MATD 2012

[hrant]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

http://www.typefacedesign.org/2012/

The balance of quality and diversity makes me smile. Physically.

hhp

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Brasilica looks interesting.

[David Vereschagin]

Nari Black captures the current typographic zeitgeist. And the regular italic has the interesting idea of doing away with the serifs.

David

[Nick Shinn]

I like Dr Jeykll and Ms Hyde.
Kind of a serif interpretation of Excoffon’s “top heavy” idea, with a bit of Val Fullard’s “Science”.
(Sorry, but everything reminds me of something else, even in a quite original design like this.)
I’m pleasantly surprised there are no readability claims for this top-heaviness!
My only criticism is that its upright Greek looks like italic, when on the same page as Latin Roman.

[HVB]

Nick: Isn't that a basic description of "Classical"? Roman and Greek ...

- Herb

[Nick Shinn]

Not any more:
http://www.parachute.gr/typefaces/allfonts/regal-display-pro#Greek

[hrant]

Nick, I'm glad you like Dr Jeykll and Ms Hyde because I do too except I can't be too objective about it since I was fortunate to consult on its Armenian component.

its upright Greek looks like italic, when on the same page as Latin Roman.

Only if you look at it through Latin eyes. And the alternative is worse. The Armenian for example might seem even more "Italic" than the Greek, but to me it's exactly right, and making it upright would ruin it.

hhp

[J. Tillman]

My favorite is Martha. In the regular weight it seems to be a very clear and readable typeface.
Quadrat, Can you offer a few words of explanation about the "current typographic zeitgeist" for the unhip? Thank you.

[David Vereschagin]

Yes: Chunky slab serifs and egyptians are trendy right now (actually all new takes on slabs are) kind of in counterpoint to skinny sans serifs which are also way in but may be outstaying their welcome. (Work on my own slab serif is languishing and I probably won’t be able to release it until after the current trend has passed!)

David

[Rafael Dietzsch]

I agree with Hrant.

Also, I would like to leave a comment. Regal is interesting, but I don't think it's a model to be blindly followed for the Greek, as there are other ways of doing it upright.

[hrant]

Regal: I enthusiastically cast a vote for it in the Display category of Granshan 2010* but I can't say I think much of the text cut. For one thing it's much easier to find occasions to use Latinized type for display than it is for text.

* http://www.granshan.org/index.php?lang=eng&mode=competition_2010

Rafael, nice to see you here!

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

The Greek of Dr & Ms is rather self-indulgently lively (if this is the designer’s idea, rather than faculty’s), when the Latin is so much more disciplined.
There should be greater consistency between Latin and Greek, if one is going to follow the “Latin” principle of Regular and Italic styles—and Arabic numerals.
If the Latin of a face is going to have Roman and Italic of markedly different construction, then so too should the Greek. In for a penny, in for a pound.
This means that the traditional Greek “scriptyness” must be deployed to the Italic, because if it’s used in the Regular, unless it’s simply a slanted version of the Regular, the Italic is painted into a corner—and that’s exactly what’s happened in Dr & Ms, for despite alternate forms of beta, theta, phi and (somewhat) kappa, it’s basically a slightly condensed, more evenly slanted version of the Regular. There isn’t the amount of distinction between styles that exists in the Latin.

There’s no need to have the Greek Regular characters with such varied inclination, some leaning forward (omicron?!), some back. Even in the archetypically Greek Plain (Monotype 90), the diversely stressed letters have balance, and some, such as gamma, are dead upright. So there is no Greek imperative for gamma and nu in Dr & Ms to be leaning to the right.
Even if the intention was to avoid Vassiliou-style modernism/internationalism/latinism, it would have been possible to maintain traditionally “scripty” Greek letter forms and stress, without being quite so baroquely slanted.
Either that, or Hellenize the Latin according to the same principle!

It’s really, really hard to accomodate the traditional authenticity of Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek in the same typeface with a strong measure of formal consistency between the scripts. To fall back on traditional conventions for the separate scripts is ultimately to shirk the design challenge.

Nonetheless, this is a minor quibble—it’s an awesome fun face with beautifully drawn glyphs.

[hrant]

The perception of text depends on context; letterforms don't exist in some formal vacuum, especially for a text face. So the Greek might not be disproportionately lively if the basic nature of Greek -and what readers of Greek are used to seeing- is more lively than Latin (which in fact it is).

My favorite example is serifs in Armenian: if you put them where they would be in a Latin font you end up with something ugly and harder to read.

A more accessible example is Trajan: making a formally congruent Cyrillic version cannot result in the same flavor because readers of Cyrillic don't have the same background.

If the Latin of a face is going to have Roman and Italic of markedly different construction, then so too should the Greek.

It's not so simple - it depends again on context. Just because you make a style of type for a writing system (Italic) doesn't mean it's used identically. Again using Armenian as an example: we have a floating emphasis mark that's placed on a vowel to emphasis a word, so we don't use Italic the same way as Latin does, which means making an Italic for Armenian the way you make one for Latin is just bad design.

