Hasta La Ideas

Noe Display creates a lovely tension between providing what we expect from its genre and bringing a sting of surprise and joy along with it.

A quick glance reassures us that this is definitely some­thing familiar. This is some kind of variation on a Victorian-era Fat Face. Because it is so familiar, what we need to read easily and also with pleasure is abund­antly there. It doesn’t take long, however, to realize that this isn’t quite what we thought it was. It is a much more pleasing, refreshing, and even sparkling thing than it seemed to be at first. Vendôme seems to have crept in. The result reassures and surprises by turns. It catches and keeps our eye. It makes us want more.

The way Noe Display finds its balance between the novel and the expected is worth noting. The overall construction and stems are unsurprising. It is the ter­minals of letters and the swell of curves that deviate.

Within the surprising elements of the design, there is also a strong contrast. On one hand, you have the tension and nuanced use of sensuality in the curves. On the other, there is the arch and almost brutal simp­licity of the triangular terminals. I think it is the quiet back and forth between these two novelties that grabs and then keeps our attention.

This would be a fine accomplishment even if the type could only be used in short display-sized bursts of text. But thanks to its consistent and measured design, Noe Display excels in short paragraphs as well. If Schick Toikka decides to release a version aimed at text, it will certainly be worth watching out for.

Quite apart from the pleasure of Noe Display itself, I also enjoy the way it contradicts the people who some­times bemoan that a genre of type design is too satur­ated for meaningful new designs to emerge from it. Noe Display simply crushes this misguided thinking. Clearly we can push much further, and real value and excitement can come from it.

It was just a matter of time until someone did it. Mauritius was the last typeface designed by German lettering artist Georg Trump. First shown in 1967 as trials for a “Barock-Antiqua” (Transitional serif) by the Stuttgart Weber foundry, it remained largely unrecognized. Trump, then in his 70s, completed his oeuvre with the design, as though ticking off the third grand genre of text faces after his rational Schadow and Trump Mediaeval. Last year, Canada Type released a revival, ticking off the last remain­ing Trump face not yet digitally available.

I know the typeface intimately, but have never used it. Ever since I haphazardly bought a random folder with type ephemera in a used book store in my first year in college, 1994, I was attracted to, or rather dragged into, Trump’s work. This folder turned out to contain specimens and ephemera of all of Trump’s typefaces for Weber, including proofs of an unfinished design: “Proben einer neuen Barock-Antiqua”. I marveled at this typeface for years and, in 2010, started to digitize it with Dan Reynolds. We didn’t get far. Distracted by life and train rides, I managed to do half of the roman and Reynolds half the italic. In an April 2010 email to Stephen Coles, I asked if he had ever seen this type­face, enclosing the images at left. His reply: “Wow. That’s pretty spikey [sic], in a nice way.”

Yes, spiky is probably the first thing that comes to mind when seeing this design, and it might, at the same time, be its main obstacle. Reynolds and I followed the original very closely, and although we hadn’t even gotten to the process of refinement yet, I could already tell that it would be difficult to get the individual characters to play together harmoniously. As original, striking, and unique as Mauritius may look in these proofs, it wasn’t a finished typeface yet. Weber seems to have rushed production and cut trials in a few sizes only: the roman in 10, 16, 24, and 36 point, the italic and bold is only shown as an alphabet in 24 point, not used in text (for good reason probably). With 1967 already late in the metal type era and business not going well, they hastily printed a pre-announcement and included the typeface — still unbaptized — in the Trump retrospective Vita Activa, published in December of that same year. Mauritius was apparently brought to market in a limited range of sizes in 1968, but it was the last type­face Weber would ever produce. The foundry closed in 1970.

One could say that Canada Type’s revival is not very true to the original in all its details, but I guess that was necessary to turn it into a functional, usable typeface. I think they did a great job and, in general, preserved the unique character and design intent­ion. (Griffin wrote about his research and design process in this extensive specimen.) While Weber only produced foundry type for hand comp­osition, Mauritius was obviously prepared to be ported to the Linotype or similar system where duplexing of the roman and italic or bold would be necessary. All three original styles were drawn to the same character width, resulting in a rather wide, loose italic with the typical hooky, non-kerning ‘f’. The italic in general seems to have been the least refined in the original, with rather uneven spacing, (too) light a color, and a very narrow ‘S’. Griffin did not iron out all peculiarities and typical Trump-isms. He maintained the general proportions and forms of the italic, and, where he deviated further, kept the form closer to the original as an alternate character — e.g. ‘a’, ‘d’ and ‘u’ — apart from the “mid-century German” italic ‘h’ we all know from Sabon (and misread as a ‘b’).

