In 2020, I created a Kickstarter campaign to revive the blackletter font Wiking. In 2021 I planned an even more elaborate campaign regarding the blackletter font Deutschmeister. Thanks to the support from people around the world, this project got funded too and the digital fonts FDI Altmeister and FDI Neumeister are now also available for free under the Open Font License. This time, I didn’t digitize the fonts from printed samples, but from the original letterpress letters themselves. After decades of use in different print shops, the appearance of those letters has its own charm. But of course that wouldn’t be visible in a digital vector font.

And that gave me an idea: What if wouldn’t just digitize the outlines, but the appearance of the physical letters as well? The support for bitmap and vector color fonts has increased in recent years and became even part of the OpenType standard with SVG. Well, one year after having the idea, the fonts have now been released and I am really happy with the result, even though there were quite a few challenges along the way. 

The general idea was to create a rectangular bitmap image for each letter using a bird’s eye perspective. That would allow typesetting with the appearance of a real letterpress layout where each letter touches the surrounding letters. But creating these images wasn’t as easy as I originally thought. Parts of the face of the letters extend to the side of the letterpress body. So, from a camera perspective, those parts would extend well over the letterpress body (see image below).

My first attempts with scanners also wasn’t successful, since they will usually distort anything that isn’t directly touching the glass surface. But in the end, I found a suitable scanner using the CCD technology, which would not distort parts of the image. Each letter of the two original letterpress fonts was scanned separately, so I got clear edges for all letters. But the edges were far from being straight and the issue of overlapping letter-parts was also present with scanned images. I solved all this by manually retouching all letters in Photoshop. I slightly increased the size of each letter and with that, the edges got straight and the overlapping parts were now inside the rectangular bitmap image. The result was a “pixel perfect” design. 

The digital letters of FDI Alte Farbmeister connect as they would in a letterpress layout

The PNG glyphs are included in two sizes in the font. A version 256 pixels high for low-resolution previews and a version with a height of 1000 pixels for the full resolution. As a result, even in a size of more than 3 inches, the fonts will appear sharp in print. 

The type size works just like it does with letterpress fonts, because the bitmap images use the full type size. So, if you set the line-height equal to the type size, all lines will connect perfectly. You can even combine different type sizes as you would in a letterpress layout. For example: a drop cap in 36 points can sit next to three lines of text in 12 points. 

Creating the wood type version was also challenging, because I ran into a problem I hadn’t anticipated. Because some letters had been used more than others, there was a significant color contrast between the individual letters of the font, while there was almost no contrast between the face of the letters and the shoulder area. As a result, putting these letters together without ink would just create a series of rectangles with different colors. But the letters weren’t legible. After considering and testing various options, I decided to create “digital ink” in Photoshop in two versions. One version of FDI Neue Farbmeister uses white ink, which creates a sufficient contrast and can be used as is. A second version uses blue ink. I chose blue because there aren’t any blue hues on the wood type letters itself. So, in a photo-editing app like Photoshop it is very easy to target the blue hues and change them to any color you like. 

Using the software tools for kerning and tracking isn’t recommended with these fonts. With increased letter-spacing the background would appear and with decreased letter-spacing, the bitmap images would overlap in a way that wouldn’t look natural. But users of these fonts can still apply spacing changes as a letterpress compositor would do it. For this purpose, the fonts contain a thin space (U+2009) and a hair space (U+200A). 

The fonts use two color font technologies within the same font files: Apple’s SBIX format, which works in many apps on Apple’s operating systems and SVG, which is supported across multiple platforms and already works in many design applications. For more details check out https://www.colorfonts.wtf/

More details about FDI Farbmeister can be found on the foundry website, where there is also a link to a demo font to test the support in the apps you are using. 
☞ https://fdi-type.de/fonts/farbmeister/

A guest article by Pedro Mascarenhas

Introduction

How the General Public relates to fonts. With the entry of personal computers in people’s lives, fonts entered the dictionary and the knowledge of the common mortals. Now, children learn to write both by hand and computer. Any user of text applications knows how to choose the font, thickness, style, size and color. Regarding the thickness of the fonts, everyone knows that there is a normal (regular) and a bold. When CorelDraw and PowerPoint applications appeared, success was immediate because it was so easy to use. In countries where people give less importance to the aesthetics of design, people practiced authentic orgies of letters with gradient colors. Nowadays, users are more experienced, therefore less eccentric when choosing fonts. In general, they know that the sans or serif letters should be used for long texts and very thin, very thick or fancy letters should be used for highlighting. Some font names entered people’s vocabulary, such as Arial, Verdana, Times, Georgia, etc, because they are part of the font menu of the common software applications.

How Professional Consumers relate to fonts. In the world of font nerds, knowledge is much more sophisticated. Since the time of Letraset until today, the font market has become an industry similar to that of music or fashion. Fonts and type designers change from pop stars (remember Neville Brody with The Face or David Carson with Ray Gun) to old-fashioned in the blink of an eye. Revivalism is constantly relaunched. Just like in fashion, there are big vendors that influence trends, alternative and experimental designers and … the rest. With the appearance of the websites to sell fonts, mainly FontShop and MyFonts, fonts have become cheap and accessible to everyone. Like music distribution platforms, these sites have increased the online sales, but above all, they have offered a worldwide stage “artists”, causing an increase in type designers and fonts. Naturally, with this increase in fonts, the new outsiders have shaken the conservative bases because almost everything has become possible.

Which brings me to the thesis presented here. What's the correct name for each font weight. How to manage to regulate some procedures so that the final consumer does not feel lost in this unregulated and overcrowded world. How to make the new trends align with the basic rules of the past. How to make the name given to the weight of a font be as consensual and universal as possible. How to know what is the minimum and maximum metric for the thickness of each font weight, and what's the name to give to that weight. Above all, how to ensure that the final consumer don't get confused when searching a font.

When comparing fonts, what do consumers do and what do they expect to see?
For designers, the decision to choose a font is done in stages, with advances and setbacks. After exhaustive search, designers selects two or three fonts to compare them and make the final decision. The final comparison is usually made in the design apps where the final design will be done (like InDesign, Illustrator …).
But before opening the design apps, designers plunge into type sites for the search. When designers are doing the search, they expect to see the different fonts about the same size to easily compare the optical result of each font. Unfortunately, this often doesn’t happen because the fonts were built with different sizes.
If these fonts had been built with a size roughly equal it will be easier for the designers to understand the characteristics and thickness of each one of them. In the end, they would just have to make some small adjustments in the body size and leading to make the final decision. But fonts appearing in very different sizes can mislead the designer’s perception of the font’s thickness.

TyMS WEIGHTS (#TW).

When consumers compare the weights of a typeface family to decide which one to use or buy, they expect to find progressive smoothness between the different weights. But, more important, they also expect to see the same optical thickness, when comparing the same weight name, between different fonts. As we all know, there are many inconsistencies in the market, between the names of fonts weights. Some fonts are called ExtraBold appear Bold, while other called Light appear Regular and so on. #TyMS Weights will allow type designers, foundries, font apps, and typography schools to “speak” the same language and achieve the goals and expectations of type consumers.

In the future, when type designers open the app to built a font, they will know (if they wants to) the correct name to give to the weight they wants to draw. The #TyMS Weights also allows each type designer to maintain their creativity because it only establishes the percentage of the Primary Stem Thickness (see the meaning in the next paragraph).

1.1. The Primary Stem Thickness (#PST).

All the consumers are able to distinguish a light, regular, bold or black font. But when it comes to more weight steps it needs an expert eye to identify the name of each weight. In the end, the only characteristic, in a “normal” font, that can help to distinguish her weight is the thickness (width) of the primary stem. So if the community starts using the same system to measure the #Primary Stem Thickness, inconsistencies in the name weights between typefaces can be reduced or even eliminated. The #Primary Stem Thickness functions as a structure for the construction of a building. It defines the skeleton, but it has no influence on creativity and details.

The ratio of the thickness of the stem, in letters like the capitular “I”, to the x-height of the font is one method used by many type designers to measure weights. This is a good method, but it has three big problems: 1. many fonts only have capital letters, which does not allow the use of this method, 2. the bolder weights are not as visually bold as the number indicates, 3. this method might not work well when type designers wants to create a variation with a greater x-height, but maintaining the same stem thickness of the capitals.

What about stripes fonts? The question arises whether the #PST corresponds only to one stroke or to the group of strokes. It seems obvious that the name to be given to the weight of a stripes font must be related to the thickness of one stroke and not to the group of strokes that make the stem. The number of strokes must define the typeface name, not the weight name.

What about experimental fonts? Some fonts do not follow the rules established by the status quo of font design (and fortunately because it is in creativity and breaking the rules that evolution finds its way into the future), so for these fonts, type designer's common sense it's very important to interpret what is the #PST of the font, and then give it the most correct weight name, the name that has the same optical weight as the fonts considered “normal”. 

What about unconventional caps height? In this study, it was found that the “normal” ratio between uppercase and lowercase height is 150% (see more details below in the “P.S. What should be the best construction practices”). In cases where this proportion is above 165% or less than 135%, type designers must simulate the #PST of a “normal” caps height, 145% for display fonts and 155% for text fonts. The #PST found will give the correct font weight.

1.2. Weights Names.

The proliferation of font editors – especially the ones with interpolation, supports a deregulation of the weight names. If each type designer continues to be able to name the font weight without strict regulation, the efforts of people like Didot, Frutiger, Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, Pablo Impallari or Luc(as) de Groot to bring some clairvoyance to the matter were for nothing. Because type designers and apps are focused on creativity, maybe the regulation must come from distributors like Monotype, Google Fonts, Adobe … because in the end they are the major players in the market and it’s them who have to categorize and list the fonts in the way that best helps consumers in the selection process.

Percentage Proportion. Studying (with the same cap height) the #Primary Stem Thickness of the fonts existing on the market, it’s not possible to find a common value for each weight name due to the inconsistencies found, but it is possible to establish a range measurement for each weight. When we remove the most unsual fonts and the most incongruous names of weights, a percentage proportion system begins to make sense and to achieve the intended objectives.
Based on the analysis of the most prestigious fonts, the largest #Primary Stem Thickness rarely exceeds 33% of the caps height (Interstate UltraBlack has #PST 41%, Gill Sans UltraBold has #PST 44%). Therefore, the interpolation axis to be adopted must stretch until this percentage. Fonts with #PST greater than 33% fall into a category of “unusual”. In addition, the web protocol defines 1000 as the last CSS number, so type designers still have the CSS numbers between 900 and 1000 to design and name their bolder weights without thickness limits.

1.3. TyMS Weights - Steps.

#TyMS Weights work regardless of the size that type designer chooses to design the font. It also allows each type designer to maintain a level of creativity, as it only uses the proportional relationship (first as a percentage and then converted to ems) between the height of the caps and the #Primary Stem Thickness, to establish the name of the weight.
From static to interpolation or vice versa. When we think about interpolation, we can imagine an infinite number of weights … or not. However, the market needs static weights and variable fonts with multiple masters or instances that correspond to the static weights. There are more than 25 known weight names on the market, but many refer to the same optical weight. With the influence of the web, the main steps now used are divided into 10 numbers. In order to achieve a better progressive smoothness and to be congruent with the weights already on the market, the steps to be adopted by TyMS Weights must be somewhere between the 10 CSS numbers. If we insert a step between each CSS number, we get 19 different weights. But to obtain a perfect progressive smoothness of the weights, this system must be linear, instead of following the curve proposed by designers such as Luc(as) de Groot or Pablo Impallari.
Whatever the number of masters that type designers wishes to put on the axis; whatever the number of instances that type designers wish to generate, they can always assign a name for the weight and its css number using #TyMS Weights Ruler.

1.4. Simple, Fast and Precise.

To know what's the best name to give to your weight just need 3 steps: 

1. Draw your typeface freely.

2. Calculate the percentage of the #Primary Stem Thickness with #TW Formula (W=(Tx100)/H).

3. See what is the advised weight name in the #TW Table or Ruler.

1.5. Weights and Variations

When type designers compare the weight of the type they are drawing, the #Primary Stem Thickness usually doesn’t have the exact percentage number of one of the weights in the ruler axis. Instead, the #Primary Stem Thickness is in a range between two different weights. Of course, when that happens, #TyMS Weights will not have the audacity to ask type designer to change his masterpiece. Therefore, type designer must choose the closest weight name or create a variation name, a thinner or a bolder. Pay attention, as the variations should not be confused with styles or grades. (See the differences below.)

Weights are the different thicknesses of a typeface family.

Variations are the two fine adjustments to the thickness of a weight – a lighter version and a darker version. Variations cannot change the width of the original stem by more than 1% or they become another weight. They are designed primarily for text fonts and serve to maintain the visual appearance of the original weight, when used in different ways or on various media. The lightest variation is recommended for coated papers and the darkest variation for negative text. The measurement of the thickness of both variations must be within the gap of two consecutive weights of the same font. The main difference for grades is that variations must maintain the same optical contrast as the original font instead of reducing optical contrast.

Styles – Display, Banner, Finesse … From the point of view of this thesis, try to reduce your knowledge of styles for sans serif and serif fonts to better understand the objectives. These styles are designed for large sizes, such as headlines, rather than for the body of the text. They maintain the #Primary Stem Thickness with the same width as the original weight, but increase the optical contrast by reducing the thickness of the secondary strokes (usually the horizontal strokes). For fonts to be considered a style, and not a variation, it requires that the strokes’ tuning be greater than 1%. Micro works as opposed to the display style.

Grades are subtle changes in the strokes of a weight in order to give a similar impression of the font in different conditions (e.g. different printing technologies or papers). Grades slightly reduce the optical contrast of the original weight. This technique is usually used for text fonts, see for example Jonathan Hoefler’s Mercury and Chronicle.

1.6. Conclusion.

Imagine that a designer presents a green logo to the client. After the work is approved, the designer has to define, in the Brand Guide, what green it is, as there are thousands of variations of green. With fonts it’s the same. The designer can’t just say that the typeface is, for example, Helvetica. They have to define the weight, style, size, etc. A variable font is for fonts what “green” is for colors - just a vague reference. The #TyMS Weights will be for fonts weights what Pantone, CMKY, RGB or Hex are for colors – an exact reference.

P.S. What should be the best construction practices.

When type designers open a font editor to build the font they draw, they have to make two decisions at the outset: 1. Which units-per-em (UPM) they will use. Ninety-nine percent of fonts are built in 1000x1000 units, other units values are allowed, but such situations are rare and should be avoided unless there is a very specific reason to do so; 2. The other decision concerns the size (height) of the design. This decision is very important because it is also directly related to the size that the font is rendered in the applications used by consumers. Typically, fonts are built with caps height close to 700em.

Text Fonts. When integrated into a family, fonts designed for text tend to have a lower proportional relationship, between the height of the capital letters and the lowercase letters, and for this reason type designers tend to build these fonts with a cap height below 700em so that the lowercase letters (x-height) are rendered in a size closer to the letters that are not for text.
Normally the height of the lowercase letters is between 60% and 70% of the height of the capital letters. In text fonts the tendency is to have an x-height, between 65% and 75% of the height of capital letters. Two examples of fonts that are clearly outside these usual range are Amplitude, with 80% and Cochin, with 56%.
Normally the text fonts are drawn from the height of the lowercase letters of the family, that is, the text fonts have the same lowercase height as the display fonts of the same family, and what varies is the height of the capital letters. Obviously there are examples to the contrary, in which the construction follows the reference of capital letters, but these cases are the exception and not the rule, see the various options in the image below. 

#PST options. Many of you are already thinking, so if the capital letters of the different fonts of a family, vary in height, the #PST also varies, so the weight names will be different. It turns out that normally the height variation of the capital letters does not exceed 1% so that height variation remains within the range of #TyMS Weights and therefore the name of the weight does not change despite there being a slight difference in the height of the caps. Of course, there may be cases where this #PST of the fonts are within the range of the two weights, which would imply a weight name of the text font different from the weight name of the font display. But in these limited cases, if the #PST does not exceed 1% difference, type designer must keep two fonts with the same weight name. 

Regarding fonts that do not belong to a larger family (with display, text, etc.) the question arises: What option should type designers choose when building the font? If they choose to create them with a cap height of 700em, they can have an exaggerated x-height and a very thick weight name, in relation to the other identical fonts on the market. If they choose an x-height within the normal parameters (between 400em and 500em), they run the risk of having very small capitals and a very thin weight name. Type designer should always think about the consumer — How will they use the font? Will it be used more in text or in display sizes? Will it be used alone or paired with another font?

In conclusion, fonts should always be built with the capitals with 700em, except those with very small lowercase letters. For those, it should be avoided to build them with the lowercase letters above 500em in order not to appear on search sites and in consumers applications with a size out of context.

More details: https://pedromascarenhas.wixsite.com/tyms
Pedro Mascarenhas is an Art Director and a type designer from Lisbon, Portugal.

To see and install these optional fonts, open the FontBook application and switch to “All Fonts”. Browse the font list and you will see lots of font families that are greyed out—either because they were deactivated or they weren’t downloaded yet. If you right-click on a font or font family that wasn’t downloaded yet, you see an option to download the individual font or entire family. 

Here are some (Latin) highlights of the available fonts:

• Font families:
  • Canela from Commercial Type in 16 styles
  • Domaine Display from Klim Type Foundry in 6 styles
  • Founders Grotesk by Klim Type Foundry in 17 styles
  • Graphik by Commercial Type in 18 styles
  • Produkt by Commercial Type in 8 styles
  • Proxima Nova by Mark Simonson Studio in 12 styles
  • Publico by Commercial Type in 12 styles
• Individual display fonts:
  • Sauber Script by TypeJockeys
  • Quotes Caps and Quotes Script by Sudtipos

In addition to those Latin fonts, many non-latin fonts are available as well. For a complete list check out this support document. 
☞ https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210192

1. Logo

Johannes Gutenberg established the use moveable type for printing texts in the West in the 15th century. There were later attempts to speed up the typesetting process by casting syllables or entire words as one piece. Those pieces were called logotypes—from Ancient Greek “lógos” meaning “word”. But handling type cases with hundreds of compartments was just not practical and so this kind of typesetting didn’t really catch on. But entire words cast as one piece of metal type still became quite common—for example for newspaper section headlines, which had to be used every day in exactly the same way.

Other uses were words like invoice, certificate, invitation and so on, which were designed in a decorated way that couldn’t be typeset with individual letters. And logotypes were also used to print the names of companies. And that is where the modern usage of the word logotype—or just logo for short—comes from. This typical use in letterpress printing started to not only describe the object, which was used to print a company name, but the specifically designed appearence of the name itself.  And while this originally only applied to printing blocks with text on it—for example a wordmark—the modern understanding of the word logotype is much broader and can also apply to graphic marks, emblems and symbols, which might not not contain any letters.

1. Uppercase & Lowercase

These commonly used terms go back to the print shop tradition in some countries of having separate type cases for one typeface in one size—one case for the small letters and one for the capital letters. The case with the capital letters was put on top—so it was literally the “upper case” and the type case with the small letters was put below that, so it was the “lower case”. And that’s how these terms were coined.

2. Cliché

To add an image to a letterpress form, printing blocks were needed that behaved just like the metal letters. Creating them was an elaborate and time-consuming process—at least in the first centuries of printing with moveable type. But there was a work-around: Instead of creating printing blocks with images for a specific use in a single print-run, generic images were often created and print shops could use them for multiple prints and for various clients. 

So with these blocks, printers were replicating a rather generic artwork over and over again. In a print shop those printing blocks were called a cliché and later people outside this field started to use this word as well for something that is not original, overused, generic, or stereotypical. And speaking of stereotypical …

3. Stereotype

Creating a letterpress form with text and printing blocks can take a lot of time. And if the prints were all handed out or sold out and needed to be reprinted, the print shop essentially had to start from scratch, recreating the typesetting and the entire layout. It was possible to store the original letterpress forms to be used later, but that meant that all the letters and printing blocks that were used were not available for other prints anymore. So very often that just wasn’t an option. But the stereotype solved this problem.

