Hasta La Ideas

There’s something quite special about Berlin’s type design scene. It is probably the most colorful and international community of its kind on the European continent. (Only the type scene in London is more global.)

And it’s not just that — it also has a pleasantly but unusually large contingent of independent female type designers, many of whom combine an original and spirited approach to drawing type with sharp digital savvy. I hate to throw the word “feminine” at a typeface, because it can mean almost anything you want it to; but it’s often the women who come up with the liveliest and cheekiest script faces. That is no different in Berlin. Several of them work alone, doing both the outline creation and the OpenType programming, making smart use of crucial features such as context­ual alternates and automatic glyph substitution.

Julia Sysmäläinen is one of them, and she’s among the most versatile operators on the Berlin type scene. Her background is both Finnish and Russian; she is a native user of both the Latin and the Cyrillic script. She studied language and literature as well as graphic design (with some product design in the mix). While she recently published several scripts at Art. Lebedev in Moscow, and brought out the quirky text face Mir on her own Juliasys label, it’s her FontFont project FF Mister K that is best known. It combines several of Sysmäläinen’s fascinations: literature, writing, technology. The original FF Mister K, an astonishing flexible font based on the handwriting in Franz Kafka’s manuscripts, was followed by two varieties based on other samples from Kafka’s writing, which indeed look decidedly different — FF Mister K Informal and FF Mister K Splendid.

In 2015, Julia Sysmäläinen published yet another Kafka-based script. As she has written, her Josef K does not reference “the works Kafka created by night as an author, but … those he produced during daytime in his professional life as a high-ranking, confident bureau­crat.” And again, the resulting font is different in atmosphere, while having the same technical and visual sophistication as the other scripts. It’s loose yet confident; rather informal (for office handwriting) but regular and readable. It’s the kind of well-programmed OpenType font that is a joy to use — especially for those pages that involve not just typesetting, but writing your own text while you’re composing it. It can be just a headline; to see it change shape and propose new combinations and alternates at every stroke is pure delight.

Sysmäläinen decided not to add this Kafka variation to the FontFont series, but to keep it on her own label. I find Josef K Paneuropean to be a perfect expression of the Berlin attitude: expressive and practical; indivi­dual­istic and user-friendly; and wisely affordable, too.

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.

Mac Miller feat. Anderson .Paak: Dang!
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by Alia Akkam

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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.