IMPRINT

Imprint
© 2013 Smashing Media GmbH, Freiburg, Germany
ISBN: 978-3-943075-54-0 (Version 1: April 2013)
Cover Design: Ricardo Gimenes
PR & Press: Stephan Poppe
eBook Strategy and Editing: Vitaly Friedman
Technical Editing: Cosima Mielke
Planning and Quality Control: Vitaly Friedman, Iris Lješnjanin
Tools: Elja Friedman. Syntax Highlighting: Prism by Lea Verou.
Copywriter: Clarissa Peterson
Idea & Concept: Smashing Media GmbH

About This Book

Typography is everywhere. If you walk out the door, you will be hard
pressed to find any element of our daily lives that doesn’t involve or re-
ly on typography. The prevalence of typography is not limited only to
the analog world. This eBook introduces historical and cultural aspects
of type and how they relate to the Web industry. Find out about chang-
ing fads in type, about the complexities of Japanese characters and
about typographic applications for different situations. You are sure to
learn something that you didn’t know before from our great authors.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Japanese, A Beautifully Complex Writing System ..........................................3

Respect Thy Typography ........................................................................................16
Typography Carved In Stone................................................................................ 27
Industrial-Strength Types .....................................................................................46
Legitima Typeface: An Experience Of Fossils And Revivals ......................69
When Typography Speaks Louder Than Words ............................................81
Weird And Wonderful, Yet Still Illegible .........................................................94
Font Wars: A Story On Rivalry Between Type Foundries ........................ 108
Hands-On Experience: The Rehabilitation Of The Script.......................... 119
About The Authors ................................................................................................. 129

2
Japanese, A Beautifully
Complex Writing System
BY SHOKO MUGIKURA ❧

As a Japanese person living in Europe, I’m sometimes asked: “Japanese

is a difficult language, isn’t it?” Those asking are often surprised when
my answer is a simple: “No, actually, it’s not.”
While it is true (at least to many Westerners) that Japanese is an ex-
otic language, when compared to learning other European languages, it
may seem harder because it has no relation to their own language. But
from my own experiences of learning English and German (and also
from seeing some European friends learning Japanese), I can say with
confidence that learning spoken Japanese is, in fact, not so difficult.
The grammar is in many ways simpler than most European languages.
Take for example the fact that we don’t have cases, grammatical gen-
ders, nor articles. However, reading and writing in Japanese is… well,
not so simple.
While discussing typography we most often focus on English lan-
guage problems, which is only natural considering that the majority of
design material is written in English. However, a lot can be gleaned
from looking at how other languages are used as part of communica-
tion and design —it helps to lend context and a different point of view.

Japanese Scripts
Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three basic scripts: Kan-
ji— which are Chinese ideographic symbols — as well as Hiragana and
Katakana — two phonetic alphabets (syllables). There are a few thou-
sand Kanji characters, while Hiragana and Katakana have 46 each. Al-
though there is a basic rule for when to use which script, there are
many exceptions, and what’s worse is that words written in Kanji have
often multiple pronunciations, depending on the context or conjunc-
tion. This is hard enough for native speaker to get right every time, so I
almost feel sorry for those non-natives who are learning to read and
write Japanese.

3
 JAPANESE, A BEAUTIFULLY COMPLEX WRITING SYSTEM

From top to bottom: Kanji is mainly used for the lexical elements: nouns, verb stems, ad-
jective stems, and so forth; Hiragana has rounded letter shapes, which are mainly used
for the grammatical elements of sentences such as particles, auxiliary verbs, and suffixes
of nouns; Katakana has an angular letter shape, which is most often used for foreign
words and also for the purpose of emphasis.

Some say that the “tragedy” started when Japan decided to “import” the
Chinese writing system, inscribing it into their own language in the 3rd
century.
Since Japanese is as different from Chinese as it is to any other lan-
guage, simply using the Chinese writing system was not sufficient, and
a more appropriate way of writing Japanese was sought out. Some Chi-
nese characters began to be used not for their meaning, but purely for
their phonetic value. So by the 9th century, Hiragana and Katakana
scripts were derived from simplified Chinese characters that were used
to write Japanese phonetically.
The story doesn’t end there. As if using three scripts isn’t enough,
we write in both horizontal and vertical orientation.

4
Horizontal? Vertical? The Unique Case Of Japanese
Typography
“Vertical or horizontal?” —when setting a piece of text in Japanese, this
is a question that Japanese designers constantly need to ask them-
selves. Being able to use both vertical and horizontal writing orienta-
tions is something so normal for us native Japanese speakers that most
of us won’t even stop to wonder why this is possible, or even when and
how it was first introduced.

The identical piece of text set vertically (right) and horizontally (left). When it is set verti-
cally it’s read from top to bottom, as the lines go from right to left; when it is set horizon-
tally, it is read from left to right, like in European languages.

In general, these two writing orientations have a clear usage: vertical

for something “Japanese”, “traditional”, “novels and other humanistic
writings”; horizontal for “contemporary”, “business documents”, “scien-
tific & foreign language related writings” and so on. When a main text
is set horizontally, the binding is on the left-hand side, and pages
progress to the right, like books in Latin scripts. Traditional books in
vertical setting are the other way around, with the binding at the right
hand side, and pages progressing to the left. So when you handle a
Japanese book, don’t confuse the front with the back!

5
 JAPANESE, A BEAUTIFULLY COMPLEX WRITING SYSTEM

A typical page layout of a Japanese paperback novel using a vertical setting. Ogai Mori
(1913), “Abe Ichizoku”, Shincyo-bunko.

6
 Needless to say, traditional calligraphy is always done vertically. With their organic
flow, characters are often connected and have different heights and widths— which
makes it impossible to disconnect and align them horizontally. Calligraphy by Keiko Shi-
moda, 2011 (http://www.tsukushidesign.com1)

1. http://www.tsukushidesign.com

7
 JAPANESE, A BEAUTIFULLY COMPLEX WRITING SYSTEM

Horizontal setting is preferred for scientific texts, mathematical texts and language re-
lated books, where words and phrases in foreign scripts and signs are often included, as
they are more easily incorporated horizontally. The example (above) is a Japanese-Eng-
lish dictionary. (Pocket Comprehensive English-Japanese / Japanese-English Dictionary,
2000, Obunsha)

Where the efficient use of space is important — namely newspapers

and magazines — both orientations are often combined. Although it
may appear a bit chaotic, or even random to foreign eyes, these two di-
rections are usually used in a systematic way as a means to indicate dif-
ferent text elements on a page. For instance, a main text is often set in a
vertical setting, but headings and captions may be set in a horizontal
setting.

8
A typical newspaper layout —the main text is vertical but headings, diagrams, tables,
and captions are placed horizontally.

9
 JAPANESE, A BEAUTIFULLY COMPLEX WRITING SYSTEM

The same newspaper as above, but highlighting the vertical text (orange) and the hori-
zontal text (blue). © The Nikkei (May 8th, 2009)

In a way, it’s comparable to “typographic variants” which are found in

Latin typography — in Latin script text one may use bold, italic, or a dif-
ferent font to differentiate things such as pull quotes from the main
text, whereas in Japanese we can do this by using a different orienta-
tion. Publications which accommodate non-linear or complex text (as
opposed to linear text, such as novels) seem to benefit in particular
from having these two orientations, which allow the layout to be highly
flexible, and also to create strong visual impact.
The extreme cases of “space-efficiency-oriented typography” are
informational-heavy pieces of text, such as diagrams and signage —also
exploiting the two directional orientations. The Tokyo Metro map (Fig
10) is a good example of this —as you can see, both orientations are
used accordingly, so that everything fits best within the limited space.

10
 Tokyo Metro map

Tokyo Metro route map. The large type on the top is the station name which is placed
horizontally. The name of the metroline may be horizontal, but the name of the stops are
placed vertically.

It’s true that in many cases they look quite chaotic and sometimes even
aesthetically questionable to eyes that are used to “orderly” design. But
it’s easy to appreciate the visual impact and energy they create —they
remind you that effective, appealing informational design does not al-
ways have to look “neat and tidy”.

11
 JAPANESE, A BEAUTIFULLY COMPLEX WRITING SYSTEM

Letters from my friends: when it comes to handwriting, orientation is up to a personal

preference or simply one’s “mood”. But when you are writing a more official letter, or
writing to somebody who is much older than you, it’s probably safer to opt for vertical
orientation.

What’s Happening On Screen-Based Media?

Since the introduction of horizontal writing in the Japanese language,
print-based media and signage have been employing both of these writ-
ing orientations effectively, and in ways that complement one another.
But what’s been happening to screen-based media? With a few excep-
tions — such as word-processing machines made exclusively for the
Japanese text output, or subtitles for film and TV screens, which tend to
use either depending on the background image —horizontal orientation
has been the dominant choice.
The prime example of this is the Web: horizontal orientation has
been used almost exclusively. For the past 15 years, I have hardly come
across a website that uses vertical setting. Mobile phone screens also
use a horizontal orientation. I believe this may be due to the relations of
hardware, operating systems and user interfaces that have become the
norm, all of which have been designed to work with horizontal writing.
It feels somewhat awkward to see vertical writing while all the other el-
ements on the screen, such as the menu bar and UI elements, are hori-
zontal.
Needless to say, the technical limitations (the support of a vertical
setting by browsers is a fairly recent introduction) have largely contrib-
uted to this too. Perhaps underestimated, maybe the biggest factor for
not using vertical setting for screen-based media could well be the

12
mental association with horizontal orientation being used for some-
thing “modern” and “contemporary”.

The Nihon Keizai Newspaper website. Although the printed newspaper employs a verti-
cal setting for the body texts, the web-version uses a horizontal setting.

So far, even with content as Japanese as a tea ceremony, a website will use a horizontal
setting. (Accessed Jan. 20th, 2012)

13
 JAPANESE, A BEAUTIFULLY COMPLEX WRITING SYSTEM

Will Vertical Writing Orientation Die Out?

Will vertical writing orientation die out from screen-based media? Or
can it make a comeback, when the technological environment allows us
to use vertical settings more easily? Many e-book apps on smart phones
and tablets have already started using vertical settings. With its intu-
itive way of navigating the screen along with the lack of external input
devices (and apps being able to have more flexible/responsive layout),
vertical writing seems to be incorporated much more comfortably.
I’ve spent some time reading these e-books — and pleasantly sur-
prised at how easy they are to read. Apart from the fact that you need to
scroll the screen horizontally, it’s just as comfortable as reading “nor-
mal” or horizontally set text. In fact, it’s even better for some types of
publications like novels, or Manga. Our association towards this type of
content when compared to the vertical setting is pretty strong; it would
somehow feel “wrong” to see them set horizontally.
Amazon’s Kindle has yet to support the Japanese language, but ap-
parently they’re on their way to doing so. If they seriously want to at-
tract Japanese readers, it would be unthinkable for them not to support
vertical setting.

Soseki Natsume’s “Sanshiro” (1908) e-book on iPhone.

14
 Kotobuki Shiriagari’s “OSHIGOTO” (2010) e-book on iPhone.

The situation also seems to be slowly changing on the Web —some in-
teresting attempts have been made in order to familiarize ourselves
with Web pages that have vertical setting. One such example is Take-
tori2, which works just like Google translate — you can type in the URL
of a Web page you wish to see in vertical setting, and Taketori does it
for you. There’s also a piece of software called Kagetaka, which can
switch any Web text into a vertical orientation.
Personally, I’m not too sure how well vertical setting will be sup-
ported by the users of normal Web pages, unless the way we navigate
Web pages is re-developed, or a new type of browser with more innova-
tive UI appears. Even though I complained earlier about the difficulty
of the Japanese writing system, I do appreciate its diversity and flexibil-
ity, while making use of its three scripts and two orientations allows us
to express subtle nuances of content—and we have been benefiting
from that for decades.
I thought it would be a shame if we lose these methods of textual ar-
ticulation in an age of screen-based media. But what has been happen-
ing for the last couple of years on touch-screen mobile devices (as well
as the Web) can reassure us that both writing orientations may happily
co-exist and collaborate on screen in the future, just as they have done
off-screen for the last hundred years. ❧

2. http://taketori.org

15
 RESPECT THY TYPOGRAPHY

Respect Thy Typography

BY ESPEN BRUNBORG ❧

Good typography shouldn’t have to rely on ornamental crutches to

stand tall. Yet despite all the tools and knowledge available to us, we
readily embrace a flourishing, decorative typography, with cheap tricks
used in a misguided attempt to make it “pop”. This ancient art may
rapidly be gaining popularity, but are we paying it the respect it de-
serves?
Take a snapshot of the visual culture that surrounds you — maga-
zines, movie posters, packaging, websites — how much of it relies on ty-
pography? How much of the typography around you is actually well
considered? Chances are you’ll find a handful of beautifully crafted ty-
pographical designs competing with an avalanche of visually “rich”,
image-heavy creations. Typography is then relegated to the role of “nec-
essary evil” in order to display text, or ill-considered typographic pieces,
where the meaning of MS WordArt has been interpreted a smidgen too
literally… Why?

Looking Back
It’s fair to say that the global webdesign community is experiencing a
typographical renaissance. Revolutionary technologies like Typekit3,
Fontdeck4, the introduction of the @font-face tag, and online licens-
ing for professional typefaces are all encouraging type enthusiasts
around the Web to transcend the shackles of common type5. Further-
more, clever use of CSS and JavaScript are allowing us to mimic a range
of typesetting techniques (though admittedly some basic typographical
controls are still frustratingly infantile6).
But with such power comes great responsibility. And even though
modern tools give us the opportunity to do so many things, doing a
great deal of these things isn’t always a recipe for beautiful design. Just
because we have many options opening up to us doesn’t mean we need
to employ every single one of them in the hope of developing a design
that stands out — and most likely for all the wrong reasons.

3. https://typekit.com/
4. http://fontdeck.com/
5. http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html
6. http://8gramgorilla.com/print-vs-web-part-1-incredible-ink/

16
 That’s not to say typographic design can’t be ornamental, complex
or even illustrative. But centuries of working with movable type has
left us with principles on which to base our typography, and it’s our du-
ty as designers to understand them (at least if we’re aiming to break
them). A good place to start is to look at what those who came before us
have done — even the briefest throwback into the annals of typography
and design history will help.
Consider Milton Glaser’s7 “I love New York” logo from 1977, com-
missioned as part of a marketing campaign by the New York State De-
partment of Commerce. Glaser, who did the work pro-bono, wisely
avoided skylines, figures of people holding hands, or flowery orna-
ments by using only a simple heart shape to represent the key word of
the mark: love. We all know the subsequent success of the logo, as it
has been brandished on millions of white t-shirts, inspiring countless
knock-offs since its inception.
And if the heart-symbol of Glaser’s work seems too pictorial in this
context, how about Robert Indiana’s8 “Love” sculpture? Originally creat-
ed for a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card in 1964, this iconic
piece of type shuns imagery altogether, relying only on the power of
letterforms (arguably based on Clarendon9) to ignite our compassion.

Lovely examples of modern typographic icons.

7. http://www.miltonglaser.com/
8. http://robertindiana.com/
9. http://typophile.com/node/27607

17
 RESPECT THY TYPOGRAPHY

Milton Glaser’s post-9/11 update of his own masterpiece.

