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2 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7
FEATURES
2 7 WOMEN OF WORDS
Meet 10 of the most talented female creatives living
and breathing letters today.
BY R EBEC CA B E D RO S S I A N
3 8 THE TOP 25 20TH-CENTURY TYPOGRAPHERS
In this roundup, Print breaks down the elite group of
typographers who have made powerful and lasting
contributions to the American typographic language.
BY S T EV E N H E L L E R
5 8 THE ART OF THE GLANCE
Monotype and MITs Clear-IP research lab shows
typographys true powerand how designers can
more effectively wield it for the greater good.
BY JAS O N TSE L E N TI S
TABLE OF CONTENTS
33
6 5 OVER/UNDER
Paul Shaw shines a fresh spotlight on a dozen overlooked
and underappreciated typefaces that, for yearsand
for various reasonshave been kept in the dark.
BY PAU L SHAW
7 2 THE IMPLAUSIBLE BOOK
For hundreds of years, the typographic riddle dubbed Cover photo by John Keatley
the Voynich Manuscript has stumped scientists, baffled Typography by Louise Fili
historians and confounded cryptologists.
BY BRANDON AMBROSINO Print (445-120) is published quarterly, four issues per year,
by F+W Media Inc., 10151 Carver Road, Suite 200, Cincinnati,
7 8 TATTOO ARTIST AS TYPOGRAPHER? OH 45242. Volume 71, Issue 2. Periodicals postage paid at
A manifesto and portfolio roundup of five artists who Cincinnati, OH, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send
address changes to Print, P.O. Box 421751, Palm Coast, FL
blur boundaries today. 32142. Printed in the U.S.A. Subscription rates: one year: U.S.,
BY A L E X HA RRELL $40; Canada, $55; international, $81.
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Biscuits 88 Desserts 70
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Bordeaux Sauce 252 Dressings 3
Brandied Peaches 118 Ranch 8
Breads Raspber
Bagels 1932 Dumplings
Potato Bread 283
Rye 157 E
Sourdough 168 Eggs

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Vegetable 381 Endive 67
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Quality Manufactu
4 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

47

UP FRONT IN BACK
1 1 GRIDS+GUIDES 2 3 DESIGN MATTERS: IN PRINT 84 LOVE LETTERS
A smattering of the latest from the world After studying with a host of masters, A tribute to the brilliant Louise Fili in text
of design. Philippe Apeloig developed an incredible and visuals.
BY CA LLIE B U D R I CK typographic style all his own. BY DEB B IE MILLMAN
BY D E BBIE MIL L MA N
1 9 EVOLUTION: SIGNS OF THE TIMES
86 STEREOTYPE: THE RELUCTANT
From skulls to trespassers will be shot
TYPE DESIGNER
on sight, warning signs are design at its
Print reviews Carol Twombly: Her Brief But
most simple yet formidable.
Brilliant Career in Type Design.
BY S T EV E N H E L L E R
BY PAUL SH AW
2 1 OBSERVER:
TYPOGRAPHIC SELFIES? 88 THE LAST WORD: JESSE JAMES
Why Fonts Matter misses the mark on Dusting off the final moments of an
what really matters about type and design. outlaw legend.
BY R I C K POY N O R 23 BY SEYMOUR C H WAST 84
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6 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7
finishing a type-
themed issue of Print
causes me to break
out into the semantic
sweats. It starts about
a week before the
issue goes to press: Wait a second. Page
32did I let a typeface slip through when
it should have read font? Page 60did
the author accidentally use type design
in lieu of typography? Page 79dear
God, is that a handlettered type?
It intensies as the prepress deadline
approaches, at which point I eventually
have ve portable fans on my desk, a
moat of perspiration around my com-
puter, an empty ask or two and thoughts
about whether or not this is the type
issue thats going to be the start of my
Rogaine days.
And then I attempt to take a step back
and collect myself, and I realize: Ive
missed the entire point of whatever article I
was just proong because Ive been groomed
to be obsessed with nailing the minutiae of
the terms at any cost.
Which is all to say: For many designers
and laypeople alike, the T in type discus-
sions can induce terror. The type world
can feel like the most brutally exclusive
of clubsand if youre willing to show
up to the mixer and engage in conversa-
tion, you sure as hell better get all the
words right. As in the real world, there
are good cops and bad cops, but the latter
members of the type police are known for
taking a particularly sadistic pleasure
in reprimanding, and then summarily
disemboweling, anyone with the gall to
attempt to engage in a type dialogue with-
out the proper vocabulary.
FROM THE EDITOR
It scares a lot of people o. But I under- environment in which, yes, vocabulary
stand it. It makes sense: The type world is important, but it shouldnt prevent you
requires a truly incredible degree of spe- from getting to the meat of the discussion
cialization, attention to detail, nuance. and understanding the true depths and
The industry requiresnay, demands value of the eld at large.
practitioners who talk the talk and walk Perhaps the tides are turning.
the walk, and operate with a precision At the HOW Design Live conference in
that is overlooked and, well, absent, in Chicago this past May, Jonathan Hoeer
many other elds. Its endemic to the revealed that he found himself in a good-
world in which type is created. And, sim- natured argument online with someone
ply put, type deserves such precision. who was unhappy that he had used font
But this is where we often lose the plot. and typeface interchangeably in his talk.
In our attempts to adhere to this stan- Hoefler argued that the distinction
dard, the rest of the design community, between the two terms is in fact incon-
and especially the public at large, gets sequential now that everyday designers
left behind. Imagine a world in which arent literally typesetting anymore.
everyone fully (or, at least, partially?) The heresy!
understood the brillianceand, often, Elsewhere (and throughout this issue,
sheer hellthat goes into making a type- in fact) youll nd a variety of voices advo-
face. Imagine a world in which the public cating for a strict adherence to classic
understood the raw skill that it takes to terms, and others advocating for every-
work with type, and typography at large. one to lighten up.
A few years ago, I asked Prints long- Perhaps the most important thing:
time editor, Martin Fox, what his overall Were having this discussion. Were ques-
mission was during the four decades he tioning our standard-operating proce-
helmed this magazine. His answer was dure. Were giving things a fresh look, if
simple: to get more people to understand anything, to rearm our convictions or,
what graphic design is, and what its value maybe, to evolve past them.
is to culture. As an editor, I trade in words. I trade in
Isnt it in our best interest to do every- the precision of language. And for a long
thing we can to encourage that? Isnt it time, hearing someone mispronounce a
worth it even if it means grinding our word or proper noun was akin to raking
teeth when someone juggles type and font, a knife along a pane of glass.
standing down from our elitist perch and The heresy!
inviting people in, rather than slapping But then I came to realize that the per-
them on the wrists when they inquire as son dealing in erroneous pronunciations
to whats inside? was probably doing so because they had
The type-obsessedthe people who read the word they mangled in a book.
know the most about the artform and Which is cause for celebration.
who should be the ones teaching the Because today, thats a hell of a thing.
world about itshould encourage an Zachary Petit
 SUMMER 2017 71.2 PRINTMAG.COM

EDITORIAL/CREATIVE DIRECTOR Debbie Millman

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Get inspired
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I am
I am InHouse
Jim Woods is the Creative Director
of Spectrum Brands PHG Aquatic
division. He and his team create all
the collateral materials for PHGs
industry-leading aquatic brands such
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_X[Xj_XjXg\k#pflm\Yfl^_kk_\
work of Jim and his team. He also
contributes to research and
[\m\cfgd\ek#`el\eZ\jgif[lZk
design, and consults on business
decisions outside the traditional role
of graphic designers.

He spends his extra time speaking at

national and regional conferences and
`el\eZ`e^pfle^d`e[jXkIX[]fi[
University. Jims hair is also Pantone
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 A N E W C O N F E R E N C E P R O D U C E D B Y H O W E V E N T S , C R E AT O R S O F H O W D E S I G N L I V E

W W W . T H E R E A C H C O N F E R E N C E . C O M
 PRINTMAG.COM 11

A smattering of the latest from the world of design.

Grids+Guides by Callie Budrick

BOOKS

NEW PRINT
today, it seems like an unspoken rule that ones letter-
press creations must feel retro and nostalgicand perhaps even
somewhat dated. After all, that makes sense for a practice
with roots in the 15th century. But Swedish designer Da Khne
has been boldly breaking that silent standard for years. And
with the help of editor Reto Cadu and Lars Mller Publishers,
nearly a decade of Khnes unique letterpress stylings can now
be found in True Print.
Personally, I dont collect posters from other designersId
rather have a catalog of their work, says Khne, explaining the
inspiration behind his decision to publish True Print.
Khne was introduced to letterpress printing while studying
visual communications at Zurich University of the Arts. He later
completed an internship with Hatch Show Print in Nashville,
TNone of the oldest and largest wood type printing shops in
the U.S. The real experimentation began when Khne started
mixing digital techniques, like laser-cutting, with the analog
printing press.
Working with physical printing blocks on old machinery bears
a lot of limitations, says Khne. You cant just Command-P
everything you make in Photoshop or Illustrator. Some of my
posters are black only. They look very simple. But it might have
taken me three or four print runs. You need to know a lot
about the technique to make it work on the press. If it all works
out at the end, its a great satisfaction!
True Print is available in English and German, with a selection
of limited-edition volumes that can be found online.
12 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7 Grids+Guides
BOOKS

SUPERIOR SUPERWOMEN
you know superman, Batman and cover beautiful vintage art and essential weve shown that women are not storm-
Spiderman. But how familiar are you reading suggestions, and finish each ing the clubhouse built by male creators
with their heroine counterparts? Since chapter with an analysis of the Hero of weve been here, building the industry and
the beginning of comic book history, the Decade, full of facts, insights and community, from the very start, Nichol-
women have been a staple of the medium, thoughtful critiques. In this history, son says. Well never fade away.
and author Hope Nicholson is here with
a collection of the weirdest, coolest,
most of-their-time female characters
in comics.
As founder and owner of the Bedside
Press, Nicholson is known for publishing
Secret Loves of Greek Girls and editing
Margaret Atwoods Angel Catbird. Now
shes taking readers through the erce
history of women in the comic indus-
tryboth real and ctionalwith The
Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen.
Meet prominent characters from the
birth of the medium (Super Ann; Flyin
Jenny; and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle)
alongside modern marvels and authors
such as Ming Doyle, Emily Carroll and
Pia Guerra.
Each chapter highlights a diverse roster
of both iconic and atypical heroes. Dis-

SIGN LANGUAGE
for decades now, despite being an academic discipline,
graphic design has been almost entirely based in genres, styles
and imitation. Steven Skaggs, professor of design at the Hite
Art Institute of the University of Louisville, is out to change
that with his latest MIT Press oering: FireSigns: A Semiotic
Theory for Graphic Design.
Semiotics is the study of signs and their interpretations.
Graphic design, Skaggs argues, is the use of visuals to create a
certain eect in the minds of viewers (a FireSign). With his
book, he oers an entire network of concepts and terminology
that not only explains how, but also proves that, since the begin-
ning of the discipline, graphic design has made implicit use of
semiotics without even knowing it.
Within the tomes 296 pages, complete with more than 100
illustrations, Skaggs provides an overview of the metaphysics
of visual perception and notion of visual entities by drawing
on the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of
Pragmatics. Ultimately, the book reveals an entirely newand
refreshingly freshway of looking at design.
o off 9:14 AM Original Wingman Transition to layered gar

otects our initial ight Homespun & Bundled Where were yi

ults Solo Distance Records Im OK Close your eyes and ho

have your head in the clouds The instructions were discovered onli

Proximity Established FACING EASTWARD Earth2-Final_v3.tx

de Break of Established Norms Telepathy, sir MY DIY BALLOON

ALLY 12.8016 KM ABOVE LANDING SITE All shuttle service suspen

g unreleased Guidance Instrument Parachutes? Lets try it

Moniker
A FRIENDLY SANS FOR COMPLEX MATTERS
Now available at processtype.com
14 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7 Grids+Guides
BOOKS

A TYPE TALE
you probably know p22 type foundry, home to the award-
winning typeface Marcel, with companion fonts and more than 1,300
glyphs. But did you know that Marcel was a real person?
Designer Carolyn Porter has captured an incredible true historical
love story in her new book Marcels Letters. Marcel Heuz was a French
soldier pulled apart from his family during WWII as part of the Vichy
governments Service du Travail Obligatoire (obligatory work service in
Germany). He was forced to spend his time working in a squalid Berlin
factoryoften a target for bombingsand regularly wrote letters to his
wife and daughters.
Porter came across Heuzs legacy while searching for font design
inspiration in the small town of Stillwater, MN. She discovered a bundle
of handwritten notes in an antique shop, and after being intrigued by his
lettering and having one of the missives translated from its original French,
realized that she had opened a portal to a dierent timea portal that
spanned three countries and one mans love for his family.
Marcels Letters follows Porter as she searches for Heuzs fate and
works on rening the typeface that would become P22 Marcel Script,
simultaneously immortalizing the man and his letters that waited years
to be reunited with his familyand creating a rare typographic tale that
intrigues and inspires.

COVERS

VISUAL POETRY
the playful cover for the recently released poetry compi-
lation The Zoo of the New: Poems to Read Now (Particular Books,
Penguin UK) jumps with jaunty shapes and colors. Only upon
closer inspection does it become clear that the collaged cover
art actually creates the letters of the title.
Designed by Richard Green, the cover is an eye-catching visual
interpretation of the title, which originates in Sylvia Plaths
poem Child: Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful
thing. / I want to ll it with color and ducks, / The zoo of the
new. Green says he was really taken with the title of the book.
Zoo of the New sounded like it was some kind of 50s jazz album
to me, so I immediately had in mind the idea of using simple
colorful shapes in some waylike you might see on those old
record sleeves.
The covers of poetry tomes can be a challenge for designers, but
they can also oer the opportunity to play with abstract designs.
As Green says, Poetry books are often something you might buy
as a nice gift, so having a beautiful cover feels extra important.
The book, with poems from the past ve centuries, including
selections from Sappho, Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks, needed
a cover that felt both modern and timeless. Greens design,
which pays subtle homage to both Henri Matisses Jazz and
Paul Rands covers, manages to convey a visual poetry of its own.
Claire Lui
 PRINTMAG.COM 15

GOODS&MISC.

VARYING DEGREES OF TYPE

you may have heard the whisperings of a type collabora-
tion between some of the biggest names in technology. Adobe,
Apple, Google and Microsoft are working togetherwith the
help of independent type foundries and designersto create
something thats literally going to change the way we see type.
Theyre called variable fonts. Adobe Type senior manager Dan
Rhatigan explains more.
Variable fonts are a way of taking many, many, many styles
within a typeface familyfrom very light weight to very bold
weight, from wide to skinnyand packaging them all up into
one small le, he says. Youre not just saving space; youre also
getting access to all of the possible weights and sizes on the
spectrum of a font.
Its a more complicated and sophisticated version of a font
le. But its still just a font le and will behave on any operating
system that can support it, Rhatigan says. Variable fonts are
based in formulas, like any other font; the same mechanism
that allows a webpage to reow when you zoom in and out of
a browser window can manipulate a fonts style when it gets
built into the CSS.
Though variable fonts are still in their early days, that isnt
stopping designers from experimenting and pushing boundaries.
For some of the latest developments, check out our extended
conversation with Rhatigan at www.printmag.com/summer-2017.

A spread from a
1998 Myriad speci-
men that explains the
concept of Multiple
Master fonts. Variable
fonts would offer
designers similar
access to the full
potential range of
styles in a typeface.
IM AG E CO U RTE S Y DAN R H ATIGA N, A D O B E
16 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7
FUTURISMO
ever wanted to share your vision of the future? Well,
thats exactly what digital marketing rm POSSIBLE and
cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab want you to do in their
new project, Earth 2050.
The interactive online portal invites dreamers, innovators
and designers to predict and illustrate the future using technol-
ogy that was inspired by Google Street View and PC games like
UFO and Civilization.
We want you to enter the website and get wonderfully stuck,
says Arthur Pechorin, senior producer on the project. We want
you to fall into a world where you are wrapped up in beautiful
illustrations created by professional designers and ordinary
people and [read] thought-provoking predictions from famous
futurologists.
Grids+Guides
GOODS&MISC.
Kaspersky paired with POSSIBLE to celebrate their 20th
anniversary and to raise awareness about the potential cyber-
security issues the future may bring.
The idea was to consolidate futurologists and visionaries
in their ambition to describe a future world, says POSSIBLE
Moscow creator Marat Arutyunov. We see lots of scientists
and futurologists tell us about the future, whilst designers,
artists and illustrators upload their works [separately] to
places like Behance. We wanted to combine them, creating a
single web platform where all the predictions and images can
be showcased.
To try your hand at designing your own bit of the future, visit
https://2050.earth.
 PRINTMAG.COM 17

GOODS&MISC.

OLD SCHOOL/NEW SCHOOL

rap mogul dr. dre is now a professor, and you can be one The degree includes coursework by a faculty across USCs
of his students. campus, including the Roski School, the Marshall School of
The University of Southern California has just created a Business, the Viterbi School of Engineering and more. The
revolutionary and rst-of-its-kind cross-disciplinary masters Academy hopes to empower the next generation of disruptors
program with the help of record producer Jimmy Iovine and and professional thought-leaders who will wield their skills in
Andre Dr. Dre Young. an international arena. To learn more about the program, visit
A gift from the two entrepreneurs, the USC Jimmy Iovine and http://iovine-young.usc.edu.
Andre Young Academy for the Arts, Technology and the Busi-
ness of Innovation was founded to teach critical thinking and
nurture unbridled creativity at the intersection of three essential
areas: art and design; engineering and computer science; and
business and venture management.
The program provides students with the opportunity to learn
across a broad curriculum while obtaining their Master of Sci-
ence in Integrated Design, Business and Technology.
This program is designed to address the changing needs of
graduates and professionals, says Erica Muhl, dean of USCs
Roski School of Art and Design and executive director of the
new Academy. At its core is a unique blend of disciplines that
represent new literacies for the 21st century, and an educational
experience that will take students beyond the boundaries of a
single eld and into a powerful space where the application of
design principles serves as a universal framework for high-level
problem-solving.

A FRESH SPIN
design challenges come in all shapes and sizes. For the Franklyn design
studio in Brooklyn, that shape was a bicycle and the size was, well, a big part
of the focus.
In 2013 Rich Hofbauer and Diana Parmer co-founded VonHof Cycles, a bike
manufacturer in Hoboken, NJ. Their goal was to ll the void between expensive
custom frames that take months to deliver, and one-size-ts-all bikes that are
mass-produced and deeply impersonal. Ever since, they have been creating
handmade bicycles that are not only gorgeous, but also aordable and made in
the U.S.
Hofbauer and Parmer realized that the cycling industry posed a unique chal-
lenge to femalesonly 14% of bike racers are women, in part because women
riders 55 and under lack high-performing options.
VonHof wanted to change that, and paired up with Franklyn to create the
DIA all-road womens bike. It might be a clich line, says Hofbauer, but [for
womens cycling] theres still a lot of pink it and shrink it going on. VonHof
began meeting with female cyclists from dierent backgrounds to create some-
thing that doesnt shout, Im a woman biker, and instead oers a realistic and
dependable ride for cyclists of smaller stature. Franklyns visual design kept a
neutral color palette with the VonHof wordmark and the addition of bold racing
stripes to tie the design back to an old-school, 70s Italian feel.
On the whole, We built this bike for any woman whos ever struggled to nd
the perfect t for a road bike without sacricing responsiveness, says Parmer.
18 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

GOODS&MISC.

OLD POSTERS, NEW LIFE

cities have changed a lot, laments the promotional
video for Plants of Posters. We see more buildings than
trees growing in them. And on the gray walls of these build-
ings, thousands of advertisement posters are placed one on
top of another.
Meet Juan Frias and Fede Morenothe creative minds
behind this innovative sustainable project. The two, who
used to work together for Leo Burnett in Madrid, were travel-
ing through Spain when they noticed the walls of buildings
covered in concert and event posters. This was one thing
that really [caught] our attention because it isnt a common
thing in our countries, explains Frias, who hails from Brazil.
Those posters are nice to see, but [they] made us think about
the impact [on] the environment. With that, Frias and Moreno
saw an opportunity to bring a little green back into city centers.
After being inspired by hanging and rooftop gardens, the
two began designing and testing. Their goal: Find a way for
the dilapidated posters to hold live plants. The designs had
to be easy enough for anyone to assemble, but also beautiful
enough that they would catch pedestrians attention as they
passed by. Frias and Moreno settled on six designs for vases,
each tting on an A3 sheet of paper: the Augalas, the Mena-
nam, the Paudah, the Vxt, the Rastlina and, the most recent
addition inspired by Brazilian paper lanterns, the Kasvi. The
models were inuenced by recognizable vase designs and were
recreated using origami folding techniques.
To learn more about the project and to bring a little green
to your concrete jungle, download a template from the duo
at www.plantsofposters.org.

Callie Budrick (@callie_budrick on Twitter) is Prints associate editor.


