Hasta La Ideas

I’m a sucker for certain old typeface and lettering styles (big surprise). There is something charming about the straightforward letter drawing practiced by earlier generations when what was called for was a “plain” style. There was a correct way to draw such letters: Simple skeletons with a minimum of style.

When they were freshly made, they probably did look very plain. But lack of style is an illusion. There’s no getting away from it. Tastes change and, as time passes, what was once seen as neutral becomes pegged to a particular moment in time and takes on the patina of history.

Trio Grotesk is Florian Schick’s revival of Kaart Antieke (1909), a face that I’m sure was intended as a plain type to be used for very ordinary purposes. Its wide proportions and generous spacing would make it a good choice for small sizes. The caps remind me of American faces like Sackers Gothic and Copperplate Gothic, but the lowercase letters have more of a European feel, reminiscent of the typefaces of Jakob Erbar and the tiny lettering on old cameras and watches.

With the inclusion of useful features like small caps, dingbats, and different figure styles, it looks like it would be fun font family to use. As a type designer, I don’t get to use fonts as much as I used to. Trio Grotesk makes me wish I were still an art director.

I’ve always considered grabbing attention to be the main point of the Grotesque genre. Where Humanists are built for immersion, Grotesques — with their tall x-heights, tight spacing, and narrow apertures — are clearly designed to cover as much surface as possible: Making an impact is the primary task. Trim walks the same path, but doesn’t stop until it reaches a dead end.

Göran Söderstrom uses a seemingly simple trick to great effect in his daring release. It’s all in the name: these letters from Sweden trim diagonals, notches, and rounds aggressively. The resulting word shapes are even more dense than in your standard grotesque, perfectly fitted for attention-craving, hard-hitting tabloid headlines. I can also see this typeface catching on in more artistic design work; its bold angularity reminds me of designer favorites like Kade and Replica.

The family’s latest addition, designed with Patch Hofweber, is Trim Poster. Optimized for compact headlines, the accents are fused with the base glyphs in a fashion worthy of the fancy diacritics Flickr pool. Sadly, the familiar Scandinavian diacritics seem to have received more attention than the rest — the cramped tilde especially suffers.

Trim’s selection of styles is broad, spanning six weights and a stencil cut. All but the stencil are also offered as manually hinted webfonts. The one-weight Trim Poster wisely comes in multiple widths, and also includes six different accent style variations. I wonder if there’s a set of matching italics under development? That would make this already versatile family even more useful.

Fenland is a very polarizing typeface — you either admire it, or you think it’s pretentious art or just plain ugly.

But Fenland doesn’t care. Fenland doesn’t care, because when it needs to prove itself by setting running text, it performs with aplomb. But it really gets the lead out stylistically when set large — flaunting its ideology, not being sneaky about it. That ‘f’ is so in-your-face, and the uppercase is so different from the lowercase.

As designer Jeremy Tankard likes to emphasize, Fenland really does have “its own way of talking”. But this face is no flight of fancy: sober proportions, seven weights with italics, five flavors of numerals, comprehensive fractions…

From day one, Tankard has been an inventive designer (see FF Disturbance), and even an innovative one (see Blue Island); with Fenland, he has crossed over into the murky yet rewarding territory of subtle innovation. As this reviewer is wont to extoll, the noteworthy innovation here involves the application of stroke contrast in oblivion of the handwritten basis of virtually all typefaces. Tankard thickens and thins the letterforms as he thinks they need to function, not as what would occur when writing by hand using a broad-nib pen (something notably absent from contemporary life).

Tankard’s stated intention is to evoke a modern, “manufactured” feel. But since Design is not Art, we must ask: What is the point of violating an established norm? The answer might very well be: What is the point of not doing so? Unlike almost any other usable font out there, Fenland makes us ask such questions. It is exactly what we need.

I’m in love with this ‘n’! Pause for a moment and dwell on its beauty. It was made by Sibylle Hagmann, best known for the superfamilies Cholla and Odile/Elido. This ‘n’ is from Hagmann’s most recent typeface, Axia, published on her own Kontour label late in December (and nearly overlooked during the end-of-year bustle). Missing this typeface would have been a shame, for Axia is more than just another square sans.

One central aspect of typeface design is how shoulders are treated. Do curves flow smoothly into stems, or do they meet at an angle? According to Tim Ahrens, this question is almost as defining as the presence of serifs. In order to prevent dark spots, arches are usually tapered. Gerard Unger has made acutely attenuated shoulders his trademark. Hans Reichel’s famous “spurless” designs are another extreme solution to the same challenge.

