Portrait

Commercial Type knows how to look at old type with fresh eyes. They may do it better than anyone. Three of the foundry’s recent releases clearly demon­strate this rare ability: Paul Barnes stripped traditional models to their bare bones to make Marian; Christian Schwartz recreated Antique Olive from memory for Duplicate; and Berton Hasebe imagined French Renaissance types from a modern, minimal­ist perspective when he drew Portrait.

It seems outlandish to combine the intricate forms of 500-year-old type with stark minimalism. Yet the output here, while unexpected, is not wild or jarring. Nor is it relegated to the bin of fleeting experimental designs. It is actually useful.

This successful result is only possible in the deft hands of a practiced and original type designer — and Hasebe is certainly that, having already reimagined the rugged text serif and geometric sans categories, as well as assisted on various other projects during his 2008–2013 tenure at Commercial Type.

Hasebe’s primary model for Portrait was a Two-Line Double Pica (32-point) attributed to French punch­cutter Maître Constantin around 1530. This was one of the first display-size Roman typefaces with a lower­case, and a major influence on Antoine Augereau and Claude Garamont, who produced the archetypes for what we have come to know as “Garamond”. But where these Renai­ssance faces are delicately shaped, refined, and complex, Portrait is spare and simplified. Simplified, but not simplistic: there is clearly nuance in this reinterpretation. Hasebe hasn’t merely reduced curve complexity and replaced bracketed serifs with crisp triangles; he has pulled taut the skin of the old type, giving it new life without masking its core character. (John Downer’s Vendetta is one of the few designs to have had this sort of reinvigorating effect on classic Roman type. In that case, it was the Venetian model.)

While the general idea of a Garamond remains in this design, Portrait has a strong personality of its own. Designers will inevitably interpret those sharp, thorny details as wicked or macabre. The typeface has already been employed for a striking paperback edition of The Shining. And that’s fine — there is no doubt Portrait plays that part well. But I’m more interested to see it cast in less expected roles.

Fortunately, there are plenty of reasons we can expect to see more of Portrait in the coming months:

  1. Commercial Type’s tastemaking clientele will see Portrait for the multitalented face that it is and put it to work in unusual and high-profile productions.
  2. Portrait’s italic has a consistent slope angle and simple wedge serifs. To me, this lets it be used more liberally without the potentially distracting frills and wobble of other italics in this genre.
  3. Good compressed serifs are few and far between. Extra condensed variants usually don’t work with an Oldstyle design as they end up feeling either forced or unrelated to the standard width member of the family. The tight curves and sharp serifs of Portrait, however, are ideal for extra narrow letters, and Portrait Condensed goes beyond “condensed” to effortlessly compressed. Combined with its prickly serifs, it brings to mind one of my old favorites, Vendôme Condensed, but Portrait is much more versatile because it doesn’t feel quite so comic-book villain and it offers five weights.
  4. Everyone loves inline type, and Portrait’s two styles are gorgeous and stately, and they depart stylistically from others on the market.
  5. In our increasingly bland landscape of safe sanses, saucy serifs are poised for a comeback. I can’t think of a better family of fonts to lead this charge than Portrait.

Stephen Coles is editor of Typographica, Fonts In Use, and The Mid-Century Modernist, and author of the book The Anatomy of Type. He works from his girlfriend’s flat in Berlin and his cat’s home in Oakland.

Alda

With the Alda project, Berton Hasebe took on the challenge of designing a type family whose members not only shift in weight, but also in their quality of expression.

Analyzing how typefaces change their tone of voice across their weights, and how certain properties (robust, elegant, sturdy) are automatically assigned to certain stroke widths, he devised a weight system that incorporates a transition from rigid to smooth.

Bringing together so many parameters in a cohesive concept, Alda seems like the perfect Type & Media project, which is where its design was first conceived. In his documentation booklet, Berton talks about the desire of learning “as much as possible” in the one-year master course, and therefore assigned himself this very intensive graduation project.

The bold extreme of Alda was drawn with the properties of the broad-nib pen in mind, giving it a strength and sturdiness, characterized by angular joints and heavy serifs. Hasebe refers to this style as having the tension of bent metal, which is easy to see.

The light weight, however, as is especially evident in the italic, is very fluid, referencing the tension of a rubber band. The elegant, refined appearance comes from the underlying construction derived from writing with a pointed nib.

The regular style presents a middle weight between the two extremes, and – refreshingly – was not simply interpolated. Instead, it borrows features from either of the two extremes and tones them down just enough to make for an excellent type to be used in running text. The light and heavy weights clearly have their strengths in display settings, but I can also see them used in conjunction with the regular weight. Of course, Alda has everything you need in a modern text typeface, like different figure styles, ligatures and small caps. With this set of features, I see Alda performing outstandingly in the fields of advertising and publication design, especially magazines.

Frank Grießhammer studied Communication Design at HBKsaar in Saarbrücken, Germany and at ISIA Firenze, Italy. He received a master’s degree in typeface design from Type & Media at KABK Den Haag in 2010. After working for FontShop International in Berlin, he joined the Adobe Type Team in 2011.