Schlagwort: typo

ATypI Konferenz Leipzig 2000

Type, unterwegs

Dies ist die Transkription einer Kopie eines Schulhefts, in das ich für Max Bollwage die ATypI Konferenz in Leipzig protokollierte und welches ich ihm nach Abschluss zusendete. (Lesezeit ca. 11 Minuten)

 

Freitag, 21. September 2000

9:45
Da bin ich also mit meinem Klapproller im alten Konsumgebäude, abgefahren rustikal, mit Shuttelbus vom Museum aus zu erreichen. Begrüßung von Mr. Batty, der ATypI-Chefin, Erik, dem Spiekermann und zu guter Letzt begrüßt auch SchumacherGebler die Hörerschaft bevor der Lederjackenträger Weidemann die Bühne betritt. Bisher no Inhalt, bad coffee und bereits leichter Kopfschmerz von rechts wegen des frühen Aufstehens.

More

Font-Shopping Continues

Type, unterwegs

In case someone actually still wants to buy fonts this year I better hurry up with my report. Alright, what more did I buy?

.

Okay Type:
They (Jackson and his cat) have some really super fonts in the making, but only Alright Sans is ready for licensing yet. I had kept track of this interesting amalgam of a sans for quite some time already as it gets mentioned almost every day on typophile. Not purely humanist in style and proportions it combines open forms with the regularities of a classic grotesque and daring slanted a’s and g’s as alts in the italic. Makes me think of good ol’ Syntax and the Ideal Italic again.
Due to my (meanwhile) mission to get as many different families as possible, I just boughts five single weights at MyFonts because one can only get the whole family on Okay Type’s website. (Why?)

Exljbris:
Now while I was there I did what probably everybody does at MyFonts from time to time—getting a couple of free fonts. Not many of them are suitable for professional design work, but in my opinion the typefaces by Jos Buivenga are. I got some complementary styles to the free version of Calluna, a versatile text face (and since Christmas joined by a sans to become a super-family) plus the flamboyant conceptional experiment that is Geotica—a high-contrast Didone only built up of geometric elements. The different fills, swashes and ornaments make it an exciting display venture.

.

The Asset:
All those typefaces hopefully complement the ones I got earlier this year:

Eames Century Gothic* Modern: I just had to order immediately, it simply is the impersonation of Erik van Blokland. One can dive deep into the individual shapes for days, the display styles make instant logos (beware, not allowed in basic license), the ornaments and numeral fonts are a playful plus. So enjoyable.

Hard to avoid the typefoundry Bold Monday this year, especially Nitty, which is surprisingly comfortable to type text in and Panno by Pieter van Rosmalen. I started out with the friendly priced sampler and got the full family of Paul van der Laan’s humanist sans Flex later.


Half way through my shopping spree Commercial Type, or rather Christian Schwartz announced the release of Neue Haas Grotesk to be near. Halleluja! Ever since working on the Helvetica Forever project I wished for that to happen. (We actually wanted to type-set the book in this newly digitized version back in 2007, but somehow either it wasn’t ready by that time or they didn’t manage to sort out the legal issues, so we ended up with Neue Helvetica.) I have no idea whether I’d ever use neue Neue Haas Grotesk, it’s just so tempting to get and be it only to show the world how Helvetica was meant to look like. But—maybe later.

Because all of a sudden the tide was turning: the notice of some unexpected debits abrupty shrunk my font-budget by almost 50% (now ~1500 €). But there was still so much left in my FontShop, A2 and MyFonts Carts :/
So these, among others, are typefaces I unfortunately had to skip (I should make a shortlist of nearly-bought fonts at some point):

Freight Micro, Text and Display I’m in love with this extensive super family by Joshua Darden/Garage Fonts for quite some time now. Especially the Micro (Italic) styles have great display qualities, too, although originally designed for extra small text.

Hercules, a quirky Modern/Scotch by František Štorm and also his
Farao, a playful take on the Clarendon genre. I like most of his typefaces although you realise some similarities after a while (the a’s e.g. are typical), but that is the case with other great type designers, too, like Gerard Unger or Fred Smeijers (his g’s and ß’s).

Lavigne got postponed as well, a dulcet text face by Ramiro Espinoza with great ampersand and complementing display styles for even more lavish demeanor.

Relato by Eduardo Manso attracted me with its distinct cursive. The rather low-contrast makes it a designated book face suitable for long-distance reading.

Iowan Old Style by John Downer, a calm, no-fuss text typeface, quite atypical for him actually.

Grot 10 from newly formed foundry A2. I especially like the true italics, which are still rather unusual for an “old-style” grotesque. There have been a lot of these kind of revivals popping up lately, like Plan by Typotheque, Fakt from Ourtype, Embarcadero by Mark van Bronkhorst or the recently expanded Founders Grotesque from Klim, to mention a few. Type expert Stephen Coles even names 2010 the year of the Helvetica replacements.

On that note, let me put you off until the third and final installment with some more shopping-occurrences, my final receipt and conclusion.