A material like papier-mâché was pressed on the letterpress form and created a precise negative impression of the entire layout. And from that a new single form could be casted. And the result of that process was called a stereotype – which means “a solid form or impression”. And using this technique had another important advantage: this new cast didn’t necessarily had to be flat like the original letterpress form, but it could also be casted in a cylindrical shape to be used on the much faster rotary printing presses with cylindrical printing forms.

A machine for casting newspaper stereotypes in the early 20th century

And just like with the word cliché, people started to use the word stereotype outside the printing trade in a more metaphorical sense referring to generalized and replicated ideas or images.

4. Being “out of sorts”

“Sorts” are the various pieces of type stored in the compartments of the type case. Being “out of sorts” (i.e. not having enough of certain letters in a font) remained a continuous problem for hand composition. The compositor’s misery in such cases continues to live on in the phrase “out of sorts”, now meaning “being mildly unwell”. 

The definition of “sorts” in Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick exercises from 1683

5. Cut and Paste

This is a comparatively young phrase. It was coined in the days of phototypesetting in the second half of the 20th century before the introduction of desktop publishing. Before desktop publishing, the text columns were already created with (phototypesetting) machines, but the make-up or “paste-up” of the pages for printing was usually still done by hand. Columns, images, lines and even individual words had to be cut with scissors and scalpels to be moved to the right place and an adhesive (“paste”) was used to have all parts stick in place and allow further corrections until the finished layout could be photographed to be transferred onto an offset printing plate. Even though scalpels and adhesives are no longer necessary with digital type, the phrase “cut and paste” is still in use. 

The video The Lost Art of Paste-Up in our video directory shows how this process was done in the past. 

You know other interesting terms, which would fit in this article? Let us know in the comments below. And if you want to learn more about typography terms, check out our typography term glossary with hundreds of translations added by our community members. 

Apple is known for its closed ecosystem and font use is no exception. Until recently, there was no official way to install fonts on the mobile operating system of Apple devices. With iOS 13 and the new iPad OS, font installation on the system level is now officially supported. 

But you might have guessed it: you won’t be able to just use a mobile browser on your iPhone or iPad and download and install any font from the internet. Apple only lets apps install fonts on the system level. So foundries and other font providers need to create an app or embed this functionality into an existing one. We can expect implementations from companies like Adobe and Monotype soon, since Apple already announced a partnership during their keynote in June 2019. 

One of the first apps to support the new font installation feature is the Font Diner app. At this time, it only lets you install a bundle of fonts free for personal use, but it’s a good and easy way to try out the feature.  

The fonts delivered through this new feature can be directly included in the app package or downloaded in the background. Apple performs a validation of the fonts to make sure they are secure and functional. As you can see on the screenshot above, system-level font installation always requires user consent. 

Once the fonts are installed, you can get an overview of all custom fonts under Settings → General → Fonts. You can browse an alphabetic list of the fonts and see the styles, file size, copyright information and a font sample. You can also remove a font directly without having to access the app which installed it. Uninstalling a font installation app will also remove all fonts which came with the app. 

It is also worth mentioning that custom fonts being installed with this new method will not be available automatically in every app that uses system fonts. Apps need to opt in to use custom fonts. Going forward, most apps will likely do so, but you might need to wait for future updates of your favorite apps, before your custom fonts will appear as a choice in the font menu of certain apps. If you want to try out the feature, you can check out Pages, which already supports custom fonts. 

Custom fonts in the Pages app

The font in use in the printing museum Pavillon-Presse

Many of today’s revivals of letterpress fonts are created from original type specimen prints. Scanning and digitizing the letterforms is easy to do, but it also has its limits. For one, the technique of letterpress printing doesn’t create an exact representation of the original face on the letterpress letters. The way the letters press into the paper makes the ink spread out. The outline of the letters gets larger and softer and the ink might even close gaps or create unwanted blobs. The smaller the type, the stronger the impact of those effects. Type designers of digital type always need to make a choice about how they want to deal with this. Do they want to keep those letterpress effects or do they try to guess the original design of the face on the letterpress letters?

Original type specimen print

And there is another problem when typefaces are digitized from printed type specimens: The prints don’t reveal the actual size of the letters, so setting the sidebearings of each letter is usually guesswork. But with access to the original font, there was a way to overcome this problem. Not by trying to measure the tiny distances with a ruler, but by revealing them in a print. So the alphabet was set in a way, where all letters are enclosed in brass borders. 

Things got a little bit more complicated than originally expected—as you can see in the picture above. Some letters had overhanging parts (a.k.a. “kerns”), so a full brass line in the type size pressed against the letters would have easily broken off the kerns. So a matching combination of brass rules and spacing material was used for certain letters. But in the end, this process proved to be successful. From the print of this form specifically made for digitization, vectorizing the font using the original metrics was rather easy. 

The design was carefully digitized and extended to a complete Latin 1 character set. The font is called “Pavillon Gotisch” after the museum. Version A contains the original design with all the ligatures and swash characters, which can be accessed easily through OpenType. 

A second style (“B”) was added, which contains romanized letter variations, so the font can be more legible for people not trained in reading German blackletter texts. 

The fonts cannot be licensed directly. They are exclusively available to supporters of the museum or the Schriftkontor community websites Typography.Guru and Typografie.info. You can become a Typography.Guru now and get instant access to Pavillon Gotisch A and B with a full desktop license for up to 5 users. 

https://typography.guru/subscriptions/

By Thomas Bohm

I work with typography week in week out designing, illustrating and typesetting books, publications and websites and there is an issue that keeps coming up, which I would like to discuss. I am always amazed at the range of new typefaces being offered and new typographic possibilities, but there is a need in the market for very large and diverse typeface families. We need highly legible typeface families for extended reading which have a very broad language, character and symbol coverage. We are currently not swamped with typefaces in this area. If you or a graphic communication designer had to think of one typeface to use that may support an unusual character that you need, which is not supported in the typeface you are currently using, what would you try?: Minion by Robert Slimbach, I bet.

We have over 150,000 typefaces (also known as fonts) available for direct download, more are added every week. Most historical typefaces are also available in a digital form. How many though are truly up to the job and able to handle the most complex and diverse content? Let us take an academic article (like in an academic journal) as a case study. You would have the print edition in which you would have the Latin characters, possible small caps in upright and italic and oldstyle numerals, superscripts and subscripts, mathematical characters, foreign characters such as Greek for possible equations or formula, you also have tables of numerical data which you would need lining numerals. You may also need some dingbats (miscellaneous symbols). How many typefaces do you think that are available that can handle this type of information? The fact is, actually not a lot. You could probably count the ones immediately available to you on your computer on one hand. Next scenario, the print edition will also be published online, on a webpage in HTML. Most typefaces these days have webfont versions available, but does the typeface even support all the characters and symbols this academic article needs?

Veronika Burian (Burian, 2016) wrote an article called Why Do We Need More Typefaces? In it she mentions:

An effective way of weakening this question usually asked by lay persons is to pose another question, such as, ‘Do we have enough music, or clothes, or art?’ In the same spirit, I agree with Cyrus Highsmith’s reply, ‘You know, I heard the same thing about people!’.

Let me respond to this: we have lots of music, how much is actually good, truly unique and motivating? If you listen to music regularly, what percentage do you really like and keep, and what percentage do you wish you had not bought, downloaded and thus discarded? If you listen to a specific genre of music, as a percentage of all the music you have listened to, what percentage would you say is actually original and truly unique or inspiring? I think you know the answers to these questions, and feel I have made my point… I know this is a highly personal and subjective issue, who is to say what is truly good and what is truly bad? If we discuss clothing, which of your clothes last the longest and which ones disintegrate in no time at all. Which ones do you wear the most and which ones never? If we are discussing art, we could say: all art is good, it is good for the person making it, it is thought provoking for the person interacting with it, and better than probable blank walls. If we apply this analogy to typefaces, we could say all typefaces can be enjoyed and have a purpose. I am not going to attempt to bash or criticize things, merely to suggest an opportunity and active need in the market of typefaces. The issue is not necessarily: of how much (quantity), but of how useful (how useful is it and how useful could and should it be).

Why design new typefaces which are not really any different to others already designed in previous years and that non-typographers and non-designers would not be able to see any difference in? People think new is automatically better, how is it any better, in what way? I think we are getting to the stage where we have enough typefaces (at least from a shape style point of view). It seems typeface designers are happy with ‘reinventing a design of a wheel that already works’. Erik van Blokland (Biľak, 2011) says: ‘If an existing typeface does the job, there is no reason to make a new one.’ Erik Spiekermann (Båtevik, 2015) says ‘If you look at the type foundries, every foundry has a Times New Roman, Garamond, Helvetica, Futura and Din’. The point can also be made that: we cannot edit and extend an existing typeface because of copyright or ownership issues… I get this, so then a new typeface has to be created. The thing which is frustrating for me as a designer is that with new typefaces, they might not be much better or better at all aesthetically than something previously done. So what we have is a new typeface which might not be more usable (in terms of language and symbol support) which also might not be as good from a letter design/aesthetic point of view than a previously historical proven one. Maybe, as information designer Paul Mijksenaar (Mijksenaar, 2018) says on his companies website ‘Build on the good and make it better’. Essentially the point I am striving for is, if you make something new and similar to something that exists, make it much better than what has been previously available. Better in the letter design, language and symbol support, weight range, technically, hinting, etc. I would like to propose a new possibility that would really benefit typographers, people using typography and a wide variety of content. Why do we not faithfully update and add to previously well designed, used and proven typefaces? Are there any examples of this happening?, yes, Nadine Chahine at Monotype has designed Frutiger Arabic, Neue Helvetica Arabic and Univers Next Arabic. There is also the Frutiger Next family which supports Greek and Cyrillic, has small caps in all weights and has oldstyle and lining numerals. Recently the road signage typeface in the UK called Transport was updated and extended. It was originally designed between 1957–1963 by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, and then updated to include many different weights, text figures and small capitals by Henrik Kubel and Margaret Calvert in 2012. The first release of Transport did not have expert features and so was not really usable in an extended text setting. The typeface Noto commissioned by Google is also worth mentioning. Noto fonts cover all 93 scripts defined in Unicode version 6.0 (released 2010), although less than 30,000 of the nearly 75,000 Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) unified ideographs in version 6.0 are covered. In total, Noto fonts cover nearly 64,000 characters, which is under half of the 137,439 characters defined in Unicode 11.0 (released in June 2018).

Maybe we could use two typefaces, there is the possibility of using two or more typefaces (the x-height of the second typeface can be made the same as the containing/body text and the closest matching weight can be chosen from the second typeface), which is more in-keeping and contains all the characters and symbols you need. This is not ideal, it is much better to have everything you need from one font family.

What is the benefit of designing a very extensive character and symbol range for your typeface?: your typeface can be used for many more items, from airport signage to academic books and the web. The wider your typeface character and symbol support is, the more chance people will use it and the more useful it will be. Not for 1 minute am I suggesting that wide character and symbol support is easy for typeface designers to achieve. Typeface design is very hard, fact, it requires the input from specialists in many different areas and can take many years to finish. There is the actual design of the shapes, there is the kerning, there is the glyph naming and sorting, there is the hinting, coding, there are testing issues with people, software testing, and then there are sale and distribution issues. This is no easy process.

Accessible and more usable variations of characters and symbols

There are clear and actual needs for typefaces to have the option to choose more accessible and usable variations of characters and symbols. See research from myself called Letter and symbol misrecognition in highly legible typefaces for general, children, dyslexic, visually impaired and ageing readers [2018 third edition] (Bohm, 2018). Characters such as the capital I (i), lowercase l (el), number 1 (one) and 0 (zero) are usually not defined enough and can get misrecognised. There may also be a need for infant characters, for children. Here is a current need, not often available or supplied, that would be welcome for complex information design projects. Recently the typeface Source Sans has been released (16th September 2015), what is interesting from an accessibility view is that it offers through OpenType ‘sylistic sets’ option a capital I (i) with a stroke on the top and bottom, and infant lowercase a and g, and a slashed zero. This is what users of typefaces want, they want accessible character options. Unfortunately there is no capital I (i) with a stroke on the top and bottom in small caps upright or italic… and what about the diacritics, foreign language marks for this variant. Also, why not provide the default typeface setup using the most legible characters?, if the user then decides to use less legible characters available, then that is their choice. Provide the most legible character and symbols by default which does not rely on advanced typographic knowledge to implement.

Major brands commissioning new typefaces

In recent years we have seen major brands commission typeface designers to design them their own typeface. Recent examples include IBM (IBM Plex), Netflix (Netflix Sans), Apple (San Francisco) and BBC (Reith). Here once again we are seeing new typefaces. Why so? The main reason being that they can avoid huge typeface licensing costs associated with pre-existing typefaces. I actually understand and get why they do it and the important thing to note from a ‘new typeface perspective’ is that they are not directly offering them to the public, they are not giving us the option to buy them. The need and requirement for the new typeface primarily satisfies their own needs. Yes some might be available for public use, but they are not commissioning and designing them directly for the public to buy (like fulfilling consumer demand, put another way).

Examples of diverse information

• Different number styles like in timetables or financial tables.

• Use of a typeface on the web, which can encounter very diverse uses and applications.

• Different languages of the world.

• Mathematical formula.

• Signage in the environment.

• Information for children or the ageing, for example.

• Information being used by people with some kind of impairment.

• Dictionaries.

Examples of similar typefaces

Non-designers and non-typographers will not be able to tell the aesthetic difference communicated from the typeface’s letters and symbol shapes in typefaces like:

Sans serif

• Neue Haas Grotesk (1956), Helvetica (1957), Arial (1982), Bau (2002), Akkurat (2004), Aktiv Grotesk (2010), Acumin (2015), Real (2015).

• Frutiger (1976), Myriad (1992), Monotype SST (2017), Squad (2018), Silta (2018) (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: four typefaces (Frutiger, Myriad Pro, SST Pro, Squad, Silta) which non-designers and non-typographers will not notice the difference between.

• Avenier (1988), Corbel (2005).

• Avant Garde (1970), Century Gothic (1991).

Serif

• Arnhem (1998), Mercury Text (1999), Rosart (2016).

• Times (1931), Times New Roman (1932), Lyon Text (2009).

• Clarendon (1845), Sentinel (2009).

• ITC Century (1894), Clarion (1985), Miller Text (1997), Source Serif (2014).

• Swift (1987), Constantina (2006).

• Collis (1993), Novel (2008), Elena (2010), Permian (2011), Lava (2013).

Slab serif

• Serifa (1967), PMN Caecilia (1991), Roboto Slab (2013), Zilla Slab (2017).

• Rockwell (1934), Lubalin Graph (1974).

Examples of good, versatile and wide supporting typefaces

Lucida
The huge Lucida family designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes and released from 1984 onwards, consists of: Lucida Arrows, Lucida Blackletter, Lucida Bright (it features more contrasted strokes and serifs than Lucida Serif), Lucida Calligraphy, Lucida Casual (similar to Lucida Handwriting, but without connecting strokes), Lucida Console, Lucida Typewriter Serif, Lucida Fax, Lucida Handwriting, Lucida Icons, Lucida Math, Lucida OpenType, Lucida Sans, Lucida Grande (which supports Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai languages), Lucida Sans Typewriter, Lucida Sans Unicode, and Lucida Serif.

Minion
Designed by Robert Slimbach, the first version of Minion was released in 1990. A Minion Pro version was released in 2000 which contained expert glyphs (small caps, superscripts/subscripts, different numeral styles, etc.) in a range of weights (from regular to bold) and in condensed versions. It also supports Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese. There are italic swashes and ornaments also available. There is a Minion Math version externally available from Johannes Küster, each font has 5800 glyphs. In 2018 Minion Pro was re-released again, which is now called Minion 3. New features in the typeface include: African and Vietnamese languages, full IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) support, refinement of both the Cyrillic and the Greek extensively (even adding a second Greek style), and introduced a new script: Armenian.

Meta and Meta Serif (see also Fira)
Meta designed by Erik Spiekermann. The first version was digitally available in 1991 and contained basic Latin, small caps and oldstyle and lining numerals. Later an OpenType Pro version was released which supports Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Hebrew. The typeface is available in weights from Thin to Black and also condensed. In 2017 a Meta Georgian was released with design support from Akaki Razmadze which supports modern Georgian, as well as additional symbols for the Old Georgian, Megrelian, Svan, Abkhazian and Ossetian languages. In 2018 a Variable version of Meta was also made available.

Meta Serif was designed in 2007 by Erik Spiekermann, Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowersby. It is available from Light to Black and in a Pro version which contains expert glyphs (small caps, superscripts/subscripts, different numeral styles, etc.). Language support is extensive and supports Cyrillic and Greek.

Between 2011–2012 as part of the Carrois Type Design team and together with Erik Spiekermann commissioned by Edenspiekermann, a DG Meta Science was created for De Gruyter publishing house. It contains an expanded version of Meta and Meta Serif (called Meta Science and Meta Science Serif). It has two weights plus italics with more than 2800 glyphs. The typefaces contain extensive coverage of Latin Extended, Greek Extended, Cyrillic and Coptic writing systems, and also phonetic extensions, geometrical shapes and much more.

Fira
Originally designed by Erik Spiekermann, Ralph du Carrois, Anja Meiners and Botio Nikoltchev in 2013, it is available in 16 weights and has small caps and oldstyle numerals, it is also open-source (open-source means it is free for personal and commercial use and can be modified). Condensed and compressed versions were added along with Fira Mono and Fira Code.

Fira Go as of 2018 supports Arabic, Devanagari, Georgian, Hebrew and Thai letters in addition to Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. The designers were: Arabic (Ralph du Carrois, Titus Nemeth and Hasan Abu Afash), Devanagari (Rob Keller, Kimya Gandhi and Natalie Rauch), Georgian (Akaki Razmadze and Anja Meiners), Hebrew (Natalie Rauch with consultancy support by Yanek Iontef), Thai (Mark Frömberg with consultancy support by Ben Mitchell).

Figure 2: Fira typeface showing the different weights and styles available.

Figure 3: World map showing the language coverage of Fira Go. Dark blue text: languages covered by FiraGO. Light blue text: languages partly covered by FiraGO. Grey text: languages not yet covered by FiraGO. Map courtesy of bBox Type.

TheSans, TheMix, TheSerif
Designed by Lucas de Groot between 1994–1999. The most current version is fully OpenType Pro and supports Cyrillic and Greek. TheSans and TheMix come in Arabic versions. There is also a TheSans and TheMix Mono.

Cambria and Cambria Math
Cambria was commissioned by Microsoft and designed by Jelle Bosma in 2004. It has full OpenType Pro features and supports Greek and Cyrillic. Cambria Math was the first font to implement the OpenType math extension, itself inspired by TeX led by Jelle Bosma and Ross Mills. These typefaces come free with Windows Vista operating system up and Microsoft Office 2007 up.

Fedra Serif
Fedra Serif was designed in 2003 by Peter Biľak. It is fully OpenType Pro and has some range of math characters and symbols. It supports Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Armenian. It is available in weights from Book to Bold. Fedra is also available in Fedra Sans, Fedra Mono and Fedra Serif A and B with different ascender and descender heights (very useful for compact texts like in newspapers or dictionaries).

Examples of old typefaces which need to be faithfully and respectfully updated for 21st century use

• Why is Monotype Bembo italic small caps not available?

• Why is Info Display small caps not available?

• Why is Monotype Baskerville italic small caps not available?

• Why is Collis bold not available?

• Why is Arnhem Greek not available?

• Why is Lola small caps not available?

• Why is Adobe Symbol Medium italic, bold or Light not available?

• Why is Meta with a stroke on the top and bottom of the capital I (i) not available?

So what do we ideally need from new typefaces?

• Proper superscripts and subscripts.

• A range of numerical styles (oldstyle and lining).

• Small caps in all weights and variants.