Evolution
Signs of the Times
From skulls to trespassers will be shot on sight,
warning signs are design at its most simple yet formidable.
by Steven Heller
S
igns bearing the words BEWARE,
KEEP OUT, STOP and CAU-
TION can readily be traced back
to stone inscriptions in ancient
Rome and mosaics in Pompeii,
even then, they followed their own path
and even earlier in other civilizations.
Warnings are some of the oldest and most
common elements in the history of what
is now called signage. They were meant to
protect property and people from harming
PRINTMAG.COM 19
others or being harmed, as in accidently
falling o a cli, drinking tainted water
or killing a neighbors livestock.
The earliest warning signs were not
even 2D signs, but rather symbolic and
representational 3D objectsbones,
skulls and sticks and stones lying on the
ground or hanging from trees. With the
coming of automobiles in the early 1900s,
there was an even more pressing need for
sign systems. In Europe, the most com-
mon of these were four pictorial symbols,
indicating bump, curve, intersection and
railroad crossingeach a recurrent dan-
ger. Trac lights came later.
Of course, not all warning signs were
intended for motorists. Signs with
skulls and lightning bolts indicating
live wires were popular in the early 20th
centuryand remain so today. In fact,
almost anything emblazoned with a skull
(or deaths head) indicates that when
touched, stepped on or swallowed, trag-
edy is a real possibility. It was important
to be cautious in business, factory and
ultimately machine work for obvious logi-
cal and practical reasons, including an
accidents impact on productivity.
Warning signs speak to the fact that
despite human beings natural aversion
to pain or death, we often walk right into
dangerous situations without knowing it.
Or, in the case of cigarettes, we know the
risks a million times over and still smoke.
Signs were meant to be idiot-proof, or at
least read by idiots. So to make and read
a sign demands certain level of common-
sense literacy.
In ancient Rome it was clear that a cru-
cix signaled death for Christian zealots
or other criminals against the Empire, but
it took a few gruesome executions before
people understood the message and,
regardless of the consequences. Crosses
of various kinds have, of course, over time
become signs of faith, but in some ways
they are also symbols of caution.
In addition to signs made of wood,
stone and metal, fabric ags and ban-
ners eectively communicate graphic
warnings, and from greater distances
20 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7 Evolution
Warnings tion. (In the good old days some signs
come in many even stated Trespassers Will Be Shot on
shapes, sizes Sight. Who said signs have no power?)
and languages. Sign removal can be a legal oense,
These are from and some jurisdictions have also crimi-
a factory (c. nalized unauthorized possession of road
1950s) in the
signs. The removal of warning signs with-
Soviet Union.
out permission has led to manslaugh-
You dont need
ter charges, and street artists who have
to read Cyrillic
vandalized signs by adding or distorting
to get the gist.
warnings are considered scoaws and
Beware!
may be charged with misdemeanors.
Warning signs are not just essential
tools in the graphic design arsenal, but
they are legal documents too. A simple
too. The most common danger sign is a have a long history, and might just be Beware of Dog sign limits the owners
red ag, yet how it is perceived derives the most emotionally charged. They stem liability if said canine bites or mauls an
from its context. During those carefree from the biggest fears that business and intruder. Now thats design at its most
Middle Ages it was an indication that a landowners can have, notably liability powerful.
town, hamlet or village was in the grips from owning private property. Signs have
of the black plagueand people did not long been a necessity in establishing Steven Heller is the co-chair of the MFA Design/
want to mess with the plague. But it also boundaries, and around the globe they Designer as Author + Entrepreneur program at
warned that combat was in progress. In play a role in legal issues surrounding School of Visual Arts, and the author of more than
either situation it was better to stay away. private property and criminal trespass- 170 books. He is an AIGA medalist and received
Among the most frequently applied ing. This signage also denes the limits the 2011 Smithsonian Institution National Design
warnings, those for No Trespassing of privacy, vandalism and theft preven- Award for Design Mind.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop

R
PENALTY FOR LAUNGHING
Injustice is relatively easy
Happy pay to the devil
Temptation is an irresistible force
However, most of the existing types were old
MENCKEN typography has not been neglected in these
been rened. A NEW TYPEFACE had to be fou
An american Scotch
remixed in 63 styles design that corresponded to todays taste. Th
From 55 created a modern & elegant typeface, both pr
robust In recent years a new tendency has b
PRO COLLECTION, EXCLUSIVELY AT TYPOFONDERIE.COM cdefg
TYPOFONDERIE

Observer
Typographic Selfies?
Why Fonts Matter misses the mark on what really matters
about typography and design.
by Rick Poynor
T
he title did exactly what it was
intended to do: It stopped me
in my tracks. I was killing time
browsing in a bookshopa sur-
prisingly large onein a big Lon-
don train station, and there in a display
surrounded by books covering every kind
of subject was Why Fonts Matter. Just
those three words in heavy capital letters
on a plain white background. No subtitle
or qualifying text. Bold and unmissable,
with no hint of apology for thumping
the viewer with a proposition that would
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL HIRSHON
once have seemed thoroughly arcane, if
not incomprehensible.
I remember those font-blind days well
because my own discovery of graphic
design involved a mini revelation about
type several years before the arrival of
personal computers put us on a path to
where everyone knows what a font is, and
PRINTMAG.COM 21
its possible to assert with condence now preferred in everyday speech for
that fonts really matter. I had always typefaceas on the book coverwas
liked letterforms, occasionally messing then obscure for ordinary viewers (no
around with sheets of dry transfer type Print reader should need the dierence
for high school art projects. Then, in the between typeface and font explained).
late 1970s, I took a temporary menial job Sarah Hyndman, author of Why Fonts
at a company that carried out typesetting Matter, knows the dierence, but no
and book production. I started to become one can resist the tide of etymological
fascinated with typefaces, peering closely change, so a shrewd publishing decision
at the letters, nding out their names, prevailed. Why Typefaces Matter wouldnt
and reading introductions to typogra- have made the same connection. Hynd-
phy. Before long I was learning to set mans book joins a small group of projects
type, using strings of code, on the little aimed at nondesigners that celebrate the
screen of one of the companys Compu- social and personal impact of typefaces,
graphic EditWriters, an early photoset- such as Gary Hustwits Helvetica docu-
ting system. mentary (2007) and Simon Garelds
Away from work I knew no one who book Just My Type (2011). Think, too, of
took an interest in any of this. The word the fabulous letteriness of Netixs recent
that people probably used if they ever Abstract episode about Paula Scher.
paused to think about such matters was I imagine plenty of designers have
the catchall printing. The word font, purchased Hyndmans book because
22 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7
Graphic designs full potential as a means of
communication comes from the integration of type
and image. It hardly needs saying, one might think,
and yet it often seems today that the emphasis falls
too much on type at the expense of the image.
designers always love it when the wider
world takes notice of what they do, and
Hyndman, too, is a graphic designer.
But the project is astutely targeted to a
general audience that knows nothing
about the technicalities of type, and has
reached the point, by making selections
onscreen in the font menu, of becoming
aware of personal favorites, and thinking
more consciously about the barrage of
typefaces that confronts us every day. A
Hyndman introductory exercise for type
consumers involves counting how many
typefaces one encounters in the space
of an hour; on a Saturday morning, she
noticed 67.
But this is only the starting point.
Hyndman bases the book on her expe-
rience running public events she calls
Type Tasting, which is also the name
of her studio. She has devised a series
of experiments and surveystested
on humansintended to reveal to par-
ticipants how we respond emotionally
to type. I am interested in using these
experiments as a fun way to start con-
versations and to dispel the preconcep-
tion that typography is a dry subject for
academics and experts, she writes. The
list of surveys includes Eat Me (what
do letterforms taste like as food?), Font
Fortunes (how typeface choices reect
values and aesthetics), and the Type
Dating Game (involving more than
5,000 participants at the time of publi-
cation). Here, people choose a typeface
to represent them at a speed-dating event,
and select the typefaces they would date,
drop, or keep as a friend.
From this we learn that given a list of
just nine typefaces, most men choose to
be Futura Light or Caslon, while women
choose to be Didot or Futura Light. What
is it with Futura Light? Men say the face
is tasteful, modest, classic. Women
deem it sleek, crisp and to the point.
The most dateable men, apparently, are
those who proclaim themselves to be
Franklin Gothic bold condensed (You
have an alpha personality) and, for
women, its Didot (You relish the oppor-
tunity to dress up in style). But women
who see themselves as Franklin Gothic,
a real passion killer for men, are going
to have a hard time getting dates. And
men who favor Eclat and Cinema Gothic
could also be out of luck, though men nd
Eclat women (casual and laid-back)
pretty appealing.
This is all very amusing, and the con-
siderable amount of detail in the book
about peoples reactions to type certainly
makes the casenot that anyone with
design knowledge has ever doubted it
that type choices are full of meaning,
and also that viewers are increasingly
sensitive to, and preoccupied with, how
type works. Hyndman correctly points
out that much of what designers think
they know about type, based on their
accumulated experience, is not veried
in evidence from academic research,
which has tended to focus on issues of
legibility. She acknowledges that her sur-
veys werent conducted under anything
remotely resembling scientic testing
conditions, but hopes to highlight areas
for possible future study in collaboration
with more rigorous investigators.
How useful such evidence would be
remains to be seen. Would it facilitate
better (as in more precisely targeted) use
of type in marketing strategies? We are
quite good at that already. In any case,
Why Fonts Matter seems much too reduc-
tive to me, as even its title reveals. By
putting so much emphasis on the person-
ality of individual typefaces, as though
the answer to a designs meaning will
reside solely in the emotional inuence
exerted by a single type style, the book
neglects the larger issue of what happens
when typefaces are put to use as part of
an intricate design.
In a piece of design, there may be sev-
eral typefaces. These combinations will
Observer
produce subtle interactions and webs of
associationhow do we determine the
meaning that arises dialectically from
these counterpoints? Size changes and
variations of font (original use intended
here) will play their part in articulating
possible meanings too. Color has the
potential to contribute a great deal, as
will the placement of typographic ele-
ments within the space of the design. We
also need to bear in mind what happens
to meaning when these highly variable
typographic units are part of a larger
sequence of some kind.
There is another factor that leads to an
even greater degree of complexitythe
presence of imagery. Graphic designs full
potential as a means of communication
comes from the integration of type and
image. It hardly needs saying, one might
think, and yet it often seems today that
the emphasis falls too much on type at
the expense of the image. At the point
where we might be better able than ever
before to proselytize the purposes of
graphic design, because public aware-
ness of type and design in general in the
21st century helps to make this possible,
instead we xate on one component
the font, simplistically reducing public
perception of visual communication to
a matter of expressing our personalities
by our type choices. According to Hynd-
man, Fonts are like typographic seles.
Those are words to chill the blood of type
masters from Caslon to Tschichold.
Designers collude in this narrowing
of perception by preferring to focus on
type concerns as an arena over which
they can still exert a high measure of
control. The global triumph of the image,
once central to graphic designers sense
of what visual communication existed to
do, has become too overwhelming. Many
have turned away, opting for the craft
satisfactions of typographic design.
Typefaces helped to ignite my inter-
est in graphic design all those years ago.
But for me, the central issue is not the
letterform, but how the letters relate to
everything else.
Rick Poynor is a British writer, lecturer and curator.
He is professor of design and visual culture at the
University of Reading.

Design Matters: In Print
Philippe Apeloig
After studying with a host of masters, the French artist
developed an incredible typographic style all his own.
by Debbie Millman
F
rench graphic designer Philippe
Apeloig was educated at the
cole Nationale Suprieure des
PH OTO 2 0 17 ATJA N RE N D E RS
Arts Appliqus and the cole
Nationale Suprieure des Arts
Dcoratifs in Paris. This was where
he rst experimented with typography
and letterforms. While still in school, he
became an intern for Daphne Ofreski
and Yoleen van der Vouw at Wim Crou-
wels rm Total Design. This experi-
ence helped create the foundation for
Apeloigs groundbreaking work.
Now the principal of his own rm,
Studio Philippe Apeloig, he has crafted
some of the worlds most inventive and
distinctive identities, including the
Muse de France, Istituto Universitario
di Architettura di Venezia and the Louvre
Abu Dhabi.
PRINTMAG.COM 23
Here, Apeloig speaks about his past,
his influences and his wildly unique
aestheticsall of which manifest in his
amazing design and typography.
Your rst design job after school was at
the Muse dOrsay, where you worked
to launch the identity created by Bruno
Monguzzi and Jean Widmer. What was
it like for you to implement their vision?
I was lucky to join the Muse dOrsay
team when I was 23 years old. I met Bruno
Monguzzi and Jean Widmer and was
surprised by the typeface they chose:
Walbaum. Up until that point, most of
the fonts in the Netherlands were sans
serif types. However, I realized their
choice made sense in the context of the
24 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7
period of time covered by the museum:
18481914. Walbaum belongs to the Didot
family, which was a typical font used in
the 19th century. This decision brought
dynamism and freshness to all of the
work. I found that Bruno had a strong cul-
tural background and knowledge about
the history of art and architecture. The
elegance of the logotype was a fantas-
tic example of combining tradition and
modernity to create something new.
You left Paris to work in Los Angeles
with April Greiman in 1988. What made
you decide to do so?
When I was an intern for Wim Crouwel
in Amsterdam, I enjoyed spending free
time in the library they had created. It
was a peaceful room full of art catalogs
and books and magazines about graphic
design. I found a book titled Posters by
Members of the Alliance Graphique Inter-
nationale 19601985, edited by Rudolph
de Harak. One poster, on page 157, stood
out; it was very dierent from all of the
others. I was struck by the freeness of the
typography, shapes and colors; it was
literally vibrating. I knew that I wanted
to learn from the designer of the poster:
April Greiman. After the opening of the
Muse dOrsay in December 1986, I vis-
ited the USA for the rst time. I arrived in
New York, where I met Massimo Vignelli,
Design Matters: In Print
Ivan Chermaye and Rudolph de Harak.
Then I went to Los Angeles specically
to meet with April and show her my
portfolio. When I rst entered her stu-
dio I realized I had jumped into the 21st
century. Everythingthe furniture, the
light, her silhouette, her attitude, the way
she dressedcontributed to her design
spirit. She liked my work, and I applied
for a grant with the Ministry of Foreign
Aairs in France to spend a year in Cali-
fornia in Aprils studio. When I arrived in
Los Angeles to start working with her I
discovered that she was using the Apple
Macintosh! April was the only designer
at that time to use computers to design. I
didnt expect to be confronted with hav-
ing to learn this new technology. It took
me a few months before I understood
how revolutionary this new tool actually
was. I was lucky; I ended up at the right
place at the right time.
logo of the magazine or the template, or
A year later, you came back to Paris choice of the fonts, or even the tabloid
to open your own studio. At that time format because it was designed by her
you also became the art director for friend and guru, Milton Glaser. It was an
Le Jardin des Modes, a fashion and amazing coincidence, but not surprising
design magazine. in that Le Jardin des Modes had a strong
Not only was this something Id never design history.
done before, I also didnt know much
about fashion. Apparently, this is what In 1993, you became a fellow at the
[editor-in-chief Alice Morgaine] was look- French Academy in Rome. You created
ing for in an art director! She wanted to a number of fonts there, and ultimately
hire someone with no experience in the won the Gold Award from the Tokyo
fashion world. But when I started the Type Directors Club for your body of
job, Alice told me I could not change the work. Original typography has been
central to your output. Can you talk a
bit about how you design typography?
I was looking for a way to use the ele-
Experimental ments of typography like a choreographer
typography is the with dancers on stage, or a composer
balance between full with a music score. I also wasand still
and empty, light and aminterested by abstraction in paint-
ing, minimalism, and repetition. But it
shade. It is midway took me time to acquire the right skills
between science and to experiment with typography. I wanted
art, functional and to bring a sense of movement and create
poetic; it is a precise and a dimensional eect by overlapping vari-
ous textures. Technology has provided
yet arbitrary practice. me with the liberty to use typography to
Typography is alive invent shapes more freely and to push
when it is a bit the limits of readability. I have taken the
awkward and fragile. opportunity to develop new fonts in my
own work designing posters or for new
corporate identities. But it took me time
 PRINTMAG.COM 25

to become unafraid to play with letter- which had given me enormous pleasure. bath of typography. All the walls were
forms and to be at ease in the discipline. I was 39 years old. I decided that the next covered with posters, placed on top of
Experimental typography is the bal- decade of my life should be in Paris. It each other and next to each other, as if
ance between full and empty, light and was a very strong emotional choice. I do they were outside, in a public space. The
shade. It is midway between science and not regret it, but it is bizarre for me to small publications were placed on tables
art, functional and poetic; it is a precise remember my New York years. I feel as in the middle of the room. I also asked
and yet arbitrary practice. Typography is if I was a totally dierent person. When Carolien to assemble three posters of
alive when it is a bit awkward and fragile. I come back to New York and walk across my mentors: Wim Crouwel, Wolfgang
I not only like it to be experimentalI Washington Square, I look at the win- Weingart and April Greiman. It created
need to be in order to create. My alpha- dows of my old apartment building and an interesting dialogue between their
bets are innocent, awkward and playful, try not to be engulfed by sorrow. I believe graphic design language and my own
and they are irrational and unpredictable. that New York City is like a chameleon work. I was especially grateful for the
she regularly changes her skin, but she opportunity to reconnect with Amster-
You moved back to the U.S. in 1998 and is always the same fascinating creature. dam, my second city. It was an honor and
became a professor at the Rhode Island a joy on many levels.
School of Design. Last year, the Stedelijk Museum
For me, teaching is a way to keep con- Amsterdam mounted a show of your Not long ago, you were commissioned
nected with the young generation. I want work titled Philippe Apeloig: Using to craft the numerals for the Slim
to share my knowledge, my skills and my Type. What was it like seeing your dHerms watch. The numbers you
experiences, but I seek to learn their codes work presented in this environment? designed are some of the most beauti-
and language. I found that most of the Carolien Glazenburg, the curator, rst ful ever created.
inspiration American students got was approached me about this project; For the Slim dHerms watch, I was
from consuming society: television, the Using Type would have been impos- asked to imagine the numbers on a
internet, etc. I found my students to be sible without her focus and tenacity. ne, elegant watch, with the silhouette
the direct descendents of the pop culture. She has worked tirelessly to make the of a thin line. I chose to use only very
Stedelijk Museum a home for graphic simple, nearly existential graphic ele-
During that time you also taught at the designers from all over the world. While ments. Everything had to work together:
Cooper Union School of Art New York working with her, I was grateful for her the angles, the lines and the curves. It
and became curator of the Herb Lubalin advice but also surprised. Some of her needed to be as pure as possible. There
Study Center of Design and Typography. choices, frankly, were dicult for me. could be no variations in the upstrokes
Thats a lot of teaching. Were you also But she gave the exhibition a coherent of the numbers, or in the widths of the
taking on your own design projects? vision and brought out qualities that were numbers. Because of their hybrid
I always make time to practice my per- unexpected. One large room was like a nature, the numbers 2, 3, 4 and 5 were
sonal work and to complete client com- the hardest to create. One of the things
missions. However, at one point I realized that has always fascinated me is the
it would be dicult to keep both posi- essence of basic shapes. Typographic
tions, so I had to make a choice between signslike the seven notes in music
having an academic career or a purely must be created in the presence of a
creative one. I chose the risky one and well-thought-out composition of impen-
resigned my full-time faculty position etrable fragments. A watch is not an
at The Cooper Union School of Art. I ordinary object. The spaces between the
kept my position as the curator of the numbersthese interruptionsproduce
Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and an absolutely metaphysical impression.
Typography, where I organized a series of The numbers never touch! For me, this
design lectures and curated exhibitions. evokes the meeting of the spatial and the
temporal. This is like life. Certain lines
Why did you move back to France? are never meant to meet. These interrup-
That is a big question. Many factors tions impose a silence: a stop, followed
pushed me to leave New York and return by the starting up again of time. The
to Paris. It was a year after 9/11, and the little breaks are like a masterful form
city was depressed. I was depressed as of imperfection. My idea was to bring
well. I didnt know if I could rebuild my a modestya fragilityto the face of
life in the U.S. without teaching, and if passing of time. This fragility, against
I could survive as a freelance designer. I all expectations, gives a strong visual
lost my apartment in Greenwich Village, identity to the watch. It is a bit like the
26 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7
From top: Herms scarf celebrating
Roland Barthes, based on his book
A Lovers Discourse: Fragments; logotype
for Muse Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech;
logotype for VIA.
unsettling skull and crossbones adorn-
ments you might see in educated salons
300 years ago.
Since 1997, you have been the poster
designer for the Fte du Livre dAix-en-
Provence. It reminds me a little bit of
Michael Bieruts long-term relation-
ship with the Yale School of Architec-
ture. How do you go about designing
these posters?
For each edition, the literature Festival
dAix-en-Provence chooses one or more
regions of the world for its literary theme.
The debates sparked by the speakers
work are often political, and they explore
the pressing social and political issues
faced by the writers countries of origin.
When I start to design a poster, I read
the novels and I collect many dierent
Design Matters: In Print
kinds of photographs. I
immerse myself in the cul-
ture of the country. I also
examine many things that
might not have any direct
connection with the topics.
This feeds my imagina-
tion and can drive me to
unexpected directions. It
also helps build my men-
tal dictionary. My goal is
to pinpoint an emotional
feeling in the design. I dont
immediately know what I
shall do. I do my utmost
to focus but my attention
wanders aimlessly at rst:
I let things float by me
images, objects, things Ive
read, sounds. Im active
by being receptive. I never
have a preconceived idea.
This would require me to
invent a visual to translate
it. I wont do that.
This phase helps me push
away insecurities and keeps
my worry at bay. When the
proposed project no longer
feels foreign to me, my dis-
quiet starts to be produc-
tive. Sketches begin to pile
up; everything moves. I like
to work with constraints. I
work with the luck of the
draw, like in gambling. I try dierent
letter arrangements and work until
the correct form reveals itself. Thats
when I immobilize it, and the searching
stops. That is a pivotal point, and it is
supported by the mass of preparatory
sketches. It is only then that I feel I can
go and show it to my client.
I believe that a graphic designer is
always cutting, changing, damaging his
alphabet and working to push the limits
of legibility. I feel that typography is the
essence of the mtier. In the end, there is
nothing worse in our practice than being
constrained by the format.
Debbie Millman is the editorial and creative director
of Print, a programming partner for HOW Design
Live, the host of Design Matters, and an author,
educator, artist and brand consultant.
OPENING TYPOGRAPHY BY LOUISE FILI, USING THE MONTECATINI TYPEFACE
PRINTMAG.COM
27
28 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

I
n 2000, a conference at the St. Bride Library in Lon-
don featured only female speakers. It was organized
by Dr. Shelley Gruendler, typographer, educator and
founder of Type Camp, and Dr. Caroline Archer,
typographer, educator and director of The Typo-
graphic Hub. We did it in reaction to a recent
printing conference that only had male speakers,
Gruendler says. Though there was some backlash,
most of the feedback was positive. Perhaps its time for another
one, Gruendler adds. I wonder what the feedback would be
today? Would people think it necessary?
Good question.
Typography, like many other eldstechnology, advertising,
politicshas been historically dominated by men. While gender
parity has not yet been met, things are changing for the better.
Type designer Nina Stssinger agrees: Over the past two years,
the question of appropriate representation and visibility of
women in the workforce, in higher positions, in teaching and
lecturing roles, has really come to the forefront. This set the
scene for women to speak up, and the formation of Alphabettes
(www.alphabettes.org), a lively network showcasing the work,
commentary and research of women in type; Typequality (www.
typequality.com), a platform for discovering and sharing type-
faces designed by women; and Yes, Equal (www.yesequal.us),
a website that lists female professionals in the design eld.
As a result, women are now presenting in greater numbers at
typographic events around the world.
Yet youre reading a women in type feature. The journey
is not over.
The 10 women showcased in this article are trailblazers. And
they are the just the beginning. Get to know them, and then go
out and discover others.

