An Anthology on Type

an ANTHOLOGY on type

an ANTHOLOGY on type

INTRODUCTION An Anthology on Type is a collection of essays regarding many facets of type design. The collection begins with “Temple of Type,” an essay on the St. Bride Library on Fleet Street in London – a place that, in the 1800s, was “at the heart of the printing trade.” Next, we discuss “Hamilton Wood Type,” a type foundry whose historical type was only recently revived, and made digitally available. We then get into the process of the letterpress, discussing the actual space that went into creating prints in “How I Came to Love the En Space.”

It is only appropriate that we also take a look into the process of identifying the origin of older letterpress pieces in “Planing Patterns and Sleuthing Origins.” Next, “Doyen of Type Design” takes a look at a more modern day type designer, Matthew Carter, and the timeless additions he has made to type design. Finally, the collection concludes with a warning to “Steer Clear of the Uncanny Valley” – an essay that will hopefully allow the reader to examine and question what can really be considered “original” work.

So, what is with all this hype about type?

Whether it be the origins and historical roots of type, or how the traditional practice of the letterpress applies today, these readings should give you a sense of how crucial type design is today, and was throughout history.

Everyone thinks they know about type – we all read and write, ya know? But how much do most people really know about the process, origins, and story behind each letter in a type face? To make it even more mind blowing, how much do you really know about historical type? Woodcut type? Letterpress? Type foundries? The printing press?

An Anthology on Type is a brief timeline on typographic antiquity. Take a look at these essays and uncover a whole history of type that you didn’t even know occurred. I challenge the reader to come away from this collection and not look at type differently—with an appreciation.

Go on, read, engage, and immerse yourself in a brief history of type.

—Libby Swofford

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CONTENT S Temple of Type

By Robin Kinross

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Hamilton Wood Type A New Foundry Celebrates an Old Art Form

by Angelynn Grant

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How I Came to Love the En Space In typesetting, the spaces between words, lines, and letters are never really empty. An Object Lesson.

By Lindsay Lynch

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Planing Patterns and Sleuthing Origins

By David Shields

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Doyen of Type Design The Most Read Man in the World

by G.F.

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Steer Clear of the Uncanny Valley

By Jessica Karle Heltzel

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TEM PLE of

type

By Robin Kinross

ver the past 30 years, printing has been transformed from metal to film to digital, from secretive craft skills to openly available knowledge. The transformation has two aspects: the loss of a technology and of the culture surrounding the material production of text and image, and the development of less exclusive but potentially more refined processes of production. In such conditions, reference to history – including very recent history – is of vital importance in improving standards and providing an understanding of where we are now.

One of the best sources in the world for such information is the St Bride Printing Library off Fleet Street in London.

At the moment the library depends on a delicate balance of circumstances which cannot last. The building is in bad repair; the demands of and on the collection are beginning to outgrow present capacities. A bold solution is needed if the library is set to continue to serve the needs of designers and scholars.

The St Bride Foundation was established in 1891 as a school of printing and a social centre in a district of London that was then at the heart of the printing trade.

In 1922 the school moved premises to become the London School (later College) of Printing,* leaving just the recreation facilities and a library formed initially

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through the purchase of books owned by the printer and scholar William Blades.

During the 1960s, major changes in textcomposing and printing techniques led to a growing awareness of the need to document the history of printing. In 1964 the Printing Historical Society, based at the St Bride Institute, was formed. Two years later responsibility for the library was placed with the City of London, which made available greater resources to enable it to consolidate its collection. The principal figure behind this work has been the present librarian, James Mosley, who took over this position in 1958.

The literature of printing tends to be fugitive in character: trade catalogues and typespecimen books, periodicals, promotional leaflets, technical manuals. Trade literature is often undated and can be acquired only from manufacturing companies or from people who have collected it or accumulated it in the course of their work. The St Bride library has what must be broadest and richest collection anywhere of the literature of printing technology – a speciality that distinguishes it from the main printing libraries in Germany (at Mainz, Offenbach and Leipzig) and in the US (the Newberry Library in Chicago or the American Type Founders’ Library at Columbia University).

Equally impressive are its holdings in the more general field of design for printing, in particular type specimens.