• Extensive language support (Latin, European, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, CJK: Chinese/Japanese/Korean, etc.).

• Scientific and mathematical symbols.

• A range of dingbats.

• Swashes.

• Accessible characters.

• Infant characters.

• The typeface to be available in a wide range of weights (Thin to Extra Bold, Condensed).

• Maybe in styles such as monospace, handwritten, informal, slab and rounded sans serif versions.

• Available to buy and also open-source.

• Original and useful designs, or extension of historically proven typefaces.

• Good hinting (so the typeface renders well on screen).

Summary

• You could say we need no more similar typefaces which have a small character and symbol support, all which are basically the same to non-designers and non-typographers (the majority of your users).

• Is new automatically better? Do we need better of what we have?

• You could say we just need better and more extensive versions of typefaces already designed.

• We need some of the really good old typefaces like Monotype Bembo to have a full OpenType Pro range and have mathematical symbols, Greek, etc.

• Let’s collaborate better together as typeface designers and with typeface designers who can design for different languages and character support.

• Let’s build extensive typefaces available in both sans and serif which are truly useful and can support a wide range of information.

• In the typeface industry, we need both professional typefaces which are purchasable, and open-source typefaces which are free. The two different typeface categories each have their own uses for different circumstances.

References
Båtevik, B. (2015). Subtle Expression in Typography. BA thesis: Westerdals School of Communication, Norway. Retrieved October 2018, from http://arvebaat.com/erik-spiekermann.html.

Bohm, T. (2018). Letter and symbol misrecognition in highly legible typefaces for general, children, dyslexic, visually impaired and ageing readers [2018 third edition]. Retrieved October 2018, from https://typography.guru/journal/letters-symbols-misrecognition/.

Burian, V. (2016). Why Do We Need More Typefaces? Retrieved October 2018, from http://www.alphabettes.org/why-do-we-need-more-typefaces/.

Mijksenaar, P. (2018). https://www.mijksenaar.com.

This paper was amended half a day later after the publication date in regard to comments by Fred Smeijers and Erik Spiekermann, thanks Fred and Erik.

About the author
Thomas Bohm studied graphic communication design at college (BTEC, Leicester College, UK) and university (BA, Norwich University of the Arts, UK). Now works for book publishers and businesses, and continues to run User Design, Illustration and Typesetting a graphic communication design, illustration and production service. Writes, researches and occasionally publishes. Published Punctuation..? (2nd edition, User Design, 2012) a fun and fully illustrated book on punctuation. Has been published in Information Design Journal, Baseline, Slanted and is a member of the Association of Illustrators and the International Institute for Information Design. 

Try to recognize who is shown on 15 sketches drawn by the Spanish designer and illustrator Evelio Gómez, who published the images under the Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA 2.0. 

In 2015 I published a revival of Elfen-Fraktur—a unique monolinear blackletter typeface. With the release of Krimhilde I am continuing on this path. Elfen-Fraktur was originally published in 1919—the year the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar. The Bauhaus designers had radical ideas about typography. They tried to reduce the letterforms to the most simple geometric shapes and even proposed to stop using uppercase and lowercase together in favor of one alphabet. Their experimental designs didn’t came into broad use, but type designers outside the Bauhaus incorporated some of the ideas. This gave birth to the category of the “geometric sans”, which remains popular until today. Erbar-Grotesk (by Jakob Erbar released at Ludwig & Mayer), Kabel (by Rudolf Koch released at Gebr. Klingspor) and Futura (by Paul Renner released at Bauersche Gießerei) are typical and successful examples of this category.

While blackletter was still in broad use during that time, the type modernization of the 1920s was almost exclusively applied to non-blackletter or “roman” typefaces—called Antiqua in German. As Jan Tschichold put it in his New Typography manifest:

❝ None of the typefaces to whose basic form some kind of ornament has been added (serifs in Roman type, lozenge shapes and curlicues in Fraktur) meet our requirements for clarity and purity. Among all the types that are available, the so-called “Grotesque” (sanserif) or “block letter” (skeleton letters would be a better name) is the only one in spiritual accordance with our time.❞

In the 1930s, designers and type foundries started to consider to replicate the popular modernization of sans-serif designs in the category of blackletter typefaces. But how should this be done? The typical German blackletter design of this time was the Fraktur—a rather calligraphic, broad-nip pen design, that wasn’t very suitable to be reduced to simple geometric shapes. So the designers came up with a different approach: They went back to the origins of blackletter—the textura of the Gothic period. Those designs already used a very simple and geometric letter skeleton, but often had elaborate decorations at the same time. By stripping all the decorations, a modern blackletter look was created. Several of these typefaces started to appear from 1933 onwards, creating a new blackletter category. 

Modern German blackletter in the 1930s. Left: Element typeface by Max Bittrof. Right: Hindenburg Lettering by Georg Wagner

But there was another benefit in going back to the origins of blackletter. At that time, roman and blackletter designs were much closer together. So using the old textura letter skeletons bridged the gap between roman and blackletter designs. This contributed to the modern look and reduced legibility concerns. 

And this brings us back to Krimhilde. Its designer Albert Auspurg also tried to bridge the gap between blackletter and roman typefaces to create modern and legible letters. But he chose a different path to achieve this. Instead of going with textura letter shapes, he merged the geometric sans with Fraktur in a rather unique way. The lowercase letters of Krimhilde use roman proportions and geometric designs, just as typefaces like Futura. But where possible, a blackletter treatment is added as well. The angular stroke endings are an example of this. The uppercase letters of Krimhilde use the typical Fraktur designs, but in an unusual monolinear application. 

Type specimen images of the metal type version of Krimhilde published by Ludwig & Mayer

Krimhilde was published in a regular and a bold style. It didn’t became very successful in the 1930s. After World War II, blackletter came out of use in Germany and so there was little demand for any of the modern blackletter fonts from the 1930s. Krimhilde was dropped from the catalogs of the type foundry Ludwig & Mayer and became forgotten. 

Krimhilde from FDI Type, released in 2018

But I believe Krimhilde has its charm and so I decided to revive it. Just as with Elfen-Fraktur, I did not just digitize the outlines from scans. Instead I recreated both the regular and bold design by starting with just the letter skeletons. And I also created two versions again: version A is close to the original design with all its traditional blackletter shapes. Of course the fonts also include a long s (ſ) and the German blackletter ligatures such as ch/ck/ſch/tt and tz as stylistic set. Version B swaps some letters with roman letter shapes, which are more legible to readers not familiar with the traditional blackletter designs. 

Version A and B of the new Krimhilde

In addition to the basic set (regular and bold as version A and B), I added some display styles to use Krimhilde as layer font with multiple colors. There is a shadow and a fill style available for the regular and the bold version and an outline style just for the bold versions. All Krimhilde styles have a full Latin 1 character set. 

• Krimhilde at Fontspring
• Krimhilde at FDI Type Foundry

Today’s demand for a capital ß (“sharp s”) character is a functional demand. And a very simple one at that. It logically follows from two points: 

• How the lowercase ß character is used today in the German alphabet
• How the Latin script works today as double-story alphabet

Put these things together and it should be clear that the ß requires an uppercase counterpart like any other Latin character as well. So people still arguing against the capital ß will usually just ignore the functional aspects of it. They have to. Instead they typically argue in one of two ways:

• “because something in history …”
• or “because something is wrong with the design” 

The history of the character ß is an interesting topic. It might be one of the most interesting ones of all the Latin characters which developed over the last couple of centuries and I discussed what we know about this history in previous articles. But whatever you know (or think to know) about the history of the character—it cannot be a proper argument against a capital ß, because it has no influence on the two bullet points listed above. So it’s by definition irrelevant. And very often people arguing this way actually know very little about the history of the character. They just go by simple claims they picked up many years or even decades ago, which might not even be true or it might just be a tiny piece of the puzzle. 

But what about the design arguments against the capital ß? Now that the character is part of the official German orthography, the design argument seems to be the last straw for the “grumpy holdouts” in our field still rejecting the character. And of course it’s the most tricky aspect, since whether or not all or specific capital ß designs are successful is subjective. If someone likes or dislikes all or specific capital ß designs, everyone else might just want to respect that. It’s just an opinion and probably an honest description of a personal perception. But people might also argue for their opinion. They might try to give objective reasons why something is supposedly intrinsically wrong with the typical capital ß designs or even the idea of the capital ß itself. And those reason can and should be checked. Normally, the burden of proof would be on the ones making such claims. But unfortunately, after all these years debating the capital sharp s, not a single article has been written trying to make a convincing case against its design or existence. All we get is short social media posts with opinions and bold assertions. So let’s look at the reasoning we can gather from these posts against the capital sharp s design. 

Examples of modern capital sharp s designs: Scotch Modern, Goodchild Pro, Rooney

Most capital sharp s designs today are based on a kind of “capitalized” ß, i.e. a design derived from the lowercase sharp s. That shouldn’t be a surprise. This design is instantly legible without requiring millions of readers to learn a completely new letter. At the same time it fixes the typographic problems one would create by putting the lowercase ß between capital letters as a work-around for the previously missing character. And this was and still is common practice. Even official documents like German passports did it this way to maintain the correct spelling of names in uppercase. But typographically, the ß character, like any lowercase character, isn’t meant to be put between uppercase characters. It might have a different height and it doesn’t use uppercase proportions. A capital sharp s based on a capitalized version of the ß can fix these problems. And so all functional and typographic problems are solved this way. Yet, some typographers, type or graphic designers insist, that this approach is somehow flawed and any capital sharp s created this way is intrinsically flawed because of it. In the most general way those people say: 

• “You can’t create an uppercase character from a lowercase character.”

But most of the time it is actually phrased this way: 

• “You can’t create an uppercase character from a lowercase ligature”.  

Well, let’s look at those claims logically and one by one.

The first one is based on the knowledge, that the (basic) set of Latin uppercase letters existed first. The lowercase letters came later and the claim essentially suggests, that this is the “natural order”, which can’t be reversed. The claim can be understood in two ways: either it talks just about the order of the development or about the designs that follow from that order. The order itself can hardly be used against the capital ß, because the same argument could also be used against the German umlauts (ä/ö/ü), which also existed as lowercase first. But no one really questions their existence, do they? 

But what about the design? Can we derive a proper uppercase shape from a lowercase character? Well, of course we can! Characters, not unlike words, are human-made cultural tools of communication. We create and shape them as we need them. And we have done this for thousands of years. If there is a functional demand for a word, we create it. If there is a functional demand for an uppercase letter, we can create it as well. The only reason this specific demand didn’t exist in the past was that German was mostly set in blackletter, which used mixed-case typesetting only. And since the ß never appears at the beginning of words, there simply was no demand for a capital version. Now this demand exists and and so now we create the letter. Plain and simple. 

But can we “reverse-engineer” the design process so to speak? And do we have to do that? Because one could argue, that the perfect capital ß would be one that could have existed 1000 or 2000 years ago and then later turned into the lowercase letter ß we use today. And people then argue, that the typical capital ß designs today are intrinsically flawed, because they don’t do that and just jump from lowercase to uppercase by “capitalizing” the lowercase shape. They basically say, that as long we can recognize the lowercase ß in there, it remains a lowercase letter and as a capital letter design is therefore flawed. So what about this argument? 

I fail to see any logic in it. It’s the reasoning you come up with while doing post-hoc rationalization. Because it just isn’t in line with reality. Again, we can look at the history of the German alphabet. German blackletter is full of (what we today consider) lowercase shapes turned into uppercase. 

Sachsenwald

A blackletter H can be seen as the lowercase shape turned into an uppercase letter by changing the proportions and adjusting the design to fit the other uppercase letters. And that is exactly what is currently happening with the capital sharp s designs. But why do some consider this wrong for the capital ß, but they don’t complain about those blackletter shapes? If it happened in the past it is okay, if it happens today it is flawed? 

And to fully drive this point home, just consider this thought experiment: A type designer would have been shielded his or her whole life from seeing the Latin letter s/S. And then one day we show him or her the lowercase letter and ask the designer to create a proper uppercase version. What would the designer do? Well, we can’t know for sure, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the designers takes the letter skeleton of the lowercase s and enlarges it regarding its size and proportions to fit the other uppercase letters. The result could look exactly like our S looks today. But would this shape now be flawed because the lowercase character came first? Of course not! That would obviously be an absurd claim in this case. But it is the same claim people keep using against today’s uppercase ß designs. 

Today’s capital sharp s designs are nothing new by the way. As an example, this typeface from 1915 (“Koralle”) already used an uppercase design based on the lowercase design

Visual similarities between a Latin uppercase letter and its lowercase counterpart aren’t a flaw—they are perfectly normal. Some character pairs (like S/s, as well as ones based on ligatures such as W/w) are very similar, others less so. But either way—it’s not a criteria for good or bad letter designs. The design of the S isn’t wrong, because it can be seen as a capitalized s. The blackletter H isn’t wrong because it looks like a capitalized h. And the capital ß isn’t wrong, because it looks like a capitalized ß. This is a logic in line with the reality of the Latin script. 

A good or bad letter design depends on the the skill of the type designer. Today’s Latin fonts need to work in both mixed-case and uppercase-only typesetting. That is the challenge for the type designer and with the capital sharp s being new, not all designs might be perfect yet. But logically, there is just no intrinsic flaw just because the lowercase letter came first. Simply knowing what came first, doesn’t affect how the readers perceive and read those letters. 

Now let’s move on to the ubiquitous ligature myth. Some people in our field seem to be unable to to see the letter ß as anything else than a ligature. And starting with that as a premise, they come to typical conclusions like: 

• if it’s a ligature (like fi/fl) it’s not really a regular letter and there is no need for an uppercase version. 

We won’t address this in detail in this article. But the conclusion is wrong since the premise is factually wrong. Today, the sharp s cannot be grouped with typographic ligatures (like fi/fl). It anything, it would have to be grouped with character such as w and æ — regular characters historically probably derived from ligatures. 

But when type designers understand the ß as a ligature of two lowercase letter, they might think that an uppercase version needs to follow the same logic and so the uppercase ß must be created from the uppercase counterparts of whatever lowercase parts the ß is made of. And since there is supposedly a long s (ſ) in the ß design, some might conclude that a capital version cannot be created at all, since there is no capital ſ. 

Once more, I fail to see any good reasoning behind such claims. First of all, if you think the original lowercase parts of the ß matter and should be used for the uppercase version as well, which parts would those even be and how can you be sure to pick the right ones? Because at this point, there isn’t even scientific consensus about the origin of the ß. There is a single paper by Herbert E. Brekle, which can be considered scientific. But it mentions several possible sources. It might be one of those. It might be a combination. There might be other theories and sources that still need to be explored. Considering this status quo, it’s really surprising and disappointing how many designers and typographers claim to know what the ß was and therefore supposedly also “is”. (Which by the way is another logical fallacy.)

But even if we would know for sure what the original parts of the ß are and if we happened to have those available in the uppercase alphabet: Would we need to create a new ligature from those individual uppercase letters? No! Case in point: We didn’t do that with the umlaut characters either. A German ä has definitely developed from merging lowercase a and e. When the uppercase versions were created much later, they didn’t use an Æ design to recreate the merger of a and e in uppercase as A and E. The type designers and writers of the time adopted the common design of the lowercase umlauts for the uppercase versions as well. At that time, that usually meant to put a lowercase(!) e on top of the uppercase letter. Not a very logical thing to do in terms of type history, but an understandable solution nevertheless. And one that isn’t questioned at all in hindsight. So why shouldn’t we be able to do that with the uppercase ß as well?

And last but not least, there is another problem with the typical ligature arguments against the capital sharp s designs: It ignores the two historic branches of the German alphabet: blackletter and roman (or “Antiqua” as it is called in German). The sharp s was established when blackletter was the dominant type style in Germany. There is no doubt about that. But if we talk about the design of today’s typefaces, we hardly ever mean blackletter typefaces. We mean the roman designs. But it is a fact that the roman ß hasn’t developed from a ligature. It hasn’t developed at all. It was introduced by a committee as a new character with a new design at the beginning of the 20th century.

The ß design as introduced and used in the early 20th century. 

The left part does indeed look like a long s (ſ), but that special character had already been removed from the roman orthography of the German language at that point. And the right part was neither a roman s, nor a roman z. So calling it a ligature actually makes little sense. If anything, it hints at a ligature design. It didn’t develop from a ligature, nor did the “parts” even exist individually in the orthography they were used in. What was created was a single roman letter with its own unique design. And that by the way is how the vast majority of people in Germany and Austria perceive it. They don’t see a ligature in the character w and they don’t see one in the character ß. It’s one design in both cases. 

So if we talk about the design for the roman capital ß, what else should it be based on than the lowercase ß? Why go further back than its introduction at the beginning of the 20th century? Why go by our sketchy knowledge about blackletter predecessors? In today’s roman typefaces, we hardly ever draw any German character (ß, ä/Ä, ö/Ö, ü/Ü) the way they looked in blackletter. So why would the capital ß—as the only exception—have to be based on asserted historic lowercase parts in blackletter put together again as uppercase ligature? It’s just not conclusive and the logical fallacy of special pleading. 

In conclusion: if some people don’t like an uppercase ß that reminds them of the lowercase ß, so be it. But I can’t see how you can make a case, that this would be an objective flaw of such designs. If the existing uppercase characters are allowed to have similarities to their lowercase counterparts, so does the capital ß. Insisting that a capital sharp s with similarities to the lowercase ß remains a lowercase letter or ligature because of those similarities—even though it was specifically drawn as uppercase letter with uppercase proportions—is frankly an absurd claim because it is not in line with the reality of the Latin script. And the assumption, that the ß character developed from a ligature also doesn’t change anything in that regard. If you accept German umlaut characters not to be drawn from their historic parts, then logically you should accept the same for the uppercase ß. 

The Latin script has a history spanning over thousands of years and characters were added all the time. There is nothing special about the current change of adding a capital sharp s. In the future and in hindsight, neither this change nor the design will be questioned. Just because this single change out of the hundreds of changes happens in the present and is in conflict with the typesetting conventions one grew up with, doesn’t mean that it is flawed. Sure, a new character might briefly stand out because it is new. But that doesn’t mean there is something wrong with the design. In the end, it’s all in the hands of today’s type designers. We know they can draw a coherent set of over 100 Latin characters and all sorts of optional ligatures—nothing is stopping them to make their capital sharp s designs work just like any other Latin character. 

Letterpress version and type specimen of Bona

Mateusz Machalski started the project in 2011, when he was in his second year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The font had only existed in metal type and it was available in the typesetting room of the academy. When Machalski became interested in the font, his professor arranged a meeting with its designer Heidrich. “I was surprised that he did not laugh at my projects. It made me more confident and I told him about my idea. He reacted with real enthusiasm” Machalski remembers. Digitization started quickly after that meeting, but the work remained unfinished for a few years.

In 2016, together with Leszek Bielski, the project was revived again. More meetings with Heidrich took place and an extended type family (regular, italic, bold) was planned. Bona was Heidrich’s only full type design. But as graphic designer in those days, lettering for book jackets for example was a typical job. But there was little choice for body copy texts.  “We always worked with 12 pt Times or Garamond—to the point of boredom. Each book looked the same inside. There was a deep need for new typefaces. For each cover or other design the lettering was custom made. It had to be drawn or painted, as there was not enough time to create and cast new letters.”

Original sketches and matrices

Heidrich worked on Bona as a side project—for the “pure pleasure” of it as he remembers. There was no specific brief or job for the design. The typeface was cast and a full set ended up in the typesetting studio of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where it was used occasionally. 

For the digitization Heidrich provided all the original sketches of the italic and the matrices could be inspected as well. But there were still so many design decisions to be made for the digital version. “With Bona Nova, the most interesting things happened during the design work. I published images and details about the progress on the internet and the Bona Nova fanpage became a stage for a typographic debate on many levels” says Machalski. 

