Hasta La Ideas

Imagine having only a handful of quality text typefaces available for Latin typography. Now imagine one of that handful, an essential workhorse face, suddenly removed from circulation for legal reasons. As outlandish as this scenario may sound to users of the Latin script, that’s exactly what recently happened for users of Hebrew.

As a result of a lawsuit between the heirs of Henri Friedlaender, the designer of the popular 1958 Hadassah Hebrew, and Masterfont, the largest Israeli font foundry, the latter’s ubiquitous version of Hadassah was taken off the market. The five-year-long litigation was decided in favor of the Friedlaender family in 2011. The decision was appealed and finally upheld by a Jerusalem court in July 2015, making it a watershed case in the history of copyright protection for type design (in contrast to the trademark or software protection that type designers and foundries in the US rely on).

Hadassah, named after a printing trade school where Friedlaender taught, is the Hebrew legibility typeface, interpreting the traditional “serif” letter through a Modernist esthetic. Its robust weight, low stroke contrast, open counters, simplified forms, and somewhat rigid appearance make it easily readable at small point sizes. Frank-Rühl, perhaps the most likely contender for the unofficial title of the most popular Hebrew text face, is fussy and idiosyncratic in comparison. And Hadassah’s pronounced typographic quality makes it better suited for books and periodicals than the less formal David and Narkissim (the two other contenders), which are more calligraphic.

To satisfy the steady demand for a legal digital version of Hadassah, the Friedlaender heirs approached Yanek Iontef, an independent Tel Aviv type designer, who went back to the original drawings as a basis for his design. The new typeface, released as Hadassah Friedlaender in October 2015 in two weights, is a faithful reconstruction of the original — as it was first conceived.

The resulting face represents the shape of the letterforms very well; many details that were lost in the earlier version, like the subtle curves and rounded corners, have been reinstated here. Significant improvement over the old version is a true bold design, not a digitally generated one. What the new design does not reflect as well is the finalized original type. As with any digitization, the letterfit that existed in metal needs to be recreated from scratch. As a result, kerning in a setting of Hadassah Friedlaender does not compare well to the original. In addition, a digital reconstruction based on drawings does not take into account adjustments and tweaks to the letterforms that happen in the course of punch-cutting and other stages of production of the metal type. In this case, the changes to the design after the drawings were given over to Amsterdam Type Foundry appear slight, and a careful comparison of the 1958 metal letterforms to Hadassah Friedlaender yields only minor differences. A few more departures were made by Iontef deliberately: the only ascender was shortened for practical reasons, for example, and the lining and hanging figures were completely redesigned to harmonize with both Hebrew and Latin.

One feature of Hadassah Friedlaender that comes as a pleasant surprise is the brand-new set of Latin characters designed by Iontef to harmonize with the Hebrew. Something that we may have come to take for granted with other non-Latin scripts in recent years has seldom been successfully attempted with the Hebrew script. A few Hebrew designs were made to complement an existing Latin, as is the case of Oron and Univers, but the other way around is still a novelty. The Latin in Hadassah Friedlaender is refreshingly unassuming. It mixes well with Hebrew; has similar feel, texture, and color; and its structural similarities to the Hebrew do not appear forced or contrived. Unexpectedly, this Latin does not look embarrassing when used on its own.

2015 was a great year for Indic type: I can no longer count the number of new releases on one hand!

High-quality, Unicode-compliant Indic designs are still rare pearls in a vast ocean of fonts, but I feel like the tide is finally turning. Adobe, Tiro Typeworks, Google Web Fonts, Ek Type, and the Indian Type Foundry all published at least one new Indic design this past year, with a scope reaching eight different Indic scripts.

Devanagari, the most widely-used Indic script, saw the greatest growth, both in number of releases and in range of styles. It seems that publishers of Indic fonts are ready to move beyond the typical “safe” projects and venture into riskier territory. Several designers branched out into the display arena this year, with beautiful results.

Ek Type’s chubby Modak is by far the most fun of these releases. It’s a very challenging style to execute in a complex writing system, and they have done it very well. Kudos to them!

But I think my personal favorite of the year is ITF’s Quantum Devanagari, designed by Hitesh “Rocky” Malaviya. Quantum is an ultra-wide, five-weight family, with a matching Latin complement.

There is such a satisfying rhythm in this typeface. Instead of trying to cram the Devanagari letters into monotonous Latin-like rectangles, as designers of non-Latin “companions” often do, Rocky lets them expand and breathe, allowing each letter’s innate density to dictate its width. As a result, the balance between positive and negative spaces is just superb. The curves are so soft and serene, and result in some beautiful horizontal conjuncts that feel like the rolling hills of a landscape. The elegant vowel marks are quiet enough to let the letters tell the story. Little human moments — like the two-stroke construction of the Ra (र), and the slight upward curl of the Ta (त) — give this design a bit of humor, too.

All in all, it just feels so natural to me, so beautiful. And, rather importantly, it feels so intuitively Devanagari — not just a façade built on a Latin framework. I am looking forward to seeing what Rocky will forge in years to come!

I am a sucker for bodacious headline typography — the sort that is over the top, tight, bold, in your face, and set solid. Who’s with me?