ALICE SAVOIE
Type designer, researcher
Notable typefaces: Capucine, Fred Fredburger

Thanks to a teacher who passed on his love of letters,

Lyon, Francebased Alice Savoie found design at an early
age. There were very few institutions where you could
learn typeface design back in the early 2000s, recalls
Savoie. Lucky for her, she picked up the basics of calligraphy and
type design in a two-year course at cole Estienne in Paris. This
experience comforted me, Savoie says, in the idea that typeface
design might be the right path. And like many designers, she then
moved to the United Kingdom to study in the masters type design
program at the University of Reading. After graduating in 2006,
Savoie joined Monotype, setting her career o to a solid start.
These days, she divides her time between teaching, research, writ-
ing and design. As for the world of education, Art schools provide
such a stimulating environment, she says. I learn so much from
engaging with students and their own work. We also develop a
number of research projects within the schools where I teach and
we involve students wherever possible, so the two activities overlap
rather naturally.
When shes not at school, she can be found in the studio, balancing
type design and writing. It is actually very pleasant to go back and
forth between the two, as both processes involve dierent ways of
thinking and working. Writing requires complete focus and silence.
I am a rather slow writer and I can only do it for rather short spans
of time (never longer than three to four hours)whereas I can design
type for hours on end while listening to music.
Her latest collaborative project? The launch of 205TF (www.205.tf),
an independent type foundry featuring the work of French designers.
 PRINTMAG.COM 29

VERONIKA
BURIAN
Type designer
Notable typefaces: Abril, Adelle, Bree

Who would have thought that

a Prague-born product designer
living in Milan would fall hard
for type? Well, thats exactly
what happened to Veronika Burian. And
all it took was a fellow designer teaching
her how to draw in FontLab. It was like
falling in love, recalls Burian. I was
already disillusioned with product design,
and I wanted to change careers. So I started
looking into the possibility of doing a [mas-
ters] in graphic design. After a bit of
research, she found the type design pro-
gram at University of Reading, visited the
campus, spoke to professor Gerry Leoni-
das, and had discovered her path.
While nishing her degree, Burian met
fellow type designer Jos Scaglione. A few
years later, when Burian was a designer
at the British foundry Dalton Maag, she
and Scaglione founded TypeTogether. For
the past 11 years, their small, independent
foundry has created typefaces that perform
well in continuous reading and also exhibit
strong personality. Case in point: Just look
at Adelle or Bree in action.
When asked what still excites her about
new projects, Burian says it all comes down
to self-initiated work. In recent years, my
days have been increasingly lled with
managerial tasks, so going back to the
drawing board is actually a lot of fun. I
enjoy developing the DNA of a typeface
and exploring the various possibilities of
expressing a certain function or emotion
that I want the typeface to convey.
Currently, TypeTogether is expanding
its focus on multi-script typography. The A multi-faceted typeface for editorial use
most immediate project is a type family for

TABLET GOTHIC
UI and infographics, a rather sti style that
we are missing in the TT-library, she says.
In addition, Burian has a script-like project
on her plate, though shes quick to point
out its not in the decorative sense. It is ThinLightRegularSemiboldBoldExtraboldHeavy

GROTESK SANS
really meant for educational, child-focused
publications. Operators are standing by.
30 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

DR. NADINE
CHAHINE
Type designer
Notable typefaces: Frutiger Arabic,
Neue Helvetica Arabic, Univers Next Arabic,
Palatino Arabic

Lebanese designer Dr. Nadine Cha-

hine cites her studies with Samir
Sayegh, a calligrapher teaching Ara-
bic Typography at the American
University of Beirut, as the catalyst for her inter-
est in type design. The beauty of the shapes,
coupled with the desperate need for well-
designed Arabic typefaces, got me hooked very
quickly, says Chahine.
When asked how Arabic type has evolved over
the past 10 years and where it is headed, Chahine
is enthusiastic about the many new designers
interested in the eld. There is also a growing
awareness in our markets about the importance
of type, she says. This means that Arabic type
design has become a serious eld to work in,
which results in a higher quality and quantity of
typefaces available. Coupled with the Glyphs
app removing more technical challenges, it is
now much easier to develop Arabic fonts.
With years of experience at Monotype, Zap-
no Arabic stands out in Chahines body of work
for the foundry as the most dicult design shes
ever worked on. Why? I was inventing a new
calligraphic style via typographic design, she
says. This is not how it usually works! Chahine
had to nd a style that would pass as an Arabic
companion to Zapnoand feel as if it were
written by the same hand. Working with Prof.
Zapf is still one of the most formative experi-
ences Ive had to date, she says. His approach
to design, attention to detail and the beauty of
the forms he created are a constant source of
inspiration to me.
After almost three years in the making (on
and o, but it was great to be able to take the
time to let the design mature and settle down),
Chahine has completed a text family called
Amariya, meant for reading on screen. Because
Amariya is not a companion to an existing Latin
typeface, it aorded Chahine signicant free-
dom in her design process.
At the end of the day, Chahine says, Its very
important to me to focus on typefaces that invite
people to read.
 PRINTMAG.COM 31

LAURA MESEGUER
Type designer
Notable typefaces: Multi, Lalola, Cortada Dos

Laura Meseguer calls Barcelona, Spain, home,

so it should come as no wonder that shapes and
forms move her. She is surrounded by themin
nature, architecture, design, painting, lettering
and calligraphy. The city touts not only Basque and Cata-
lan inuences, sitting between the Mediterranean and
Europe, but the surreal architecture of Antoni Gaud.
Meseguer received her masters in type design from The
Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, Netherlands. In 2005,
the typeface she designed while thereRumbawon in
the TDC Type Competition. Since then Meseguer has been
working in editorial, lettering and type design, both inde-
pendently and as part of Type--Tones, the typographic
design company she founded alongside Joan Barjau, Enric
Jard and Jos Manual Urs.
A sense of place plays prominently in much of Meseguers
work. She is researching and developing the Latin portion
of Qandus, a tri-script font family designed in collaboration
with Kristyan Sarkis (Arabic) and Juan Luis Blanco (Ti-
nagh). Qandus is part of the Typographic Matchmaking in
the Maghreb project for the Khatt Foundation, whose goal
is to facilitate a cultural trialogue in the region.
Meseguer, along with Nueve Ojos, also designed the La
Rosa de Foc typeface for the title credits of Manual Huergas
documentary Barcelona. In seeking to answer the question of
what typeface would best represent the city, she realized Bar-
celona does not have one clear typographic identity, but many.
Likewise, from her lettering to typefaces such as Lalola,
Dauro and Magasin, Meseguers body of work does not t
into one single box, but many.
32 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

NINA STSSINGER
Type designer, educator
Notable typefaces: FF Ernestine, Nordvest, Slavy

Swiss-born Nina Stssinger found type while studying graphic

design in Germany. One thing led to another, and she enrolled in
the postgraduate TypeMedia Program at the Royal Academy of Art
in The Hague, Netherlands.
When Armenian type designer Hrant Papazian contacted Stssinger about
contributing to a typeface called Ernestine, she answered with a resounding yes.
I had visited Armenia in the summer of 2009 and was fascinated by the wealth
of exquisitely carved and painted letterforms, she says. In contrast to this rich
cultureand the abundance of typographic choice from Latin-based languagesI
was struck by the relative dearth of digital type to serve the Armenian language.
Her rst commercial typeface, FF Ernestine, was subsequently released in 2011.
Stssingers decision to support this fascinating, underserved writing system in
collaboration with Papazian turned into a rewarding experience for both.
Last summer, Stssinger went from running her own studio in The Hague
to crossing the pond and joining Frere-Jones Type in New York City. It was
a big change, she admits. Im very happy and grateful to be here, as part of
a great team doing work that is more impactful and meaningful than what I
could accomplish on my own. Type design strikes me as something thats hard
to practice entirely on ones own, especially when one is still learning (as I hope
I will always be). At some point you need feedback and exchange.
In addition to honing her design skills, Stssinger is now teaching typeface
design at Yale (alternating terms with Tobias Frere-Jones, who has been helm-
ing the course for many years). Its an inspiring experience: Talking with
young designers makes me question the way I approach work, why I do things
a certain way. Its very gratifying to be able to give young designers access to
type design, a eld I myself found hard to initially approach, and have grown
to enjoy so much.
 PRINTMAG.COM 33

JESSICA HISCHE
Letterer, illustrator, type designer, author
Notable typefaces: Tilda, Minot, Brioche,
Snowake, Buttermilk

Art meets type in the work of Jessica Hische,

who divides her time between San Francisco
and Brooklyn. She wears many hatsletterer,
typographer, illustratorand her work reects
this. From stamps, movie titles and books to branding
and packaging, Hische blends fresh elements of fun and
grace in her illustrative work.
While Hische is best-known for her elegant lettering,
she has also adapted it into a number of beautiful type-
faces. As she revealed about her process in Print in 2015,
When Im tasked with lettering dozens of headlines and
the client wants those headlines to feel fairly consistent,
it sometimes makes sense for me to create a makeshift
typeface of the basic letterforms, rather than dragging
and dropping drawn letters in Illustrator. These half-
baked typefaces are in no way ready for the world to use,
but they work well enough for me to quickly typeset lines,
hand-kern and customize with swashes, ligatures, etc. I
dont think it saves me much time, but what it does do is
allow me to spend more time perfecting letterforms and
less time copy/pasting.
Rening those forms has led to Tilda, Brioche and
other faces.
The variety in Hisches work prompts a question about
inspiration and where she nds it. For her, its not the
usual suspects of type specimens or Pinterest boards. I
draw the most inspiration for lettering projects from the
project briefs themselvesnarrowing the scope of whats
possible by really understanding the needs of the client
in order to make something appropriate and beautiful,
explains Hische. Understanding how all the parts of
something work together to make a cohesive whole is
much more inspiring than looking at a ton of nalized
pieces. I try to expand my knowledge by understanding
why certain letterforms might be drawn a certain way,
what attributes evoke certain eras or how legibility con-
cerns aect the range of choices I can make.
Lately, shes been focused on using her work to re
people up politically. The more I am inundated with
news and visuals related to whats going on, the more
empowered I feel to have those dicult conversations
with family, friends and strangerseducating others about
why language matters, what all of these movements and
political organizations are actually about. And if I can
create some art to raise money for organizations that are
doing great work, thats very motivating.
34 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

LUISA BAETA
Type designer, letterer
Notable typefaces: Bligh, Arlecchino

Luisa Baeta has always been about

evolution. After graduating with a
degree in graphic design, she fell
down the typographic rabbit hole.
I got this idea that if I learned to design type,
I would gain a structural understanding of
typography and would become a better graphic
designer as a consequence, she says. And so
this Brazilian-born designer entered the Uni-
versity of Reading, which resulted in a masters
degree in type design. Upon completion, the
perpetual student felt that there was still more
to learn.
Like Veronika Burian, Baeta became a type
designer at the Dalton Maag foundry, which
aorded her the opportunity to work on global
brands in multiple scripts. Working on dier-
ent non-Latin scripts is an incredible learning
opportunity. I had the chance to work on the
Ethiopic scripthow often does a chance to
do that come along?Devanagari, Thai, Greek
and Cyrillic, recalls Baeta. It was during her
time at Dalton Maag that Baeta designed her
own typeface, Bligh, a three-weight sans serif
family selected as one of Typographicas Best
Typefaces of 2015.
The plan was always to go back to graphic
design once I felt like I had learnt typography,
she says. At some point, it dawned on me that
learning type was an innite road, [and] I left
Dalton Maag (and London).
So how does New York City feel after 10 years
in the U.K.? Its a moment of transition: Not
only am I settling in a new city, but I am also
moving back into graphic design and branding
after a long time focusing mostly on type design.
 PRINTMAG.COM 35

LAURA WORTHINGTON
Type designer, calligrapher
Notable typefaces: Adorn, Charcuterie, Mandevilla

Laura Worthington lives in the Pacic Northwest, which makes one wonder if Seattles short, dark winter days
account for her prolic output. Shes been on a roll since she released her rst typeface in 2010.
Worthingtons interest in calligraphy started early, while learning penmanship at age 9 in school. Like many
of her peers, she found typography through design. My father encouraged me to pursue graphic design, a career
I engaged in from 1997 till late 2010. During that time, I kept looking for more opportunities.
Her love of letters persevered and, today, you see it shine through loud and clear in her typeface and lettering work.
Scripts with ourishes and airsuch as Adorn and Beloveddominate her oeuvre. I was always fascinated at the in-
nite possibilities of lettering, Worthington says, how one letter could take on so many dierent forms yet still hold the
same meaning. Her scripts, display, decorative, serif and sans serif fonts are infused with playful nostalgia, reminiscent
of French signage and packaging.
Worthingtons inspiration comes from what she observes, her lettering practice and, perhaps most surprisingly, market
needs. I could be looking through junk mail, or be in the grocery store when an idea hits me there arent enough cute
typefaces denoting youth or playfulnessI should create something that lls that need.
My passion for letters is unending, Worthington says. I see my role as creating tools of expressionnot just for myself,
but for those using my typefaces.
36 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

BEHOLD LYNNE YUN

Type designer, letterer, calligrapher, graphic designer
Notable typefaces: Constant, Ampersandist

AMPERSANDIST Spend a little time with Lynne Yun, and you

cannot help but be taken by her thoughtful,
curious nature. I often ponder the role of cal-
ligraphy in design, both in terms of its
historical signicance and its practical applications in
modern-day design, says Yun. It used to be that callig-
raphy, lettering, type design and typography were
practiced by a similar group of people. Somehow they
split apart over the years, but the time is ripe for them to

NOTABLE
converge again. They are all branches of letterform design.
Born in Nashville, TN, she spent much of her child-
hood traveling between her hometown and Daejeon, a

&BOLD
small town in South Korea. Add studying graphic design
at School of Visual Arts in New York City and working as
a designer at Apple in San Francisco, and its fair to say
Yun has been crisscrossing the globe both personally and
professionally her entire life. Her nomadic adventures
take shape in the United States map she designed and
handlettered (see bottom left).
It was Yuns time in San Francisco that started her on
the path to letters and typefaces. A project at Apple was
the catalyst for taking calligraphy classes, which eventu-
ally led to Type@Cooper, the typeface design program
at Cooper Union. Since calligraphy is one of the earliest
of formalized letterforms, it gives me a solid foundation
throughout my work, says Yun. With this knowledge of
historical letterforms, you can derive a norm, and even if
you are designing letters that deviate from the classical
form, you know which parts to keep and to change with-
out sacricing what the general public would perceive
as a letter.
Today, Yun works at Monotype, specializes in lettering,
calligraphy and typeface design, and calls Brooklyn home.
 PRINTMAG.COM 37

LIRON LAVI
TURKENICH
Type designer, graphic designer, researcher
Notable typefaces: Makeda, Aravrit, Lefty

I get angry, I smile to myself, I get

sad, I get energized, says designer
Liron Lavi Turkenich, referring to
the multilingual signage in her
native Israel. Every sign features three scripts
Hebrew, Arabic and Englishsome with
typefaces chosen without care or respect;
some with slightly dierent translations; oth-
ers with too small or cramped scripts; while
some are painted with a single brush for all
scripts. Those signs are a huge source of inspi-
ration and, she says, such an important visual
of our urban space. They say a lot about it.
Though she has always loved words and
letters, Turkenich ocially discovered type
design as a profession while studying visual
communicationsand everything clicked. I
nally understood what attracted me to study
design in the rst place, she says. Very early
on in my studies, I knew where I was going. And
while my peers complained about our Type 1
task to copy letters, I was as happy as a person
could be. Turkenich went on to receive her
MA in type design from University of Reading,
specializing in Hebrew and Amharic.
Today, she teaches typography and takes on
projects such as typeface designs for interna-
tional companies, and is an active contributor
to Alphabettes and ATypI.
Turkenich radiates energy as she talks about
the many projects shes working on at any one
time. Meditatively designing typefaces bal-
ances nicely with the chaos of organizing the
ATypI conference. Covering a wide range of
topics through teaching typography and the
history of Israeli graphic design balances with
deep research for texts and articles. Working
online with the Alphabettes mentorship pro-
gram balances beautifully with face-to-face
workshops that I teach locally and internation-
ally. Namaste.

Rebecca Bedrossian is global content director at

POSSIBLE and the former managing editor of
Communication Arts.
38 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

THE TOP 25
20 CENTURY
TH

TYPOGRAPHERS
by
bySSteven
te
tev
ev
ve
en H
He
Heller
ell
ller
er
er

Letters of the alphabet that are and the typographer is not always an excellent type designer,

cast or founded for the purpose even though computer programs have made it possible to more
easily create faces.
of impressing upon paper are A typographer is, in my opinion, one who makes type and let-

known as type. The precise ters come alive on a page (or screen) through aesthetic manipu-
lation and organizationotherwise known as composition.
form of the types and the exact For the average person, the distinction between a typographer

position they need to occupy the and graphic designer may be fairly arcane. A typographer and
graphic designer do almost the same exact thing to an extent.
selected paper involve skill in the Yet specifying or setting a line of Helvetica is not typography, just

art that is called typography.
Stanley Morrison, British type adviser to Monotype and
designer of such typefaces as Times New Roman
Those reading this magazine should know the dierence
between type design and typography. Right?
Learning to draw letters is hard enough, wrote type designer
Jonathan Hoeer, but learning to create typefaces is some-
thing else entirely. Type design is the creation of a typeface
family, from drawing the letters to developing all of its various
components. Typography is the application of typefaces, some
that already exist, and others that are drawn for specic proj-
ects. Each demands uency in the craft, design and grammar
of type, but the type designer is not always a great typographer,
as drawing an alphabet is not type design. Compare a violinist
to a ddle player. Both can play their parts, but one is a virtuoso.
For this issue, Print asked me to name 25 of the most signi-
cant typographers of the past 100-plus years. In their minds the
focus would be on designers like Robert Hunter Middleton and
Matthew Carter, both great exponentsbut not typographers.
I further wanted to narrow down the list: American or inter-
national? Living or dead? Latin or non-Latin typography? I
decided on American, living and dead, Latin letters. Now, I rec-
ognize that my selection is probably dierent than yours. While
there are some names we can all agree upon, there will be the
inevitable wheres so and so? Or why is this person included? If you
have a complaint, letters, tweets and text messages will be read.
So, herefrom my perspective, and arranged chronologically
by birthare the top 25 typographers active during the 20th
century who have made powerful and lasting contributions to
the American typographic language today.
 PRINTMAG.COM 39

BRUCE ROGERS (18701957), the father

2. of 20th-century book design, was inspired

by William Morris. Rogers designed the
Centaur typeface in 1914 for the Metro-
politan Museum of Art in New York City, and was
known as a classical typographer with literary air
in his output. In 1916 Rogers moved to England to
work with Arts and Crafts advocate Emery Walker,
hoping to establish a press for ne editions. How-
ever, because of the outbreak of World War I, they
only produced one book. Shortly after, Rogers be-
gan working with Cambridge University Press. He
then returned to the U.S., where he met the original
publisher of Print, William Edwin Rudge. Rudge
put Rogers to work, enlisting his talents as a book
designer for Mount Vernon Press. When Rogers
wasnt designing for Mount Vernon, he kept busy
as typographic adviser for Lanston Monotype and
designer at Harvard University Press. Starting in
1928 he took six years to oversee the typography and
printing of The Oxford Lectern Bible, which Joseph
Blumenthal called the most important and notable
typographic achievement of the 20th century.

WILL H. BRADLEY (18681962) was Americas rst

1. graphic designer and an American Art Nouveau and

Arts and Crafts pioneer. Under his Wayside Press he
served as illustrator, designer and editor of Bradley:
His Bookmaking him one of graphic designs earliest self-
branded entrepreneurs. His privately printed chapbooks and
keepsakes were precursors to the self-promotion journals that
led to, among others, The Push Pin Graphic and Pentagram Pa-
pers. He was also a consultant for the American Type Found-
ers, where he designed various faces, including Wayside Ro-
man, Missal Initials, Bewick Roman and Vanity Initials, as well
as type specimen books. As art editor for Colliers Weekly, he
made certain that its typography was up to a high standard. For
Victor Bicycles and other advertisements he integrated his sin-
uous lettering throughout the oriated iconography that was
a hallmark of his early output.