Among other details, the design for the Capital Sharp s was heavily discussed on Facebook

And of course a roman design had to be developed from the italic, which is rather unusual. Letters on stamps and banknotes by Heidrich helped to work out certain characteristics. The final designs got an extended Latin character set with over 1000 glyphs, including small caps, lots of ligatures, multiple figure sets and ornaments.

But the family still continued to grow. Three inline versions were added and three title versions with a very high contrast. These are available as commercials offers. And there might be more in the future. “There are some plans—perhaps Cyrillic? Maybe a sans serif version … Only time will tell.”

Specimen images from Bona Nova

The free styles of Bona Nova

The commercial styles of Bona Nova

The free and the commercial styles are available on the Capitalics website.

More information about the project in Polish and English here: http://bonanova.wtf

Today we take it for granted to use fonts for almost anything. Not just printed matter, but also logos, stamps, t-shirts, neon letters, and so on. Anything is possible—we just need to provide an image file. But this is a rather new development, considering how long movable type is in use. Over more than 500 years, fonts (made from metal or wood) were connected to letterpress printing, were each letter had to be made in the target print size, arranged by a typesetter, inked and finally printed on a surface like paper. That’s how things like the text block of books, flyers, letter heads, business cards, or posters were being made. But this technique was not suitable in many other areas. Think of a 50 inch sign on a train station building for example. It wouldn’t make sense to create a set of 50 inch letters just for this case and then press these huge letters against a sign or even the building wall itself. It was done differently and the following sections describe typical areas where letters were often not created using fonts.   

The Signpainter

Signs over shops or on shop windows, political banners, train station signs, advertising boards and banners, large-scale ads on walls—those are all uses usually created by sign painters in the past. A sign painter could draw or write alphabets in many different styles, but his job had little to do with the letterpress letters used in print shops. The sign painter’s tool were brushes and pencils and every sign was usually a unique design, with letters specifically drawn for this one use. That’s what we call lettering.   

Sign painter training

But it wasn’t just advertising. Even street signs, or the signage for busses or trains could have been lettering. If the same letters had to be repeated over and over again, there might have been stencils or technical drawings for each letter. But those were usually just for internal use, not sold publicly like letterpress fonts. And because of that, there was often not even a need to name the sets of letters just used internally. And so we also cannot identify a certain name in hindsight. The only chance is that the sign painter’s alphabets were interesting enough for someone to create a font later based on the original lettering design. 

A sign painter working on streetcar signs in the 1940s.

Older logos, like the one from Coca-Cola in this case, were almost always drawn, not made from fonts

Logos and mastheads

Setting the logo of a brand or company in a certain typeface—or at least to base the design on a typeface—is very common today. But before the computer, logos were almost always created as individual drawings by a graphic designers. The same is true for mastheads of newspapers and magazines. They weren’t printed every time from moveable type. The were designed once and then turned into a printing block or “logotype”. In fact, this is were the term logo comes from originally. Combining several letters or full words to one unit was called a logotype (from Greek: logos → word). And since this was so common for the names of companies, logotype (or logo for short) became a synonym for visual trade marks of any kind, even the ones that don’t contain letters or words.  

Book covers

The body copy of books is usually being printed from moveable type since Johannes Gutenberg. But the same was not necessarily true for book covers and dust jackets. They are designed by illustrators and graphic designers and before the computer, if there were letters, they were created as lettering—drawn in the original size just for this one use. And while it was less common, title pages or pages starting new chapters could also get such a lettering treatment. 

Product lettering

Clock faces, food and cosmetics packaging, tube radios, vacuum cleaners, coffee makers and so—letterpress fonts weren’t suitable for putting letters on such products in the past. So even if the design of letters on such product looks similar to letterpress fonts, they were usually not made using fonts.  

Stonemasonry

Just as the sign painters created the lettering on signs, stone cutters created the lettering on stones, may it be inscriptions on walls, tombstones, or on plaques mounted on buildings. And even while the letters might look as uniform as the ones in a typical font, before the computer, such stone cuttings were usually not made using fonts. The letters were designed and carved by the stone cutter for the specific application. 

Handwriting/calligraphy

Most of the examples mentioned above fall into the category we call lettering. But letters can also be created with a another technique, that neither is lettering nor uses fonts: handwriting (or calligraphy, as we call it as an art form). Many requests in our font identification forum simply show handwriting, but people still ask for a “font identification”. Typing everything has become so common today, it might not even occur to people anymore, that things like logos, poster texts, or advertising claims might be handwritten. And modern script OpenType fonts might indeed even look a lot like lettering or calligraphy. But usually, if one takes a closer look, handwritten texts and fonts can still be distinguished very clearly. 

Defining the terms

What do these terms mean anyway? The most simple explanation is: a typeface is what you see, a font is what you use. Both refer to a “set of letters (or symbols to put it more broadly) with a specific style”, but the term typeface puts the focus on the artistic work, whereas font points to the actual tool to arrrange and print or display text using a design with a specific style. Considering the most common techniques, this tool can be …

• the letters (made from materials such as metal or wood) in a single letterpress type case
• a phototypesetting disc or strip containing letters as photographic negatives
• a digital font file containing letters as digital outlines 

Fonts used for different typesetting techniques

In contrast to what one might expect, most dictionaries aren’t of much help either and they demonstrate that the problems around the distinction between the two terms isn’t a new phenomenon caused by computer users with a lack of knowledge about letterpress printing. Most English dictionaries I checked use something like a “set of letters in a particular design” as the key element for the definition—but for both terms! The additional characteristics usually vary. Some limit the terms to printing, others have updated this to include today’s digital use as well. Some mention a specific size for fonts, some make that optional or omit it altogether. 

But most experts in our field probably agree that at its core, it’s about the visual design on the one hand (☞ typeface), and the useable manifestation or instance of this design (☞ font) on the other hand. And this broad definition works for all typesetting techniques. 

The debate

It can’t be denied: The term font is used all the time in our field today. We go to sites like myfonts.com, fonts.com, fontshop.com and download digital font files to put them in a font folder and later use them in our application by opening the font menu. And other designers who see our work might later ask for a “font identification”. 

Still, there are people who reject this use of the word font, because it is not a perfect match with how they might have learned to define it decades ago when they started out with letterpress printing. Yes, fonts for letterpress printing happened to be size-specific. It’s just a physical requirement of this technique. And in a letterpress cabinet, each size of a typeface would be referred to as individual font. But as shown before, this is not necessarily a key element nor a requirement to define the term font for all eternity. Just as with the material by the way. Font (or “fount”) probably comes from the “melting” or “casting” of the metal alloy in order to make the moveable type. Yet, the same term was used when wood type became common, even though nothing is actually melted or casted in this case. Despite the conflict with the “original” meaning of the term font, it made sense to adopt it for wood type as well, because the purpose was the same. And the same thing happened with the shift to scalable fonts with phototypesetting and later digital typesetting. A phototypesetting disc was neither casted from metal nor was it restricted to a specific type size. Yet, just as a letterpress font it was used to typeset a specific type design and that’s why the term font was used as well. Sure, we could also use completely different terms for different typesetting techniques, but using a shared definition for letterpress fonts, phototypesetting fonts and digital fonts is just a normal effective use of language. 

The interchangeable use of font and typeface

Now that we have clarified what the terms mean and why they exist the way they do, let’s move on to the actual question of this article. A typical complaint about today’s use of font and typeface is that the interchangeable use removes the distinction between the terms and so this is something that must be avoided. But in my opinion, that is a flawed logic, which often seems to be based on the assumption that only one term could be correct in any situation. The other extreme—which is also quite common today—is to say we should just give up and accept that these terms are essentially synonyms today. I disagree with both positions. They only propose two possible options: the use of these terms must be exclusive or identical. But that is a false dilemma. There are more options and I want to argue, that the interchangeable use of font and typeface is mostly the result of the fact, that both terms usually apply at the same time and so it just doesn’t matter much which one we pick. 

Let me explain that with an analogy. Take the words “song” and “recording” for example. They aren’t synonyms of course. I can whistle a melody and someone standing next to me might recognize the “song”. The person is standing next to me, listening to me. No recording was involved. But I could also give a talk and someone makes an audio recording of it. There is now a “recording”, but since it was just talking, the word song wouldn’t make sense. Both words have different meanings and in these two examples only one was valid in each case. But if we talk about music albums for example, both terms apply at the same time. There are songs—the musical composition (and optionally lyrics)—and there is a specific recording of that song on a certain album. If we talk about a specific album, it doesn’t matter if we refer to the songs or the recordings on that album. We could mean exactly the same thing. The recordings are the manifestations of the songs and both are bound together. This relationship can be shown in a very simple Venn diagram: 

There can be exclusive and overlapping uses of the terms. It doesn’t have to be “exclusive” or “identical”.  Usually we just refer to a song or a recording by the same name written on the album cover and there are hardly any confusions. The linguistic symbols are pointing to the same thing. But as shown in the diagram, there are exclusive uses as well. A song might appear on different albums of the same artist or even different artists. In this case song and recording clearly point to different things and we need to make sure to use the correct words. 

And I would argue, that typeface and font share the same relationship as song and recording. When a new typeface or family with different styles is released, there will be fonts available to actually use the design or the different designs within the family. It goes without saying. And that’s the overlapping use that explains the interchangeable use. Helvetica Bold Italic is both a typeface and an available font. But that does not mean that typeface and font are synonyms. The exclusive uses remain as well. A type designer sketching letters in a notebook isn’t drawing a font. The designer is working on the visual artwork—the typeface! If the designer ships that typeface in various font formats I might have a folder on my computer with one typeface, but two or more fonts. In such cases an interchangeable use of font and typeface would make little sense and might cause unnecessary confusion. 

Conclusion

Words don’t have intrinsic meanings—words have usages. Therefore it makes little sense to cling to a very narrow metal type definition of the word font, just because that happens to be the first or literal meaning of that word. It’s almost ridiculous to deny the reality of the usage of the word that became common with phototypesetting and digital type. Nothing is lost anyway. It is always possible to apply a broader or more narrow meaning depending on what the specific context requires, as we do it with many other words as well. If necessary, we can use a broader meaning for the word font which covers all typesetting techniques. And at the same time we can create categories and sub-categories to be highly specific about certain types of fonts. The specifics of a letterpress font can still be described by referring to it as “letterpress font” or “wood type font” to be even more specific. 

And in my opinion the interchangeable use of font and typeface is fine, as long as we stay in that overlapping area of the Venn diagram. There can be a fine line between words being used interchangeably in certain contexts and words being synonyms. In this case, it is a difference that matters and one that we should be aware of. 

The idea is simple: instead of requiring low vision readers to enlarge the letters until they become legible, a new kind of “script” is being tested, that provides the uniqueness of each character by the means of digital screens: simple block shapes + colors + animations. The combination of these features allows a full character set without requiring the level of detail of traditional typefaces. 

The results look promising. According to the study, the script can be learned with similar effort than existing foreign scripts. And the legibility benefits (which means: being legible with less magnification) could be demonstrated for both readers with low and normal vision. “Increased legibility from livefonts can potentially help reduce or eliminate the magnification needed to identify letters. Sighted users can also benefit, especially people reading small text on small screens, those who wear glasses but do not always have them at hand, and people who need glasses but cannot afford them.”

The study was done by Danielle Bragg (University of Washington, Seattle, WA), Shiri Azenkot (Cornell Tech, New York, NY), Kevin Larson (Microsoft, Redmond, WA), Ann Bessemans (Hasselt University/PXL-MAD School of Arts Hasselt, Belgium), Adam Tauman Kalai (Microsoft Research Cambridge, MA). 

You can read the full paper here:
https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~dkbragg/papers/livefonts.pdf

The following video provides a quick summary. 

The typefaces were modeled around Wolpe’s original Albertus, Fanfare, Pegasus, Tempest and Sachsenwald designs, embracing their collective quirks and deliberate inconsistencies. “The inconsistencies in Wolpe’s designs were freeing in the sense that it taught me to challenge conventional design and rethink how typefaces should be constructed,” said Toshi Omagari, Type Designer at Monotype. “Wolpe made compromises in his designs due to the limitations of typesetting in his time. However, the modern digital environment means that typefaces can be revised to capture his original design vision and applied across a wide range of offline and online media.”

Wolpe’s designs achieved varying levels of popularity when they were first created, but weren’t meant to be used exclusively in their era. And while the Albertus typeface has been used in some modern applications, the others were never digitized, and as a result, faded from view. Monotype saw the opportunity to revive these designs with contemporary appeal and flair.

Albertus Nova has been expanded to include a set of small capitals and five weights. The fonts incorporate original designs including a new capital J and Q and fixing different proportions and lost details of characters. The Albertus Nova typeface also reintroduces a number of alternate capital letters originally created by Wolpe, including an unusual M with a lower apex and a slanted left stroke, a W with crossing center strokes, a 2 with a closed loop, and an open ampersand. Monotype has also added new designs including an A with a top bar, a lunar-shaped lower and upper E and a long-tailed Q and R.

The Fanfare typeface was built for Fanfare Press in 1935 and has graced hundreds of book covers. The sharp resolution of digital media makes the Wolpe Fanfare typeface great for display use. It is available now in six weights. 

Building off the original Pegasus typeface commissioned by Monotype in 1937 as the text companion to the Albertus design, the Wolpe Pegasus design takes advantage of its predecessors’ inconsistencies. For example, characters that would conventionally share details, such as b, d, p and q, don’t share them in this set. Additionally, some serifs in the uppercase alphabet of the Pegasus typeface are different. This was a conscious effort by Wolpe to create individual letterforms. Wolpe Pegasus keeps every convention-defying detail of the original character set and adds Regular and Bold weights (with italics) as well as small caps and various sets of numerals.

The Tempest typeface was originally created exclusively for use on book jackets by Fanfare Press and, despite being designed in the mid-1930s. The revived Wolpe Tempest design continues on its original path to set itself apart from the formal and static sans serif italic typefaces of that era and offers three weights, including Regular, Bold and Black, preserving Tempest’s unmistakable profile and skeleton. It also offers alternates for the A, B, D, E, L, M, N, P, R, X, Y and Z characters which sport flourishes on entry and exit strokes, and are great for adding extra embellishments to book titles, logotypes and headlines.

Monotype has digitized the original Sachsenwald typeface for the first time, adding an alternate X character to the original set to make it more legible. Wolpe first created the Sachsenwald design for a German publisher, who abandoned the order just before World War II. Wolpe then tried to make the Sachsenwald typeface suitable for use in the general public, with the hope that it would ignite the interest of “horizon-scanning advertisers” and create a “passing vogue” for blackletter type. The letterforms are softer and less decorative than traditional blackletter script. However, the use of blackletter type declined in favor of more legible Roman type within Germany and was not popular in other regions of the world – keeping the Sachsenwald typeface from achieving wider adoption at that time. Monotype saw the opportunity to revive and preserve a beautiful design and bring it into the modern era – as blackletter usage becomes more commonplace in areas such as publishing, fashion and album covers.

The Wolpe Collection is available now. The Albertus Nova, Wolpe Fanfare and Wolpe Tempest designs are available in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. The Wolpe Pegasus and Sachsenwald designs are available in Latin, only.

When the German lowercase letter ß (“sharp s”) was standardized and added to all German typefaces around 1900, the addition of a capital version was planned as well. But the introduction was postponed, because the committee couldn’t agree on a design in time. In the end it took over 100 years to get the ball rolling again. 

Fonts with a Capital Sharp S made in the early 20th century. Their use didn’t catch on and it wasn’t part of the German orthography. 

The discussion around the missing uppercase letter started again in the 21st century after changes to the German orthography, which reduced the occurrences  of the letter ß, but gave it a more distinct phonetic function. But this function was lost when texts were set in uppercase only and German names became ambiguous as well. So once again, the introduction of a Capital Sharp S was proposed. In 2008 it was added to the Unicode standard and after that type designers could start to add it to their typefaces. More than a thousand new type families containing a Capital Sharp S have been released since then—and a keyboard layout with support for the Capital Sharp S was standardized as well. 

A children’s book from 2014 using a Capital Sharp S

And even though the letter wasn’t yet part of the official German orthography, more and more people started to use it. The Council for German Orthography as well as the publishers of German dictionaries like Duden had acknowledged the usefulness of a Capital Sharp S years ago, but they couldn’t prescribe the use of a letter that wasn’t available on keyboards and in fonts. 

Eight years after the addition to the Unicode, the Council for German Orthography decided that the time was now right for an uppercase ß. They proposed a change to the orthography in 2016 and after the approval process in all the countries using the German language the change became official in June of 2017. 

The change doesn’t mean that everyone now has to use a Capital Sharp S. The previous spelling of replacing ß with SS in uppercase texts remains the default for the time being. But using the Capital Sharp S is now officially allowed as well and wouldn’t count as spelling mistake anymore. 

Addition Information:

• Press Release of the Counsil for German Orthography (in German)
• The Multifaceted Design of the Lowercase Sharp S (ß)
• Capital Sharp S – Germany’s new character
• How to draw a Capital Sharp S
• Capital Sharp S designs. The good, the bad and the ugly.
• The Capital Sharp S in Use

YouTube Sans was created by Saffron in partnership with Letterjuice in Barcelona and URW++ in Hamburg. Unfortunately, Saffron’s presentation page for the project rather feels like a sales pitch—or a parody of such presentations. We see typical clichés like adding construction circles to the finished artwork. Almost funny are the following images, that honestly want to draw a connection between the rounded YouTube play button and the execution of the YouTube Sans letters, such as the G. You know that this would be true for the vast majority of typefaces, right? And the tension of the specific arcs isn’t even similar. 

But all this marketing talk aside, what about the type design itself? Currently YouTube Sans comes in several upright weights. The overall look of the design isn’t anything spectacular. A modern sans-serif design leaning towards geometric designs, which are very popular currently. So its not really a bold choice, but the execution does have a subtle uniqueness, which could certainly be sufficient to serve the branding requirements of a custom font.  

But type designers have critizized the execution of the design. 

Both looking at the details, like how arcs and stems meet, as well as how letters work together, the design doesn’t feel as consistent and professional as it could be. Its easy to point to successful retail typefaces in the same general sans-serif category with much better execution and visual consistency.

But the biggest flaw of the design is certainly the use of another branding cliché: randomly cutting off corners of letters. A trend so big, that has its own Tumblr feed as a “hall of shame”. 

Yes, its lazy and there is never an acceptable justification for it. Just because its so easy to do in your vector design app, doesn’t make it desirable. Stroke endings can take on many different shapes, but in the end (or on the end in this case), consistency is key. It goes back to the roots of typefaces in writing, where the stroke endings were a result of the writing tool and the angle one would hold this tool. Rounding or cutting off corners arbitrarily can only lead to an inconsistent and distracting appearance. Explaining it through the angles of the YouTube play button triangle might be a nice gimmick in a pitch, but it doesn’t do anything useful in the real-world use of the type family. 

YouTube Sans on the YouTube TV welcome page

You can see YouTube Sans in use here. The bold headlines do their job quite nicely. This is where your custom (display) font can shine. The legibility of the smaller text isn’t as good though. Google’s Roboto, recently rolled out on youtube.com works much better in such cases. It will be interesting to see how these different typefaces will be used and possibly combined in the future. 

What’s your opinion on YouTube Sans? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below. 

Links:

• analysis by Nina Stössinger on Typographica

I began reading books about Renner and Kramer to straighten my mind about who really made the first design of Futura. At the end Futura is even today one of the most popular typefaces.

Right or wrong?

The book by Christopher Burke about Paul Renner (Hyphen Press, 1998) was a good start to read. The second was an article by Burke about ‘The Authorship of Futura’ in Baseline 23 (1997) that should bring me on the right track. In this article Burke widens this authorship to the design staff of Bauer Type Foundry. Not strange when you look at the complex production of a typeface in that period of time, but sadly it makes my research not easier. Technical support by foundries played a big role in almost every type design in the lead era. Often the typedesigners where artists or architects by profession and could not oversee all the aspects of the production process. Luckily Burke also gave some publications to read further. One is an article from the author Hans Peter Willberg (Tiessen, 1969). Willberg writes that Kramer was a student at the Städel-Schule in Frankfurt in 1925 and that he made there the first drawings on which Renner based his design on Futura. But Kramer was in 1925 already a well-known architect and product designer and was working at the building department of the city of Frankfurt. He never attended the Städel-Schule as far as I know. Renner began with his first drawings for Futura in 1924 and winter 1924/25 first cuts of Futura were already done by Bauer Type Foundry. So both assertions of Willberg where wrong.