Nitti Mostro makes me wish I had a bunch of 200pt headlines for an ad. Or magazine spread. Or poster. Or banner. Or billboard. Or movie title for an IMAX theater! Can you see it!? Pieter van Rosmalen did not mess around when he expanded upon his Nitti Grotesk Ultra for Bold Monday. This is not a typeface for the timid; neither is it another twee* chromatic design. Eighteen fonts, four subfamilies, and more potential combinations than I can wrap my head around.

Generally I am very skeptical of any typeface that comes locked and loaded with so many bells and whistles. I mean, why include them when there are so many ways to make them on my own, right? But for this family, I can really see that time was spent on exploring ideas and drawing meaningful and useful shapes. For starters, it has solid, shadow, inline, inline solo, gradient, gradient solo, stripes, stripes solo, chrome, chrome solo, comic, comic solid, comic shadow, disco inline, disco floor, disco shadow, stencil solid, stencil shadow, stencil rough, and — sheesh I’m out of breath just typing that — last, but not least and possibly coolest of all, actual wood type. Squat and square, short ascenders and descenders, set alone or layered, Nitti Mostro is positively ready to handle any grandiloquent words I might have in mind.

* You know, I’ll wager someone could use Nitti Mostro Inline Solo to do something really quite experimentally classic. But it would still be bombastic.

I’m not ashamed to admit it: I love Brush Script. You secretly love Brush Script, too. We all secretly love Brush Script. It’s like ice cream. Sure, it’s not great on every occasion or in unlimited quantities, but at the right time and in the right amount, ice cream is … amazing. Brush Script is just like that.

But! Lots of us turn our noses up at Brush Script. We sneer, “That typeface looks … amateurish.” And we dismiss it with a curt, “It’s so … overused.” The thing is, we have to separate the typeface itself from the things that have been done to and with it. For decades, Brush Script has been mistreated by font bundling marketers who lumped it in with 9,998 other fonts and sold it for fractions of a cent. That is what has led to it being overused. That overuse is what has given typo-intellectuals¹ an aversion to it. None of that has anything to do with the design of Brush (as it was originally named).

The reality is that Brush is a marvel. Scripts are tough to get right even with all of the contextual substitutions, elastic spacing and sophisticated drawing tools that we have to throw at them today. A fluid, brushy, animated script cast in little metal blocks in 1942? My goodness, that sounds impossible. Yet, Brush totally works and is completely beautiful. Robert E. Smith was a magician.

ATF Brush is a loving revival of everything that is great about the original. It has those graceful curves, the playful bounce, and the gutsy capitals that we all cherish in the most private parts of our hearts. ATF Brush brings lots of new stuff as well. It has a range of weights from the surprisingly spry Light to the pull-no-punches Black. It has some clever alternates and ligatures delivered automatically via OpenType substitutions. It supports a bunch of languages and has the latest and greatest monetary symbols. It’s also drawn really well (that can’t be said of that “Brush Script” that already shows up in your font menu). ATF Brush is Brush Script, but better and new.

It’s time to show how we really feel about Brush and start using it with care and respect. Don’t just trot it out when you want something to feel nostalgic. Use it because it still feels fresh. Don’t hide behind irony when you use it. Use it because it looks great. Use ATF Brush because it’s all of that and so much more.

Notes

1. Hi! That’s you. And me. I’m writing an essay about Brush Script. You are reading it. We’re probably overthinking this.⤴

I have a weakness for font families that are colorful — each face a character of kinfolk, unlike the inflated and identical thick-to-thin twinning that defines our digital-type times.

César Puertas’ Buendia makes a harmonious melody its trait, sounding over the predictable tonal scale of ups and downs. My appreciation of this family stems not only from its jovial look-and-feel, but also from its conscious conceptual effort to offer typographers garden-variety versatile tools without forfeiting consistency.

This family, with its deceptively minimal range, cont­ains a complete text and display suite, each with a clear application in mind. Small footprint indeed, the weights provided are spot-on! All six Buendia styles share the same underlying framework, differentiating themselves with various characteristics and narratives. This unconventional family includes three sans weights (Thin, Medium and ExtraBold), two serifs (Regular and Italic), and one Bold slab. Each weight takes a measured cue from the brush for movement and stroke definition, while the romantic and vivid italic serif embraces the brush, the fullest lending top and bottom stems little swashy loops.

This is a family you want to befriend, not only for its kindness, but also for its endorsement of multi­generationality. Each affiliate connotes a hint of a different time period — from the serifs, which allude to a past era of leisurely picnics-at-the-lake-in-elegant-clothes (minus any austerity), to the Sans and Bold, clearly anchored in contemporary roundedness.

The type flaunts some enchanting informal idiosync­rasies. Take a look at the lower case ‘a’, with its low bowl and inward bowing top terminal; this latter feature recurs throughout the system, which gives the face in aggregate a confident and stable upright position. The assertiveness of the top serifs of the uppercase ‘T’ is almost theatrical in the way it demonstrates their repetitive unilateral mechanics. The type plays hide-and-seek with slightly outward arched sans stems, barely visible in the thin, and most apparent in the extrabold.

I look forward to seeing this type employed with a vision, as no twin will willingly stand in for another. There have been some contemporary type releases that might be compared to one or another weight of this crowd, but none comes close to being part of a bigger idea.