Differing Accents Conference Catalogue

3differing accents | Monday 11th June

Polska 10120 00 Prague 2Czech Republic

www.praguecollege.cz(+420) 222 101 020

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Printed in Prague, Czech Republic.

EDITOR IN CHIEFStefano Cavagnetto

PROJECT MANAGERS AND ADMINISTRATORSSimon Gray, Marketa Musilova, Leah Adler, Lucie Evjakova, Milena Jirovcova, Masa Hilcisin

PRODUCTION DEPARTMENTGavin Bird, Silvia Weinzettelova, Ryan Cole

CONFERENCE IDENTITYMarusa Racic

SPECIAL THANKSTo all the Prague College students, lecturers and staff who have participated in the organisational activities, production and development, research and workshops, whom with their amazing efforts and hard work have made this conference a reality.

Differing Accents is a four-day Typographic and Lettering Conference, bringing together renowned speakers from across Europe.

The main focus will be on traditional typographic and lettering practice from the past, the present, and looking to the future, as well as the underlying aspects of type as a craft.

The conference will take place inside Prague College and is open to delegates from the UK and Czech Republic, students and members of the public.

Jo Hamill 62

Lost for Words

Errol Donald 66

PRIDE Graffiti

Dave Farey 72

National Type Identity

differingaccents

Monday 11th

Tuesday 12th

Wednesday 13th

Thursday 14th

Stefano Cavagnetto 18

Gifts from the past

what we all gained

from medieval manuscripts

Kate Sill 34

26

Iva Knobloch 42

Ladislav Sutnar:

Typography &

Information Flow

Mark Noad 52

Getting from A to Z:

Type, Travel and

The Tube Map

Veronika Burian 6

Oldřich Menhart:

Calligrapher, Type

Designer and Craftsman

Stephen Raw 16

Making Language Visible

Oliver Linke 86

The Urge to Rule

Colin Brignall 100

The Liberated Letter

Filip Blažek 102

European Diacritics

Richard Kindersley 108

Letter Carving

7 differing accents | Monday 11th June

BurianVeronika

Born in Prague, Veronika got her first degree in Industrial Design in Munich, Germany, before she moved on to Austria and Italy to work as a mix between a product and graphic designer. Discovering her true passion for type, she graduated with distinction from the MA in Typeface Design in Reading, UK, in 2003 and started to work as a full-time type designer at DaltonMaag in London until 2007.

After staying for some years in Boulder, Colorado, she is currently living and working in Prague and dedicates her time fully to TypeTogether, an independent type-label that she co-founded with José Scaglione. She also continues to give lectures and workshops at international conferences and universities. Her typeface Maiola received, among others, the TDC Certificate of Excellence in Type Design 2004. Several other typefaces by TypeTogether have also been recognised by international competitions, including ED-Awards and ISTD.

TypeTogether Veronika Burian and José Scaglione met at the University of Reading whilst completing their MAs in Type Design, launching the independent type foundry TypeTogether (TT for short) in 2006. TT developed out of the desire to publish high quality typefaces and work on new type projects together (hence the name). The foundry provides common grounds for intense cooperation with other type designers, creating an interesting and diverse platform.

TypeTogether’s main interest is finding innovative and stylish solutions to old problems for the professional market of text typefaces, with a focus on editorial use. This is where the greatest challenges are faced: creating typefaces that perform well in continuous reading, that also have a high degree of personality.

The quality of TypeTogether’s work has already been recognised in several international competitions, including TDC and ED-Awards.

http://www.type-together.com/


OldrichMenhart

calligraphertype designer

and craftsman

In June, 1897, Oldřich Menhart was born in Prague where he also died in February, 1962. His father was a goldsmith teaching his four sons engraving, drawing, and carving from an early age on. Here Menhart acquired skilled hands and a profound feeling for shapes. He developed a sense for detail up to a level of perfectionism. Additionally, he became familiar with the peculiar characteristics of the material and the tools. The skill of being aware of the relationship between tool and form, that is to know how technology would affect the final shape, became Menhart’s fundament for his later mastery.

Further formative impacts were his working experience in the printing house Politka in Prague and his teacher, Karel Mrázek, at the school of typography. The contact with the process of printing and the industrial production of typefaces was crucial for his extraordinary understanding of technical conditions when it comes to design. On the other side, through Mrázek he was exposed to calligraphy and book design. Quickly Menhart realised the potential of expressing visually, beauty, sentiments, and intellect by the means of this art and took every opportunity to study letterforms in churches, public buildings, cementeries, libraries, etc. Free from traditional heritage and knowledge, he was able to observe the inscriptions with innocent eyes and to see the spirit of the letters behind the external form. This made for a gradual maturing of his intuition for the viability of lettershapes and their emotional effect on the message to the reader.

Beautiful but superficial, decorative calligraphy was alien to him, though. The challenge was to develop his own ideas and to find new ways of conceiving of artistic handwriting as a graphic representation of his individuality. The art of writing, in fact, became an existential element of his life and work. An excellent example of Menhart’s calligraphic roots is the highly individual typeface Manuscript from 1943–45. Freely drawn with a spring pen, it is deliberately rough with a primitive and peasant finish. Despite its rustic feel and irregularity, the typeface appears very spirited, elegant, surprisingly uniform, and legible. Paul Standard once noticed that it is “seemingly written with molten metal.” Its irregularity


is intensified by the jagged and to the bottom tapering strokes. As you can see below, the tails on the letters K R, the frankly pen-formed serifs on E F L T and the characteristic slope on the bottom stroke of Z z show, also, the calligraphic heritage of Manuscript. It is regarded as Menhart’s masterpiece, expressing the author’s energetic temperament and self-confident personality. Max Caflisch went as far as to say that it “…has no type-design counterpart either contemporary or historic.”


Designer and technology

In many ways Menhart’s approach to design and its realisations differs quite remarkably from his contemporaries. Not only did he consider himself rather a craftsman than an artist, but his work also shows greater maturity and understanding of the matter.

Probably because of Menhart’s experience in the printing industry, he had a positive attitude towards new technologies. He was familiar with the characteristics of the material, its constraints and possibilities, and knew about the technical limits and requirements of printing and the production of type. In his opinion, the designer had to keep in mind, while creating, that the control of the process had been increasingly removed from him.

Therefore he needed to imagine the final appearance of his typeface, had to predict possible problems and act upon it. Competence and mutual understanding between designer and typefoundry were essential suppositions for success. Relying on the foundry to correct the designer’s errors was, according to Menhart, fatal. He was convinced that, because of the designer’s demands and high level of quality, he could have a fruitful influence on the progress of technology.

Generally he evaluated mass-production of printed matter and typefaces as positive and appreciated this democratisation of the book trade. It was, in his eyes, the logical consequence of the social changes of that time and a challenge for the designer. Technology was to be used smartly giving to the industrially produced typographical product a sense of personality and liveliness.

In the 1930s, the economic and technical climate though was under-developed in his home country. Its history, involving loss of political sovereignty for many centuries, and the related lack of an independent printing industry, contributed greatly to the missing professional knowledge and experience of type-making. The inadequate equipment and miserable conditions of Czech typefoundries and printers were jointly responsible for the international failure of Czech typefaces.

The inadequate equipment and miserable conditions of Czech typefoundries and printers were jointly responsible for the international failure of Czech typefaces


Menhart was fortunate to have had the possibility to publish his first typefaces abroad. The dealer for the Bauer typefoundry, O Zahradnik, whom he encountered on his trip to Offenbach, encouraged him to submit a proposal to the foundry. He followed this advice and sent a map with drawings and sample text layouts. The name was Codex Antiqua and Kursiv, a hint to two important medieval manuscripts, the Reimser and Wyssehrader Codex. It was strongly calligraphic and dynamic, but not yet accomplished. After several revisions it resulted in the typeface Menhart Antiqua / Kursiv, cast in 1931 by Bauer in Germany. It is a nicely balanced and calm design, with generous proportions and calligraphic reminiscence. The dynamic spirit is enhanced by the asymmetrical shape of the serifs. They are blunt, rectangular on the right side but wedge shaped and elongated on the other. The strokes are modulated, reflecting the broad edge pen and the round letters tend towards a square shape. In doing so, they form a solid base for the diacritics above them. These are some hints of his leitmotifs that became fundamental features of the later designs.

fig 2. Menhart’s Antiqua.


The typeface is neither radical nor particularly inventive. It respects traditional heritage and conventions. Nevertheless, it is elegant, vigorous, personal, and legible. People, including E R Weiss, Stanley Morrison and Jan Tschichold were among those that stated their admiration. The most remarkable comment, though, reflecting Menhart’s perfectionism and skillfulness, came from Georg Hartmann, senior chief of the Bauer typefoundry. He said, “tell me, how did you do it? In all my thirty years of typefounding I have never before had a design from an artist’s hand which in the very first trial cutting and casting was ready and usable without any correction!” All of these characteristics contributed to make Menhart Antiqua the first Czech typeface, to have any truly international success.

“Bodies without soul”

Menhart expressed this opinion with reference to the constructed sans serif typefaces from the 1920s. As discussed earlier, he believed in social and technical progress that required new solutions in the field of visual communication. The direction he took, however, was less controversial. It was very much related to his calligraphic background and love of written letterforms. To him, free handwriting was the best source of inspiration and innovation in the search for new, interesting forms. Slogans such as “calligraphy is the cradle of type design” and “letters could not be designed until they had been written” reflect this conviction. He refused to use any technical tools (ruler, compass, ruling pen), stating that typefaces created in this manner could be executed by anybody. In an article published in the magazine, “Český Bibliofi,” in 1932, Menhart explained that the beauty of a typeface and its aesthetic value do not depend on a pile of geometrical tools. He continued mentioning that letters that are purely mathematically constructed, so to speak, unpleasantly accurate and consistent, are only results of mechanical production, without personal charm, thoughtless, and a boring and deadly born thing. He believed that dull repetition of shapes and their lack of subtle optical adjustments hamper legibility and tire the reader.

As proclaimed by some designers, the idea of a universal typeface, that was supposedly appropriate for every application, reduced in Menhart’s view, the energy and power of it. He sought for typographical diversity, and thus expression of diversity of life. Industrial production must not destroy human versatility. A typeface should maintain the dynamic vibration of the human hand with all its irregularities and imprecision. This is the spring of charm and vigour. Consequently, his starting point was always writing, which he had mastered in a very impressive and sophisticated way. Writing developed, not in the sense of a sudden, ephemeral act, but more in the form of laborious and intense practice, over a long period of time. In a lecture he gave in 1958, he said, “no ‘Master’ ever just fell out of the skies. That is, no letter-artist was born…but rather he arises through the accumulation of experience and through study and practical work.”


In doing so, the scribe realises the inherent quality and structure of every single letter and the hand learns exactly all the needed strokes from the logic of the pen itself. A powerful and balanced relationship between scribe and tool is thus created. Once the scribe has absorbed this to its very last depth, he goes beyond the phase of thought to pure expression. In fact, he was convinced that awkward lettershapes came from misuse and a misunderstanding of the pen, since the pen itself cannot do wrong.

Superficial attributes decorating the letters unnecessarily were not what he envisioned, though. On the contrary, he wanted to free the classic letters, to retain their original and eternal, comprehensible spirit, to achieve maximum simplicity without disturbing the easy flow of reading.Indeed, in his second typeface Menhart Roman/Italic, he experimented with how far he could remove the design from the traditional conventions normally associated with text faces. It was supposed to represent modern typeface design deliberated from historical archaism and focused more on functionality.

Thanks to Method Kaláb, director of Průmyslová Tiskárna, it was published by Monotype, UK, in 1936. The starting point was a simple handwritten alphabet. Gradually and very carefully, serifs and terminals were added only where optical balance, texture, and legibility required it. This led to the use of semi-serifs—only one sided and completely missing on the first legs of the letters h k m n—as a solution which was unusual for that time. In general, the typeface appears light, unsophisticated and aloof, functioning very well in continuous text.

Diacritics

Czech accents were of great concern. Readability and aesthetic appearance of the typeface suffer markedly if the diacritics are not brought into accord with the rest of the alphabet. Similar to punctuation marks, they are a subdued but a very important part of the script that help the reader.

Their function is to enhance the ease and flow of reading and to gently indicate changes in pronunciation and the phonetic value of letters. Arbitrary changes to their appearance and position might lead to misunderstanding.

Although influenced by Vojtech Preissig’s experiments with accents, Menhart’s approach was reserved and functional rather than expressive. Part of the solution was to emphasise the x-height, thus creating a solid and stable base for the diacritics by accentuating square forms of the letters ’a e c o s’, in particular.

It is the inexperienced and unskilled hand that is misleading


The resulting imaginary straight, continuous guideline enhances the calm, nicely even and well-balanced effect of the printed Czech text. Other aspects to be considered are the frequency of specific letter combinations in the Czech language, e.g. the sequence of more than three consonants, and the non-existence of double pairs like ’oo,’ ’ee’. Furthermore, he took the respective occurrence and non-occurrence of particular letters into account and designed accordingly. The letters ’j k v y z,’ for example, are very frequent as opposed to ’q w x.’

fig 3. Figural with diacritics.

fig 4. Photograph of an original technical drawing of Menhart Roman,

done by the Monotype Drawing Office .It shows the lowercase letter a with all

the accompayning diacritics.


Civilising calligraphy

Bringing calligraphy and typography together fascinated Menhart throughout his lifetime. When being regularised and adapted to typographic needs, it was a great challenge to subdue the influence of written letterforms without losing their vigour and energy. In his opinion, the solution could only be found by clearing the shapes of handwritten elements, striving for simplicity and discipline wherever possible, and thus revealing the basic and pure letterforms. By doing this, their original beauty and power would be naturally expressed and more muscular curves full of tension would be obtained. Calligraphy is, so to speak, tamed and appears only indirectly in the form of a dynamic spirit behind the scenes and not so much in the graphic visualisation itself. Perfecting the technical standard of the design could, as he thought, support this process in a positive way. In fact, he was uncompromisingly critical and pedantic about his own work and that of others, always looking for optimal results. Only rarely did his drawings need to be reworked in order to fit the technical requirements of the type foundry.

A brief comparison of his most accomplished typefaces Menhart Antiqua, Menhart Roman, Figural, and Manuscript demonstrate his proven leitmotifs with which he managed to maintain the calligraphic touch without losing sight of typographic conventions. This venture was successfully supported by an even, regular, and well-handled letter-spacing, which is indispensable for readability. • Trend to square the shape of round letters a c e o s, • pen-based terminals on letters a c f r,• swelling of the stems towards the head serifs, • slightly bending stems, having their narrowest part approximately in

the middle of the stem,• modulation of stroke coming from the logic of the broad nib pen,• sloped and curved head serifs,• variation in form and length of the head serifs,• balanced contrast of stroke weight,• long extenders,• calligraphic fluent tail of Q,• pen-formed terminal on J j.

Following a list of design elements which occur in Menhart Antiqua in a much more regular and subdued way than in Codex Antiqua, its forerunner:• the tail of k x,• general shape of z Z,• terminals on f r,• stroke ending on c e,• shape of head serifs on b d h k l,• flick on b,• broad square top of A,• flick of N,• serifs on C E F G L S T Z.


Expressing contemporary culture

In this context it is interesting to see the typeface Figural from 1940, published in 1949 by Státní tiskárna in Prague. It is commonly regarded as Menhart’s greatest and most mature book face. Paul Standard said, “both [roman and italic] are plainly derived from his handwriting, handwriting so direct and muscular as to suggest the learned script of a structural steelworker with a PhD.” Traces of calligraphy are visible only in a very subtle way, bringing enough elasticity, dynamism and fluidity to the shapes. As opposed to the previous designs, the serifs are flat and very fine and the ‘Menhartesque’ sloped stroke of the z Z is reduced to a serif drawn over the baseline. The proportions are rather classic and generous, remotely based on Jenson’s Roman of 1470. Figural appears in general angular, disciplined, and vigorous, emphasising horizontality. It is his model of how a contemporary book face should look like.

From Menhart’s point of view, the designer is supposed to take an active part in shaping the visual appearance of contemporary culture and society, and in doing so, become historical himself. This does not mean, however, that typographic tradition and conventions should be neglected. The tradition of the past should be logically continued by creating honest, authentic methods and styles from the spirit of the time. It serves the reform and evolution of society. The revival of historic typefaces could no longer serve as the stimulus of new ideas. It fulfilled its task of cleaning the typefoundries and printers from the type ballast of the excessive nineteenth century, but now it was time to move on.

His focus, after all, was not restricted to the Czech language only. Believing that all languages unified by the Latin script, deserve proper respect, put him into a global light in a time in which nationalistic sentiments were widely spread throughout Europe. This implies that Menhart was a modern designer who was actively looking over his own borders, seeking to meet the then current needs whilst simultaneously attempting to uphold his own Czech culture.

The long list of his practical and historical publications mainly functioning as educational guidelines confirms moreover, this quite unusual character, who although open to criticism, was always striving for perfection. He succeeded by designing typefaces which communicated the message of the author with a high degree of beauty, energy, and above all harmony.

From Menhart’s point of view, the designer is supposed to take an active part in shaping the visual appearance of contemporary culture and society, and in doing so, become historical himself


RawStephenStephen Raw (born in London, 1952) has lived in Manchester for the last thirty

years. He has been a self-employed artist and designer since he returned to Britain from two years teaching at the National Arts School in Papua New Guinea.

Stephen’s work is varied, from paintings in exhibitions through to cover designs for Carcanet Press, and his commercial lettering for a variety of clients, including leading publishers, architects and design groups throughout Europe. “Fundamental to all my artwork” Stephen says, “is a love of language and how that language is given a visual dimension through signs we simply call letters: never-failing sources of inspiration. Letters are images in themselves and, for me, that’s more than enough to be getting on with.”

He has exhibited widely: Germany, Ireland, the United States, and Italy. One of his paintings, “Words by Nelson Mandela,” is in the collection of the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin. All of his book jacket/cover artwork, part of the Carcanet Press archive, is now kept by the John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester. Currently he sits on The Royal Mint Design Advisory Committee, chaired by Sir Christopher Frayling.

www.stephenraw.com


making lang

uage visible

Stephen Raw will present an illustrated talk about his work as a 'textual artist' over the last thirty years. In that time he has worked for a wide variety of clients - in fact anyone for whom 'bespoke' lettering is their requirement. “Where the computer stops,” Stephen says, “I start”. Design groups and architects feature in his work but it has been the world of publishing that has been the commercial mainstay of his income. In his time he has contributed to thousands of book covers, but only a few of them are any good he claims. In addition to this income-generation, he has pursued his own personal work and has exhibited widely. Mostly they are experimental pieces which concentrate on the imagery of text but at other times he has been taking poetic language and delighting in that. Poetry is the result of a writer's care and consideration, and that process is reflected in the time invested in painting or drawing it. Currently, he is working on a large exhibition concerned with the text, that composer Benjamin Britten, chose for his oratorio “War Requiem.” It will be on show next year in the city of London.