St Bride’s also collects manuscript or non-printed materials, of which the most important must be the drawings for inscriptions and type by Eric Gill, donated by the Monotype Corporation in 1976. Another major area has been printing tools: a wooden press (ca. 1800), an iron Stanhope press, some later jobbing and proofing presses in working order, and type, including notable historical collections such as the ‘Fell types’ from

“ St Bride library has what must be broadest and richest collection anywhere of the literature of printing technology—a speciality that distinguishes it...”

Oxford University Press. These pieces are among the ‘highlights’ of the collection, but Mosley also stresses the less glamorous aspects: the range, depth and completeness of the library’s holdings.

With the departure of the newspapers from Fleet Street and the dissolution

of the local printing trade, the St Bride Foundation’s original constituency has been lost. Although accommodation for the library has been indicated only vaguely in the redevelopment plans for the institute revealed by the foundation over the last year, it seems likely that the space allocated will be inadequate and inappropriate. Certainly there is no provision for the expansion that would be a natural response to the growth of the collections. The recent marked increase in readers, in part the result of a desire within graphic design education for a stronger historical and theoretical component, should also be considered.

It may be that the present manoeuvres concerning the institute will produce an acceptable solution, from the City of London or elsewhere. Meanwhile, the fight for the library’s continuing existence is an issue with the largest repercussions and should be of concern to the international design community. For in securing this centre of research and knowledge of the past, we also contribute to the good health of printing in the future.

The St Bride Printing Library is at the St Bride Printing Institute, Bride Lane, Fleet Street, London EC4Y 8EE *Now the London College of Communication.

First published in Eye no. 2 vol. 1, 1991

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H W T

Hamilton Wood Type A New Foundry Celebrates an Old Art Form

by Angelynn Grant

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wood type revival has been happening over the past few years. In fact, there was a 2011 Kickstarter project called Wood Type Revival that spawned a digital foundry by the same name. Several other wood type-devoted companies have popped up, including Moore Wood Type (moorewoodtype.com), which makes type both digitally and the old-fashioned way: in wood, using traditional methods by a skilled cutter/craftsman. Now P22, the Buffalo, New York-based type foundry, has teamed up with the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum (woodtype.org) in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, as the Hamilton Wood Type Foundry (hamiltonwoodtype. com) to produce a new line of OpenType fonts drawn from the Museum’s vast collection of artifacts and tools that span the history of wood type manufacturing.

The Hamilton Holly Wood Type Company was founded in 1880 by Two Rivers native James Edward Hamilton. He invented a new and much less expensive way of quickly making wood type using holly wood veneer. This manufacturing advantage helped the company eventually buy up all of its major competition and, by the turn of the century, Hamilton was the largest purveyor of wood type in the US. The Hamilton Museum houses over 1.5 million pieces of wood type in more than 1,000 styles, plus the tools to both make and print wood type and an extensive

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array of twentieth-century advertising cuts.

The Museum is overseen by brothers Jim and Bill Moran, as director and artistic director respectively, and has many former Hamilton employees on staff as volunteers.

The Morans seem perfectly suited to the helm: their family owned the Quality Print Shop in nearby Green Bay for three generations, which donated presses and other equipment to the Museum, and Bill Moran still runs Blinc Publishing, a St. Paul, Minnesota, design studio that includes letterpress printing.

In a similar fashion, P22 seems a perfect match for this partnership. For two decades, P22 has specialized in creating digital fonts inspired by historical designs, from Cezanne’s signature to the London Underground typeface. A few years ago, founder Richard Kegler saw that there was a lot of untapped beauty housed in the Museum’s type drawers. “I have known Bill Moran for years, but visited the Museum for the first time only three years ago,” he says. “During my first visit, I encouraged him to consider starting a digital division of the Museum to both raise funds and bring the Museum to a wider audience. He indicated there had been a few people talking about different approaches to digitizing fonts for the benefit of Hamilton, and, in the end, I was a bit surprised when he came back and said they wanted to partner with P22 on this project. That was not my goal

in pitching the idea to him, but I was flattered and excited that this might be a project that we take on at P22.”

“ I encouraged him to consider starting a digital division of the Museum to both raise funds and bring the Museum to a wider audience.”

Their first release, American Chromatic, debuted in September 2012. Quite the technological achievement when it was created in 1857, it had two parts that allowed some areas to overlap to produce three-color effects. Because of recent changes in CSS, similar overlapping tricks are now possible with web fonts and P22 was able to take it even further. The digital font allows more overlapping combinations for multicolor 3-D shadowing effects and optional sprays of stars. “During a visit for TypeCon in July 2012, I saw a box of American Chromatic in a glass cabinet at the Museum and envisioned a synchronicity of using chromatic types as layered digital fonts on the web, specifically for the upcoming US presidential election.