Now, if Greek does use Italic very similarly to the way it's used in Latin then I agree that the degree (or more accurately, the flavor) of divergence should be comparable.

Hellenize the Latin according to the same principle!

Ideally you go both ways, like in my Nour&Patria. :-)

To fall back on traditional conventions for the separate scripts is ultimately to shirk the design challenge.

Actually I think Latinizing is much easier than doing what Papassissa has attempted. Latinization is like a parlor game, devoid of insight and sensitivity. And I don't consider myself a traditionalist - I just believe in using ideas that work no matter where they come from.

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

Sure, Latinizing is easy if you make nu = /v and eta = /n.
But I’m not talking about that.
The quaint scripty treatmentment of gamma and nu in Dr & Ms is too much about making each letter a nice Greek glyph, not about the typeface as a whole. That doesn’t mean I’m advocating they should look like /y and /n.

Why, in this day and age of stylistic diversity and internationalism, should new Greek typefaces be chained to an historic pen-driven model? I would have thought you would support that position Hrant, based on your criticisms of chirography in type design!

[kentlew]

No disrespect to Papassissa (the design is indeed lively and well done), but my first thought when I saw Dr Jekyll and Miss Hyde was “František Štorm does Bonsai.”

But, like Nick, the older I get the more everything reminds me of something else.

Nice job.

[hrant]

You want close?
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/pampatype/arlt/
But when I pointed that out to Elena she said she'd never heard of it - and Lo Celso is a Reading grad! Apparently at Reading they try to reduce exposure to specific precedents; I guess that makes sense educationally.

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

If it’s forbidden to “Latinize” Greek by straightening it out and adding serifs, then why not, if one is starting with a Greek design and adding Latin, and wants to create a harmonious multi-script serifed typeface, “Hellenize” the Latin component by removing serifs and loosening it up?

While not the archetypal antiqua model, it would be quite acceptable to conservative taste.

There are several semi-serif designs like this, such as Puyfoulhoux’ Cicero.

[Rafael Dietzsch]

Why don't you try it yourself?

[hrant]

Nick, your last two posts elevate the discussion nicely... More soon.

hhp

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Maybe the Greek is the "Dr. Jekyll"?

Also, FWIW, I was pretty unimpressed with it on the page Hrant linked to, but upon opening up the specimen I got a whole other impression of it. Maybe the designer could change the name to make it look more appealing, although Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde is such a specific name (not to mention a good description of the font's ideas) its hard to think what other names it could be changed to.

[Nick Shinn]

Why don’t you try it yourself?

I have no plans for any new Greek types at the moment.
Those I’ve produced so far started out as extensions to Latin designs.
Unless I get a commission to produce a Pan-European typeface, it’s unlikely I will do any more Greek fonts in the near future.

[Jongseong]

I'm quite intrigued by the cursive devanagari in Pooja Saxena's Cawnpore. Has there been an attempt before to design a cursive companion to a regular devanagari text face, not as a display face on its own?

One of the MATD typefaces in 2011, Aaron Bell's Saja, included an attempt at a hangul (Korean alphabet) italic. I actually tried to talk Aaron out of it since there is no tradition of pairing a slanted (or indeed any type of) cursive hangul with the regular, and I wasn't convinced that one could be successful. Seeing the result hasn't changed my mind, though I applaud the willingness to experiment.

[John Hudson]

It was interesting for me to read Nick's comments on the DrJ*MsH before actually looking at the specimen. I think there is a matter of perception here, in which I know my own is influenced by the fact that almost all the Greek text I encounter is either written or typeset in traditional minuscule-derived styles. When I look at Elena's Latin and Greek side by side, I don't get the same sense as Nick of the Greek being too lively by comparison. Rather, I think there is a tension within both scripts between very lively letters (Latin a and Greek lambda) and much more constrained letters (Latin g and Greek pi). The Greek looks to me simply like a fairly conventionally structured type, and its problems are not of style but of proportion: several letters are noticeably narrow and disturb the (sorry, Hrant) rhythm. The beta, gamma, pi and upsilon stand out in this regard.

[Nick Shinn]

My first impression, before I had a chance to read any of the text, was of the whole page.

It seemed obvious to me that the ductus is quite different between the two “upright” DrJ*MsH scripts, and that the Greek is far busier.

Here’s a comparison of the DrJ*MsH specimen with the same text set in the typeface I’m working on at the moment, which I’d like to think demonstrates that it is possible to achieve some measure of ductus consistency between scripts, without horrendously Latinizing the Greek. The Greek could be slightly heavier en masse, despite the same stem widths, perhaps it could be tightened up a little. (Apologies for showing my own work, I would have liked to have used one of Panos Vassiliou’s faces, but don’t have a licence for any of them.)

[John Hudson]

Saying that the ductus is different and that the Greek looks busier than the Latin seems to me different than saying that one is livelier than the other. To me the statements 'is has a different ductus' and 'is busier' are simply descriptions of the Greek script vis à vis Latin.

As I said, this is a matter of perception and hence also of experience.