In designing Axia, Hagmann took a different approach, one that is refreshingly reckless: when a curve reaches its zenith, it kinks sharply and shears toward the stem. This treatment is applied to all letters where rounds and verticals join. It is particularly interesting to see how ‘b’/‘d’ and ‘p’/‘q’ are handled: the “sloped eyebrows” lend the face a stern look. Angular rigor shines through in other details, too. While I like the ‘B’, I find the chamfered top of the ‘t’ and the double-bent ‘J’ a little mannered.

When looking at many releases, I have no idea how the fonts might possibly be used. Not so with Axia, which has a pronounced modernist architectural feel. It’s easy to imagine this typeface applied in the arts, industrial design, and related fields. No wonder — Axia started out as a custom design for the Rice School of Architecture in Houston, Texas. Its shapes are robust enough to be placed on top of photographs, be it for posters or covers. At the same time, they are sufficiently sapid to be looked at — especially in the two fancy stencil cuts — e.g., in exhibition signage.

Axia is constructed and technoid, but not in a naïve or reduced way. Although obviously not made for immersive reading, Axia can also be used for text sizes. Ascenders project above cap height; the ‘g’ is double storied; oldstyle figures are the default. Axia is a text face with character — suitable not for novels, but for catalogs or brochures. As an extraordinary feature, all its styles share the same metrics. The italics are neither too compact nor too inclined. This renders the family ideal for multilingual publications: columns in different languages could be distinguished by using different styles, which will always take up an equal amount of space.

Axia’s uncompromising design execution, with its squarish and rather open forms, leads to some obtrusive glyphs like the oldstyle ‘3’ and ‘9’ with their heavy bottoms. The ‘ß’ (eszett) is too dogmatic for my taste. The designer insisted on accentuating the derivation from ‘ſ’ (long s) plus ‘s’, thereby accepting the resulting wide and complex glyph. At 660 glyphs per weight, Axia covers a considerable range of languages, but some of Axia’s diacritics appear off-center. Another bone of contention is the unorthodox placement of bridges in Axia Stencil.

Don’t let these small criticisms overshadow Axia’s many good aspects. This is a well-produced and full-featured family, including small caps for all styles (except the stencils); case-sensitive alternates; and a complete set of figures, including small cap figures. Incidentally, Hagmann solved the quote mark dilemma. Americans sometimes want their quotation marks top heavy, while Europeans prefer a consistent angle (see this discussion). Axia includes the mirrored American flavor as a stylistic alternate.

You can have a closer look at Axia and its features on the new Kontour website, which launched simultaneously with this remarkable typeface.

Among recent Grotesque-inspired releases and Hannes von Döhren’s rapidly growing oeuvre, Supria Sans stands out to me as an especially interesting and useful addition.

The design has just the right amount of character to be memorable and unique but also restrained enough to remain thoroughly useful. Bypassing the polished rationality of Neo-Grotesques, it builds upon the hearty solidity of 19th-century faces, a heritage revealed in the curled-in jaws of glyphs like the ‘C’ or the faucet-shaped ‘r’. While some details seem quite charming, the design never gets coquettish. With its blunt inktraps, tight curves, and solid weight, Supria is ready for work.

Despite this crafty atmosphere though, its rolled-up sleeves don’t get uncomfortably sweaty. Apart from older roots Supria also appears informed by recent, softer approaches to sans-serif design, and steers clear of the sharp, sometimes clumsy vintage chic recently en vogue. With its idiosyncracies tamed just enough, this design is firmly anchored in a contemporary context. There is definitely no smell of mothballs here, but rather a fresh breeze of menthol. I’ve found Supria to feel decidedly fresh, especially when set in text, and more clear and angular than its details might suggest in large display settings.

A design that harmoniously balances such diverse stylistic factors promises to be excitingly versatile. This, along with Supria’s impressive range of styles, including a Condensed variant and the all-too-rare choice of two italics (a curly Italic – likely too cute for some applications – and a more rigid Oblique), makes it an attractive candidate for more complex typographic projects too. A winner at the 2011 TDC2 competition, Supria Sans altogether strikes me as a convincingly versatile, mature, and well-conceived face.

Nina Stössinger is a graphic/typographic/type designer based in Basel, Switzerland. She spends her days writing and designing for web and print at her own studio and many of her nights designing typefaces.