Of course, this kind of admiration for type didn’t just start with 60’s ad-
vertising. Typography is a craft going back thousands of years10 — to
the birth of writing, if you wished to go deep enough — and has evolved
and developed a great deal since that time. Theories have been postulat-
ed and developed as to how to best communicate through letterforms,
especially when an idea needs to be transmitted as easily as possible. As
Bringhurst explains while introducing the first chapter of his timeless
“The Elements of Typographic Style”: Typography exists to honor content.
Beatrice Warde’s well known essay “The Crystal Goblet” beautifully
explains the role of the typographer and his or her type, and she rein-
forced this point during an address given in 1930 to the British Typog-
raphers Guild in London. Advocating the idea that type was not there to
be admired, or even noticed, that it existed only with the purpose of

10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan’s_Column

18
communicating an idea, she proclaimed; “I have a book at home of
which I have no visual recollection whatever as far as its typography
goes; when I think of it, all I see is the Three Musketeers and their com-
rades swaggering up and down the streets of Paris.” I wonder how
many us have the same consideration for content when we browse
through MyFonts or Typekit in search of the perfect typeface.
One of the many great designers who echoed Warde’s ethos was Jan
Tschichold11. His most well-known work is found in the legacy he creat-
ed during his time working for Penguin (1947-1949), refining and re-
designing the former book covers and creating the rulebook for the
Penguin covers that followed him.

Notice the absence of decorative elements in this series of Penguin covers by Tschichold.

Looking at these covers one will see that the focus is unequivocally on
the communication of a book’s title and author, and the result is truly
magnificent. The covers are not beautiful because of particular orna-
ments or images, or even the individual shapes of the letters, but for
their clarity of message. It’s not by accident that a clarity of (and focus
on) typography has stuck with Penguin until the present day, which is
beautifully demonstrated by David Pearson’s12 designs for the “Great
Ideas” series from 2004, 2005 and 2008.

11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Tschichold
12. http://www.davidpearsondesign.com/

19
 RESPECT THY TYPOGRAPHY

Though the style may be different, the focus on typography still embodies the spirit of
Tschichold.

Challenging The Rules

The approach advocated by modernist typographers is one of clarity
and legibility. Scientific methods (let’s call it early “A/B testing”) were
utilized in the quest to find the perfect typeface —not in terms of aes-
thetic, but rather efficiency for communicating— and rigid systems
were developed to achieve ideal reading conditions. In the strictest
sense, typographic beauty is not to be gained from the letters or orna-
ments themselves, but should come as a natural result from an “invisi-
ble” type that unselfishly honors the words and content.
However, movements of any kind invariably inspire counter-move-
ments, and the modernist ethos was to be thoroughly challenged to-
wards the end of the last century, most notably by David Carson (b.
1954), Peter Saville (b. 1955) and Neville Brody (b. 1957). While earlier de-
signers sought to communicate the messages they were setting as
clearly and cleanly as possible, these young contenders wished to push
the boundaries of legibility and normality, so that the emotion and idea
wasn’t delivered via what the words represented, but how the words
were seen as objects separated from their meaning.
These three designers were to shape the face of contemporary ty-
pography with their groundbreaking work spanning magazines, news-
papers, film titles (Carson and Brody) and record sleeves (Saville). They
helped pioneer experimental typesetting in the 80′s and 90s’, throwing

20
the modernist rulebook out the window, yet retaining the communica-
tive authority for letters and words.
Nowadays it’s easy to argue that their use of type did indeed include
a great deal of flourish and extras. But seen in the context of the post-
modern era, it’s clear that this was not simply an attempt to “beautify”
their work. On the contrary, the disrespect for clarity and to embrace
“grunge” were design statements opposing the impersonal coldness of
the modernist designers… they were adding emotion to the words they
were communicating, which also reflected the cultural movement of
the time.
Jan Tschichold might have turned in his grave at brash expressions
such as these, but the power of typography seemed stronger than ever.
Their work showed that there is an infinite number of ways that typog-
raphy can be used to communicate a message.

Clockwise from top left: Saville’s cover for Hard-Fi: Once Upon a Time in the West, Car-
son’s High Priority spread for NY magazine, Nike ad by Neville Brody.

The conscious tenet arising from such examples is an appreciation, by

the designer, of how typography can be emotionally valuable. Each of
the above examples evoke something —whether heartfelt, or slightly

21
 RESPECT THY TYPOGRAPHY

adrenalin pumping, it can be concluded that this is often the role of il-
lustrative typography: to move the heart, and not just yell at the mind.

From Movable Type To Type That Moves

Regardless of the word count, the typographic experience can be as
emotional as any pictorial masterpiece. This notion is beautifully exem-
plified by the “Coming Together” campaign for FontAid by The Society
of Typographic Aficionados13 (SOTA) in support of relief efforts follow-
ing the 2010 disaster in Haiti. The project — a font consisting of hun-
dreds of ampersands designed by contemporary typogra-
phers —showed that despite the common saying that “a picture speaks
a thousand words”, sometimes all you need is a handful of letters… or
indeed, just a single character.

The “Coming Together” typeface shows us the power of a single character.

Other, less sentimental examples of moving (literal as well as

metaphorical) type are masterfully displayed on the blog of Trent Wal-
ton14, a true magician in terms of utilizing modern technologies to add
depth to his typography. When spelling out the title Workspace15, a
particularly illustrative typographic treatment conjures up images of
your very own — or perhaps your dad’s very own— workspace, complete
with holes in the wall for hanging up indispensable tools (“I really need-
ed that magnetic stud finder”).
In another example, Unitasking16, the “I” in the headline doubles as
an illuminated “1” when it is interacted with, emphasizing the message

13. http://www.typesociety.org/
14. http://trentwalton.com/
15. http://trentwalton.com/2011/11/18/workspace/
16. http://trentwalton.com/2011/09/20/unitasking/

22
of the article. Granted, neither example can be described as “pure” ty-
pography. But note how the extensive use of technology with typo-
graphic tricks can be used to illustrate the message, infusing it with
added emotion, rather than for decorative purposes.

Movable, interactive typography with nostalgic undertones.

Laborious use of CSS trickery adds value to the message.

Stefan Sagmeister17 is another designer (actually, another legend) fasci-

nated by the concept of emotional typography and how design can
touch our fellow human beings, and he’s unafraid to use unconvention-
al means of communication. For a 1999 AIGA lecture poster he literally

17. http://www.sagmeister.com/welcome

23
 RESPECT THY TYPOGRAPHY

carved all the copy into his own body using a razor blade (well, his stu-
dio mate did the carving) before photographing himself, the result be-
ing so disturbingly powerful that it’s difficult to look away.
But it’s not all gore, of course. As part of his “Things I have learned”
series he created a type-only billboard for Experimenta Lisbon18,
spelling out his message in capital letters: “Complaining is silly. Either
act or forget”. Simple enough, right? Not quite. Using no ink what so
ever, Sagmeister and his team created a gigantic stencil and exposed
huge sheets of newsprint to the scorching sun over a period of weeks.
The letters (covered by the stencil) would remain white as the
newsprint yellowed, and by the time the billboard went up the state-
ment was easily read by onlookers. The subsequent effect was, as you
may have deduced by now, that the letters would slowly fade away as
the previously non-exposed newsprint would yellow to the same color
as the background. Thus the message to “act or forget” was emotionally
strengthened with every passing day.

Sometimes typography can be effective without trying to be beautiful.

18. http://www.sagmeister.com/node/219

24
 Using the sun’s ultraviolet rays to slowly fade away the message.

At this point we’ve come a long way from the clear, simple typography
of Tschichold. I’m sure many of you are questioning whether the latter
examples, in comparison, rely too much on visual tricks to get their
messages across. Indeed, I opened this chapter by challenging the over-
use of ornaments and decoration in order to enhance our typography,
and yet aren’t Walton’s and Sagmeister’s work examples of just that?
Not quite.
Despite heavy use of non-typographic elements, there are no unnec-
essary flourishes to be found, nor are there any signs of unrelated deco-
ration (though, to be pedantic, Walton’s use of surface textures may be
superfluous). In truth, both designers are adding value by choosing tech-
niques and expressions that purposefully match the content and create
an emotional frame in which to deliver the message, thus highlighting
it’s impact.
Contemporary experimentalists like Walton and Sagmeister might
contradict traditional typographic principles, yet they play an impor-
tant role in the global, ongoing design conversation by constantly dis-
covering new and unconventional means for typographic expression.

Spread The Word. Literally.

In all honesty, type is not just movable, it has the power to move— and
it’s up to us to carry this legacy forward and into the digital frontier,
that is inevitably our future. By learning from past examples of excel-
lence, we can challenge the status quo of mediocre typography and
misplaced stock photography, and start to push things forward. We
don’t always need to do too much (well written copy is, after all, your
very best friend), and we certainly don’t have to use all the tools in our
drawer every time.

25
 RESPECT THY TYPOGRAPHY

But we can continuously look for new ways to add value, as long as
we make sure our typography doesn’t communicate anything other
than the intended message. Sometimes that means heavy use of CSS,
making creative use of sunshine, or experimenting with size and posi-
tion. Other times — perhaps most times— it means keeping things sim-
ple, letting the words do the talking and letting the typography work it-
self gently into the background.
Remember, despite the plethora of typographical tools we now have
at our immediate disposal, we’re the latest chapter of a long history of
typographic craftsmanship —typographers painstakingly arranged let-
ters by hand for centuries before the computer (or even phototypeset-
ting) came along. We should honor the hard work that has been put in
by those who came before us. We can do this by recognizing typogra-
phy as an essential part of our work (be it for Web or print), learn about
the principles (especially if you’re aiming to break them) and consider
all the factors that make for great communication through letterforms.
If right now you are thinking “but my boss will never let me do what
Sagmeister does!” — don’t sweat it, most projects don’t allow for typo-
graphic experimentation. But that doesn’t mean you can’t hone your
skills — there’s plenty to be gained from taking pride in the small
things, and making sure you get the details right. If your brief dictates
uninspiring imagery, put your effort and pride into perfecting the ac-
companying typography. Is the line-length appropriate? What about
font-size, line-height, and hierarchical contrast? Does the typeface echo
the sentiments of the message? Maybe if you get all the small things
right, the bigger things will come easier once that suitable project
comes your way.
So roll up those sleeves, consider the meaning of the words you’re
setting, and pay some respect to the centuries of evolution behind the
typeface you’re using today, and just as importantly, the craft of typog-
raphy as a means of expression. By all means use images, but just re-
member that you don’t always have to —typography can be just as
meaningful by itself, even without the alluring magic of word-art.

A big “thank you” to our typography editor, Alexander Charchar19, for preparing
this chapter. ❧

19. http://retinart.net/

26
Typography Carved In
Stone
BY ANNE BRADY ❧

Every name here is a tragic story of loss and heartbreak. The Garda
Memorial Garden, or Gairdín Cuimhneacháin an Gharda Síochána, is locat-
ed in the heart of Dublin city. This memorial is a contemplative garden
with large stone plinths and a lot of names and numbers. The list of
names, this “roll of honor,” records individual police officers (gardaí)
who have lost their lives violently and tragically in the line of duty
since the formation of the Irish state in 1921.
This chapter offers insight into the creative thought processes I fol-
lowed in designing a typographic solution for this memorial. I’ll discuss
my choice of typeface, my detailed layout, the size of type, the materi-
als, the process of engraving, and leaving open the possibility to add
names in the future. My objective was to keep a sense of visual harmo-
ny throughout the design, while aiming for a certain consistency in the
future engraving of names, regardless of language.

Detail showing the carved dual-language granite plinth leading into the memorial gar-
den.

27
 TYPOGRAPHY CARVED IN STONE

The garden is located in Dublin castle, originally a medieval fortress.

The memorial garden is curved. It contains carved plinths, seating and plants.

28
 The garden at night.

Background
In the spring of 2009, Ana Dolan, senior architect in the Office of Public
Works, asked me to think about the style of lettering that should be
used in a project she was working on. Her job was to design a new
memorial garden to honor all those who had died in the line of duty.
The state had decided to carve the names of these 82 individuals into a
new limestone memorial, and the need for a typographer on the team
was recognized. It was great to be offered such an unusual and non-
ephemeral project.

A detail of the carved lettering in speckled granite, with dark-gray infill.

29
 TYPOGRAPHY CARVED IN STONE

Some letters in the Irish alphabet have accented characters called “fadas.”

The typeface was also carved into stainless steel and infilled in dark gray.

Ana explained to me that another memorial to honor all of these gardaí

already existed somewhere else in the city. It had served as a place for
their families to visit since the 1950s. All of the people’s names and
unique regimental codes were carved in stone in a continuous block,
each separated by a simple cross. The original lettering style (see below)
was handmade and calligraphic in style; simple, elegant and carved
deeply. Sadly, information about its architect and typographer has been

30
lost over time. However, it might have been carved by the English ty-
pographer Michael Biggs, and the monument designed by the Irish ar-
chitect Desmond Fitzgerald. More research is required on this.

A detail of the original memorial from the 1950s, with hand-carved names and crosses.

This older memorial was located in a high-security place that was diffi-
cult to visit without prior appointment or without undergoing strict
screening. Over the years, the families of those people whose names
were inscribed in this memorial felt that visiting the place was quite
difficult. As a result, a decision was made to redesign the roll of honor
and relocate it in the city center, on the grounds of Dublin Castle.

A New Memorial
The architect and I met in early 2009 to discuss the new memorial and
to assess the advantages and disadvantages of the carved lettering in
the old memorial. The lettering reflected the typographic sensibilities
of the time (1950s); so, pondering the choice of lettering and layout was
crucial to bringing some of those qualities into the new memorial gar-
den’s typography. Initially, I was instructed to faithfully copy the origi-
nal letters, but thankfully this specification changed as the project pro-
gressed.
The new architectural team had also gone some way towards devel-
oping a typographic approach and were favoring a ranged-left (i.e.
ragged-right) style rendered in a PC-available face. Happily, I was invit-
ed to join the team at this stage, before too many decisions had been

31
 TYPOGRAPHY CARVED IN STONE

made about positive and negative spatial planning, choice of face, gen-
eral layout and credentials of the stone carver (more on that last point
later).
In an email conversation with my client, I explained that the ranged-
left model that her team had designed and emailed to me (see below)
had visual problems. For example, the white space between the left and
middle blocks of names looked wider than the space between the mid-
dle and right blocks. This visual oddity happened because the length of
the names in the middle block was longer than in the other two blocks,
resulting in an uncomfortable spatial arrangement.

The ranged-left layout didn’t work visually, especially with long names.

To my eye, the uneven white space between columns looked crude and
clumsy. Harmony and regularity were demanded by the vertical and
horizontal rhythm of the letterforms, the thicks and thins, the counters.
It was important that the white space also have visual harmony. A lack
of visual calm and harmony would detract from the overall coherence
and stability — not a good vibe for a garden that needed all visual ele-
ments to be fully considered, that needed a thoughtful approach and
that needed to be an oasis of visual order. These men and women died
protecting Irish society from crime. Most died violently and in chaos. I
didn’t want chaos in the typography. I wanted to create a calm and con-
templative space. The typographic layout needed to be visually coher-
ent, with a sense of structure and order. These people had made the ul-
timate sacrifice by giving their lives to protect others. The typographic
design and layout needed to reflect the gardaí’s role of order and disci-
pline in society, not the chaos that resulted in their deaths.
The task of laying out these names and numbers of different lengths
in the allocated space in the limestone was complex. It presented the ty-
pographer with a visual riddle to be solved. I requested more time to ex-
plore these challenges on paper. Of course, allowing me more time
came with a financial cost, but, happily, the architect understood the

32
importance of typography and agreed with my arguments, giving me
the green light.

