Hasta La Ideas

To say that Magasin is not your average script font is stating the obvious. It is quirky and totally irreverent. It sits stock-straight upright and follows very few rules when it comes to connection between the letter­forms. You get a real sense of Mid-Century Modern and French perfume packaging, along with the echoes of Quirinus/Corvinus and Fluidum in its contrast and terminals.

But don’t confuse Laura Meseguer’s Magasin for some dusty script revival. It is rigorous and modern, por­tray­ing a fierce independence as it easily sets itself apart from all the script fonts being released right now, dancing to its own atonal, syncopated rhythm.

Anyone daring enough to use Magasin will find a useful amount of alternates, ligatures, and swashes that create captivating and playful word shapes. (If anything is missing, I’d say Magasin could use more terminal forms.) I can imagine it deployed large in magazines and small on packaging. Don’t worry about the unorthodox letter shapes; instead, consider them an asset, because they will make people look twice. Additionally, the proud x-height assists, along with the context, in making Magasin legible enough at text sizes.

If you want a taste of what is possible, check out the specimen Meseguer created, along with the article she wrote for I Love Typography. They clearly dem­on­strate the different things that are possible with this idiosyncratic typeface design.

Today’s large font families allow graphic designers to easily create variation — using different weights, widths, or italics — while retaining stylistic consistency. Kunihiko Okano, who is also an experienced package designer, chose an unusual way of creating a useful palette of fonts.

How do you achieve typographic diversity in display use? The layered approach of Quintet gives the designer a toolbox that allows exploration of different shades within the same underlying model. Different weights are implemented in an unconventional way: instead of varying the main strokes, Quintet varies the weight of the outline. And this contour itself is maybe the most remarkable feature of the font: it is in fact broadnib-based double stroke drawn as a single, connected line. This technique itself has been practised by calligraphers for centuries, albeit in ornaments and illustrations, not the letterforms themselves. This way, Quintet gives us the pleasure to enjoy it not only once at first sight but again as we discover its clever loops and connections.

You could think of so many design possibilities with Quintet, as well as applications. It could be perfect for chocolate packaging or cosmetics — perhaps each layer printed in a different colour, or maybe one layer embossed, or even better foil blocked? It is not often in student projects that one could instantly see applications of the font so clearly.

Quintet was originally developed at the type]media type design course in The Hague. If we remember correctly, the first two of the unofficial rules of the program are “Make it extreme” and “Enough is enough”, and Quintet is a perfect example of this. It is remarkable in that it implements so many concepts without looking like a mash-up. Despite its richness, the typeface looks strangely simple and systematic. It must have taken a lot of self-discipline, trying and discarding of options. Hats off!

Collages, calligraphy and grids in a retrospective of the late Beat painter Brion Gysin’s work

by Isabelle Doal

The work of British-Canadian artist Brion Gysin, defined by techniques like mixed collages, systematic repetition and “cut-up” (a method he invented), is experiencing somewhat of a revival since his death in 1986. A stream of contemporary artists have recently taken interest in the artist and the newly-opened “Alarme” exhibition at Paris’ Galerie de France illustrates the scope of his oeuvre, following two recent important exhibitions of his contributions.

The Pompidou showed a film, jointly produced by Gysin, William Burroughs (the two were good friends) and Antony Balch, demonstrating “semi-conscious states and trances,” while his work on sound-collages, a medium he conceived with his former NYC studiomate Ramuntcho Matta, was featured in a group show on the topic at Galerie Anne Barraulthe.

Gysin’s based his works on crossings, formally represented by the constant use of grid patterns. Most of the time he employed a rudimentary printing technique, rolling a paintbrush on a paper sheet over a canvas of wire threads, consistently incorporating script letters and photos into the grids.

Both poet and painter, and part of the Beat Generation, Gysin has always played with words and letters as graphic materials. He arrived in New York during World War II and started experimenting with literature and various kinds of writing experiences. He created “permutation poems,” repeating a single sentence several times with the words rearranged in different orders so that each reiteration is a new discovery, for example “I don’t dig work, man/Man, work I don’t dig.” Many of these variations he derived using a random sequence and was inspired by free verse, but several also followed a mathematical structure.

The cut-up technique was used by writers such as John Dos Passos and laid the foundation for “Naked Lunch.” “Alarme” shows a couple of artworks featuring pieces of text from the pivotal novel, using letters as signs on small square water-colored papers, created by rolling paintbrushes on metallic grids.

A couple of panels show the four-year-long construction of the Pompidou through a photographic series consisting of vertical stripes stuck together. Small square photos from contact sheets act as grids, one by one incorporated into inked columns reminiscent of skyscrapers.

Completing the overview, a series of ink-painted letters in Asian and Arabic scripts speak to Gysin’s devotion to painting and drawing. The artist, who spoke Japanese and Arabic, played with the opposition between the Japanese vertical script and horizontal Arabic writing with an interest in painting these figures to make crossings and grids.

“Alarme” runs through 2 April 2010 at Galerie de France.

Ken Barber is an incredibly talented letterer. And Tal Leming is an incredibly talented font technology whiz (and a good type designer as well). House Industries’ Studio Lettering series unifies great lettering, cutting-edge OpenType font technology, and one more thing: culturally-sensitive design.

The three script fonts — Studio Lettering Swing, Slant and Sable — deliver just what one expects from a House Industries font family: high-quality, fresh, lively signwriter-style “hand lettering”. Yet unlike most “script fonts,” text set in the Studio Lettering faces looks anything but mechanical. Smart OpenType programming produces alternating letter shapes so that the result looks natural.

Owing some to House’s earlier successes, House Script and House Casual, the first member of the series, Sable, recreates the friendly “store signwriter” look — but takes it a few steps ahead. After an extensive study of handwriting differences between America and various European countries, Ken Barber created (in all three fonts of the series) letter and digit variants that follow different national preferences. In Sable, there is a “forward” and a “reverse” ‘r’, a ‘7’ with and without a horizontal stroke in the middle, or a ‘p’ with a swoosh or with a bowl. The variants have been linked to the OpenType language selection mechanism, so assigning a different language in InDesign automatically gives the text the appropriate local flavor. Bloody awesome! Also, the diacritics in all three fonts are really well done. I only wish Sable included the all-favorite “Sale! Yes! Free! Call!”
wordmarks, ideally with localized variants.

With more than 1,400 glyphs, Studio Lettering Swing has the most extensive character set in the suite. Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t. Rather than randomly switching alternate letterforms, Swing smoothly flows between slightly larger and smaller shapes, which produces a recurring rhythm. Signwriter-style, and a bit girly.

To me, the third member of the suite, Studio Lettering Slant, is probably the most impressive. The localized flavors in this bold, backslanted, somewhat serious script go as far as allowing the user to switch to a German-style flavor, in which some letterforms are derived from Sütterlin — a kind of a handwriting counterpart to Fraktur. But while Fraktur has very little practical application today, the German flavor of Slant feels very authentic, reminding me of handwritten signs that I still sometimes see in Berlin.

Overall, I’m impressed and amazed.

Based in Berlin, Adam Twardoch works as product and marketing manager at FontLab as well as multilingual typography and font technology consultant for MyFonts and other clients. He teaches at universities in the UK, USA, Germany, Poland, and Russia. In 2007, Adam edited the Polish edition of Robert Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographic Style”.