Griffin’s Mauritius became a distinct, modern text family of dark, lively color — still spiky, and sometimes a tad bumpily spaced, but grown up. Only the roman ‘f’ and some italic forms hint at its age; otherwise, you might mistake it for a contemporary. Mauritius needs a fair amount of line spacing, more than Canada Type applied in their specimen, where it appears quite dense and sometimes flickering (the 9/11 pt showing seems the most balanced to me). And although I mourn the loss of some details (one of the greatest ß’s of all time!), I acknowledge that a collection of beau­ti­ful letters is not what makes a good, usable typeface.

Based in Vienna, Typejockeys are three young designers — Anna Fahrmaier, Thomas Gabriel und Michael Hochleitner — with a broad palette of activities. They make graphic design for print and web, and have their own digital-to-letterpress project. They are also a typefoundry, to which both Gabriel (KABK, The Hague graduate) and Hochleitner (University of Reading graduate) contribute.

With everything that’s going on besides type design, they aren’t Europe most productive foundry, but when they bring out a new typeface, it is always something of an event. Typejockeys’ fonts are not only beautifully made, they also have content — they are carriers of a typographical culture. Their 2012 Henriette is a case in point. ​​Michael Hochleitner’s versatile family is a functional typeface of striking features that betray the design’s origin in early 20th-century lettering styles — more specifically, in Vienna’s street name signs.

I like it when designers do serious research regarding their source material (as opposed to quickly scanning a specimen they like and begin fontifying); and here, thorough research took place indeed. The story of the Viennese street sign alphabet and its many incarnations is told (in English) on the Typejockeys website; no use repeating it here. The main outcome of it was that, as there had been so many variations on the (anonymous) early alphabet, done by so many companies for various production techniques, Hochleitner felt free to improvise, no strings attached.

The original alphabet came in two distinct versions, for short and long street names — the one a kind of Heavy or ExtraBold, the other Bold Condensed. Developing a family with a broad range of widths, as Hochleitner did, is tricky: it’s like deriving a text family from Cooper Black. The resulting lighter weights are quite interesting, in that they don’t resemble much of what’s already there (Bookman and Candida come to mind) while still building a plausible and usable toolkit for day-to-day typographic work. If you’re looking for something neutral, the typeface’s idiosyncratic feel is a drawback; but for those designers who are looking for a strong and unusual personality, Henriette may be a terrific find. Needless to say, the character set and language coverage are flawless.

With thanks to Florian Hardwig.

Hunt Roman is a unique typeface. Resulting from a private commission, it was designed in a single weight and cut in steel in only four sizes for hand composition. As it did not have to be adapted to any of the popular type setting machines of the early sixties, its designer was free from technical limitations and marketability. Hermann Zapf wanted to design “a type of our time”. In fact, Hunt Roman was ahead of its time.

Between 1961 and 1962 legendary German type designer Hermann Zapf designed Hunt Roman as a display face exclusively for the world-renowned Hunt Botanical Library (Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation since 1971), situated on campus of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (today: Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to accompany their text face Spectrum. The punch-cutting and casting of the letters was executed by Arthur Ritzel at the D. Stempel AG in Frankfurt am Main, where it was known by its provisional title Z-Antiqua until the fonts left the assembly line. This private commission was only made possible through the Californian master printer Jack Werner Stauffacher, then typography professor at Carnegie, for it was he who brought Hermann Zapf and Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt, founder of the botanical library, together.

In the early 1960s, the last years of the metal type era, the manufacture of fonts for private use was extremely expensive and therefore incredibly rare. Viewed in this context Hunt Roman can be considered a prototype for exclusive typefaces, designed for one specific purpose, as opposed to the universally applicable typefaces of the time, such as Adrian Frutiger’s Univers or Max Miedinger’s Helvetica.

The friendship between Jack Stauffacher and Hermann Zapf is the foundation for the development of this typeface. Its character and final appearance came into being through the lively exchange of the two men. They had explored different shapes and studied multiple historical forms before they agreed to create a typeface that would bear characteristics of the transitional style. Hunt Roman captures oldstyle features such as bracketed serifs and an angled axis on some of the lowercase letters. At the same time it anticipates the greater stroke contrast introduced in the rational style. There is a precedent for these characteristics in other transitional typefaces, but Zapf made a point not to adopt any details from historical examples.

A significant feature is the large x-height, rare at the time and usually applied to typefaces to be read at smaller sizes, for example in newspapers. Even though all letters have very narrow side bearings, making words appear tightly set in regular body text (especially in the smaller sizes), the characters are quite wide and a line of Hunt Roman type can take up a lot of space in a column. In “Hunt Roman: The Birth of a Type”, a sort of specimen book designed and produced by Stauffacher, there are no kerned letters and few ligatures were necessary to support legibility.

Latin diphthongs ‘æ’ and ‘œ’ were specifically produced to set names of the binomial nomenclature system (which uses Latin grammatical forms). Furthermore a number of accents were needed to support several European languages, mostly to set the names of French and German botanists of the 18th and 19th century. In order to reduce the manufacturing costs, Hermann Zapf developed a method that was customarily applied to capital letters; piece accents. By later casting a portion of the lowercase on a smaller body size, piece accents could be added on top to complete the rest of the metal sort height. The accent pieces only made up about a tenth of the respective point size.

