Hasta La Ideas

The type-obsessed graphic designer in me has had the specimen for Luzi Type’s new release, Nantes, open in a tab for about six weeks now. Luzi Gantenbein is a graphic-turned-type designer, whose quirky, blinky, lovely serif demonstrates that this is a typeface for graphic designers more than type designers.

That’s not necessarily a criticism. Type designers can often be myopic when it comes to what appeals to their audiences because irregularities don’t bode well for larger contexts of type, and type designers serve the content. But graphic designers are always hungry to discover new type that looks weird. Embracing the quirk is just one way to differentiate a client’s voice.

So because I straddle both design worlds, it took a while to know what voice would come out on top in assessing Nantes. (A third factor was its name; my ex-boyfriend is from the eponymous French town, so early-20s me piped in too.) The result was an internal dialogue that went something like this:

Graphic Designer: Ooooooh look at that a. What is this!?

Type Designer: I know immediately if I’m going to love a typeface by the lowercase a. Great Cheltenham vibes.

Graphic Designer: Ooooooh look at this funny blob of ink in the e.

Type designer: Huh. That’s… I wonder if that’s to even out all the color you get in the teardrops of the a and the ear of the g. The s feels light.

Graphic Designer: I really wanna try this out. I bet it looks great when it’s big.

Type Designer: Hmmm… Says here it’s for text and display. I dunno about that.

Graphic Designer: The specimen isn’t the best representation. I’ma download the trial and see it for myself. [Quickly designs and prints own specimen.]

Early-20’s Me [enters room]: What are you guys talking about?

Type Designer: She’s seeing how good she can make this type look at different sizes.

Early-20’s Me: Type looks different at different sizes?

Type & Graphic Designers [in unison]: GET OUTTA HERE!

Graphic Designer: This has so much personality, but…

Type Designer: The spacing needs work. I get that it’s tricky with these borderline-typewriter widths, but…

Graphic Designer: Ugh, you type people and your spacing. But yeah, I see your point. This paragraph of light italic at 11pt kind of shows that you wouldn’t use it like that.

Type Designer: There are some weird things in here that are great and some weird things that might limit how you use it.

Graphic Designer: Totally. Several individually unique glyphs that I’m excited about, but the light weight is probably the only weight I’d use, and I wouldn’t go small.

Type Designer: This seems to be the only weight, too, that has those classically slightly-heavier cap stems. That’s what makes the color somewhat “blinky”.

Graphic Designer: Agreed. The numbers feel like a missed opportunity, considering all the personality in here.

Type Designer: Yeah. There are these very Caslon italic glyphs, then an italic double-story g, back to a single-story a, a somewhat bulbous k, and disparate widths throughout…

Graphic Designer: I like all that!

Type Designer: But does it all work together? No.

Early 20s Me: It’s called Nantes? Dreamy!

Among typefaces, there are the workhorses: humble, durable, with subtle senses of charm. And then there are the domestic pets: attention-grabbing, delicate, and meant to be cherished alone. Nordvest is neither. It’s a monster — a monster worth wrestling and taming.

Nordvest is Nina Stössinger’s contribution to the obscure tradition of reverse-contrast typefaces. For many typographers and type designers, that usually means “quirky display type”. Efforts to make reverse contrast work in text have resulted in precious few successes, such as Roger Excoffon’s Antique Olive and Evert Bloemsma’s Balance. Nordvest pulls it off: its internal logic is still based on inverted distribution of blackness (instead of simply exaggerating the serifs like French Clarendons), but that blackness is subtly undulated so as not to tire the eyes. It proves that adding blackness in the horizontal direction, in the forms of triangular serifs, thickened terminals, and occasionally heavier curves, done right, can create an almost lyrical texture in running text.