Setting the dates

The most used piece of evidence about Kramer-Grotesk is a sheet of paper that shows capitals of Futura with some of them in outline that are crossed out. Elsewhere on the sheet alternative characters for the crossed out capitals are enclosed [picture 1]. In a lot of publications this sheet is dedicated to Kramer.

Picture 1: Bauer, Konrad F., Wie eine Buchdruckschrift entsteht, 1958

So I had to figure out when this designsheet was first published and why it was attributed to Kramer. Since most of the material of Bauer Type Foundry is supposed to be destroyed during World War II I first looked at publications from before this war. One important publication is an article by Denis Megaw in ‘Typography 7’, published in 1938. On page 34 drawings are shown that are presented as the first designs of Futura by Renner. These are the lower case characters and capitals that are placed on top of the page in picture 2.Below this a complete set is shown from Futura as published by Bauer in 1927 in its final form (without the extra alternative characters).

Picture 2: Megaw, Denis, Typography 7, 1938

The sheet of paper with sketches [picture 1] show in black more or less the definitive forms of the capitals of Futura while the outline forms are showing his first designs from 1924 for the A and K as in Megaw’s article. An invitation card for a lecture dated 3. July (1925) [picture 3] made with trial cuts of Futura by Bauer show also these capitals that are in a state between the first designs in the article from Megaw and the final ones on the same sheet. 

Picture 3: Luidl, Philipp and Lange, Günter Gerhard, Paul Renner (Eine Jahresgabe der Typographischen Gesellschaft), 1978

Look for example at the M, N and R. The same story is told by a trial setting that was made for the publication ‘Schrift’ by F.H. Ehmke that was published on July 9th 1925 [picture 4]. 

Picture 4: Ehmcke, F.H., Schrift, ihre Gestaltung & Entwicklung in neuerer Zeit, 1925

You have to keep in mind that at that time making a book would have taken several months from concept to printed matter. As described by Paul Renner in ‘From Georg-Müller book to Futura and Meisterschule; recollections by Paul Renner’ (translated), published in 1940 and 1943, he reports that he showed slides (Lichtbilder) of Futura by Bauer Type Foundry already in February 1925 during lectures at large printing firms in Cologne and Mönchengladbach.

Renner meets Kramer

In May 1925 Renner moves from Munich to Frankfurt to teach at Fritz Wicherts Frankfurt Art School (the former Städel-Schule). He also meets Wicherts friend Ernst May who is head of the building department of the city of Frankfurt. Another person he met was the architect Ferdinand Kramer who was also working at this department. Ernst May had ambitious plans for rebuilding parts of the city of Frankfurt. A lot of inspiration for the plans came from the Bauhaus and buildings of the Stijl in The Netherlands. One of the examples also published in the magazine ‘Das Neue Frankfurt’ was De Unie in Rotterdam by Architect Oud. On that building geometrical sans serif typography is clearly an essential part of the architecture. May asked Renner to deliver a typeface that could be used in architecture as well as on shops, advertising and small structures like bus stops. I think that the sheet that was delivered by Renner to the building department is the sheet that also can be found in the ‘Werkkatalog Ferdinand Kramer 1923-1974’ by Jochem Jourdan.

In this ‘Werkkatalog’ the designsheet of letterforms is dated 1925 on the back (according to Jourdan). The stencil typeface on the left of picture 5 is not discussed in origin, dated 1952, and made by Kramer. With the sheet to the right the discussion of the Kramer-Grotesk started but it is a different sheet than the one most publications about Kramer-Grotesk use to discuss this issue. For example in ‘Baseline’ (‘The authorship of Futura’ by Chistopher Burke) and several other publications the sheet in picture 1 is presented as the Kramer-Grotesk sheet. I think the sheet from the ‘Werkkatalog’ was credited to Kramer simply because it was found in his archive. I personally think that this is a copy or the original that Renner delivered at the building department for copying and distributing to letter sign firms and architects that worked in Frankfurt. There are some slight differences between the characters (for example the J and S) between the trial settings from 1925 of Bauer Type Foundry and the capitals on this sheet but that could be a design decision by Renner for the architectural purpose of this set. ‘Das Neue Frankfurt’ [picture 6] in january 1927 shows the typography of the fassade of the hat shop of Ferdinand Kramers parents in Frankfurt using the capitals of Futura. This design and the design of a second shop fassade on that page is credited to Renner. Also the name of the typeface (Futura-Groteske) is mentioned in the caption of the second picture. Some slight alternations to the characters can also be caused by sign makers who had to take over the letterforms from the drawings of Renner. At that time no computers, scanners or laser equipment where available to do that. 

Picture 6: Behne, Adolf, ‘Kultur, Kunst und Reklame’ in: Das Neue Frankfurt 3, 1927 (digital file uni-heidelberg)

Renners design process

I think that looking at the consistence of the design process of Futura by Renner there can be no doubt that Kramer-Grotesk is a myth. The drawings on picture 1 can clearly be seen as stage three in the design process. The first step was the line ‘Die Schrift unserer Zeit’ from 1924 from which all started (not available but mentioned in Renners writings), second where the drawings in ‘Typography 7’ (picture 2) and third was to my opinion the much discussed sheet from picture 1. The crossed-out capitals on that sheet match with the earlier design of the capitals of the top drawings in picture 2. It can be seen as a logical step to the trial settings of picture 3 and 4 in 1925. The sheet found in the Kramer Archive has to be looked at as a separate design of Renner but fits in the stage of the design of Futura at that moment. For me and for most typedesigners it is also quite clear that it would almost impossible to draw ‘out of the blue’ an alphabet with such a quality and consistance between the characters, especially when you hardly have any experience in graphic design like Ferdinand Kramer had. Although Renner was also not a typedesigner by profession he was 23 years older than Kramer and had loads of experience in graphic design, had been teacher in graphic design at his own school and had already written a well-received book about typography. There is a sheet with a stencil typeface [picture 5 on the left] in the Kramer Archive that is to me clearly a typeface design of an architect. Drawn on the drawing table with rule and compass. The ‘B’ with the same top and bottom curve, the ‘S’ with a top that is too large and an ‘O’, ‘Q’ and ‘G’ that has the same vertical and horizontal line thickness. And that typeface is dated 1952, a quarter of a century later. See also picture 11 with the timeline of the alledged Kramer-Grotesk designsheet. Of course there where architects like Peter Behrens who created typefaces but mostly architects who did where more active in graphic design and typedesign than Kramer and did this with support of a very experienced design staff of a foundry. Kramer-Grotesk on the contrary is supposed to be created without that help. 

Picture 7: Hahn, Peter, Ferdinand Kramer Architektur & Design, 1982

One of the publications that helped me a lot in this research was the thesis of Charles C. Leonard ‘Paul Renner and Futura: The Effects of Culture, and Social Continuity on the Design of Type for Printing’ that he published in 2005/2006. Leonard thoroughly researched the drawings shown in ‘Typography 7’ as well as the disputed design sheet from ‘Wie eine Buchdruckschrift entsteht’ (How a new printing type is made) of Bauer Type Foundry in 1958 [picture 8].

Picture 8: Bauer, Konrad F., Wie eine Buchdruckschrift entsteht, 1958

It is very interesting to see how he did a lot of work comparing designsheets of Renner (see picture 12). The ‘Kramer-Grotesk’ sheet shown in picture 5 on the right has the same cap-height and could easily be put in the comparison and would match the other two. One thing that Leonard presumes falsely is that the designsheet (picture 1) from 1958 was a reprint of the publication of Bauer from 1931 [picture 9].

Picture 9: Bauer, Konrad F., Wie eine Buchdruckschrift entsteht, 1931

This publication was completely different. Bauer Type Foundry used this first publication to promote the typeface Beton from Heinrich Jost that was new in 1931. All the illustrations and text went about that typeface. In 1958 the publication had as subject Futura that was a longrunner in sales at Bauer. So the designsheet of Futura that was published in the 1958 publication was first published in that year and never before as far as I know. So I think that this sheet was never even near Kramer as presumed by Christopher Burke in the caption of Baseline and has always been in the archive of Bauer Type Foundry (untill WW-II) being one of the designs of Renner. In the caption of the 1958 publication of Bauer the design is dated 1925 but because Renner showed first cuttings during lectures in february 1925 (see above) and Burke also writes that first trial cuts by Bauer were done in the winter of 1924/25 I think that this could also be an earlier design and maybe has to be dated before the trial cuts were made.

Recent publications

Recent publications from 2016 that publish the discussed design sheet from picture 1 are ‘Futura. Die Schrift.’ and ‘AllesNeu!’. They are a feast for the eye showing a lot of type specimen and printed matter with Futura. In ‘Alles Neu!’ some strange things are happening. The publication ‘Schrift’ by Emcke with a preliminary test (Vorprobe) of Futura is dated at 1926/27 while above in the picture the date of July 9. 1925 is even quite visible. On the same page the designsheet [picture 1] that was dedicated to Renner at first publication in 1958 is suddenly subscribed to Ferdinand Kramer. The source of the picture is not given. The article of Katherina Pennoyer with the subtitle ‘So far unknown facts and details’ (bisher unbeachtete Fakten und Details) indeed gives some more details that according to her gives Kramer a bigger role in the creation of Futura. She writes again that Kramer studied at the Städel-Schule in Frankfurt (p. 99). As written before Willberg introduced this false story in 1969 (see above). I cannot find any proof of that (see picture 8: Timeline Renner and Kramer). About the text of Paul Renner on his recollections of the design of Futura, published in 1940 and 1943, Pennoyer writes: ‘It seems that the story was written by those who earned money of it’ (Es hat den Anschein, dass die Geschichte von denen geschrieben wurde, die daran verdienten). So according to her Renner did not write the article about that important part of his life himself. But Renner never rejected the article and accusing him and Bauer Type Foundry of a story that is false is far beyond the reputation of Paul Renner and Georg Hartmann, who was beside being owner of Bauer Type Foundry also a bibliophile and patron of the arts in many ways. I think we should leave that remarkeble text to the responsibility of Pennoyer and the publishers of ‘Alles Neu!’. Her mentioning that Renner and Kramer could have met in 1919 when they both where living in Munich can nowhere be verified. Renner left Munich in 1919 and Kramer came to live there in 1919 (see timeline picture 10). Renner was also 23 years older than Kramer and could have had a totally different circle of friends. But ‘never say never’, Renner had to be sometimes in Munich for his work for the publisher Georg Müller and I would gladly like to get information about them meeting at that time and place.

Picture 10: Pohlen, Joep, ‘Timeline Renner-Kramer’, Roermond, 2017

The book ‘Futura. Die Schrift’ is thoroughly written and researched. Of course the famous sketches page [picture 1] is also present in this publication but it is left in the middle who made it actually. Interesting is however that this picture is taken from a whiteprint (Lichtpause) from the Klingspor Museum. So another source than the earlier publications (picture 11).

Picture 11: Pohlen, Joep, ‘Designsheet Paul Renner (also known as Kramer-Grotesk)’, Roermond, 2017

According to the author Petra Eisele the whiteprint is 98% of the original. And that is peculiar because whiteprints where copied in contact with the original using the diazolid (or Ozalid) process. So it should be 100% or close to it. I asked specialist Ed Kemmerling who worked for 28 years in the business of copying architectural drawings. He also thought that 98% is quite a difference. The aim is 100% because builders often use it to measure. But a difference is not impossible according to the process and machines used. I mailed with Klingspor Museum to learn how this whiteprint got in their collection but the answer is that they don’t know because they have it for a long time. But Klingspor has also proofsheets showing trials of letters with some characters glued over earlier letters. And on some sheets all the letters are glued on separately. These sheets are shown for example on page 38-41 in ‘Futura. Die Schrift.’. These must to my opinion descend from the studio of Bauer Type Foundry because there is a typical way of working to reach the final design. They are dated in the book from 1926 to 1928. The source that delivered them to Klingspor could also have delivered the sheet from picture 1 that is in their archive. But that’s speculation …

Conclusion

The thing that remains and is hard to understand is why Ferdinand Kramer did not protest against this so-called Kramer-Grotesk that was published in several important publications like the Bauhaus-Archiv publication ‘Ferdinand Kramer Architektur & Design’ in 1982 when he was alive and kicking (although he was at that time 84 years old). Kramer was an architect who had a very good reputation as product designer and architect and one could say that he did not need this credit for Kramer-Grotesk. The capitals of Futura were already developed in the definitive form in the beginning of 1925 but the lower case characters still had to go a long way to meet the final design. Maybe the development of this lower case letters were part of the discussions Renner had with Kramer and it could be that the huge transformations of these designs strengthened Kramers idea that he participated in the design of Futura. But Renner discussed it with more people. I also read somewhere that according to the wife of Jan Tschichold he also thought that he had contributed because he discussed the design with Renner. Neumann mentioned in his article in ‘Ferdinand Kramer’ from 1991 that Kramer did say (gesprächsweise) that he considered himself as one of the ‘fathers’ of Futura. This is all speculation but I can find no other reason why Kramer did not reject the publication of Kramer-Grotesk and his role in the design of Futura like stated in the caption on page 33 in the Bauhaus-Archiv publication [picture 7].

Despite the findings this story leaves an odd taste in my mouth about the role of Ferdinand Kramer. Or maybe the ones that believe they serve his legacy. With my limited knowledge I think that Kramer himself never wrote about designing Kramer-Grotesk. But maybe others can look into that and could find more about Kramers personal view about this. 

Joep Pohlen, May 2017

Literature:

• Bauer, Konrad F., ‘Wie eine Buchdruckschrift entsteht’, 1931, Frankfurt (DE)
• Bauer, Konrad F., ‘Wie eine Buchdruckschrift entsteht’, 1958, Frankfurt (DE)
• Behne, Adolf, ‘Kultur, Kunst und Reklame’ in: ‘Das Neue Frankfurt’ 3, 1927, Frankfurt (DE)
• Burke, Christopher, ‘The authorship of Futura’ in: Baseline 23, 1997, East Malling (UK)
• Burke, Christopher, Paul Renner, the Art of Typography, 1998, London (UK)
• Ehmcke, F.H., ‘Schrift, ihre Gestaltung & Entwicklung in neuerer Zeit’, 1925, Hannover (DE)
• Eisele, Petra, Ludwig, Annette and Naegele, Isabel, ‘Futura. Die Schrift.’, 2016, Mainz (DE) 
• Hahn, Peter, ‘Ferdinand Kramer Architektur & Design’, 1982, Berlin (DE)
• Hansert, Andreas, ‘Georg Hartmann (1870-1954), Biografie eines Frankfurter Schriftgießers, Bibliophilen und Kunstmäzens’, 2009, Vienna (AT) 
• Kemp, Klaus and Wagner, Matthias K., ‘Alles Neu!, 100 Jahre Neue Typografie und Neue Grafik in Frankfurt am Main’, Stuttgart, 2016 (DE)
• Leonard, Charles C., ‘Paul Renner and Futura: The Effects of Culture, and Social Continuity on the Design of Type for Printing’, 2006, Georgia State University (USA) 
• Lichtenstein, Claude, ‘Ferdinand Kramer, der Charme des Systematischen’, 1991, Gießen (DE): the article ‘Frankfurter Typografie’ from Neumann, Eckhard, pp 32-34
• Luidl, Philipp and Lange, Günter Gerhard, ‘Paul Renner (Eine Jahresgabe der Typographischen Gesellschaft)’, 1978, München (DE)
• Megaw, Denis, ‘20th Century Sans Serif Types’ in: ‘Typography 7’, 1938, London (UK)
• Renner, Paul, ‘Vom Georg-Müller-Buch bis zur Futura und Meisterschule; Erinnerungen von Paul Renner’ in: ‘Imprimatur’ 9, Ein Jahrbuch für Bücherfreunde, 1940
• Renner, Paul, ‘Vom Georg-Müller-Buch bis zur Futura und Meisterschule; Erinnerungen von Paul Renner’ in: ‘Gebrauchsgraphik’, Heft 5, 1943, Berlin (DE)
• Stresow, Gustav, ‘Paul Renner und die Konzeption der Futura’ in: ‘Buchhandelsgeschichte’ Nr. 51, 1995, Frankfurt (DE)
• Willberg, Hans Peter, ‘Schrift im Bauhaus/Die Futura von Paul Renner’ in: ‘Monographien und Materialien zur Buchkunst’, Band 2, 1969, Neu-Isenburg (DE) 

Making zinc sheet stencils

Engraver at work

Transferring the letter shape from the finished stencil

Making a punch

Punchcutter at work

Making matrices for type casting

Type casting machines

Close-up of a type casting machine at work

In-house printing with foundry type

In-house press

Making matrices for hot metal typesetting

Checking the matrices

Making phototypesetting fonts

Digital font production at the end of the 1980s

Photographic reproduction to test the design in smaller sizes

I think the most interesting thing about me is that I grew up in a provincial town near the sea. I did spend my time sailing yachts, playing the violin and painting. When I was seventeen I left my lovely hometown and moved to Moscow. My passion was art and I was planning to become a book illustrator and designer because I love books and everything related to them. So I passed my exams and started studying at Moscow State University of Printing Arts. There I learned a lot about art and design history, illustration and book design. But for me the most important course was calligraphy and type design class led by Alexander Tarbeev. I fell in love with typography and type design. And I found the perfect teacher. Since then my ruling passion in life has been drawing letters. I practice calligraphy, draw letterings, logotypes and work on typefaces. My hobbies are music and art. I play the guitar, study singing and of course draw and paint when I have free time.

I have been doing it for about eight years now. My first calligraphy attempts had to do with the beginning of Alexander Tarbeev’s class and it was nearly eight years ago. Since then I’ve been practising hard, but it was just for myself. I studied calligraphy, drawing non-commercial letterings and typefaces a lot. And honestly I don’t remember what was my first commercial lettering job. But my first released typeface was Voltaire script made in Artem Gorbunov’s design bureau. It was my first big commercial project and I was happy with the result.

That’s hard! I’m afraid I can’t choose one. And I’m not too proud of any of my works because they always could have been better. I’m a perfectionist so I struggle with that all the time. But I can choose one project that is very important for me despite being old and noncommercial: the posters for the Ukranian calligraphy and typography festival Rutenia. I was an unknown student and I was afraid of everything. But it was an amazing event and the task was both interesting and difficult, so it was a real challenge. I wanted to try my skills and it took me 3 days to make the posters. I mixed European calligraphy with old Cyrillic calligraphy traditions. I was proud of the result and I received a lot of appreciation from people I respect and admire very much. That was a perfect beginning and that encouraged me to work even harder.

I used to work at home. It’s difficult for me to focus on the work though when it’s noisy or you get disturbed in any other way. Sometimes I work in co-working spaces, but not so often.

I love monoline connected signs. I love the way they look and I think they are perfect for street signs, logotypes and small typography too. I’ve seen many of them during my trips through Europe. But there are not so many typefaces in this fashion. And that’s understandable, because it’s rather complicated to create them.

If a typeface you work on is just a monoline without connections, that’s OK. If a typeface is connected but it’s not monoline, that’s OK as well. But if it’s monoline and connected at the same time, you are in trouble. You have to work on letterforms a lot to make them acceptable even a bit. Then you will realize that it’s absolutely not possible in some combinations and you have to create a lot of alternates and ligatures. In the case of Jonesy it’s been hundreds. Of course I talk about situations when you want your typeface to look as good as possible. So it was a challenge and I didn’t see similar typefaces on MyFonts or anywhere else. It was really interesting for me and I thought it might be useful for other designers who love this kind of typography and have no appropriate tool.

