History of a new font (notes on designing Fedra Serif)
Type design as accumulated knowledge and continuity: a look at the role of type designers, history and technology, revivals and invention.
Type design, like many disciplines, has often been driven by technology. Each wave of technological change in printing provoked the development of new approaches enabled by the new possibilities. In the eighteenth century, for example, new typefaces exploited innovations in papermaking and improved inking techniques to greatly increase the contrast between letters thick and thin strokes. The introduction of pantographic punch- and matrix-cutting in the late nineteenth century enabled numerous variations of a typeface to be manufactured from a single drawing. This understanding of the mechanical scaling of forms changed the idea of the alphabet; it was now a flexible system, resulting in a vast range of typographic variants compressed, expanded, extruded, ad infinitum. In the mid-twentieth century the adoption of photocomposition systems meant that spacing and kerning could be adjusted with greater precision; among the many novelties that photo technology enabled, more fonts simulating connected handwriting were developed. And most recently the personal computer spurred a wave of new fonts based on previously unexplored motives, such as modularity or randomness. With each of these technological changes, typeface libraries were updated to reflect the changes.
Type designers are very fond of the problems imposed by the technology. They work in a discipline where restrictions and conventions define the frame of work. A problem is the type designers muse, and in the last decades we were blessed by enough problems to solve.
While working on the typeface to be called Charter, Matthew Carter was confronted with a peculiar technical problem. Early computers were not able to process font files over a certain kilobyte limit, so Carter quickly offered a solution: a typeface that would consist mainly of straight lines, thereby keeping the file size small by limiting the number of points needed to construct the letters. Proudly he claimed to the technicians, I think I solved your problem What problem? the technicians asked; an even quicker fixing of the computers limitations would render Carters solution useless.
Seeing type design solely as a problem-solving exercise is limiting, reducing type design to a response mechanism a craft detached from its own history. When the idea of cultural progress is supplanted by technological progress, the more implicit motives of type design, such as continuity or self-awareness are neglected. Solving a particular technological problem is only a short detour in historys path. Solving all the technical problems would mean the end of the type history, but this history can itself be the prime inspiration for new designs.
Carter, alongside many of the great punch-cutters, designers, and printers, has participated in the sequence of discoveries, summed up - for the sake of comprehensibility - as History. They contributed to the History of the profession by responding to current situations. Their aim was not to reinvent the existing, but to reveal an unknown aspect of the art itself. Typefaces designed to fulfill the needs of their times contribute their small part to the knowledge accumulated across the centuries; not necessarily by inventing anything revolutionary, but by extending and adapting collective knowledge to contemporary conditions. The spirit of continuity is crucial: each new creation is an answer to what has come before and each new typeface contains accumulated knowledge.
So: contemporary type design is necessarily historical. Typefaces are results of the processes, they are responses to the conditions in which they were created, and they immediately take a part in the history.
On the other hand, revivals, or typefaces teleporting their inspirations from concluded periods of time, are unrelated to contemporary demands. They discontinue the series of inventions, becoming a game of pastiche, merely repeating what has already been created. Revival typefaces are, then, ahistorical, as they place themselves outside their natural history. They create their short-lived parallel histories and fail to participate in the big story.
History has been gravely abused, and an excuse for many misdemeanors, but it always outlasts those who tried to abuse it. Historys only enemy is the end of the progress. Repeating what has already been created closes the circle of discoveries. The value of understanding history as an infinite source of accumulated knowledge is manifest in the intangible processes as much as the tangible results. The history is driven by intellectual pursuits. Most historical discoveries are the isolated discoveries of introvert individuals rather then mainstream technologies.
The Austrian writer Herman Broch, author of a number of formally inventive and intellectually ambitious novels, used to repeat this mantra: The sole raison dêtre of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. My conclusion is equally optimistic: the purpose of type design is to explore its own possibilities by its own means.
Other Articles By Peter Biľak
- Why Not Associates?2
- The Book of Probes
- Restart: New Systems in Graphic Design
- Maeda@media
- Contemporary Dutch graphic design: an insider/outsiders view
- Dutch type design
- Martin Majoor, type designer
- Irma Boom, book designer
- Designing Type Systems
- Karel Martens, graphic designer
- Letterror, designers and programmers
- Max Kisman, graphic designer
- In search of a comprehensive type design theory
- Experimental typography. Whatever that means.
- Martin Majoor feature
- Sandberg, Designer and Director of Stedelijk
- En busca de una teoría completa del diseño tipográfico
- Historia de una fuente nueva
- Acerca de Fedra
- Falta de diseño, exceso de diseño y volver a diseñar
- Tipografía de los noventa. La demistificación y re-mistificación
- Designing Type — book review
- Graphic Design in the White Cube
- Kyoorius DesignYatra 2006, review of a design conference
- Ways of Seeing, book review
- À la recherche d’une théorie générale du dessin de caractères
- 화이트큐브의 그래픽디자인 / Graphic Design in the White Cube
- What is Typography?
- Family planning, or how type families work
- A View of Latin Typography in Relationship to the World
- Jan van Toorn, Critical Practice
- In the Name Of the Father (or the troubles with L-caron)
- The history of History
- Methods of Distribution: Digital Fonts and the Global Market
- Méthodes de distribution : les caractères numériques sur le marché mondial
- Font hinting
- Beauty and Ugliness in Type design
- Conceptual Type?
- We don’t need new fonts…
- Julien — the making of
- Type design competitions
- Una mirada a la relación de la tipografía de origen latino con el mundo
- Métodos de distribución: Tipos digitales en el mercado global
- Irma Boom interview
- Lava — Voice of a Magazine
- Caratteri concettuali?
- About Uni Grotesk, a Central European geometric Sans
- Related Type Families
- Verwandte Schriftfamilien
- Designing Hebrew Type
- Notes on Designing and Producing the Typeface Wind
- A Brief History of Sans Serif typefaces
- Brief History of Webfonts
- The Importance of Play
- About Nothing, really
- Size-Specific Spacing of Fonts
- Reclusive Designers — Redefining Success in the Internet Era
- Theory of Type Design, a book review
- Designers Reclusos – Redefinindo o Sucesso na Era da Internet
- Planejamento familiar, ou como as famílias tipográficas funcionam