19 differing accents | Tuesday 12th June

CavagnettoStefano

Stefano is a Doctor in Mathematics and Philosophy. He earned his degrees from Charles University, the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences and the Amedeo Avogadro University, in Vercelli, Italy respectively. His MA in Science Communication was completed at COREP – Centre for Education and Permanent Research – of the Polytechnic University of Turin. Stefano was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York City and the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge.

He founded the Prague College Research Centre in 2008 and is currently exploring with his staff and colleagues such diverse topics as the history of programming languages, links between art and mathematics in cooperation with the design school, game theory and its application to philosophy and business management, ancient manuscripts and cryptography, and recently, exploring the relationships between typography and mathematics, medieval writing techniques and processes, and the secrets behind great typefaces.

He helps to ensure that the research activities of students and staff, and especially the Bachelors and Masters dissertations, are intrinsically connected to the our key areas of inquiry in Business, IT and Art & Design.

20differing accents | Tuesday 12th June

giftsfrom

the pastwhat we all

gained from medieval

manuscripts Generation and transmission are the two major aspects of the production of written works which came to us from the Middle Ages. At that time, the author of a work was the first step in a long chain of transmission, in which works were sequentially copied by hand over generations and over a long period of time.

The most relevant fact in studying medieval manuscripts in terms of generation and transmission consists of the presence of certain “patterns of thought” generated by the original authors which were as valued as the fine manuscripts on which they were recorded. All of this is particularly relevant to paleography. In this article we will deal win its broadest interpretation as the study of ancient writing together with the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts.

This study also includes the cultural context of writing and the set of methods in which writing and books were produced in a specific period of time. It includes also the history of scriptoria. Normally in paleography there are manuscripts that were actually penned by their original authors, and they are known as “autograph manuscripts;” there are cases in which the original author was also the person illustrating the manuscript, even though this was not so common. When it comes to books, very few are known from autograph manuscripts; frequently, especially for very old works, the earliest surviving copies are several years apart from the original authors.

The most interesting fact in the transmission processes is that the scribes, and the agencies which employed them, have transmitted the values of their society in selecting the works that they have chosen to perpetuate and to pass on to the next generations.

Thus, the modality of work that those scribes employed and the different forms of script they used for particular tasks reveal certain attitudes of society towards certain types of written work.

byStefano Cavagnetto

and Gavin Bird


Some works required elaborate and formal scripts which were highly demanding in terms of time, while others sufficed with rapidly written but less formal cursive scripts.

Thus, a dichotomy appears evident since the importance of a work cannot be simply established by its legibility; quite often calligraphic and design skills emphasise the importance without making it easy to read.

Traditionally, there is a clear distinction between books and documents, and this is not only because of the different families of scripts, but also for the significant differences in the authoring and production of the two types of works. However, as suggested by Dr. John and Dianne Tillotson, there are many crossovers, and to have clear distinctions in front of so many hybridisations would be of scarce effectiveness. This may look a bit less scientific and academic, but the insight into the communication routes of these ancient scholars equipped with immense and extraordinary diligence will be definitely clearer than a dry set of tables and classifications. This also offers a chance of reconstructing more effectively the passage from handwriting into a defined set of typefaces that came into use in the later Renaissance period.

Before proceeding with a possible classification of different families of script and some examples of it, is important to further clarify the technical term “manuscript,” and how it is used in this article. The term origins from the Latin “manuscriptum,” from “manu” and “scriptus,” meaning “written by hand.” It is interesting to notice here that the term manuscript is also used to denote information that is hand recorded in different ways than the simple writing.

This is the case for example of inscriptions that are chiseled on a hard material or scratched (the original meaning of graffiti) as with a knife point in plaster, or with a stylus on a waxed tablet as Romans used to do notes. With the advent of the printing press, the entire mode of production of books changed rapidly.

Manuscripts almost disappeared with a few relevant exceptions such as the legal and business areas where handwritten documents maintained certain relevance; the main reason for this was the fact that each document produced had to be unique. In this way standard formats such as hand-lettered indentures and title deeds were produced well into the modern era. Thus, calligraphers using nibbed pens were still employed heavily in the 20th century to copy huge number of pages of business and legal documents and records.

An interesting element from a semiotic point of view is that the advent of printed books, and in general to the mechanisation of reproduction, led to a different concept of written text. In this new conception the uniformity and the identity principle referring to the texts become dominant, and alterations are flagged as exceptions.


In this new perspective the old manuscripts and their transmission mode are seen as an imperfect system of transferring information. In fact, in the modern paradigm, concepts such as that of legibility and readability are dominating the analysis of written texts.

These concepts were of far less relevance in the production of medieval manuscripts, even though, as we will see, they led to a new style of writing, the humanistic script that itself was the source of inspiration for one of the most successful family types in the history of typography.

Also, as it has been testified by several studies in the areas the humanistic script, was the basis of the so called italic style invented in the Renaissance period by Francesco Griffi, a punch cutter from Venice, and Aldo Manuzio, the best typographer of the Renaissance.

Finally, the last part of this article will deal with the contribution of Manuzio’s printing house, the Aldine Press, to the printed Latin and Greek masterpieces plus a few more modern works. Italics was used for the first time by the Aldine Press, a small printing house that also adopted for the first time in the history of typography the format of the small octavo size, a kind of modern paperback, in order to increase the portability of books and the reading.

Classification of script styles

An important thing to realise when dealing with medieval manuscripts is that there are no rigid stylistic barriers, and the different script styles grade into one another. In the table below is a rough base classification. This is intended to be a sort of mind map rather than a scholarly cumbersome or exacting classification.

FAMILY

Old Roman scripts

New Roman scripts

Uncial

Half-Uncial

pre-Carolingian (Merovingian) scripts

Caroline Minuscule

In each family we have several variants, including those in cursive or majuscule.


Let us see some examples for comparison. The everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, business accounts, and children at school was the Old Roman cursive.

A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals,

Figure 1. Old Roman handwriting dated from the reign of Claudius.

The basis for modern capital letters. Even though it was used mainly for inscriptions, there are some rare examples of documents written in this style (see figure 2); they are known as Latin book hand. The roman square capitals are characterised by sharp, straight lines, supple curves, thick and thin strokes, angled stressing, and incised serifs. They are also called majuscules, because they are seen as a counterpart to minuscule letters, such as Merovingian and Carolingian of which we will see some examples below. It is interesting to notice that the Monotype Felix Titling (1934) is based on a 1463 alphabet of the Italian calligrapher Felice Feliciano which was based on Roman inscriptions.

Figure 2. The Codex Augusteus of Virgil: a rare example of square capitals, which were generally reserved for display purposes or for use in monumental epigraphic inscriptions (scriptura monumentalis), used for a complete text in a prestigious manuscript.

The angular letter-forms, with their frequent changes of angle and their serifs, were difficult to achieve with the reed pen (calamus), hence the preference for more rounded book scripts.


During the Merovingian dynasty the Merovingian script was developed in France. This script was employed in the 7th and 8th century before the Carolingian script. There are four major types of Merovingian scripts, and they take their names from the monasteries where they were developed and used. These types are Luxeuil, Laon, Corbie, and Chelles. Each script developed from uncial, half-uncial, and the Merovingian charter scripts.

From figure 3 we can see that the this version of the Merovingian type the so called Luxeuil type uses distinctive long, slim capital letters as a display script. Capitals are characterized by wedge-shaped finials. Usually the crossbar of the ‘A’ looks like a small letter ‘v.’

Instead the crossbar of the ‘H’ is a line that is undulated. The letter ‘O’ is many times similar to diamond shape. In the Luxeuil minuscule script, the letter ‘a’ is similar to a “cc.” ‘b’ often has an open bowl and an arm connecting it to the following letter. Because of these features, sometimes in the literature the Luxeuil type is known as “a-b type.” The letter ‘d’ can have either a vertical ascender or an ascender slanted to the left; the letter ‘i’ is very high and quite often can be mistaken for an ‘l.’ The letter ‘n’ can be found written in uncial form.

There are cases of oval-shaped letters, such as small case ‘o’ which is usually connected to the next letter with a line. ‘t’ has a loop extending to the left of its top stroke. Normally, the letter ‘t’ comes in forms with different types of ligatures. Ligature is used normally also with ‘e’ and ‘r.’

Some similarities can be found with the script called uncial and half-uncial developed in the 3rd century CE even though both of them look much more refined as styles with respect to the forms of Merovingian.

The uncial script has its own ancestor in the Old Roman cursive script. The first types of uncial scripts are characterised by broad single stroke letters using simple round forms. This is to take the advantage at the most of the materials and supports such as the new parchment and vellum.

Figure 3. An example of Luxeuil Merovingian script.


This enhanced a very rounded set of letters which are opposed to the angular, multiple stroke letters, which are more suited for rougher surfaces, such as for example papyrus. In the oldest examples of uncial, all of the letters are separated from one another but still word separation is actually in use. In later samples of uncial the word division in the space comes in and it works effectively.

In general, there are some common features of uncial script. For instance ‘m,’ ‘n,’ and ‘u’ are relatively broad; ‘m’ is always constructed with curved strokes, and ‘n’ is always designed as ‘N’ to be able to clearly distinguish the letters ‘r’ and ‘s.’ Normally four letters are quite narrow and they are: ‘f’, ‘I’, ‘p’, ‘s’ and ‘p.’ The letter ‘e’ is constructed by a curved stroke and its ‘hasta’ is not connected with the top curve. ‘l’ has a small base and it is divided from the next letter on the right side.

Also ‘r’ has a quite long curved shoulder that is normally used to connect to the next letter; often it is very hard to distinguish ‘s’ from ‘r,’ compared to the easy identification of ‘f’ in this specific script. Finally, it is important to notice that later uncial scripts are written less neatly than earlier scripts. A common feature of later scripts in uncial is that, for example, bows for the letters ‘b,’ ‘p,’ and ‘r’ do not entirely curve in to touch their stems.

Figure 4. A beautiful example of uncial taken from the Book of Kells (8th Century CE). This particular version is known as insular majuscule, and it is a form of uncial that originated in Ireland.


Figure 5. Half-uncial insular script.

The script became more complex during its development. In the period around the 7th century CE, ascenders and descenders were the first major alterations, followed by twists of the tool in the basic strokes and overlapping.

Scipione Maffeiin introduced the term half-uncial, or semi-uncial. The ratio behind this new terminology was to distinguish what seemed like a cut-down version of uncial in the famous Codex Basilicanus of Hilary. This code contains both versions of the scripts, uncial and semi-uncial; then Maffein was thinking of giving a clear categorization that could help a to build a suitable taxonomy.

However, both types of scripts are derived from the Roman cursive. Semi-uncial was already used in the 3rd century of the CE and it lasted for at least five more centuries, approximately to the end of the 8th century of the CE. and it remained in use until the end of the 8th century. In the beginning the first forms of semi-uncial were employed for pagan authors and Roman legal writing. With the beginning of the 6th century the script came into use in Africa and Europe for the transcription of Christian texts.

As it is possible to see from figure 5, there are some general constant forms of half-uncial letters: the letter ‘a’ is usually round, sometimes with a slightly open top; the letters ‘b’ and ‘d’ have vertical stems, identical to their modern letter counterparts, and the letter ‘g’ has a flat top, it does not have a bow, and a curved descender. The result of this is that the letter resembles the number 5. Finally, the letter ‘T’ has a curved shaft, and instead the letters ‘n,’ ‘r,’ and ‘s’ are very close to their uncial counterparts. The half-uncial script was highly diffused in Ireland, and in England as well, and developed into the insular script after the 8th century of the CE.


The Carolingian Minuscule script was so widely used from 800 to 1200 CE in all of Europe that we could call it the calligraphic standard for these four hundred years. It was the script of scholars during the Charlemagne Empire and it made the Latin alphabet the most recognisable one. The script has its origin in the Roman half-uncial and its cursive version and it was the source of inspiration of several different Continental minuscule scripts. Relevant was the influence of the insular scripts that were being employed often in several monasteries in Ireland and England.

One of the main features of the Carolingian Minuscule is its uniform rounded shapes in clearly distinguishable glyphs, disciplined and above all, highly legible compared to other medieval scripts. Clear capital letters and spaces between words became standard in Carolingian Minuscule.

The legibility of the Carolingian script is highly improved because the low number of ligatures. Still ligatures are existing for some peculiar cases such as the ‘et’ (&), ‘ae’ (æ), ‘rt,’ ‘st,’ and ‘ct.’ The letter ‘d’ usually is written in an uncial form in which the ascender slanting to the left remains in place. It is interesting to notice that the letter ‘g’ is in its essence as the modern minuscule letter and different from the usual uncial ‘g.’ Ascenders normally become thicker near the top.

The Carolingian script has a quite complex evolution because of the long period of employment. In the early period in the late 8th century and early 9th century, there were still widely varying letter forms in different regions. For example, it is quite common to find the uncial form of the letter ‘a,’ which still resembles a double ‘c’ (cc).

In the same period another script was using the question mark, and it was the Beneventan script, which we are going to present later on in this article. During the 9th century, the script became modern and the variations dissolved into a more standard international version. Thus, modern glyphs started to appear, notably for the letters ‘s’ and ‘v,’ and ascenders, after thickening at the top, were finished with a three-cornered wedge.

During the 10th and 11th centuries the script contained a very few ligatures; another feature of the Carolingian was about ascenders: they began to slant to the right and the terminal part was ending with a fork. In this context there is the appearance of the letter ‘w.’ In the 12th century, Carolingian letters became more angular and there was reduction of the space between the letters; at the same time, the modern ‘i’ with a dot appeared. However, the later version of this script has a reduced legibility.

Another important characteristic of the early period is the use of punctuation such as the question mark


Figure 6. Carolingian script from the 10th century CE. As a last remark on the Carolingian Minuscule, it is important to notice

that the Gothic blackletter hands took over around the 12th century CE, but later they were interpreted so thoroughly as ‘classic’ by the early Renaissance humanist that these old Carolingian manuscripts were thought to be ancient Roman originals. This is the main reason why they modeled their script on the Carolingian forms; and as we will see it is from there that the script passed to the Renaissance book printers, such as Aldus Manutius of Venice.

In this way it is plausible to say the Carolingian script forms the basis of our modern lowercase typefaces. Indeed ‘Carolingian Minuscule’ is a style of typeface and a careful analysis shows that the approximation to the original script is very high, and the modern typefaces are obtained by eliminating the nuances of size of the capitals and long descenders.

The main problem faced by the Carolingian Minuscule was that the script was time consuming and required intensive labor to produce. Another minus of the script was its large size that consumed a lot of manuscript space in a time when writing materials were extremely expensive. It is important to notice that from the beginning of the 11th century, different types of Carolingian scripts were already used, and by the mid of the next century, a new form of script appeared, called the blackletter, or Gothic script. There are several different types of Gothic scripts. A traditional classification offers four variants such as textualis, rotunda, fracta, and cursiva. The most common, and today commonly associated with the Gothic script, is the textualis.


This is the form that was used by Johannes Gutenberg when he printed his famous 42-line Bible. If we compare the script with the previous Carolingian then letters are taller and narrower.

Figure 7. A page of a rare blackletter Bible from 1497 in which we can see the coloured chapter initials were handwritten in after the printing.

The first impression we have when we do the comparison among the Gothic and the Carolingian types is that the Gothic letters are made of lines which are very angular and sharp and instead the Carolingian are more rounded. The result of this design is a high degree of “breaking,” thus curved letters do not connect to each other quite often.

The ascenders in letters such as ‘b,’ ‘d,’ and ‘h’ are vertical and often end in sharp finials. Two letters with bows such as ‘be’ and ‘bo’ overlap, and the letters are joined by a straight line. This is known “biting.” Another classic feature of the Gothic is the half ‘r’ function; when the form of ‘r’ is connected to other letters with bows, then only the bow and tail were written, connected to the bow of the previous letter. The same idea is used for the letter ‘d’ when is followed by another letter with a bow. Normally the letters ‘g,’ ‘j,’ ‘p,’ ‘q,’ and ‘y,’ and the hook of ‘h’ have descenders, but no other letters are written below the line. The letter a’ has a straight back stroke, and the top loop eventually became closed, somewhat resembling the number 8.


The letter ‘s’ very often has a diagonal line that connects its two bows, but the long ‘s’ is frequently used in the middle of words. Minims, especially in the later period of the script, do not connect with each other. This makes it very difficult to distinguish ‘i,’ ‘u,’ ‘m,’ and ‘n.’ Words having a sequence of these letters in this script would resemble to a sequence of single strokes.

This is one of the main reason why the dotted ‘i’ and the letter ‘j’ developed. Finally, and this is one of the main reasons why the script was very successful, the script contains many more abbreviations than Carolingian script. This made it more appealing for writing at speed.

The last type of script we are going to look at is the Humanist Minuscule script. This is a handwriting, or style, of script that was invented in Italy at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Many art historians have remarked that there were very few periods in Western history that have produced writing of such great beauty and clearness.

The script is essentially based on the previous Carolingian Minuscule. The historical reason for this is quite interesting. Renaissance humanists and scholars were obsessed with the idea of returning to the Age of Antiquity, and in particular with the idea that the Renaissance should represent the inheritance of the ancient lost worlds of the Romans and Greeks.

The scholars used such a strong embedding in the classic cultures of the past as a reaction of the darkness of the Middle Ages that as several historians have pointed out that when they were dealing with manuscript books copied by scribes two centuries before, they thought they were looking at texts that came right out of ancient Rome.

This is the main reason in humanistic scholarship the term litterae antiquae (the “ancient letters”) was used to denote this script as an inheritance from the fourteenth century, where the term was often opposed to litterae modernae, “modern letters” to denote the blackletter or Gothic scripts in general.

The name itself of the script, Humanistic Minuscule, was half denoting the content of the texts and the second half the style of writing. The production of manuscripts in the 15th century is basically divided into two groups concerning the style of writing. In the first group we have texts of law, medicine, and the Thomistic philosophy. These texts were still in use in the universities, were Gothic script was very common; in the second group the vernacular literature, with humanistic content, had its own, separate, distinctive traditions.