I always start working on a typeface with lettering or calligraphic sketches on paper. I use pencils, markers and a wide range of calligraphy tools.

Regarding the software: I used to work with Adobe products and Robofont (with associated programs). For lettering I use Illustrator and sometimes Robofont too. For typefaces I use Robofont, MetricsMachine and Superpolator.

Great question! Yes, I really enjoy calligraphy/lettering because I have complete freedom to write and draw as I please. But I enjoy the process of creating typeface even more, because it’s like a brainteaser. You have a lot of issues and limitations, but if you solve these problems you have a clever type system that works and looks well. Of course OpenType technology improves our lives as type designers a lot in that regard, but I’m sure typefaces will never be able to look like calligraphy or lettering. And I don’t think it’s bad because they serve different purposes.

Gerrit Ansmann is a physicist from Germany, who worked on the freely available blackletter font Unifraktur Maguntia, which now has a large character set and makes extensive use of smart font technologies such as OpenType. In this interview he gives us some background information about this project. 

I always had an interest in computer graphics, which was intensified when it became useful for creating scientific illustrations and when Bézier curves, splines and similar were part of my elective numerics courses. Moreover, type design is an appealing art form to me due to its mathematical nature. But that’s not what actually lead me to working on blackletter fonts.

As a physicist, I naturally belong to the target audience of roleplaying games, and my roleplaying game of choice was Call of Cthulhu, whose main arena is our world in the 1920s and which features a lot of investigations. Thus people like me who want to create scenarios for this game often need to create fictive newspaper clippings and similar from that period and older. Being somewhat perfectionistic, I learnt a bit about blackletter typesetting and produced texts reproducing historical typesetting, in particular the long s and blackletter ligatures.

Unfortunately, most blackletter fonts that allowed for such an authentic typesetting did not support Unicode or OpenType, and so I had to find out where special characters were located for each font and manually insert them into the texts. Unifraktur Maguntia was an exception to this, but—like most blackletter fonts—was based on a dissatisfying digitalisation, e.g., words like Luftfahrt featured bars of f and t at three different heights, and the J and I were just scaled versions of each other. As the font was open, I began with fixing some prominent issues, discovered more issues, fixed them, decided to throw away everything and to re-digitialise the historic source, and so on. In the beginning, my motivation was that I could eventually create a brief guideline for historic blackletter typesetting, which would not require the user to use some esoterically placed special characters, but rely on OpenType features or similar.

Soon, another motivation arose: Almost all creators of blackletter fonts seemed to go for quantity rather than quality, and I wanted the world to have at least one good and free blackletter font that allowed to do everything that one could reasonably want to do with it.

The primary historical source is Mainzer Fraktur by Carl Albert Fahrenwaldt from 1901. It provides most letters (and ligatures) of the standard German alphabet, except J, Ä, Ö, and Ü, which were only beginning to emerge for blackletter typsetting when it was created. From the few remaining glyphs of the original typeface, I adapted a few and redesigned the others—in particular the numerals and some basic punctuation characters—as their style was roman and not blackletter. For reasons that still elude me, this was typical for historic blackletter fonts, which is why I later added numerals in the style of roman typefaces as an alternative.

All other elements were newly designed, based on the existing glyphs, if possible, and inspired by the original Maguntia and other blackletter typefaces. This redesign includes the modern variants, numerals, diacritical marks, and several special characters.

On the one hand, many glyphs and features only exist for the purpose of reproducing historical typesetting—allowing a user to render an equivalent to every fraktur text is one of the main goals I was striving at. On the other hand, I created modern variants of ten letters that are typically misread by readers unfamiliar with blackletter as well as a round s without a swash for use in the beginning or middle of a word, where historically a long s was used in most cases. However, when creating the modern variants, I tried to adhere to the design principles of the original typeface and therefore, for example, I did not create a modern T (as I could not come up with a satisfying design) and the modern N is still very far from a roman-type N. So the modern variants are a trade-off between readability and preserving the blackletter style, hopefully a good one.

A paragraph using the traditional and modernized glyph designs 

I do not think that anybody should design or use a certain typeface just to keep some style alive. Use a typeface if it fits your needs; design one, if you enjoy the process or if you think that somebody else needs it—in which case it would be this need that would be actually keeping the style alive.

That being said, I think that both, modernised and traditional approaches, have their place: If you just want the typeface to say “traditional” or “German”, and readability is a valid concern, modernisations are fine; if you want the typeface to say “historical” or “old”, and you can trust your audience to decypher the text in a reasonable time, use the long s, the traditional letter forms, ligatures, and so on. However, I have no sympathy for pointlessly bizarre mixtures or failed attempts at being historical that could have been avoided with one minute of Internet research. The most common of these mistakes is plainly replacing every s with a long one, but there are also things like the new Warsteiner logo, whose t looks like a blackletter k, if anything, but neither like a blackletter nor a roman t.

In my experience, fraktur has its niches in Germany where it isn’t automatically associated with Nazis, for example in the contexts of tradition, history, or ceremony. Outside Germany, it can have similar niches, in particular in countries who used fraktur historically—e.g., I observed a considerable amount of fraktur in Prague. For the rest of the world, there are at least some people to whom fraktur just says “German” (which alone unfortunately makes for a Nazi connotation), but again the context and also the location is crucial. However, for other uses, I do not think we will or need to overcome a certain Nazi connotation—for instance, “historical” or “old” are not labels that one would normally see attached to one’s political views. Ironically and hopefully much to the Nazis’ dismay, one of the Maguntia’s features is a wide support of “international” characters and thus the capability of writing names of non-German origin in blackletter, e.g., for the needs of a German folklore society—I would really enjoy seeing the Maguntia being used to write the name of, say, a carnival princess of Turkish origin.

Also, many features and glyphs are not aimed at reproducing historical German typesetting but that of other languages such as Latvian, Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian. That being said, I did not focus on a single type of application, but rather hope that the Maguntia gives users the freedom to do what they want for their application—be it creating a menu for an Austrian restaurant in Portugal, a facsimile of some historic text, the Polish translation of Asterix and the Goths, or even a political cartoon.

The smartest feature is arguably the heuristics for the long s which uses the surrounding letters to decide whether an s is long or round and changes it accordingly. This isn’t perfect, but if you aren’t happy with the results, you can correct them with a zero-width non-joiner and still leave the majority of the work to the automatism. I should mention there are fonts out there that go further and implemented an entire dictionary (which are however not free and do not work in all applications). A similar automatism is implemented for the round r, a variant that can be found in very old typesetting.

We also separately implemented the two types of ligatures distinguished by historical blackletter typesetting—required and typographical ones—, which facilitates the implementation of letterspacing, which dissolved the latter type of ligatures but not the former. 

Mainly for modern typesetting, I implemented a feature that removes the—in my opinion disturbing—swashes from round s that do not occur at the end of the word.

The majority of the remaining features are not that smart, i.e., just simple substitutions, in particular the aforementioned modern forms, historic variants, and four kinds of numerals: blackletter and roman as well as proportional and monospace.

Little surprisingly, a program that fully supports OpenType with feature selection is the best and allows you to quickly tune the font to your needs. If you have OpenType, but cannot or do not want to select features, there are ready-to-use variants which correspond to the activation of certain feature sets and try to emulate German historic typesetting at a specific time or cater modern readers, respectively. If possible those features are hard-coded and thus work, if there is no OpenType support at all. As a last resort, all special characters can be accessed through Unicode’s Private Use Area.

On another note, if you go to small resolutions, you will notice that hinting technology isn’t really made for most blackletter typefaces. I put some effort in this direction, harmonising line widths, positions, and manually marking a lot of stems, but I am not willing to perform hinting on the bitmap level.

The sharp s (or “Eszett” as it is called in German) is a letter of the alphabet in Germany and Austria. The Unicode casing rules state: “The German es-zed is special”. Indeed it is! Its (still not fully explained) history is full of twists and today’s understanding of this history is often full of misunderstandings. The origins of this character won’t be the discussed in detail in this article. Instead I will focus on the stylistic options which have resulted from the recent history. 

Sharp s variations for an alphabet in a lettering/calligraphy book from the 1930s by Willy Schumann

Today there are two standard models for the design of the ß character. They are explained at first and are recommendable for most of today’s typefaces. 

1. The ſs Ligature Design

This design is both very old and rather new at the same time. It was used for centuries across Europe, especially in cursive writing, either as a purely stylistic choice or in accordance with a typesetting practice which avoided a long s as the end of words and therefore displayed a double s (ſſ) as ſs, either visually connected or not. 

ſs ligatures from Giovanbattista Palatino, from a 1578 compendium

Since this design in its connected form is so visually similar to the typical modern German ß, it is often mistaken as the actual origin of the German character. But using this design for German texts is a rather new practice, which only became typical since around the middle of the 20th century. At that time, the roman and italic type styles of the Latin script replaced blackletter and Kurrent for German texts and with that, the influence of blackletter on the design of German typefaces started to vanish. Typical German blackletter ligatures (such as ch, ck, tz) came out of use and the understanding of the ß character shifted slowly. In caps-only typesetting the ß would be set as SZ in the beginning of the 20th century, but later SS became more common and finally the only correct spelling—until the introduction of the capital sharp s. 

Without the influence of blackletter, a German alphabet in the roman type style was now again more clearly based on designs from the time of Classicism and Renaissance and the historic ſs ligature became a perfect fit for the German ß—both in its design and the understanding of the character. 

Using this ligature design is the typical choice for so-called humanistic typefaces, i.e. designs which have their roots in the traditional book typefaces of the Renaissance. Both serif and sans serif typefaces can use this design model of the sharp s character.  

The ſs ligature design in Optima and Syntax

Designing the ß in this style is rather simple, since it really is just ſ and s connected with an arc. The connection however is mandatory today. While an unconnected design is a historic variation, it won’t be accepted by today’s readers.

The upper counter area is ofter narrower than the lower counter area, as it can be seen in the examples above. But there are also typefaces with a more prominent upper counter area, especially in italic styles. 

The sharp s in Sabon

The arc and the s shape usually connect as one continuous curve, but there are a few typefaces which stress the different letter parts more clearly by making an abrupt change of direction. This can also work fine. But just to be clear: German readers without a background in typography see the ß as one character. Stressing ſ and s as individual parts of that design is neither expected nor necessarily helpful. Just as a W exposing its origin as ligature of two V is a possibility, but not necessarily helpful. 

The sharp s in Utopia and Calibri

The ſ in its upright version might have a horizontal stroke on the left side and the ß then gets this stroke as well. This is a traditional design feature, but not really required. In my opinion, it only supports the confusion of ſ and f and therefore the horizontal stroke might also be omitted for ſ and ß in modern typefaces. Either way, ſ and ß should always follow the same principles. 

And speaking of the long s: It will usually have a descender in the italic design, but not in the roman version. The same is true for the sharp s. 

Upright and cursive styles of Tierra Nueva. 

2. The Sulzbach Design

As already mentioned, German was mostly set in blackletter (or written in Kurrent) until the middle of the 20th century and the sharp s as German character was established and mandatory in these type and writing styles. When German was written or set in the roman type style, a counterpart for the blackletter ß wasn’t available for a long time. As a result we can find different alternative spellings until the end of the 19th century. For example: a word like “groß” (big) in blackletter could appear as gross, groſs or grosz in roman typefaces.

German book from 1795 in a roman typeface (Prillwitz Antiqua) using ſs where a blackletter text would always use ß.

Around 1900 an official German orthography was established and a committee of type founders and printers met to define rules regarding the design and use of German characters like ß, ö, ä, ü in upper and lower case. At that time, typesetting and writing German in the roman style had already gained popularity and there was a need to find solutions and regulations regarding the different practices used for blackletter and non-blackletter typesetting. Some differences were kept, some things were unified. The ſ character was kept for blackletter, but dropped for setting German in roman and italic typefaces. The ß on the other was understood as a character of its own, which had become so important, that it was decided to add it to all typefaces, not just blackletter ones as before. All German type foundries should add it to their roman and italic designs. The design proposal that was chosen had similarities with an unusual letter used in the 17th century by the printer Abraham Lichtenthaler in the city of Sulzbach and is therefore now known as “Sulzbacher Form” (Sulzbach design). 

Sharp s in the Sulzbach design added to Walbaum Antiqua in the 20th century. In the time of Justus Erich Walbaum such a roman typeface had no sharp s. 

The new design doesn’t include a clear s or z shape, but consists of a long s at the left side and two connected arcs on the right side. As a result, the letter often looks like an uppercase B to people not familiar with German. This design was applied to many German non-blackletter typefaces after 1903, including the traditional old-style and modern typefaces. It remains in use until today, but mostly for more geometric/constructed typefaces, where the simplicity of the two arcs works better than the flowing connection of the upper arc of the long s with a lowercase s.

Sharp s in Futura

The Sulzbach design can more easily use an upper counter area that is similar in size and as width as the lower counter area. A tear-shaped or ball-shaped terminal can be used for serif designs. The connection of the two arcs in the middle should reach to the left as far as necessary, to make the character legible, but not so far as to suggest a connection with the stem – after all, it is not a B. And of course the aperture at the bottom should not be closed. 

Sharp S with teardrop terminal in this version of Bodoni

The Sulzbach design is also the standard model for German handwriting. It will usually be written with a descender and fonts might replicate this. 

Sharp s in German in the historic Kurrent handwriting

Handwritten sharp s FF Schulschrift

The Schulbuch typeface is aimed at children learning to read and uses the descender of the handwritten sharp s.

The two models explained above should suffice to design a proper ß for almost all roman and italic typefaces, but there are more variations in existence. For the sake of completeness they are shown below. They should only be used where appropriate. An unusual design of the ß character can make a typeface unsuitable for setting German, especially when it is supposed to be used for copy texts. It’s often better to include uncommon/historic designs as stylistic alternates and put a standard ß in the default slot for this character (U+00DF).  

The beautiful sharp s in the metal version of Bernhard Schönschrift (1925)

The unusual sharp s in Ratio-Latein (1923)

Historic Variation: The “Blackletter ß”

With German blackletter and non-blackletter typefaces being used side by side since the end of the 19th century, type designers also started to mix elements of the two.

The sharp s in blackletter

Blackletter fonts became more simplified and the letter skeletons of the early blackletter fonts became more popular, which were still closer to the design of the roman letter style. And roman typefaces from German foundries started to “look more German” in the first half of the 20th century. The mandatory ligatures of blackletter typesetting were often added to the character set of the roman typefaces and the design of individual letters was also borrowed from blackletter typefaces. A typical case for that is the sharp s character. Many, but not all typefaces used the recommended Sulzbach design. A design as a ligature of a long s with something like a 3 with a flat top resembled the typical look of a blackletter ß and also became a popular choice until the middle of the 20th century.

The blackletter-inspired sharp s in Erbar

Meister-Kursiv by Herbert Thannhaeuser, 1952

Technotyp by Herbert Thannhaeuser, 1948

Not using a descender is also possible for this kind of sharp s

Because the “blackletter sharp s” in roman typefaces is typical for the first half of the 20th century, its use can still evoke a connection with that time. It appears—as default or stylistic alternative—in a few modern typefaces as well (e.g. FF Kava, Verlag, Metric, DIN Next Slab) and is legible within a word context, but it is not something that works for every font or use case. 

The examples shown above represent the most typical design of this “blackletter sharp s” approach. But as a variation, some typefaces also use a design that looks like a 3 with two arcs or a z design on the right side of the ligature. These designs might not work so well for today’s readers. 

The sharp s in Ehmcke Antiqua (1909), which is also in the digital versions named Carlton.

The URW++ version of Bodoni

While used occasionally in the 20th century—a literal Eszett (“sz”) ligature is not recommendable today.

Historic Variation: The Connected Script ſs Ligature

I already explained the ligature of a long s and a round s where the top part of the long s is used to make the connection to the round s. But in connected cursive writing there is also a way of writing a regular long s and then making a connection from the bottom, usually as extension of a descender loop in the long s.

This style can also be found across Europe and across different languages over several centuries. It usually just represents a double s, but in a German text that isn’t written with a long s as individual character, this design represents the sharp s, as seen in the following examples. 

From an original type specimen booklet of Justus Erich Walbaum from the early 19th century. “daß” and “bloß” are typeset as “daſs” and “bloſs”.

This design can be found in use until the 20th century, but it not common anymore and will probably confuse many of today’s readers of German. 

An undated German school poster shows the connected script ſs ligature as alternative to the regular ß in the Sulzbach design. 

I was born in Romania, in a small town called Medgidia, about 50 km from the coast of the Black Sea. When I as 12, my family moved to Vienna, where I attended the American International School. I feel like I got the best of both Eastern and Western Europe, and I consider myself to be an “international.” When I was in high school, I wanted to be a lawyer (to be able to argue my point of view in front of a judge), an artist (I had always loved drawing and painting), or a psychologist (to analyze people’s thoughts and behaviors, then help them come to a solution). However, there did not seem to be a job that combined all of these … until I discovered graphic design. Practicing graphic design and working for clients is pretty much like being a creative psychologist lawyer. Later, while studying graphic design, I developed a love for typography, calligraphy, and type design. When I work on type design projects, it is more than art (I never liked creating for the sake of art), it is a system that is dictated by a series of rules, traditions, and historical implications. It gives just enough room for creativity while allowing me to do what I do best: analyze, test, and systematize.

The Indian Type Foundry has been doing extremely well with Indian scripts, but they aim to become a global distributor of quality typefaces, so they have been expanding their font library with Latin script type families and more. They recently released their first Arabic type family.

Satya Rajpurohit, the co-founder of ITF, contacted me at the end of 2013, knowing that I had just graduated from Type and Media at KABK. He proposed that I design a slab serif family for ITF, which was something I never had designed before. I love a good challenge and, after some back and forth emailing, we agreed to create a bigger family including sans and slab, as well as italics, so that it could be used in all kinds of editorial projects, branding, and packaging. This was going to be one of the biggest ITF families so far and my most complex project yet. I couldn’t wait to start.

Knowing I had to make a slab serif design, I did my research and was not very inspired with what I could find. There were flavorful slab serifs that were a bit old-school looking (Clarendon, Century Schoolbook), where the slabs seemed well integrated in the letter shapes; and there were modern designs (Museo, Neutraface), where the slabs were just sort of slapped onto existing sans serif letters, which made them seem a bit too static. I generally appreciate the approach of typefaces like Eames Century (designed by Erik van Blokland), Maple (designed by Eric Olson), where it seems as though the designers just created their own path, without being influenced by related designs, and it works! These designs are usable, yet full of life.

While browsing through the old specimen book of Palmer and Rey’s from 1844, the skeleton forms of their typefaces really spoke to me. They had some typefaces called Antique, some Clarendons, and some Gothics that looked very related with each other in their basic shapes and proportions. Without forming a family, they were obviously following the same logic. 

I was fascinated by the skeleton forms and general character of these Antiques, with very long serifs and closed apertures. Although the letters seemed clumsy for today’s standards—the shapes were overcorrected, and the caps were much to heavy— it seemed that these letters were hiding a secret elegance that I could possibly tap into by creating a modern family. So this is what I started doing.

I started by shaping the slab serif, because this has the most personality so it would help me to define the family. My first attempts were quite literal replicas of the shapes I saw in the book from 1844, but slowly the design progressed into a family with its own merit. 

I knew that the sooner I introduce other weights and styles, the better I will be able to make decisions about the family as a whole. I see the whole type family as a system where members have to work with each other, support each other, and yet share the same DNA. That is why I start working on a few “strategic” weights from the early phases.

Within the first month, I gave the Sans a try, which would inform me if the skeleton shapes of the slab are transferable. Then I started the Slab Black weight, where I knew that I could pump up the personality even more. The Slab Thin weight would tell me whether the proportions of the letters were fitting well with each other and whether the skeleton shapes were interesting on their own, without contrast. With each development, the type family took shape. The masters for each of the sub-families were Thin, Regular, and Black.