Establishing A Layout

Early experiments of mine

Finding an effective typographic layout for the gardaí’s names and

numbers called for a number of considerations to be made, such as the
number of names, their varying number of characters, and the dimen-
sions of each stone plinth. Eighty-three names (and ID numbers) were
to be carved across nine limestone plinths of varying widths, each of
which would allow room for ten rows of names across one, two or three
columns.
I decided to center all of the names vertically.
To get more consistent margins and better balance, I advised that
long names not be put on the same row across the three blocks. Long
names sat best in the center block, with two shorter names on the left
and right. The reverse (i.e. a short name in the center and longer ones
on the sides) would work equally well.
For obvious reasons, not leaving any plinths blank was important.
So, the 83 names were arranged across each of them, with space left be-
low for names to be added in future (as will be needed, tragically).
There is capacity to carve another 117 names into the plinths.

33
 TYPOGRAPHY CARVED IN STONE

Each panel has one, two or three columns of names, with each panel holding up to 10
parallel lines.

A one-column panel holds a total of 10 names.

A two-column panel holds a total of 20 names.

34
 A three-column panel holds a total of 30 names.

Choosing A Typeface
There was general agreement that the shape of the letters and numerals
in the 1950s memorial reflected a sense of “Irishness,” particularly in
the letterforms, which were calligraphic in style and had a slightly un-
cial quality commonly seen in the letterforms of the Irish/Celtic manu-
script tradition of the 8th century onwards. The Book of Durrow20, the
Book of Kells21 and the Book of Lismore22 all contain calligraphic letter-
forms whose shapes are influenced by the angle of the quill head and
the angle of the scribe’s hand. However, I felt that a calligraphic type-
face was not suitable for this project. I wanted a face that was almost
invisible, so that, when reading the names of the fallen, one would
think of them and not of the typeface. I wanted a typeface that was nei-
ther difficult to read nor so full of personality that it drew attention to
itself, but rather one that reflected the hand-drawn character of callig-
raphy, a human quality. Yet it also needed the uniformity, strength and
regularity of form found in a print typeface.
It was important that the new memorial have a typeface that could
be set and carved in dual languages, namely English and Irish. Howev-
er, for the long term, given the increase in gardaí with names that are
non-Irish, non-English and non-European, the typeface needed to be
versatile, be robust and include all glyphs and accented character sets.
I knew that the typeface would need to be easy to carve. I didn’t
want one that had thin serifs, counters, stems or terminals that could
be easily misinterpreted by a stone carver, resulting in a badly drawn
version appearing in stone.
The hunt for a suitable typeface was on!
After some research online and using atlases of type, I found three
possibilities for the project: Optima, Zapf Humanist 601 and Exemplar

20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Durrow
21. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Kells
22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Lismore

35
 TYPOGRAPHY CARVED IN STONE

Pro. Each had a beautiful visual rhythm and lovely numerals. They
were also all available for purchase in OpenType format and — more im-
portantly for typesetting — available in digital form. The faces could all
be slightly modified if needed with accented characters (commonly
found in the Irish and central European languages), customized letters
and individual number spacing.

The Optima typeface was a candidate for the memorial.

The Zapf Humanist typeface was another candidate.

36
All three faces had visual traits that were similar to the original 1950s
lettering. For example, in Optima, the uppercase “K” had the same calli-
graphic kick in the top and bottom diagonal strokes. The uppercase “O”
had the same vertical stress, and the stem of the numeral “7” leaned
back at the same angle. And as in the old memorial, the crossbar on
Zapf Humanist’s uppercase “T” was not parallel but had a calligraphic
bend in the middle that was very satisfying.

THE PERFECT FACE

Exemplar Pro was chosen.

Exemplar Pro
After much deliberation, I settled on Exemplar Pro as the most robust
and flexible typeface. Its weight and solidity of design were greater
than those of Optima or Zapf Humanist; plus, it had a full range of ac-
cented characters, ideal for unusual names.
Comparing Exemplar Pro to the 1950s hand carving, I noticed that a
lot of the capital letters (N, M, C, H) and numerals (7, 1, 6) were sympa-
thetic in design. The letterforms in Exemplar Pro have a roundness and
rhythm that I liked, as well as a slightly calligraphic or hand-drawn
quality. I wanted to avoid typefaces that were coldly geometric or me-
chanical. I was dealing with the names of people who had died tragical-
ly. Their families would visit this memorial regularly. I didn’t want the
relatives of fallen gardaí to feel that the memorial was cold, industrial
or mass produced. I wanted the typeface to be sensitively drawn and a

37
 TYPOGRAPHY CARVED IN STONE

little quirky, the way people are sometimes quirky. When set in Exem-
plar Pro, the individual names and numbers had a friendliness and in-
dividuality that was appropriate to the project. Exemplar Pro also
seemed to translate well into a carved face. The serifs were not too thin,
and the shapes not too fine or difficult for a carver to redraw or laser-
cut. I decided to set the type and provide size layouts, which the
stonecarver carefully cut into stone.
It was interesting to research Exemplar Pro’s designer and his ratio-
nale for this face as I was critiquing the letterforms. I came across this
online description written about the typographer, Göran Söderström:

“Söderström, born 1974, is a self-taught Swedish type designer and

font developer based in Stockholm. Having just finished a little bit of
calligraphic studies, he was twenty when he made the first sketches of
Exemplar in 1994. In 2009 the full version became available, all glyphs
were redrawn and improved. Diacritics were build for central Euro-
pean languages and small caps, different numerals and alternate let-
ters were added. Finally, the typeface family was expanded to four
weights with corresponding italics.”

Inspired by the beauty and perfection of several typefaces and the art of
calligraphy, he wanted to create a typeface that was traditional yet un-
conventional, a balance that felt both old and new. It was the perfect
typeface for my project. Thank you, Göran!

Final Layout
The limestone plinths had a uniform height of 540 millimeters, but
their widths varied, ranging from 900 to 1800 millimeters. For the lay-
out of the names, I looked closely at the scale and size of the type (with
letters that were 17 to 25 millimeters in height), the weight of the letters
(roman or bold), the number of lines of text (a minimum of 10 and max-
imum of 11) and the visual positioning of the text.

38
 Different point sizes and weights were considered.

I created a series of sample design layouts for panels of varying widths

(1800 and 1300 millimeters), including a visual reference of names at
the actual size on an A3 landscape page, demonstrating the three possi-
ble heights of names (17, 20 or 25 millimeters, the last being preferred).
Regarding the number of names, letters that were 17 millimeters in
height, in roman or bold, would fit 11 lines per panel, making for 264
names in total. Alternatively, letters that were 25 millimeters in height,
in bold weight, at 10 lines per panel would fit 200 names in total. The
latter was more legible, and it had a better visual scale and allowed for a
larger carving area letter by letter.
My client and I were in total agreement on the final height of the
letters, the general shapes of the letters, the number of lines, the layout
and the overall number of names for the memorial. The result was
25-millimeter-tall capital letters (100 points) over 10 lines, providing a
total capacity of 200 names. We could have increased the capacity by
reducing the size of the type, but that would have compromised the
aesthetics and the carver’s accuracy.
The full and final list of names finally arrived as a Microsoft Word
file, set in the Courier typeface. I got to work and supplied all of the fi-
nal size layouts on paper to the stone carver for execution. (More
names have since arrived, each one being carved directly on site.)

Engraving Technique
We decided to ask the stonemason to do a test piece on the limestone in
order to firefight any final problems before all of the names were

39
 TYPOGRAPHY CARVED IN STONE

carved. At that point, we also had to make the crucial decision of

whether to carve the letterforms and numerals by hand or by machine.
The decision would have a major impact on the visuals, budget and
schedule. Limestone is actually quite porous and weathers fairly rapid-
ly, and its color and texture when dry is distinct from when it’s wet.
I also provided the names of two proofreaders who were qualified to
proofread the stone carver’s work at phased intervals on site in Dublin
Castle. I suggested that the architects order one or two extra pieces of
stone in case of spelling mistakes or a carving accident. I love contin-
gency plans, especially on a project like this!

A piece of limestone was carved by hand and by laser to test the quality of the carving.

To our surprise, the handcut lettering was shallow and hard to read. In
strong light (our rare Irish sunshine) and in overcast conditions (which
was more normal), the hand-carved lettering was the same color as the
surface of the stone, so one couldn’t read it properly. However, the
machine-cut lettering was very deep; shadows were apparent, and the
text was very easy to read. The letters looked darker than the surround-
ing stone, and the resulting contrast improved legibility hugely.
Unsurprisingly, we agreed to cut the letters by machine. This deci-
sion had several other positive outcomes. First, it ensured that the carv-
ing of future names would be consistent with the initial names; second-
ly, it ensured a deeper definition of form, given the sharper edge; and
thirdly, it maximized legibility.
The stone carver used an interesting technique (three stone carvers
have worked on this project so far). I supplied the full-sized artwork in

40
black and white on a large sheet of thin grammage paper (120 GSM),
one per plinth. The carver then glued this paper onto a “blanket,” or in-
termediary sheet of heavy blue material, which in turn was glued into
position on each stone. The stone mason handcut the letterforms by
scalpel, cutting through the paper and blanket layers.

The stonecutter placed the full-sized printed sheets onto the stone before carving.

He then sandblasted and lasercut the cutout areas of paper and blanket
to a standard depth of 2.5 millimeters. The edges of each letterform and
their uniform depth had a very pleasing visual effect.
A decision was made to leave the lettering uncolored on the lime-
stone. However, the granite, which contained a heavy background tex-
ture and pattern, needed greater legibility. So, a dark-gray infill was
chosen for the granite plinths over each entrance.

Troubleshooting
The best laid plans sometimes don’t go as hoped! The original stonema-
son was chosen by the memorial’s architect. The builder who won the
tender to build the memorial had included stone carving as part of their
price. Four or five plinths were carved under this financial arrange-
ment. Unfortunately, the main building contractor on this project was
not so in tune with all of our typographic sensibilities and had hired a
building subcontractor, who in turn had a different stonemason who in
effect was working blind and hadn’t been vetted for quality. The result

41
 TYPOGRAPHY CARVED IN STONE

(illustrated below in the letter “G”) was disastrous. The letterforms were
poorly cut and had no fidelity to the original typeface.

An example of an uppercase “G” and “A” carved in granite and infilled. The letters are
sharp.

The “G” and “A” carved in limestone without any infill color. The “G” has lost some of its
elegance.

42
 Uppercase “G” and “R” carved in limestone.

These letters have been very poorly carved. The “G” and “E” have lost vital shape in their
serifs.

I spoke to the original stonemason some time later and learned that his
switch in supplier was accidental. He had received all of this feedback
through the “trade” grapevine. He also mentioned that a third stonema-
son was hired by the building subcontractor. The overall result is that
the letterforms were not properly carved and, sadly, the standard of
carving is very inconsistent throughout.

43
 TYPOGRAPHY CARVED IN STONE

I contacted my client and mentioned my disappointment in the

quality of the stone carving. The client happily took my comments to
heart and has since gotten a new stone mason. New names are now
beautifully carved. Happy days!

Conclusion
The names of the fallen will continue to be carved in random order, so
having a sustainable design and manufacturing process that could po-
tentially last the lifetime of the designer and stone carver and then get
passed on to the next generation was important.

New names are typeset in black ink. The gray names have already been carved.

44
 New names take a year or two to weather and blend in with the other names.

To assist this process, I created a set of detailed typographic guidelines

for future reference, outlining the typeface, alignment and point size
and offering advice on tackling white space and the general layout.
These guidelines were created to help the next typographer take over
the project from me. This project will probably run for another 100
years, with approximately one name being added each year —I don’t
plan on being around to see the last name added!
Being asked to tackle this emotionally loaded typographic conun-
drum was a huge honor. I hope I have created a sense of visual coher-
ence and restful harmony. Each letter shape was important. Each per-
son memorialized here was someone’s son, daughter, father, brother,
mother or friend. Each name is now set permanently in the heart of this
island’s capital. Even if you didn’t know any of these people personally,
hopefully you feel that this memorial is a fitting monument to their
lives and service.
Of course, this being Ireland, we never like to leave on a low note.
The next time you are in Dublin, if it’s not raining, please remember to
visit the memorial; sitting in the garden and reflecting is a rewarding
experience. ❧

45
 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TYPES

Industrial-Strength Types
BY ALASTAIR JOHNSTON ❧

The Industrial Revolution gave us a new iron age, one of cast iron,
which a devotee of Vulcan told me he thought was the highest achieve-
ment of man — or, as he put it, “the hairless ape.” In the 18th century,
cast-iron bridges sprang across British rivers such as the Tay and Sev-
ern. These lovely sculptural archways are resistant to rust, so many are
still standing.
But tragedies like the Dee Bridge collapse and the terrible Tay Bridge
disaster of 1879 dampened the public’s enthusiasm and led to William
McGonagall’s famous ballad:

“Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay,

Alas! I am very sorry to say,
That ninety lives have been taken away,
On the last sabbath day of 1879,
Which shall be remembered for a very long time.”

What are “Industrial-strength types”? In this chapter I propose to ex-

plore them.

Birth Of Trainspotting
Railway locomotives, which moved through the countryside, were the
first big machines to broach people’s consciousness. As individual self-
propelled machines, they altered the landscape, which had been static
until that point. A coach or horse-drawn cart moved along well-worn
paths, but a railway required straighter lines and a level surface, so cut-
tings, ramparts and bridges were built, and the coal-fired locomotive
would spew fire and ash like a dragon as it clattered along.

46
 A replica of “Puffing Billy,” a giant boiler on wheels with a beam engine, runs at the
Beamish Open Air Museum in County Durham, UK. Its nameplate reads “Locomotion”
in sans serif.

The Agenoria, built in 1829, is on display at the Railway Museum in York, UK. Its name
is cast onto the driving wheel in a thick roman typeface.

The Great Western Railway was one of the first to have a livery, and
Isambard Kingdom Brunel also distinguished his railway by having a
broad gauge, of seven feet. Though he was well known as an engineer
and a builder of bridges and iron ships, he was pleased to buy two
steam locomotives from George Stephenson, who is considered by
many to be the father of the modern railway for his 1829 “Rocket.”

47
 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TYPES

The original “Rocket,” in the Science Museum in London.

The brass nameplate shows a strong hand-wrought letter with

backward-only serifs on the upright of the K and reinforced bracketing
on the serifs of E and T. Otherwise, it is an early form of the type later
known as Clarendon.

The Purpose Of Clarendon Types

Clarendon was first introduced for emphasis, a precursor of bold as a
related face in a family. The idea of a boldface directly related to a ro-
man arose with the Linotype machine in 1895, where bold was offered
as an alternative to italic in two-matrix machines, but in the 20th centu-
ry, extended typeface families that included bolds and semi-bolds be-
came commonplace.
Before the introduction of Clarendon as a text face, it could be seen
as a display type, for example in Figgins’ two-line Pica in shade, from
about 1817. It was copyrighted by Robert Besley of London’s Fann Street
Foundry in 1845, and as soon as the copyright lapsed three years later, it
was widely copied. Railway timetables, newspaper headings, dictionar-
ies, guidebooks, textbooks and other places that required spot emphasis
were its preferred venues at first.

