Hasta La Ideas

You don’t see him much on Twitter. You won’t find him on the popular design conference circuit (though you may spot him at ATypI). In fact, unless you’re a bit of a type nerd, you may not have even heard of him. No matter. He’s doing just fine. Quietly, without fanfare or braggadocio, from a hilltop studio in a small town near Zagreb, Nikola Djurek has been designing some of the most original typefaces to emerge in recent years.

With Nocturno, Djurek continues the questioning of classification and tradition undertaken with earlier designs like Brioni. The influences of pen and brush shine through here, and Nocturno’s personality is largely Oldstyle. But it also shuttles fluently between early inscriptional forms and subtle modern gestures.

True to its name, Nocturno tends toward darkness. Color accumulates at the mid- and baselines via broad shoulders and substantial sculpted serifs. This massing draws readers’ eyes along and lends Nocturno an overriding sense of horizontality and momentum, an effect reinforced by compact extenders. Quasi-elliptical tittles placed slightly off-center also do their part to pull text rightward. But the horizontality never feels overbearing; relief comes in the form of steeply sloped head serifs, echoed by jaunty outstrokes at the baseline.

In any event, reading is never simply about moving forward. Reading, if one thinks of it as a continual negotiation between recognizing discrete shapes and clustering those shapes into familiar word patterns, is equally about pausing — as much a “vertical” activity, it seems, as a “horizontal” one. Djurek emphasizes the autonomy of individual characters in part through attenuated arches and through what he calls “recurvate inside contours”. The only potential drawback of these gorgeous interior curves is that, combined with the Clydesdale feet of ‘h’, ‘m’, and ‘n’ in the text version, they make for cramped quarters on the insides of forms; the counters of these letters risk appearing closed when rend­ered at extremely small sizes in less than optimal conditions. Even the best typefaces require careful use.

Nocturno is not a lighthearted face; it is a rolling, sober, and sensual one. But for all their heavy roundness, the text styles feel crisp and precise, on paper as on screens, down to fairly small sizes. Medium contrast, generous x-height, slightly oblique stress, subtle curves combin­ed with modest angularity, moderately open apertures — all work together to encourage immersive reading.

The incisive display cuts are more than simply refined versions of their sturdy text counterparts. Nocturno Display is its own thing. It sheds massive, almost clunky concave slabs for pointy shards; the graceful tapering of the stems almost pushes the display version into flare serif territory. And, particularly in the display, the face’s overall heaviness is leavened by finely attenuated joining strokes, providing the sort of contrast often associated with modern types (and, of course, scripts). One can imagine the brighter display cuts working remarkably well for headlines in just about any context. In fact, at the very moment I was writing this, Stephen Coles licensed the webfonts to use for Typographica heds.

Perhaps it is no longer possible to call Djurek a new or up-and-coming designer, but he consistently innovates. That he is scrappy and independent seems undeniable. Shortly after founding Typonine, Djurek told John Boardley that his ambition was to create “a nice foundry (nothing big), where I will publish some of my fonts”. As the eight-year-old company enters maturity with no signs of slowing down, Djurek appears to have achieved his goal.

Do you fancy extremely fat mathematical operators? Maybe you need a fat, inverted interrobang, to set bold sentences of dis­belief, even in Spanish? How about some ultra-fat small caps and a full set of very heavy superiors?

Look no further than Pufff.

Pufff is a very fat typeface. In fact, Pufff is so fat that installing it on your computer will make the machine noticeably heavier.

What is remarkable about Pufff?

• Pufff is not ashamed of its fatness. Pufff even boasts the titles “King of Cellulite” and “Undisputed Heavy­weight Champion of Fonts”.
• Pufff stretches the font-naming paradigm by tripling consonants, an area that has previously only been ex­plor­ed very minimally.
• I like that Pufff includes the characters “HEAVY DOUBLE TURNED COMMA QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT” and its friends (all the cool, heavy quotes from Zapf Dingbats!). Many more fonts should include those glyphs. Pufff even has three variations of each!

• Pufff is so fat that the counters are gone. Yet, letter and word shapes remain amazingly “readable” — or at least identifiable. Despite this general rule, not all letters lose their counters. The Greek Xi (Ξ) or Theta (Θ) and the Cyrillic Shcha (Щ) introduce hints of counterspace, simply for the sake of preserving legibility.

  Other solutions, like the lowercase ‘xi’ (ξ), are just amazing exercises in abstraction.

  All of those decisions are a testament to Rob Keller’s abilities as a type designer — even in such a silly genre, it is obvious that he knows what he’s doing.

• In Pufff, manicules are boxing gloves. Awesome.

Where might Pufff be used?