When I added the italics, I felt like a machine, working on 12 masters at once. I bought a new 27 inch computer screen (I can recommend this conveniently priced monitor for any design work: Dell Ultrasharp U2715H), rotated the old 23 inch screen by 90° and placed it on the right hand-side. This helped divide my screen real-estate wisely and work more productively. I love this part of the process, when I am juggling dozens of numbers in my head, remembering decisions I made the day before, applying changes in all the masters at once. I had the privilege to be working on this almost full-time, so I could keep all the details fresh in mind. This helps a lot for being efficient! I ran many checks and tests, designed many editorial-like pages to see how the weights played together, how the numerals and other symbols fit in.

After 6 months of work, in August, I handed over the final files to the Indian Type Foundry. They were not yet kerned and the character sets were still rather small. In January of 2016, I was asked to add kerning and expand the character sets of the Equitan family. This was a great opportunity to see the typeface one last time, and I ended up making, once again, all kinds of small corrections. After this, we generated and tested all the interpolated weights.

Equitan is a multi-purpose family, generally for use that requires typographic richness. The Thin and Black weights are great for headlines. The other weights offer the designer a lot of freedom for text use. 

Equitan would be great as the in-house type family for a larger company, because the Slab is very recognizable, yet the Sans can be a trusty replacement for Helvetica in office use. 

Secretly, I would love to see Equitan Slab be used on some meat packaging. The all-caps deliver such BBQ-awesomeness! But, honestly,  I would be excited if my typefaces are used in any way. That would mean I did my job right.

Like most designers who grew up with a computer in front of their face, I designed most of this family on-screen (rather than sketching whole alphabets by hand). However, and this is very important to me, I checked every weight in print so many times, and optically adjusted what looked strange. The result is a typeface that is not entirely “perfect.” Some things are measured, others are judged by eye. If you look at the “o” shapes for a long time, you will notice that they are … potatoes. Not all circles are really circles. I think this is something that helped the typeface retain some of that dynamic quality that the original 1844 letters had.

I used RoboFont to design this family. I used MetricsMachine to kern it. I used Prepolator & Superpolator to make some test interpolations and extrapolations (The final interpolations were made in-house at ITF, and I don’t know what software they use). 

Inside RoboFont, I use a bunch of extensions that help make life easier when designing a family: 

• Overlay UFO: shows an overlap of the same glyph in multiple weights. This helps you see if the details match in those weights, compare angles in italics, control if the heights of your ascender or oldstyle numerals are the same in all weights.
• Ramsay St: shows related characters left and right of the one you are currently designing. This helps you design in context, and you can even define the neighbors yourself.
• AdjustMetrics: makes sidebearing adjustments in batch
• Word-o-mat: generates very customizable strings of real words. This is great for testing words when your character set is not yet complete. 
• ScalingEditTool: also known as interpolated nudge, helps you make small changes to letters quicker by proportionally adjusting the length of the handles while you are moving a point or group of points.
• TestInstallAllOpen: test installs all open font files. I must have clicked this a thousand times.

I use custom scripts for generating anchors and accented glyphs and making character set overviews. I design using InDesign and I use an HP LaserJet Pro 400 M401 to print tests, which gives a sharp print for a good value. I use either 80 or 90 gsm off-white paper for testing type, because the lower contrast of type-to-paper not only resembles real books, but is also a bit nicer for your eyes.

The beginning of the type design process is always the hardest part for me. I want to make something new and relevant, yet without copying previous work. The best advice I got about this was from someone who told me, “It is unique because YOU are making it for the first time.” That takes away part of the pressure; the second thing is to just keep working on it, shaping it until it becomes yours.

In my hope of making something very unique, I had added slabs even to the bottoms of capital V and W. These looked totally strange for a text type.  I knew the usual story would unfold: I would at some point realize that most of these details are irrelevant and I chopped everything off. Yet, like with most things that you fall in love with, you cannot just say “Goodbye.” You need to get angry, you need to be pushed into letting go! To speed up this process, I asked for feedback from a ruthless friend, whose opinion I respect very much; and she told me to my face what I already knew: that the shapes still looked very dated, that I was not supposed to be making a revival, and that I had to bring my own voice to the design. Bingo! I immediately fell out of love with the letters.  

Working so long on one project, it becomes personal. This can often be an issue because your emotions get in the way of progress. The fact that the timeline was rather short helped me not to get lost in iterations and details. My best advice here would be to work as if you are working on someone else's typeface. That way, you can keep rational about decisions and progress much faster. If you cannot do that, have a friend help you with an honest and critical opinion once a month.

Of course, there are also design challenges. Some shapes were harder to pull off and took days of tweaking and testing. It was difficult to design the Q, R and k in such a way that they stay interesting, legible in small sizes, and that their sans versions retain some queues from the quirky slab shapes.

Although this was my most complex project yet, it was not overwhelming to be working on so many styles at the same time. Because I was able to dedicate large chunks of time to this project, my short-term memory helped keep all the details together, and I was able to work effectively.

At the moment, I am not planning to extend Equitan. If ever, I would like to add an even fatter slab weight, for crazy display use; and maybe an impossibly thin version, the kind that Lucas de Groot would work on.

For now, I am working on my 10,000 hours (which apparently is the number of hours of practice you need to become a master at something). I have been commissioned to create another type family for ITF: a sharp, not-so-strictly geometric sans serif for text use. This is turning out to be a bit more challenging than I thought: striking the balance between quasi-geometry and text-appeal inside a multiple-weight family. 

This year, I want to finally finish up my Type and Media graduation typeface, Editura, which will be released with Bold Monday. This is a type family for “serious” publications, possibly with the phonetic alphabet and other goodies that linguists need included in it. 

By Thomas Bohm 

1. Introduction

Incorrect recognition of a letter or symbol can occur in a number of different situations, whether it be an unclear typeface, reading a book or at long distance reading a road sign, to more serious instances, like medicine information leaflets or on a display in an aircraft. Different people (general, children, dyslexic, visually impaired, ageing) also have specific letter and symbol issues and requirements. Which letters and symbols are the most problematic and how are letters and symbols to be designed for maximum recognition clarity?

The word ‘legible’ used in this paper refers to typefaces which have well defined easily recognisable letters and symbols, which can be decoded easily and quickly, which are not overly stylistic in letterform design, typically typefaces used in the context of continuous reading, not script typefaces.

2. Confusing letters and symbols for general people

We define general people as aged between 13–45 years old, who do not have dyslexia or visual impairments.

The following letters can be easily confused as other characters: lowercase l (el) can be read as the number 1 or a capital I (i). The capital I (i) can be read as a lowercase l (el) or as a number 1. The number 1 can be read as a lowercase l (el), capital I (i), or number 7 (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Typefaces: Bucko and Sassoon Infant.

Regarding the uppercase I (i), from research and testing Smuc et al. (2007) found that because of ‘a very high possibility for confusion with i, +, 1, t, l, it is advised to add serifs for distinction on top and base’.

In research and testing of a typeface (Tern) for road signage Smuc et al. (2007), found that ‘a bent terminal (at the bottom of the lowercase l (el)) was of great importance to distinction.’ Beier and Larson (2010) found that ‘a tail at the bottom of the lowercase l (el) letter, more specifically a broader one, improved legibility’.

Also Smuc et al. (2007) found that ‘a distinctive arm (at the top of the number 1) has a positive effect on discrimination, serifs at the lower end of stem do not seem to have an influence’. This is something I would question: that serifs at the bottom of the number 1 do not have an influence on recognition and clarity. In Chaparro et al. (2011), a number 1 with a distinctive arm at the top and a serif at the bottom scored 97% identification in testing with users, whereas a number 1 with only a distinct arm at the top and no serif at the bottom scored 43%; there is conflicting research in this area, for me the number 1 with an arm at the top and serif at the bottom defines the number 1 the most obviously (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Typefaces: Mandatory, Century Gothic, Adobe Garamond, Myriad, Monaco, Verdana, Knockout, Century Gothic, DIN, Sassoon Infant Alt, and Rockwell.

In a fast (extended reading) or long distance (car number plate) reading environment, the lowercase i could be read as a lowercase j (Scarrott, 1968). The capital B could be read as the number 8, and the capital D as a number 0 (zero), capital O (ow), or lowercase o (ow) (Nicholson, 2007). Other potentially confusing letters in some typefaces are the italic lowercase k (which could be confused as an italic capital R), the italic lowercase a (which could be confused as a lowercase o (ow), capital O (ow) or 0 (zero)), italic capital J (Spencer, 1969) (which could be confused as a lowercase f), the italic lowercase r (which could be an italic lowercase v or capital Y), the German Eszett (ß) (which could be confused as a capital B or number 8) and the lowercase g (Banjanin et al., 2013) (which could be a lowercase q) (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Typefaces, line 1: Century Gothic, Trebuchet, line 2: Mandatory, Helvetica Neue Condensed, Georgia, line 3: Mandatory, Helvetica Neue Condensed, line 4: Georgia, line 5: Bembo, line 6: Myriad, line 7 and 8: Baskerville, line 9: Century Gothic, Adobe Garamond, Mandatory, line 10: Courier.

Smuc et al. (2007) found that ‘the negative space between the stem and the dot (space between dot on i and main stroke) must be wide to allow for good distinction from characters as l, f, I, 1, [...]. The influence of a serif is to be explored in further testing’. In research and testing Beier and Larson (2010) found that ‘the hypothesis that serifs on the letter “i” improve legibility was confirmed for distance viewing. [...] it seems as if the slab serif on top of the stem helps to clarify the letterforms, although when placed at the bottom, the character becomes difficult to identify’. However, the last point, that the serif on the bottom of the i makes the character difficult to identify, is something I would question.

Regarding the lowercase j, research and testing (Smuc et al., 2007) found that ‘the tail is needed to be considerably bent and wide’. Beier and Larson (2010) support this: ‘The hypothesis that broad characters improve legibility was confirmed overall for the letter “j” (larger tail, broader descender)’.

The United Kingdom car number plate in Figure 4 shows a letter which is not in a normal alphabet. What does it stand for? I have been unable to find out. From comments, Riccardo Sartori suggests it is a capital L rotated 180 degrees to form the letter/number which symbolises a number 7.

Figure 4. Letter on car number plate not in normal alphabet. Top typeface: English car number plate typeface ‘Mandatory’, bottom typeface: German car number plate typeface ‘FE-Schrift’.

Speech marks in typefaces like Verdana, Frutiger, Syntax (“ ” , ‘ ’) can be confused and look like prime marks (″ = inches, ′ = feet) or single and double dumb quotes (' , ") (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Real curly quotation marks, Verdana quotation marks, inch mark, feet mark, single and double dumb quote.

There are also three types of fraction marks (see image below). The third example could be read as a division sign. Whereas the second example uses a diagonal line which implies that the number above and below is a chunk, fraction of the numbers, a horizontal line has connections with division, dividing the number above and below, this is also supported by design of the division sign (÷) (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Fraction sign 1, 2 and 3.

Midpoints (·) should not be used as decimal points (.). I have seen midpoints used as decimal points in real life contexts: GCSE educational textbooks (Burndred, 1997) (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Midpoints and decimal points.

Why are commas used as decimal points when a decimal point is specific to numerical use? You would never write 2,5 mm, but you would write 2.5 mm. You would more often see 2 thousand 500 sheets written like so: 2,500 sheets, but rarely and maybe more correctly like so: 2.500 sheets. Commas should not be used as decimal points, as frequently seen in newspapers, because a comma marks a pause in text and is not specific to numbers. However, there are two co-existing conventions worldwide. One uses decimal points, the other uses decimal commas. More countries are subscribing to decimal commas than to decimal points. A decimal comma or decimal point can also be used to separate thousands, for example: English style: 967,295.00 (nine hundred and sixty seven thousand two hundred and ninety five pounds and zero pence), German style: 967.295,000 notice how the English and German styles are reversed. We can also note that in time values, a colon is used to separate hours, minutes and seconds. Note: if you use a space in numbers, it can split the numbers up, making them look like two different numbers. Figure 8.

Figure 8. Comma, decimal, and space points for numerical data (line 1). Thousands separator (lines 2 and 3), and colon for time data (line 4).

Roman numerals I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X (1–10) are a frequent source of confusion. Few people know their meaning. One should avoid using them. Also, a multiplication sign, an italic uppercase I (i), vertical line used as a separator used incorrectly, and the letter combination TT can also be misrecognized as a mathematical pi symbol. Figure 9.

Figure 9. Multiplication sign (line 1), italic uppercase I (i) vertical line and italic uppercase I (i) set in Century Gothic then Verdana (line 2), vertical line set in Helvetica (line 3), and TT and pi symbol (line 4).

‘Tightly spaced sans serif typefaces (Century Gothic, Helvetica) are more prone to confusion, because they do not have serifs which add definition to characters’ (Hudson, 2009).

Other confusing letter combinations are cl, which can be read as a lowercase d; rn, which can be read as a lowercase m; vv, which can be read as a lowercase w (Albert-Jan Pool, 2009); lowercase o (ow), capital O (ow), and 0 (zero), which can be read as each other. In OpenType typefaces, a defined (slashed or dotted) zero can be built into the typeface and selected from the typeface/software using the slashed zero option. The capital S could be read as 5, Z could be read as 2, LJ (capital el and jay) could be read as an uppercase U (as is noticeable in the professional dart player’s name MENSUR SULJOVIĆ). There is also the case of possibly needing to clarify the numbers 6 and 9 by adding an underline to them to mark where the baseline of the number is, in order to tell what number it is and if it has been turned around, like you see when lottery balls are being extracted from a tumbler on TV or on pool balls. There is also the case that a helicopter could need to identify the number on the top of a car’s roof on an official vehicle or ambulance. ce (when tracked/letterspaced tightly) can be seen as a œ (diphthong). Dmytro Perepølkin a data scientist from Norway contacted me via email in 2018. He raised an interesting issue regarding letter and symbol misrecognition used for phishing and spoofing purposes. Phishing is creating a fake lookalike page of a specific page. Spoofing can be defined as duplicating a domain name/phone number/email address/IP and using it for wrong purposes. See Figure 10 for an example of what he was suggesting. Even though characters in domain names between the www. and .extension are closely standardized, it is still a possibility that problems from letter and symbol misrecognition in domain names and URLs could be used for illegal purposes. Figure 10 and 11.

Figure 10. Easily misrecognised letter combinations for general people. Typefaces: Century Gothic, Cambria and Myriad.

Figure 11. Typefaces: Trebuchet, Monaco, Andale Mono and FE-Schrift.

Situations in which the previously described letters and symbols could get misrecognised are as follows:

• III or Ill: Academic book.
• Number 1 or 7: Medicine information leaflet, road signage, financial data.
• i or j, B or 8, D, O or 0: Text (book), long distance (car number plate).
• Apostrophe/speech marks: Text, mathematical work.
• Fraction sign: Academic/educational textbook.
• Decimal point (.)/midpoint (·): Academic/educational textbook.
• Decimal point (. or ,): No major confusion, but possibly in financial data, a newspaper or academic text.
• Multiplication sign: Academic/educational textbook.
• Letter combinations: Text or signage.
• Number 0 (zero), lowercase o (ow), capital O (ow): username and passwords for online accounts, international zip/postal codes (Chaparro, et al., 2006), aircraft monitors (BBC News, 2002), credit card number or speed cameras.

3. Confusing letters and symbols in condensed typefaces and superscripts/subscripts

Some condensed weight typefaces work and read as good as regular weight typefaces. However, in highly legible condensed typefaces, the condensed nature and form of letters does not give the letters the normal horizontal width they need, which creates specific problems, especially when they are used either very small, less than an x-height of 1.5mm (around 8pt) or less, or at long distance on signage or car number plates. Also if you look at the default superscript and subscript for the number 1 in a typeface like Calibre, unfortunately the typeface does not offer an alternate design to the default number 1 used specifically for superscripts or subscripts. The default number 1 style for superscripts and subscripts has an arm on the top, but no stroke on the bottom. You cannot input the default number 1 style used for the number 1 in general body text (which does by default have an arm at the top and stroke on the bottom of the number 1). The result of this is that, the number 1 in the superscript or subscript without a stroke on the bottom, could be seen as a small number 7. Why might the typeface designer have not provided an alternative number 1 style for superscripts and subscripts in Calibre? Maybe the typeface designer feels a stroke on the bottom, at the typically small size superscripts and subscripts are, would hamper legibility. What do non expert typographic people think of this, is it unclear or does it create confusion for general readers and the public? (Figure 12).

Figure 12. Examples showing condensed weight issues, and the superscript and subscript number 1 designs in the typeface: Calibri. The number 1 design for superscripts and subscripts is unchangeable and does not match the default number 1 design. Typefaces: Helvetica Neue Condensed, Silom and Calibre.

4. Confusing letters and symbols for children

We define children as aged between 4–12 years old.

Figure 13. Population of people who are children.

Infant characters, a, g, l, q, y, I, J, 1, 4, 7, 9, are characters specifically designed for people around 6 years old. In research and testing (Walker, 2005), ‘a possible reason for using infant characters is to make the characters more like handwritten forms’. Infant characters are what a child aged around 6 years old would write (by hand) and would be taught to write; subsequently, infant characters might more clearly reflect what they do and are taught. When children are a few years older and have learned to read and write fairly confidently, there is less need to use infant characters as a clarification. However, in the results from testing (Walker, 2005), infant characters did ‘not affect their reading performance in our tests’ and the children were able to point out ‘[an infant a] is what we write, [a normal a] is what we read’.

In research and testing (likely to be adult people), Beier and Larson (2010) found that ‘the infant a resulted in bad performance and misreadings’. Although as Sassoon (2001) points out, ‘recognition is a dominant factor when learning to read; the fact that the one-storey (infant) a, references to the letter shape that most children learn to write, has a positive influence on the inexperienced reader’. What can be noted is that the tail (stroke to the bottom right of the character of the infant a) in the typeface Sassoon Infant is far greater and defined than the infant a in a typeface like Century Gothic and many others.

Infant a’s are also used in italic and cursive typefaces; they present the same misrecognition problems as normal infant a’s.

In contemporary advertising/graphic communication typography in the United Kingdom, the infant a character is increasingly becoming popular (Age UK, Churchill Insurance, Facebook, Mastercard, Royal National Institute for the Blind, Vodafone, Waitrose, Waterstones, Yellow Pages), although the obvious problem is that it looks very similar to the lowercase o (ow) or a (0) zero or an uppercase O (ow) or even a lowercase sans serif Greek Alpha letter in an academic context [serif lowercase Greek Alpha letters seem to be in general more defined/distinguished than sans serif versions], a similarity which is increased further in a continuous reading context, [what is Mostercord?]. This increase in the popularity of the infant a is a typeface design fashion around the year 2011 (Figure 14 and 15).

Figure 14. Infant a’s in contemporary logo designs.

Figure 15. Infant a, lowercase o (ow), 0 (zero), captial O (ow) italic a, and lowercase Greek Alpha letter (sans serif), and lowercase Greek Alpha letter (serif, in brackets). Typefaces: Century Gothic, Georgia Italic, Myriad and Georgia.

Characteristics of infant characters are a: single story, g: single descender without loop, l: tail at bottom, q: diagonal line on descender, y: more curved descender, I: stroke on top and bottom, J: stroke on top, 1: diagonal stroke on top, 4: unjoined top, 7: crossbar on stroke, and 9: straight stem (Figure 16).

Figure 16. Top: Infant characters, bottom: normal characters. Typefaces: Above: Sassoon Infant, Below: Helvetica Neue, Trebuchet, Mandatory.

5. Confusing letters and symbols for people with dyslexia

Figure 17. Population of people with dyslexia.

Dyslexia is a neurologically-based, often familial disorder which interferes with the acquisition and processing of language. Varying in degrees of severity, it is manifested by difficulties in receptive and expressive language, including phonological processing, in reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, and sometimes arithmetic (Bright Solutions for Dyslexia, 2010). However, ‘the condition covers as many difficulties with the spoken and written word as it does definitions’ (Hillier, 2006).