The style of writing in this second tradition added aesthetic content to the content itself; the content should be suggested by its look, and the medium is the script itself, or as the art historian Martin Davies puts it, “very old wine in new bottles, or the very latest vintage in a stylish new dress.”


However, this division was far more elaborated, and as we will see it required the contribution of important figures of the Italian Renaissance before the actual script shown in figure 8 came to light in its beautiful final dress. The Italian Humanistic script was very successful and reached quite quickly the rest of Europe. The main reason for this should be most likely attributed to the large diffusion of highly organized scriptoria in Italy during the 15th century. However this fact remains still a very important aspect that has not yet been fully explored and understood by historians and paleographers.

Figure 8. A beautiful example of Humanistic Minuscule script from the Book of Hours of Giovanni Bentivoglio (1497).


The origin of the Humanistic script

It has been pointed out by paleography experts such as Ullman, Davies, and Morison that the Humanistic script can be seen as a reaction to the Gothic script.

If we compare the two scripts above this, it is quite evident and clear from the manuscripts at our disposal that the script was a reaction to its predecessors. There was another drawback connected to the Gothic script. The script that was created for being extremely fast in writing had many contractions and ligatures, but these were not coming in a standardised form.

In Italy at the same time there was another type of script that was still in use even though it started to decline around the 11th century; its origins are from the town of Benevento in the south of Italy. The so-called Beneventan script was invented in the 8th century CE and was heavily employed until the 11th century. In particular, the Beneventan Minuscule was contemporary to the Carolingian Minuscule discussed above. The Beneventan Minuscule use was very localised and never went beyond the southern part of Italy with the small exception of Dalmatia where the Beneventan faith was quite widespread.

What still remains unknown to scholars is the reason why the Humanistic script did not face the same destiny of the Beneventan one. In any case what seems to be clear from development of research in paleography is that the Humanistic script was a reaction to the difficulties faced by the scholars in the late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Renaissance period.

As the Italian scholar Giulio Menna pointed out in his beautiful paper about the origin of the Humanistic script, “this typology of script was already influenced by the ‘littera antica’ but it is in the later fully developed Humanistic Book-hand that its influence is mostly evident. As it is generally understood, in the thirteenth century, Florence was the center of the humanistic world and became the birthplace of the humanistic script, which developed very quickly and soon spread through Italy and beyond the Alps. Humanistic script, on the other hand, developed at the end of the fourteenth century and by the first decades of the same era it was already found in Ferrara, Bologna and Venice.

By 1455 the script would be in Subiaco, near Rome, ready to influence the first types used in the printing machines in Italy.” Menna’s work explains also in detail what contributed to the rapid spread of the script beyond the Alps, “the reason of such a rapid spread of the Humanistic script was also due to the fact that many of the early humanists would come to Florence, discussing humanistic topic and eventually buy copied manuscripts, eventually carrying home the script to the different parts of Italy. Moreover, in the same period, the kings of Aragon decided to originate a new library in Naples and, intriguingly, rather than relying on the Beneventan script, typical of the area (Benevento is just fifty kilometers north-east of Naples),


the Humanistic script was preferred instead. Scribes from Florence traveled to southern Italy to write the manuscripts necessary to fill the newborn library. Soon the script would be dominant in many other libraries such as the one in Urbino, Cesena; but also in Hungary, where King Matthias Corvinus would create one of Europe’s greatest collections of secular books.”

Another interesting fact about the script is its name. Humanistic script’s expert Martin Davies noticed that the name is most likely due to the contents of the texts transmitted. This seems to be true since the manuscripts that interested the majority of the humanist scholars of the period were the classics coming from the Ancient world of Greece and Rome. Many of these transcriptions in the Humanistic book-hand have survived until today. As Menna’s remarked quite clearly, “texts in Italian vernacular written in Humanistic script and dated before 1450 are difficult to find, and even after that date the script’s presence in vernacular texts is not so common.

Manuscripts regarding professional matters that were useful to lawyers, philosophers and physicians continued to be written in Gothic script. There are also examples of Humanistic script used in various Books of the Hours, while the only example of Bible written in Humanistic script that I was able to find is the “Urbinate Bible.” This is a massive vulgate Bible ordered by the previously mentioned Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, from Vespasiano da Bisticci, the Florentine bookseller.” The very interesting point of Menna’s work is that it can be proven easily that the Carolingian script directly influenced the Humanistic script.

Menna through a quite detailed text comparison between the Stuttgart Psalter, an illuminated Carolingian manuscript written in Saint Germain des Prés in circa 830, and a written text by Poggio Bracciolini showed that the uppercase of ‘Q’ are written in the same manner. Other similarities can be found for the letter ‘s’ which is “written almost the same exact way.” Finally from the comparative study carried out ‘&’ looks basically the same in both manuscripts.

However the influence of the Carolingian scripts is largely limited to the minuscule case because the majuscules were inspired by inscriptions of the capital letters. This ambiguous mix is easily explained by the fact that humanist scribes thought that the Carolingian script was the original script used by ancient authors. When humanist scribes such as Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolo de Niccoli travelled to Rome they had samples of true ancient majuscules and decided to copy these rather than the ones found on manuscripts. Poggio Bracciolini’s well-known book about inscriptions in Rome is the evidence for this. The most influential styles coming from ancient Rome that influenced the Humanistic majuscules are the so-called Imperial and formal inscriptions.


Many of these inscriptions are still around today because of the existence of ancient Roman monuments. Following Menna’s comparison, we can also see that the same style of majuscules was already used by Carolingian scribes. This is because most likely the Carolingian scribes had the Roman style as a reference for their work.

Then it is not surprising at all that with the advent of the first printing machines, installed in the Abbey of Subiaco in the second half of the 15th century, the Humanistic script had a strong impact on Italian typographers, and it influenced the produced fonts of the time. It is sufficient to observe with some accuracy the work of the masters of the time such as Francesco Griffo, a punchcutter working for Aldo Manuzio, who designed the Italic style and many variants that have been very influential in the history of typography.

Just to name a few, we can mention:

• Monotype Poliphilus Roman, • Bembo Book Roman, • Bembo Titling, • Cloister Old Style Italic, • and less similar scripts such as:

• Garamond, • Dante, • Yale Typeface.

As we have seen many elements were transmitted along the way in the history of writing and the scripts that were produced in the Middle Ages. Many features and issues in the conception of new scripts led to a well-defined solid ground for modern printing and new typefaces.

Also many elements and features that were characteristics of the medieval writing were lost forever, and most of them are no longer suitable for the modern era we live in. The concept itself of uniqueness of the final manuscript and the different timing is irremediably lost into the centuries.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNO

PQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890

A sample of Bembo Book by Monotype


SillKate

Kate is based in the UK and has used her background as a graphic designer and academic as a vehicle to pursue her interest in the sculptural quality of letterforms, the dynamic of the printed page and, in turn, their relationship with formats and materials associated with contemporary book arts.

The abstract and concrete qualities of letterform and the spaces created in between are at the heart of our ability to articulate emotions, ideas, hopes and fears . . . as well as direct us to the supermarket . . . and persuade us to buy! Kate is interested in the oppositional rhythms of letterform – the functional and the poetic. How can the 26 shapes that make up the Roman alphabet possess such transformative qualities?

There is something simply wonderful about the curves of a lower case ‘g.’. Its form has a grace and ease that transcends its utilitarian function of representing thought and sound. The turn of an ear, the sensual loop of a descender supports not only the identification of a shape but also a human need to connect and understand. How can the mechanical and mathematical calculations associated with readability and legibility also provide a profound connection with the viewer?


26

There is a fluttering – the first signs of growing panic. I have been asked to write some words for a typographic conference in Prague, and now after pontification and procrastination, they need to be written, pronto! Panic continues to rise.

The words are about my theme, 26. At the time I was asked to submit this title I was feeling very smug. It has taken some time to arrive at this visually succinct title that also acts as a talisman for the simplicity, complexity, frustration, and wonderment that is typography. Of course this refers to cultures with an alphabet of 26 letters; others have more or less or alternative systems of communication. However, for this purpose, I will retain 26. What will be included? What can I contribute? What is the angle? How can I link with the theme of the conference, Differing Accents? It is all too much and my head is spinning.

I am a tutor. Someone who tries, and sometimes succeeds, to help young, would-be designers find their way through the trials and tribulations of the design process. How can I address 3,000 years of development in communication into a few thousand words? It is impossible.

I’ll take a break, have a cup of tea and browse through Flickr (Frutiger).

The presentation intends to explore the dichotomy that can exist between the practicalities of legibility and readability and the potential influence of content. To support this discussion contextual references will be included. However, before starting to consider possible examples, there needs to be a decision about the typeface for this article. I cannot possibly start to write such an important and illuminating reflection without a considered selection. Which one? I know the pressure is mounting but it is definitely worth spending a little time ensuring an appropriate choice. It must possess personality and attitude – a post-structural healthy disregard for convention, yes, that is the way to go . . . but perhaps not. There is no objectivity. There’s a need for a balanced view that conveys neutrality . . . not an irritation on the eye. It needs a face that allows access


to information without carrying bias and provides much-needed gravitas? It needs to be British, but which one? Perhaps Times New Roman, but no, it’s a default face and this discerning audience will think I am lazy - not an option. Caslon is an obvious choice and cited as the first typeface of English origin. It is imbued with elegance, refinement and possesses an historical authority. Alternatively, it could be sans serif – Gill Sans, very British and a lower case ‘g’ to die for. However, according to Mr. Jan Tschichold, sans serif is not recommended for continuous text. I could hedge my bets and go for a hybrid, Optima perhaps? There is a need to return to a serif, Georgia perhaps? A face designed by British-born Matthew Carter, classic proportions plus the added quality of being created by a current designer.

Hummm. Choices, choices . . . think I’ll open that packet of biscuits. Jammie Dodgers (font derived from The Beano’s ‘Rodger The Dodger’ comic strip).

Am now in a position to begin writing. There will be a brief whistle-stop tour of the last 3,000 years stopping off at various points to pause at key moments that have allowed a particular direction to dominate, and in turn, become the accepted norm. This would bring the presentation up to the present where examples of current designers have employed these self-imposed rules. There is a need for careful consideration about the selection of examples employed to illustrate these points.

OK – decision made, it is Georgia

fig 1. Trajan Column, Rome Completed in AD 113 and noted for its beautiful proportioned letterforms.

fig 2. JensonOne of the first 15th-16th century letterpress typefaces.


However, I know it is of no matter as this text will be flowed into a document designed by someone else, but while writing a piece it is always more pleasing to see an article emerge on screen with some grace. Hopefully it enables the words to have more accessibility and in some way prevent my humble contribution to the world of typography seem less inconsequential. Anything that can provide a confidence boost now is very welcome. Well worth spending a few moments considering this.

As a habit, I always start with 9/13pt and then adjust combinations of size, weight, space, and line length and how it is applied to format and substrate until there is visual balance - a magical moment. However, it is a predictable solution and surely this is an opportunity to try something different – it may help to sharpen the mind. Conversely, what I need now is something familiar like an old cardigan, comfortable and worn-in. I know how it is going to wear, providing familiarity while dealing with challenging content. No distractions required on this job.

To recap, the emerging aim of this talk is to comment on the oppositional values we place on letterform and text, the functional and the poetic. This will be supported firstly by a discussion surrounding the definition of typography and its applied attributes of legibility and readability. Much has been written on the subject, and this is an opportunity to refresh and take stock. Ellen Lupton in her article entitled “The Science of Typography” states that “Despite heroic efforts to create a critical discourse for design, our field remains ruled, largely, by convention and intuition.” So far so good for the logical aspect of my talk - the practical, measured and justifiable parameters that reinforces convention.

So, it is Georgia 9/13pt for the body text of this article

fig 3. Jeramy TankardSample sketchbook page for

typeface, Fenland.


Before being enticed by the potential contribution that content can play in the influence of visual outcomes, perhaps there can be a digression to consider the need for typographic hierarchy of this article. The title needs some attention. Could go for a contrast of typeface; perhaps the sans serif deliberated earlier can be utilised?

However, I am not designing this article, it just needs to be an indication that the title is separate from the main body of text. Georgia it is, but Bold and perhaps also larger. Will avoid all caps – it looks very stern and the intention is to write an article that has some levity.

The challenge will be how to weave the practical aspects of typography into how the human eye is able to detect beauty within these abstract but very functional shapes. How can we define the elegance of these forms designed to represent sound? How do we make the intangible, tangible?

There is a sculptural quality to the defined contours of our early letterforms that emerged from clay or stone by the skill and craftsmanship of their creators. What triggered their sense of aesthetic? What is aesthetic? What is it in the human condition that understands when something looks right?

Being surrounded by beauty provides a feeling of wellness, an uplifted spirit – it is core to our sense of being. It is linked with our basic instinct to survive. Selecting a mate who was healthy, had good posture and able to run fast led to an ideal physique and an associated aesthetic. It connects with our basic need to communicate.

OK – the article is now in Georgia 9/13pt, u/c with the title in Bold

fig 4. Neha HattangdiCreative interpretation of the functional face, Helvetica.


From early civilisation we have needed to co-operate to survive. Sounds that have evolved into language, and in turn its visual representation of letterform, are central to the advancement of humankind. In two-dimensional form, the inky black of letter shapes on a stark white ground freshly revealed from the press have the ability to put a tingle down the spine.

There is a rhythmic quality that emerges when letters like individual stars follow each other and cluster into words that in turn generate one line flowing after another creating a galaxy of light points that dance across the page. Perhaps too poetic – note to self – reign in a touch.

Time for lunch – Brie, olives, pumpernickel bread, ovocné knedlíky and coffee – need to consider the European audience.

Return to review text – now having many doubts. Perhaps not such a good idea but have now committed and there is no turning back, the deadline is looming. A fresh look at the article reveals I have been working with justified text.

fig 5. Dina SilantevaInvestigations in generative typography.

Certain parameters of basic shapes areapplied to music theory.


Suddenly great rivers of white are flowing down the screen. How did I not see that before? It cannot be entertained. The ranged left icon is quickly clicked and immediately there is a balance of air around the words – they are breathing easily. However, that cannot be said for the black horizontal dashes that have suddenly emerged at the end of some lines. The fluid meandering of line length on the right hand side of the column is now brutally punctuated with severed words. Does not look good. It will be worth the effort to reflow the text and it won’t take long – time well invented. I digress.

Where was I? Yes, function and aesthetic. This has been analysed by the great and good over many years and no doubt glasses of red wine. Philosophers, historians, and practitioners such as Ellen Lupton, Jacques Derrida, Beatrice Warde, Peter Bil’ak, and Jan Tschichold to name a few, have all attempted to encapsulate the social need to connect. Warde in her iconic paper The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible, London 1955, uses the metaphor of a transparent glass goblet filled with red wine to describe how well-applied typography should seem invisible in order to allow clarity of content. She goes on to discuss balance, restraint and the visual interpretation of sound. These themes will resonate in my presentation.

In Jacques Derrida’s theory, deconstruction asks how representation inhabits reality. In the West he argues that traditionally the arts and sciences have valued one half of oppositional pairs such as reality/copy or inside/outside. In terms of typography, we can consider for example speech/text or functional/emotive. Deconstruction is seen superficially as the chopped up, layered and rearranged content style made popular in the 1980s and 1990s. However, in relation to Graphic Design it is argued that this was a visual questioning of technology, regulations or formal organisations. Derrida introduced the concept of ‘deconstruction’ in his book Of Grammatology, published in France in 1967. According to Ellen Lupton, “Derrida’s critique of the speech/writing opposition locates the concerns of deconstruction in the field of graphic design.”

In his article, In Search of a Comprehensive Type Design Theory, Peter Bil’ak states that “type designers, like computer programmers, clinical biochemists, entomologists, and agricultural scientists are marked by an unintelligible jargon and slavish devotion to their pursuits; what sets them apart, however, is the seeming unimportance of their discussions.”

All is now well. The article is now in Georgia 9/13pt, u/c with the title in Bold.It is set ranged left, ragged right and the hyphenation has been removed. Somehow this feels satisfying


Occasionally I raise my head from dotting i’s and crossing t’s to question whether it is really important that the world needs yet another typeface. There are thousands already. Does it really matter that Univers has a slightly different inference to Helvetica or that the loop or an ear of a letterform is important to the world? In comparison with famine or war, perhaps not – but in terms of how we are able to express ourselves as humans, of course it is. The world would be poorer if individuals did not care about the visual form with which we express our deepest thoughts.

Now ready for something stronger – vodka will do (Absolut Headline or at a push, Futura Extra Bold Condensed).

fig 6. Ryan DixonA visual interpretation of Morse Code.


KnoblochIva

Iva Knobloch is an art and design historian. She works as curator of Prints Collection in the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. She is vice-president of the Organisation Commitee of International Bienniale in Brno and teaches history of graphic design at the Academy of Arts, Design and Architecture in Prague. She curated a traveling exhibition on Ladislav Sutnar, published 3 books of his work, and in collaboration with Petr Knobloch and Tomas Celizna she prepared www.sutnar.cz.


Sutnar &new typo

graphy

“My ambition is to design a page, graphic abbreviation, diagram or picture in order to express an idea so clearly and precisely that the purpose of the word becomes compound, if not minimal or redundant. There would be a singular force in this, should it prove successful.” In a letter from Ladislav Sutnar to ophthalmologist Jaroslav Hůlka, New York, 1943.

Sutnar, Lubalin and American Typography

One generation divided the two graphic designers who spoke at a conference in 1959 of New York’s Type Directors Club entitled “What is New in American Typograhy.” They were Herb Lubalin (1918-1981) and Ladislav Sutnar (1897-1976). Needless to say, sparks must have flown between them when Herb Lubalin stated that contemporary American typography may be ugly, but releasing the ugliness could give rise to something remarkably tender and charming.

On the contrary, Ladislav Sutnar put forward a programme manifesto which he called “The New Typography Expanding Future.” This text in no way resembles the emotional thoughts of his co-speakers. It looks to the future because its arguments and principles logically link together while its language is exacting and terse, restricted to the very core of the ideas … it is an urgent and defensive text.

Sutnar was 62 in 1959 with an incredibly productive and successful life behind him. His archive of work contains more than 23,000 items of realised and unrealised projects all concerning the field of typography. His graphic script has since been printed in millions of sheets of printed matter, but remains anonymous, concealed - circulating the everyday life of American society. As an American designer, Ladislav Sutnar did not move in cultural circles, but in marketing and advertising where all leaflets, direct mails, advertisements and promotional catalogues were published in millions of copies.