48
 Baedeker’s “Greece,” Leipzig, 1909. Clarendon used for emphasis.

In essence, Clarendon is a condensed slab-serif letterform (known as

Egyptian in its earliest lead incarnations), with brackets on the serifs.

Specimen Texts
Images of railway trains frequent the Fann Street Foundry’s 1844 speci-
men (which still bears the name of Thorowgood & Co). They feature on
sans-serif, bold and even Tuscan display types. One of my favorite
pages advertises the speed of the new mode of transport:

Thorowgood’s two-lines Grotesque Outline of 1841.

49
 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TYPES

The typeface is a condensed sans serif with a slight shadow on the

right, suggesting movement. (Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the first
Bridgwater station in 1841 on his Great Western Line.)

Thorowgood’s 48-point Railway Ornaments of 1841.

Detail of Thorowgood’s locomotive, the Centaur.

Cuts of trains that could be pieced together by printers were also made
by Thorowgood for use on posters. An enlargement of the largest size
(four lines pica, or two thirds of an inch high) shows a locomotive of the
“Firefly” class, the Centaur (labeled in grotesque, or sans serif), which
was also built in 1841 and ran on the Great Western Railway.

Fellow Travellers
The Rocket ran on the Liverpool and Manchester railway. For its 150th
anniversary, a replica coach was created (now in the Railway Museum,
York) along the lines of a stagecoach body, with the word “Traveller” in
silver slab serif, to which an elegant two-tone shadow in blue and black
(like daintily made-up eyes) has been added.

50
 An early passenger carriage built along the lines of a stagecoach.

Such illusionistic shadows became a staple of the 19th-century sign-

painter’s art, and many superb examples are found on surviving coach-
es from the time.

Nameplate of a Great Western Railway locomotive, 1838.

The North Star was built by Stephenson around 1838, and a rubbing of
its brass nameplate shows a bold slab serif with brackets. The style,
which became the basis of the Great Western Railway style for the next
century is “exciting and has a solid magnificence,” according to Patricia
Davey in her article “Locomotive Lettering” (Typographica 13, p. 12).

Kidding Around
Alphabets of things were a popular subject for children’s books in the
19th century. The Great Western Railway is depicted in Cousin Chatter-
box’s Railway Alphabet (London, Dean & Son, 1854), drawn by Freeman
DeLaMotte.

51
 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TYPES

Cousin Chatterbox’s Railway Alphabet, 1854. (Courtesy of the Fox Collection of Chil-
dren’s Books, San Francisco Public Library)

While the vehicles are labelled in plain grotesque (or square sans-serif)
lettering, the alphabet book uses an elementary Clarendon form, suited
to the subject. At the outset —“A is the ARCH”— we see the Doric en-
trance to Euston station from 1837 (no longer extant), which was one of
the first recreations of monumental Graeco-Roman architecture in
Britain after its designer Philip Hardwick visited Italy. The engine
shown is the “Mazeppa” (a name popularized by Byron’s 1819 epic po-
em). Euston was opened as the base for the London and Birmingham
Railway in 1838.

52
 Gladstone, 1882.

The Gladstone was built for the Brighton and South Coast railway in
1882. The sans-serif lettering floats off the surface with its multicolored
3-D effect as well as a double shadow. The red of the body detail is clev-
erly echoed in the highlights of the letterform. These illusionistic ef-
fects were employed throughout the British railways in the late-Victori-
an period.

Detail of London and North-Eastern Railway tender.

53
 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TYPES

Elaborately detailed lettering in a third-class compartment.

Here are some more examples from London and North-Eastern Rail-
ways and from London Midland and Scottish railways of floating sans-
serif capitals:

Bold shadowed grotesque letters from Victorian-era trains.

A century later, locomotive lettering had evolved with the times. The A4
locomotive, known to trainspotting youth as a Streak, in service on the
East Coast route, was a magnificent Art Deco streamlined model, built
in 1915. The first four Streaks were silver in color and went 500 miles a
day. When I was a lad, the names Mallard, Falcon, Guillemot and Sir
Nigel Gresley were magical to us, and we would interrupt our cricket
game by the side of the track to gawk as the Flying Scotsman sped past
at 100 mph. (These locomotives were mostly named after birds; Sir
Nigel was the designer of this model.)

54
 An Art Deco locomotive known to trainspotters as a Streak. (Image: Gavin Cameron23)

The LNER express trains, in service until 1963, were British racing
green, although Mallard and Sir Nigel were blue. The lettering was akin
to Gill Sans; indeed, Eric Gill was also inspired by locomotive lettering
as a boy and was a pupil and flatmate of Edward Johnston, celebrated as
designer of the London Underground railway’s proprietary typeface
used in its signage. Gill Sans is now institutionalized as a British na-
tional letterform (seen for example in the typography of the BBC). A ri-
val to Monotype’s Gill Sans face was made by Stephenson-Blake and
called Granby. It actually leans more toward Johnston’s interpretation
of humanist sans serif, a style he had invented.

23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2011-04-24_SirNigelGresley.jpg

55
 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TYPES

A spread from “Specimen of Printing Types” by Stephenson-Blake (Sheffield, 1932), show-

ing Clarendon and Granby.

Pressing On
One of the great inventions of the 19th century was the all-iron printing
press. Ever since Johannes Gutenberg adapted a wooden screw-lever
wine press to printing in the 1440s, printers had tried to improve the
power of the machine. The first successful iron press was the one made
in 1800 by Walker for the third Earl Stanhope, who generously did not
patent it, so anyone could build a cast-iron press. It was a huge step for-
ward in print production and quality. The Stanhopes had the maker’s
name and “Stanhope Inv.” engraved in a modern roman letter on either
side of the staple.
More improvements followed, the most famous being the Albion
and Columbian, but many companies made machines incorporating
their own patents to improve the screw action or the pressure. The “Son
of Vulcan,” whom I alluded to earlier, collects cast-iron machinery — in
particular, iron printing presses. A visit to his collection inspired me to
think about the letterforms chosen by their makers to identify them ;
quite a few of his machines are unique. Unlike other cast-iron machin-
ery, such as engines, stoves and military equipment, for which sans-
serif forms seem to be preferred (because dealing with the mould when
casting is easy), two letterforms dominate printing press identities:
modern face and Clarendon.

56
F.J. Austin of New York engraved his name in a bold modern face on the metal plate bolt-
ed to his iron press, with its bas relief of acorns, patented in October 1836.

The 1848 Imperial Press, a tabletop model, uses a bold modern for its cast name; some of
the alignment is a bit erratic, perhaps because the makers attempted to follow the curve
with letters that work better upright. A strut supporting the feet of this same press is in a
regular, more contrasted modern typeface.

57
 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TYPES

The Albion Press was another popular cast-iron printing press. The lettering is a stout
modern face with bracketed serifs; in essence, a Clarendon. This one was made by Henry
Watts of London in 1853.

Cincinnati Type Foundry’s acorn-shaped Press was made after the design of Stansbury,
sometime between 1825 and 1856. The stars are a nice touch. The lettering is also Claren-
don and quite regular, suggesting that punches were used to make the mould.

58
For a change from the Clarendon, the British-made Lion press uses a bold Tuscan letter-
form. This press was an advance on the Albion made by Frederick Ullmer from 1866 on-
ward. It was designed for embossing or bank-note printing, for which great pressure
was required. The location, “LONDON,” is in a heavy monoline sans serif.

Stolid And Solid

Speaking of banks, there is something suggestive of strength in the
best bank typography. A bronze plaque on the old Wells Fargo building
on Montgomery Street in San Francisco, undated, has a condensed bold
modern letterform. It is hybrid of Ultra Bodoni and Engraver’s Bold,
with a dash of Imre Reiner’s 1932 typeface Corvinus Fett in the K.

59
 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TYPES

Wells Fargo Bank (date unknown) bronze plaque.

60
 Bank Chambers in Haringey, north London, suggests solidity with its bold square sans
serif. It may have been made by pressing wood pattern letters into wet cement.

A cast-iron plaque from 1869 on an iron bridge in Morpeth, Northum-

berland, tells the story of the bridge in bold modern. Note the initial S in
“Subscription,” “Josh” and “ESQ” have been turned upside down. There’s
a folk quality to this (reminiscent of the Superman logo) that puts the
weight at the top of the letter.

1869 brass plaque on a footbridge over the River Wansbeck, Northumberland.

61
 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TYPES

I’ve found many examples of Victorian cast-iron lettering buried in or-

nate structures, from bridges to manhole covers to drinking fountains
to public toilets — the one for drinking fountains, seen in Edinburgh,
asks you to “Keep the pavement dry” in a condensed, spaced gothic or
sans serif.

Ornate shelter for a Victorian drinking fountain (a dry spot in Scotland).

Iron Ladies On The High Seas

Ships are magnificent examples of machine-age artistry, and all of
them have names. One of the last sailing ships with an iron hull, the
four-masted windjammer Peking, was built in Germany around 1890.

62
The Peking in South Street Seaport, New York.

63
 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TYPES

The Turbinia in permanent dry dock.

The Turbinia was built in 1894 as the first steam-turbine-powered ship

and was by far the fastest ship in the world. Charles Parsons was its en-
gineer. The sleek and elegant design was matched by a fanciful late-
Victorian letterform for the name that has the strength of a sans serif
with additional midriff bulges (popularized from the 1860s to ’70s). The
Ionic serifs resemble a Stephenson-Blake type of the time called Flem-
ish Expanded, but the visual effect, with simple drop shadow, is more
akin to wood type of the period.

The Mauretania is no longer extant.

64
The RMS Mauretania was the sister ship of the more famous Lusitania.
At the time of her launch, she was the heaviest and largest moving ob-
ject on earth. The Mauretania held the record as the world’s fastest ship
from her inaugural Atlantic crossing in 1907 and on for the next 22
years. She was built for Cunard at the Swan Hunter shipyard on the riv-
er Tyne, and, interestingly, the name of the ship contains a huge typo.
The North African roman province is often spelled Mauritania, but hav-
ing gone ahead with it, the directors decided that the alternative
spelling was acceptable.

This massive brass letter for the Mauretania was an enormous typo.

The brass letters used for the name of the ship were two feet square in
rudimentary sans serif, but set at an angle to create a racy, more nauti-
cal italic. My photo above is of the model ship made by Swan Hunter
for its board room, and the “E” is the original letter, saved when the ship
was scrapped in 1935.

65
 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TYPES

The U.S.S. Pampanito in San Francisco Bay.

The U.S.S. Pampanito is a submarine built in New Hampshire in 1943

that saw active duty in the Pacific during World War II. The name is
Spanish for “butterfish.” Typical of military machines, it has chamfered
gothic letterforms —like on a rugby or American football jersey — sug-
gestive of ruggedness.

66
 Chamfered Gothic lettering on a bulldozer.

We would expect a bulldozer to have the same letterform. Indeed, here

is a typical example from Laytonville, in Northern California:

Original Caterpillar tractor logo.

67
 INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH TYPES

However, there’s always an exception to the rule: the original logo of

Caterpillar reflected the sinuous delicate creature it is named after.
Consciously or unconsciously, typographers use types for graphic
effect. Bold types are used for impact, but we increasingly see subtle
differences between weights of type to articulate levels of meaning.
The industrial-strength types I have been discussing seem like natural
choices for cast-iron machinery that emerged during this period of
technological change. Today, they are found in contexts where strength
or solidity is needed. But there is always a parallel history to the one we
write. Forays into Tuscan or the decorative shadow effects of the sign-
painter’s palette show that, no matter how straightforward a letterform,
there is always an urge to adorn and decorate.

CREDITS
All photos copyright 2012 by Alastair Johnston, except “Sir Nigel Gresley” by
Gavin Cameron. Thanks to Ted Salkin for providing access to his collection of
cast-iron printing presses. Trains photographed at Beamish Open-Air Industrial
Museum, Durham, UK; The Science Museum, London; The Museum of Trans-
port, Glasgow; and the National Railway Museum, York. Turbinia and Maure-
tania photographed at the Discovery Museum, Newcastle-on-Tyne. Fann Street
Foundry 1844 specimen, Baedecker’s Greece, and Stephenson-Blake catalogue
from the Poltroon Press collection. Cousin Chatterbox’s Railway Alphabet cour-
tesy of the Fox Collection of Children’s Books, San Francisco Public Library. ❧

68
Legitima Typeface: An
Experience Of Fossils And
Revivals
BY CÉSAR PUERTAS ❧

Just as living species depend on mutation and adaptation to survive,

typefaces too depend on their features to optimize the performance of
text in a given environment. This principle seems to determine, in a
way, the degree of failure or success that printing types (old and new)
have in the physical world.
Typeface revivals (i.e. old typefaces beautiful enough to see a second
digital life) are a virtually never-ending source of inspiration, as well as
a good opportunity for graphic designers to learn some history. After
taking part in the practice, I can say without doubt that the similarities
between this process and the work of palaeontologists when recon-
structing the appearance of dinosaurs and other extinct animals from
fossils are striking.
This chapter covers the process of reviving a typeface almost lost in
time, which, in its digital incarnation, I’ve named Legitima. The results
shown here are the product of an exercise to learn a little history and
some of the basics of typeface design, which I undertook in the Type
and Media postgraduate course given at the Royal Academy of Art in
The Hague (KABK).

La Cicceide Legitima, spread from the prologue.

69
 LEGITIMA TYPEFACE: AN EXPERIENCE OF FOSSILS AND REVIVALS

Introduction
I was nearly 12 years old when my parents took me to see The Land Be-
fore Time, a Disney animated movie relating the adventures of Littlefoot
and his fellow dinosaur friends sometime during the Jurassic or Creta-
ceous period. I have been interested in everything concerning evolution
and dinosaurs ever since, so much so that I even considered a career in
paleontology when I was younger.
Later, when I got involved in typeface design, I realized that the
process of reviving a typeface is comparable to the reconstructions
done by paleontologists when they imagine how creatures long extinct
might have looked. Even more fascinating is that both processes usual-
ly start with isolated findings and incomplete evidence, but imagina-
tion and informed speculation come to the rescue and help to fill in the
missing pieces. If we look closely at the history of paleontology, we can
see how both time and imagination have played a major role in the de-
velopment of the science, for only these two components can enable us
to go back in time to see these awe-inspiring creatures.
Both paleontology and typeface design seemed to be completely un-
related to me until they mixed in late 2008, when I had the experience
of reviving a typeface used in a book printed long ago. What follows is
the history of that, with my findings from the process of digitization
and the result of the revived typeface.

Background

THE BOOK
It is widely known that the remains of creatures that lived millions of
years ago have been preserved thanks to the process of fossilization. As
infrequently as a well-preserved fossil is found, so too is a well-printed
and well-preserved 17th-century book discovered. This is the case of the
source of my revival: a carefully composed but poorly printed copy of
La Cicceide Legitima by Giovanni Francesco Lazzareli (third edition), a
book of poems recounting the deeds of a man nicknamed Ciccio in Italy
in the late-17th century. The book appears to have been printed in
Venice in 1694 in a printshop named Herz.