So while other designs had already started to be digitized, this one was fast-tracked to be pre-released a couple months

before the election. Also the face has a very iconic look that says a lot about the time and place these fonts were originally made,” explains Kegler. The Museum had a fairly complete set of letters, but, as with all the fonts they will be releasing, the digitizing process required a lot of detective work and extrapolation. “The unique combination that is American Chromatic is really not without plenty of precedent,” notes Kegler. “The base style is a bold Tuscan. The missing characters were extrapolated from similar Tuscans following the same style of American Chromatic. Looking at multiple samples helps to understand how the types evolved.”

HWT chose as their second release Borders One, a set of ornate modular borders and “streamers”—banners that originally would have been custom-made with the text reversed out and fitted with decorative end caps. Kegler explains, “The borders were one of the first digitizing projects we started before any specific type designs were chosen. The modularity of ornament systems really interest me in hand-set type. Digitally, it can be easy to build up designs with these pieces.

Down the road, we plan to release other border and ornament fonts to complement the alphabetical fonts.”

Introduced in November, Antique Tuscan No. 9 is an extremely condensed face with a hint of mirth in the notched

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terminals, almost like the gingerbread trim on a Victorian-period house. “We had a very good specimen to work from that included the full upper- and lowercase plus ligatures. We also had access to an actual wooden font with diphthongs and additional punctuation,” says Kegler.

“Almost every font we do at P22 has a basic set of approximately 250 characters. The design of characters such as the euro and yen symbols would never have existed in most historical designs, but after spending some time with the base alphabet, there can often be some artistic license to adding missing characters, but for the HWT collection, we are trying to keep the known characters true to their original design.”

Having the Museum’s rich resources available is a big advantage. Because wood type fonts varied depending upon the pantograph cutter, many references come together to produce these fonts. “This is one of the really fascinating sleuthing aspects of this project,” explains Kegler.

“For example, we get to see the patterns at the Museum—patterns are the larger outline blocks from which the pantograph cuts smaller type. Also, it really helps to see multiple impressions of the type in specimen books. Although never more than a few letters of each font are shown, these are arguably the best examples of the typeface to be found in print. They were trying to sell the type and wanted it to look as good as possible. The fact that various

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manufacturers copied each other’s designs makes for an interesting piecing together of lineage. Ultimately we try to choose one version and use similar designs to help inform the design of missing characters.”

A very different font is HWT’s new Roman Extended Lightface, a gorgeous modern serif with many distinctive grace notes, like the tails on the R and the 2 and, especially, the loop on the lowercase g. This font seems less stylistically bound to the wood type era—more delicate than one would think possible when cut in wood using a pantograph. “The idea from the beginning was to show off a diverse range of what was made,” Kegler reveals. “Most wood type found in printshops are the standard Gothics used for headlines and posters. Our first releases intentionally span a range of extremes. And coming up will be some more surprises.

“There are at least twelve distinct releases in the works,” elaborates Kegler about the game plan. “We first try to determine what designs are in the Hamilton Collection or are historically part of the designs that were owned by Hamilton. Next we try to determine which fonts have already been digitized and to what level of success. For example, Antique Tuscan No. 9 has at least two other digitizations out there in the world, but they have no lowercase. We felt that justified a new digitization for a more flexible design. Some future releases

will include Gothics as well as what some people might call crazy circus alphabets.

The multilayer chromatics were truly a feat of manufacturing in the 1800s and we hope to see designers working with our releases on both historical pastiche as well as innovating with designs no one has ever expected.”

Although only a few months old, the Hamilton Wood Type Foundry has had great initial buzz. But, sadly, just as the new partnership got off the ground, the Museum received news that they had to relocate. “In some ways the project has been overshadowed by the unfortunate development of the Museum itself needing to move and raise funds to do so,” Kegler says. Although now temporarily closed, the Museum plans to stay in Two Rivers and reopen this summer. Kegler looks on the bright side: “A new Museum location should present a fresh approach to the organization, documentation and display of the collection. We’re not only very happy to be part of this next phase of the Museum, we look forward to seeing what designers do with each release.”

