Compacta is Todays Black Letter

[Ryan Maelhorn]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

discuss..

[Nick Shinn]

Compacta is Todays Black Letter

You lazy fellow, sloppy grammar and can’t even be bothered to start the thread with any content.

[Ryan Maelhorn]

I had faith the content was already there in ten folds.

[zeno333]

Well, first of all, there is no valid reason to call it Blackletter or to compare it to Blackletter....So IMHO there is nothing to discuss given your initial premise.

[Ryan Maelhorn]

though I prefer Compacta, I would include in this, any other black, heavily condensed sans, such as Impact, Helvetica Compressed, etc... Three stroke widths wide... Four to Five stroke widths tall.

This is today's black letter

[Joshua Langman]

Meaning what?

[cerulean]

The analogy is incomplete. Compacta : Blackletter :: today : when?

[russellm]

& beige is the new black?

[Nick Cooke]

No it isn't.

[LexLuengas]

And Agenda is today's Rotunda? C'mon...
What's the actual statement behind "Compacta is Todays Black Letter"? Please elaborate.

BTW Compacta is fifty years old.

[Nick Shinn]

30 is the new 18.

[PublishingMojo]

Since blackletter was originally designed to make movable type look like the hand lettering of scribes, wouldn't the "new blackletter" be something like Bradley Hand?

[quadibloc]

@PublishingMojo:
You beat me to it. I was going to reply to the original question:

No. Comic Sans is today's blackletter.

[zeno333]

I do not agree on that one....Blackletter was and is about more than just the handwriting of scribes, it is partly about decoration "for the sake of decoration", a concept that simply is not in the Bradly Hand typeface. There is some debate on the reasons behind the decoration of Blackleter, but even with that, the decoration for the sake of decoration is still there no matter what the reasons for it.

[PublishingMojo]

@zeno: In that case, Compacta is the anti-blackletter, since it was produced at the height of Modernism, without a hint of gratuitous decoration.

[Nick Shinn]

http://canadatype.net/fonts/bigfoot

[quadibloc]

Come to think of it, one of the properties of blackletter was that it was used for printing texts in the vernacular, while Roman was used for texts in Latin.

Today, if different languages still use the Roman alphabet, usually the same typeface is used for both. But occasionally sans-serif typefaces are used for foreign languages just slightly more often than for English... thus, Pinyin in some dictionaries is in a particular sans-serif face; Univers is associated with continental Europe.

So perhaps Roman is the new blackletter, if anything.

If not, there's always Optima or Lydian... or even Radiant. (Or should I try to defend the notion that its cousin, Peignot Bold, is the "new blackletter" for our time?)

[Nick Shinn]

John, we’re talking about “todays”, not way back back in the 20th century.

(Cue Robin Williamson song…)

[hrant]

Ryan, you know that blackletter doesn't have to be dark, right?

hhp

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Well as far as I'm aware, no, the darkness is very important to what blackletter is. That's where the name comes from, no? (so dark that there is more black(ink) on the page than white(space))?

[Joshua Langman]

See Duc de Berry, Clairvaux, etc...

[hrant]

American Indians were misnamed by ignorants too.

hhp

[Ryan Maelhorn]

The f uck? American Indians? Lol..

Okay, so there is a 'light' blackletter or something? I honestly have never heard of this.

[LexLuengas]

When you refer to blackletter you're merely thinking of textura. Look at the rest of the family. Just put on your google goggles.

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Yes, the Textura!

But I thought Blackletter was the 'style' that defined textura?