Bradley: Advertisements featured in Bradley, His Book, Vol. 1, May 1896.

Rogers (top to bottom): Fra Luca de Pacioli, Grolier Club, New York, 1933.
Essays of Michael Lord of Montaigne, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1902;
images courtesy of Letterform Archive, San Francisco.
40 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

OSWALD BRUCE COOPER (18791940), a progenitor of the Chicago Style during the

3. 1920s and 30s, combined calligraphic skill with typographic expertise to create mass
periodical advertisements that were modern in character and classic in form. But as
a prodigious typographer he may be overshadowed by his emblematic type design,
Cooper Black, the most imposing of the so-called fat faces and leader of the so-called fat face
market (or black blitz) of the mid-1920s. Coopers layouts were unfettered by decoration; he
was skilled at the art of arranging type for maximum eect without the owers, dingbats and
borders that junked up many press advertisements.
He often complained that he was beholden to public tastes: We lose hundreds of years of
taking seriously every inane suggestion from anybody anywhere, he once said.

Left: Sans serif lettering, c. 1909. Right: Customized lettering for Packard Motor Car ad, 1909.
 PRINTMAG.COM 41

WILLIAM ADDISON DWIGGINS (18801956)cred-

4. ited with coining the term graphic designwas a type

designer, calligrapher, book designer, letterer and
typographer, among his other arts. Dwiggins began
his practice as a letterer in Chicago with prolic type designer
Frederic Goudy; together they moved to Hingham, MA. He
spent the rest of his life there, designing, printing, writing, ed-
iting and performing with his homemade marionettes (really).
The typefaces he designed, Electra, Caledonia, Metro, Eldorado,
Winchester and more, as well as his book on typography, may
outlast his more commercial lettering work. Still, it can be ar-
gued that his book, advertisement and magazine typography
loom large in the stylistic pantheon of his era. Whether it was
the handlettering for the spines and jackets of Alfred A. Knopf
bookssuch as the exquisitely decorated Autobiography of a
Super-Tramp by William H. Daviesor the smartly fragmented
(schizophrenic) cover type and art for The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dwiggins worked on letterforms with the-
matic, harmonic and tonal precision.

Left: Handlettered book spine design for Economic Planning, 1949.

Above: Book cover of The 14th Formula, date unknown.
42 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7
FREDERICK G. COOPER (18831961), better known
5. as F. G. Cooper, helped develop the commercial
American poster. He was known particularly for his
lettering, and noted for his interest in using lower-
case rather than capital roman letters. Also a cartoonist, his
lettering set a tone for the semi-comic/serious work of his day;
neither modern nor classical, it had a witty quality. According
to Leslie Cabarga in The Lettering and Graphic Design of F. G.
Cooper, by 1905 Cooper (not to be confused with No. 3 on our
list, Oswald Cooper) was entrenched in work for the New York
Edison Company, including their corporate character icon. As
time passed, his lettering became more typographic than car-
toony, and he became best-known for his illustrated magazine
covers for Life and others. Being printed from wooden blocks,
these very modern creations had the air of primitivity, noted
The Poster #13. And although it may not have always looked like
it, his strength was his complete and utter simplicity.
MERLE ARMITAGE (18931975), an art di-
6. rector, book designer and theater set and
costume designer in New York City, had a
xation on modern artists like Picasso,
Klee and Kandinsky, which inspired his total immer-
sion into typography for booksoften books he wrote,
edited or published about progressive artists of his
time. Armitages notable books epitomized the Art
Moderne sensibility. Paul Rand once grumbled that
Armitage overdid it, referring to his signature mam-
moth type treatments, usually on two-page title
spreads (a form he claimed to have invented). He was
also extremely fond of generous margins and widely
leaded serif body texts. His unorthodox treatments
were the result of a mission to demolish antiquated
tenets and reect his time. He angrily described the
books of his era as anonymous among their fellows
becoming comparatively impotent as a means of
communication. Critiquing the publishing eld at
large, he noted, the grand escalator that has brought
us all up from darkness and slavery into light and
freedom has, in our time, lost its leadership, and is
uncertain of its function and its direction. He de-
plored ersatz William Morris and other classical
graphic forms, and replaced antiquarian aesthetics
with modern sans serif typefaces, custom-made let-
ters and bold pictorial images. Armitage imbued in
each book a certain monumentality that underscored
the words and enhanced the pictures.
Cooper: Poster for New York Edison Company,
Keep Cool Electrically, 1919. Armitage:
Book title spread of Martha Graham, 1937.
 PRINTMAG.COM 43

ALEXEY BRODOVITCH (18981971) was

7. best-known as a magazine designer who

exquisitely mastered pacing photography
and type in a cinematic manner. He was
a typographic narrator, so to speak, echoing the con-
tours and moods of photographs with the uidity of
type. His favorite face in the late 1930s was Didot,
which he used while working in Paris on Cahiers
dArt in the 1920s. During his time at Harpers Ba-
zaar, Didot with its lights and darks, poise and bal-
ance, became Brodovitchs veritable signature that
dened the essential qualities of fashion of the pe-
riod. In the 1950s Bodoni shared the stage.
Typographically speaking, Brodovitch did incred-
ibly modern things with classical aesthetics. Port-
folio, published between 1949 and 1951, was a case
in point, a 20th-century graphic and industrial arts
magazine that elevated design and set the standard
of magazine layout that few publications then or
now can equal. The key to success was dynamic jux-
tapositions: big and small, bold and quiet, type and
pictorial. Brodovitch splayed comps out on the oor,
mixing and matching, moving pages and entire sto-
ries around as needed. He used a photostat machine
like a notepad; he would get stats of every photo, and
as he put them down all of a sudden a spread would
materialize beautifully proportioned, everything in
scale, with just the right amount of white space, type
and picture mass.

Above: Cover for

Portfolio magazine,
Winter 1950.
At left: Cover for
3 Poems, 1935.
44 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

BRADBURY THOMPSON (19111995) was a

8. maestro of the grand typographic symphony,

especially the turning of pages. He so mas-
tered the rhythmic tenor of his typography
that one couldnt help but hear music while seeing the
letterforms. His opus was the orchestration of the com-
pany magazine Westvaco Inspirations, which he edited
and designed for more than 60 issues (19391962).
Among these issues were some design and typographic
history milestones, but my favorites were two issues
produced on photography in 1954 and 1956, which
showed Thompsons genius for integrating photos, ty-
pography and painting together as essential elements
of design. This was not his only typographic feat, how-
ever: He designed Alphabet 26, a simplied English
alphabet system to help readers learn letters faster.

OTTO STORCH (19131999) was one of a handful of

9. graphic designers in the 1950s who helped modern-

Thompson, top: Interior spread of Mademoiselle, 1952; bottom:
Interior spread of Westvaco Inspirations, 1961. Storch, top:
McCalls cover, 1961; bottom: McCalls interior spread, 1961.
McCalls images courtesy of Letterform Archive, San Francisco.
ize the visual content of staid old American maga-
zinesin part, by returning to the past. He belonged
to what the graphic design historian Philip B. Meggs called the
New York School, a group of editorial and advertising design-
ers who based layouts on unied visual ideas rather than merely
embellishing the page with ornamentation. As art director of
the womens lifestyle magazine McCalls for 14 years starting in
1955, Storch wed stylish typefaces and studio photography into
word-pictures, so that a headline or text type was an integrated
component of the illustration rather than separated from it, as
was the common practice.
Typical of this approach was a 1961 McCalls layout for The
Forty-Winks Reducing Plan, in which a picture of a sleeping
woman lying on top of the text distorts it to simulate a sagging
mattress. Storch used a variety of photographic processes to
make type twist, turn and vibrate in the days before computers
made such special eects commonplace in magazine layouts. He
also helped revive late 19th-century Victorian wood typefaces,
which had been pass for decades, to add graphic impact and
contrast to the printed pagea style embraced to this day.
 PRINTMAG.COM 45

PAUL RAND (19141996)

Clockwise: Book cover of
The Second Man, 1963.
Package design, El
Producto, 1952. Spread
from childrens book
Listen! Listen!, 1970.
10. would not single him-
self out as a typogra-
pher; he was a com-
mercial artist or graphic designer, and
typography was part of the mandatory
job skillset. But there would be no Rand
design if typography was simply included
as part of a larger patchwork. He had a
lot to say about typography: I know peo-
ple who have religiously used only sans
serif, who suddenly switched to Times
Roman. Now, the reason they switched
to Times Roman is for the same reasons
they used sans serif. They considered sans
serif very functional, devoid of doodads
and ringlets and hair curlers. There is
no typeface that is more reasonable than
Times Roman. But lets face it, Times Ro-
man is ugly, especially in big sizes. Like
many of his Modern contemporaries,
Rand used only certain faces but not for
their looks alone. The real dierence is,
he said, the way space is interpreted:
that is, the way an image is placed on a
sheet of paper.
46 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

ALEX STEINWEISS

11. (19172011) often goes

down in history as the
rst graphic designer
to put art on 78 rpm album covershow-
ever, this claim must be modied to say
he was the rst to make typographically
illustrated posters for records. The dis-
tinction is essential; art was used on
some RCA albums before he introduced
his original designs in 1938, but these in-
stances were usually existing paintings
by great masters. As an illustrator and
typographer, Steinweiss was profoundly
inuenced by the French, German, Eng-
lish and Italian poster artists of the 1920s
and 30smost importantly A.M. Cas-
sandre, who hand-drew letterforms and
made typefaces for a range of advertis-
ing clients. Steinweiss eclectic typo-
graphic palette, which included 19th-
century wood and electrotype cuts that
he wed to more modern scripts and sans
serifs, helped dene the modern record
cover aesthetic. These albums were
sometimes raucous like theater bills and
other times subdued like book pages, but
in total changed the way records were
displayed and sold as individual typo-
graphical entities.

Clockwise: Magazine cover of AD, 1941. Record cover,

Andres Segovia Plays, 1954. Record cover, Concerto
in F, 1942.
 PRINTMAG.COM 47

Top: Detail of
Gastrotypo-
graphicalas-
semblage, 1966.
Bottom: Ad, Lets
Talk Type, 1958.
Courtesy of The
Herb Lubalin
Study Center
at The Cooper
Union.

HERB LUBALIN (19181981) amplied

12. the voice of typography. Although his

expressive work began prior to the ad-
vent of phototype, he anticipated its
wonders, as well as other technological advancesand
not just in how to set type, but in how to extract emo-
tion from it. Lubalins typography was sometimes like
a building block in which paragraphs, words and punc-
tuation t seamlessly together in a pattern that both
symbolized and stated the idea it was communicating.
Curiously, however, he was oended at being called a
typographer. What I do is not really typography, which
I think of as an essentially mechanical means of put-
ting characters down on a page. Its designing with let-
ters. His friend and business partner, the type impre-
sario Aaron Burns, called his work typographics, which
implies a kind of acrobatic skill that was clear from the
moment Lubalin left New Yorks Cooper Union and
became an advertising art director. Lubalin also de-
signed alphabets, his most famous being Avant Garde,
a tip of the hat to the future of type. But most charac-
teristic of his body of work was his playful approach to
design; he was amazed at how the shape and the weight
of each symbol could change the meaning of words.
48 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

CORITA KENT (19181986), aka Sis-

13. ter Mary Corita Kent (born Frances

Elizabeth Kent), used typography
as a means to an end. She was not
a commercial graphic designer, but type was a com-
ponent of her art, and art was a tool of her social ac-
tivism. She joined a Catholic convent in 1936right
after she completed high schooland served in the
Immaculate Heart of Mary order in Los Angeles for
three decades as a rebel nun and head of the art
department. (She ultimately left the order to pursue
art in Boston, feeling stied by an archdiocese that
did not always stand by her politicized service.) Kent
was mostly a silkscreen printer, although she also
published oset books because she wanted her art
to be aordable and widely distributed. Her designs
combined handlettering and vintage display letter-
forms printed in bright uorescent colors. She prac-
ticed during the heyday of Pop Art, and many of her
posters borrowed from this language. Damn Every-
thing But the Circus was one of her most gaily orna-
mented typographic assemblages, illustrating the 26
letters of the alphabet. On the whole, her circus-
themed prints drew on materials she saw at the Ring-
ling Museum of the American Circus, as well as in
19th-century American advertisements.

Interior pages from Damn Everything But the Circus, 1970.

 PRINTMAG.COM 49

SAUL BASS (19201996)

14. was the pioneer of motion

typography. While he was
not the first graphic de-
signer to make type dance on screen, he was
the most demonstrative, indeed ingenious,
Clockwise from above: Ad for Con-
to do so. Part of his strategy was to brand or
tainer Corporation of America, 1957.
identify a lm from the get-go, the advertise- Poster for The Magnificent Seven,
ments, then follow through with consistent 1960. Book cover of Great Issues in
American History, 1969.
title sequences. Using pictorial devices wed
to expressive lettering and type, as he did
for The Man With the Golden Arm and Bon-
jour Tristesse, among his many campaigns,
he developed a system emphasizing that
creativity is indivisible. In the May/June
1958 issue of Print, the editors acclaimed
that since trade requirements demanded
extensive credits on movie titles, It seems
that this usually rather dull interlude should
be converted into a positive introduction to
the lm. Saul Bass objective is to make the
titles suciently provocative and entertain-
ing to force movie-goers to remain in their
seats. While Bass did not completely
achieve this with type, it was his typography
that revolutionized the movie industry.
50 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

PUSH PIN STUDIOSMILTON GLASER, born 1929, and SEYMOUR CHWAST, born 1931created a ty-

15. pographic and language revival of past for present. In 1953 when the rst Push Pin Almanack was pub-
lished, it launched a graphic style challenging the prevailing ethic of functionalism, the International
Style, imported from the Swiss and adopted by leading American corporate and advertising designers.
A bimonthly promotional piece, the Almanack led the way of emerging historicist design trends. A taste for all things
old fashioned was returning, perhaps as a reaction to what was perceived as cold, humorless Modernism. It was called
the Push Pin Almanack, Chwast explained in a 1990 interview, because it was a quaint nameand quaintness was
popular in those days. Chwast and co. published six issues of the Almanack before Push Pin Studios ocially opened,
and two after. The Almanack evolved into the Push Pin Graphic, which began as a monthly broadside printed in black
and white on one sheet (usually newsprint). The elegant and emblematic logo was designed by Glaser in a variant of
German Fraktur. In all, 86 issues were published from 1957 to 1980, and they ran the gamut from the silly to the profound.
The Graphic had an incalculable inuence on the conceptualization of graphic design, and its evolution eclecticized
American design but also changed the style and content of American typography and illustration.

Glaser, left column, clockwise: Poster, I Heart NY More Than

Ever, 2001. Poster for Bob Dylans Greatest Hits, 1967.
Poster for Cooperstown Summer Music Festival, 2016.

Chwast, right column: Package for Artone Ink, 1964.

Interior spread of The Nose #14, 2006.
 PRINTMAG.COM 51

MASSIMO VIGNELLI (19312014) believed everything could be designed better

16.
Above: Magazine cover
for Dot Zero 4, 1967. At
right: Magazine cover for through the correct use of typefaces. In The Vignelli Canon, he wrote, Most
Industrial Design, 1969. typefaces are designed for commercial reasons, just to make money or for iden-
tity purposes. In reality the number of good typefaces is rather limited and
most of the new ones are elaborations on pre-existing faces. His essentials: Bodoni, Helvetica,
Times Roman, Century, Futura, Optima, Univers, Caslon and Baskerville. As you can see, my
list is pretty basic but the great advantage is that it can assure better results. It is also true that
in recent years the work of some talented type designers has produced some remarkable results
to oset the lack of purpose and quality of most of the other typefaces. Vignelli was a typo-
graphic minimalist; he favored clear hierarchy and dramatic contrasts, which allowed him to
achieve the maximum impact using economical means. He knew how to make a few typefaces
or images dramatic and expressive. While he admired classic typefaces, he avoided typeset-
ting traditions that created fussy complexity, such as paragraph indents and hyphenation. His
control made clarity look simple, when in reality it was dicult to copy his work unless one
shared his ideology. Merely using a few typefaces or cropping full-bleed images tightly wasnt
enough; his process involved nding the perfect balance of joy, surprise and consistency.
52 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

VICTOR MOSCOSO (born

17. 1936) was a fallen Modern-

ist in the San Francis-
co psychedelic countercul-
ture. The Brooklyn-raised, Spanish-born
artist/designer stumbled into this milieu and
became a dening force in the distinctly
American typography introduced through
psychedelic rock posters. The style was note-
worthy for its illegible typefaces, electric col-
ors and antique illustrationsa conjoining
of 19th-century slab serif wood types and
Vienna Secession/Art Nouveau naturalistic
letterforms. Moscoso created some of the
most emblematic posters of the 1960s; the
Blues Project poster is one classic for which
he used a vintage photograph of a nude Sa-
lome. Following her contour, he arranged
the concert information in a typeface that
he called Psychedelic Playbill (an adapta-
tion of a Victorian woodtype). But he did not
just set the type, he drew the letters out of
negative space (whiting out all the areas be-
tween the bodies of the letterforms, rather
than drawing them directly). The gure was
Moscoso image: Poster for
printed in bright orange against an acid-
Blues Project, et al., 1967.
green background; the lettering was printed Above: Bea Feitler, cover
in process blue. The slightly o-register trap- for Ms. Magazine, 1973. At
right: Ruth Ansel, cover for
ping gave the letters a three-dimensional Harpers Bazaar, 1971.
look in addition to the vibrating sensation
produced by the juxtaposition of similar
chromatic values.

BEA FEITLER (19381982) learned magazine design, fash-

18. ion photography and typography from Marvin Israel, one

of her teachers at Parsons who, in 1961, became art direc-
tor of Harpers Bazaar. That same year, Feitler and RUTH
ANSEL (born 1938) joined the magazine as art assistants. When Israel left
Bazaar in 1963 to devote himself to painting, Feitler and Ansel, then in
their mid-20s, were named co-art-directors and at once channeled the en-
ergy emerging from pop culture: street fashion, rock music, pop and op
art. Each had their respective typographic preferences, which was a touch
of the modern, a bit of the classical and a dose of the spectacular. They
followed Alexey Brodovitchs tradition of designing magazines as a har-
monious and cinematic whole. They were open to accidents, material
around the studio and events surrounding them, Philip B. Meggs noted
in an AIGA prole. They maintained an inspirational wallsomething
like a mood boardthat would oer them (and anyone who laid eyes on
it) a resource for invention. Making type carry the weight of expression
was one such outcome. Feitler summed up her editorial design philosophy
as thus: A magazine should ow. It should have rhythm. You cant look
at one page alone; you have to visualize what comes before and after. Good
editorial design is all about creating a harmonic ow.
 PRINTMAG.COM 53
KATHERINE MCCOY (born 1945) was as much a catalytic force in

19. late 20th-century American typography as she was a practitioner.

Originally an adherent of clean Swiss Modernism and a problem
solver through modern objectivity, she was exposed to an alterna-
tive method of experimental expressionnotably by Edward Fella, who launched
his own rejection of Swiss-ness.
In the early 1970s McCoy co-founded a multidisciplinary partnership with her
husband, Michael, and eventually both accepted roles as co-chairs of Cranbrook
Academys graduate design departments. The schools Avant Garde legacy inspired her
to look dierently at design and typography through a linguistic lens. She encouraged
students to play more uidly and expressively with typography, teaching by example
with the Cranbrook materials she and Michael produced as McCoy & McCoy. Her
critiques at Cranbrook frequently addressed disrupting the norms of everyday practice.
She required students to read about both historical and contemporary design and
theory to really understand the context in which they were communicating. What
she founded became a Postmodern style but began as an intellectual conversation
on the pre- and post-digital age.

APRIL GREIMAN (born 1948) was for a while

20. the American incarnation of Wolfgang Wein-

gart. But then she was reborn in 1984 when
the Macintosh inched its way into the design
eld. She recognized the huge potential of this new medium
and quickly threw herself into it. The digital landscape fasci-
nates me in the same way as the desert, she said in an AIGA
essay. Greimans formal journey as a designer began at the Kan-
sas City Art Institute. She studied under Basel School of Design
alumni Inge Druckrey, Hans Allemann and Chris Zelinksy. Af-
ter experiencing their talents and being introduced to Modern-
ism, Greiman was inspired to pursue her graduate studies at
Basel as well, where she was a student to Armin Homan and
Weingart. At the time, Weingart was exploring what is now
called New Wave. He introduced a form of design that broke
away from the strict grid organization of the International Style
and encouraged designers to explore wide letterspacing, new
angles and changing weights and styles to expand their typo-
graphic communication. New Wave would later become a staple
in design history and in Greimans arsenal. After moving to Los
Angeles, Greiman collaborated with photographer Jayme Odg-
ers, which led to two experiences that would greatly inuence
the direction her life would takehe introduced her to the des-
ert and, shortly after, they formed a creative partnership that
was to last for four years and produce some highly visible typo-
graphic/photographic work that would dene the digital 80s.

McCoy: Poster for Fluxus Selections, 1988.

