Hasta La Ideas

On a cold night in the fall of 2011, I rode the subway downtown to look at a typeface specimen. As I walked south on Elizabeth Street and then turned right onto Kenmare, the specimen came into view through the large windows of a corner storefront. Neon. Nails. Mirrors. I had never seen anything like it.

The typeface in question was Marian, designed by Paul Barnes throughout the aughts, finished in 2011, and released by Commercial Type in 2012. To celebrate the family’s completion, Commercial (in collaboration with artist and industrial designer Dino Sanchez) mounted an exhibition in New York called Thieves Like Us, which is where I found myself that October evening.

Marian has been catchily described as a collection of revivals or cover versions. It’s a highly personal selection, as Barnes readily admits: a subjective “concept album” of the greatest hits of a carefully circumscribed period in typeface design history. And herein lies a fascinating tension: Marian is an abstraction of a golden age of type spanning from the mid-sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, when serifed faces used in book typography were ascendant. Yet this process of reduction of a form that is willfully understated — a book face, by design, prefers not to call attention to itself — results in flamboyance. Skeletal, almost a whisper, Marian demands attention and extra care, and needs to be big, even larger than life. (Commercial recommends setting it at 60 pt and above and signals its potential for use beyond print; Thieves Like Us is the realization of that potential.)

The nineteen styles (eight romans, eight italics, and one blackletter thrown in as a “bonus track”) occupy an ambiguous zone between facsimile (cf. Brunel, a strict recreation for contemporary use of a 1796 typeface cut by John Isaac Drury for Caslon) and broad interpretation (of which Chiswick and Dala Floda are examples). What is faithfully adhered to is the genotype of each chosen face. All stroke contrast has been stripped away, leaving a monoline endoskeleton.

Interestingly, although the absence of any modulation implies the removal of any traces left by the tools used to create the source typefaces, the serifs — which might be considered relics of their means of production — have been spared, considered integral to the forms: “While the method of production of a serif has disappeared,” writes Barnes in the exhibition broadsheet, “the serif remains as part of the letter”.

In many type designs, stroke contrast makes the face; modulation yields character. And yet Marian is a character in her own right, instantly recognizable as herself. She could never be mistaken for anyone else. The decision to follow structure to the letter has led, through its very constraint, to a contemporary family of striking originality.

Will Marian be used, though? In an interview with Barnes and foundry partner Christian Schwartz, Simon Esterson hazarded that the new typeface was “going to be everywhere”. So far, with an exception here or there, that has not proven to be the case, which is a shame. And that reveals perhaps another tension. Marian is in some ways a highly impractical typeface — a labor of love and research, designed over the span of many years, introduced to the world through what was probably an expensive installation — published by a studio that wants itself, as its name suggests, resolutely commercial. Barnes and Schwartz have cheerfully noted the irony in interviews. Typefaces, after all, are meant to work. As Schwartz points out in the conversation with Esterson: “[W]hen we’re done with our work that’s not the end of it, it’s a beginning.”

But should that be the sole criterion when advocating for a design or underscoring its importance, or when deciding whether or not a given typeface works? This is where I think it becomes crucial to remember that Marian also functions as pedagogy: a design driven by, Barnes states at the end of the Ypsilon monograph, “a desire to spread knowledge”.

The specimen emphasizes this, too. Marian is a history lesson, a survey course that starts with the beginnings of book typography and continues up to the moment when type was freed from books — when it broke out into posters, broadsides, advertisements; when it became fat, showy, slabby; when it started to shed its serifs. As a contemporary offering, Marian comes at an equally pivotal time. Text has become orbital. It no longer needs to be baked into things. Marian, a display face about the history of book faces, arrives at the very moment of the book’s unbinding and of type’s liberation, closing out a long era of stasis.

As I prepared to leave Thieves Like Us that October night, two guys in their thirties blustered through the door. They stood there looking flummoxed, eyes wide. I wondered what had drawn them into the space. Finally one of them turned to me. “What is this?” he asked.

