This seems particularly well-suited to wayfinding and information design. Discretionary ligatures and stylistic sets equip the typographer with enclosed numerals and arrows, and the inclusion of an extensive range of icons by Josh Nychuk rounds out the range of purposes to which this family could be put.

The scale of the family, which also includes small caps, a full set of tabular, proportional, lining, and oldstyle figures, along with fraction parts and small letters, allows for complex typesetting. Couple this with the functionality and range provided through the well-balanced Greek by Natasha Raissaki and Cyrillic by Gayaneh Bagdasaryan and you have a powerhouse worthy of the Typotheque stable. All in all, Echo packs a punch, and its subtle quirks ensure that this workhorse has legs.

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In 2013, Finland’s major daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat transitioned from broadsheet to tabloid. The redesign, under group creative director Sami Valtere, called for a sans serif family to pair with Paul Barnes and Berton Hasebe’s striking custom display serif (Sanomat) for secondary text settings that would include captions, sidebars, and television schedules.

Sanomat Sans, undergoing a minor transition of its own from its original name Helsingin, was drawn in ten display weights and seven text weights by Christian Schwartz, assisted by Vincent Chan, and made avail­able for retail sale through Commercial Type last year.

A low-contrast geometric at heart, Sanomat Sans seeks to moderate its sibling’s more characterful flourishes while retaining its generous apertures and angled terminals. It is not without Humanist moments, either: the release notes make a special mention of the engineered asymmetry of its lowercase bowls, designed to disrupt the monotony of repeated letters that appear with high frequency in Finnish text.

The term “workhorse” is commonly used to describe typeface families that possess (or perhaps lack) just enough personality to work well in a wide variety of situations. It has never been more aptly applied than to this family. With the exception of the ‘W’ glyph’s overlapping middle vertex and the serpentine binocular ‘g’, Sanomat Sans’ default alphabet might appear strait-laced at first glance, but a staggering sixteen stylistic sets (and a black stencil weight contributed by Commercial Type staff designer Miguel Reyes) provide endless possibilities for modifying texture and tone.

Included in these sets are storybook versions of the ‘a’, ‘g’ and ‘y’; an open-bowl, looped ‘k’; and a cursive ‘e’ reminiscent of the one in TypeTogether’s Bree. When applied to the Gill-inspired elegance of the thinner weights or the youthful energy of their heavier counterparts, these alternates provided Helsingin Sanomat’s creative department with an exhaustive number of styles for its stable of related publications.

Sanomat Sans is a better-proportioned, warmer, and more versatile Verdana for the HiDPI age.

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