• Pufff was originally designed as a custom typeface for an exhibition at the Mota Italic Gallery. This implies that signage and exhibition design are natural territory for Pufff.
• I think that Pufff might not work very well on traffic signs, but probably is perfect pretty much anywhere else. Designers of book covers, handbills, and posters for advertising acid house parties, or of food and lifestyle magazines, will delight over the bold letter shapes of Pufff.
• One thing that can be done with Pufff better than any other font: filling letters with images.

The well-prepared typographer’s toolbox should contain Pufff. With extensive pan-European language support, Greek, Cyrillic, and even a handful of arrows, dingbats, and the latest currency symbols, Keller brings the ultra-fat genre to a new level. In many respects, his Pufff goes leaps and bounds further than fonts of the display variety usually do.

I hate this typeface.

I hate it because I wish I had drawn it myself. But I didn’t. And even if I had, who is to say whose would be better? It doesn’t matter, because this is excellent, and there is no need to even try.

When in conversation with people who know nothing about fonts, once they find out about my job, they in­vari­ably ask what my favorite typeface is. I’ve always found that question to be awkward. It’s difficult to answer when one makes, but rarely uses, the thing under discussion. I feel like an asshole saying, “I like the one that I made for this well-known, high-end client” — it’s self-absorbed and pretentious. I appre­ciate a high-quality typeface, of course, but I’m not a graphic designer, so I have no reason to license one. In answer to this question, I usually just give the name of a typeface I admire to keep the conversation flowing.

But this… this is a typeface I want. And that is an incredibly rare thing. This captures what I would want for myself so perfectly (without me even knowing that until I saw it), that I have been thinking about it. In fact, I don’t want anyone else to have it. I want perpet­ual exclusivity. I know that’s silly (and expensive), and that Ondrej can’t agree to that now that Odesta is out there. I take solace in knowing that now everyone else can license it and put it on everything BECAUSE THEY SHOULD PUT IT ON EVERYTHING.

More specifically, I love Odesta’s perfectly round ball terminals. (I often make them in my own sketches.) They lend themselves well to the pochoir/stencil effect, but this is also a script, which is lovely. It has some beautiful curves. The ‘M’. The ‘k’. The ‘r’… Especially the ‘r’. I make an ‘r’ like that in my hand­writing just because I love the shape so much. And, oh yes, that high contrast. So elegant! All of these ele­ments together should be a total mess, but here, they come together quite nicely. There is a bit of stiffness to it, but I know where it comes from, and I forgive it. What Ondrej pulled off here is pretty amazing.

Odesta is a little bit bonkers, and that’s why I love it. I could never truly hate it.

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.

Mark-marking with the help of letters carved into wooden blocks predates the Gutenberg printing revolution. Large-point-size typefaces manufactured from wood instead of lead alloy have been with us for centuries, too. However, for most of today’s graphic designers, what comes to mind when think­ing of wood type is the panoply of styles used in the nineteenth-century ephemeral printing of France, Great Britain, and the United States.

To achieve a very similar surface effect with digital tools, it is not necessary for contemporary designers to rely on typefaces. The use of certain filters in Photoshop or Illustrator seems enough for many graphic artists. Some makers of digital typefaces have responded to this by marketing pre-distressed fonts, in order to save their customers from having to age the appearance of their text themselves.

Fortunately, the ease of applying filters hasn’t stopped the more historically aware graphic designers from searching for scalable vector fonts featuring letter­forms more period-appropriate to the sought-after wood type aesthetic. Already in the early 1990s, Adobe’s type department was producing work in this vein (Birch, Mesquite, Rosewood, etc.). Several members of the American font community recently came together to support the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, which is indeed an unequaled sanctuary for remaining wooden type sorts from the 19th and 20th centuries. Under P22’s auspices, there is now a Hamilton Wood Type Foundry distributing new digital fonts inspired by old wooden type.

One of my favorite works of 2013 is their HWT Tuscan Extended typeface, made by Frank Grießhammer. It may come as no surprise that Grießhammer is with Adobe. Perhaps in honor of their own pioneering digital wood-type-style fonts, Adobe seems to be actively supporting both the Hamilton museum and the HWT foundry. Grießhammer is not the first Adobe designer to release a font via HWT, (see Miguel Sousa’s contribution), but HWT Tuscan Extended is the weirdest so far. Indeed, its letterforms were the strangest, most odd-looking glyphs that anyone in 2013 was likely to see.

HWT Tuscan Extended is a useful digital tool, within the limits permitted by such an unusual design. The font includes both uppercase and lowercase letters (a feat uncommon in many real wood type faces), and accents for dozens of European languages (a feature not common in virtually any real wood type face).