Hasta La Ideas

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.

Somewhere between the lands of slab, sans serif, and typewriter there lives Outsiders.

In the roman it appears an elegant, sartorial slab, somehow holding itself above all others of its kind, with a bit of typewriterly officiousness, like a crisp, upper-level spy in MI6. But under the cloak of propriety in all of its seven weights, is Outsider’s surprising décolletage: a flamboyant, beautiful italic. Quelle surprise – Outsiders is gay! … or perhaps, more insidiously: French. Yes, during the day Outsiders may be sipping tea and filing precise reports, but at night it takes the Eurostar to Paris to kick up its heels along the Champs-Élysées.

All this to say that Outsiders is versatile. In all seriousness, I have used this font and find that it sets well and creates a block of text that I find very pleasing. But the italic is so pretty, so delightfully charming, that it begs to be used extensively – perhaps as one of two parts in a Q&A, or integrated where both roman and italic play together in a bibliography!

Also, note, that Henrik Kubel makes the best ‘K’s, both upper- and lowercase, in all of his fonts, all weights and styles. Could he be biased?

Marian Bantjes is a designer, typographer, writer and illustrator working internationally from her base on a small island off the west coast of Canada, near Vancouver.

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.