Fontasm like a sneeze, but better.

What can I say about that suit that hasn’t already been said about Afghanistan; It looks bombed out and depleted.
–Silky Johnston

There are two paths you have to go through to find the mythical Futura Alternates, by which i mean the old style figures, small caps and the released-only-in-japan-on-a-double-ep alternate glyphs. The first is The Foundry’s Archetype Renner which provides the crazy a, g, f, n, m, r, ff, and æ alternates. It actually does this by not including other glyphs in the font and instead putting the assorted old style figures where the []s are and so forth. The experience is closest to setting lead type from within inDesign, as you leave the glyphs palate open so you can make sure you can swap out the right glyphs contextually as your heart desires as ‘twere a california job case without the associated cleanup.

The second is Neufville Digital’s 1999 reissue of Bauer’s original 1928 Futura release. While The Foundry’s offering feels like a typeface you might have bought on a floppy disk in a mid '90s museum gift shop (ala p22) Neufville’s offering is distinctly more prosaic, lacking five separate as but is fantastically utilitarian and includes an amazing € symbol.

The winners here are the condensed weights, the small caps, and the display weight. Those features in particular are so great that you can skip the normal futuras entirely once you play with them.

Futura ND Display is just amazing, hailing four years later (1932), it toes the line between Rob Roy Kelly and Rudy Ray Moore, except it leans (predictably) more towards Dolemite. Tungsten too mechanical? Why not try this instead.

The condensed weights (1950) are equally fascinating. My favorite is the light weight set all uppercase, which is rocking such an impersonal interoffice mail vibe that it feels like you’re photo-typesetting a coworker’s early termination letter at 3:20 on a thursday afternoon. These are tough times; you shouldn’t feel this reflects upon you personally.

–marcos

Huzzah! It’s the roaring 20s again! The trans-atlantic telephone is all the rage, the stock market is on a roll and Les Baxter is fourty years away from filling our hi-fis with the exotic sounds of faraway fantasy islands. For now, though, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is all the rage and all our aspirations are tied up with technology and the coming rise of the man-machine and mythical pocket calculator.

Enter Rudolf Koch. Despite being in the twilight of his years, he has the audacity to draw Kabel, a geometric typeface with a distinct wackiness that makes other geometric typefaces look constipated, struggling to find a glass of prune juice and a saturday evening post for any relief.

Unfortunately (or not), my love of Kabel is not exclusive to the type itself (the outlandish upward sloping venetian e, the brilliant g and its shiv-tastic terminals are all turn-ons). Instead i ask you to consider the contrast between Kabel, Neuland and all of Koch’s other script types.

You see, although in this weird family, Kabel looks like a prepped out douche wearing a pepto-pink lacoste shirt next to rowdy uncle Neuland, when you step out into the regular world all those unfortunate associations fall away and kabel looks downright decent. Ok, i’ll concede, maybe a little goofy, perhaps a bit lighthearted, but really, is that such a problem these days?? I mean, it’s still 1927, we have so much to look forward to!

–marcos

While doing this i realized that I don’t ever actively ever think to myself: oh yes, i think i’ll use Centaur for that truly baroque feel because so often i’m reaching for Poliphilus, but then i see some Centaur in print and i feel like a philistine.

That’s not to say you can’t use your favorite venetian whenever you want, you really should; Centaur isn’t right for all occasions. But what you get for free is that it looks really hot just straight black on some cream colored paper. Sure, it might look a bit too fancy for the occasion, but it never hurts to dress up a little. And seriously, Centaur might as well be as respected as a well worn sports coat, if not a new John Varvatos black pinstripe jacket. It plays both sides.

Like i said, half the time, i feel like a total ass for even forgetting that Centaur exists because i feel like i’ve been conditioned to forget about all those monotype classics, but it’s worth revisiting from time to time. Aside from its sloping e and its proper punctuation marks, it reminds me of a turn-of-the-century scrappy 16 year old bare-knuckle boxer that’s been tidied up with a couple splashes of brut and half a tin of brill-creme.

