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.

Marian

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.

Zizou

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.

Stag

If at the end of our current decade slab serifs are the new black, then Christian Schwartz may be the new Maggie Prescott.

In 2005, Schwartz and Barnes’ Guardian included a masterful retelling of what an Egyptian could do in print with its wedge-shaped serifs, subtle weight contrast and proportions diverging from traditional, Figgins-esque slabs. With Stag, Schwartz takes that talent for new Antique forms even further. Commissioned for Esquire (and later expanded for Las Vegas Weekly), Stag conjures up an amalgamation of influences — the marked modulation of thicks and thins in George Trump’s Schadow or Robert Besley’s Clarendon; the interesting counterforms of Heinrich Jost’s bold faces for Beton; the rhythmic italic of Caslon’s two-line antique from the early 19th century, and this face Schwartz found in a Deberny & Peignot specimen from around 1835 — rolling them together into his own chunky recipe.

But Stag is no mere revival, it employs curious details, like the bracketing only on the outside of the serifs, with a giant x-height to create an completely new texture. This face sings like the fat lady in the heavy weights.

Christian Palino is a salty Cape Codder and currently a design strategist at Adaptive Path. He’s appeared in and written for various design publications and has taught courses on subjects including typography and service design at IUAV University of Venice, Domus Academy, and the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.