When writing his paper in 1959, he observed with fear the crisis of values and ideals, which had been the foundation of great artistic invention in modern American typography of the 1940s and 1950s. The roots of this energy stemmed from the European “new typography” of the 1920s and 1930s which in the title of his paper he prophesises as being the “expanding future” and regards it as the starting point for its further proper development.

Returning to Europe it must be mentioned that the publication of the book “New Typography” by Jan Tschichold in 1928 meant a fundamental turning point for Sutnar the graphic designer. Tschichold had set the direction for the hitherto European typographic experiments when formulating the following principles: optical legibility and the quickest possible transmission of the contents of a message. In the spirit of the time, applied graphic art was to have been inspired by modern abstract art and the picture was to be created using new technologies. Ornaments and spectacular designs, which diverted the eye and thought from the contents of the message, were prohibited. Tschichold and other European pioneers, as well as all left-wing thinkers, invented another socially beneficial field in which new, quickly legible and perceptible typography could be utilised; hence the new typography would pass into a much broader field, which in 1959 Sutnar called the hitherto infinite potential of visual communication.

However, the fact of the matter was that graphic designers of the younger generation did not really know how to comprehend the legacy of “new typography.” They either imitated it formally without knowing the original sources (a translation of Tschichold into English did not appear in the USA until 1995) or yearned for change. Lubalin’s “release of ugliness” only proved to Sutnar that he needed to bluntly warn against typographic formalism in his paper, “witty puns, short-winded effects of alternating fashion trends, sentimental style revivals, new falsely speculating styles and novelties, which prefers only type - all this would quickly disappear.” (Sutnar’s son Radoslav likes to describe spectacular, illogical designs as “lace,” which was the description they used at home).

Nevertheless, what shocked Sutnar more than the lace in typography were the conditions in modern American advertising, which he co-founded in the 1940s and 1950s. “Advertising has ridiculed the moral values, which stood at its origin.” Sutnar considered advertising to be an art for the widest section of the population; a form of good quality promotion of quality goods, which fulfils the highest artistic criteria because it influences general taste, life, and environment. While he still worked in advertising directly with his clients and enlightened managers, by the end of the 1950s, advertising came to be dominated by agency type of work, an impersonal apparatus whose objective was financial profit for the agency, which had little to do with moral values and artistic ambitions.


It was therefore not very surprising that the sixty-three year old Ladislav Sutnar was more than disturbed by what was happening, and furnished with futuristic foresight, he sensed that further development could lead typography astray. He used all his educational efforts to prevent this in the paper he gave before a mass professional public and continued on the subject in his book, “Visual Design in Action,” two years later in 1961.

Vision of the future

What was Sutnar trying to say: with the aid of visual communication help to solve problems of society in the interest of its survival and progress. He was a socially and futuristically thinking designer who attempted to create timeless values and quality, and used typography in such a manner that it would cleverly, joyfully, and universally serve society.

He understood the world in a dynamic way, and in his transition towards the future he tried to anticipate the questions of further development. He belonged to the futuristically thinking generation of designers who could hear the grass grow and a meeting with one of the greatest of them, Buckminster Fuller, resulted in the appearance of a brilliant publication entitled “Transport: Next Half Century” (1950), which - as an irony of history - has fallen into oblivion as printed advertising matter of a firm trading in paper. It was a beautiful gesture by a society that did not hear the grass grow. Of course the same fate awaited Sutnar’s prediction of the computer and information age, which he made famous, for the first time, in this very paper in 1959.

“As the world gets smaller, a totally new meaning is becoming the centre of attention of its also growing interconnection and inter-dependence. Of course, this results in the new need for visual information, which would be comprehensible throughout the world. This will require many new kinds of visual information, simplified information systems and perfected forms and techniques. It will also lead to the urgent need for improving mechanical equipment for processing, integrating and transmitting information. This innovation will also affect visual information design for the home consumer.”

Could anyone in the lecture room of the Type Directors Club in New York in 1959 imagine what a personal computer would look like one day? Most of the audience was more concerned with the question of whether typography is a craft or an art, and there was no response to the prophetic forecasts of the information age, which sounded demanding, strict and categorical.

Sutnar, who was more than twenty years ahead in his intellectual visions, must have realised the exceptional nature of his paper, and therefore being fundamentally a teacher he tried to logically convince and show how well he was prepared for the forthcoming information and computer reality. Just as Tschichold in the 1920s, he formulates the principles,


which guide development towards the future, not in vicious circles. He compares the situation in design to natural sciences where the discoveries of preceding generations are not forgotten but developed in future generations. He continues on from the legacy of “new typography” and states that the characteristics of our environment are the increasing speed of communication and mass. Everybody needs quickly perceptible typography today: not just the architect or teacher, but also the jet pilot needs effective typography for his control panel so he does not get killed.

So a graphic design can achieve greater intensity of perception and comprehension of contents, the designer (typographer) should be aware of the following principles: 1/ optical interest, which arouses attention and forces the eye to action. 2/ visual simplicity of image and structure allowing quick reading and comprehension of the contents. 3/ visual continuity, which allows the clear understanding of the sequence of elements.

In his vision Sutnar quotes Karel Teige, who in 1934 presented Sutnar’s exhibition of graphic work and inspired by his approach, he predicted that a typographer and designer of the future will have to exceed his professional boundaries by also becoming an architect, editor, artist… a designer could not rely on mere typography in the services of a dynamically growing company. So graphic design is not just a profession, but also an attitude towards the environment. Sutnar did literally achieve this role. At the beginning of the 1950s he was one of the first to work on ecological projects. With his increasing worries concerning “visual pollution,” inflation of typography and graphic design, he had his own ideas about design ecology: graphic designers were to exert their efforts in serving to promote ecological behaviour because the survival of humankind and this plant depends on it.

Typography for modern perception -Czechoslovak Republic

Returning to his exhibition in 1934… Sutnar was then an influential manager, successful designer of three-dimensional utility objects, director of the School of Graphic Arts, and was part of the European community of “new typography.” The torso of the exhibition has been miraculously preserved in the collections of the Museum of Applied Arts in Prague and today represents a unique example of sparkling vitality in the graphic arts of the time.

The exhibition didactically demonstrates a broad spectrum of “new typography.” The most interesting, in this respect, is the presentation of the structure of photographic publications and advertising leaflets based on the sequence of the photography and their details allowing penetration beneath the surface to the essence of the events. The principles of visual flow, optical fascination, and thoughtful simplicity is already implemented in the photographic publications.


“… graphic design,” he writes in the commentary to one of his illustrated books, “ … makes sure that the illustrations clearly follow the sequence of the text, so that the light and dark areas alternate in a certain rhythm, the small and large illustrations alternate on the pages of the book thereby providing a complete picture, their details and so on. In its entirety the book has its own structure that is preceded by a preliminary study…”

The fact that detailed care and thoughfulness tends not to be a feature of today’s illustrated books, it will do no harm to recall Sutnar’s work procedure. “First of all the photographs are selected in accordance with the text and numbered. Then they are classified in order of importance and purpose. Now each photograph is considered individually bearing in mind the size for future portrayal. The size of the picture will depend on its significance. Depending on whether it is to accompany or underline the text. Whether it will be a mere comment or an important document …The size of the picture also decides where it will be placed, what sort of mutual associations will there be between the text and pictures, and in what sort of a relationship will they be to the rest of the pictures on the same page or the surrounding pages.“

Illustrated books reflect all of Sutnar’s creative experience: the sense for drama, rhythm and tempo, which he acquired from his scenographic work (for the puppet theatre Drak (Dragon), National Theatre and Workers Olympics). Sutnar, as a further representative of the avant-garde, was a fervent admirer of cinematography, and his work also reflects his understanding of film editing - thanks to Sutnar, lectures were already given in cinematography at the State School of Graphic Arts in the 1930s. Sutnar’s book designs were also a sort of manifesto of the new perception of space: open and dynamic, moving space, space we perceive from an aeroplane. This time-space sense refined his interest in modern architecture - Sutnar promoted publications and organisational activity concerning modern housing, he had personally experienced when building his own family house at Baba (translator’s note: part of the sixth district of Prague) and experience from monumental exhibition installations.

Typography for daily life - USA Catalogues

After one desperate year of looking for work, in 1941 Ladislav Sutnar became Art Director for the firm Sweet´s where he created, in today’s words, a database system of classifying and searching out commercial-technical information in catalogues covering the field of construction. In a short period of time, he made great progress in research into the effect of typography and design on the perception of the contents of information and incorporated this experience into small didactical, visual brochures entitled “Controlled Visual Flow” (1943) and “Shape, Line and Color” (1945).Minimum means, maximum effect - that was his Czechoslovak principle,


which he also used when designing catalogues. In the US he was the first to use the horizontal area of a double-page for organising information complying with the idea of dynamic reading. He designed the double-page in such a manner that it would firstly be immediately overlooked then would quickly provide the details required (the principle of today’s website design). These catalogues are considered founder’s work in the field of information design. They are constantly fascinating due to their brilliant balance between the strict logic of hierarchical structure and playfulness, which resembles abstract paintings.

Marketing and the telephone directory with the aid of typography

As early as the 1940s, Ladislav Sutnar was profiled as a pioneer in the field of advertising and marketing. The big projects of the 1940S and 1950s lead me to consider that Sutnar perceived type in an abstract way - as a geometrical structure, which must be as legible as possible, but likewise optically interesting while the interest is always subject to the legibility. The famous logo of the firm Addo-x is a good example of this. Sutnar recalls that the logo occurred to him within five minutes - he pictured it as a horizontal sequence of four rings ending in X. The advantages of the abstract geometry of this logo were soon demonstrated when the logo could be used in various configurations for various forms of corporate communication as an easily identifiable and remembered symbol of a firm that produces calculators.

Disfigured question and exclamation marks, that still retain their basic symbolic form, became the fundamental elements of an advertising campaign for the fashion firm Vera. Sutnar used the moment of surprise, which the typographic symbol evoked in this respect. He also put these typographic symbols to brilliant use when in 1964 a reformed the American telephone directory, an equivalent to our yellow pages. By that time he had already become absorbed in producing enormous paintings of nudes, and even this unremarkable, and in his case, truly anonymous work meant a great challenge.

He was the first to understand how important an information medium the telephone directory was and how direct and fatal the role was of typography in it (just as in the case of a pilot). The basic change as opposed to the original chaos lay in the fact that he simplified, classified, and visualised the introductory information into some sort of information package form allowing information to be quickly found, understood, and retrieved. Besides new pictograms for the most important numbers, he also altered the entry of long numbers (codes in parentheses). Although his reform was accepted, further telephone directories did not respect his designs.


Books

Unfortunately, Sutnar did not get many opportunities for book design in the US. He was greatly disappointed by the low typographical level of the enormous American book market, which appeared to be controlled by “prejudices, indifference and conventions,” as he stated in his paper in 1959. Perhaps this is why his dozen books are an example of the experimental laboratory of book typography and design. He could implement the unusual, but logical designs because the authors and publishers were his friends, or he himself.

Among the remarkable works of fiction is the book edition of the lecture paper by Pavel Eisner entitled “Franz Kafka and Prague” (1950). The wide river of text was to reflect the continuous flow of words that is why the paragraphs were removed. So the printed page would not appear monotonous, Sutnar introduces headings in brackets, which summarises the contents of the paragraph.

He followed up on his Czechoslovak photographic books by designing his own books, which we could describe as visual essays (Design for Point of Sale 1952, Package Design 1953). The text is reduced to a minimum, and the main information carrier is the blocks of black and white photographs. Their rhythm is developed with the aid of diagram so that the movement of the eye alternates and attention is held in constant suspense just as when watching a film. The book “Catalog Design Progress,” which he wrote in 1950 with Knud Lönberg-Holm and is considered a milestone in the field of information design, is one of the jewels of 20th century book design. The book is very carefully structured into individual sections separated by dividing pages – Sutnar compared the dividing pages to the intervals in a theatrical performance and stressed the physical role of division either by colour or different texture of the paper. According to Sutnar, the dividing pages contribute to the essential vitality of the book. A spiral that became part of the cover and page design bound the book.

Sutnar also toyed with the idea of contrasting types of paper in his last book on design, “Visual Design in Action” (1961). On coated paper he develops the illustrated story of his life’s work in the field of graphic design in which he includes colour portfolios with the principles of his biggest projects. The portfolios are printed on paper with a rough surface. As Sutnar justifies in the book, he used this method to relive the monotony of the book block.

The already mentioned illustrated publication “Transport: Next Half Century” has a highly original design. Here Sutnar uses the space of the double page freely by placing the introductory block of text vertically to gain as much space as possible for the illustrations, and the explanatory texts horizontally there where the illustrations would allow it. The invisible order also controls this playful invention. Sutnar’s book designs gained a response in the US and were acclaimed by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) as books of the year.


Architecture Ladislav Sutnar was also described as an architect although he only studied architecture for one term. However, he did associate with the architectural community throughout his life and his work as a designer was related to contemporary concepts in urbanism and social housing. In the US he had the opportunity to work with orientation systems in architecture in the first pioneering years. He came up with his own alphabet for the orientation systems for school, hospital, and home signs - obviously because he did not find any that would comply with his requirements. The simple alphabets had to be legible in all types of versions and on all outdoor and indoor signs. Sutnar also stressed the perfect and pleasant proportions of the type, which creates the atmosphere of all public buildings. He himself considered the letter “s” the acid test for the correct proportions of the designed alphabet. In the headings he unobtrusively alternated small letters with reduced capital letters to stress the division of the words, but did not disrupt the continuity of the visual flow. Throughout his work for architecture he was plagued by the design of the EXIT sign focusing on the letter “x” as the symbol whose peculiarity allows immediate awareness of the meaning. However he did not manage to convince any client by his argument of quick and clear legibility, so his simply eloquent symbol remained unrealised.

Genius of composition

Most of Sutnar’s designs and logos are marked for their unrivalled perfection for composition. His former colleague, today the famous New York painter Philip Pearlstein, stated the following about Sutnar: he was a genius of composition. Ladislav Sutnar rarely created his designs intuitively. Most of his models were based on careful, detailed geometric drawings. As professor of descriptive geometry and drawing, he compiled his compositional formulas mathematically. He measured out and incorporated all the elements of his compositions into a geometric grid. Although they appear to be accidental and playful, the mathematical laws of perspective, axonometry or gold cut precisely calculate their position. Perhaps that is why they still have such optical vitality and timeless perfection of modern form.

Greetings to those forgotten and discovered

A revolutionary first extensive study was published in the third issue of Typo on Otto Neurath by whose work Ladislav Sutnar was inspired and shared similar pioneering ideals and a similar fate. Their work is not appealing as it is based on a broad social idea and importance of visual perception. That is why they and their work are only just being discovered as the prophets and workers of the civilisation of the eye, which is assuming the most fanatastic dimensions in the 21st century. First published in Typo Magazine 5/2003


Ladislav Sutnar(1897-1976)

born in Pilsen

serves on the front in World War One

studies at the School of Applied Arts in Prague

designs toys, puppets, scenography

designs about book layouts

designs the installation for about 40 exhibitions

art director of the publisher Družstevní práce (Cooperative Work) and the designer studio Krásná jizba (Beautiful Chamber)

designs glass, porcelain and cutlery services, textile articles and metal objects

in the post of director of the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague

travels to dismantle the Czechoslovak exhibition hall at the World Exhibition in New York and does not return

art director of the firm Sweet’s Catalog Service

publishes a series of books and articles about information design, cover design and goods arrangement

works on corporate identity for a number of American firmsworks on orientation systems in architectureworks on the ecological magazine Power

works with Radio Free Europe and on the design of the magazine Svědectví

touring exhibition and book Visual Design in Action

redesign of telephone directory

large paintings of nudes

dies in New York

in memoriam award conferred by the Czech state

9.11.1897

1915 - 18

1918 - 23

1921 - 30

1926 - 39

1926 - 39

1929

1930s

1932 - 39

1939

1941 - 60

1943 - 61

1950s

1956 - 70s

1961

1964

1960 - 70

18.11. 1976

2001


Noad

Mark is a designer with 25 years experience working for some of the biggest names in the industry. A graduate of Norwich School of Art, his first job was working for David Hillman at Pentagram Design where he received a thorough grounding in editorial design. From there he moved to Addison Design mainly producing annual reports and then to Smithfield design working on a broader range of projects.

After a stint at Studio Alexander in Auckland, New Zealand, Mark set up his own business in 2003. Based in London, Mark Noad Design has worked with a cross section of clients from international businesses (Tate & Lyle, Three, and CEMEX) to social and environmental organisations (WWF, RSPB, Waterwise, and the Prince’s Foundation for Children and the Arts) as well as smaller clients (The Margaret Beaufort Institute, Wonderful World, and Katherine Brown). Projects include annual reports, branding and identity, promotional campaigns, and environment graphics that are delivered in print and on line.

Mark approaches this range of clients and type of project with the same philosophy: good design it is about understanding what a client does and what they are trying to communicate; it offers a different perspective that provides insight into their business then communicates that effectively to their target audiences. What clients get from working with Mark Noad Design is distinctive, eye-catching, effective communications solutions.

In addition to the commercial work, Mark also works on self-initiated projects. A recent one is his redesign of the London Underground map (www.london-tubemap.com) that received some media coverage and generated heated debate in the design world and beyond.

Mark


getting from

a to z:

I’ve lived in London most of my life and take the Tube for granted, but as a designer, I’ve listened with interest to friends from outside London and overseas saying how confusing they find it. The major criticism being that it bears little or no relation to London at street level.

The original London Underground diagram, designed by Harry Beck, is one of the greatest designs of the twentieth century. He rationalised and clarified a complex system to produce a simple, easy to follow piece of information graphics. Over the years, the Underground system has grown and now has twice as many lines as there were on the last version Beck worked on in 1960. The current version still looks similar to his original work; but, although it follows the same principles, these have not been applied with any great care.

If Harry Beck saw the current diagram, I don’t think he would be happy to put his name to it. Newer lines have been shoe-horned in with stations pushed and pulled around in what seems more of a space filling exercise than an attempt to communicate clearly and effectively. Yes, Beck did compromise geographical accuracy to create a clearer, simpler diagram, but the subsequent updates have exacerbated this with some quite dramatic liberties being taken with the position of stations.

The recent addition of the London Overground network in particular has thrown up some laughable juxtapositions of stations, Watford and Watford Junction, Archway and Upper Holloway, South Acton and Chiswick Park are all seriously misleading. And of course there was the short-lived experiment of removing the river Thames, the only ‘geographic’ feature on the map.

