Hasta La Ideas

A slew of slab serifs were released in 2008. Most of them continuing last year’s trend of following the cute and chunky approach, often to delicious effect.

But as marvelous as so many of those slab serifs were, sadly they were let down when it came to lighter, or more usable text weights. For me, it is Archer that stood out, with H&FJ concentrating on the lighter half of the spectrum, eight weights offering a delightful range of contrast, but never venturing heavier than bold. Making a text face distinctive with a clear personality that can scale right up to display sizes is a mammoth task at the best of times, but a slab?

Yet here it is; with its judicious yet brave use of ball terminals, and blending geometry with sexy cursive forms, all brought together with the kind of historical and intellectual rigour you fully expect from this particular foundry, Archer succeeds where others falter. I only hope that in its use out in the wild (and away from that jailbird Martha Stewart) people give it the same level of thought.

David Earls is a recovering graphic designer based in London. He sometimes designs typefaces for his own enjoyment, but considers himself to be very much an amateur who never wants to stop learning. David founded Typographer.org in 1999 in the hope it should provide fiercely independent voice on the web, with honesty, impartiality and independence of funding at its core.

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”.

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.