An interesting detail is the missing ‘ß’ in Hunt Roman. After creating the special system to include accents and consequently covering multiple languages, Zapf left out this character that is unique and essential to the German language. Instead he designed a ‘Th’ ligature, a significant letter combination in the language in which it would be used most. While this ligature has become a standard in many fonts today, especially through OpenType, it was quite a novelty in the early 1960s.

Hunt Roman is a true Zapf face. It bears his style, especially in the uppercase letters. Like other typefaces by Hermann Zapf its origin lies in calligraphic lettering done with a broad nib pen and that is still visible in the final result. These calligraphic qualities include the intentions in Hunt Roman’s bends, and the transition of the curves into stems that become almost square-like. The flat terminal in the lowercase ‘a’ is a very significant detail of Hunt Roman and reoccurs in the ‘e’. Hunt Roman’s presence on the page maintains a human touch and at the same time exudes a classic look, lending authority to the words of its owner, the Hunt Institute.

Some have criticized Hunt Roman for its unavailability and lack of additional weights. It has been compared to several other Zapf typefaces, but only simply to show how Zapf borrowed ideas from Hunt and applied them to other designs. In “Twentieth Century Type Designers” (London 1995), core literature in typography, Sebastian Carter suggests that Berthold Comenius, ITC Zapf Book, and Marconi for Hell Digiset, all issued in 1976, “bear a close family resemblance, and made good these deficiencies”. Jerry Kelly, in “About More Alphabets” (New York, 2011), also points out that Comenius is “not too dissimilar” to Hunt Roman. While Zapf Book and Marconi only share similar contrast, perhaps Comenius is entitled to be a true member of the Hunt family. And yet there is another typeface by Hermann Zapf that has an astonishing resemblance to Hunt: Crown Roman, exclusively designed for Hallmark Cards Inc. and used for the recent book by Rick Cusick, “What Our Lettering Needs”. In a comparison between the two typefaces it is quite hard to point out the few things they don’t have in common. Nevertheless, all of the typefaces mentioned above have been designed for “cold composition” and none of them has the same overall crispness of Hunt Roman.

Fifty years after its birth Hunt Roman remains the proprietary typeface of the Hunt Institute in Pittsburgh, however a small number of individuals and presses hold a few fonts with special permission. Additionally, the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University has fonts for academic purposes in their letterpress workshop. Throughout the years Hermann Zapf and Jack Stauffacher have expressed their hopes that Hunt Roman would never be commercially distributed. By means of its exclusiveness and unavailability Hunt Roman maintains its allure and continues to play an important part in type history.

Ferdinand Ulrich is an information designer, typographer and design researcher. He studied communication design at Berlin University of the Arts in Germany and at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. In 2012 he received a graduate degree in Berlin for his extensive research thesis on the genealogy of Hunt Roman.

Doko’s name was generated automatically. Designer Ondrej Jób was only sure of how the name should sound, and – based on a small number of variables – he wrote a Python script that finally created the name he was looking for.

This is not the only thing that makes Doko unique. Doko’s features are drawn from various fields of inspiration, including comics and cartoons, illustration, and hand-lettering. The letter proportions (big head on a small body) are a direct reference to cartoon characters. In the italic styles, especially in the decorative swash caps, the nod to brush lettering is clearly visible.

As this project was started in the Type & Media master program at KABK in The Hague, Jób created extensive documentation where he states the goal of designing a serif typeface, but also plans to “have some fun” along the way. He clearly succeeded. Doko is, indeed, a serif typeface, and every letter is witness of the fun Ondrej must have had drawing it – the vigor they carry in their curves is quite evident.

Doko is a fresh take on the classic four-style type family model – pairing a Book and a Bold weight with their matching italics. Being a deliberate decision, this reduction is nice. For constructing a basic typographic hierarchy, Doko will go a long way.

Doko comes with a host of typographic niceties, such as the mentioned titling capitals, different figure styles, and a load of ligatures. Additionally, many alternate characters exist, emphasizing the playful nature of the family. By design, Doko is suited for many applications. One such fertile field is editorial design, where short paragraphs of text are combined with big headlines that can show off its illustrative features. Doko is also an excellent choice for packaging, especially if the appetizing swash caps are used. (Who wouldn’t love Doko Cereal, Chocolate, or Cream?)

Tânia Raposo is a freelance designer, dividing her time between Portugal and the US. She got her graphic design education from ESAD.CR Caldas da Rainha, and a master’s degree in typeface design from Type & Media at KABK Den Haag. Tânia has shared her passion in workshops and lectures on type design and lettering in Portugal, Germany, and the UK.

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.