“It’s … a type specimen,” I responded.

“What?”

We talked some more. They were traders, he told me, looking a little sheepish. They worked on Wall Street. “We don’t know anything about type,” he said.

“You know more than you think,” I suggested. He seemed nonplussed and asked me what I meant. “You stare at type all day long,” I said matter-of-factly. The two of them looked at me, then at each other. “Huh. It’s true,” said the other guy. Suddenly, they were interested. Commercial alum Berton Hasebe was on hand to give the two traders a detailed tour of the face and its development. I slipped back out into the night, leaving Marian to do her work.

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.

Like it or not, much of modern life is lived through a screen. We navigate our world via an omnipresent system of menus, lists, buttons, and other elements that we scan all day, every day. In many ways, the operating system is the environment we live in — and type is at its core. Many of us interact with this sort of type more than any other — by a long shot. Despite all this, it’s a category of typography that is rarely discussed.

Of course, one of the reasons for this is that we have little say in the matter. We are, for most practical purposes, at the mercy of the OS manufacturer. For Mac users, this means OS X, and the unsung wonder that has served as its face since the beginning: Lucida Grande.

Setting aside, for a moment, the recent (ill-advised) switch to Helvetica for apps like iTunes, there are good reasons why Apple has stuck with Lucida. Not only is it structurally ideal for the screen and the kind of scanning and reading that goes with using an OS, but it also fits comfortably with the aura and personality of OS X: professional without pretense. An OS typeface must be invisible — even more so than a book face — and Lucida Grande is invisible because its stylistic character is so right for the system and because its functional character is perfect for the job. It does what Apple’s best products do: it just works.

JAF Bernini Sans is that kind of typeface. It works like an involuntary muscle.

One doesn’t have to go far to find a prime example of what I mean by this. It’s right here on this very page. Most visitors won’t notice that Typographica.org switched from Lucida to Bernina Sans for all the small type on the site. That’s just how we want it. They won’t notice because Bernina has much of the same humanistic modesty. But as the makers of the site, the thrill of this change is that we now have the added flexibility of italics, which are included in the Lucida Sans family but missing from Lucida Grande.

Visitors won’t know that the Bernini webfonts come in a perfectly graduated range of weights. But that aspect was certainly useful for us when we found the Bold to be just a tad too heavy for our tiny stuff, so we simply switched to Semibold which still had enough heft to contrast with the Regular.

Readers won’t know that screen proofing and hinting was an integral part of Tim Ahrens’ design process. They’ll just be able to read it with ease, even with a dusty old Windows machine. Even the most observant and jaded type users probably won’t notice that Ahrens’ goal was to combine open apertures with round counters. They will simply find Bernini to be pleasantly legible and stylistically versatile.

As JAF Bernini Sans pervades the design landscape, I envision multitudes of scenarios like the one we experienced at Typographica. This broad and well-considered family is a typographic framework that will enable designers to simply make their thing — whether it’s a website, a wayfinding system, a corporate identity, an e-book, a magazine, or a dialog box — while the reader, the user, is blissfully unaware. All they’ll notice is that it just works.

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

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.

Good wide display fonts are tough to come by. Period.

As a novice designer in the late 90’s, I was enamored with Microgramma. Maybe it was obsession with things Swiss, having a grandfather born in the country. Perhaps it was a natural inclination to wide type. Whatever the case, the release of Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Idlewild renewed an infatuation that has fallen dormant in the latter years of my career.

“For the longest time,” H&FJ writes in its description of Idlewild, “we’ve been reaching for a typeface that wasn’t there.” So I have I. Maybe that explains the dormancy. But what amazes me is how remarkably well the H&FJ crew pulled it off. Industrious, versatile, and instantly timeless. And that ‘G’, how it perfectly demonstrates the font’s subtle, restrained beauty!

Microgramma still enamors me a decade later, and I’m pretty certain I’ll say the same for Idlewild in the 2020s.