Lyrical, that is, if you wrestle with it. Nordvest will not easily coexist with whatever you bring in: its triangular serifs can clash with many traditional serifed typefaces, and its unconventional construction can seem too geometric at times. Neither will it be content if you merely enlarge it like a Didone, or even Antique Olive Nord: though the sharp contours work at display sizes, its subtlety demands your attention beyond setting it on a pedestal and admiring it from a distance. But when you bring it down to the text range, it defies conventional typographic treatment: positive tracking destroys its word-image, while negative tracking can easily make it overwhelming. Lead too loose, it quickly amplifies the stripe-y effect to an unpleasant degree; too tight, it makes the paragraph block too black and offsets the page’s visual balance. Typesetting common Garalde or Grotesk faces is safe and convenient most of the time, and rewarding if you put in extra effort. Nordvest demands that you put in extra effort. All of it, all the time. To get it right, to honor its charm, requires discernment, sensitivity — and, most importantly, patience.

The struggle is worth it. When you’ve finally tamed this monster, the dance between whites and blacks, the well-studied horizontal emphasis, and the pleasantly calligraphic construction of italics — all form parts of the reward.

I first encountered Nordvest in 2015, when it was still Stössinger’s KABK graduation typeface and bore the name “Mica”. Struck by its beauty, I emailed her and asked if she would license it to me privately. She hesitated, replying it was being hinted by the wonderful folks at Monokrom. Now that it is officially out, I invite all of you to go try it. It will bite you if you’re not careful, but success doesn’t always come easy, does it?

Baloo is a big deal. As far as I know, it’s the world’s first display typeface family to render the ten* most-used Indic writing systems in one cohesive style. These are scripts used by 1.3 billion people.

How difficult is this task? Each of the world’s scripts has its own visual language, and the multiscript type designer must act as an interpreter to find the common ground between them. In this case: the sharp, jagged forms of Bengali and the flowing loops of Malayalam; the cadence of repetitious Tamil and the variable texture and density of the lively Telugu; the hypnotic undulation of Odia’s top curves and Gurmukhi’s squarish, solid forms; the many curls, teardrops, and terminals of Kannada and the fluid simplicity of Gujarati; the dense, top-heavy Devanagari and the streamlined, simple Latin.

It’s a delicate balancing act, and I believe that Ek Type nailed it. Baloo’s soft, thick stroke was applied with great care, subtly quieting each script’s complicated elements, and smoothing over their differences. The designers have harmonized the stems, curves, angles, loops, ticks, dots, knots, and tails of roughly 3,500 different glyphs. The scripts look like they’ve all been wrapped in the same blanket. It’s just sublime. And while I feel that the scripts’ relative sizes may not be perfect, I commend the Ek Type design team for prioritizing the clarity of each letterform, no matter how complex. If Baloo represents the very beginning of Indic multiscript display families, I can’t imagine the marvels that are yet to come.

* Baloo Bhaijan, the Arabic script variant, was added in 2017, after this review was written.

What are serifs? When I first started looking at type, I thought of serifs as decorative additions to letters, intended to lend some finish and distinctiveness to the design. After more careful consideration, I came to view my initial impression as naive.

Serifs play a vital role in establishing what is called the “color” of a typeface: they facilitate a pleasing distribution of blackness in otherwise light areas. I recognized that even the typical shapes of serifs, which initially seemed like arbitrary ornament, had a functional logic: the arm of the r in Caslon blooms into a teardrop because that’s an efficient way of bringing darkness to the lightweight right side of the letter; the funny beaks at the top and bottom of Bodoni’s S solve the problem of adding color to the curved terminals of a glyph that is otherwise dark only in the middle.

Rui Abreu’s Pathos promotes serifs as a design element by enlarging them beyond “normal” bounds. Given what I’ve just said about serifs being practical rather than expressive, such a strategy might sound like a disaster. But Abreu has a sophisticated understanding of typographic color, and he has adjusted his letters to maintain color and balance even with the ungainly attachments. The result is the best kind of experimental type design: one that begins with an unexpected premise but that uses sound typographical design sense to make that premise functional.