Greiman: Poster for Your Turn, My Turn symposium, 1983.
54 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

PAULA SCHER (born 1948) began her typo-

21. graphic journey as an archeological anthro-

pologist. One of her most well-known digs
included the Best of Jazz poster that was the
result of uncovering the much-forgotten Russian Avant Gard-
ists visual vocabulary, but she ended up with a distinctive tap-
estry woven of personal anities, problem-solving pragmatism
and New York derring-do. The letterforms are not Russian Cy-
rillic, but 19th-century American sans serif woodtypes savored
from old Victorian type catalogs. Yet Scher also borrowed the
constructivists strong geometric composition, thrusting diago-
nals and signature colors: red and black. High contrast is ap-
parent between the bold, black capitals that spell out Best and
the smaller, busier typography. Overlapping colors, surprints
and knockouts make the most of the limited color palette. There
is an unmistakable resemblance to Victoriana in the tightly
packed, nearly cluttered arrangement of type, the woodtype
typography itself, and the slant toward ornamentation. Al-
though it was a hybrid of two historical forms, the result was
fresh-faced, decidedly contemporary yet eerily familiar, much
like a child whose genetic code spawns frombut ultimately
transcendsthat of its parents. Schers work is never entirely
based on typography but it does play a central role in commu-
nicating her ideas. While the selection of typefaces may origi-
nate in the history of design as inspiration, inuence, homage, Clockwise from top left: Poster for The Public Theaters 19951996 season.
Poster for Shakespeare in the Park, 2016. Poster for Henry V, 1996.
quotation and parody, the results are clear interpretations held
together by the glue of knowledge and imagination.
 PRINTMAG.COM 55

LOUISE FILI (born 1951) is the paradigm of ty-

22. pographic elegance. Hired by the legendary

type maestro Herb Lubalin, a formative expe-
rience to be sure, she was already working on
expressive ways of retooling vintage and historical typefaces
from all over the world. As art director of Pantheon Books, she
had an extraordinary opportunity to experiment daily with many
dierent periods of design history, and produced close to 2,000
jackets and covers, including the now-classic The Lover, in which
she introduced a form of nuanced shadow lettering that inu-
enced many other typographers (Ed. Note: See page 84). Design
historian Philip B. Meggs wrote in Print that Fili was one of The
Women Who Saved New York, a reference to the revival of re-
vivalist graphic design emanating from the city. Yet Filis work
never slavishly references the past but rather incorporates its
virtues. She later left Pantheon to diversify and pursue another
passion through her work: food. Fili invariably began making
typographic logos that were elegant, witty and memorable. From
there, she produced distinct package designs with an intense
focus on type and typography. Typefaces that exist yet are re-
drawn are her driving design force, but type that expresses ideas,
if not moods, is what distinguishes her typography.

Clockwise from top left: Poster for School of Visual

Arts, 2011. Wine labels, Il Conte, 20072008.
Book cover, Grafica della Strada, 2014.
56 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7
DAVID CARSON (born 1954) dened the zeit-
23. geist of his epoch. In 1990, the magazine
Beach Culture, devoted to West Coast water-
sports, was a perplexing yet enviable radical
design object when it landed in competitions and annuals na-
tionwide. Surfers were its target audience, yet it was also fol-
lowed by design practitioners and scholars. It was a turning
point in publication design. Carson, its art director, created a
vehicle rooted in raucous typography and design tomfoolery
that broke the same rules that Futurists and Dadaists had at-
tacked in the teens and 20s. With its deliberate design indul-
gences and computer-driven trickery, Beach Culture made a
statement that graphic design should not be simply a neutral
frame for contentdesign tropes should be integrated into the
content or even be the content. Carson catered to an audience
that was presumed literate enough to navigate through the
chaotic visuals and text. Although there were no rules about
how a surng magazine should look, one would still not have
expected this to be a wellspring of typographic revolution, or
that its distinct style would wash up on the shores of main-
stream culture. Carson seized the opportunity; following in
the footsteps of contemporary design experimenters, includ-
ing Wolfgang Weingart, Rudy VanderLans and Neville Brody,
he began an expedition into new realms of visual presentation.
But Carsons spin on typographic anarchy was dierent: He
not only infused his pages with wit and irony, he accepted that
a magazine page is destined to be pulped, and should not be
taken so seriously. Comically, it was taken seriously by design-
ers and design historians.
RUDY VANDERLANS (born 1955) co-
24. founded Emigre, the clarion of the new
graphic design, with his wife, type de-
signer Zuzana Licko. The magazine
knocked the typographic establishment for a loop and
helped forever change visual communication and graphic
design. Emigre was a laboratory for the new-new digital
typography that VanderLans type foundry was putting
into the world, and a trailblazer in those uncertain early
days when fonts became part of the ambient vocabulary.
Most designers were telling us the Macintosh was a fad
without any use for serious graphic design, VanderLans
has recalled. So at the time we felt very isolated within
the design community. We werent taken seriously at all.
We enjoyed the challenge and opportunities this tool of-
fered, but we had no idea how big it would become, and
that it would solidify our place within it. Emigre issues
were often designed in radically dierent styles from one
another, some by guest designers, showing alternative
ways of making typography using the Mac. Older Mod-
ern designers went nuts because the tenets of balance,
hierarchy and elegance were turned on their ear. In 2005
the magazine ceased publication, in large part because
of its tremendous production expense, nanced by type
sales that declined when the economy dipped. But there
were other reasons to discontinue Emigre, VanderLans
says. The world of graphic design was changing, the fo-
cus became the internet and blogs, and I felt disconnected
from much of it. It was too geeky for me. The legacy of
Emigres typography was the so-called design-culture wars
of the 90s, in which he and Licko fought with tradition-
alists over legibility and illegibility, classical versus experi-
mental. VanderLans concludes, Our type designs often
responded to the larger conversations that were circulat-
ing around design in general. Now our work is far more
inward-looking.
Carson: Magazine cover for Beach
Culture, 1990. VanderLans:
Magazine covers for Emigre #24,
1992, and Emigre #70, 2009.
 PRINTMAG.COM 57

Clockwise from top right: Poster for David Copperfield,

2012. Postage stamp, Emancipation Proclamation, 2013.
Poster for SVA, 2007.

GAIL ANDERSON (born 1962) is the quintes-

25. sential pot type masher. Her typography is

either pitch-perfect pastiche or a hybridized
version of Victorian, Deco and Futurist ap-
proaches. She ne-tuned her approach working with art direc-
tor Fred Woodward at Rolling Stone. Like actors on a stage,
Anderson directs letterforms to perform dramatic and comic
feats. In just two dimensions they emote, express and exude
energy that projects them o the page. In 2002, after a move
to SpotCo, her typography switched from the intimacy of a
magazine page to work that competes for the attention of the-
ater-goers. She is always looking for that little visual wink or
tiny gesture of extra care, Anderson says. Im all about the
wood-type bits and pieces. I love making those crunchy little
objects into other things, like faces. A fancy border and de-
tailed extras are always part of her repertoire. Id ask the de-
signers I work with to put them on everything, Anderson says,
but I like being employed.
For its human dimension, the art for The Good Body, the Eve
Ensler show about women and body image, struck just the
right chord with its curvy Isabelle Dervaux line drawing and
two ice-cream scoops for breasts. But Anderson may be best
known for the Avenue Q subway-inspired, puppet-fur logo, a
delightful image that became an indelible brand for the play.
Im denitely wittier on paper than in real life, she laments. I
think I approach the work looking for a little wink where I can,
because deep down, I hope people associate clever with smart.

Steven Heller is the co-chair of the MFA Design/Designer as Author + Entre-

preneur program at School of Visual Arts, and the author of more than 170
books. He is an AIGA medalist and received the 2011 Smithsonian Institution
National Design Award for Design Mind.
58 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

[THE ART OF
THE GLANCE]

Monotype and MITs Clear-IP research lab shows

typographys true powerand how designers can
more effectively wield it for the greater good.
by Jason Tselentis
 PRINTMAG.COM 59

T
ypography is the rst thing we see
every day. Our alarm clock, watch or
smartphone sounds, and we check
the time. Preparing breakfast, we see
type on kitchen appliances such as
microwaves, ovens and refrigerators,
microw
as well as
a toastersand increasingly,
those ap
appliances have complex LED
displays. Typography has also over-
display
taken o our automobiles, with many
cars now
no including large digital dis-
plays that can sync to ourr smartph
smartphones to showcase most of our
devices content. The music
mu usic we listen
li to, as well as trac and
the days mapped destinations,
destina ations, all
al feature typography for us to
reador glance atduri
atduring ng our cocommute.
In those brief-glance enenvironments
nvironme such as in an automobile,
safety matters, and the time t we take
t our eyes o the road can
make all the dierence.
erence. We hav have to translate and interpret
what we see in fractions s of a sec
second, and its designers who
are responsible for makmaking
king sure everything works correctly.
What typeface or typefac
typefaces ces will re
read best? How big should the
text be? What about the e types c contrast and color? The type
designers who make type typefaces
efaces an
and the graphic designers who
use those fonts have an appreciation
apppreciati and understanding of how
type works. But what if th the
he guidin
guiding principles designers under-
stand and use are wrong
wrongor or at ththe very least, misunderstood?
What if the age were livi
living
ing in, ful
full of digital devices and quick
glances at screens, neces
necessitates
ssitates n new standards and guidelines
for typography?
Sure, there are dieren
erences
nces in tytypefaces used for a variety of
applications, such as tho those
ose made for distance reading versus
close reading. But the de decision-making
ecision-m process requires more
than these factorsa lot more,
m according
acco to Bryan Reimer, Ph.D.,
a research scientist in the MIT Age AgeLab and the associate director
of The New England University
Uniiversity Transportation
T Center at MIT.
Every design is the end d result of thousands of decisions, large
and small, he says. Wha
What at makes a design most legible will vary
depending on the situationis
situattionis iit printed? Digital? Indoors?
Outdoors?and must be balanced with the intent of the design.
Reimer and his colleagues
colleag gues at the
th Clear Information Presenta-
tion research consortium m (Clear-I
(Clear-IP) are delving far beyond the
surface properties of typo
typography
ography a and exploring the way it works
in glance-based environm
environmentswith
mentsw the intention of discover-
ing how, exactly, we can all make it work better.

GOING TYPE-FIRST
Monotype
Monotype
Monoty p and MIT creacreated
ated the C
Clear-IP collaboration in 2012
t study visual
to vis
sua
uall design, ttypograp
typography and usability in highway
signage
i and automobile
automobille interfaces,
interfa two areas where brief
glances are routine. As the foun founder and leader of Clear-IP,
Reimer and his colleagues have conducted
co research on text leg-
ibility, but they have also widened their investigations to other
Studies from Clear-IP have helped Android Autos areas of design
design. Its a team e
eort
ort b
between Monotype and MITs
research team better understand a drivers use of AgeLab, along with Google, which has joined as Clear-IPs rst
in-vehicle displays. Image courtesy Android Auto. full-edged member. In the case of Android Auto, Clear-IPs
60 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

ndings help inform the teams design decisions, assisting

them with understanding how typefaces and typographic lay-
out can inuence a drivers use of in-vehicle displays.
On the whole, Clear-IPs research, new discoveries and nd-
ings may signal fresh design paradigms in our always-on, all-
digital, brief-glance day and age.
As technology has taken deep roots in our lives, so too has
typography, to the point that a designer might need to now work
type-rst. In the case of brief-glance environments, typography is
the primary design element, and sometimes the only design ele-
ment, along with shape and color. Automobiles, mobile devices,
HTML advertisements and, yes, even your refrigerator are just
some of the environments where we now see typography on a
routine basis, says Nadine Chahine, Ph.D., type director and
legibility expert at Monotype and member of the Clear-IP board
of directors. There are many questions we want to answer, but
we cannot do the research on our own, she says. A variety of
contributors to Clear-IP are conducting research that results
in empirical data to guide decisions on typography and design.
What we need is a thirst for knowledge, and more support for
the approach for scientic questioning.
In addition to being Monotypes resident Arabic expert,
Chahines research focuses on psycholinguisticshow we read
and how our eyes move during the act of reading. She nished
her independent legibility research in 2012, the same year
Clear-IP was founded. Per Chahine, Clear-IPs goal is simple:
to quantify the eect of not choosing the right typeface.
Chahine cites one example in which a designer might use black
text on a white ground because its thought to be more legible,
and more so at nightbut success can depend on how much
light goes into the retina, and how it aects the size of your
pupil. Jonathan Dobres, a research scientist at MIT AgeLab,
elaborates: Weve found that more light generally improves
Android Auto in action. Images courtesy Nat & Friends, via YouTube:
legibility. The exact reason is an ongoing debate in the eld,
http://youtu.be/OFHjmDrUF9A.
but under lower lighting, our pupils dilate and get larger.
Because the surface of the eye is imperfect, this distorts the design on the surface, but also factors such as age, suboptimal
incoming visual information. Under brighter lighting, the viewing conditions and accessibility.
pupil is tighter and there is less chance of optical aberration. Whether its the type designer who creates it, the graphic
So brighter lighting tends to result in clearer images from the designer who composes with it, or the user who reads it, every-
eye, or so the theory goes. These ndings were published in one has one thing in common: They each utilize a transla-
Eects of Ambient Illumination, Contrast Polarity and Let- tion mechanism. Chahine says the mechanism in our brain
ter Size on Text Legibility Under Glance-like Reading, and recognizes type and makes sense of it via its own code. When
Dobres stresses the need for more research. The dynamics translation fails, we dont recognize the letterform or letter-
of this pupillary response, and its implications for legibility, forms, and the typography fails. Much of what we see and
beg further investigationparticularly in regards to how these translate is based on what we know, and Chahine cites factors
dynamics change when one is switching between bright and such as vision, culture, familiarity and speed, all of which
dark rapidly, as one may when using an in-vehicle device dur- play into the translation. Speed is what the eye can gather in
ing night driving. a given amount of time, and with more people referencing
Given Clear-IPs collaborations between scientists, typeface screens more than ever, the bottom line is that typography
designers and automotive experts, is it a case of art meeting sci- has to work. The process of designing, testing and reviewing,
ence? Perhaps its better framed as entirely science and research, and then verifying and reverifying what works, is important
especially since purpose comes rst, even with typeface design. when it comes to how typography functions when fractions
Chahine calls type designthe practice of creating, designing, of a second matterand matter a lot. In some cases, Clear-IP
testing and producing typefacespractical design intended has undertaken equipment-intensive research studies, such as
to fulll a purpose. Its not only about the visual solution, the with Assessing the Impact of Typeface Design in a Text-Rich

Automotive User Interface. Dobres cites the importance of
the study and such research: Our rst typographical study
performed in a fully simulated driving environment showed
that the choice of typeface used for an in-vehicle menu system
made a measurable and signicant dierence in the amount
of time spent glancing to the screen, number of errors made,
and overall time completing tasks while driving. While it is
dicult, of course, to draw a line directly from these indicators
to roadway safety, it is certainly reasonable to say that they are
related. We want a vehicle environment that keeps the drivers
eyes on the road, and typography that is optimized for legibility
allows the driver to complete a potentially distracting task and
return his/her eyes to the roadway quickly.
While Clear-IP has a particular focus on typography in vehi-
cles, its not the only issue they seek to address. There are
many new environments that we need to design for that we
know very little about, or that present design challenges that
are completely new to us, Chahine says. This is particularly
the case with augmented reality, virtual reality, as well as digital
displays that require very fast reading speeds or are very small
in size and need design solutions that can adapt to that. It
really is about the testing of how well the design decision we
take works, and our research has shown that some of what we
assume to be better is not always the case. So we too have been
surprised sometimes by the research results.
PUTTING ON THE BEST FACE
Not that long ago, when we wanted to nd an unfamiliar des-
tination, wed use a printed map to help guide our journey.
Maybe it was drawn by hand, based on what we saw on a phone
books mapor maybe we tore the map out of the phone book.
But these days, we have a map on our phone and will read it
and walk. This, Chahine says, is a good example of a new read-
ing situation that designers must analyze, especially if a
handheld device is being read in low ambient lighting or on
the move (both being suboptimal conditions for reading).
Clear-IPs rigorous approach requires scientic questioning
to drive the quest for answers. In one study Chahine conducted,
Clear-IP tested the Neue Frutiger Regular typeface at two sizes
(3mm and 4mm cap height) in two line spacing values (0% and
33%). The results were interesting, as the 4mm with 0% line
spacing performed better than the 3mm with 33% line spacing.
The latter looks nice, cleaner and would be what I would have
chosen as a designer. The logic for that is that the extra spacing
around the words would have improved reading. However, it
seems that the eect of size is bigger than the eect of line spac-
ing, so while line spacing brings a benet to design, it cannot
compensate for the hurdle of setting text in a relatively small
size. This is what we are usually referring to when we say that
we need to know how to balance our design decisions and to
understand how each factor aects legibility.
Dobres cites one study the group conducted, Utilising Psycho-
physical Techniques to Investigate the Eects of Age, Typeface
Design, Size and Display Polarity on Glance Legibility, which
yielded unexpected ndings about typography as well as demo-
PRINTMAG.COM 61
An automobile testing environment in the MIT AgeLab. Photograph by
MIT AgeLab.
graphics. This study replicated the results found in [a] driving
simulator using desktop-based methods, and also expanded
the investigation to the eect of font size on legibility. There
were two surprises here: First, the interaction between font size
and font style was more dramatic than we had thought it would
be. It turns out that some fonts scale better than others, likely
because of how their design characteristics interact with the
pixel grid. This is a nice example of how the art of typographic
design interacts with the science of rendering technologies.
Secondly, we noticed that in this study, people younger than 30
werent really aected by the choice of typeface. Past 30, however,
dierences in legibility began to emerge. We had thought that
these eects would start later in life, but it turns out that aging
[as it pertains to typographic perception] starts in the early 30s,
not the early 50s. This has implications for accessible design.
When it comes to analyzing specic typefaces, Dobres points
out that research studies and results arent intended to absolutely
identify a winner or loser. We have indeed found that typefaces
with larger x-heights and more varied letter shapes have supe-
rior legibility compared to those that do not. Weve also found
that black-on-white text is easier to read than white-on-black,
though this may have less to do with typeface design and more
to do with the amount of illumination emitted by the bright or
dark background of the screen. Weve compared the typefaces
Eurostile and Frutiger, for example, and Frutiger is much more
legible. Its also important to keep in mind that we arent saying
that Frutiger is absolutely always better than Eurostile, or bet-
ter than any specic font in a specic situation, for that matter.
Our work is about understanding the trade-os that manifest
between factors like typeface design, size, color, etc. (Eurostile
was used in the comparison because, according to Dobres, it
wasand still ispopular in in-vehicle interfaces because of its
high-tech look. Frutiger, on the other hand, has been a go-to
typeface for many designers because of its legibility, a result of
its high x-height.)
On the whole, Reimer concurs with Dobres.
Clear-IPs research does show that some typefaces, for example,
seem intrinsically more or less legible at a glance than others.
62 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

But its not about saying, X is always better than Y. Clear-IPs

work is more attuned to the relationships between these fac-
tors, trying to understand the web of connections that govern
legibility. For example, if a designer wishes to use a somewhat
less-glance-legible typeface for stylistic purposes, she may be
able to balance that loss of legibility by making the typeface
slightly larger.
What if Clear-IPs research ndings suggest weve been going
about things incorrectlyor at least a bit dierently than we
should? Who would need to be alerted? Would it start at the aca-
demic level, with university coursework being adjusted? Would
practicing designers need to change the way they go about their
jobs? Chahine says everyone would need to know. We would
have to open the eyes of the design community, she says. She
suggests that publishing results, writing articles, giving talks
and taking part in interviews are just some of the ways to get
the word out about Clear-IPs ndings and to raise awareness.