The major criticism being that it bears little or no relation to London at street level.

type, travel & the tube map


Development

A truly geographic representation of the London Underground system is not practical to use as a navigation tool. The system covers a huge area but the majority of stations and the most important interchanges are located in a small central area. To be successful, the new version needed to reflect the geographic relationships of the stations to each other and to London as a whole but also be easy to read and usable to plan journeys.

Beck’s map was not wholly original. Diagramatic representations of the lines already existed in different forms, the colours of the lines and the way stations and interchanges are identified were already standard so his map, although radical in shape used a visual language already familiar to users of the system. In the same way, I wanted to use the existing visual language for the lines and stations and also to follow similar design principles, in particular the fixed line angles and shortening the extremities of the lines to make it more compact.

To plot the position of the stations, I used a combination of true geographic representations of the system found on line, Google maps, and a battered old copy of the London A to Z street atlas. Once plotted, the main design task was to establish the angles and to create a grid. Through the central area, the Jubilee, Bakerloo, Northern, and Piccadilly lines all run roughly parallel at 60 degrees from the horizontal so this was my starting point. The map uses vertical, horizontal, 60 and 30 degree lines throughout, just one more than Beck’s horizontal, vertical and 45 degree system.

So I wondered what Harry Beck might do if asked to start again with the different parameters we have today: • more lines and upcoming

additions including Crossrail, the Docklands Light Railway extension and the Northern Line extension to Battersea;

• the Docklands Light Railway and London Overground moving the emphasis away from the Circle Line loop;

• developments in technology meaning it is just as likely to be viewed on-screen as it is in print;

• many more visitors from outside London, especially for the Olympic Games.

King’s CrossSt. Pancras

BankMonument

White City

Shepherd’sBush Market

Shepherd’sBushGoldhawk Road

Hammersmith

WoodLane

Latimer Road

LadbrokeGrove Westbourne Park

Willesden Green

Maryland

Forest Gate

Leyton

Leytonstone

LeytonstoneHigh Road

Leyton Midland Road

Dollis Hill

Neasden

Golders Green

Hampstead

West Hampstead

BelsizePark

Chalk Farm

Archway

Crouch Hill

Upper Holloway

KentishTown West

Kentish Town

Camden Road

Camden Town

Euston

MorningtonCrescent

GospelOakHampstead

Heath

Tufnell Park

Kilburn

Finchley Road& Frognal

Finchley Road

Swiss Cottage

St. John’s WoodKilburn Park

KilburnHigh Road

Willesden Junction

EastActon

Maida Vale

Queen’s Park

Kensal Green

Kensal Rise

BrondesburyPark

Brondesbury South Hampstead

Royal Oak

Paddington

Bayswater

Queensway

Holland Park

OlympiaTurnhamGreen

StamfordBrook Gloucester

RoadSouth

KensingtonSloaneSquare

St. James’sPark

RavenscourtPark

BaronsCourt

Earl’s Court

West Brompton

Fulham Broadway

Parsons Green

Putney Bridge

East Putney

Imperial Wharf

Clapham Junction

Clapham Common

Clapham South

Clapham North

Stockwell

Brixton

Oval

Kennington

Elephant& Castle

Borough

LambethNorth

Southwark

Waterloo

Embankment

Bermondsey

Queens RoadPeckham

PeckhamRye

DenmarkHill

Brockley

New CrossGate

New Cross

Lewisham

Elverston Road

Deptford Bridge

Greenwich

Cutty Sark

IslandGardens

Mudchute

Crossharbour

South Quay

India Quay

Heron Quay

NorthGreenwich

Canning Town

West Ham

BlackwallPoplar

Westferry

All Saints

East India

Bow Church

Devons Road

PuddingMill Lane

Bethnal Green

Angel

Hackney WickHomertonHackney CentralDalston

Kingsland

DalstonJunction

Highbury &Islington

Caledonian Road& Barnsbury

Caledonian Road

HollowayRoad

Arsenal

Manor House

Finsbury Park

Canonbury

Plaistow

Stratford

Shadwell

Tower Gateway

TowerHill

StepneyGreen

Mile End Bow Road Bromley-By-Bow

Aldgate EastAldgate

Whitechapel

LiverpoolStreet

Moorgate

St. Paul’s

RussellSquare

TottenhamCourt Road

OxfordCircus

Holborn

Temple Blackfriars

MansionHouse

CanonStreet

CoventGarden

LeicesterSquare

PiccadillyCircus Charing

Cross

Chancery Lane

Barbican

Farringdon

Old Street

ShoreditchHigh Street

Hoxton

Haggerston

Limehouse

Canary Wharf

Canada Water

Surrey Quays

Rotherhithe

Wapping

Westminster

LondonBridge

Vauxhall

Victoria

Knightsbridge

Hyde Park Corner

Green Park

Pimlico

ClaphamHigh Street

Wandsworth Road

High StreetKensington

NottingHill Gate

WestKensington

Lancaster Gate

Marble Arch

BondStreet

Edgware Road

Baker Street

Edgware Road

Marylebone

Regent’sPark

GreatPortland

Street

Warwick Avenue

EustonSquare

Warren Street

Goodge Street

Early version of the Tube Map


The stations are positioned so they are geographically correct in relation to each other, for example: Waterloo is east of Westminster; Cockfosters in north of Bond Street; West Croydon is south of Elephant and Castle and Upminster is further north than Uxbridge. However, the lines do not follow all the actual twists and turns. These have been drawn to make navigating between the stations as simple as possible.

One of the most familiar elements of the Underground map is the typeface Johnston (or Johnston Sans) which is also used for signage throughout the system as well as on the London Bus network. Originally designed by Edward Johnston and first introduced in 1916, it was redrawn and digitised as New Johnston by Letter Exchange member Eiichi Kono working with design Group Banks and Miles on their revamp of the London Transport identity materials in 1979. This version is exclusively for the use of London Transport (or Transport for London, TfL as they are now), but another version was made available by the International Typeface Corporation (ITC). ITC New Johnston was drawn by Dave Farey of Housestyle Graphics (and a former Letter Exchange Chairman) and released in 2000.

I wanted to keep the typeface as another familiar element from the existing map, but the geographic positioning of the stations on my map means that some of them are quite close together making it difficult to add the station names. What I needed was a condensed version of the New Johnston so I asked Dave Farey if he would be interested in creating one. We worked together to create a font that has many of the characteristics of New Johnston but also removed some of the quirks of the original to improve legibility. The single weight of New Underground, as it was christened, is used throughout the map and promotional material.

Launch and reaction

From the first sketches to the launch of the website was just under a year involving many redraws, tweaks, and refinements. Publishing in web and app format gives the opportunity to add more layers of information to the map without making it overcrowded. Layers currently available include: step-free access; journey times between stations; river bus services; and useful walking links between stations at street level. There are plans to add many more and to include individual station directories to give more information at each location for example the number of steps, escalators or lifts, toilet facilities, bus links, local attractions, etc.

Facebook and Twitter were very useful for spreading publicity about the map. Once started, the story was picked up by many on-line magazines and blogs and also by the conventional press. Notable coverage included: press articles in London’s Metro newspaper, The Independent, Intersection magazine and Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter; on-line coverage from The Economist, The Toronto Star, Dezeen, Travel + Leisure (New York), and Juxtapoz (San Fransisco); and an interview with BBC Radio Kent.


An article on the Fast Company (a New York based style magazine) blog generated particular interest. It received a comment from designer Erik Spiekermann, designer of the Berlin underground map and typeface Meta, among others, that generated a follow up article about “what design means” (www.fastcodesign.com/1664692).

In general, the responses were split between those who like the new geographic approach and those that think the existing version is such an icon it should not be messed with. However, in defence of the existing or ‘classic’ map there seemed to be three main lines of thought which can be summarised as: it’s ugly; if it ain’t broke don’t fix it; and you don’t need to be geographically accurate when you are underground.

I have no problem with criticism; it helps make a better map, but there are a few points that need to be made in response to these comments which will hopefully add to the debate.

The relative aesthetic qualities of the two maps is an interesting one. There have been as many comments for – ‘beautiful,’ ‘very sexy,’ ‘ This may be the best piece of design I’ve ever seen’ – as there have against – ‘an ugly waste of time,’ ‘looks like it’s been dropped,’ and ‘aesthetically frightful’ (the most eloquent thanks to actor and writer Mark Gatiss).

Maybe aesthetics should have been higher up my priority list when designing it, but it really was about finding the clearest solution as was Beck’s original which is equally ugly and beautiful in its own way.

It ain’t broke? As reported previously, I am a fan of Beck’s original map and in no way claim to have produced something that is better than his, but the current version does not come up to his high standards. Those that defend the current map in Harry Beck’s name are really not looking at it carefully enough; there is room for wholesale improvement within those design parameters. The problem with anyone independent trying to improve it is that they would be unlikely to be able to publish it because of TfL’s copyright enforcement. And those responsible for the current map don’t seem to understand or care about the rigour and quality Beck applied during the 30 years he was responsible for the map.

As for not needing geography underground, that is probably true. But recent additions to the system, London Overground (the clue is in the name), Docklands Light Railway, and Croydon Tramlink are all on the surface. In 1931 (Beck’s original), less than half the system was underground anyway; the proportion is much less now.

I have no problem with criticism; it helps make a better map


5

1

1

1

5

5

5

7

9 S†

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

6

6

6

6

8

2

2

2

2

2

4

44

4

4

4

4

1 2 3 4 5 76 8 9

1 2 3 4 5 76 8 9

A

B

C

D

E

F

A

B

C

D

E

F

Northern

Piccadilly

Victoria

Waterloo and City

Jubilee

Metropolitan

London Overground

Bakerloo

Central

Circle

Croydon Tram Link†

District

Docklands Light Railway

Hammersmith and City

Interchange stations† Croydon Tram Link, Heathrow Express and Watford Junction Station are subject to special fare rates outside of the zone system* London Overground Surrey Quays to Clapham Junction opens 2012Interchange with network rail services

Heathrow Express†

Journey time between stations in minutes

www.london-tubemap.com

New London Tubemap version 1.3

The information on this map is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of publication. It has no connection to

Transport for London and does not represent the official depiction of the London Underground system.

Visit our website where you can let us know what you think about this map and your experiences of travelling on the underground system via our blog, twitter and facebook.

© Mark Noad 2011

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Convenient street-level walking links between stations






© Mark Noad 2011

Above : Walking link Maps London Tube

Below : Journey time between stations map for the London Tube


The Paris Metro

As a result of the publicity for the London Tube map project, I was approached by a Paris-based app developer looking to create a copyright-free map of the metro system for use in their products. They had launched an open competition to design a new map and invited me to participate.

Time was tight with only three weeks to the deadline, and I was less familiar with the system than I am with the London Underground. Working from the official metro map and from Google maps, it was obvious the character of the system was very different than that of London. There are more lines, the routes meander more and some of the interchanges are very complex.

My approach was to sketch out the most complex interchanges, make them work then fit them together to make the whole system. In doing so, I decided that it would be clearest if the interchanges showed separate station markers for each line, a system I may well bring into the London map in future versions. The result is something that is probably less geographically accurate than the official version, but much easier to navigate and use. My version was one of the ten finalists that were put to a Facebook vote, eventually coming in sixth (www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.303204153038029.79568.120982201260226&type=3).


What next?

There are some refinements I would like to do to the London map in particular to improve the way intersections are identified, and I will also be adding a layer showing all the National Rail services covered by the Oystercard system.

But I would also like to do much more with layering and customising the map for use on screen, and I want to change the way you access information from a map. My aim is to create a map that you can customise to your own requirements using filters for the whole map and individual station directories.

So, for example: I’m in Camden and I want to go to a park.

The Tube map should identify where you are either by entering a postcode or by a location search on the app and show the nearest station options. You can then filter ‘parks,’ and the map will show all the stations adjacent to parks along with a representation of the park areas.

If you want to take the dog, filter out all stations with escalators. If you want to take a child in a buggy, filter out stations with lots of stairs. Make your decision on the best destination, and Tube map shows you the best route with times, if required.

You then look at the info pop-up for that station which will tell you what carriage to be in, to be nearest the exit, and what side the doors open. It will also have a list of other attractions, shops, food/drink, etc. so you can go on to that afterwards along with comments and tips from fellow travellers. You will even be able to hear how the station name is pronounced.

This will take a lot more research, planning, and investment, but once the system is developed, it should be adaptable and able to be applied to any transport system map.

When planning a journey, there are four main questions:

– Where am I? – Where do I want to go? – What do I want to do?– What constraints, if any, do I have?

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The Final Submitted Map

63 differing accents | Wednesday 13th June

HamillJo

Jo Hamill is a UK-based artist and academic at Teesside University. She studied at Manchester Metropolitan University and University of Leeds and has worked commercially as a graphic designer and freelance illustrator. She will present a number of recent works and discuss the themes which underpin her current practice as an artist. The construction and deconstruction of meaning, absence and presence, the inexpressible, the reader as viewer and the attenuation of conventions are explored in her work through the limits of materiality and representations of language.

Within her work Jo often uses iconic literary texts as a vehicle to ask questions of the space that exists in and around language. Our inured use of linguistic conventions recognises the functionality of language but belies the frustrations inherent within the written and spoken word as a means of self-expression and human connection. How can a system, which efficiently constructs a shopping list, adequately communicate the most intimate and deepest of human concerns? How are we moved by and connected to language? What strategies are employed to manage the limits of language in order to construct or find meaning? Our (sometimes fractious) relationship with language finds solace in the use of habitual conventions. Familiar limits mark out a territory for expression, governed by a complex code system, which is deciphered into letters, words, and syntax in order to form meaning; a meaning challenged by what lies beneath the surface, social conventions, arbitrariness, ambiguity, and the unsaid.

64differing accents | Wednesday 13th June

lost for words

The inexhaustible range of conventions, which although designed to elucidate and help us find meaning, often highlight the impenetrable inadequacies of language. The interstice between the concrete presence of language and the ‘other space’ that language takes us belies the nature of where and how intimacy is formed. By situating language outside of normative conventions and establishing encounters that disrupt, subvert and undermine, Jo’s work attempts to question the processes of seeing and reading language.

What potential does the estrangement of convention have to enable us to suspend our formed relationship with language and consequently our role as an expectant reader to become an uninformed viewer, seeing language afresh? How dependent are we on our need for established conventions to access language within new contexts? Can investigations into the materiality of language help bridge the interstice between the concrete and the conceptual?

Abridged 2011 (left) subverts the formal structure of a randomly chosen page from a carefully selected book. All elements are retained, words, punctuation, letter spacing, etc., but they are now conflated into an abbreviated form. However, fragments of the familiar are retained. The work’s size echoes the page’s lost space; it alludes to a recognisable format, and one that we are intimately connected to. The rhythm of language and the traces it leaves are still evident, enough perhaps to prompt the search for meaning?


From Merz to you, from you to me, from me to you, 2011 (above) explores the contradictory dynamic between the written and spoken word. What is lost in the transmission of words, what is gained by their rereading or retelling? What limits the written and spoken word as a means of self-expression and human connection? The process of making From Merz to you, from you to me, from me to you began with an A4 piece of paper and a typeset block of words, the content of which was a quote by the artist Mario Merz. The acts of speaking, reading, writing, and drawing were conflated in order to explore and disrupt the fixed nature of language. The repetitive action of handwritten transcription, which after a time became more akin to drawing, resulted in a work woven out of the rhythm of reading the quote out aloud. Words and sounds became connected; they rotated and flowed into a circular form. The action became automatic but out of reverence the words retain their meaning.

Right pageTop - And the spaces in between (detail), 2012. Bottom, left and right - Somatic I

(detail), 2011.



DonaldErrol

Errol Donald is a London-based brand and marketing professional and business mentor. He is also a member of a European graffiti collective, The Chrome Angelz TCA).

He is committed to cultural leadership through education and the arts, and regularly shares his experiences at events and in schools, where he collaborates with educators, practicing artists, and students.

Formed in 1985, The Chrome Angelz spent a brief, yet productive and highly influential, period in the public eye. Their approach to developing a distinctly European aesthetic resulted in a number of high-profile paintings and collaborations with artists inside and outside the world of Graffiti art and Hip Hop culture. Their meeting with Subway Art author Henry Chalfant would prove fruitful as their appearance in the follow-up book “Spraycan Art” introduced them to a global audience.

His formal design training at Camberwell School of Art allowed him to experiment and develop personal approaches within the then burgeoning European graffiti scene.

Camberwell’s multi-disciplinary environment provided the perfect space to explore the technical and creative opportunities offered by graffiti art. Before his studies had confirmed his particular commitment to the letterform, Errol had long been fascinated by the visual presentation of letters, and in particular, their ability to both inform and express different aspects of culture.

At heart, he is a passionate creative who continues to explore areas of art, education, and society while maintaining a robust commitment born out of, and inspired by, graffiti art and writing culture.


word bond

In 1975, eight years and a long way from Trench Town, Jamaica, DJ Kool Herc starts to play the first of many parties that would eventually spawn the birth to Hip Hop. The similarities between Hip Hop culture and my own were so close, it was perhaps inevitable that I would eventually embrace its many forms – graffiti art in particular – to express my own creativity. Like many writers at that time, I can remember being in awe of the ingenuity and skill of New York City’s pioneers. The graffiti ethos fit perfectly with my understanding of cultural expression. It was also the perfect foil to my view of the arts establishment, which seamed oddly detached from community life.

UK Hip Hop’s first generation was predictably burdened by the sometimes harsh, comparisons with their counterparts in New York. We were a close-knit community that although respectful, wanted to draw upon our own experiences to be part of what was an already burgeoning youth movement. It was the perfect context within which to express your creativity, while remaining ensconced within your community.

Graffiti’s democracy and accessibility appealed to me, as did its direct, if then awkward relationship with the general public. I’d long-since set my goals on becoming a design professional, so the arrival of a rich, organic Hip Hop culture was welcomed with open eyes. I served my writers apprenticeship while studying full-time. Art history, printmaking, and typography during the day – motion tagging and ‘piecing’ at night. Attempting to define my creative voice, I’d seek out, and absorb material on pioneers like Phase 2, Futura 2000, Rammellzee and Dondi. Closer to home, inspiration and encouragement came from British artists, Keith Piper, Rita Keegan, and Patrick Caulfield.

The irony of my dual-existence was ever-present, as the creative establishment back then took a slow and cautious approach to accepting this new art form. Graffiti art thrived amongst young, (largely) male inner city groups. Keen to develop, create, and ultimately express their own personal beliefs, they were drawn to the immediate, and largely unauthorised powers of communication that graffiti art so readily offered.