Perhaps you can see young centaur coming home from dinner on the way to meet its girl–suddenly, it runs afoul of a brash Garamond #3. Fisticuffs imminent, it’s a close fight, but that doesn’t matter. You know in your heart who’ll win.

Burgues Script released by Sudtipos and designed by Ale Paul is a labor of script type love. At first you see all the swashes and the wild exuberance and you almost sigh for a second: there goes zapfino again, but wait, what’s that, you’ve never seen such a bombastic lowercase y, or should i say, you’ve never seen four such bombastic ys.

The place where Burgues really shines is that it is not so much meant to be set automatically as much as you are asked to delve into the glyphs panel of illustrator so that you may pick out exactly which of five glyphs you might want for any particular letter. In almost all cases, there exists a glyph for setting at the front of a word, in the middle, and at the end plus another flourish glyph that goes with the last letter you typed (the swirly end of the y in Baby). So at the end of your typographic endeavour, you actually feel like you actually had some part in the final composition.

I wish i could match Ale Paul’s description of his own typeface (modeled after the script of louis madarasz), but i can’t. If you do nothing else, it is worth reading what he has to say about burgues script:

If I was an actual poet, my words would be about things I desire but cannot attain, objects of utter beauty that make me wallow in humility, or people of enormous talent who look down at me from the clouds of genius.

But I don’t write poems. My work consists of letters drawn to fit together, that become an element of someone’s visual poetry. I am the poet’s assistant, so to speak. Once in a while, the assistant persists on what the subject of the poem will be. And occasionally, the poet gives in to the persistence. I hope you, visual poet, find my persistence justified in this case.

–marcos

Guest Post!

“Look – the fact is that John Downer is kind of a dick. I saw him at TypeCon 2004, at a symposium on intellectual property. When someone raised the quite legitimate issue of privacy, with regard to the inclusion of an embedded ID number for licensed OpenType files, Mr. Downer screamed "Why don’t you just PAY for the fonts on your computer that you STOLE!?!” and stormed out while angrily flinging some personal effect of his to the side. This was in stark contrast to the otherwise civilized and respectful discourse that persisted throughout the rest of the discussion.

“Also, every year, I have this thing where I think I really want some tomato juice. Not a bloody mary, and not a smoothie health drink thing – the notion of tomato juice (or V8, more or less) is something I think I want. So I go get some and take a sip, and of course I am summarily revolted, for like another year. It’s the exact some thing with Vendetta.

"But so Iowan Old Style – with its altogether comfortable x-height, tangy periods, and good ligatures – is a fucking American classic for reals. And I mean American in the real old sense, like how New York is actually a descendant of Amsterdam… it’s like you can see how it has the same cultural lineage as Fedra, but less airport-y and more charming. I can’t really explain this, other than that thing about stopped clocks being right twice a day.”

–fish

I learned about Fred Smeijer’s Quadraat over the summer, which let me admire its blackjack-in-a-knife-fight aesthetic. And that is prehaps the truly endearing quality of the font: it just looks a bit rugged, possibly hung over. It has something like a scruffy unshaved drunken-master look. Except dutch, not chinese.

It’s entirely possible you’ve seen this in your type library, maybe even set a line or two of text and then switched to some pansy-ass venetian after remarking: oh that’ll look too messy on the page. Look, nobody said life was easy. Quadraat’s like a cast iron pan: you’ve got to season it a bit, give it some tough love and a few charred steaks. Don’t even try to use soap on it. That ruins cast iron.

Or, it’s possible you’ve used Quadraat’s more homely, take to dinner with the folks younger sibling Arnhem. Sure, it’s a good choice–it’s an easy choice–but really, why not let your hair down, maybe give it a tousle once in a while? Quadraat takes its Bowmore neat. So what if Quadraat likes a smoke now and then? It’s not like it’s been living under a rock these past ten years.

But real draw, once you get past the analogies, is the almost frenetic calligraphic qualities of both the italic and normal weights. The bold and small caps have a raw… essence, but there’s a quiet confidence in the broad-nibbed roman and the angular moments in the italics. It’s like a little lion cub growling for the second time.