70
 Spread of La Cicceide Legitima showing the extent of deterioration of the book.

I came across this book in a second-hand bookstore in my hometown,

Bogotá, Colombia, in 2003. I found the idea of reviving a very old type-
face very attractive, but I didn’t realize how hard it would be, working
with a sample in this condition. However, the thought of the freedom
of interpretation this would give me helped me decide to use this book,
dismissing two other better printed but less interesting candidates.
The book, a volume of 228 pages and nine signatures and measuring
9.8 × 16.5 centimeters, is printed on what appears to be highly absor-
bent, ordinary handmade paper. Three type sizes were used to set the
text, and the one in small pica (about 10 points in size) features both ro-
man and italic style. All of the pages appear to have been carelessly
printed, the evidence of which includes excessive pressure, worn-out
types (printing offices at the time would use a set of matrices for
decades or even centuries) and unjustified or moved characters.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The history of a typeface is incomplete without some consideration of
the context in which it was used. The one we’re interested in was pro-
duced in the early Baroque period (17th century), concurrent with a sig-
nificant decline in the quality of books and typefaces produced in Italy.
But it was also a period of great achievements in typography in other
nations such as France and the Low Countries.
Europe in the 17th century falls in what we now call the Early Mod-
ern period, characterized by the Baroque cultural movement, the

71
 LEGITIMA TYPEFACE: AN EXPERIENCE OF FOSSILS AND REVIVALS

French Grand Siècle dominated by Louis XIV, and the beginning of

modern science and philosophy, including the contributions of Galileo
Galilei, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton. Europe was also
torn apart by warfare throughout the century as a result of the Thirty
Years’ War, the Great Turkish War, the end of the Dutch Revolt against
Spain and the English Civil War, among others, while Europe’s colo-
nization secured the Americas as a major economic resource of the new
empires.

An intricate ornamental pattern found in the book, reminiscent of works from the
Baroque period.

THE TYPEFACE
Precisely identifying our typeface was especially difficult, due in part to
the ubiquity of some printing types at that time, as pointed out by M.
Carter, 1961:

“Community of typefaces becomes particularly evident in Germany

soon after 1500, and those faces that were common in Germany are
found also in Italy, the Low Countries, England, Scotland and even,
during the first thirty years of the century, in France, a country that
has rarely imported type or matrices. Mr. A. F. Johnson has done some
hard work on the German types of 1500 to 1540, and has left it on his
record that as many as ten or twenty presses had founts made of the
same set of punches during those years.”

On the other hand, some features of our typeface, such as the low con-
trast and the notably tilted stressing, correspond to an early (but not
Venetian) roman type, of the kind known as “old style.” A few other fea-
tures (such as the pointed shape of the right stroke of the roman “g”

72
and the unusual treatment of the same letter in the italics) make the
typeface hard to identify with more accuracy; although certain treat-
ments — such as the horizontal crossbar of the “e” and the more dissim-
ulated pen strokes — point to a French or Dutch roman, close to the
typefaces cut by Garamond and Van den Keere. Another reason why
the typefaces used in the book could be French is because Italian print-
ers began buying matrices from France in the middle of the 16th centu-
ry. Additionally, Garamond’s romans, like a handful of its predecessors,
served dozens of printers in several countries.

A sample of three roman types with similar characteristics: Minion (blue), Garamond
Pro (green) and Arno Pro (red). The overall proportions, stress axis and serif shapes, all
features of garalde roman types, were borrowed for the revival.

If pressed to pinpoint this typeface, I would say it is a small pica roman

old-style type, probably French, cut in the 16th or early-17th century,
featuring medium extenders, medium contrast between thicks and
thins and a good optical weight for long text settings.

The Process

WORKING FROM THE INSIDE OUT

Due to the low quality of my samples, I started with great uncertainties
about the actual shape of each letter. All I had were tiny models blurred
by the excessive pressure during printing, so I decided to select the best
of every uppercase and lowercase letter, as well as every number, in or-
der to make reasonable decisions.
I straightened and superimposed every sample as a separate layer in
an image file so that the common areas tended to be darker than the ec-

73
 LEGITIMA TYPEFACE: AN EXPERIENCE OF FOSSILS AND REVIVALS

centric forms produced by the spread of ink on the paper. I called the
resulting shape the “maximum”: an area of ink potentially spread in all
directions that would contain the DNA of the typeface.

Scans of several samples of the same letter were put on layers in order to find the maxi-
mum ink spread.

I looked for the “skeleton” of each letter (theoretically located in the

middle of each stroke) in order to start drawing from the inside to the
border of the ink spread (outwards). This skeleton would become one of
my very few certainties during the entire process of revival.

The skeleton of the typeface emerged from the blurry letterforms. Like a digital paleon-
tologist, all I would have to do afterwards was add the flesh and skin.

74
OPTICAL SIZE AND WEIGHT
Upon finding the skeleton of each letter, I felt more confident to start
drawing. The next logical step was to decide the visual weight of the
original typeface —or at least of the one I wanted to create. This was
done rather arbitrarily, just making sure to keep the width of the verti-
cal stems of the lowercase inside the “maximum”, thus making the vi-
sual weight optimal for reading at 10 points in size. I decided to start
with one fifth of the x-height, because I learned this has been one of the
most established practices of typeface design in the last few centuries.
These would turn into the muscles and tendons of the new type.
Up to this point, no details at all were present. Perhaps the only addi-
tional decision I made was the result of thinking about what sorts of
shapes could have been derived from the carving of a piece of metal
just a few millimeters high with burins and files. According to Fred
Smeijers, the shapes were the natural result of technical limitations:

“Not only do the tools invite the punchcutter to make the second n, but
also this shape is easier to handle in the rest of the process of typeface
design and punchcutting. It has no straight lines and no sharp cor-
ners. And the absence of these hard elements makes the form of the
second n more acceptable to the human eye than that of the first. This
more subtle shape has notable visual margin of tolerance. Hard
straight lines make us wonder whether they are really straight or not.
If they are indeed not quite straight, this is awkward to look at. So the
punchcutter avoided such niggling questions and situations by build-
ing in a kind of visual doubt: no straight edges, no sharp corners. The
forms become easy to handle, easy to mix and to bring into balance
with each other.”

So, I decided to avoid sharp corners and straight edges, just as a punch-
cutter four centuries ago would have done. This decision proved very
useful in helping me to distribute the visual weight of the letters at the
baseline and at the x-height, thus producing a horizontal effect that was
perhaps useful to achieving a nice word shape and, therefore, a com-
fortable reading experience.

75
 LEGITIMA TYPEFACE: AN EXPERIENCE OF FOSSILS AND REVIVALS

The lessons of broad-nib pen calligraphy provided a good starting point for the propor-
tion between the x-height and the stem width, since the model was initially obscured by
the excess of ink and pressure.

At this point, I had drawn the lowercase and uppercase letter and the
numbers. But the page had a certain blurriness overall that I found dis-
turbing. The new typeface looked worn out and overused, just like the
original, and that was not the effect I was going for. That made me real-
ize that most of the smaller details needed special attention.

FROM BLURRY TO SHARP

The final shapes of the serifs and stem connections emerged from my
analysis of existing types, some of them revivals and others not, such
as Adobe Garamond Pro, Minion and Quadrata. From a careful observa-
tion of Adobe Garamond Pro, I realized that most of the round connec-
tions in my typeface were too round. Minion showed me the grace of
sharper details; I also learned from it that some serifs needed harder
and crisper edges to look more convincing. The process of borrowing
details from similar typefaces is comparable to taking the scales, skin
texture and color from living species during the process of reconstruct-
ing a dinosaur.

76
The evolution of the serif details: first draft (blue), intermediate stage (yellow) and final
version (red).

THE CAPS DILEMMA

Everything was progressing until I noticed a subtle yet important dif-
ference between the original typeface and my rendering: the caps were
remarkably darker in the book. So, I decided to make my capital letters
darker than the lowercase letters in order to stay true to what seemed
to be the intention of the original designer and the convention at that
time. This is a principle of optics: the larger the letterform, the darker
strokes need to be in order to compensate for the excess of white in the
counters. This principle has been followed since the invention of print-
ing and is still used today. I exaggerated it a bit here to achieve an older-
looking style.

77
 LEGITIMA TYPEFACE: AN EXPERIENCE OF FOSSILS AND REVIVALS

Darker caps (right) are typical of old-style printing types and one strongly visible in my
source book — something worth preserving in the revival.

MY ADDITIONS AND CONTRIBUTIONS

Just as living species depend on mutation and adaptation to survive,
typefaces too depend on features that enhance their performance in
their natural environment. This seems to partly determine the degree
of failure or success of print typefaces in the real world.
Even though many typefaces with features similar to those of Legiti-
ma must exist, many of them seem to me just too polished to capture
the special atmosphere that old metal typeface gives to the page (per-
haps with the exception of Quadraat and Adobe Garamond Pro). Legiti-
ma was designed from a 10-point original to work best when printed at
the same size.
A certain awkwardness or imperfection present in the original was
preserved, too, apparent in the bulkiness or fullness at the points where
the strokes change direction. Among the other details, the uppercase
letters were left purposefully heavy, and the drawing of the curves was
meant to the recall the effect of the burin and file on old metal type.

78
Sketches of Legitima. The additional weight where the strokes change direction (top) as
well as the diversity of angles in the italics (bottom) are some of the characteristics that
were preserved in the digital fonts.

All of the features mentioned above, plus the slightly concave strokes
(stronger at the top and bottom), contribute to making Legitima a very
legible text type, rooted in the traditions of 17th-century Europe but
with great expressive potential for our time.

79
 LEGITIMA TYPEFACE: AN EXPERIENCE OF FOSSILS AND REVIVALS

Conclusion

The original typeface as it was printed compared to the final version of Legitima.

During the process of designing Legitima, I learned that reviving a

typeface is not so much about bringing old shapes back to life as it is
about preserving the qualities that justify its existence in today’s digital
world. Merely tracing contours could be done by a machine, but bring-
ing the spirit of a bygone age into the 21st century is inherently human,
adds value to our time and contributes to preserving a cultural heritage
that would be lost without the sensibilities of the designer. ❧

80
When Typography Speaks
Louder Than Words
BY CAROLYN KNIGHT & JESSICA GLASER ❧

Clever graphic designers love to use typography to explore the interac-

tion between the look of type and what type actually says. In communi-
cating a message, a balance has to be achieved between the visual and
the verbal aspects of a design.
Sometimes, however, designers explore the visual aspect of type to a
much greater extent than the verbal. In these cases, the visual language
does all the talking. This chapter explores when the visual elements of
typography speak louder than words.
Cal Swan, author of Language and Typography, makes this point well
when he says, “These two distinct areas often come together in practice
as there is clearly a very strong relationship between the conception of
the words as a message and their transmission in visible form.”
To avoid any misunderstanding, let’s clarify what the terms “visual
language” and “verbal language” mean. In professional graphic design,
visual language refers to the meanings created by the visual appearan-
ce of both text and image. In this chapter, the term “visual language”
refers to the character and significance created by carefully selected ty-
pography. Verbal language is the literal meaning of words, phrases and
sentences.
In this chapter, we will look at the powerful effect that typography
has in taking control of meaning. We will discuss a range of examples,
from verbal language that inspires and shapes visual treatment to visu-
al language that dominates verbal meaning. The implications of typo-
graphic choices in meaning and interpretation will also be examined.
And we will show how the same message can be presented in a number
of ways to convey and encourage a diversity of responses.
We all have different cultural backgrounds and experiences that af-
fect our perception of type one way or another. So, regardless of the de-
signer’s skill and effort, a number of uncontrollable aspects remain, in-
cluding the viewer’s perception, expectations, knowledge, experiences
and preferences. And while accounting for all such unpredictable re-
sponses to type is impossible, awareness is critical.
For starters, let’s look at an interesting piece from an ad campaign
by Greenpeace24:

24. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/po/index.html

81
 WHEN TYPOGRAPHY SPEAKS LOUDER THAN WORDS

The name style from Greenpeace’s campaign to raise awareness of the impact of defor-
estation.

In this ad, you are confronted with the familiar name style of one of the
world’s favorite chocolate bars, the Kit Kat. The type style and letter-
form proportions and certainly the color, shape and angle all create an
instantly recognizable connection with the Kit Kat brand—so much so
that you would be forgiven for seeing the name Kit Kat before reading
and taking in the actual written message. Your familiarity with the
brand is an instant draw, and appreciating the change of message
might take you a second look.

Manipulating Feelings and Reactions

The visual language established when designing with type can bring
into play not only emotions, but also physical responses. The following
examples are simple illustrations of the varied and emotive effects and
highly dominant control that can be achieved by changing the visual
language of a message, while still presenting the same verbal language.
This first of a pair of illustrations shows a single large bold word, set
in lowercase and closely kerned. The positioning in the frame makes
the word dominant and loud, and the message comes across as enthusi-
astic, friendly and confident. The person speaking is pleased to see you
and is coming towards you with a big smile on their face.

82
The second illustration contrasts dramatically with the first, despite
featuring the exact same greeting. The font, case, scale, color and posi-
tioning all suggest a considerably more distant and hesitant meeting.
In fact, you would be forgiven for thinking that the person speaking
here is not at all sure they even want to acknowledge you and would
have preferred to ignore you completely.

83
 WHEN TYPOGRAPHY SPEAKS LOUDER THAN WORDS

Reading these examples aloud helps us instantly appreciate the differ-

ent effects of visual language. If you read the first example out loud, it
would be a loud enthusiastic call that exudes genuine delight, friendli-
ness and openness. Reading aloud the second example, the exact same
word, it would be delivered in a much quieter tone, an almost hesitant
voice, lacking the assurance and delight of the first. There is an infinite
range of typographic alternatives that achieve subtle or dramatic
changes in volume and tone of voice.

Making The Most Of Visual Language

Verbal language is often used to inspire and shape design and typogra-
phy in order to get a message across, with the goal being to make the
most of the viewer’s reaction. Carefully mixing a design’s implication
with literal meaning can lead to a memorable outcome. The following
designs are great examples of the effects that can be achieved by em-
ploying verbal language that has helped to inspire a visual treatment.
Our first illustration is taken from the work of renowned American
graphic designer Herb Lubalin, who was described in a monograph
about him by Gertrude Snyder and Alan Peckolick as being “a tenacious
typographer, whose graphic concept employed copy, art and typogra-

84
phy, and he used available production methods to underline the drama
inherent in the message. Idea preceded design.”
Given the subject of this chapter, this quote is especially fitting. It
shows Lubalin as a designer who valued the combined communicative
power of language, typography and composition. The book goes on to
explain that he used production methods not just for effect but also as a
way to emphasize the meaning and message of a project. In Lubalin’s
time, these decisions would have entailed manual labor, posing greater
limitations than we face today. Finally, this quote confirms that, for
Lubalin, concept was of paramount importance and always came before
design.
One of his many entries in the Visual Graphics Corporation’s 1964
competition features a carefully selected quote by US editor and writer
Caskie Stinnett.