BALANCING FORM AND FUNCTION

All of this talk about typography, and testing and verifying what
works or doesnt, can cause a designer to question their role, or
even second-guess their work. But similar to choosing between
two typefaces, its not necessarily about right versus wrong,
Reimer says. Its about improvement. Our hope is that Clear-
IPs research allows designers to make better-informed decisions.
We are building a body of research that will help designers
understand the shape of the landscape as they balance the
many trade-os that go into any design.
Part of that overall improvement extends to the larger team-
based environments where, say, automobiles are created. Its
not only designers who play a role in choosing and using type-
faces, but also engineers, as Reimer details in the MIT short lm
Impact of Typeface on Driver Demand. He cites a tug of war
between designers and engineers. In many contexts where
ecient glance-based read-
ing has safety relevance, such
as the automobile and smart- Our work is
phone, branding and design
language have clouded the
about under-
need for reduced reading
demands. Designers obvi-
standing the
ously have dierent consid-
erations than engineers, and
trade-offs
its the engineers who may that mani-
be more attuned to practi-
cal limitations or applica- fest between
tions. A typeface or layout
the design team deems ideal factors like
may not be possible based
on what the engineers have
typeface
to work with. If branding
considerations come first,
design, size,
and those considerations
are applied to the in-vehicle
color, etc.
displays but the typefaces are JONATHAN DOBRES
 PRINTMAG.COM 63

not ideal for in-vehicle

use, then branding has
gotten in the way of func-
tional design.
C ontrasting the
automobile simulation
research referenced earlier
in this article, these days
Clear-IPs studies have
become less equipment-
intensive. Theyve begun
applying techniques from
vision scienceDobres
specializationto develop
Testing four weights of Neue Frutiger. According to Jonathan Dobres, the rendering comparisons highlight a dis-
desktop-based methods of
connect that can exist between what the designers are working with (often, high-quality samples on nice, bright
assessment that he dubs monitors), and what can happen in the actual interface (suboptimal rendering).
more resource-ecient.
Chahine compares the two.
Our rst study used simulated driving, and the subjects were To that end, if conducting research with typography and in-
sitting in a specially tted car, and their eye movements were vehicle displays and other digital devices seems high-tech, theres
being tracked while they drove the simulator and completed another domain thats even more next-gen, and its an area of
the on-screen tasks. Afterwards, we switched to a new method research that Clear-IP is excited about: augmented reality, or AR.
based on word recognition. It is a pure test of legibility and Its at the top of their list, Chahine says, because AR presents
requires only a computer screen and a regular computer. It can text on a completely unpredictable background. AR is the kind
be conducted in a variety of environments and the data collec- of environment thats ripe with possibilities for the designer
tion is very straightforward. and ripe with possibilities for miserable, unusable typography.
Dobres elaborates. The type of data we collect now might Reimer stresses the complications involved with AR, as well
result from briey showing someone a word under a specic as virtual realityespecially when it comes to legibility. VR and
typographic conguration or visual scenario (lighting, back- AR increase the level of complexity in information display. For
ground textures, etc.). We can collect things like response accu- example, designers are often placing text upon partially opaque
racy and reaction time to gauge how well a person is processing layers that impact reading in ways we dont yet understand.
the information, which allows us to infer things about how Blending of motion into interfaces further complicates the
dierent reading scenarios are perceived. factors. AR/VR is also currently aected by the close distance
The benets are big. The desktop-based methods can be of the display to the eye, as well as the achievable texture reso-
used with standard computer equipment and grant us more lution, both of which can degrade legibility. I suspect that the
experimental control, since generally the experimental situ- users ability to clearly extract information will be reduced if
ation is simpler and more targeted to some issue of interest. we dont begin to invest in developing an understanding of the
key design principles in this space.
DRIVING THE FUTURE FORWARD In-vehicle displays, smartphones, AR and VR are just some
So how does Google t into all of this? Greg Neiswander, UX of the areas Clear-IP has dug into with their research. Its all for
research manager for Android Auto, says his team contributes the greater good and, according to Chahine, intended to further
to Clear-IP by providing insights for the consortiums activi- scientic research for better design guidelines and principles.
ties and direction. As stakeholders, Android Auto receives Chahine is excited about every study, no matter what it
Clear-IPs subsequent ndings. Ultimately, we want to better involves or where it takes her and, on the whole, Clear-IP is up
understand the eciencies of driver interactions to inform for anything: As long as its typography, says Chahine, we
design decisions, and it has certainly been a rewarding experi- dont have any topics o limits.
ence for us to engage with the consortiums experts to explore Type-rst, for certain.
legibility for glanceable environments, Neiswander says. As
is often with research, I think we collectively nd that the more Jason Tselentis is an associate professor of design at Winthrop University in
we start to investigate and dig into one area, the more new ques- Rock Hill, SC. www.morsa.com
tions arise and the more we all want to further explore. So 1. Dobres, J., Chahine, N., and Reimer, B. (2017). Effects of Ambient Illumination, Contrast Polarity, and Letter Size on Text
theres been no shortage of topics. From a grander perspec- Legibility Under Glance-like Reading. Applied Ergonomics 60(C) 6873.
2. Reimer, B., Mehler, B., Dobres, J., Coughlin, J. F., Matteson, S., Gould, D., Chahine, N., and Levantovsky, V. (2014). Assessing
tive, the research topics being explored within Clear-IP are the Impact of Typeface Design in a Text-Rich Automotive User Interface. Ergonomics, 57(11), 16431658.
certainly bigger than just our own individual product or the 3. Dobres, J., Chahine, N., Reimer, B., Gould, D., Mehler, B., and Coughlin, J. F. (2016). Utilising Psychophysical Techniques to In-
vestigate the Effects of Age, Typeface Design, Size and Display Polarity on Glance Legibility. Ergonomics, 59(10), 13771391.
automotive space. 4. http://ilp.mit.edu/videodetail.jsp?id=755
 PRINTMAG.COM 65

OVER
UNDER
Paul Shaw shines a
fresh spotlight on a
dozen overlooked and
underappreciated
typefaces that, for
yearsand for various Six years ago I wrote a column for Print on 12 underappre-
ciated typefaces, my response to those ubiquitous
reasonshave been beginning-of-the-year lists. Longstanding reader interest
prompted the magazine to seek out another dozen type-
kept in the dark. faces that are available digitally, and that, from an American
perspective, deserve greater attention. Here, presented in
the order in which they were originally designed, are 12
faces that merit a much closer look than they have been
given in the design world.
G
66 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

EGRagh
AEGKMQRagjktu
EGRaghERagkz URW++ Erbar Book

EGRagh EGKMQRagjktu
Dunbar Low Book
PS Fournier Pro Petit Book PS Fournier Pro Book PS Fournier Pro Grand Book

Fournier by Pierre-Simon Fournier

le Jeune
EGKMQRagjktu
Dunbar Text Regular

c. 1740s1760s
Updates: Monotype Fournier, PS Fournier by Stphane Elbaz (Typofonderie)
Erbar-Grotesk by Jakob Erbar
(Ludwig & Mayer, 19261930)
Pierre-Simon Fournier le Jeune (17121768) is one of the
Updates: URW Erbar (URW++), Dunbar by CJ Dunn (CJ Type)
most important gures in the history of type for a variety
of reasons. He was among the earliest advocates of a point
Most designers are familiar with Futura by Paul Renner,
system for measuring type (1737) and, in the two volumes
but few know of the enormous impact it had when it was
of his Manuel Typographique (1764 and 1766), he provided
released in 1927. It was a juggernaut long before Helvetica
the rst detailed description of the process of typefounding,
was even a thought. Virtually every type foundry and com-
among other things. He was a pioneer in designing scripts
posing machine manufacturer in Europe and America felt
and ornamented types, and was famous for his rococo eu-
compelled to either make a near-copy or invent a credible
rons and vignettes. Most importantly for this article, his
alternative such as Gill Sans or Metro. Yet, as was pointed
romans and italics, inuenced by the Romain du Roi, broke
out by its designer at the time, Futura was not the rst
from oldstyle conventions. They are transitional in nature,
typeface to explore the geometric sans serif realm. Erbar-
hovering between the oldstyle types of Garamont and the
Grotesk by Jakob Erbar got there a year earlier. But it was
neoclassical ones of Firmin Didot. As such they have been
not as rigorously Euclidean in its forms, and like other
unjustly overshadowed in the Anglo-American world by the
Futura wannabe rivals (e.g., Metro), it eventually suc-
types of Fourniers contemporary John Baskerville.
cumbed to the pressure to add Futura-like alternates to its
Until recently, the only modern revival of Fourniers
character set.
roman and italic available digitally was Monotype Fournier,
Although it was a popular typeface in Europe, Erbar
designed in the 1920s as part of Stanley Morisons type
began to be forgotten when Helvetica and Univers pushed
revival program. However, it was not the design he wanted.
out the geometric sans serifs in the late 1950s. Now that
At Morisons request, the company cut two slightly dier-
there is an interest in less purist geometric sans serif types
ent versions of Fourniers types (numbered 178 and 185)
such as Avenir, Gotham and Proxima Nova, it seems time
to see which would be the better one. While Morison was
to remind designers of Erbars existence. Ignore the variant
abroad, the latter, named Fournier, was chosen for release
oered by Linotype since it consists solely of two weights
by the company. Morison thought 178 (subsequently named
of a condensed version, and head either for URW Erbar
Barbou) was the better recutting and had it issued, though
or Dunbar.
only in one size, in 1926. Although this story has been well
URW Erbar has both original letters and some of the
known for decades, Barbou has never been digitized.
Futura-like alternates (e.g., both double-story and single-
Fortunately, an even better version of Fourniers types
story a; M with both vertical legs and with splayed legs). It
than Barbou now exists. PS Fournier, designed by Stphane
comes in ve weights (Light, Book, Medium, Semibold and
Elbaz for Typofonderie, has a family of seven weights (Light,
Bold) but only the Book and Bold have italic counterparts.
Regular, Book, Demi, Bold, Heavy and Black) with match-
Dunbar by CJ Dunnthe name being a conation of the
ing italics, all of which have been made in three optical sizes:
creators surname and that of Erbaris not a strict revival
Petit, Regular and Grand. The Petit version is the closest
but it seems to capture more of the original Erbar avor.
in color to the text sizes of Fourniers original types and is
Dunn has created both Tall and Low versions (the dier-
intended for small text and caption purposes. The strong
ence is in the x-height, not the ascenders) with the latter
thick/thin contrast of the Grand version positions the design
aimed at text uses. The resultwith its various alternate
closer to neoclassical types than expected. Intended for
charactersis a typeface that can look one moment like a
display, it promises to be a fresh look for those searching
Futura clone, the next like an Art Deco alphabet, and after
for an alternative to the Bodoni/Didot duopoly. Meanwhile,
that like a 1970s neoArt Deco design.
the Regular version is exible enough to be used for both
text and display. This typeface should nally give Fournier
le Jeune his proper due in England and America.
QR
AEGKMQRabgty
ITC Golden Cockerel Roman
AKMQRaefghy
ITC Golden Cockerel Italic
AEGKMQRW
ITC Golden Cockerel Titling
AEGKMQRWY
/0#$w%x
ITC Golden Cockerel Initial Ornaments
Golden Cockerel by Eric Gill
(The Golden Cockerel Press, 1929)
Update: ITC Golden Cockerel by Dave Farey and Richard Dawson (ITC)
Eric Gill (18821940) designed more typefaces than the
eponymous Gill Sans that is so familiar to designers. One
of the least-known is Golden Cockerel, which was created
for Robert Gibbings of the Golden Cockerel Press, a private
house specializing in books illustrated with woodcuts by
the best English artists of the time. The most famous of
those books is The Four Gospels (1931), a monumental mas-
terpiece that is all Gill, featuring numerous illustrations
and lettering by him, and set in his Golden Cockerel type.
Despite this showcase, the typeface remained generally
unknown among designers because it was never publicly
available. That is, until Dave Farey and Richard Dawson
of House-Style created a digital version for ITC in 1996.
ITC Golden Cockerel is a respectful revival. The family
consists of Regular with Italic, Titling and the oddly named
Initial Ornaments. There are no weights. The roman is dark
in the tradition of Jensons type, which might explain why
ITC Golden Cockerel has not gained much traction with
designers since its release. But it is that rich color that makes
it worth reconsideration today rather than so many of the
classic typefaces whose digital incarnations are weak and
febrile (e.g., Perpetua by Gill).
The italic is not as pleasing as the roman. In place of exit
strokes there are angled serifs, which give it a choppy feel.
It also has Gills trademark closed-loop g and calligraphic
overshoots at the top of B, D, P and R. The titling face described other than that its members are somehow caught
is a strong design that can be used on its own. The capitals
have the sturdiness of Caslon. The Initial Ornaments part
of the Golden Cockerel family combines versal-like initials
with an odd melange of ornaments, such as sprightly cock-
erels (roosters), curly fringed leaves and several Christian
symbols (crosses, angels, doves and a chalice).
PRINTMAG.COM 67
EGKMQRabgkny
Photina
EGQRabefghkxy
Photina Italic
EGMQRabgny
Photina Ultra Bold
GMRabfgknxy
Photina Ultra Bold Italic
Photina by Jos Mendoza y Almeida
(Monotype, 1971)
Jos Mendoza y Almeida (born 1926) has designed only a
handful of typefaces in his multi-decade career, but a few
of them have been signicant, and none more so than
Photina. It was the third and most important typeface
designed specically for the Monophoto, Monotypes rst
successful foray into photocomposition. While frequently
used in the 1970s and the early 1980s in England, it never
seemed to gain the widespread popularity it deserved in
the United States. And with the advent of digital type,
Photina faded further from view.
The typeface was released in four weights (Roman, Semi-
bold, Bold and Ultrabold) with matching italics. Although
there is an OT Pro version available today, nothing much has
changed other than the inclusion of extended Latin char-
acters and the folding-in of small caps and oldstyle gures
that had appeared in a separate expert set in the PostScript
era. The f-ligatures are limited and there are no stylistic
alternates. Yet it is still a typeface to be reckoned with.
Photina is a transitional face, but that description fails to
do justice to it. It looks nothing like Baskerville, the typeface
most commonly held up as the exemplar of the transitional
category. But it is in a category that, by name, cannot be
between oldstyle types like Garamond and Caslon and
neoclassical ones like Bodoni and Didot. And that clearly
describes Photina. It has a broad-shouldered a, h, m, n
group, enabling clarity at text sizes. The horizontal serifs
in C, G and S are oversized, possiblylike the detached
tail of Qin response to the eects of photocomposition.
Overall, Photina is a sturdy design that still maintains a
sense of elegance, which is a dicult balancing act.
g
68 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7
#')-/34CIM[
Optima Nova Regular
AEGKMQRagky
Poppl Laudatio Regular
abefgny
Poppl Laudatio Italic
Poppl Laudatio by Friedrich Poppl
(Berthold, 1982)
Update: Laudatio BQ (H. Berthold Typefoundry)
Friedrich Poppl (19231982) was overshadowed during his
lifetime by Hermann Zapf, his German compatriot. But
he was an outstanding calligrapher and a good type
designer. His type creations were all made in the photo-
type era for Berthold Gmbh, and thus few American
designers are aware of them. They all qualify as overlooked,
but the one I want to single out here is Poppl Laudatio, a
sans serif that supercially resembles Optima by Zapf.
Both are marked by subtly curved strokes, but in the post-
metal era I would suggest that Poppl Laudatio is the more
successful face since it was designed for non-impression
printing from the beginning.
Poppl Laudatio has a taller x-height than Optimaa
byproduct of the 1970s, when such things were in vogue,
thanks to ITCand also a lower stroke contrast. It is the
latter that makes it less elegant and more broadly prag-
matic. Poppl Laudatio has been described by MyFonts as
calligraphic, which is completely misleading. It is more
accurate to say that it has glyphic qualities in the manner
of Albertus without being as rigid. Poppl Laudatio has a
beautifully smooth italic with true chancery features such
as the descending f ; it also has a series of weights (Light,
Regular, Medium and Bold) that successfully maintain the
designs character without becoming cartoonish. That is
no small feat for a humanist sans serif. It achieves that by
its low stroke contrast and its narrow proportions.
MENAGERIES
graft & kickbacks
543 Queens Way
Jaeger-Antiqua (and Osiris)
by Gustav Jaeger
(Berthold, 1984)
Update: Jaeger-Antiqua (and Osiris) BQ (H. Berthold Typefoundry)
Gustav Jaeger (19252010) is not a household name among
designers, though most will recognize his typeface Catull
since it was used for many years as the Google logo.
Admittedly, that typeface was a poor choice for the logo of
a Silicon Valley corporation. Yet it is a design that shows
Jaegers willingness to challenge familiar letterform expec-
tationsin this case, Carolingian minuscules. That same
attitude is behind what I consider to be his best typeface,
the eponymous Jaeger-Antiqua.
Jaeger-Antiqua is a neoclassical face with strong thick/
thin contrast, hairline serifs and a vertical axisyet it looks
nothing like a Bodoni or a Didot. Or even a Walbaum. It is
as idiosyncratic as Tyfa but less overtly weird. And it has
a calligraphic sensibility, but much less pronounced than
in Kepler. Trying to generalize about Jaeger-Antiqua is
incredibly dicult.
Jaeger-Antiqua is characterized by numerous distinc-
tive characters, yet the typeface manages to hang together.
These characters reect a diverse array of inuences. The A,
M and N have double serifs at the apex (with the A being
reminiscent of Charlemagne, Rockwell or Stymie; and the
M and N being similar to Nicolas Jensons roman). The
g has an abruptly shaped link between the bowl and loop
in the manner of Melior, the form and size of the bowl of
a is similar to that of Candida, and the dagger-like legs of
K, R and k bring to mind Trump Medieval. Finally, the
bent head serifs of the lowercase stems seem inspired by the
romans of Fournier. All in all, Jaeger-Antiqua is in the grand
German tradition of preWorld War II schriftkunstler types.
What is most surprising about Jaeger-Antiqua is how well
the design holds up throughout the family, which includes
Light, Regular, Medium and Bold, with matching italics.
The latter are very energeticalmost jazzylike ITC Veljo-
vic, a typeface designed at nearly the same time. This may
be too much for many type users, especially book designers.
But Jaeger-Antiqua is clearly a typeface for ephemera and
advertising rather than books.
Osiris, a humanist slab serif also designed by Jaeger in
1984, has many of the same individual letterform structures
itemized above in Jaeger-Antiqua. Especially nice in the
Light and Regular weights, it is an excellent alternative to
Serifa or PMN Caecilia.
y
PRINTMAG.COM 69

AEGKMQRabgty
Ellington Regular

AEGKMQRabgty
Strayhorn Regular

EEEEMMMM
hhhhyyyy
AEGKMQRaegkny
Amerigo
Strayhorn: Light, Regular, Bold and Extrabold

Ellington and Strayhorn

EGKMQRaegkny
Amerigo Medium
by Michael Harvey
(Monotype, 1990 and 1995)
Update: Ellington Pro and Strayhorn Pro (Monotype)

EGKMQRaegkny
Amerigo Bold
Michael Harvey (19312013) was a stonecutter, book jacket
designer and type designer. His second typeface was
Ellington, a condensed serif derived from lettering he had

EGKMQRaefgkny
Amerigo Italic
been using for years to squeeze long titles onto book jack-
ets while maintaining a large size. It is thus a very practical
typefaceespecially since it comes in four weights (Light,
Regular, Bold and Extrabold), all with companion italics.
Amerigo by Gerard Unger But Ellington also exudes a lot of character that can work
(Bitstream, 1987) against its functionality. It has a large x-height, pronounced
Update: Amerigo BT (Bitstream)
serifs and a g with a jaunty ear. This strong personality may
explain why the typeface has been overlooked. Despite the
Gerard Unger (born 1942) is one of the giants of contem-
Pro designation it now sports, the only key extras in the
porary type design, though hes not as well known in the
glyph palette are small caps, oldstyle gures (only in the
United States as he should be. At the dawn of the digital
Light and Regular weights, though) and extended Latin
type era when the rst laser printers had a resolution of
characters. There are no new bells and whistles, but on
300 dpi, he was asked by Bitstream to design a subtly
the other hand, none are needed.
tapered typeface like Optima. He resisted the idea and
In the 1980s and early 1990s the notion of a superfam-
instead created a typeface inuenced by wedge serifs in
ily of matching serif and sans serif typefaces rst became
the manner of the Latins so popular in 19th-century France.
common. Alongside Lucida, ITC Stone, Rotis, Scala and
The result was Amerigo.
Thesis as pioneers of this new typographic genre, there was
Optima is broad, soft and round, Unger has written,
Ellingtonbut with a hitch. Its sans serif companion was
whereas Amerigo is narrower and sharper, with terminals
not called Ellington Sans but Strayhorn. The name was an
that end wider and a bigger contrast between thick and
inside reference by Harvey, an inveterate jazz fan, to the
thin. The sharpness is especially noticeable in the stroke
close working relationship of bandleader Duke Ellington
junctions. Amerigo is a superior design to Matrix, which
and songwriter Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn is even more
was also created to accommodate low-resolution printers.
overlooked than Ellington because of its dierent name, but
It is simultaneously more elegant and more practical, and
it is the perfect alternative for those desiring a condensed
is especially legible at small sizes.
typeface who might nd Ellington too busy. It has the same
Amerigo is available in three weights (Regular, Medium
weights and italics.
and Bold) with matching italicstrue italics, not sloped
Strayhorn is marked by subtle curvature to its strokes
romans, though I am less keen on them than on the romans.
in the manner of Optima, but it is much more rugged and
no-nonsense. Yet, because it shares the same structure
of Ellington (including the g with the jaunty ear) it still
retains some personality.
a
70 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