The point of departure for Pathos is a monoline slab-serif structure — the equality of weight between stroke and serif being necessary for the typeface’s playfulness. While the exaggerated horizontal serifs lend a chunkiness, the vertical serifs are where things get really interesting. There, the glyph structures lean and readjust to make way for the outsize serifs. For example, the apertures of the lowercase s do not get closed off by the serifs, because the whole letter has been skewed to accommodate them. The top of the regular a leans the other way, so that the serif on its hood similarly does not run into the bowl. These adjustments preserve even color, but also lend a very appealing energy, with leaning and skewing forms contributing dynamism, even as the bottom horizontal serifs firmly reassert the baseline.

In the case of some glyphs, the accommodation feels effortful. The r in particular catches my eye, and I wonder: if its arm serif has to droop that low, should the glyph itself also be a touch wider? How to terminate the diagonal legs of K, R, and k is another conundrum, as extended serifs there would reach well beyond the bounds of the letter. Abreu left them serifless, rightly sacrificing consistent treatment for workable spacing. The angular t of the regular, though a little odd in isolation, works well in context. The E, especially in the lightest weight, seems bananas — but in a likable way.

Though not a monospaced design, Pathos evokes typewriter fonts. I think that may be because we’re familiar with chunky serifs on letters like i, l, and r in typewriter faces, there used to compensate for the necessity of uniform advance width. Even beyond the serif effects, Pathos’s characters tend toward more regularized widths (the M, for example, being not that much wider than the J), which strikes me as an appropriate design decision.

It is said — probably more often than it is true — that some type designs work well both big and small. But it really is the case with Pathos. And that is because what makes it funky and interesting at large sizes — the way it adjusts to ungainly serifs — is exactly what makes it functional and pleasing at small sizes. What excites me most about Pathos is not that it starts from a novel proposition, but that it works out the consequences of that proposition so smartly.

Early mechanical typewriters were pre-digital engineering marvels. These machines produced crude typography: all letters had to be the same width (or “pitch”). So narrow letters occupied the same space as wide letters, making some look stretched and others cramped.

Few type designers were involved with typewriter companies in those days, making the design of letterforms a technical assignment for an engineer. When the mechanical reasons for monospaced typefaces faded, the tabular quality of the typography gave it a new venue: in early digital terminals, the cathode ray tube could only show eighty columns. Again, all letters were required to be the same width; again, most were drawn by engineers.

Operator appears to be a monospaced revival of a late-electric-typewriter or an early-digital-computer face. Note the occasional serif that camouflages an unsolved spacing problem, the almost monolinear contrast, and the italic that tries so hard to be expressive with loops and connectors. But underneath, Operator communicates a different, more complex, more contradictory view of design.

Yes, the typeface bears a hint of newsrooms and fact-reporting journalists, but it manages that without a single skeuomorphic smudge. And only ten of the sixty-four styles are actually single-width. Close up, with all stylistic duties fulfilled, the shapes of Operator begin to shine. These shapes are not mechanical; rather, they’re cut from an elegant but tough material. The strokes are stubborn and do not always want to bend. The counters are open; the joints show contrast in sensible places and are very well balanced. Operator is far removed from mechanics and engineers; there is even an echo of a handheld writing tool here.

Perhaps Andy Clymer (senior designer at Hoefler & Co.) was motivated by the third great era of monospaced type: code. The process of digital type design involves all kinds of syntax, from features to Python to HTML and CSS. Operator may offer a glimpse of something Clymer wanted to make for himself: his view of what his own code should look like in the spartan environment of a code editor. One could argue that code typography is too important to leave to engineers and that it deserves the same scrutiny as more conventional fields of typography. Operator is a well-drawn and sophisticated typeface, destined for a wide range of applications, that sometimes pretends to be a typewriter.

Other examples of type designers making fonts for coding exist, but not many. To name a few: David Jonathan Ross (Input), Pieter van Rosmalen (Nitti), Just van Rossum (Python Sans), and Petr van Blokland (BitCount).