One of Lubalin’s many typographically expressive designs that have become iconic and
inspiring to generations of graphic designers. (Image: Peter Gabor25)

25. http://www.typogabor.com/herb-lubalin/pages/herb_lubalin_040.html

85
 WHEN TYPOGRAPHY SPEAKS LOUDER THAN WORDS

Using delicate and well-considered composition of typographic detail-

ing, Lubalin has succeeded in making an unpleasant message seem at-
tractive and pleasing. The quote states “A diplomat is a person who can
tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the
trip.” The focal point of this statement, being told to “go to hell,” is
shown in an elaborate and elegant calligraphic form, enabling this
mildly offensive statement to be mistaken for something that could be
looked forward to with great anticipation at first sight.
The work of hand-lettering designer Alison Carmichael26 provides a
range of current examples that beautifully illustrate the powerful effect
of typography when it takes control of meaning. One such design is her
award-winning self-promotional ad for the Creative Circle.
Carmichael’s hand-lettering is engraved and inked in an elaborate
style on the lid of an old school desk. At first sight, we seem to be look-
ing at a beautiful, possibly historic, work of gothic lettering; seconds
later, reality strikes and the rather unpleasant meaning of the text be-
comes clear.

Award-winning self-promotional ad by Alison Carmichael for the Creative Circle.

26. http://alisoncarmichael.com/

86
Type Tarts is a UK initiative established to raise awareness of the plight
of workers trafficked into the sex industry. Contributing designers are
asked to send type-oriented “Tart cards” for exhibition. Many London
prostitutes advertise their services by displaying promotional cards in
phone boxes. Even in the age of the Internet and mobile phones and in
the face of police crackdowns, these cards have achieved a cult follow-
ing, being highly praised and collected as art.
Both examples below use expressive typefaces and type manipula-
tion to visually reinforce the meanings of the provocative text. In the
context of the campaign, figuring out the meaning of the cards is easy
enough.

“Nice and Tight” by Duncan Bancroft

87
 WHEN TYPOGRAPHY SPEAKS LOUDER THAN WORDS

“Big and Bouncy” by Peter Fletcher

Another stunning example of the visual language of type is by Ameri-

can designer Jason Munn27, well known for his highly acclaimed music
posters. This example for Liars is mainly typographic, with sections of
each letter cleverly removed so that the viewer doesn’t get the full pic-
ture. What is the truth? The choice of typeface is also significant; its ex-
treme contrasts of thick and thin strokes point to the contrast between
truth and lies.

27. http://jasonmunn.com/posters.php

88
 Jason Munn’s poster for the US band Liars

The designs above use type to reinforce the meaning of their state-
ments. Meanwhile, the British Battleaxe Collection’s visuals for a pro-
posed range of type-based tea towels feature quotes from strong UK fe-
male comedy characters. These designs are doing something slightly
different; type is used primarily to reinforce the agenda and assertive
tone of the speakers.

89
 WHEN TYPOGRAPHY SPEAKS LOUDER THAN WORDS

British Battleaxe typographic tea towel design, inspired by the voice of the lead character
in the BBC sitcom Keeping Up Appearances. (Credit: Bright Pink Communication De-
sign)

The example above features a quote from the BBC sitcom Keeping Up
Appearances28. The words themselves are spoken by the program’s
main character —the eccentric, social-climbing and bossy Hyacinth
Bucket, a lady in her 60s with grand aspirations. Typographically, the
letterforms have been selected and grouped to emphasize the desires of
the character. The words “I want” and “my” stand out because of a dra-
matic change of scale. “Superiors” is emphasized with capital letters,

28. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_appearances

90
whereas “your” is reduced in size and given lowercase letters, thus
downgrading the importance of whom she is talking to, in keeping
with the character’s bossy nature and tone of voice when speaking to
her milkman.
In this design, the typeface has been dictated by the character’s tone
of voice. The serif typeface with its stylish italics and capital letters cap-
tures the meaning and cultural context of this statement from a
“woman of a certain age.”
Typography is used to communicate tone of voice, personality, age,
gender and mood, and it can be easily manipulated. If, instead of this
serif font that so successfully represents this woman’s personality, we
used a slab serif, suddenly the character changes, as does the emotional
impact of the statement. Judging simply by the font, the narrator is no
longer definitively female; she is no longer in their mid-60s, and her
mood is not merely pompous, but could be described as verging on an-
gry. It’s a great example of how quickly the tone can shift with a simple
change of typeface.

91
 WHEN TYPOGRAPHY SPEAKS LOUDER THAN WORDS

A different typographic treatment of this tea towel clearly manipulates the tone of voice
and possibly even changes the gender of the speaker. (Credit: Bright Pink Communica-
tion Design)

The Power Of Typography Cannot Be

Underestimated
All the examples discussed in this chapter demonstrate that typograph-
ic treatment works alongside verbal language to create, enhance and al-
ter meaning. While the aesthetic value of design is always important,

92
 the significance of type in influencing meaning should not be underes-
timated.
The role — and, in fact, the obligation —of the designer in establish-
ing a tone that adds meaning to the verbal message is a matter of regu-
lar debate. Many graphic designers and academics argue that the de-
signer has a responsibility to add “flavor” to their work, not only help-
ing to convey and enhance meaning, but also making the message en-
joyable and encouraging to “read” and also memorable.

FURTHER RESOURCES

• The Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography29

• Herb Lubalin Archive at Cooper Union30, Flickr

• Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design31, Gunther Kress and Theo
van Leeuwen.

A big “thank you” to our typography editor, Alexander Charchar32, for preparing
this chapter. ❧

29. http://lubalincenter.cooper.edu/
30. http://www.flickr.com/photos/justinthomaskay/sets/72157619656156152/
31. http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Images-Grammar-Visual-Design/dp/0415319153/
32. http://retinart.net/

93
 WEIRD AND WONDERFUL, YET STILL ILLEGIBLE

Weird And Wonderful, Yet

Still Illegible
BY ALASTAIR JOHNSTON ❧

First a question (or perhaps a Freudian jab at your subconscious): What

does this shape represent?

Could it be a trowel, a duck, an ornamental motif, or a seed-pod? I

know, Aladdin’s Lamp! What if I told you it was an alphabetic charac-
ter? What alphabet would you assign to it? Cham? Telugu? Perhaps it
has the cursive quality of South Asian letterforms, created on bamboo
strips (or palm leaves) and written with the pen held in one’s fist…
doesn’t it?
It has been said that “we read best what we read most”. This quote
was used as a type specimen in Emigre magazine in the late 1980′s by
Zuzana Licko. It was written in defense of her typefaces, whose ele-
mental shapes — designed with the strictures of the early HP laser
printer in mind — challenged the commonly held notions of what made
typefaces legible.
The paradigm shift — wrought by the personal computer, Postscript
and desktop publishing — should have had a massive impact on the
shapes of our typographic characters, just as the advances of the World
Wide Web further changed the way we viewed words (even though let-
terforms change at the pace of the most conservative reader). Thus, rad-
ical innovations like Kurt Schwitters’ Systemschrift, (a phoenetic alpha-
bet from 1927), are doomed to fail.
Our writing, which is derived from either Roman or Gothic forms
(and sometimes both), is historic and non-systematic, said Schwitters.
His “optophoenetic” approach was to make the shapes of the letters
more accurately reflect how they sounded. But in order for it to work,
massive re-education would be required.

94
 Kurt Schwitters’ “Systemschrift”, an attempt at developing a phoenetic alphabet.

Licko was paraphrasing Sir Cyril Burt who wrote, “almost everyone
reads most easily matter set up in the style and size to which he has be-
come habituated.” (A Psychological Study of Typography, Cambridge, 1959,
p. 18). So we do not necessarily respond to “beautiful” type. You may
find Centaur elegant, but others will find the spiky serifs distracting.
For this reason, rather dull typefaces (like Times Roman), come to dom-
inate our graphic landscape. My purpose here is to examine some failed
attempts at creating economy, or furthering the cause of legibility.

Is Blackletter Unreadable?
For hundreds of years English was written and read in blackletter. To-
day we struggle with such works, such as in the piece below printed by
Richard Faques at the “Sign of the Maiden’s Head” (St Paul’s Church-
yard, London, 1530). The Roman character gradually supplanted black-
letter in the 17th century. It was referred to by the English printers as
White Letter, due to the lighter massed effect on the page. In the 19th
century, during the period known as the Gothic Revival, blackletter was
reintroduced as a novelty in English printing.

95
 WEIRD AND WONDERFUL, YET STILL ILLEGIBLE

Our modern Roman alphabet is a hybrid reflecting the handwriting

from two periods in the development of Roman letters. It combines the
Capitalis Quadratus of 1st century Roman inscriptional lettering — which
are our “capital” letters — with their devolved state as manifested in the
11th century in the monasteries (that had flourished in France under
Emperor Charlemagne). These became our minuscules, or lower-case
letters.
Charlemagne himself desired to learn to read and write, but said
that “a hand accustomed to the sword could only form the simplest
shapes.” By this time, war with the Arabs had cut off the supply of
reeds, but relief was on the way with the introduction of papermaking
(cheaper and more amenable to writing than parchment was), and
goose or crow quills were substituted for reeds. These, in turn, gave
way to steel pens, introduced in the 18th century (and popularized in
the 1830′s), which also had a strong impact on the way we read and
wrote.
Copperplate scripts, learned from writing manuals, featured steeper
angles and added virtuoso flourishing. Handwriting, just like music,
was considered a useful art suitable for instructing young ladies.

96
Script type based on the hand of its cutter, Robert Granjon— a wonderful example of the
everyday handwriting of 16th century Protestant Europe.

As letterforms were introduced by scribes, they were soon emulated by

the founders of type. In 1557, French punch-cutter Robert Granjon cut a
typeface based on his own handwriting, hoping to supplant the popu-
larity of italics (first introduced by Aldus in a 1501 Virgil), which he him-
self had made widespread. His Gothic script (today called Civilité, after
the children’s conduct book in which it was used) unfortunately did not
catch on, although it accurately reflected the everyday handwriting in
Protestant Europe at the time.
The problem for Granjon was printers were equipped with blacklet-
ter (batârde) for vernacular works, Roman type for works in Latin, and if
they wanted variety, (say for poetry), they used italic. Beautiful as
Granjon’s vernacular script is, it was not essential. On top of this, the
extra sorts (30 ligatures, 24 alternates for terminal letters, etc.) made it
difficult for typesetters. But the introduction to Gautier de Châtillon’s
Ten Books of Alexandreidos (Lyon, 1558) lauds the type:

“The novelty and strangeness of these letters will certainly surprise the
reader, but I dare say he will be as much delighted by their cleanness
and elegance. In point of beauty and legibility these letters are not out-
done by others, and they are familiar to us because they imitate the
written hand. What is printed looks like writing, and it may be hard
to tell the pages printed with type.”

— Translated by Harry Carter, in Carter & H. D. L. Vervliet, Civilité

Type, Oxford, 1966, p. 16.

97
 WEIRD AND WONDERFUL, YET STILL ILLEGIBLE

As If Written By Hand
Roman letterforms evolve slowly, gradually reflecting the medium in
which they are written. The Rustic letterforms of the ancient Romans,
often written with a stylus on a wax tablet, were fluid and more con-
densed than the capitalis quadratus, but less cursive than letters written
in ink with a reed (on parchment or papyrus). In 1741, Joseph Manni, a
Florentine printer (and the first of our misguided visionaries) produced
a unique edition of Virgil based on a manuscript of the poems (Codex
antiquissimus) found in the Medici Laurentian library.
With an eye on retro-style, he cut new versions of “A”, “U” and “Y”,
and sorted them with his Roman capitals to create a likeness of the
original —sacrificing detail, but giving an overall approximation of the
look of this ancient manuscript. He refers to them on the title-page as
“Typis descriptus”, or descriptive types. Daniel Berkeley Updike had
said of it: “The work displays that amazing audacity at arriving at a
striking effect, notwithstanding inaccurate details and economy of
method, which was typical of Italian printing of the time.” (Printing
Types, Harvard, 1937, vol 1, p. 171)

98
Florentine printer Manni cut new versions of A, U & Y to evoke a 1st century manuscript.

A later typographic copy of a manuscript form was made perhaps by

Joseph Jackson, a former apprentice at the celebrated Caslon foundry
whose work was acquired by them after his death. Talbot Baines Reed’s
assessment of this script type is that it “is of no particular merit though
faithfully enough rendering the contemporary clerkish hand.” (A Histo-
ry of the Old English Letter Foundries, 1952 Edition, Faber & Faber, p.
245). The type had to be heavily kerned (which caused frequent break-
age, as it was cast on angular bodies) might work in some contexts,
such as a circular letter, or brief documents intended to look hand-writ-
ten.
But it certainly did not work for continuous text. Nevertheless, that
was how it was put to use by J. P. Cooke, a London printer, in his edition
of Mary Potter’s Poetry of Nature (1789). The poems are in fact prose re-
workings from the legendary Highland Bard Ossian, hailed as “The
Scottish Homer”, but who was actually a fabrication of the poet James
MacPherson. Cooke added titles in blackletter capitals to really con-
found his readers.
The decorative qualities of the blackletter caps work well individual-
ly with the plainer lowercase letters, but when grouped together, all-cap
titles in blackletter become a tangle of confusion. The copperplate
script, however, was popular with founders (less so with printers, be-
cause of the breakage) and was still being manufactured up until the
mid-19th century.

99
 WEIRD AND WONDERFUL, YET STILL ILLEGIBLE

Troublesome script typeface in use in 1789: as it had to be heavily kerned this led to fre-
quent breakage.

100
So The Blind Can Read
Before Louis Braille (1829) there were several attempts to devise a raised
letterform to teach the blind to read. Valentin Haüy met Baroness Von
Paradis in 1780 and “was surprised to find in her apartments several
contrivances for the instruction of the blind; for instance, embroidered
maps, and a pocket printing apparatus.” (Charles Timperley’s Encyclope-
dia of Literary & Typographical Anecdote, London, Henry G. Bohn, 1842, p.
751).
Haüy’s Essai sur l’Education des Aveugles (Paris, 1786) was a strange ef-
fort. Printed by Clousier, printer to Louis XVI (the last King of France),
the book was typeset by blind children as part of Haüy’s plan to allow
them to be a useful part of society, by having them set and print work
for themselves to read. His fundamental blunder was he approached
the problem from the angle of a sighted person, assuming that conven-
tional alphabets offered the best hope.

The highly decorative, non-kerning, upright script form he chose (pop-

ular in France at the time) would impede even the nimblest reading fin-
gers. In the printed version the letter-spacing and swash cap headers al-
so would slow you down. One minor benefit to the compositors was
that since the work was produced by embossing, the young typesetters
worked with right-reading types.

TWO MORE CLUES

OK, remember our quiz? Here are two more clues… what are these:
Ladies’ shoes, or just squiggles?

101
 WEIRD AND WONDERFUL, YET STILL ILLEGIBLE

Attempts At Cleverness
Like Manni’s attempt, economy of method was the tool employed by
Philip Rusher, who also falls into our “misguided visionary” category.
He proposed to save space, and thereby paper, by eliminating descen-
ders, since only five letters in our alphabet — g j p q y —have them. But
he made a serious tactical error; to demonstrate his new type he chose
to reprint a popular novel, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
(Banbury, 1804). Apart from the fact that it is an unremittingly dull sto-
ry with little incident and a dim grasp of locale, most of the story is set
in Egypt — and that word, with its three descending letters in an awk-
ward huddle, pops up frequently.

Notice something missing…?

The type was later used by Rusher’s nephew in 1852. Rusher even ob-
tained a patent for “various improvements and alterations in the form
of printing types … so as to diminish the trouble and expense of print-
ing, and to render it more uniform and beautiful.” But clearly they were
anything but uniform and beautiful.