EGKMQRabgty
DTL Documenta TOT

abefghxy
DTL Documenta TOT Italic

EGKMQRabgty
DTL Documenta Sans TOT

abefghxy EGKMQRabgty
DTL Documenta Sans TOT Italic
Schneider Libretto BQ Normal

DTL Documenta and

DTL Documenta Sans
EKMQRabgy
Schneider Libretto BQ Fett

by Frank Blokland
(Dutch Type Library, 1993 and 1997)
EGKabefgnsy
Schneider Libretto BQ Kursiv [italic]
Gerrit Noordzijs teachings at the Royal Academy of Art
in The Hague (generally known by its Dutch acronym
KABK) in the 1980s are legendary. His theory of the stroke
Schneider Libretto
approach to letterforms has increasingly inuenced type
designers in the past few decades. But even when it was
by Werner Schneider
(Berthold, 1995)
not widely known, it had already supplied the framework
Update: Schneider Libretto BQ (H. Berthold Typefoundry)
for a remarkable eruption of original typefaces at the cusp
of the 1990s from young Dutch designers, many of whom
Werner Schneider (born 1935), an outstanding German
began their designs as Noordzijs students. The list includes
calligrapher, has designed several typefacesall of them
PMN Caecilia, Thesis, Scala, Beowolf and Documenta.
excellent but overlooked. Schneider Libretto is the least
The only one of these typefaces not to gain widespread
calligraphic of them, which makes it the most versatile. It
fame outside of the Netherlands was Documenta by Frank
is a soft interpretation of a neoclassical typeface, but not
Blokland (born 1959).
as much so as Kepler. It is not as elegant as Didot or Bauer
Documenta began in 1986 as a bitmapped design, but was
Bodoni, which is good as it is far better than either of those
not released as a PostScript font until 1993. It is an unassum-
faces for text purposes. This is because its stroke contrast
ing design, easy to overlook. Other than its distinctive a,
is not extreme.
it has no characters that call attention to themselves. (The
Schneider Libretto comes in four weights (Light, Regular,
italic however, does have a surprisingly fussy ampersand.)
Medium and Bold), all with companion italics. There are
This is what makes it so good for lengthy text use. It is quiet,
the necessary small caps and oldstyle gures but not much
readable and legiblebut not dull. Think of Documenta as
more. The f-ligatures are limited. The italic is unobtrusive
a meal of a simple grilled steak with a perfectly baked potato.
yet pleasant. All in all Schneider Libretto would make a
Originally Documenta had a family limited to Regular
great text companion to use in conjunction with a Didot,
(with italic), Medium and Bold, but last year italics for the
Bodoni or Walbaum for display.
latter two weights were nally designed after the typeface
was chosen for a new edition of the Luther Bibel by the
Evangelische Kirche in Germany. However, there are still
separate fonts for small caps instead of mega OT glyph sets.
ab
M
EGKRaghkyTh
EGRafghky
Chaparral Pro Regular and Italic
EGKRaghky
EGRafghky
PMN Caecilia Roman and Italic
Chaparral by Carol Twombly
(Adobe, 1997)
Update: Chaparral Pro (Adobe)
Carol Twombly (born 1959) is best known as the designer
of Adobe Caslon and the Modern Ancients series of titling
faces comprising Lithos, Trajan and Charlemagne. But
her most original designand perhaps her bestis
Chaparral, with roots as a Multiple Master face that eort-
lessly integrates humanist bookhand features into a slab
serif. Although there are a handful of other humanist slab
serifs such as Osiris and PMN Caecilia, Chaparral stands
alone. In fact, it may be its uniqueness that has caused
many designers to overlook its strengths.
I discovered Chaparral through the design writer and
book designer John D. Berry, who has been touting its
qualities as a book face for many years. Chaparral has more
energy than PMN Caecilia due to its faceted strokes, but is
not restless at small sizes. The energy comes through more
in the heavier weights and in larger sizes where that can be
a plus. There are four weights (Light, Regular, Semibold
and Bold) with matching italics, and the latter have clear
chancery cursive roots but are not overtly calligraphic. They
are worth discovering in their own right.
Although Adobe abandoned the Multiple Master tech-
nology in 2003, Chaparral Pro still has vestiges of it. The
family includes four optical masters (Caption, Regular,
Subhead and Display) that allow designers to optimize its
color and legibility for a range of sizes. Finally, the glyph
palette includes some unique ornaments reminiscent of
patterns on Hopi and Navajo blankets.
PRINTMAG.COM 71
EGW&adefgny
Kingfisher Regular
EGK&adefgny gfi
Kingfisher Italic
MWbrdm
MWbrdm
Kingfisher plug-in swashes
Kingfisher by Jeremy Tankard
(Jeremy Tankard Typography, 2005)
If there is a recurring theme to this list of underappreci-
ated typefaces, it is types for extended text use. Kingsher
continues that theme with a vengeance. It was created by
Jeremy Tankard (born 1969) with the specic intention of
working as a text face for the humble paperback. In a ter-
ric PDF booklet made to accompany the typeface, Tankard
chronicles his search for secrets of the elusive quality of
the text faces of the letterpress era. For his roman he closely
examined the Doves Roman, Bembo, Ehrhardt and Barbou;
and for his italic he investigated why Romulus failed but
Joanna succeeded in applying Stanley Morisons theory
of an italic designed as a sloped roman. The result of this
research is not an historical revival of any of these metal
typefaces, but a digital face that succeeds in recreating the
feel of such types when set in mass at small sizes. Seeing
Kingsher set as a page of text reminds me of the Penguin
paperbacks of the 1960s and 1970s, whose typography was
overseen by the perfectionist Hans Schmoller.
What makes Kingsher successful seems to be two things:
the introduction of small disturbances into the design of the
letters (such as a slight inclination to the stems) that keep
the eye from becoming bored, and the narrowness of its
characters. During development of the typeface, Tankard
did more than make the usual laser-print proofs. He had a
book designer test it out. The result is a no-nonsense face
that still has a sense of style.
Kingsher has a family of three weights (Regular, Bold,
Heavy) with matching italics. They are optimized for text
use, but the Regular weight and its italic are also available
in display versions.
Paul Shaw is a designer and design historian. He teaches the history
of type at Parsons School of Design, and is the author of Revival Type:
Digital Types Inspired By the Past.
72 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

THE
IMPLAUSIBLE
BOOK

For hundreds of years, the typographic

riddle dubbed the Voynich Manuscript
IM AG E S CO U RTE S Y OF T HE B E I NE CK E
RARE BOOK & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY

has stumped
st mped scientists,
scientists baffled historians
and confounded cryptologists.
by Brandon Ambrosino
 PRINTMAG.COM 73

W
hen author Umberto Eco visited Yale Voynich bought the manuscript that now bears his name in
Universitys Beinecke Rare Book & 1912, though the precise circumstances surrounding the pur-
Manuscript Library in the fall of 2013, chase arent entirely known. During one of his regular trips to
he asked to examine only one text: Europe, he writes, he came across a most remarkable collec-
Manuscript 408, popularly known as tion of precious illuminated manuscripts, most of which, he
the Voynich Manuscript. surmised, must formerly have belonged to the private libraries
Perhaps the late Italian novelist wanted to see the manuscript of various ruling houses of Italy. In comparison to the other
because it, like his masterpiece The Name of the Rose, is some- manuscripts, which were embellished with arms and various
thing of a literary puzzle requiring its would-be interpreters to hues of gold, the Voynich appeared to be an ugly duckling.
be equally procient in medieval history, semiotics and good The collection Voynich purchased in 1912 was at the time the
old-fashioned detective work. Perhaps as he examined the possession of Italian Jesuits who, since the unication of Italy
Voynich Manuscript, turning its 600-year-old pages over in his in the latter half of the 19th century, and the subsequent govern-
hands, he recalled his own words from his 1980 novel: Books ment-ordered conscation of their libraries, had been hiding
always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that their books. Some texts were discovered in a secret room at the
has already been told. Collegio Romano, and were summarily seized by the state. But
This might well be true of the Voynich Manuscript Eco was most, including the Voynich Manuscript, were successfully kept
so taken withmaybe its story is as old and banal as any other. under watch by the order, until it decided, for whatever reason,
But that kind of analysis would require someone to pull o a to sell about 380 manuscripts to the Vatican Library. The sale
literary feat that has thus far proven impossible: reading it. was initiated in 1903 and, as Ren Zandbergen notes in his essay
Earlier Owners, took nine years to complete. During that time,
and under the condition of absolute secrecy, Voynich acquired
a few of the books earmarked for the Vatican, including Ciceros
At rst glance, the Voynich Manuscript is rather unassuming; philosophical works and the soon-to-be-famous ugly duckling.
its unglamorous, even somewhat shabby, writes Eamon Duy My interest was aroused at once, he later wrote.
in The New York Review of Books. Roughly 10 by 7 inches, its
234 pagessome have been lost since its original composition
are bound by a limp vellum, the Renaissance counterpart to
todays paperback. But if judging a book by its cover were ever
misguided, its particularly wrong to do so with this manuscript,
which, as far as we know, has never been decoded, though not
for a lack of eort.
The book is named after its discoverer, the eccentric Lithuanian-
born Polish bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, whose biography is
anything but typical. While studying law and chemistry at
the University of Moscow, Voynich became sympathetic to
the Polish Nationalist movement, and eventually became a
member of the social-revolutionary party, which led to his arrest
in 1885. After being held prisoner for 18 months in Warsaw,
he was exiled to Siberia to live out his ve-year sentence. In
1890 Voynich escaped and went on the run, making his way
through Mongolia, China and Germany before nally arriving
in London, where he used his past as a political revolutionary
to his advantage. Voynich quickly bonded with other exiles,
including Sergey Kravchinsky, famously known as Stepniak. It
was this man, well-placed in British cultural and intellectual
circles, who introduced the young Pole to the exciting world
of bookselling.
Following Stepniaks unexpected death in 1895, Voynich
opened his rst bookshop three years later. According to Arnold
Hunt, author of a biographical essay included in Yales volume
The Voynich Manuscript, Voynich quickly established himself
as one of the most knowledgeable and well-read booksellers
in the business. Though he started out by collecting fth- and
sixth-century books, after several years in the trade he turned
his eye toward higher-end items, like early Bibles.
74 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

If the outside of the book is unremarkable, its contents are any-

thing but. Those who open the manuscript are met with elegant
scribblings in an unknown language, and whimsical drawings
of plants, star diagrams and nude women.
The text was written, as most of its medieval contemporaries
were, with a quill pen. The parchment was made from the skin
of a calf, certainly a more expensive writing surface than other
available options, like stone or wood. The process of preparing
parchment for writing was laborious, as Yale librarian Raymond
Clemens explains in the collection of Voynich essays he edited.
The rst step was to soak the skin in lime juice for several days,
the result being that hair follicles swell and are easier to remove.
The skin was then placed over a round object, perhaps a tree
trunk, and the parchment maker used his hands to scrape o
the loose hair. He then draped the pelt over a rack designed to
stretch it taut, and with a lunellum, or curved knife, scraped both
sides of the skin. The more a particular skin was worked over,
the lighter and thinner it became, which meant that the more
valuable parchments were nearly white on both sides, as is the
case with the Voynich Manuscript. After several days of drying,
the skin was whitened with chalk or some other substance and
cut into individual sheets. It was then ready for writing.
The word ink is derived from the Latin encaustum, which
translates to having been burnedappropriate, given what
Medieval people believed about the writing process. When rst
applied to a parchment, explains Clemens, the iron-gall inks
would appear light brown, until some time later when a chemical
reaction caused the inks to darken. In addition to brown, other
colors in MS 408 are white, green, yellow, red and blue, all of
which were inexpensive and common, Clemens notes.
Acionados of the manuscript refer to the text as Voynichese,
because it is sui generis. The writing aesthetic is sophisticated
and pleasing to the eye, like the languid, loopy cursive of ones words. The number of dierent words in the manuscript, writes
third-grade teacher. The text moves left to right, top to bottom, DImperio, seems surprisingly limited, with the same word
and is broken up into what look like paragraphs, most of which being used several times in succession. Most words are short,
begin with a character that is double in size to most of the let- merely four or ve symbols in length. Two-letter words are
ters of the page, something a modern reader might consider to rare, as are words made up of more than seven symbols. There
function like a capital letter or drop cap. There are four such are also instances where words dier from each other only by
characters in the manuscript, which experts refer to as gallows one letter (e.g., share and shape in English). According to an
characters. These are sometimes written in conjunction with estimate cited by DImperio, there are approximately 250,000
another symbol, and the occurrence of both together is known characters in the manuscript.
as pedestalled gallows. As Zandbergen notes on a website he runs about the Voynich
Voynichese has a deceptively owing, rhythmic quality that Manuscript, the text contains a number of characters that appear
suggests long practice and familiarity on the part of the scribe or strikingly similar to Latin ones: a, c, i (undotted), m, n, o.
scribes, writes M.E. DImperio in a 1978 book published by the Several others seem to resemble the numerals 2, 4, 8 and 9. Each
National Security Agency, which was only recently declassied. folio is numbered on the right-hand margin, though experts
Whoever composed this text knew what he, she or they were agree this was done after its original compilation.
doing. Some handwriting experts think the lettering resembles In addition to such unknown characters, every page contains
the Humanist minuscule script from 15th-century Italy. drawings ranging from simple doodles to elaborate oral render-
The basic alphabet of frequently occurring symbols is small, ings. In fact, the text appears to be written around its drawings,
writes DImperiosome 15-25 characters. A selection of these which, as they are at least interpretable to experts, oer a useful
individual characters is ligatured to create other symbols, which structure for organizing MS 408.
are then grouped together to form what is presumed to be The rst half of the manuscript, about 130 pages, is referred to

as the Herbal section. On each folio can be found a large draw-
ing of plants; the text is carefully organized around the images,
resistant to any overlap. Experts do not agree as to whether
these plants are fantastical or based on real-world species. Edith
Sherwood, a retired professor of chemistry, has spent years
trying to match plants in MS 408 to their possible 15th-century
counterparts. Of the 126 plants in the text, she claims to have
identied 124, which gives her a 98 percent success rate. Oth-
ers, like Eamon Duy, claim the drawings represent biological
impossibilities, such as one that depicts a plants roots and
branches [bifurcating] and then [reconnecting] again to form
a single stem.
The second section of Voynich is the Astronomical section,
which contains large foldout pages, a feature that is rarethough
not unheard offor books produced in the same period. The
foldouts feature a central drawing of either stars or an anthropo-
morphized sun or moon, around which curl Voynichese text as
well as smaller illustrations. This section is followed by 10 folios
featuring plump nude women bathing. Duy calls the gures
decidedly unerotic, which echoes DImperios assessment that
they certainly do not present an appearance of voluptuous
PRINTMAG.COM 75
The various sections appearing throughout the Voynich Manuscript,
from Herbal to Astronomical.
beauty to the modern American eye. Each female gure sits,
stands or lies on tubs, tubes, pipes or other water conduits.
Theres another astronomical section, followed by some
more herbal images that make up the books Pharmaceutical
section. Some experts believe the short blocks of Voynichese in
this section to be medical recipes. The book closes with about
two dozen folios almost completely covered in the mystifying
language, their only adornment a vertical line of stars on the
left-hand margin.
And with that, the worlds most mysterious manuscript comes
to a whispered end.
Since the enigmatic MS 408 came to light a century ago, many
possible solutions have been posed as to what it means. But
Zandbergen is less concerned about meanings than the histori-
cal events that helped produce the text.
For me, the question isnt, What does it say? Or, How can we
convert it back to meaningful text? But, How did they do it?
says Zandbergen. Somebody sat down and wrote it. Somebody
invested a lot of time and money, or somebodys money. There
was a message there because of the consistency [of the text] from
beginning to end. There must have been a purpose.
That being said, questions about the texts purpose arent any
easier to answer than questions surrounding the texts meaning.
Thats because experts have no idea how the text came to be in
the rst place. They have only been able to construct a piece-
meal history based on what many assume to be reliable clues.
The rst is a letter from 1665, which was included with the
manuscript when Voynich purchased it in 1912. According to
the ensigned, Prague scientist Johannes Marcus Marci, the book
was sold to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II for 600 ducats.
Marci also included the information he heard from someone else,
that the manuscript was produced by Roger Bacon, Doctor Mira-
bilis, the controversial 13th-century Franciscan and scientist.
76 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

Voynich was convinced Bacon was the original author, as is years later, in March 1639, admitting failure. As Zandbergen
clear from the title he gave MS 408: The Roger Bacon Cipher notes, this letter was discovered in 2000, and is the earliest
Manuscript. The rare book dealer Hans Peter Kraus similarly reference to MS 408 in the historical record.
advertised the manuscript when he tried to sell it in the 1960s. But Barschius persisted: Now since there was in my library,
When no one would bite on his exorbitant asking priceas uselessly taking up space, a certain riddle of the Sphinx, a piece
high as $160,000Kraus ultimately donated the text to Yale of writing in unknown characters, I thought it would not be out
University in 1969, where its lived ever since. of place to send the puzzle to the Oedipus of Egypt to be solved.
Carbon dating has since ruled out the possibility of Baco- If Kircher did answer the appeal, his reply is lost to history.
nian authorship. Findings from the University of Arizona in Upon Barschius death around 1662, his personal alchemi-
2009 place the manuscript between 1404 and 1438, with a 95 cal library, including MS 408, was bequeathed to Marci, the
percent probability. It should be noted, however, that some Prague scientist. Three years later, Marci, desperate to have
experts believe the manuscript might be copied from an earlier the secret text cracked, again sent the manuscript to Kircher,
one, given the lack of erasure or correction markings in the text. which is where the historical trail goes colduntil Voynichs
Therefore, while MS 408 is conclusively of 15th-century origins, purchase in 1912.
it is possible its source materialif there is anypredates the
text in Yales library.
Nonetheless, though Voynichs belief in Bacons authorship
has been summarily debunked, there are good reasons to believe When Yale procured MS 408 almost a half century ago, its cata-
Voynich was correct to place the text in Rudolf IIs court. One of logue entry read: Scientic or magical texts in an unidentied
the chief reasons has to do with a discovery made by Voynich language, in cipher, apparently based on Roman minuscule
some time after his purchase. Applying an unidentied chemical characters. Voynich himself was convinced the Voynichese
to the front page of the text, Voynich was able to read the name was a cipher. Some of the most brilliant cryptographic minds
Jacobus Hoick de Tepenec, which was until that time invis- have spent countless hours trying to crack its code, as it were,
ible to the unaided eye. (Contemporary multispectral imaging only to end up right back where they started: ignorance.
has revealed the same name.) The rst scholar to claim hed interpreted the manuscript was
Hoick, also known as Sinapius, was raised by Jesuits and historian William Romaine Newbold, who worked under the
perhaps spent time at Pragues Jesuit College. His pharmaceu- now-debunked assumption that Bacon wrote the text. Newbold
tical reputation preceded him, and he was thus able to curry believed Bacons cipher system to be what William Sherman
favor with Rudolf II, who, according to a possibly apocryphal describes as anagrammed micrographic shorthand. That is,
legend, Hoick cured from a deathly disease. In 1608, the the letters orderings were changed, the words were abbreviated,
emperor ennobled him with the title z Tepenecan important and the characters were composed of tinier symbols only visible
detail for Voynich scholars because MS 408 includes the stately when magnied. Newbolds theories were at rst praised by the
title, which means he added his name to the text after his o- medievalist John Matthews Manly who, in a Harpers Monthly
cial assignment. When Hoick died in 1622, he left all of his article, introduced his ndings.
possessions to the Prague Jesuits library, but for some reason, But by 1931, Manly came to disbelieve Newbolds theories.
408 ended up somewhere else. What Newbold was convinced were micrographic scribblings
By 1637, G eorgius were nothing more than random cracks formed in dry ink.
Barschius came into pos- It appears that Professor Newbolds cipher systems and his
session of the manuscript, decipherments were not discoveries of secrets hidden by Roger
by means still unknown. A Bacon but the products of his own intense enthusiasm and his
lawyer by trade, Barschius learned ingenious subconscious, concluded Manly.
was convinced the text was The other most well-known deciphering attempts were made
medical, which was, as by the husband and wife team William and Elizabeth Friedman.
he wrote in a letter to the Manly met William in 1916 at what is now known as the Cradle
Jesuit polymath Athana- of Cryptography, housed in the Chicago-area Riverbank Labo-
sius Kircher, the most ben- ratories. (William, by the way, corroborated Manlys assessment
ecial branch of learning of Newbolds Voynich work.) At the time, the Department of
for the human race apart Codes and Ciphers focused its energies on literary secretsfor
from the salvation of souls. example, the idea that Francis Bacon was the actual author of
Barschius believed Kircher Shakespeares works. Elizabeth was one of Riverbanks Shake-
to have an unmatched intel- speare scholars, and according to Sherman, shared her future
lect, and pleaded with husbands patriotic loyalty to the U.S. government, as well as
him to try his hand at the his fascination with literary ciphers.
unreadable text. The math- As the need for cryptologists became more apparent, Riv-
Wilfrid Voynich, c. 1885. ematician wrote back two erbanks focus shifted to breaking military secrets. By 1921,
 PRINTMAG.COM 77

William and Elizabeth had moved to Washington, DC, where One of the most plausible theories is it could be an invented
they both took up government posts. It was there that Manly language, says Johnson, echoing the Friedmans own cryptic
put the couple in touch with Voynich, who in 1925 sent them a conclusion.
few photographs of his own cipher manuscript hed developed. What about a fraud? Could the entire thing be a hoax? British
Those images piqued the newlyweds interest, and for the next 40 cryptoanalyst John Tiltman summarized in 1951 the problems
years, the duo remained committed to guring out the puzzling with this theory: I do not believe the manuscript is completely
text. The pursuit paused during WWII, as Williams team set meaningless, the ravings or doodlings of a lunatic, nor do I
to work cracking the Japanese code known as Purple. Near the believe it is just a hoaxit is too elaborate and consistent to be
end of the war, in 1944, William turned his attention once again either. As for the theory that it was a deliberate forgery cre-
to MS 408, and to that end assembled the Voynich Manuscript ated for nancial gain, Tiltman admits this is possible though
Study Group, which met regularly in Arlington Hall. rather improbable.
For almost 15 more years, the Friedmans continued to try Zandbergen says he is open to the possibility that the text
to decipher the book, but over that time, their enthusiasm for has no meaning at all. Johnson goes even further: In the battle
the enterprise seems to have waned. In a 1959 article for Philo- between the text and human readers, he says hes rooting for
logical Quarterly, Acrostics, Anagrams and Chaucer, the two the manuscript.
expressed the ultimate futility of trying to solve anagrammatic If the Voynich Manuscript remains unreadable, what value
ciphers. The article was accompanied by a note explaining that is there in studying it? Its no doubt a work of beautyeven a
the text itself was an anagram. The solution was sealed in an cursory glance at one page of the text would lead anyone to that
envelope and given to the editor of the journal, who printed the conclusion. But arent scholarly energies better directed toward
secret message when he ran the original article again in 1970. texts that can be gured out, toward typographies that can be
The message: The Voynich MS was an early attempt to assigned meaning?
construct an articial or universal language of the a priori On the contrary, says Johnson, the Voynich Manuscript
type.Friedman. is worth studying precisely because it resists reading. In an
age when information is so readily available to us, theres
something important about a book that cant be read. Its sort
of an island of inexplicability in the midst of a life in which
Nothing about the book is plausible, says Reed Johnson, a everything is resolved.
Ph.D. candidate in Slavic Languages at the University of Virginia Every time we look at the Voynich Manuscript, were forced
and a longtime Voynich Manuscript enthusiast. The book to confront the limits of our understanding. In contrast to most
itself is implausible. books we read and interpret, the Voynich Manuscript is about
It could be a cipher, he says, but given that the manuscript your failure and your inability to read it, says Johnson.
looks to be some sort of compendium of knowledge, why dis- This is none other than a lesson from Ecos The Name of the
guise the information in the rst place? Perhaps, he suggests, Rose: Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to
the composer wanted to make banal natural phenomena seem inquiry. That is certainly true of the elusive Voynich Manuscript
more magical than they are. Or perhaps the images have noth- Eco once held in his hands.
ing to do with the textalthough this seems unlikely given the
consistent patterns that emerge between words and drawings. Brandon Ambrosino is a writer living in Delaware. His pieces have appeared
For example, some words are specically thematic, occurring in The New York Times, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Politico and the BBC,
only in certain sections. among other outlets.
78 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