From research and user testing (Hillier, 2006), ‘dyslexic users encounter identification problems with the following characters: lowercase l, numerical 1, exclamation mark !, lowercase o; uppercase O, p q, b d, j g, m n, m w, g h t, J L, L I. Character confusion difficulties are experienced with the following characters: b/d, p/q, a/e, b/k, u/v and the numerals. All of these difficulties are related to the similarity in design of the character forms, resulting (in the examples of b/d, p/q and 6/9) in letter reversals. Vowel letters (in the example of a/e) may also be a factor in dyslexic character confusion’.

Hillier (2006) from research and testing found that people with dyslexia prefer the following:

• Handwritten style letters.
• Uppercase (Sylexiad) forms rather than lowercase forms.
• Long ascenders and descenders. [Height of the letters which go above and below, for instance, a lowercase x].
• Distinctive and well-defined letters. [Not typefaces such as Arial, Century Gothic, Futura, Helvetica, which have very similar, undefined, geometric rounded forms].
• Uniform stroke widths. [Not a typeface such as Times New Roman, which has varying stroke widths].
• Perpendicular design. [At an angle of 90° to a line or surface, upright, vertical].
• Familiarity of form.
• Sylexiad Serif (as a typeface family) (Figure 18).

Figure 18. Robert Hillier, typeface: Sylexiad Serif Medium Regular and Italic weights (sans serif version also available).

In 2008, Christian Boer (Boer, 2008) designed a typeface called Dyslexie to increase the accuracy and readability of texts for dyslexics so that the errors by switching letters are reduced. Renske de Leeuw (de Leeuw, 2010) researched and tested the typeface. They found that Dyslexie resulted in fewer reading errors, although mainly in the specific area of dyslexics switching, flipping, mirroring and turning letters, such as the p and d (de Leeuw, 2010). Their main implemented design features considered to be of benefit to dyslexic readers are:

• Keeping the focus on the letters at the bottom.
• Enlarging the openings (counters) of the letters.
• Making some letters a bit italic.
• Defining characters which look quite similar.
• Making the sticks (ascenders and descenders) of some letters longer.
• Making the capitals and the punctuation bold at the beginning and the end of the sentence.
• Making similar looking letters different heights, each with its own features.
• Using wider letterspacing than is normal (Figure 19).

Figure 19. Christian Boer, typeface: Dyslexie Regular and Italic.

6. Confusing letters and symbols for people with visual impairments

Figure 20. Population of people with visual impairments.

The 2 million people with a sight problem in the United Kingdom have varying degrees of sight loss, ranging from those who have no light perception at all (total blindness), to those who have a sight loss which is uncorrectable by aids such as glasses and who have difficulty reading small print as well as text at a distance.

The many different eye conditions affect people in different ways. Three common eye conditions are glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and macular degeneration (Figure 21). Glaucoma can result in tunnel vision, where all side vision is lost and only central vision remains. Diabetic retinopathy can cause blurred and patchy vision. Macular degeneration can lead to a loss of central vision while side vision remains. But everyone is affected in different ways, and it is important not to assume that you know what someone can see simply because you know which eye condition she/he has (RNIB, 2006). The vast majority of people with sight problems are aged 65 and over (Tiresias, 2009). Another common term which gets used also within the area of visual impairments is low vision, low vision is defined as visual impairments that are not correctable through surgery, pharmaceuticals, glasses or contact lenses (The Vision Council, 2015).

Figure 21. Three common eye conditions. Photo credit: Action for Blind People.

People with visual impairments are likely, due to similarity of form, to find the following letters hard to recognise and confusing due to lack of visual clarity. The number 1, capital I (i) or lowercase l (el) or exclamation mark; the capital U or capital V; the lowercase u or v; number 5 or capital S; capital B and number 8; lowercase (infant) a or lowercase o (ow) or number 0 (zero) or uppercase O (ow); capital D or number 0 (zero) or uppercase O (ow) or lowercase o (ow); lowercase i and j; cl or d; rn or m; vv or w; capital Z or number 2; capital C or G; capital Q or uppercase O (ow); capital I S and O (ow) or number 150; word go or number 90 (using oldstyle figures). The letter combinations: LJ (capital el and lowercase jay), IJ (capital i and jay) LI (capital el and i) Ll (capital el and lowercase el) L1 (capital el and number 1) could be seen as an uppercase U. The letter combinations: LU (capital el and u), LLI (capital el el and i), LILI (capital el i el and i), and UU (capital u) could be seen as an uppercase W [other problematic characters which could be substituted into this previous series are the lowercase l (el) and number 1]. The following letter combinations: LU, LLI, UU could be read as an uppercase W, and LILI as UU [other problematic characters which could be substituted into this previous series are the lowercase l (el) and number 1]. The letter combinations: CI (capital c and i) can be seen as an uppercase O (ow) or number 0 (zero) [other problematic characters which could be substituted into this previous series are the lowercase l (el) and number 1]. There are also issues to do with letter design and punctuation/symbol combinations: <J (less than symbol with an uppercase jay) can combine to look like a <l (lowercase el) or <I (uppercase i). A lowercase or uppercase j to the right of a starting bracket/parentheses: (J (j could possibly look like an uppercase U, Peter Glaab (Glaab, 2017) has mentioned that a small white space character or extra kerning is manually necessary. Another similar problematic letter combination is: (T (which can look like a uppercase N). Figure 22.

Figure 22. Easily misrecognised letter combinations for people with visual impairments [and people with ageing eyesight, see heading number 7 later on in this paper]. Typefaces: Century Gothic, Myriad. Line 20 (last): Calibri, Lucida Sans, Avenir.

A recent example of one of the previous issues becoming a real-life problem was from an article by Ewout van Lambalgen (van Lambalgen, 2017). Ewout and a friend of his (both did not even have any visual impairments) booked their flight and then tried to check-in for their flight via an app on their mobile phone. The app kept on giving errors without being specific about what was going wrong. He then moved from a mobile app to a website, where he got an error message telling him that he apparently entered his friend’s passport document number incorrectly. The issue was all down to bad typography. The passport number was written like so: S35P7EC8 using capital letters and oldstyle figures. Because she was not paying enough attention and does not have a lot of knowledge about typography, she did not notice that the B in her document number (she misrecognised the last number eight as a capital B) was actually an 8 (number eight) due to the number eight aligning/sitting on the baseline and not dropping below the baseline (Figure 22.2).

Figure 22.2. Typeface: Calibri.

Additional guidelines (Perera, 2001) regarding letter design for people with visual impairments are as follows:

• Anything in italics is very difficult for partially sighted people to read.
• Sans serif or bracketed serif was preferred over serif. It appears that a slight degree of serif which accentuates the characters ends without distracting from the simple form actually increased legibility.
• Normal or enlarged spacing. [This refers to spaces between characters (tracking/letterspacing)].
• Darkest weight/bold letters.
• Punctuation marks should be made bigger, but not to the point where they distract from the content (Figure 23).

Figure 23. Tiresias LPfont: Regular and Italic weights (Perera, 2001). Illustration (right) slight degree of serif on characters in LPfont (LPfont stands for Large Print font).

7. Confusing letters and symbols for people who are ageing

Ageing people are aged 45+ years old and may have started to develop impaired vision.

Figure 24. Population of people who are ageing.

The population of the UK is ageing, the percentage of the population aged 65 and over increased from 15% in 1984 to 16% in 2009, an increase of 1.7 million people. This trend is projected to continue. By 2034, 23% of the UK population is projected to be aged 65 and over (Office for National Statistics, 2010). 28% of the world’s population between the years of 2000–2025 will be aged 45 and older (World Health Organisation, 2001).

Brad Pettengill outlines 3 common conditions of ageing eyesight (Pettengill, 2014):

• Loss of light: advancing age causes the pupils to shrink, less light enters the eye, causing vision problems in low-light environments.
• Inability to focus: the eye’s lens loses elasticity, becomes less able to focus while reading.
• Vision field loss: age-related eye diseases include macular degeneration, glaucoma, cataracts and diabetic retinopathy.

Due to lack of visual clarity (blurred, dark), which can also be known as presbyopia (Funcke, 2002), people who are ageing are likely to experience problems with the same letters and symbols described under heading: 6. Confusing letters and symbols for people with visual impairments mentioned earlier in this paper. Additional guidelines (Nini, 2006) are as follows:

• Consistent stroke widths [not typefaces like Bodoni or Times New Roman].
• Open counter forms.
• Pronounced ascenders and descenders.
• Wider horizontal proportions.
• More distinct forms for each character (such as tails on the lowercase letters ‘t’ and ‘j’).
• Extended horizontal strokes for certain letterforms (such as the arm of the lowercase letter ‘r’ or the crossbar of the lowercase letter ‘t’).

8. How do we and should we test typefaces?

We can research and theorise all we like, but a good evaluation is surely by finding out if our intentions are experienced by people, and even to learn about new problems and what is or is not working. What can we test in regard to a typeface? Alex Poole (Poole, 2012) suggests these measures of legibility or readability:

• Speed of reading.
• Speed of perception.
• Fatigue in reading.
• Backtracking and other eye movements.
• Perceptibility at a distance.
• Perceptibility in peripheral vision.

Other measures to add to the mix could be:

• Personal preference.
• Ideal and best maximum optimized performance for a certain user type and use task.
• Appeal.
• Recall: quality of comprehension understanding of the text.
• Motivation.
• Read aloud/back.
• Quality of rendering on screen and hinting issues (technical).

I am sure the lists above do not list all possibilities. It is worth noting that some of these testing options will get you weak information (like personal preference) and some will get you stronger information. Ruth Shrensky and David Sless (Shrensky & Sless, 2007) mention the following in regard to testing: ‘[...] The first is that inexperienced, untrained, or misguided information designers ask the wrong questions: What do people think of my designs? Which of my designs do they prefer? What must my artifact look like? What information must my artifact contain? The second reason is that asking the wrong questions about the design leads inevitably to certain ways of asking questions – methods of testing which give inadequate answers. [...]’. David Sless also raises the problems with: attitude and opinion surveys, preference tests, expert opinion and content-based design. ‘[...] A far more useful question to ask before you design a new information artifact or redesign an existing one is, what do I want people to be able to do with this artifact? [...]’. So we can observe that not all data or information gained is necessarily useful.

Ralf Herrmann mentions (Herrmann, 2011) in regard to testing typefaces generally: ‘Doing scientific studies to test which typefaces work best in this regard is almost impossible to do. For a proper test setup you would need to modify one parameter while keeping every other parameter unchanged. But setting a letter or word in different typefaces can not be considered as ‘changing one parameter’, because a typeface consists of dozens of relevant parameters like x-height, weight, contrast, width – just to name a few. So scientific test for typeface legibility are often full of flaws. Very often the typefaces are set at the same point size, but as every graphic designer should know, the point size does not reflect the actual size of the letters in print or on screen. So if you come across a scientific legibility study that compares typefaces set at the same point size, don’t even bother to read on!’.

9. Concluding observations

For general people, quite a few letters and symbols in highly legible typefaces are usually not defined enough, resulting in letter or symbol misrecognition, word confusion, and possibly fatal incidents. The context the letter/s or symbol/s is in, is also important, if the confusing letter or symbol is within a word you can probably work out what it is by looking at the whole word, if the confusing letter or symbol is isolated, on its own or within a password, it can be difficult to tell what it is. I came across quite a bit of research stating that, for instance, the lowercase y could be confused with the lowercase z (Grissinger, 2017) and the capital H and N could be confused with each other (Russell-Minda et al., 2007) and so on, which I was not convinced about. I cannot see how, if using a highly legible typeface for these characters, that they would ever get confused, so this information was not discussed further in this paper. I have noticed in 2019 that a version of Neue Frutiger called Neue Frutiger 1450 was released by Linotype in 2013 which tries to adhere and tackle issues raised in this paper and conform to DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) legibility standard 1450:2013-04 (DIN, 2013) which I have been unable to read because it is not in a language I am fluent in. It seems to make good commercial sense, as Frutiger is used a lot for signage and signs in airports. There is also the very real and present issue of webfonts, we have come to the point where basically any typeface designed recently or that is available in a digital format will most likely be use and can be used as a webfont. If a typeface is used as a webfont, the requirements and uses of the webfont, in regards to the information it will be required to handle, is strictly unpredictable and diverse. Finally, I noticed this billboard for a local historic attraction, see Figure 25, notice what they have done at the bottom of the billboard in the website address (all the typography for the billboard is capital letters), the website address should have been written like this: WWW.KRIII.COM but was written like this: WWW.KRiii.COM, I think this just reinforces that there is a genuine problem in this area in regard to typeface design.

Figure 25. An interesting issue is highlighted in the website address at the bottom of the billboard.

For children, the infant a is the most problematic character. It is easily misrecognised and, for some reason, has always been considered beneficial. This is not the case though. Research and testing reviewed in this paper has shown that even adults misrecognise the infant a. If the infant a character is used for children around 6 years old, it should be much better defined (like in the Sassoon Infant typeface) and used with caution. The infant a should not be used for competent, teenage, or adult readers. Where does this variation of standard recognizable letter shapes end? Also, infant a’s commonly used in italic or cursive typefaces should be well defined or distinct, or one should use a slanted form of the regular upright lowercase a. Is a reason for the rise in infant a’s because typefaces designers and designers want the text and typography to feel more friendly and informal? Do people even notice this change? It is worth noting that children today more readily encounter a wide range and vast variety of different letter designs, whether it be in the environment, on TV, using a computer, or through mobile devices. They encounter much more varied letterforms than in previous years.

Reviewed research has shown that people with dyslexia, in terms of the amount of problems, are the most problematic user group. Highly defined letters and symbols are desirable, to minimize misrecognition, misreading and mirroring of letters, symbols, and words. There are also other issues not specifically in regard to letter and symbol misrecognition which people with dyslexia experience such as: a wash-out effect, a river effect and a swirl effect (Irlen, 1991). All these effects cause the text to blur and jump, which results in visual confusion for the dyslexic reader (Evans, 2004). If you look in books or on the internet you can find examples of what it is like for people with dyslexia who experience these issues. Do specifically designed typefaces for people with dyslexia actually work?, one study by Chuck Bigelow (Bigelow, 2014) concludes that after surveying more than fifty scientific papers and books about dyslexia, he found no evidence that special dyslexia fonts confer statistically significant improvements in reading speed compared to standard, run-of-the-mill fonts. There seems to be conflicting views in this area, some say specific dyslexic typefaces make a difference and some say not. There seems to be conflicting views in this area, some say specific dyslexic typefaces make a difference and some say not, some have positive testing results, some not. Unfortunately there is an increasing amount of fonts/typefaces claimed to be designed specifically for people with dyslexia which are not convincing and do not supply any or an insufficient amount of: research references, problems faced or tried to tackle, and no information about testing procedures or results with people who have dyslexia. Dyslexic typefaces not included in this paper are: OpenDyslexic, EasyReading, Read Regular, Riona Moore’s dyslexia typeface and DysLex (which seems to be a similar typeface to Dyslexie). As of 2019, some new typefaces have appeared which tackle issues of vision impairment and dyslexia: Lexie Readable and Andika. These typefaces claim they tackle issues, but offer no research, original research or references to support the design or claims, and offer no feedback or testing information with people, this is a bit disappointing.

For people with visual impairments, lack of visual clarity means that letters and symbols of similar form need to be well defined. More research and testing is needed into the problems people with visual impairments encounter when reading text.

For people who are ageing, a blurry and dark vision means that letters and symbols of similar form need to be well defined. More research and testing is needed into the problems people who are ageing encounter when reading text.

For graphic communication/information designers, interesting typeface examples in relation to this research are as follows: Avance, Copperplate Gothic, Info Display, Lola, OCR-A, Rockwell, Unit and Zine Slab.

For typeface designers, implementing the research and guidelines into typeface designs can be seen as part of the creative challenge of designing a typeface and it is not an intention to make your job any harder. With the invention of OpenType, alternate letters and symbols to a defined version of the typeface can be built into and selected through the typeface/software using ‘stylistic sets’ option.

Regarding testing of typefaces with people, we need to better setup and compare typeface material when testing, and also get better (stronger) information/data when testing with people. Sofie Beier (Beier, 2016) touches upon the different issues and constraints designers and academics have faced in the past ‘To produce findings that are relevant for the practicing designer, scientists benefit from consulting designers in the development of the experiments. While designers can contribute with design skills, they cannot always contribute with scientific rigor. Hence, researchers will profit from adopting a methodological approach that ensures both control of critical typographical variables and scientific validation. An interdisciplinary collaboration where scientists provide valid test methods and analysis and designers identify relevant research questions and develop test materials, will enable a project to reach more informed findings than what the two fields would be able to produce in isolation’. To recap, designers have tended to, in the past, produce information lacking scientific rigour. Scientists produce information which is hard to understand, contains equations and lacks practical application.

In regard to all our user groups in this paper, Ralf Herrmann raises the point of ‘when a typeface is read in difficult reading conditions, [...] all those stylistic details that define the overall look of these typeface disappear under difficult reading conditions. What matters most is the skeleton of the letters. On one hand these letter skeletons should be very generic, so they easily match the visual patterns we have learned and seen so many times in our life. But on the other hand, they also need to be somewhat unique. The most generic letter forms do not necessarily create the most legible letters, because too generic letter shapes are harder to differentiate (Hermann, 2009). It is worth noting that generally, letters have become more generic and reliant on a letter’s base skeleton over time (early 1400s blackletter, late 1400s humanist, early 1500s old style, mid 1700s transitional, late 1700s modern, mid 1800s slab serif, and early 1900s sans serif).

Figure 25. From (Hermann, 2009). Top typeface: German road sign font DIN 1451, bottom typeface: Wayfinding Sans Pro. Regarding the ‘a’, the prominent stroke ending on the right may not be necessary to recognize it, but if it is there it helps to distinguish the ‘a’ from other characters. To the right: under difficult reading conditions, details such as the usually rather small crossbars of ‘f’ and ‘t’ get easily lost. Making these parts more prominent can significantly improve the legibility under difficult viewing conditions.

Adhering to the research and guidelines in this paper has clear benefits for the clarity and recognition of letters and symbols in graphic communication. It is positive how designers and researchers are tackling these issues more and more. By including different people’s needs, other than the clients’ and your own, your design will better support the wide range of people who will use your design and ultimately be better.

About the author

Thomas Bohm studied graphic communication design at college (BTEC, Leicester College, UK) and university (BA, Norwich University of the Arts, UK), now works for book publishers and businesses, and continues to run User Design, Illustration and Typesetting a graphic communication design, illustration and production service. Writes, researches and occasionally publishes. Published Punctuation..? (2nd edition, User Design, 2012) a fun and fully illustrated book on punctuation. Has been published in Information Design Journal, Baseline, Slanted, Boxes and Arrows and is a member of the Association of Illustrators and the International Institute for Information Design. 

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Original drawings by Eric Gill from 1932

Gill Sans Nova was created by George Ryan. The update comes in a coordinated range of weights in regular and condensed weights, each with italics. The family has grown from 18 to 43 styles. Several new display fonts with inline and shadow effects were added, including Gill Sans Nova Deco – based on a typeface previously withdrawn from Monotype Library. 

Gill Sans Nova

Joanna Nova by Ben Jones is based on Eric Gill’s Joanna and now has 18 styles with added support for Greek and Cyrillic. It also has small caps in both upright and italics, several numeral options and contextual ligatures. 

Ink drawings by Eric Gill for Joanna from 1939

Joanna Nova

Joanna Sans Nova by Terrance Weinzierl is a new typeface design, a Gill-inspired sans serif version of Joanna. According to Monotype this addition to the Gill family was designed specifically for the age of screen-based reading. The type family contains 16 fonts, from thin to black with accompanying italics and more than 1000 glyphs per style. 

The fonts from the Eric Gill Series are available on MyFonts.com, Fonts.com, and Linotype.com.