Figgins Sans Extra Bold

[Ryan Maelhorn]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

So In my never ending love for sans serif and my attempt to find the earliest appearances of it (see my attempt at a 2 line english egyptian here, if you care: https://typography.guru/forums/topic/97773-forwarding ) I stumbled, strangely after quite some time, into Figgins Sans. What a beautiful thing. Apparently it was created by some guy named Nick Shinn? Anybody here ever hear of him. I'd love to grill him sometime on how he came up with the lower case letters. Hmmmm.... If only...

[Riccardo Sartori]

?

[Frode Bo Helland]

Nick is here. Just you wait and see.

[Nick Shinn]

Thanks for the kind words. I do indeed spend some time at Typophile every day (have been doing so for the best part of a decade) and am not averse to a little show and tell. I can send you the Modern Suite specimen book, which has an essay on Figgins Sans, with illustrations—contact nick“at”shinntype.com.

In my estimation of the original 1836 bold caps face by Vincent Figgins, the style had not yet settled into the typical 19th century grotesque mode, i.e. fat and furled curves, but had geometric elements. Therefore I did not give my extrapolation the “funky grotesque” treatment which is the norm in neo-Victorian sans serifs. This also made it a better companion for my revival of the contemporary Scotch Modern, which is packaged with Figgins as the Modern Suite.

That accounts for the styling. For the lower case letter shapes, generally speaking I made them correspond to the Scotch. So the “a” and “r” are a bit awkward. I suppose I should have made the arm of the “f” similarly wide, but that would have been impractical for a multi-lingual 21st century font.

The italic is quite strange, but really just a straightforward sansification of the Scotch italic.

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Ok, well where did you get the scotch from? Hopefully it was Johnny Walker Black....

Does anybody know for sure what the first sans serif with lowercase letters was?

[Nick Shinn]

http://www.typophile.com/node/46184

Too bad there are no images showing in that thread at the moment—they’re really good!

Here’s one of them (1858), courtesy of James Mosley:

[Michel Boyer]

> Too bad there are no images showing in that thread at the moment—they’re really good!

Have a look at this pirate copy

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Damn no lowercase till the 1890s? The Grotesks were around by then. I really like the earlier English/Scoch/Irish whatever sans'. There is something so refined about them. Though I do love the standard German Grotesks as well.

[Nick Shinn]

Another “unborn” typographic taboo was rag right (or rag left, for that matter).

Even when the sans started to come into its own, in mixed case, in Modernist layouts, it was justified. See Lissitzky’s The Isms of Art:

[Nick Shinn]

LOL!

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Those Isims look completely modern. Seriously, that could have been designed yesterday. Crazy.