Tattoo
Artist
AS TYPOGRAPHER?
A Manifesto and
Portfolio Roundup
by Alex Harrell

A
fter experiencing rst-
hand the eternal
embarrassment of a
poorly executed type-
based tattoo, I started
looking for artists who
specialized in custom
lettering to revive my illegible ink. I found
myself wondering: Can tattoo artists be
considered typographers? Are tattoo art-
ists typographers?
There are those who very aggressively
believe that lettering and calligraphy are
notand will never betypographic. But
why not?
Tattoo artists are typographers in their
own right. Alleging they arent is like con-
demning Johannes Gutenberg as arti-
cial and Alfred Roller as an amateur.
These men are now regarded as inspi-
rational innovators in an industry that
has clearly had a hard time adapting to
change throughout history.
Excluding calligraphic-based styles
from typography is an elitist result of Jan
Tschicholds claim that clarity triumphs
intention. Heinrich Wieyncks comment
on his former students style applies as
much to tattoo artists today as it did the
Bauhaus movement in the 1930s: The
secret to good typography does not lie in
obeying a one-sided school of thought;
instead it will always remain bound up
with personal creativity capacity.
If typography isnt intended to con-
vey emotional expression and is strictly
for communicating, why dont wedding
planners design invitations with Comic
Sans? Why are text-based tribute tattoos
to Ernest Hemingway designed to resem-
ble Courier?
Perhaps many in the design world turn
their noses up at gratia background
the majority of tattoo artists specializing
in lettering come frombecause its an
art comprised of diversity. Perhaps the
design world is scared to incorporate let-
tering into the standard realm of typog-
raphy because that would allow stereo-
typical lower-class artists to participate
in a historically white-maledominated
industry. For centuries, grati has given
a voice to the disenfranchised throughout
the world. Tattoos, while theyve become
less taboo in recent years, were once
PRINTMAG.COM 79
deemed tasteless and for uneducated, their deaths. Its only appropriate that
impulsive degenerates. tattoo artists will go through the same
A bit harsh, no? pedantic trial of worthiness. Plus, much
Tattoo artists themselves seem to be like tattoo artists, some of the biggest
excluded from the typographic world names in type historyGutenberg, for
not because they lack qualications or examplehad little to no formal typo-
because major dierences in denition graphic training.
exist, but because its largely a boys club Filippo Marinettis Futurism move-
thats averse to change. Its arbitrary. ment was also uneducated. His revolu-
Above all else, these minute dividing tion aimed at the so-called typographic
details that put type a few ranks above harmony of the page, according to his
every other letter-based artform are dated manifesto Destruction of Syntax. Critics
and the result of the baby boomer genera- were less-than-thrilled with the Futur-
tions unwillingness to adapt to the digital ists anti-establishment publications and
and DIY world. The internet and Insta- performances. Yet Marinetti has since
gram have transformed typography to be been credited with opening the prover-
about much more than just arranging bial doors to modern graphic design.
type for print. Herb Lubalin was criticized for his type
In this case, its arranging letterforms works reduction in legibility. When the
for skin. The renaissance of handmade phototypography pioneer was scruti-
type (sorry, Paul Shaw et al.) has only nized for his tight tracking and kerning,
further catapulted tattoo artists into he responded, Sometimes you have to
the typographic world. Tattooers have compromise legibility to achieve impact.
to take the rules already established and He was awarded the Type Directors Club
further specify them to withhold the wear Medal in 1984 after his death.
and tear the human body goes through. David Carsons digital-revolutionized
Unlike paper, skin is alive. It requires its work focused more on the emotional
own systematic approach to maintaining impact than the types legibility. It pissed a
its integrity and legibility. lot of people o, even Paul Rand. But a few
Of course, history did warn us of this years later, Newsweek wrote that Carson
grudging acceptance of radicalism. Most changed the public face of graphic design.
of the truly great typographers were ridi- The denition of typography has histor-
culed in their day, only to be revered in ically and continuously changed, almost
always contradictory to the decisions
made by the design police. But where
would type design be without rule-break-
ers like Lubalin and Carson? They toyed
with new technology as it unraveled and
prevailed despite the harsh criticism of
their elders.
So instead of dooming ourselves to
repeat the past, we should learn to recog-
nize innovation when it brazenly appears,
and tolerate itmaybe even attempt to
understand it. Lets drop the academic
parlor games of whose denition of typog-
raphy is the most exclusive to keep it a
boys club, and loosen the reigns on an
industryand denitionthat thrives
on adaptation.
With that said, here are ve artists tak-
ing tattooing to new typographic heights.
Heres to hoping that they and their peers
can break the stubborn, cyclical nature of
design denitions.
80 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

BRYAN HEIMOWSKI, 28 /
ADRENALINE VANCITY TATTOOS
AND PIERCINGS / VANCOUVER
I design typefaces on the side, but I
began to tattoo because I felt that I
had more creative freedom and I could
do letters that were a little more
expressive and less rigid, Bryan
Heimowski says. I still have a love for

B
type design but I wanted to start
with something where I could develop
my style.
He denes his style as calligraphy-
based, and freestyles with a Sharpie
directly onto the skin. I do keep in
mind spacing and kerning, but thats
something that an artist should be able
to execute from the beginning to end,
he says. Regardless of whether the
type is on a body or a poster, typogra-
phy should t where its being placed.

Not just stuck on like a sticker.
As both typographer and tattooer,
Heimowski recognizes the place that
calligraphy occupies within typogra-
phy, though it might not t into any
standard denition.
Everything has its purpose,
Heimowski says. Whether its to cre-
ate a legible or fancy typeface, they
have the same function. And that
function is to convey a message. It
just depends on what message youre
trying to send.
As a result, Heimowski stresses
that its importantfor tattooers and
typographers aliketo understand
what the function is, and how it will
inevitably change over time.
How do you think people took a leap
from blackletter to sans serif? Through
innovation. If typographic art is going
to move forward, its always going to
have to try something new, he says.
I really dont see typography as being
set in one single way that it should
be done. Thats like telling a painter
to only paint in realism; its not how
it works.
K
KINGSLEY HAYWARD, 26 / LOWRIDER TATTOO / LONDON
When grati-turned-tattoo artist Kingsley Hayward rst swapped out
cans of spray paint for ink and rotary machines, he was primarily inter-
ested in producing darker imageslike skulls, snakes and shrunken heads.
But lettering is quite popular; it doesnt matter what kind of style youre
into, everybody loves lettering, the London-based artist says. I got asked
quite a bit for lettering, so I steered that way.
The self-proclaimed letterheads letters are exhaustively detailed with
a level of intricacy that seems to combine elements of 16th-century Man-
nerist calligraphy with its gothic cousin, Fraktur.
I like to base my stu on structure, make sure everything matches up
with something else so theres a ow, Hayward says. I guess I have a rough
idea in my head and then I go with it. No real method to the madness.
His hybrid system of structure and madness is startlingly successful.
Despite the few seconds it takes for the eye to adjust to the onslaught of
detail, the letterforms seem to levitate above the swashes and exagger-
ated strokes and become quite legible. I prefer to do a lot of small details
that you might not pick up on straight away, but that bring everything
together, he says.
Almost paradoxically, he achieves this. Hayward draws inspiration from
fellow script and lettering artists such as Scott Banks and El Whyner. And,
of course, from his younger days as a grati artist.
Grati and tattooing have a kind of strange friendship because your
typical grati style doesnt work as tattoos, but you can see gratis huge
inuence in the majority of work by anyone who does lettering.
 PRINTMAG.COM 81

GRACE JOSEPH, 28 / DIVING

SWALLOW TATTOO / OAKLAND, CA
Skin isnt like paper; over time it
stretches and ages, says tattoo artist
Grace Joseph. You need to leave
enough room inside the actual letters
so the ink can expand, but still be leg-
ible over time. I think thats the biggest

G
thing I struggle with trying to convey
to people: The tattoo is going to be
larger than they were thinking, she
notes with a laugh.
Most of the Oakland-based artists
clients request typefaces found online
or from Microsoft Word. I try to con-
vince them that if youre working with
someone who is a custom-lettering art-
ist, you should probably let them go
ahead and come up with some original
lettering, she says. Its more organic
to the ow of the body, rather than

K
something blocky from the computer.
Her style is grati-meets-gothic let-
tering, mixed with decorative scripts
evocative of type designer Ken Barbers
early 2000s work. Her letter structure is
tailored to where the tattoo is located
on the body; she accentuates swashes
and adds ink traps to further ensure
the longevity of the tattoos legibility
as well as its aesthetic appeal.
What I nd creates the best tattoo is
when a client has a general idea of what
type of script theyd like, and then let
me run with it, she says. Having more
freedom always results in a better, more
creative tattoo.
Joseph was trained as a small-for-
mat tattoo artist in Florence, Italy,
during her undergraduate years. The
smaller the tattoo, the more meticu-
lous the work has to be. That lent
itself really well to lettering because
it has to be so precise, she says. As
far as the tattoo goes, even if youre
executing something thats drawn to
look imperfect, it still has to be exe-
cuted with extreme precision.
 E
82 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

EDWIN EDS DURRANI, 36 /

TRAVELING ARTIST / TORONTO
Growing up I was always intrigued
with lettering and grati, but I never
got out and bombed walls, says Edwin
Eds Durrani. I couldnt do it. I wasnt
prepared to catch a vandalism charge.
Instead of tagging the streets of
Toronto, Durrani broke the law in
other waysfor example, getting his
rst tattoo at 14 years old. Three years
later, Durrani studied graphic design at
George Brown College for a year before
dropping out. Maybe I shouldve
waited a bit longer, he laughs. But
thats kind of how I live; if something
feels right, it feels right.
So he started tattooing. Now, 10
years later, Durranis days are booked
solid with clients requesting his cus-
tom-lettered freehand work.
But that wasnt always the case.
Like Joseph, When I rst started,
people wanted Edwardian Script and
other Microsoft Word fonts, Durrani
says. Itd be too small, the loops would
bleed together over time, and some peo-
ple had a hard time understanding that.
So I would write it out in my own style
and see if they liked it. Nine times out
of 10, they did.
Casting any references or rules aside,
Durrani considers his style to be as
versatile as any font found on- (or o-!)
line. After a moment of hesitation, he
says he does consider himself a typog-
rapher, despite the sometimes sour
attitude of professionals.
Instagram is huge in my industry,
and I connect with a lot of typogra-
phers and people who dont tattoo but
are involved in the art of lettering, so I
guess I am one of those type guys. He
pausesbut I dont mind.
 PRINTMAG.COM 83

LIO FAAMASINO, 42 / A-TOWN

TATTOO / GARDEN GROVE, CA
Growing up in Carson, CA, Lio
Faamasino was introduced to grati
when he was around 12 years old. Hes
been into lettering ever since. And
though Faamasino has done hundreds
of grati-inspired pieces, his preferred
tattoo style is script and incorporates
elements of ambigrams, broad-nibbed
tapers and inclines.
Hell either hand-draw the letters
and transfer the type onto a client, or
freehand directly on the skin, depend-
ing on size and placement.
I feel like I have no rules, Faamasino
says, regarding his design techniques
and routines. However, the way I want
to come up with [the tattoo] is the way
it is and the way its going to be.
Which isnt to say Faamasinos let-
tering lacks consistency. Instead of
restricting himself to a style guide or
particular family of font and characters,
Faamasino lets the word itself dictate
the ow of each letter. The results are
incredibly legible and uidnot dis-
similar to the concave and Uncial type-
faces of blackletter artists Georg Trump
and Rudolf Koch.
I think that theyre just haters, Faa-
masino says of those who look down
upon custom lettering as a typographic
artform. Because in the typography
world, those people probably have to

L
go uniform and it has to be a certain
way. But in our world, we can design
the letter any way we want.

Alex Harrell is a multidisciplinary designer and

writer based in Chicago. She is passionate
about exploring and expanding the ever-grow-
ing relationship between digital media and the
written word.
 84
P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

D E S IG N BY DE B B IE M ILL M AN A ND E MI LY W E IL AN D
PRINTMAG.COM 85
86 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7
Stereotype
The Reluctant
Type Designer
Paul Shaw reviews Carol Twombly: Her
Brief But Brilliant Career in Type Design.
Carol Twombly (far right) with her Stanford classmates. From left:
David Siegel, Dan Mills (seated), Cleo Huggins, Lynn Ruggles.
C
arol Twombly: Her Brief But Brilliant Career in Type
Design (Oak Knoll Press) has been billed as the rst
book on type design centered around the career of
one woman. I would argue that it is more important
than that. It is the rst full-length biography of a type
designer of the digital eraman or woman. There is no compa-
rable publication on Sumner Stone, Erik Spiekermann, Robert
Slimbach, Jonathan Hoeer, Zuzana Licko, Tobias Frere-Jones
or Gerard Unger. Only Matthew Carter, who began his career in
the late 1950s, has a monograph to his name: Typographically
Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter by Margaret Re, Johanna
Drucker and James Mosley (2002). Perhaps the reason that
Twombly is the rst digital type designer to be proled in
depth is because of her short career. All of the other individu-
als mentioned here are still active.
Carol Twombly is also important for its insight into the his-
tory of type design during the moment of great technological
transition from photocomposition to digital composition,
from bitmapped fonts to vector-based ones, which occurred
between the early 1970s and mid-1980s. That territory is admi-
rably covered from a technological perspective by Richard
Southall in Printers Type in the Twentieth Century (2005) and
the narrow-but-sharp focus on a single type design by Rob-
ert Bringhurst in Palatino: The Natural History of a Typeface
(2016)but in Carol Twombly, Nancy Stock-Allen provides a
welcome personal angle.
As mentioned, Twomblys career as a type designer was a rela-
tively short one, beginning in 1984 with the release of Mirarae,
her rst typeface, and ending with her retirement from Adobe
Systems in 1999. During that decade and a half she designed
eight typefaces of her own, co-designed one, and oversaw the
creation of nine others. It seems like a small body of work com-
pared to some of todays leading type designers, but not when
viewed alongside the output of 20th-century designers from the
metal era. For instance, Twombly designed more typefaces than
Bruce Rogers, Jan Tschichold, Paul Renner, Max Miedinger,
Oswald Cooper, Rudolph Ruzicka and Roger Excoon, among
others. Furthermore, three of her typefaces are standards today:
Trajan, Adobe Caslon and Myriad (co-designed with Robert
Slimbach). Three others are vastly underappreciated: Lithos,
Charlemagne and Chaparral (see page 71).
Moreover, with the prominent exception of her contempo-
rary Licko (and now the script specialist Laura Worthington,
page 35), Twombly has created more typefaces than any other
female designer. It is in this capacity that she has gained
much of her fame. Along with Licko and Gudrun Zapf-von
Hesse, she has been constantly trotted out over the past 25
years as a rare example of a woman in the type design busi-
ness. Although this notion is no longer true today, Twombly
is still held up by others as a role model. This was the impe-
tus for the biography of her career by Stock-Allen. However,
Twombly has never seen herself as a female type designer, and
Stock-Allen does a good job of respecting and representing
her views in this regard. She does not try to force Twombly
into a pre-conceived narrative.
At the same time, Stock-Allen works hard to put Twomblys
career into proper perspective. The book opens with a chap-
ter summarizing the history of women in the 20th century in
the type design business. It is probably the best single source
available on this subject, though it is not comprehensive. Stock-
Allen not only namechecks Zapf-von Hesse and Licko, but also
covers Elizabeth Colwell, the type drawing oce at Mono-

type, Elizabeth Friedlnder, Freda Sack,
Veronika Elsner and Kris Holmes. How-
ever, she fails to mention Ilse Schle, any
of the women who designed typefaces for
Photo-Lettering Inc. (e.g., Ursula Suess),
or the women working for Compugraphic
and ITC (e.g., Renee LeWinter, Janice
Prescott, Holly Goldsmith, Ilene Strizver).
At the end of the book Stock-Allen makes
a very brief comparison of Twombly and
Licko that focuses on their craft activities
rather than their typeface designs. She
misses the opportunity to bookend her
book with a summary of the tremendous
growth in numbers of female type design-
ers today, aided by the establishment
of type design programs in The Hague,
Netherlands; Reading, U.K.; and New
York City.
Despite this criticism, Stock-Allen
provides a good description of Twom-
blys career, from her student days at the
Rhode Island School of Design in the
late 1970s through her surprise retire-
ment from Adobe. She points out the
important mentors she had along the
wayGerard Unger, Chuck Bigelow and
Holmes, and Stoneas well as the invalu-
able colleagues she had at the Stanford
University Digital Typography Program
(headed by Bigelow and Donald Knuth
of METAFONT fame) and Adobe. Thus,
Dan Mills, David Siegel, Cleo Huggins,
Lynn Ruggles and Fred Brady get some
well-deserved attention along with the
better-known Robert Slimbach.
If there are any bad guys in this book,
they are the unnamed computer geeks at
Stanford who, unsure of what to make
of Twombly and her fellow type design-
ers, ignored them and hogged access to
the mainframe computers. Stock-Allens
description of the Stanford phase of
Twomblys career is perhaps the high-
light of the book, since it is a period not
widely known. Through colorful anec-
dotes from Siegel and others, the time
truly comes alive.
Stock-Allens description of Twomblys
time at Adobe is less exciting, perhaps
because the stories increasingly focus on
the changes at the company that nally
culminated in her decision to leave and
abandon her career as a type designer.
This was due to a host of factors. The
Twomblys comparison sketches of Caslon
italic lowercase at various sizes.
rst was her longstanding ambivalence
to being a type designer. She was good
at it and she enjoyed it, but she always
wanted to create art instead. Twombly
was shy, and Stones well-intentioned
attempts to promote her at Adobe back-
red. She was not comfortable being in
the limelight. When Stone left and she
was promoted, it was not a positive move,
as she spent more time managing people
than designing typefaces. And nally,
she was not comfortable in the urban
Bay Area and longed to live in a more
rural, quiet, less-stressful place. Hence
her decision to leave Adobe and move to
the Sierra Nevada mountains.
While many were probably disap-
pointed by Twomblys decision to leave
the type design business, it was a coura-
geous and admirable one. Twombly did
not leave for family but for herself; to be
able to pursue life as a craftsperson and
artistand to live life outside the glare of
the design world. It is to her credit that
Stock-Allen got Twombly to agree to help
with this book in the rst place, but at the
same time Twombly did not provide her
with as much insight into her career as
one would want.
Carol Twombly is a fairly brief read at
176 pagesa nice change in an era where
design books keep getting bigger and
bigger, heavier and heavierbut only
137 of those pages cover Twomblys life
and career. They are supplemented by
20 pages ostensibly detailing each of her
type designs, with commentary from
Twombly. But they are very disappoint-
ingthere are no proper showings of her
PRINTMAG.COM 87
work, only a few scattered letters spelling
out each typefaces name. Twomblys
comments also tend to be largely super-
cial. The few instances where she does
say something insightful it is repetitive
of comments she has made earlier in the
book. Stock-Allen provides no critical
analysis of the typefaces.
In the main text the author provides
some background for each of Twom-
blys faces, but she relies primarily
on what Twombly has told her about
them rather than looking at them in a
broader context. For instance, there is
no comparison of Myriad with Frutiger
or TheSans; no discussion of why Stone
and Twombly chose Greek sans serif
inscriptions, the Trajan inscription and
versals from the Benedictional of Aeth-
elwold to be the models for the Modern
Ancients set; no insight into how Chapar-
ral stacks up against other slab serif faces,
especially contemporary designs such
as FF Scala and PMN Caecilia. Some
essential images are also missing, such
as an historically authentic example of
uncial instead of a 20th-century imita-
tion, actual showings of William Caslons
typefaces and the Greek inscriptions that
inspired Lithos.
Finally, there are several indefensible
errors that appear in the book: Anna
Simmons, Hallmark cards, Giovanni
Bodoni, Higgins instead of Huggins,
Lucinda instead of Lucida, Freder-
ick Goudy, Caitch instead of Catich,
and Mark Taylor-Batty. Mergenthaler
Linotype is also incorrectly described as
a type foundry.
Despite these carpings, Carol Twom-
bly is an essential addition to the book-
shelves of anyone seriously interested in
the history of type design. However, it is
not the last word on the typefaces that
Carol Twombly created or on where she
and her body of work stand in that his-
tory. That book has yet to be written.
Disclaimer: I was asked by Oak Knoll Press to
review the manuscript of this book.
Paul Shaw is a designer and design historian. He
teaches the history of type at Parsons School of
Design, and is the author of Revival Type: Digital
Types Inspired By the Past.
88 P R I N T 7 1 . 2 S U M M E R 20 1 7

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