Font Shopping (Part I)

Type, unterwegs

Last week I found myself faced with the rare and luxurious task to spend quite some money, quickly, and on something typography related.
I guess I’m not alone with this end-of-year-business-expence problem, so instead of a list with cool things in type 2010 I want to share my shopping experiences here.

As kind of a warm-up I ordered a couple of books and studio-material — easy — followed by some software, but I figured investing in fonts would be a lot less age sensitive and a more sustainable way to spend the remaining rest of this non-recurring source of capital. But what to pick?
I have a good overview and dialog with German and neighbouring European foundries, the classic Adobe Font Folio and ancient URW collection but what was kind of missing were the more independent anglo-american contributions of the past years.

so

So I started my stroll — at Font Bureau. I love them for their varied collection of part vernacular, part sophisticated typefaces, a lot with display styles available, and webfonts of course (but better avoid the “wacky” section).
My cart filled quickly, felt a bit like the old game »Ich packe meinen Koffer und nehme mit …«:

Amplitude: Because I fell in love with the triangular opening at the base of the a. A big fat wide compressed family presumably suitable for almost everything. Not too gruff, yet not too friendly (I got a bit tired of all those numerous humanist sans recently).

Farnham Text + Display: The a again, it won me over ever since I first saw it. I’m into baroque, Baskerville-ish typefaces for quite a while now and Farnham is a very amicable interpretation of the theme. I buy my daily Frankfurter Rundschau just because of this.

Giza: Yeah! Who can resist Nine Five? Now to find the right occasion to use and not only look at it.

Ibis Text + Display: “Very small and very big” are probably the best applications for Ibis. It resembles the feel of Zapf’s Melior and other squarish, almost-slab-seriffed 1950s typefaces I like a lot. Didn’t use it up to now, but Ibis does an amazing job as a webfont, especially on windows. Bold italic!

Meno: An irresistable cursive, like a bacchanal exaggeration of Galliard. Probably tricky to typeset but I definitely want to take the challenge and spend some time with her one day.

Miller Text + Display: Hard to go wrong with Miller, one of my all-time favourites. A versatile workhorse for tons of text with crispy, sexy display styles. Yum!

Prensa: As an admirer of Dwiggins one simply has to love Prensa (and Delicato and Enigma). Edgy, hardheaded, yet very legible and with great display qualities, too. Once again: bold italic!

Skilt Gothic: A better replica, derived from 1920s Danish signage lettering, this new release is a good alternative to DIN or when you want to say “industrial and undesigned”. Cool g and y, both one- and two-storey a’s and lots of other OT goodies (yeah, still rare but finally pro/premium OpenType arrived at Font Bureau, too).

Titling Gothic: Incredible, huge Grotesque families are FB’s specialty, so choosing a sans and picking styles from their ample palette was extra hard. I went for Titling Gothic because it somehow stands in the middle between the eccentric Bureau Grot and the more sane Benton Sans and Franklin. I would have liked Boomer Sans, too, but that sounded difficult to license.

Trilby: Well, what to do with Trilby, posters probably. It’s just so damn cool.

Whitman: I have to admit, it’s not my favourite but it seemed an expedient investment. Maybe it’s the a (again, they are my acid test), or that it is so perfectly balanced, but Whitman is a good alternative for Joanna, often described as a difficult diva. Or Scala.

Zocalo Text + Display: It definitely is the a! Freakish italics, cantilevered serifs in the caps, very readable in text, quirky at display sizes, simply a joy to look at.
so

I didn’t select all those typefaces at once. But after putting like 10 fonts in the cart I noticed a significant drop in price, even though I didn’t get the full families but only individual weights. From 40$ in the beginning the price per font decreased to 35, 30 and finally 25$ only. That’s awesome! And dangerous.
From then on I was lost. I forced myself to take a break, shopped at some other manufacturers and wholesalers and decided to fill my parked FB-cart with as many fonts as possible at the end of my trip.

so

Stop 2: Hoefler & Frere-Jones
They make very good, downright perfect typefaces, no doubt. I like them, really. But somehow everybody loves HFJ and regard them as the authority in quality fonts — it doesn’t make me want to use their typefaces so much anymore. Everybody else is using them already.

so

Stop 3: Process Type
Right on time the nasty* guys at Process Type announced a 25%-off christmas sale. Not easy to keep me from buying something with a wallet so loosely in my pocket. I got Locator, a versatile, uncluttered Sans with cool Q, J and l (a bit like in Neuzeit) and freaky Maple because I couldn’t resist the g and e, r and a are so cheerful in bigger sizes.

so

Intermezzo:
As mentioned earlier I mainly roamed through the collection of the smaller independent foundries and I have to admit “evil”* MyFonts came in really handy during my expedition. I’d rather spend my money directly on the foundry’s site but it can get quite tedious to look up all of them individually, creating an account, providing payment info etc. So I lazily filled my cart at this central market place. Besides MyFonts’ search, mark, save, rate, tag and easy-use test-facilities are just super practical (plus some foundries don’t even sell their fonts on their sites).