102
 The letters g, y and p are found in an awkward huddle.

An early, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, study of legibility is James

Millington’s Are We to Read Backwards? This book was published by the
remarkable Leadenhall Press of London (1884). The press was run by
Andrew W. Tuer, an antiquarian who also enjoyed the look of old
books, so his typography is quite anachronistic for that time period.
However, there is a great printer’s jest in his frontispiece which
shows how books look in a railway carriage as the reader is bounced &
rattled along (The frontispiece is from Millington’s introduction to Eng-
lish as She is Spoke, published by Field & Tuer the year before—a French-
Portuguese phrase book, translated into English with a French dictio-
nary!).

A printer’s joke — the page on the left simulating the reading-on-the-train experience.

Several “improved” alphabets are shown. Plate 5 (as shown below) is

boustrophedon type, which would save eye movement in reading, but
caused brain strain as well as posed problems for typesetters when they
had to fix an error. Plate 7 (with no ascenders or descenders, to save
space), has an almost folkloric quality to it, suggesting lettering done by
amateurs.

103
 WEIRD AND WONDERFUL, YET STILL ILLEGIBLE

An attempt to reduce eye-movement resulted in more problems than it solved.

A typeface lacking ascenders & descenders creates a visual jumble.

Non-professional lettering is a common source for experimental alpha-

bets. In the 1930′s the American artist Ben Shahn was documenting The
Great Depression in the rural South for the Farm Security Administra-
tion. He adapted the primitive signs he’d photographed to create his
own distinctive letter-forms, seen in posters and dust-jacket designs.
These in turn have been digitized into the FF Folk typeface family by
Maurizio Osti in 1995 (below right).
There is a problem with the typographic adaptations of quirky letter-
ing, and that is each character is always going to look the same. When
two or three “O”s appear in close proximity, they tend to become mo-
notonous. An artist will vary letter-forms, not just to avoid predictabili-
ty, but to make pairings work better together. Even without numerals,

104
Granjon cut 138 sorts for his first Civilité type seen earlier in this chap-
ter. FF Folk has two versions for each letter, and three weights to obvi-
ate the problem.

Ben Shahn dustjacket, inspired by Southern US folk signs, and a modern typeface based
on Shahn’s lettering.

Unreadable Letters In Readable Sentences

But let’s go back to our riddle. The answer is, if you haven’t guessed al-
ready, the letters “e,” “n” and “r” in Hoyt Script.

Handwriting flourished — no pun intended —in the 19th century, before

the perfection of a new gadget called the typewriter (1873). And people
experimented with different nibs, including one called the stub-pen,
whose effect was as blunt as it sounds. Simultaneously, a major change
was underway in the production of typefaces. Having learned how to
grow matrices from a cast character or piece of type (to pirate type-
faces), the ingenious Americans soon discovered that instead of cutting
steel punches, they could simply carve a character out of a piece of soft
type-metal.
This created an electrotype matrix, taking hours out of the laborious
process. Typeface production accelerated, and there would be a boom in
the 1880′s for the introduction of new types. James West adapted these

105
 WEIRD AND WONDERFUL, YET STILL ILLEGIBLE

optimized methods of production. He worked for many founders in his

career, including Miller & Richard (in his native Edinburgh), Caslon and
Figgins (in London), and George Bruce (in New York). In the 1880′s he
worked for the Cleveland typefoundry and cut many scripts with intri-
cate connecting strokes for them, beginning with Carpenter Script,
based on the handwriting of a “Mr. Carpenter” (who worked for Robert
Hoe & Company, the press manufacturer).

Released in 1883, the letters of Hoyt Script are individually unreadable, but when
brought together are lively and overflowing with personality.

This script was so popular that Cleveland induced West to cut more
scripts, and Hoyt Script was patented in February, 1883. It’s seen here
above in Cleveland’s 1883 specimen book, where as you perhaps can

106
see, it’s recommended as “an excellent representation of stub-pen writ-
ing.” Individually the characters are completely unreadable, but en
masse, they create a unique and lively typeface, overflowing with per-
sonality.
Ideal for selling ladies’ shoes, Aladdin’s lamps, or whatever you fan-
cy.

Note: Granjon, Manni, Potter, Haüy & Rusher books are reproduced courtesy of
the Robert Grabhorn Collection on the History of Printing & Development of the
Book at San Francisco Public Library. All other images from the author himself.

A big “thank you” to our typography editor, Alexander Charchar33, for preparing
this chapter. ❧

33. http://retinart.net/

107
 FONT WARS: A STORY ON RIVALRY BETWEEN TYPE FOUNDRIES

Font Wars: A Story On

Rivalry Between Type
Foundries
BY SIMON LOXLEY ❧

I had thought of terms like “intellectual property” or “intellectual theft”

as being of fairly recent provenance, so my eye was caught by the lat-
ter’s use in a headline of a 1930 edition of the American trade journal
The American Printer.
The article it fronted proved to be equally intriguing, a response by
the president of American Type Founders to a June 1929 article in the
German journal Gebrauchsgraphik by the designer Rudolf Koch calling
ATF a “highway robber of German intellectual property”. The issue was
a typeface marketed by ATF earlier in 1929 called Rivoli. Koch and the
German typefoundry Klingspor asserted that Rivoli was no more than a
copy of Koch’s 1922 design Koch Antiqua, also later known as Locarno,
and released in America as Eve. Klingspor had already taken legal ac-
tion for piracy against the Viennese foundry Karl Brendler und Sohne
for their lookalike Radio Antiqua, but with no success.

Wyss: Part of the sample of Wyss’ script offered by ATF to back their claim that Koch An-
tiqua was not its designer’s intellectual property. Neither of the two styles of ‘g’ resemble
Koch’s however—to take just one example.

108
 Koch Antiqua: Koch Antiqua, and uppercase letters of the italic.

Klingspor lost that case, argued ATF, because far from Koch Antiqua be-
ing Koch’s or German intellectual property, both it and the Austrian
face were based on the Lombardic penmanship of the Swiss calligraph-
er Urbanus Wyss, in particular from his 1549 book Libellus Valde Doctus.
Klingspor could not claim theft of a design that was not theirs to begin
with.
Whatever the truth of this, the most striking part of ATF’s broadside
was their free admission that the similarity between Rivoli and Koch
Antiqua/Eve, far from being accidental, was quite deliberate, Rivoli hav-
ing been created and released both as a spoiler for the popular Eve but
also as a “reprisal” face. Klingspor was partially owned by Stempel,
whose 1925 catalogue contained what ATF claimed were “confessedly”
fourteen type series of American origin, including what they deemed
pirated versions of their own designs.

109
 FONT WARS: A STORY ON RIVALRY BETWEEN TYPE FOUNDRIES

110
Comparison: ATF’s comparison of the faces which accompanied their article, but not the
truth, says David Pankow. What purported to be Wyss’ script was in fact Brendler and
Sohne’s Radio Antiqua, printed heavily onto soft paper.

The ATF/Koch/Stempel “face-off” (for the full story see David Pankow,
“A face by any other name is still my face: a tale of type piracy” Printing
History 37, New York, 1998) was part of a savage turf war, fought by a
company to defend its commercial position with arguably, only a
decade after a world war, some national antagonism thrown in. ATF re-
mained relatively conservative in its designs, whereas on their own
doorstep the New York-based Continental Typefounders’ Association
was importing type in which was enshrined the latest European stylis-
tic developments. The acerbity of the language on both sides is unre-
strained, while exacerbated by ATF’s suspicions that Continental were
involved too, stoking the fires of the argument.
Type design is a business that has long been bedevilled by piracy
and plagiarism, conscious or unconscious, licensing issues and scant or
no legal protection for intellectual property. Some of the problems stem
from the nature of the craft itself. Although in theory the number of
ways you can position the points of say, a capital A, are myriad, the de-
mands of legibility, style and fashion radically reduce the options, and
alphabet designs are all using the same raw material.
As designer Dave Farey has described himself, facetiously but with
an undercurrent of truth: “Nothing I have done is original, it’s all based
on the 26 letters of the alphabet and the Arabic numerals.” Add to this
revivals and redrawings of classic faces, and similarities are unavoid-
able. Type design is an art that is constantly echoing and alluding. Most
people working in the graphic arts are, in a big part of their design psy-
che, fans. We will probably have been inspired to get started in the first
place by seeing other people’s work that we absolutely love. It’s un-
avoidable that some of that DNA will crop up or be used consciously in
our own work. In the area of type revivals you can at least credit your
source in the type name; as designer Nick Shinn says on Typophile34,
“plagiarism means copying without recognition of the source.”
In today’s digital environment, do any of the attitudes and practices
that marked the ATF quarrel persist? I asked Phil Garnham of London’s
Fontsmith if he regarded other font companies as rivals:

“I think there is definitely a healthy and friendly rivalry between to-

day’s independent digital foundries. Over the past few years, as de-

34. http://typophile.com/node/70238

111
 FONT WARS: A STORY ON RIVALRY BETWEEN TYPE FOUNDRIES

signers have become more aware of the power of type in branding,

particularly the possibilities of bespoke type and with the boom in
type design education at Reading University and Type Media at the
Hague, fresh competition is popping up on a monthly basis, which is a
great thing for type design. It keeps us all on our toes and looking for
new possibilities within our beloved alphabets.”

And spoilers? Phil feels the tactic might still be out there, but for his
own part, like musicians who consciously don’t listen to other people’s
music when writing and recording, he tries not to look too much at oth-
er work: “I think that it keeps me detached from other people’s ideas,
and allows me to pursue mine, free from any subconscious involve-
ment.”
But even then you can find that what you’ve done looks like some-
thing else: “Arguably, I think there are many designers tripping up in
this way, even with the best intentions. I’ve been in this awkward posi-
tion myself. You have to explore new proportions and alternative letter-
forms so you can bring something new to the market.”

Square leg —Horatio with its restyled ‘R’ in the Letraset catalogue, available in three
weights.

112
How close have people steered, consciously? Dave Farey recalls from
his time working for Letraset how, among one selection of faces pre-
sented to the committee for inclusion in the dry transfer giant’s range
was Harry, a design owned by the Visual Graphics Corporation. The
committee loved it, but unfortunately permission hadn’t yet been ob-
tained, and VGC refused. So Letraset produced Horatio: “I think the on-
ly thing we changed was the leg of the uppercase R,” Dave recalls,
adding candidly, “Ours was worse.”

Heldustry: From the 1983 Compugraphic Type catalogue.

Clues could even be given in the font names —or not. Customers re-
questing Helvetica of 1980s photosetting companies which used the
Compugraphic type library might be told: “We don’t have Helvetica but
we do have Heldustry” — which looked, well, similar. The catalogue
which digital company Bitstream produced at the start of the 1990s was
helpful to customers unable to find familiar names: their Staccato 222,
for instance, was the “Bitstream version of Mistral”, “Lapidary 333 is the
Bitstream version of Perpetua”, Venetian 301 the “Bitstream version of
Centaur”.

Staccato: From the Bitstream catalogue, early 1990s.

113
 FONT WARS: A STORY ON RIVALRY BETWEEN TYPE FOUNDRIES

Some More “Face-Offs”

MEMPHIS AND STYMIE

Memphis: Memphis seen here in extra bold weight, and Stymie Bold.

1931 saw ATF squaring up to Stempel again, countering their Memphis

slab serif with Stymie, the name being golf-talk for blocking your oppo-
nent’s line of play. ATF’s prolific Morris Fuller Benton based Stymie on
his own Rockwell Antique, basically a repackaging of Litho Antique,
whose owner the Inland Type Foundry had been taken over by ATF. Ac-
cording to Patricia Cost in her book The Bentons, Monotype then copied
Rockwell Antique and called it, confusingly, Stymie Bold.

JACNO AND BANCO

Rather than stealing the design, Excoffon exercised squatter’s rights in the territo-
ry — with style (above). The names were near anagrams, probably no coincidence.

French type legend Roger Excoffon’s employers, Fonderie Olive, were

such rivals with Parisian foundry Deberny and Peignot that Excoffon
examined with a magnifying glass a picture of their designer Marcel
Jacno at work on his new self-named type. “Then I rapidly made some

114
sketches for a few letters in a commercial type, not identical, but of the
same family… The rest is a success story. Banco was used throughout
the world… It’s the most shameful thing I ever did in my career.” (From
Roger Excoffon et la Fonderie Olive, Sandra Chamaret, Julien Gineste and
Sébastien Morlighem, Ypsilon Editeur, Paris, 2010.)

STARLING BURGESS VS. STANLEY MORISON

A comparison of Starling Burgess’ design (Lanston no.54) and Stanley Morison and Vic-
tor Lardent’s work on Times, as it appeared in Printing History 31/32 (1994).

According to a 1994 article by Mike Parker which appeared in Printing

History, Times New Roman was an extremely close reproduction of a
typeface designed years earlier by maverick genius boat and car design-
er Starling Burgess, which lay unpaid for and abandoned at Lanston
Monotype until the design of the new face for The Times newspaper be-
came problematic. Although Morison had the reputation among some
for being a slippery operator, the story as presented seems hard to cred-
it. Font Bureau offer a Mike Parker design called Starling.

115
 FONT WARS: A STORY ON RIVALRY BETWEEN TYPE FOUNDRIES

FUTURA AND TWENTIETH CENTURY

No cigar, but close, Twentieth Century (above), Lanston Monotype’s response to Futura
(below).

Buffalo, NY-based foundry P22 have in their Lanston Type Company

collection Twentieth Century, “Monotype’s answer to Futura”. They de-
scribe Sol Hess’ redrawing as “close”; as an attractive optional extra
they have included digital recreations of some of Paul Renner’s original
experimental characters for Futura.

COMIC SANS AND CHALKBOARD

Comic and Chalkboard: Both ideal for warning notices.

116
Apple’s OS X doesn’t supply you with the world’s favourite, Comic Sans,
but you do get Chalkboard, which inhabits pretty much the same ter-
rain.

HELVETICA AND ARIAL

Hard to actually love perhaps, but Arial has certainly been well used, if only by default
setting.

Arial, designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, seems

to attract a certain amount of online ill-feeling in “font hate” blogs
these days on the grounds of being Microsoft’s Helvetica lookalike.

Does It Really Matter?

For the user, does any of this matter? If you like a font and it fits your
purpose, then its provenance is irrelevant. And if it’s a new or recent de-
sign, then it comes with little or no backstory. But it’s always useful in
terms of design rationale to investigate the background to your choice.
Who designed it? When, and for whom— for a specific project in the
first instance or for a company? If for a particular project, would those
associations jar with how you’re planning to use it now, and does that
matter? If it was designed originally for Monotype, is the one you’re
planning to buy a Monotype font, or from someone else? What do
Monotype offer as their version, and how does it compare? Stempel
Garamond versus Simoncini Garamond, or Garamont?

117
 FONT WARS: A STORY ON RIVALRY BETWEEN TYPE FOUNDRIES

Koch Rivoli: Channelling the spirit of Rudolf Koch and Willard T Sniffin.

