Hasta La Ideas

Roger Excoffon (1910–1983) was the most talented French type designer of the 20th century and probably the most prolific in the whole of French typographic history. Being an admirer of Excoffon’s work myself I was happy to see that 2011 has brought a sudden re-appreciation of his work in the form of no less than two biographies, along with an interesting take on Mistral (called Nouvelle Vague) and Zizou.

In the words of designer Christian Schwartz, Zizou is his attempt to “draw Antique Olive from memory”. The name Zizou is a clever and witty reference to the city where Excoffon was born: Marseille.

When Antique Olive was released in 1960 it was regarded as the French answer to the rise of the highly successful neo-grotesques of the time, most notably Univers and Helvetica. It is interesting to notice that this style, and in particular Helvetica, has seen a gigantic re-appreciation (or rather over-appreciation) during the last five years.

Will a similar thing happen to Antique Olive? Probably not, since it is too outspoken in comparison to its contemporaries. A prime characteristic of Antique Olive is its play with balance and imbalance thereby breaking conventional rules for stroke contrast. Excoffon believed that by deliberately thickening the most important parts of a letter it would gain legibility.

Zizou appears to have swapped this radical idea for a return to a more conventional stroke contrast. Some critics might argue that means the design was watered down, but that’s too easy. Zizou immediately conveys this very specific Antique Olive atmosphere in a manner that is unique and highly suitable for today’s design. It does its job beautifully and admirably in the tightly tracked headlines of FastCompany which has exclusive rights to the typeface.

Now let’s hope 2012 will bring us more spiritual successors to Excoffon’s legacy executed so well.

William Morris’ Golden Type, inspired by the founts of Nicolas Jenson, sparked a mania for Venetian types in the 1890s that continued for nearly 30 years. But since World War I the lighter types of “Garamond” and Francesco Griffo have pushed those of Jenson aside. Dieter Hofrichter’s Cala is notable not only as a contemporary Venetian but as one not rooted in the work of Jenson.

Cala has the low stroke contrast and sturdy bracketed serifs characteristic of Venetian Oldstyle types but not many of its idiosyncratic letters. The ‘E’, ‘H’, and ‘Z’ are not overly wide; the ‘M’ does not have double serifs at its apexes; the leg of ‘R’ ends in a serif; and the ‘e’ has a horizontal eye. The head serifs on lowercase stems are flatter and less beak-like than those of Jenson. The counters are larger and more open and the x-height is slightly taller. All of this makes Cala feel contemporary rather than musty.

Fifteenth-century Venetian printers did not have italics. Unlike most Jenson revivals, which have Arrighi-based italics grafted onto them, Cala Italic is a pure Hofrichter invention. It is more French Oldstyle than chancery cursive, though with less inclination. Furthermore, the inclination is consistent throughout the glyph set – another indication that Cala is a contemporary design.

Like most OpenType fonts today, Cala has a large glyph set, which is notable for offering ‘Th’, ‘ty’, ‘ct’, ‘sp’, and ‘st’ ligatures; long ‘s’ and long ‘s’ ligatures; and beyond the usual set of fractions, including 1/5s. There are no alternate forms of letters, other than the long ‘s’. The italic has no swash characters. In other words, Hofrichter has eschewed frivolity in favor of sobriety.

Cala is a quiet design, one that does not call attention to itself. This, coupled with its strong, even color, makes it a perfect typeface for books and other texts requiring a “crystal goblet” approach.

Paul Shaw is a designer and a design historian. He is author of the book “Helvetica and the New York City Subway System” and a contributing editor for Print magazine for whom he co-writes the “Stereotype” column.

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.

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.

Chartwell is a set of three fonts that together create a remarkable set of tools for creating bar, line, and pie charts. It uses OpenType ligatures to perform its magic – a series of numbers can be transformed into clean, perfectly rendered graphs, as you type.

In use, the fonts are pretty straightforward, and though it’s an overused phrase, it does feel rather magical: you type numbers, it creates graphics. The formatting for all three fonts is to type the numbers as a sum, with the numbers separated by plus symbols: 20+40+10+30 for example. The fonts have a set of basic numbers and letters (resembling a compressed Trade Gothic) you can use with ligatures turned off to type in and check your numbers. Turning the ligatures on transforms your numbers into charts, and demonstrates just how many glyphs these fonts contain – up to 10,000 in each style.

Each of the fonts has a set of specific features and capabilities. Chartwell Lines creates sparkline-style graphs, while Chartwell Bars creates stacked bar charts. It’s Chartwell Pies that most feels like magic though. Like the other two, it works in whole number increments, from 1–100, but what’s interesting is what happens when you go over 100. Anything up to 100 and you get a single pie chart, go over 100 and the remainder starts a new pie chart, and again at 200, 300, and so on. Magic! Seeing a font interpret your numbers to create graphics like that is pretty remarkable. With Chartwell Pies you can also add a letter to the end of your sum to transform the pie into a ring – ‘A’ for a small hole in the pie, ‘Z’ to transform it into a hairline circular chart.

For all three fonts, you can set each number in a different color and it’ll be reflected in the chart.

Chartwell is the first in a new category of fonts that use ligatures to transform text into graphical representations while leaving the text itself untouched. In terms of a milestone it’s similar to the move from expert fonts to incorporating standard ligatures and swashes into the one font file that OpenType first enabled. The methodology does require you to type in a particular format which slightly limits its flexibility, but the promise is clear: the potential to transform data into graphical forms without losing the original text. It’ll be useful in all areas of publishing, if only to relieve the chore of creating basic graphics. For the web, however, it could be transformative: instead of icons and other indicators as bitmap pictures, they’re glyphs, stored in the right unicode slots, and selected as ligatures for particular words or abbreviations.

Aegir Hallmundur is a type-obsessed web and graphic designer living and working Brighton, England. He also runs The Ministry of Type, a website mainly about type and sometimes calligraphy, illustration, architecture and photography.