While graffiti art does not fit neatly within the strict definition of palaeography, it nonetheless defined the cultural context for a generation of young people, each with their own spoken language, value systems, and societal narratives.

At the source of this seemingly infinite adaptability is the word, and thus the possibilities, creative and otherwise, are endless. From my first encounter with the word ‘Wildstyle’ written in tag form to promote the eponymous, and seminal film, to the quantum theories of graffiti pioneer, Rammellzee, the word has been the recurring theme that has allowed me to engage with creative professionals, artists, parents, educators, politicians, thinkers, each with their own relationship to the word as it is expressed to enable, advocate, and inspire.

In 1982, a relatively small, but significant number of young artists, worked independently and in almost ritual secrecy across Britain’s urban centres. Uncertain, but steadfast in the pursuit of their craft, they would form the ‘first wave’ of what was to become the European graffiti art movement. Attempting to emulate and in some instances, elaborate on the achievements of their American predecessors, they similarly refuted false charges of vandalism and its related misconceptions, demonstrating with bravery and skill, the creative merits of the art form.

Long before the rise in commercial opportunities, this vanguard of artists grasped Hip Hop culture by its exposed roots, and in doing so, accepted responsibility for preserving them. In preparation, artists accepted a number of varying lifestyle changes in which friends, finances, language and even career choice would all become subject to very rapid change. Responding to a need to be taken seriously, many found strength in numbers, and formed collectively.

I belonged to one such collective, namely, The Chrome Angelz. Recognising early that the ‘Golden Age’ of New York graffiti writing had long since passed; we were determined to establish a unique style by drawing upon our own experiences, new found influences, and knowledge of the visual arts and design. Like many of our peers, we were avid fans of Hip Hop culture and became earnest students and admirers of graffiti practice and its early exponents. Importantly, we were able to acknowledge the societal context that gave rise to the graffiti phenomenon, and albeit from a distance, drew inspiration from the sheer impact and influence on the new visual landscape.

It was from this perspective that we focused our efforts on exploring new creative possibilities, and deliberately chose to advance the evolution of ‘style’ (lettering, painting techniques, characters and themes) from our individual perspectives, and collectively, as a group. Where possible, we openly engaged with the wider creative community in order to challenge the then, often-negative view of graffiti art, and the stereotyping of its artists.


Both infectious and irresistible to most, the word spread virally, and was soon pandemic. Although warmly embraced by youth culture, graffiti art’s induction into the British mainstream was less straightforward. The nation’s media, supported by the moral minority, rallied quickly to curb the growing enthusiasm. When first presented to a curious British public, first-time viewers were largely unaware of the histories of many artists who were by now, established and exhibiting in galleries for the first time, outside of New York City.

The maiden voyage from the Bronx to Europe was perhaps the most significant one in the development of Hip-Hop and graffiti culture outside of the United States. Beats, rhymes, and dynamic dance forms, were all easily transferable and warmly welcomed in clubs, precincts, and youth centres.

Now a global phenomenon, a new generation of graffiti artists express themselves within their own cultures and environments. In some instances, they have willingly abandoned the accepted methodology and rituals in favour of less life/career-threatening practices, and have in turn, produced new creative solutions.

However, despite today’s more welcoming reception, and increasingly diverse, and illustrative applications, graffiti original definition remains intact, due largely to those who continue to honour the commitment to the letter-based practices of the culture’s earliest traditions.

Graffiti art has been embraced by today’s younger generation, who are very familiar with the terminology, ritual and need for dedicated practice. Many elder artists now work in schools, and public organisations, actively engaging with young people and sharing their experiences. With the arts programmes of many educational establishments facing a bleak future (due to tighter funding and curricular targets), it is both heartening and ironic to witness graffiti’s influential as it inspires creative, and academic excellence.

Given the heavy influence of commerce, it is also forgivable for occasionally viewing the artistic merits of contemporary graffiti art through the lens of new-media popularity. However, it must be noted, that in its journey out of the boroughs of its native New York City, graffiti culture has taken root in far-removed locations, where young people courageously explore, and express the spirit of graffiti art, in their own words.

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FareyDave

Dave Farey was extremely lucky to have been born left handed in London, a little before the explosion of type design, facilitated by the technologies of transfer lettering and photosetting. Sent to the London School of Printing (later the London College of Printing and now the London College of Communication) to learn photo lithography techniques, by an employer with more faith than judgement, and part of the course involved ‘Lettering’ which was far more interesting than spinning egg albumin and mixing chemicals. Taking advantage of drawing lettering and being paid for it, by a progression of false starts and experience, he was eventually capable of designing type faces for most of the existing 20th century print processes, that is metal type, transfer type, and photosetting, but unfortunately not for woodtype, which would have been a bonus as his father was a carpenter. Currently working with Richard Dawson at HouseStyle Graphics, they have created bespoke fonts for all forms of media and business and leisure enterprises, plus commercial fonts based on historic forms and influences, and of course, 21st century styles.


the times verna cular 2002

When we look to the future it has a quantifiable framework. Tomorrow is 24 hours away and the next Olympic Games will be two years and nine months hence. Whereas the past can be just a blink of an eye away in the memory, yesterday or 100 years ago can be recaptured, conjured up more accurately in a book or film and video, or as a sound archive.

In the UK, broadsheet newsprint typography and layout have changed by steady increments rather than radical jumps during the past 40 years. There have been changes in ink and paper technology and many advances for print enhancement and reproduction, along with the use of digital tools which now allows the design process to move from the machine age to the computer age and beyond. But to a large extent the freedom that a computer system provides can bring confusion that cannot be created by the human mind alone.

A computer is by definition an instrument with which to impose order. But in a modernist environment of precision and predetermination, the computer creates confusion. Too much order cannot co-exist. To counteract an excess of order, the computer creates chaos: The future thrives in a disordered environment: Computer + order = disorder. But, Computer + disorder = order. 1

The creation of Times Millennium in 1991 allowed for the introduction of a computer programme to determine and exaggerate design characteristics.A programme called FontStudio has enabled the designer to maintain the Times Millennium family likeness across groups of characters more precisely than if they had been drawn by hand (let alone carved in wood). The output of each design is not a picture of a letter but a mathematical formula for feeding into a computer typesetter. 2

The method used to create the three weights of Times Millennium, Roman, Demi, and Bold was a computer process called ‘extrapolation.’ This allowed for the basic Roman weight to be manipulated and generated as heavier versions whilst still maintaining the design characteristics of the original.

1 Marcello Minale, ‘Order or Disorder? Creativity in Design.’ Chartered Society of Designers Journal, Sept. 2000. 2 Simon Jenkins, The Times, Monday November 25th 1991.

byRichard Dawsonand Dave Farey


Unfortunately, this can be compared to a beautiful child with a turned up nose growing into an unattractive teenager and eventually an ugly adult. The exaggeration of specific characteristics, attractive or pleasingly acceptable in the Roman weight of Millennium, are less so at progressive weights. They become the letters which draw attention to the form of the integral design, and consequently reduce two of Stanley Morrison’s requirements: ‘clarity and ease of reading.’

The design guidelines and art direction for developing the series of Times Classic as text and display typefaces for The Times were, in a sense, both specific and general. The specific requirements were in relation to the ambiance of The Times, that a new typeface needed to be slightly heavier than Times Millennium in its basic Roman text weight, that it was to be as economical of word usage as Times Millennium and it would conform to a 9 point grid – its physical size being placed within a clear space of 9 points, allowing a sufficient balance of white and black for ocular satisfaction.

Times Millennium, showing design features which become exaggerated as the weights progress. Note the crossed w, high crossbar on the e, thickening of the junction at the base of the a, pointed top to the t, extreme angle of the top serifs on the h, r, i and n, the elliptical development of the dot of the i, the rounded internal structure to the counter of the n, and the irregular development of the bottom bowl of the g.

Times Classic, showing the uncrossed w, the lower and more legible crossbar on the e, the cleaner exit at the junction of the internal counter of the a, the square top to the t, the shallower angles of serifs on the h, r, i and n, the circular shape of the dot on the i, the hard branch internal join on the counter of the n, and the balanced development of the bottom bowl of the g.


The general requirements for a new typeface were that it should not have a dramatic or noticeable change for the readership and that it should retain and exemplify a ‘Britishness’ within its design characteristics and form. This is not as vague as it seems, as there are typefaces that are recognisable by their origin or association, either British, French, German or American as well as other identities. British typeface design has achieved a strong profile during the 20th century, indeed, the most prolific text typeface for newspaper and book use is Times (New) Roman, designed in 1932 and first used in The Times as its livery for 40 years.

To digress slightly, but which formed a part of the research during the development of the new typeface, the following table shows the continuing influence of Times Roman nationally and internationally, and is fairly surprising.

UK and other publications currently and recently using Times Roman:

• Sunday Times: Times Roman text and Franklin headlines.• Financial Times: Times Roman text and Nimrod text mainly, with Times

Roman headlines.• Metro (Daily Freesheet): Times Roman text and and Franklin headlines.• The Independent: Between 1997 and 1999 Times Roman text and Gill

headlines. • The Express: Up to early 2000, Times Roman text and Roman and Bold

headlines. • Lloyds List: Times Roman text and headlines.• Asian Age: Times Roman text and headlines.• Times Literary Supplement: Times Roman text and headlines. • The News (News International staff paper): Times Roman text. • The Wharf (freesheet in Docklands): Times Roman text.

Selected examples of foreign daily papers using Times Roman:

• France – Le Figaro: Times Roman text and headlines.• Spain – El Pais: Times Roman text and headlines.• Germany – Frankfurter Allgemeine: Times Roman text and headlines• Holland – NRC Handelsblad: Times Roman text and headlines.• Italy – Corriere Della Sera: Times Roman text and headlines.• Italy – La Gazzetta dello Sport: Times Roman text and other faces. • USA – International Herald Tribune: Times Roman text.• Ireland – Irish Independent: Times Roman text. For the sake of completing this current picture, by comparison Times Millennium has been restricted to News International publications, being the text and headline style for The Times, The Times Educational Supplement and The Times Higher Educational Supplement. As previously indicated, The Times Literary Supplement is set in Times Roman.


The objective of a newspaper text typeface is to achieve maximum legibility with the minimum waste of space. The legibility of a typeface has an exact parallel in the audibility of a human voice. A lecturer must make every word audible and distinct; yet within the limits of audibility lie the whole range of speaking tones from a metallic monotonous drawl to the infinitely flexible and persuasive tones of the good speaker. . . what the book lover calls readability is not a synonym for what the optician calls legibility.3 Equally, a typeface must have an attractiveness without distraction, and this determines readability. Readability is that quality of type which involves maximum ease and eye comfort over a period of sustained reading. Thus readability is the test to which body type must be subjected. 4

With this in mind, plus research into the recent typefaces used by The Times during the 20th century and comparative studies of text typefaces introduced and those currently used in the British broadsheets, the criteria for the new typeface began to emerge, and in fact, the criteria established itself.

By its very nature a newspaper is both a simple and complex arbiter of typography; it needs to repeat itself for familiarity, and also regularly be fresh and creative. A newspaper page combines text and display over a larger area than any other printed matter and is divided into tightly packed columns of text averaging less than 12 ems wide. These narrow measures prescribe a small size – between 8pt and 9pt – and make a degree of condensation essential in newspaper text typeface design.

The relationship of the x height of a typeface to its ascenders and descenders are crucial for a newspaper typeface, as the height to width relationship should be oblong and not square, and the body of the x height should not encroach on the ascenders, as those distinguishing strokes perform an essential optical function. The eye does not examine the whole body of the letters in the line as it reads. They are taken in at a glance, and the eye registers the salient features of the letters that occur regularly, and less frequent letters are accepted instinctively. The most characteristic elements of individual letters in a lower case alphabet are within the top half of the letters, so the relationship of the middle portion of a line of type, the shapes of the parts of letters at their x height and those letters that require to ascend, determine how the eye travels if these intricate elements are well proportioned. As an extension to this, the relationship between a top line in a short line of text, which are pre-eminent in newspaper columns, and the lines above and below – the line just scanned and the line instantly following – requires the correct balance between descending elements and ascending elements from adjacent lines.

Within the range of typefaces in the UK that have been created specifically, or have fortuitously entered the category for newspaper use, there are two broad bands of style. These two groups are a catch all, and obviously can be further sub divided, but they are essentially classified as ‘Ionic’ and ‘Contemporary Roman.’

3 Beatrice Warde, ‘The Crystal Goblet’, 1955.

4 Allen Hutt, ‘Newspaper Design’, 1971.


Primarily, Ionic style typefaces tend to have a square x height as opposed to oblong, they have a more regular weight, so the natural thicks and thins of a letter do not vary greatly, and the serifs of the letters are heavy and have parallel aspects to the terminals. In contrast, the contemporary Roman styles have an oblong structure, there is a variation of line weight where horizontal and joining strokes are noticeably lighter than vertical strokes and the structures of the serifs are more gentle on an inclining slope to the terminals. This is a particularly important aspect in regard of continuous text on low grade paper, as the purpose of a serif is to give maximum value as a black line on grey newsprint. A line, in this case a serif, with no variation in thickness (however thick), loses a fraction of its apparent length through halation in relation to preceding and following letters, which suffer in the same way.

Examples showing the variation in comparative x height between, on the

top line, three Ionic style typefaces, Miller, Telegraph Modern, and Times Europa. On the bottom line are shown

Times Roman, Times Millennium, and Times Classic, three typefaces in the

style of contemporary roman. The serifs on the Ionic styles are chunky and flat,

whereas the contemporary romans, the serifs are shallow, which suggests

a vanishing point beyond the physical terminal of the serif.

Within the Ionic category, there are a number of current typefaces which are successful, as they have been designed to incorporate strength and minimise the inherent deficiencies of a rigid style. In particular, the typefaces Miller and Nimrod are in constant use, with Miller the face of choice in the Guardian and Nimrod the face of choice in the Financial Times. (Prior to Miller, the Guardian had used Nimrod). Miller suffers from a lack of word efficiency as it is square in construction, while Nimrod has a slightly larger x height than normal, which restricts the ascenders and descenders. Consequently, a little wider line space is required to restore optimum balance. A primary defect of Ionic – from the point of view of text composition – is a certain monotony resulting from the complete uniformity of line through every character. In a word, having no thick and thin, it does not look customary to eyes habituated to old faces, old styles or contemporaries employed in 99% of the reading matter in this country. There is no consensus that Ionic provides the final satisfactory newspaper face. 5

Contemporary Roman styles are without question best exemplified by the 20th century design of Times (New) Roman, where the design structure and characteristics are based upon the classic stress and relationship of angle and weight for legibility, where the thicker parts of a curve can be made heavier without encroaching upon the interior counters, as it is as much upon the inside of a letter as the overall outline of a character that separation and identity depends.

5 John Dreyfus, ‘Miller Modern Ionic’, Monotype Recorder, no date.


Within this regard the model of a contemporary Roman combines legibility, a strong colour and space economy. It is also aesthetically satisfying for headline purposes, with finer terminal serifs than the Ionic model, where larger sizes do not have optical or balance problems, and where subtle design features within letters produce a separate appreciation of the typeface apart from its text solutions and value.

There have been efforts to create text typefaces that are either hybrids of the Ionic and contemporary Roman models, or have developed from an innovative standpoint. These styles, while maintaining a regular weight of line, without traditional thick and thin variations, have tended to have a monumental construction and sharply defined internal counters with serifs that lack a gentle flow towards their terminals. Profile examples of this monumental style would be Palatino and Charter, which within themselves are highly legible, inasmuch as they have defining characteristics, but they lack readability, that being the test of continuous reading without distraction or irritation. The most current example of a ‘monumental’ style adapted for newspaper text is the typeface Coranto, used in The Scotsman. This is a highly defined typestyle, that cannot be confused or identified with any other, but for current reading habits it is too stylised. The quote by Suzanna Licko, the type designer of Emigre, that “You read best what you read most”, may well apply here, but it has also the converse side of “you read most what you read best,” which should be the preferred option for the reader.

Examples showing the sharply defined internal counters and monumental serifs of Palatino on the top line, and Charter on the second line, compared to the more natural constructions of a contemporary roman, Times Classic.

To return briefly to the broad description of Ionic, this would embrace the typefaces Telegraph Modern, Miller Roman, Nimrod, and Century. From the following listing of text faces used in British broadsheets, they will be seen to be dominant. The two problems with Ionic styles, in general, are that they require a fuller body depth to their physical size, Nimrod being the extreme example, and more relevant perhaps for Inonic styles is the increase in width and the consequent loss of economy. It has been estimated that a contemporary roman style, such as Times Roman, is considerably more efficient than a more rigid typeface such as Telegraph Modern or Times Europa, previously used by The Times, two typeface revivals ago. Ionic has a square fat character which looks big; typographers say it has a large x height. For space economy they are naturally attracted to small types which have a large x height, because the type looks big. Size for size, Times Roman will get 30 per cent more words than Ionic. 6 6 Harold Evans, The Times, 9th Oct 1972.


Newspaper Text face Point size Body size

The Telegraph Telegraph Modern 8 9

The Guardian Miller Roman 8•5 9•5

The Independent Century Roman 8•5 9•5

Financial Times Nimrod 8•5 9•5

The Scotsman Coranto 8•5 9•25

Irish Independent Times Roman 7•5 8•75

The Sunday Times Times Roman 9 9•5

The Observer Nimrod 8 9•5

The Times Times Millennium 8 9

In regard of the natural body width of contrasting Ionic and contemporary Romans, the following table, when related to the typefaces in use, show column widths and their measure across standard broadsheet and tabloid pages where appropriate. Interestingly, two of the newspapers with a ‘square’ Ionic style, The Telegraph and The Guardian, make use of wider than standard columns on a regular basis.

Newspaper 4 col. 5 col. 6 col. 7 col. 8 col.

The Telegraph 15ems 12•5ems 11ems 9•5ems

The Guardian 12•5ems 9•5ems

G2 (tabloid) 11•5ems 9ems

The Independent 11ems 9•5ems

Financial Times 13ems 11ems 9•5ems

The Times 11ems 9•5ems

Times 2 (tabloid) 15ems 11•5ems 9•5ems

The four purposes of layout are: 1. To increase readability and to attract the reader into the news; 2. to sort the news so that the reader knows at a glance which are the most important stories; 3. to create attractive and interesting pages; 4. to create recognition, to make the reader identify and want your paper as soon as he sees it. 7

Once the decision of creating Times Classic within the general concepts of a contemporary roman had been tested and accepted, the specific nature and styling of the typeface were developed. With the original constraints in mind, that is to be efficient as Times Millennium and based on a 9pt grid, the Roman letter shapes were developed. Among the considerations, and in particular regard to the typeface that was effectively being replaced, Times Millennium, physical relationships between the capitals and the lower case, and the styling of the numerals and punctuation, could only be achieved by comparisons of the elements which were considered weak or least effective with the Times Millennium style. Similarly, the comparative model of Times Roman was used, as it is and has been the superior contemporary Roman for a considerable period.