While browsing some “new-and-noteables” I went astray and came across an ancient all-time-favourite of mine — and simply melted away confronted with its light italic: Bitstream’s Schadow by Georg Trump, one of my favourite designers anyway. Look at the g!

so

End of day 1. To be continued with some okay type, more hands-on shopping experiences, my in- and out-takes, reciept and conclusion.

so

Typography ≠ lettering ≠ writing

Type
Typography can look like lettering (Liza Pro, fancy opentype faces) but it’s not. It can even look like writing (formal scripts or handwriting fonts like FF Mister K), with the major parts of the letter or whole words formed of one stroke.
In the same way lettering can look like typography (rub-down letters, fine rendering) orwriting and still has nothing to do with those techniques.
The key nature of typography is, that it makes use of prefabricated glyphs, which are set with the help of machines according to abstract parameters.
If you send a setting instructions like the following to someone at the other end of the world, he will be able ro reproduce the exact same column of text, typographically, but never with one of the other methods.
Typographic parameters: typeface Nitty Mono light, 14/18 pt, flush left, tracking 0, 6 mm indent in first line of paragraph, none in first line of column, line length 14 cm

Typography can look like lettering (Liza Pro, fancy OpenType fonts) but it’s not the same. It can even look like writing (formal scripts or handwriting fonts like FF Mister K), where the major parts of the letter or whole words are formed out of one stroke. In the same way lettering can look like typography (rub-down letters, fine rendering) or writing and still has nothing to do with those techniques.

The key nature of typography is that it makes use of prefabricated glyphs which are set according to abstract parameters. If you send a setting instructions like the following to someone at the other end of the world, he will be able to reproduce the exact same column of text, typographically, but never with one of the other methods.

Typographic parameters are font, size, leading, alignment (justified or ragged), tracking, kerning, line length like for example in:
ITC Garamond light, 14/18 pt, flush left, no hyphenation, tracking 0, line length 140 mm, paragraphs indented by 1 em.

 

 

The Difference between Humanist, Transitional and Modern Typefaces

Ask, Type

Some key-characters for classifying typefaces are a, e, and R.

Humanist (Serifs, Sans, Slab) a’s mostly have an open upper counter and a rather small bowl; the lower half of the e has an open, friendly »mouth«, whereas the eye in the upper half is usually small. R has a diagonal, often long, maybe swashy tail. The uppercase letters are all of different widths, following the proportions of inscriptional Imperial Roman capitals (Capitalis Monumentalis).
If the typeface has contrast the stroke is likely to be thickest north-east and south-west (rotational symmetric, you can draw a diagonal line trough the thinnest parts). In the venetian subclass the e has a diagonal crossbar.
If the typeface has serifs they are bracketed and often asymmetric.

Transitional typefaces have more regular forms. The a and e are rather open, but in general the letters are not as lively and divers as in a humanist face. R has a diagonal tail, the widths of the uppercase are more equal. Stroke contrast is mostly symmetrical to a vertical axis. Serifs are bracketed and also more symmetrical. These typefaces stand inbetween Humanist and Modern, hence the name.

Modern typefaces, like Didones but also Grotesques have rather closed forms of e and a. Caps are of the same widths and more narrow, also the lowercase letters look comparatively alike (b, d, p, q). The R has a more vertical leg [I miss the proper english terms for that].
In the Didone style the stroke contrast is extremely high with a vertical axis, serifs are very thin and not bracketed. There is a subclass with bracketed serifs, like Century for instance, for which we are all still looking for a good name.

Typostammtisch am Freitag, 5. Februar

HBKsaar, Type

update:

Es war wiedermal ein rauschendes Fest mit Euch. Bilder gibt es in unserer Typostammtisch-Flickr-Gruppe (danke Frank).

fuer_fuenf_tische_reservieren*
Typostammtisch Mosel–Saar–Ruwer am Freitag, den 5. Februar 2010 um 19:30 im Kafé Costbar, Nauwieser Str. 19 in Saarbrücken. Frank Kiosk-Fonts Grießhammer kommt extra und live aus Den Haag. Löchert ihn mit Frage (nach einem Erfrischungsgetränk, er hat einen harten Arbeitstag hinter sich).

((* Danke an Patrick, Visualisierer de luxe, amasius fungus und prima Typ))

Ein Schriftfächer-Klassifikations-Musterbuch

Type

Ende letzten Jahres wurde ein neuer Schriftfächer von seinen Autoren auf typografie.info vorgestellt. Thomas Kunz hat nun dankenswerterweise eine Liste der vorgestellten Schriften veröffentlich.

facher

So viele verschiedene Gruppen sehen in bunt toll aus. Aber die Einteilung finde ich nicht in allen Punkten toll, die ersten beiden Bezeichnungen eher unglücklich gewählt. »Schriften vor Gutenberg« sind natürlich zeitgenössische Interpretationen wie z.B. Carolina, Duc de Berry uws. Aber warum dann nicht auch Ondine? Diese steckt bei den Breitfeder-Schriften.

Anstatt des Begriffs »gotisierende Schriften« fände ich »gebrochene Schriften« weniger missverständlich, vor allem, da sich so bizarr klingende Unterkategorien wie gotisierende Renaissance-Schriften und gotisierende gotische Schriften ergeben.

Auch bei den einfacher benannten Gruppen würde ich einiges anders zuordnen, More