–marcos

Farnham by Christian Schwartz and released by Font Bureau is a ridiculously diverse typeface. In its black display form, it feels like you should engrave it on money while in its lightest forms it becomes even more fantastically angular.

But that’s not to say that it’s always sharp or rigid: it just features those qualities and isn’t unafraid to go all the way when it does. Why settle for strictly boring terminals, when you can have a bit of ball terminal, some nice triangular serifs, some flat terminals and some great calligraphic swashes from time to time. It’s all there and it all works.

It’s one of those things where you might go back in a few months and think: maybe i should set this in Caslon but there’ll be that part of you that immediately cringes the minute you set the text and says: heavens no, caslon’s much too prude for this job, it’ll never do. If only it could be a bit more like Farnham…

And similarly, you’ll find that for all those times when you unabashedly felt like rocking out some Bookman Swashes, you can instead rock out some Display swashes in farnham instead. In effect, you can take all those wimpy transitional typefaces you have sitting around: Bookman, Bell, Caslon, Mrs Eaves, &c. and have yourself a great outdoor fight…

Three days. Three acres. Thirty or so typefaces… Only one will win the Great Outdoor Fight!

My money’s on Farnham.

–marcos

I discovered Square 721 while perusing a copy of the works: anatomy of a city by Kate Ascher, a fun book about the urban planning and design of new york city. The book, published by penguin, is really fun to look through, loaded with illustrations, quirky footnotes and is set in both Square 721 for heads and Eureka for body text.

Square 721 along with its bastard doppelgänger Square 711 are both published by Bitstream. It turns out, though, that Square 711 is just another version of Georg Trump’s City and that Square 721 is actually a variant of Aldo Novarese’s Eurostile. My guess is that it is probably easier to pitch a name as generic as Square 721 for a book about New York rather than, say, Eurostile during a casual crit. Just my guess.

And while Eurostile is sorta a love it or hate it thing, City is actually the real deal. It’s got the same unabashed love of 1930s heavy industry that i love about Tower, but it’s even more rigid and it has an absolutely ridiculous ampersand that’s hard not to love. It’s that strict rigidity in City that makes it completely fantastic when, for example, Gridnik loses that magic luster it once had. but let’s not lie to ourselves, that never really happens, right?

Perhaps you’re DIN'ed out, FF Unit is a bit too humanist for you or you can’t stand helvetica rounded. Want to use Gotham Rounded, but don’t want to look like a poser? Enter Gravur Condensed released in 2004 by LineTo and designed by Cornell Windlin and Gilles Gavillet. The font has the appearance of a modest monoline engraved from a pantograph with a router into a plastic name badge.

A nice surprise of Gravur is that it gets more condensed as you increase the weight, perhaps this is common and i’m a rube, but it felt almost magic the first time i noticed it. LineTo’s website describes the aesthetic as born from rampant swiss standardization, so you can feel haute generic. I mean, only If that’s your thing.

Imagine for a moment walking into at a small boutique shop smiling at a smart looking retail associate and seeing engraved white on precious sapphire tinted polyethylene: Hello, My name is Gravur Condensed. Can i help you today? Yes Gravur, yes you can, i’ll take that limited edition Devo ep over there, you know, the one they only released in Japan…

–marcos

Vendôme, a quirky typeface designed in 1952 by François Ganeau while working at Fonderie Olive. I recall reading that it was named for Place Vendôme, a square in the 1st arrondissement in Paris, but i can’t actually find any written proof of that, so i’ll speculate that there is some connection. The face itself is inspired by 16th and 17th century type by Claude Garamond and Jean Jannon (which, to my eye, it feels more like Jannon’s lowercase a and the overall tone).

For me, though, the type is characterized by its fantastically violent beaks and its unabashedly classic design. It’s like what Trajan’s drunkle might look like after several glasses of Knob Creek on a cold winter day. A great (pseudo-)contemporary use of the type is the album art of Magzine’s The Correct Use of Soap

–marcos