7 Edmund C. Arnold, ‘Functional Newspaper Design,’ 1956.


The first observations, common to Times Roman and Times Millennium, were that the capitals were, in both instances, too heavy for the accompanying lower case. This is perhaps a 21st century observation, but once determined, it could not be ignored – the balances were not quite right. Although the prevailing tendency is to set headlines in lower case and obviously in natural text, lower case dominates by around 95%, the capitals for the new Times Classic needed to be well proportioned to the lower case, more so than the existing models. The second consideration was the dimension of the lower case in relation to the capitals. Times Roman, by today’s standards, has a slightly small x height, whereas Times Millennium’s x height is considerably larger. As mentioned previously, there is an important balance to be struck between the ascenders and x height for ease of reading, and it was necessary to reduce the x height of Times Classic by around 4% in measurable terms compared to Times Millennium but a hairswidth in visual terms at text sizes, which gave the Times Classic lower case text setting a discernably more satisfying appearance when sited correctly on a 9pt grid compared to Times Roman or Times Millennium.

Once the lower case scale had been established, the design of individual letters for maximum clarity within the structure of a contemporary roman began, which determined the most satisfying letter shapes, and parts of letter shapes, that matched their companions. The critical factor is the ‘smooth reading’ and therefore the correct construction of the alphabet would be the sum of all its parts. To relate to some of the details within the design of individual letters, there is a predominance of curves which have to move away from a vertical line within the lower case of typefaces, and how that is resolved is a major factor in relation to the accumulative pattern when used in text. The lower case letters h, n, m, r and u need careful attention, followed by the letters b, d, p and q, which are adapted to reflect and enhance this specific design detail. There are other letters also that need adjustment to this pattern, and lead to other solutions, for example, the lower case letters r and a require a similar vertical curve solution, but also incorporate a terminal which is usually resolved with a round or ball effect on the overhang. This in turn requires that other letters, which are normally familiar and related with round terminals, such as the c and the y, that in any section of text create random patterns which appear balanced because of the regular design of similar elements and not extreme nor intrusive.

Among other minor decisions that have helped to provide a smoothness to the typeface, in regard of eccentricity or interruption while reading, is the shape of the lower case t. The Times Classic t has an oblong rising above the x height junction, so above the crossbar there is a rising flat-topped stroke. This is a break from convention or the traditional pointed terminal used in both Times Roman and Times Millennium. The treatment of letters partially containing diagonal strokes or constructed wholly with diagonal strokes have been considered carefully for their relationship with non-diagonal letters. For example, and in particular, the w is not constructed from two


overlapping v’s, but is designed within its own integral shape, which in turn allows for the exterior diagonals to be able to fit harmoniously alongside the variously curved shapes of letters, and alternatively the straight sided letters, that will randomly accompany the w.

To the marriage of type and text, both parties bring their cultural presumptions, dreams and family obligations. 8

Typefaces are developed as families to provide emphasis and variety. Semi bold and bold weights do have their value, to flag, for subheads and marking the opening of a text, or to modify the texture. They are also useful for the emphasis selectively of words and numerals, such as in a dictionary. Principally the weight variations incorporated into Times Classic, the Roman, Medium, and Bold, have been developed for textural and colour variation of whole pages that contain separate reports or features. The construction of the Roman, Medium and Bold weights of Times Classic are intimately combined, but not to the extent that characteristics of one weight of the family are over-emphasised within the family, as this can be to the degradation of a particular weight, particularly the bold, and creates a disharmony and will affect legibility.

Consequently, the balance between the three weights, and at the extremes, the Roman and Bold of Times Classic, have a genetic connection and basic compatibility. This is lacking in particular within the relationship of the text face used by The Daily Telegraph, where the Roman weight and Bold weight are not constructed in any sense from a family base. In that regard, all of the current broadsheet newspapers make use of two weights, a Roman and a Bold, and do not have the facility of an interstage Medium or Semibold. This tends to limit the ability for emphasis that The Times newspaper already possesses with the Times Millennium typeface, and now Times Classic will provide for a similar choice within the family.

It has been said that a good text typeface will also be a good headline face, but a good headline face will not be a good text face. This is self evident in terms of legibility, as in general, text faces and headline faces are specifically created for different typographic functions. But a good text face usually provides for only an adequate solution when used at larger sizes for headlines. The serifs and the relationship of thin to thick strokes, which have been deliberately designed and controlled for text application, are less satisfying at larger sizes: the serifs can appear heavy and unrefined, and features such as the ball terminals, as mentioned previously, can appear strained or inflexible. Times Classic has a compatible set of display weights of Roman, Medium, and Bold where the weight structures are in each case heavier in the main strokes and lighter in the lighter strokes than the equivalent Times Classic Roman, Medium and Bold text family. This provides for more contrast and delicacy within the display family, while still retaining a perfect conjunction with the accompanying Times Classic text.

8 Robert Bringhurst, ‘The Elements of Typographic Style,’ 1996.


Interestingly perhaps, the typeface Miller, used by the Guardian, although it has two text weights rather than three, does have companion and dedicated headline versions, which are used effectively. Conversely, The Daily Telegraph has two weights of headline which are also used effectively, but are not related in character design or weight structures to either of the dissimilar text faces used. This is not totally discordinate, but in as much as the visual unity of a page can be achieved by using related family typefaces, it can be equally as effective for the text style and the headline style to be from different typeface families, to the extent of Roman text and sanserif headline. The Daily Telegraph appears not to strive for either of these visually satisfying solutions, by choosing to have unrelated typefaces for headline and text. This may be a moot point, but to the extent of applying logic to the process of integrated type design and typography, the Times Classic family has an initial advantage in terms of recognition and the ability to provide a textural rhythm for the eye of the reader.

For the construction of the companion Italic typefaces for Times Classic, the first stage was to have a hard look at both the purpose of italics and the significant schools or developments of the italic style. Generally the purpose of italics is to differentiate the pattern of reading in text, for quotations, to highlight titles or names or places, and more significantly, for contemporary typographic application, for separation and emphasis for key quotes, or where the italic is used in juxtaposition with the Roman as a text identity, for example, a question and answer dialogue between two people.

The top example is set in Telegraph Modern and Telegraph Modern Bold, the text faces used in the Daily Telegraph, with the accompanying headline set in Telegraph Newface. These three typefaces are not part of one family. The bottom example is set in the family of Times Classic, which has, apart from a genetic similarity, the benefit of a medium weight, whereas the Telegraph has only Roman and bold.


The developments of companion text italic faces has a separate history to Roman letterforms, and many companion italics have evolved as a ‘roundhand’ italic, exemplified by Miller Italic. This is a typical 19th century style, with extremes of curl and swash, which is not unattractive in itself, but is over indulgent for contemporary purposes. Fournier says that he has approximated his italics to the prevailing round fashion in handwriting, and Contemporaries were much struck with their likeness to the copperplate hand. Their extensions make them the most legible of italics. 9

The first column shows Miller, Telegraph Modern, and Nimrod, three Ionic style typefaces. Miller has a number of decorative characteristics as shown in the w, and a 19th century angle of inclination. Both Telegraph Modern and Nimrod, although modernised, have shallow serif bowls and roundhand characteristics. The second column shows Times Roman, Times Millennium and Times Classic, three styles that are generally described as contemporary roman. Both Times Roman and Times Millennium have shallow curved structures on their serifs whereas Times Classic Italic has a clearer calligraphic emphasis in keeping with British models. The angle of Times Classic Italic is not as angled as Times Roman and Times Millennium, as the construction of the lower case alphabet in particular allows for sufficient visual variation between the Roman construction of letters and the Italic without requiring an extreme Italic emphasis.

During the 20th century many italic typefaces designed to accompany their Romans have not been constructed with variation in letterforms, but are ‘sloped Romans’ in the sense that they have been obliqued or angled mechanically, and the only variation between the Roman style and the italic has been the lean to the right. Alternatively and refreshingly, there has been a significant British school of development of the italic style, which developed from a Roman serif style construction for its base, and involves the relationship between the distinctive calligraphic styles of Edward Johnston, Eric Gill, David Kindersley and Will Carter, all renowned British letter carvers and type designers.

9 Pierre-Simon Fournier le juene, ‘Manuel Typographique’, 1766.


This 20th century contemporary italic can be seen to some extent within the Times Roman Italic, where the serifs depict the position of the pen, in the form of transitive beginning and finishing strokes, where the serifs slope at a natural writing angle, creating a pattern from one letter to the next. Because the actual shapes of lower case letters between Roman and italic have different forms, where the italic are calligraphic such as the a, e, m, and u for example, there is not the necessity to angle the slope to an extreme, as the letterforms alone are now sufficient to indicate a difference of typeface between Roman and italic. The angle of Times Classic Italic is nine degrees, whereas Times Millennium is thirteen degrees, and Times Roman is sixteen degrees. Once Times Classic Italic is compared with Times Roman Italic, which is a fine example of its period, it will hopefully be judged that the Times Classic Italic letterforms are more simplified but as functional as its predecessors.

The Times Classic Romans and Italics, viewed as a complete typeface family, as they are intended to be used in The Times newspaper, will have a distinct identity developed from historic models which have, as a natural inclusion through a reappraisal of 20th century typeface innovations and developments, the characteristics and style capable of providing for a continuing British vernacular as the livery for The Times.

87 differing accents | Thursday 14th June

LinkeOliver

Oliver studied graphic design at the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg, Germany and the University of Missouri, Kansas City (1993–98). He continued his studies in art history, art education, and philosophy (2000–05) at the University of Augsburg. Today his work focuses on book and type design. He is co–founder of Lazydogs Typefoundry, teaches at the Munich Design School and other universities, and writes for the German graphic design magazine “Page.” He is author of “Zierlich Schreiben” (2005), a monograph on Renaissance writing master Johann Neudörffer the elder.

www.lazydogs.de

88differing accents | Thursday 14th June

the urge to rule

constructed letterforms from

antiquity to tomorrow

“Construction or no construction?” – was the basic question that brought me to the topic of this research. For some reason there has always been a certain desire to find the constructive skeleton or some kind of a “mathematically correct” description of letter shapes. Generations of designers have been searching for the best way to convert complicated characters into an easy formula, believing to discover the very essence of type. Adrian Frutiger even assumes that Man has an innate sensibility to geometry. Meanwhile, many have changed to another confession, where rulers become void and the impression of the eye is the only reliable guideline. With the advent of the computer, this schism in type design seemed to be given another revival. Type has become digital, shaping is done through mathematical equations, and often enough letters are cut down to a set of pixels. It’s about time to take a closer look, what’s really valuable about both concepts.

The first part of this inquiry is a historical analysis: I collected various examples where people applied geometric methods to the design of letters. The review will start at present time and trace back the paths of history all the way to our ancient ancestors.

Today there is a rich variety of geometric type design. But not only the shape of the letters itself, also the way in which we design them, has become more and more geometry based. In order to automate certain steps in type design, we built software that uses geometric principles for these tasks. Interpolation, for example, has become a fundamental working method in type design by now. Here lies a basic problem already: the software or the ways we digitise our outlines have a much greater impact on the design than most designers think.

Type has become digital, shaping is done through mathematical equations


An example for an experimental software approach is “Calligrapher” (fig. 1). It was developed by Jürg Lehni and François Rappo for an experimental type design project in 2006 at ECAL, Lausanne / Switzerland. The software builds the complete glyph set by applying a virtual pen to a pre-fabricated skeleton. The pen can even change while tracing the paths so really weird forms can be generated. Although the tool is based on a pre-fabricated skeleton and therefore will never “design” something really new, it is great for experimental variations.

Paul van der Laan followed a related approach in his workshop “From Pixel to Outline.” During a one-week workshop the students were assigned to build a new (curved) outline from a pixel font (fig. 2). Again, this was probably not useful to find new ideas for typeface designs, but as the student Sarah Kläy declares, the pixel template was very helpful to control the black and white spaces of her font; so the grid served as a proportional system to balance strokes and counters.

Figure 1: J. Lehni / F. Rappo: Font creation software “Calligrapher,” 2006.

Figure 2: Sarah Kläy: Type design from pixel to outline, 2006.


The overall pattern of text surface must have also been in the mind of Fred Smeijers when he designed Quadraat in 2000, and especially in the italic curves that have been reduced to straight sections where in large scale the letters look quite rough (fig. 3). In this case, Smeijers intended to mirror the raw woodcuts from the very beginnings of italics in the 16th century. In smaller sizes the impression of Quadraat gets close to the original prints from Aldus Manutius or Ludovico Vicentino. So here the straight lines served as a simulation of an old technique: woodcut in the digital age.

It went the other way round with the next example. Sabon ran through a rather painful stage of digitisation in 1985 (fig. 4). The outline was trimmed to mathematically “correct” values, built up from straight lines and circles. The serifs do no longer grow out of the stem like in Tschichold’s original design. They are simply mechanically attached – two parts that won’t fit together very well. In this case, the construction impaired the design. Fortunately, Jean-François Porchez was able to correct this lapse in 2002 with Sabon Next.

Figure 3: Fred Smeijers: Quadraat Italic, 2000.

Figure 4: Sabon in different versions. From left to right: Sabon letterpress print

(Jan Tschichold, 1965), First PostScript version (Linotype Library, 1985), Sabon

Next (Jean François Porchez, 2002).


Another typeface that went through several stages of redesigns is Din Mittelschrift. Ludwig Goller’s early designs from 1936 were laid out on checkered paper. But this time the grid was given for reproduction reasons, as Din originally was intended for signage use. It was in 1995 when more and more designers had been using the digital version for copy text when Albert-Jan Pool was commissioned to redesign the typeface for FontShop (FF Din). One can spot the differences between the digital versions (fig. 5). Two contrary intentions for use, signage and text, lead to a closer or farther distance from the grid foundation.

Generally the grid and other construction methods were a quite common method by sign painters to reproduce letters. You can find many examples in their specimens with extensive instructions on how to build the letter shapes. Some constructions are even so complicated that it is a real challenge to follow the author’s descriptions.

Figure 5: DIN-Schriften, 1980 and 1995.

Figure 6: An example of type construction method.


A highly promoted example is Jan Tschichold’s “Blockschrift” from around 1930. An announcement in a magazine (fig. 7) was entitled “Jan Tschichold – type for quick and easy construction.” The explanation reads, “for inscriptions of all kinds, signs, drawings, exhibitions, shop decorations etc.” But it was not only the reproduction method that drove Tschichold’s design. The ideas of the Bauhaus geometry – circle, triangle and square – were already in every designer’s head. Together with his colleague, Paul Renner, he experimented with several type designs to find basic letterforms with constructively reduced shapes. While Renner was enormously successful with Futura, Tschichold’s design for Deberny & Peignot (fig. 8) was never released.

Right - Figure 7: Jan Tschichold: Announcement for “Blockschrift,” 1930.

Above - Figure 8: Jan Tschichold: Sans serif design for Deberny & Peignot, c. 1929.


Going back further in history, a “Bauhaus ancestor” who needs to be mentioned is Theo van Doesburg. In 1919 he designed an alphabet on a 5 by 5 “pixel” grid, which was widely used and adapted. A nice example is a poster by the Austrian architect Friedrich Kiesler for the Vienna Theatre Festival in 1924 (fig. 9). During the whole constructivism period many artists had tried to design new alphabets, often with the intention to achieve better readability through geometric reduction. But the only typeface that was widely used in print was Futura. Just like I described with Din before, Renner obviously found the right compromise for the balancing act between geometry and readability.

Jumping back to the 19th century, geometry in letter design was not very common. But still there are a few examples. In 1882, for example, Camillo Sitte decided to redraw (and refine) Renaissance constructions of the Roman capitals (fig. 10). He was really fussy about how the serifs should be attached to a stem, especially to a slanted stem; three different constructions for serifs were offered in his book. Obviously his goal was purely scientific: the search for a mathematical or geometrical explanation for each letter – something a physicist would call a “theory of everything.”

Figure 9: Friedrich Kiesler: poster lettering, 1924.

Figure 10: Camillo Sitte: “The Capitals of the Renaissance,” 1882.


Probably the same scientific approach led the “Académie française” when they commissioned a new typeface for the royal printing office (Imprimerie Royale) in 1692. Following the spirit of the academy, the committee decided to first design each letter with accurate constructions (fig. 11) before they were finally cut. For the first time in history type was actually planned and designed on paper. During the design process one major step was to align the height of caps and ascenders – not very clever, as we know today, because readability was rather decreased through this alignment.

The humanist spirit of the 15th and 16th century, with its tendency to explain the world with geometry, came up with a large number of letter constructions. Italian scholar Luca Pacioli, for example, named his book “The Divine Proportion” and underlines the emphasis of geometry in the Renaissance worldview. It was only Giovan Francesco Cresci, who uncommonly stated in 1570 that “the true proportions of letters originate in mental concepts and cannot be measured.”

Figure 11: Drawings for the “Romain du Roi,” ca. 1692.


During those times many writing masters contributed their own geometric representation of the Roman capitals (fig. 12). One of them was Johann Neudörffer the elder. His manuscript from around 1549–53, today in the Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, is quite interesting as it adds to each construction a separate page with a black image of the letter without guides (fig. 13). But construction and black image are not the same. It seems like there was some aesthetic improvement involved between “theory and reality.” This is especially evident in some details, like a crossed out guide in the S or a red freehand outline of the serif, where a construction seemed too complicated to execute.

Top - Figure 12: Various constructions for the Roman capitals in the 15th and 16th century.

Left - Figure 13: Johann Neudörffer, ca. 1549–1553.


Contemporary Albrecht Dürer published his book in 1525 with the suitable title, “Unterweisung der Messung mit Zirkel und Richtscheit” (Instruction to Measure with Compasses and Rulers). The book was a guidebook for artists, but for today’s eyes it almost looks like a math book. Besides the Roman capitals, Dürer also provided a construction of a textura where he incorporated a grid system (fig. 14).

The grandfather of all writing masters, Sigismondo de Fanti, was the first to publish a thorough book, consisting of four volumes, dedicated solely to the art of writing (1514).

Figure 15: Sigismondo de Fanti also provided constructions of the Roman capitals, as well as a set of

lowercase characters of rotunda and textura scripts .