And how has history served those original battling typefaces? Sebastian
Carter in Twentieth Century Type Designers says of Koch Antiqua: “One of
the most successful advertising faces of the inter-war period, still often
used to suggest the vanishing luxury of ocean liners.” Though some of
that usage might have been in reality Rivoli, Koch’s reputation as a type
designer endures.
As does the name Rivoli, although its creator or draughtsman, the
magnificently-named Willard T Sniffin, is less remembered. But urban-
fonts.com for one offers as a free font Koch Rivoli (a pairing of names
that would have the German designer spinning in the proverbial grave),
an uppercase-only design that takes inspiration from the thick-thin
double stroke of Koch’s italic uppercase — and Rivoli’s. ❧

118
Hands-On Experience: The
Rehabilitation Of The
Script
BY SIMON LOXLEY ❧

Serifs, sans serifs and… scripts. In theory not a bad typographic palette
to play with, but when it comes to practice, the options are always far
fewer.
One member of that stylistic trio could never quite punch its weight.
But over the last few years we have seen something of a rebirth and re-
vitalization of scripts, a category that once represented a care home for
the typographically underemployed. But why has this come about, and
why was one needed in the first place?
The problem with scripts was that although they were supposed to
offer a freer, natural, handwritten style of lettering, when you tried to
use them, most turned out to be more rigid and constricting than sans
serifs and serifs. There was little room for any play with letterspacing,
because the characters needed to connect. Uppercase letters could be
equivocal, to put it mildly, in terms of legibility.
Although one of their traditional default applications was wedding
invitations, even there you could run into problems. If the RSVP ad-
dress included a postal code composed of capital letters and numbers
the visual effect was clumsy at best, unreadable at worst. There was of-
ten a density of strokes in the x-height area that impeded legibility, an
angle that always seemed to dog scripts; like handwriting itself, certain
words could look ambiguous, or not readily identifiable. If you pushed
nagging doubts to one side and persevered in your decision to use a
script on aesthetic grounds— just because it looked great or felt
right— it would frequently be shot down by client or editor for lack of
clarity.
For a typeface this is a considerable disadvantage; as designers we
can sometimes be forgiving, but others can be brutally frank. Jan Tschi-
chold, in his 1946 book An Illustrated History of Writing and Lettering, pro-
vides a possible explanation as to why this state of affairs came about,
blaming eighteenth century “seductive engraved copy-books”, where a
florid over-decorative style had emerged which owed little to genuine
penmanship. What would be called the copperplate style, and commer-
cial script, was a further distortion of this, using “regular alternation of
fine and thick strokes [to disguise] the unnatural writing technique”.

119
 HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE: THE REHABILITATION OF THE SCRIPT

Where it went wrong, according to Tschichold, the abandonment of a natural writing

style in favour of decoration.

There was also a stylistic handicap. R.S. Hutchings, in A Manual of Script

Typefaces (1965) says: “Until well into the 1930s it was exceptional for
even a well-stocked composing room to hold more than a single script
series, and their use was restricted almost exclusively to the circum-
scribed field of professional and social stationery”. To test this out I
took a look at my copy of the beautiful A Book of Typefaces produced by
printers WS Cowell of Ipswich, England in 1952.
In their main display of faces is a solitary script, Marina, a 1936 de-
sign from Stephenson Blake, the standard copperplate style that would
have been hauled out if someone came in and wanted some wedding
invitations printed. It’s this kind of lifeless, off-the-peg sophistication
to which designer Michael Bierut alludes in Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica
film, when talking of corporate makeovers of the 1960s; clients would
have “some letterhead that would say ‘Amalgamated Widget’ on the top
and some goofy… maybe a script typeface … the nuptial script and the
ivory paper.”

120
Marina in action; although Cowell’s catalogue features some attractive pages of type in
action, this is probably the least confident example. The fault of the type?

121
 HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE: THE REHABILITATION OF THE SCRIPT

Scripts were almost a default headline style for American ads of the forties and fifties, a
“visual bad habit that was endemic in those days,” says Michael Bierut. But some have
since found them inspirational.

Later, more informal styles emerged, based on letters written with a

brush, or contemporary handwriting. Several have become standards
on computer operating systems; Brush Script, a 1940s American Type
Founders advertising face by Robert E Smith, and the celebrated Mis-
tral of Roger Excoffon, (1953) a handwriting-style script that belonged,
says Julien Gineste in Roger Excoffon et la Fonderie Olive, “to the ‘civiliza-
tion’ of the ballpoint pen”.
A more recent addition to the lineup has been Hermann Zapf’s mag-
isterial Zapfino (1998). But these three all present problems. Think of
the logo of world-conquering 1980s Australian soap Neighbours to get

122
an aesthetic reading on Brush Script. Excoffon’s designs are wonderful,
but outside of France, carry too much aesthetic baggage. They seem
more like works of art than typographic workhorses. Zapfino is a cathe-
dral; you want to fall to your knees before the power of its sweeping as-
cenders and descenders, but it feels like a script that no mortal hand
could actually have written. Just how or where do you use it?

Everybody needs good ones —scripts that is. Brush Script was used for the logo of Kylie’s
springboard.

Roger Excoffon overcame the physical limitations of metal type while moving diametri-
cally away from the rising Swiss aesthetic.

123
 HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE: THE REHABILITATION OF THE SCRIPT

Cynical writer proved wrong; the designer of this label thought Zapfino was just the
thing.

Fortunately the choice has broadened considerably. With it a lot of the

old legibility issues seem to have disappeared, surely a result of faces
being properly designed and considered for a purpose rather than being
bastardized historical hand-me-downs. Nick Cooke35 has recently re-
leased Rollerscript36, described in MyFonts” March 2012 Creative Charac-
ters37 newsletter as “the most realistic script face on the market”. Roller-
script is based on multiple versions of characters written in his own
hand using a Pentel roller pen. I wondered if he thought there was a
script renaissance, and what the reasons were:

“There has been a huge rise of script/handwriting fonts over the past
couple of years and it’s definitely to do with more type designers ex-
ploring the features of OpenType and the complexities of program-
ming. Designers are finally becoming aware of and are embracing
OpenType technology and its possibilities for more expressive type us-

35. http://www.g-type.com/
36. http://www.g-type.com/blog/new-rollerscript-fonts-released/
37. http://www.myfonts.com/newsletters/cc/201203.html

124
 age, now that most programs are OT savvy, even the dreaded— by
me— MS Word.”

Nick Cooke’s latest comes in Rough and Smooth versions, seen here. Described as a “mod-
ern sister” to his Olicana, it has over 100 ligatures.

Developments in software are clearly a factor then, but maybe another

is that different people are moving into the field. Nick continues:

“I noticed that when I released an earlier script, Olicana, in 2007 there

were many more purchases from the USA than in Britain. I think
scripts have been popular over there a lot longer than here. Of course
there are a lot of very poor fonts but there are also many more fantas-
tic new ones available from the likes of Alejandro Paul at Sudtipos,
Laura Worthington and Emily Lime. This seems to be an area which
attracts more women designers, which is a good thing. Type design
has for too long been pretty much a male preserve.”

You can probably see more connecting and brush scripts in one place at
the site of Argentinian collective Sudtipos38 than anywhere else, or at
any point in history. This struck me as possibly a cultural influence,
and brought to mind the beautiful individualistic script lettering you
can often see on shop fascias in Spain. But assumptions can be risky. In
Creative Characters: the MyFonts interviews, volume 139, Alejandro Paul says
that Argentinian graphics are broadly European modernist in flavour,
outside of packaging, his own background. Much of his inspiration
comes from early twentieth century American scripts. Which brings us
back to one of Nick Cooke’s observations. It’s a field in which Buffalo
NY-based P2240 are strong. They offer as one option fonts based on the
handwriting of artists: Cézanne, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Rodin, Mon-
et and Gauguin. Christina Torre’s Dearest41 is an elegant addition to
this field, although using an anonymous nineteenth century century as

38. http://sudtipos.com/home
39. http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Characters-Interviews-Font-Designers/dp/
9063692242
40. http://www.p22.com/
41. http://www.p22.com/ihof/dearest.html

125
 HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE: THE REHABILITATION OF THE SCRIPT

its source. But that twentieth century advertising feel is strongly repre-
sented too: Rob Leuschke’s Corinthia42 and Michael Clark’s Sneaky43
are two examples. Richard Kegler’s Casual Script44 is a “free-flowing
thin brush style evocative of vintage product advertisements and pack-
aging lettering”.

Alejandro Paul’s Buffet Script was based on the calligraphy of American signwriter Alf
Becker. (image from Creative Characters: the MyFonts interviews, vol 1).

P22 Gauguin, based on the artist’s own handwriting.

42. http://www.p22.com/ihof/corinthia.html
43. http://www.p22.com/ihof/sneakypro.html
44. http://www.p22.com/ihof/casualscript.html

126
 P22 Casual – look at the ad picture above, and the source of inspiration is fairly clear.

Nick also picks up on a significant wider trend, the desire for the hand-
made: “I think designers nowadays are looking for a personal touch and
faux handwriting is just part of that ‘homemade aesthetic’ trend”. This
is due partly to the turning of fashion’s wheel. During the 1990s the
complete dominance of computer-generated design made other meth-
ods look obsolete. It was a period in which photography dominated, to
the point that Rick Poynor could write in Eye in 1993 that “the effect of
the continuing preference for photography… is to make most design
based on illustration look decidedly old hat”.
Photography could be easily manipulated in Photoshop and — cer-
tainly in the UK — we saw the blanket dominance of the “fuzzy-photo”
school of book cover design. Why spend money commissioning an il-
lustration when you could use a stock photo, or even take one yourself?
Crop in very close or take your subject at a great distance and then, cru-
cially, blur to add mystery, obscure awkward details and cover up any
technical shortcomings in the picture. But eventually people tire of pro-
duction line design that anyone can do, and turn again to the personal
and the handcrafted. The latter also chimes with a post-global economic
meltdown, do-it-yourself aesthetic that has also seen a rise in populari-
ty of traditional homemaking crafts previously considered moribund,
such as sewing and knitting.
But — and here I risk making myself very unpopular —I think there’s
another contributing factor to the rise of the script. It may be sublimal,
but significant — the ubiquity of Comic Sans. Although it is not a script
in the sense that the letterforms connect, consider its source of inspira-
tion. The lettering in the speech balloons of comic books are hand-
drawn, and often have a slight calligraphic incline to them. It is this
characteristic that drew enough people to use it in its early years as a
bundled font for Windows 95 for it to reach a tipping point of familiari-
ty to over-familiarity. As its creator Vincent Connare has said: “People
like it because it isn’t the kind of font that they would use to type a seri-
ous letter.” Although you might complain that that is exactly what a lot
of people have been doing with it for years, his point is an important

127
 HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE: THE REHABILITATION OF THE SCRIPT

one. Comic Sans has had an impact on our feel for type, whether we
like it or not, and part of that effect has been a new wave of lively, fun,
informal scripts, definitely not the kinds that you would use for your
society wedding invites. Now I’m getting out of here before you start
looking around for something to throw. ❧

128
About The Authors
Alastair Johnston
Alastair Johnston is a scholar, teacher and letterpress printer. He is the
author of “Transitional faces,” a forthcoming biography of Richard
Austin, cutter of the Bell and Scotch Roman types and his son Richard
T. Austin, a wood engraver. He is co-editor of William E. Loy’s
“Nineteenth-century American designers & engravers of type,” and
most recently has produced “Typographical tourists: tales of the tramp
printer,” from his Poltroon Press based in Berkeley, California.

Anne Brady
Anne Brady MPhil, MISTD, MIDI is Creative Director and founder of
Vermillion Design (Design Consultancy) & Associated Editions (Pub-
lishing House) in Ireland. She specialises in typographic design for
books, exhibitions and multimedia projects for a large international
client base. MPhil in Visual & Textual Studies, Trinity College Dublin,
Ireland. BA Hons in Typography & Graphic Communication, University
of Reading, England. Diploma in Design Communications with Mar-
keting, AIT and a Diploma in Decorative and Fine Arts, IPAV, Ireland.

César Puertas
César is a graphic designer graduated from the National University of
Colombia (1999) and master in type design from the Royal Academy of
Arts (KABK) in The Hague (2009). Co-founder and active member of
ADG Colombia (Colombian Association of Graphic Designers). Associ-
ate member and country delegate of ATypI. Co-organiser of the biennal
Letras Latinas 2006 and Tipos Latinos 2008. Tipos Latinos 2010 jury.
Speaker, lecturer and consultant on typography and type design.Follow
the author on Twitter45.

Carolyn Knight & Jessica Glaser

Carolyn Knight and Jessica Glaser are academics from the University of
Wolverhampton in the UK, graphic designers, and prolific design writ-
ers. Their numerous books focus on topics including the use of space in

45. http://www.twitter.com/cesarpuertas

129
 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

graphic design, mnemonics and memory devices and the understand-

ing and creation of visual hierarchy. Their latest book is the best selling
“Graphic Design Exercise Book”, published in English by RotoVision
and in Spanish by Editorial Gustavo Gili. Their company Bright Pink
Communication Design, works in such areas as healthcare, construc-
tion, education, financial services and the public sector.

Espen Brunborg
Espen Brunborg is Head of Design at Primate46, a Web agency driven
by an overwhelming passion for the web industry and a slightly unset-
tling love for monkeys, and is an advocate of content-led design, sim-
plicity and typographic principles. He writes about his design convic-
tions at 8 Gram Gorilla47 and his tweets48 are occasionally worth read-
ing.

Shoko Mugikura
Shoko Mugikura is a Japanese designer based in Berlin. Alongside
working on book design projects, she is running the type design studio
Just Another Foundry49 with Tim Ahrens. Her special interest is the his-
torical development of multi-script (Japanese and European) typogra-
phy.

Simon Loxley
Simon Loxley is a freelance graphic designer, author of Type: The Se-
cret History Of Letters and the forthcoming Printer’s Devil: The Life
And Work Of Frederic Warde. He is editor and designer of Ultrabold50,
the journal of St Bride Library, London.

46. http://primate.co.uk/
47. http://8gramgorilla.com/
48. https://twitter.com/#!/ebrunborg/
49. http://shokomugi.com/
50. http://stbride.org/friends/publications/ultrabold

130
About Smashing Magazine
Smashing Magazine51 is an online magazine dedicated to Web design-
ers and developers worldwide. Its rigorous quality control and thor-
ough editorial work has gathered a devoted community exceeding half
a million subscribers, followers and fans. Each and every published arti-
cle is carefully prepared, edited, reviewed and curated according to the
high quality standards set in Smashing Magazine’s own publishing pol-
icy52.
Smashing Magazine publishes articles on a daily basis with topics
ranging from business, visual design, typography, front-end as well as
back-end development, all the way to usability and user experience de-
sign. The magazine is — and always has been — a professional and inde-
pendent online publication neither controlled nor influenced by any
third parties, delivering content in the best interest of its readers. These
guidelines are continually revised and updated to assure that the quali-
ty of the published content is never compromised.

About Smashing Media GmbH

Smashing Media GmbH53 is one of the world’s leading online publish-
ing companies in the field of Web design. Founded in 2009 by Sven
Lennartz and Vitaly Friedman, the company’s headquarters is situated
in southern Germany, in the sunny city of Freiburg im Breisgau.
Smashing Media’s lead publication, Smashing Magazine, has gained
worldwide attention since its emergence back in 2006, and is supported
by the vast, global Smashing community and readership. Smashing
Magazine had proven to be a trustworthy online source containing
high quality articles on progressive design and coding techniques as
well as recent developments in the Web design industry.

51. http://www.smashingmagazine.com
52. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/publishing-policy/
53. http://www.smashing-media.com

131