Figure 14: Albrecht Dürer, 1525.

Figure 16: Bible, 2nd half 9th century (Paris, BN Ms. lat. 2290, fol. 19)


As we go on with our backward review, we reach the Middle Ages. Again we can find constructed letterforms, although here the purpose seems to be purely ornamental. Many illustrated manuscript have so called “Incipit-pages,” with more or less abstract letter shapes, mostly geometrically altered. As a random example we can take the text “VERE” on an illustrated page of a 9th century bible (Paris, BNF Ms. lat. 2290). While the “V” is completely integrated in the framework, the “ERE” is painted into a raster system; the letters are built of angular spirals and arrowheads (fig. 16). Obviously readability was not a primary goal when the page had been painted.

When we finally reach the Romans with their majestic capitals, many believe that their letters are the foundation of all letter constructions. Script names like “Capitalis Quadrata” and the Renaissance constructions lead to the persuasion that the Romans used geometric tools to “design” their letters. Of course one can see that straight lines and circles played an important role in the way the skeleton is built up. But the serifs and the way contrast has been applied to the strokes are unlikely the result of compasses and rulers but rather a desire for rhythm. Nevertheless, no evidence at all has been found so far that the Romans actually constructed their letters. It is more likely that they simply adopted the basic structure from the Greeks and “wrote” the letters with an edged brush before they chiseled an inscription in stone.

An example from the Greek classic period (4th century B.C.) reveals the geometric system of the primal letter models (fig. 17). The Greeks obviously had a major interest in geometric linear shapes, and these forms had great advantages: they were easy to learn, easy to redraw by students, and still they differed enough from each other to avoid confusion. Sometimes the letters were aligned even vertically so that the whole text became an overall systematic structure.

Top - Figure 17: “Hekatompedon inscription”, Greek classical period,

ca. 485 B. C.


The difference between Greek and Roman probably describes best the core of the geometric antagonism: while the Greek letters are beautiful through their simplicity and systematic pattern, the Roman ones live through their rhythmic alternation of stroke widths and the playful serif details. Geometry versus rhythm – a combination the keeps type designers busy until today.

After this tour through the history of type design and lettering, we can summarise a few reasons and intentions when constructions were helpful:• To give it a scientific status • As an explanation for students• For easy reproduction and scaling• To suit a certain output device (e. g. screen)• To save time in the working process• To control rhythm (black and white spaces)• For aesthetic demands• To simplify (ease recognition)

Although this method obviously has quite a few advantages, the drawback cannot be missed. It is based on the human eyes’ perception of shapes. We do not always see what is really there. What is geometrically correct might look odd and what is actually uneven suddenly appears well balanced. Figure 18 shows some of these “optical tricks.” The left E is completely geometric, while the right has some optical adjustments: vertical stems are slightly heavier than the horizontal ones, and the middle bar is a bit shorter and has been lifted up. These are just a few of many alterations that type designers use today to make a font look right. They might start with a constructed shape, but then a lot of tweaking has to be done to make it a well readable and orderly looking set of letters.

Figure 18: Optical illusions.


In her book, “Designing Type,” Karen Cheng shows the construction of an upper case “S” and the necessary alterations by starting with two circles on top of each other she suggests to draw the bottom one slightly bigger, to add overlaps on top and bottom, to straighten out the middle part, etc. But taking a closer look at her construction, one might find that the movement of this curve is still not completely smooth. Figure 19 shows what needs to be done to resolve the last reminders of geometry. Furthermore, I must add that the resulting skeleton is not the only one for an S-shape. There are closed forms like from Helvetica, open ones like from Frutiger, and many in-betweens from which we can (and should!) choose.

I could go on with many more examples of optical corrections to letters. In any case, it is important to know that the character or temper of a typeface is strongly influenced by the extent of optical adjustments. If more of the geometric structure is kept, a typeface will probably get a cool, mechanic, static, male, maybe modern expression. Moving further to the “optical” side, the design will become more human, warm, female, dynamic or old style.

Going through the history of lettering again, we can actually find that both approaches are alternating or even have a parallel existence. For example, we can often find formal scripts with a rather static or even geometric basic form, and at the same time a quickly written, mostly casual and cursive variation that was used for informal notes. The Gothic scripts Textura and Bastarda are good examples for such a parallel existence of geometric and dynamic letter concepts.

The conclusion of this research for any type design project might be the following statements:1. Type design is always a walk between geometry and free form.2. Geometry can be very helpful to find a general proportional system

and control rhythm.3. The amount of geometry applied to your type design alters the timber.4. Within the boundaries of rules, only variations are possible but

nothing is new.5. Evolution proceeds when “defects” occur that are beyond the rules.

Figure 19: Adjustments to the construction of K. Cheng.


BrignallColin

Upon leaving school, Colin Brignall’s first five years of employment involved working in various fields of commercial, advertising, and fashion photography. In 1964, he joined Letraset International as a darkroom technician allied to the company’s typeface artwork and design studio. Here he developed an avid interest in letterforms which quickly attracted the attention of the studio manager. He was soon relieved of his darkroom duties in order to undergo exhaustive training in finished artwork and design creation for typefaces the company were in a hurry to add to their hugely popular dry transfer system.

Brignall left Letraset for a short period to gain experience in the newly emerging photo typesetting industry but returned in 1974 to take control of the creative content of Letraset’s type development programme. In recognition of his work, he was promoted to Type Director in 1985 with the responsibility for all Letraset’s dry transfer ranges as well as overseeing the conversion of their exclusive typefaces into digital formats. This resulted in the creation of Letraset Fontek, the award winning range of digital display typefaces.

Colin Brignall’s typeface designs include Aachen Bold, Revue, Harlow, Retro, Epokha, Italia, Romic, Corinthian, Edwardian, Figural, and ITC Rennie Mackintosh. In recognition of his services to typography, he was awarded the prestigious Type Directors Club TDC Medal in 2000, the very first recipient to be awarded the medal outside of the USA. Although now retired, he retains a keen interest in all things typographic and often undertakes lectures on the subject.


the liberated

letter

Appearing at a printing trades exhibition in London in 1963 amongst displays of typefounder punches, matrices, and other relics of the traditional trade were displays of new typesetting systems. To those present it began to dawn that, after some 500 years, printing was about to change forever. Liberated from the constraints that lead type imposed, type could be used with far more freedom. One such new system on display was Letraset’s revolutionary dry transfer type. In fact, by 1963 Letraset had more than just arrived. It was up and running and in spectacular fashion.

My talk is an account of this remarkable company and the contribution it made to typography from its inception in 1956 to its last dry transfer issue in 1993. Also covered are the methods of creating headline typography that preceded Letraset. It positions Letraset in relation to the burgeoning fashion and music industries during the 1960s, claiming with justification that it was equally influential during the so-dubbed “swinging sixties”. Typeface trends during this period and all the way through to the 1990s are extensively covered in my talk.

So too are the designers behind the typefaces. Letraset invested generously in a type design resource, but there were some incredibly talented designers who augmented the work undertaken in-house. The Standard Instant Lettering product, along with Letragraphica, Letragraphica Premier, and the acquisition of International Typeface Corporation (ITC) in 1985 are all featured. How the company adjusted to the onset of the digital age that put dry transfer type into rapid decline is also addressed. Finally, I will look at the design and development of the Letraset Fontek range of digital typefaces launched in 1990 that remain just as fresh and as popular today.


BlažekFilip

Filip Blažek (1974) works as a full-time graphic designer since 1993. In 2000, he graduated from the Faculty of Arts at the Charles University in Prague.

Apart from being a designer, he is a co-author of Praktická typografie (Typography in practice), ComputerPress, 2000, 2004. He regularly contributes to professional periodicals in the field of graphic design. He is a founder and a member of the editorial office of TYPO magazine, which focuses on typography, graphic design, and visual communication. He is an owner of the Typo.cz server, dedicated to Czech and international graphic design.

Since 1999, he lectures on type and corporate identity. He is the Czech deputy of the international organisation ATypI.

www.magtypo.cz www.typo.cz

www.atypi.orgwww. diacritics.typo.cz


euro pean diacr itics

History

Accents have enhanced the basic 26 letters of Latin alphabet since the Middle Ages. They delimit the way a word is pronounced and they help distinguish between words which would otherwise look the same. This is necessary, for all European languages have more phonemes than the 26 basic letters. Another option of increasing the number of characters is more old-fashioned, but still in use: it is the diphthongs or two following letters, which are read as one phoneme (for example ch in Czech). In some languages one phoneme may be represented by more than two characters (for example by three, in German: sch). In certain languages there exists more than one character for the same phoneme: in Czech these are i-y or ú-ů. There is also the possibility of creating a completely new character, such as Old English þ and ð adapted by Icelandic. However, the easiest and also the most practical away of extending the Latin alphabet are the accents. That is why they are the most commonly used.

Although the basic shapes of the accents have been standardised during the 20th century, the accents do develop — permanently and almost invisibly. For example, in Czech, there is a tendency to abandon a decorative style in favour of something neutral and less eye-catching: the previously common caron with sharp contrast is being abandoned nowadays, in favour of the version symmetrical along the vertical axis.

The decorative approach to Czech accents by Vojtěch Preissig (the twenties of the

20th century) and the contemporary style of the Goudy Old Style face (the accents for the latter face were designed by the

author of the article).


In some languages, the readers are very sensitive to the proper shapes of the accents; in others, the shapes are more varied. In Czech and Romanian, it is not acceptable to interchange a caron with a breve; in Turkish, the two shapes are freely interchanged. Accented characters are often perceived as individual letters. This is reflected in the alphabet order — sometimes the accents are ignored, but in other cases, accented characters are placed following to the non-accented ones, or they are placed at the very end of the alphabet.

Digitalisation

When digitalising an existing face, the typographer has to make an important decision: whether it is better to use the original shape of the accents, although it might seem out of date, or whether to design new accents. Both ways are possible. For the digitalised version of Preissig’s antiqua, František Štorm has prepared two versions: one with the original accents (very unusual from the contemporary point of view), and one with modern ones.

Well known is the example of Futura, whose accents were designed by Paul Renner. Some foundries have adopted them, some have replaced them by more conventional ones. I believe that with the most common faces, the reader gets accustomed to a certain shape of the accents. If these are replaced by new, unconventional ones, it might cause difficulties with the fluent reading of the text, even if the new version is typographically better.

One of the most common errors is using accents which do not harmonise with the character of the face and which are constructed differently than the face, such as the accents of a sanserif face used with an antiqua, or, even worse, with decorative italics. Accents must be constructed in harmony with the way the face was built. The designer’s indifference to the shape of the accents is typical for a number of type foundries. Appalling ignorance is exhibited for example by the North American Emigre foundry. In such faces one of the common errors is interchanging a caron with a breve or including a useless ogonek. Sad example of faces with incorrect accents is unfortunately provided by the ones most commonly used: the Times New Roman and the Times typefaces supplied with MS Windows and Mac OS operating systems. I fear that here one might wait for the rectification in vain.

Original accents designed by P. Renner (Futura T, URW++) and their redesigned version (Futura BT, Bitstream).


The distance between the glyph and the accent constitutes another problem for the typographer. The reader perceives the accented character as a whole and a wrongly placed accent may lead to a wrong interpretation. If the accent is placed too close to the character, it could merge with it, especially in small lettersizes or during cursory reading. This makes reading more difficult and it can even lead to mistaking a character for another one. An accent placed too far above the character makes smooth reading nearly impossible. The same problem is encountered in cases where the diacritics is placed on the side of a character (ď); here one also has the added problem of proper kerning. The distance between the baseline and an accent should be, within one face, constant. It is necessary to take into account that some glyphs (such as the ones with round strokes, like c or s) might be taller or shorter than others. In exceptional circumstances, it is unavoidable to alter the shape of the character, if an ornament gets in the way of an accent.

Most common errors

Even if the face contains correctly shaped accents placed in an ideal distance of the characters, all effort might be in vain if the accents are not well placed horizontally. Such accents “fall off” the characters and they destroy the overall harmony. Symmetrical accents are, almost as a rule, placed at the optical center of the character, especially if the characters themselves are also symmetrical. Asymmetrical accents offer more options where to place them. Again, it is necessary to opt for the visual balance, so that the accents do not “fall off” the characters.

“Floating” accents with the Platelet face (Emigre, designer Conor Mangat 1993)

are utterly useless for both Polish and Czech, where there is, in addition, a

breve instead of a caron.

Asymmetrical caron and wrong shape of the ogonek in the system face Times New

Roman (MS Windows); better shaped caron, but in varying height above the

glyphs and, again, wrong ogonek in the system face Times (Mac OS X).


Maximum care has to be taken while adding accents to the italics, especially to a strongly calligraphic one; sometimes, one has to give in to a compromise. Some foundries fault by assuming that for one typographic family, one set of accents is sufficient. Correct diacritics have to be designed for each weight separately, or at least it has to be correctly interpolated. Because the accents must respect the character of the face, it should be pointed out that italics, especially antiqua italics, has strong calligraphic leaning and the accents should therefore be calligraphic, too. With other faces (such as sans serifs) it is usually sufficient to slope the accents.

The obstacles of diacritics

A different approach to accents is applicable when designing a poster, a book cover or a logotype. Then it is possible to adapt the original accents, for example to fit the text into the available space. Some artists work creatively with the accents — they use them to enhance the aesthetic impact of the work. In such cases, the caron might be substituted with a horizontal stroke, a breve, or a triangle. Dieresis might form a part of the character or it might be stretched to its full width. An accent might also grow out of the character. This option is not advisable in cases where such revolutionary approach may lead to misinterpretation. One example is the face used for the names of Prague metro stations, in which a caron is replaced by a macron. (Recently issued digital version of the face does not contain that error).

There is no single answer to whether accents may vary in width. One of the typical examples is the macron above i and above the æ ligature. If the width is set to be universal, then it comes out as too wide above the i and therefore requiring adapting of the kerning in words such as līl; on the contrary, it is too narrow for the æ ligature. In my opinion, it is better to use a variable shape of the accent, both in the case of the macron and with the ogoneks. These need to be adapted so as to harmonise with the character. In times of the printing press, the accents above the uppercase letters constituted a number of problems. That is why the diacritics above the uppercase letters usually comes out flatter than the diacritics above lowercase; this also allows the uppercase lines to be set closer together.

Left: Example of an s character, altered so that it allows adding the diacritics, in the face Fette Fraktur (Linotype).

Right: Accents designed in the Czech company Macron by Otakar Karlas and Martin Klimeš for the Adobe Caslon face respect the calligraphic style of the italics. They are well balanced with the face and thus function as a whole. The second example comes from the Adobe Caslon Pro font.


It is not clear whether it is better to use similar accents for lowercase and for small caps (this is desirable where the small caps are used on one line with the lowercase), or whether it is preferable to use smaller accents for both small caps and uppercase. An ideal solution, of course, would be having both options available.

Diacritics are a hot topic, both among type designers and the general public. Millions of readers in Europe struggle with the incorrect accents in foreign fonts, and converting between the different encodings is a nightmarish experience for virtually every computer user in Central and Eastern Europe. Apart from the extreme opinion that it would be easiest to get rid of all accents whatsoever, there are some interesting ideas resulting from the discussions. As a proof one may look at the Slovak project “Diacritics”. The students of the Graphic Design Department of the VŠVU (College of Fine Arts in Bratislava) have attempted to design entirely new symbols; some have tried to simplify the accents, some have parodied them. The brochure is undoubtedly inspiring. However, globalisation and standardisation make the possibility of a complex change yet more difficult. Introducing new characters would prove far more complicated than the recent adding of the Euro symbol, and still, there are so many typefaces which have not had it added yet.

The following overview does not attempt to be comprehensive. The list of languages does not contain some minor and rarely used languages, as well as any non-European languages. It is also necessary to consider the fact that some languages are influenced by the neighbouring ones. Thus, they adopt words with their original orthography, for which the original accents are needed. This is common in English; some words adopted from French, such as café or façade, are written as in original. Also, the overview does not contain some special symbols needed for transcription from foreign alphabets into the Latin one, or the symbols used nationally for denoting accent in textbooks and dictionaries.

Examples of contemporaneous individual accents in Písmo v propagaci

(Type for advertisment), book by Bohumil Lanz and Zdeněk Němeček

(Merkur, Prague 1974).

Unusual, strongly authorial approach to the accents in some typefaces (Preissig Antikva, Vojtěch Preissig, 1924; Futura, Paul Renner, 1924; Parlament, Oldřich

Menhart, 1950; Fedra, Peter Biľak, 2005).

First published in Typo Magazine 10/2004.


KindersleyRichard

Richard Kindersley studied lettering and sculpture at the Cambridge School of Art and in his Father’s workshop. In 1970 he set up his own studio in London, accepting commissions for lettering and sculpture. Among his sculpture commissions are works for Exeter University, British Telecom, Sainsbury’s, Lloyds Register of Shipping, Flaxyards, Christies’ Fine Art, and Night and Day Grosvenor Square London. He is also winner of 7 major brick carving competitions and awarded the Royal Society of Art, Art for Architecture Award.

He has designed title lettering schemes for London Bridge, Tower Bridge, university buildings in Cambridge, Oxford, Exeter, Kent, and Staffordshire. He has also created inscription on glass, wood, and stone for the Supreme Court and Parliament Square London as well as inscriptions for many of the great churches and cathedrals around the UK including St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey.

Richard has also lectured widely on both the historical aspects of architectural lettering and the present development within the context of his own work. He organises yearly study trips in the spring to Rome and Pompeii to visit significant Roman classical inscriptions both of the Republican, Imperial, and Renaissance periods. Included are visits to the Epigraphy Museums in the Museo Nazionale Romano and the new Epigraphy museum at Museo Palatino.

www.kindersleystudio.co.uk


Richard Kindersley is a renowned British letterer and sculptor who has been commissioned for many of Britain’s most important lettering projects including the M25 Queen Elizabeth Bridge over the Thames at Dartford, inscriptions for St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey in London, as well as many commissions overseas. His work is broad in the areas it covers including architectural carving, memorials and plaques, standing stones, font design, clocks, and sundials.

Richard will present his rich portfolio of work and talk about his career as both a letterer and sculptor, including his award winning brick carving. He will then undertake a live carving into stone, which will be broadcast as he undertakes it. This should prove to be a very unique experience indeed.

letter carving

Polská 10120 00 — Prague 2, VinohradyCzech Republic

Tel.: (+420) 222 101 020 (+420) 222 722 544Fax: (+420) 222 718 813

[email protected]

ISSN 1804-3402


Documents

Differing Accents Conference Catalogue