Editor’s note: At press, the Museum has a new home—with a stunning view of Lake Michigan.

Communication Arts, May 22, 2013

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How I Came to Love the En

S P A C E In typesetting, the spaces between words, lines, and letters are never really empty. An Object Lesson.

by Lindsay Lynch

our small, wooden blocks hang from a yellow string around my neck. Though they resemble antique children’s toys or minimalist Etsy crafts, they were stolen from a mostly defunct letterpress shop.

I didn’t know it at the time, but these wood blocks are probably centuries old— they were once used to create spaces between words on a letterpress printer.

In the years after college, I learned how to make a book traveling from print shop to print shop across the country. I made paper by hand from recycled cotton tee shirts. I bound pages together and stitched intricate leather shells for them.

I silk-screened, marbled, and blockprinted paper. I sorted metal and wood type into words, composed pages, and ran them through countless presses.

When people think of printmaking, most imagine the printing press itself— someone running paper through a large machine, turning out sheets of words or colorful posters. But in truth, the actual printing portion takes less than half the time. To understand letterpress printing, imagine that every letter you see on your screen is an object, a tiny piece of metal. Not only is every letter an object, but every space between every letter is also an object. Every space between words, every space between lines—every bit of white space is an object. When

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typesetting, a printer has to think about negative space as something tangible.

This is where the en space comes in.

An en space is a rectangular piece of metal or wood whose primary purpose is to be smaller than the metal or wood type being printed. The en space isn’t type-high—it doesn’t sit proud like an ordinary character—so it doesn’t catch ink when it’s run through the press. It just holds printable type together in a tight grid, creating spaces between words. It is never seen, but without it, everything printed would be nonsense.

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oday, people associate reading with solitude and quiet, but this wasn’t always the case. In the Middle Ages, the Bible was only reproduced in its original Latin scriptura continua, meaning there were no spaces between the words. To differentiate between words, readers had to sound them out; no one read silently.

We have the Irish to thank for the spaces between words. When Roman Catholicism made its way to Ireland by the fifth century, the Irish were given Bibles written by hand in the original scriptura continua Latin.

Having never heard Latin spoken before, the Irish had an understandably difficult time reading it. The solution? When copying the Bible, they separated the words with a small space.

The invention of spaces between words changed the process of reading entirely.

In his book Space Between Words, the medievalist Paul Saegner argues that spaces were directly responsible for the development of silent reading. “Altering the neurophysiological process of reading simplified the act of reading,” he explains. Specifically, it allowed readers to comprehend the text separate from its oral performance. By adding space and reading silently, early readers could take in information more quickly.

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n 1455, Gutenberg printed the first Bible with moveable type. During the centuries since the Irish developed spaces between words, the process of copying texts by hand has transformed into an art form in and of itself. When the 15th-century Italian scribe Poggio developed what is now the template for Roman typefaces, he did so in the service of constructing a clear and legible script that more people could read, thus making different texts more available to a wider audience.

To most, the introduction of the printing press, with its identical typefaces, indicates a rise of uniformity, a removal of the beautiful scripts of Poggio and other scribes. On the contrary though, no two printed Gutenberg Bibles are the same. As Matthew Battles points out in Palimpsest: A History of the Written

Word, the Gutenberg Bibles (and many of the Bibles printed later) were typeset with ample blank spaces. “Well into the 16th century,” Battles writes, “printed books were produced with space in the margins for custom-painted borders and added illustrations. Far from putting the scribes and illuminators of the late Middle Ages out of work, the technology of the press offered these artisans a new medium and new markets for their labor.” The empty space afforded by wood and metal blocks allowed printed texts to be individualized.

“ The empty space afforded by wood and metal blocks allowed printed texts to be individualized.”

Although computers can mimic the style of letterpress printing, there is still demand for the original process—people like to see the embossment from the wood and metal type, the visual quirks of the old printing blocks, and the small discrepancies between each pull of the press. They are small things, but still things that computers can’t do.

After mapping out a design for each poster or invitation, a typesetter uses a composing stick, a small adjustable tray that holds type, to organize lines of text into a

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standard grid. When putting together type, I would first retrieve each letter I needed for the line of text I was working on. After I had assembled all of the letters in my composing stick, I would add spaces—the pieces of wood and metal small enough that they don’t print. The trick was equally distributing space between the words and then adding spaces between the letters until the line of type filled the length of the composing stick. As the designer Ellen Lupton writes in her book Thinking with Type, “Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.”

“ Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.”

Typesetting is slow. As I arranged and organized letterforms, I would pass the time talking with the two printers who ran the shop—about art, about politics, about creative anxiety, about the individual merits of the different sandwiches at the deli down the street. I also spent a good deal of time taking apart the designs that had already been printed—going letter by letter and space by space, putting each bit of metal and wood type back into its correct drawer or cubby so it could be used again for another design. Inefficiency is a virtue in a print shop. When no one is running the press, everything can be

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cleaned up and reconfigured. The spaces aren’t just in the composition, but in the workplace as well.

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n letterpress printing, spaces are added and removed as necessary to make sure that the words are justified to the margins of the page. But with the introduction of the typewriter, spaces became uniform.

Christopher Latham Sholes invented the first successful typewriter in 1867. It resembled the typewriter we know today, except that it printed on the underside of the roller; the typist could not see the result until after finishing. Because typewriters work in a continuous line, there isn’t any way to adjust how much space goes between letters and words. If you look at the original typewritten manuscripts of any modern writer, you’ll see that the right hand margins are uneven, creating jagged blank spaces. The margins are always corrected in the final printing of the book, which by the 20th century was primarily done through offset printing, a process that transfers an entire page or image at a time from a single plate, as opposed to the individual forms of letterpress printing.

Today’s word processors mimic letterpress printing more closely than they do typewriters. Although the computer keyboard isn’t all that different from an early typewriter’s, the word processor can space and arrange text on a page after it has been typed. Many of the fonts in an

ordinary word processor can also be found in the drawers of a print shop.

The language of computational typesetting is all adopted from letterpress, too. When graphic designers talk about kerning— the technical term the amount of space between letter and words—they’re building

back to the ancient Egyptians, letterpress transformed how designers think about type within that grid. For letterpress printers, the grid works on both an aesthetic and functional level. When a line of type doesn’t fill the entire space on the grid, typesetters will add flourishes and dingbats to compensate for the extra

“ The language of computational typesetting is all adopted from letterpress...” on the printers’ tradition of carving away space on individual letter blocks—“A” and “V,” for example—so they would fit together tightly on the press. Any student who has tried to make a paper appear longer by adding space between lines is using leading, a letterpress term that refers to the process of adding strips of lead horizontally between lines of type. What we know as the standard 12-point font was originally called a pika, the standard measurement for any given typeface in a printer’s drawer. The terms uppercase and lowercase come from the fact that those typefaces were literally separated in an upper and a lower case.

Letterpress has left its marks all over contemporary design. The grid is a cornerstone of graphic design, fundamental to any program in the Adobe Suite. While designing with a grid dates

space. In addition to looking better, the embellishments also help the letters print more evenly on the press—too much empty space and the rollers of the press will place extra weight on individual blocks, damaging the blocks and the print itself.

As letterpress printing began to be used for commercial fiction, newspapers, and playbills, typesetters started mixing different typefaces together, switching between roman and italic to add emphasis to different words. Of course, there is a practical explanation for this as well: A letterpress shop only has so many copies of the same letter. If, for instance, a typesetter is compiling a line of text in 24-point Franklin Gothic and needs eight uppercase ‘A’s but only has five—perhaps one word can be set in an altogether different typeface. In 19th-century design in particular, there’s a distinct style of

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alternating very small fine print with large bold headlines, leaving virtually no white space between. As advertising became more essential to printing, blank space meant lost profits.

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ince then, blank space has become a unique commodity in print.

Minimalist design responds to the scarcity of emptiness, making a point of using as little material to say as much as possible. In the wake of national tragedy or political strife, it is not uncommon for entire pages of The New York Times to be bought out and feature only a few words, a short letter, or a list of names. The negative space indicates that this concise message is more dear, in both its meaning and its cost, than whatever would otherwise occupy the page.

Long before minimalism exalted the aesthetic and commercial value of blank space, the ordinary folk who operated printers held it in their hands, in the form of en spaces, leading strips, and the wedges of metal that hung off kerned glyphs. It didn’t take a turtleneck to see why blank space can be moving.

Object Lessons, The Atlantic, September 9, 2016

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Planing Patterns

&

Sleuthing Origins

By David Shields

dentifying the manufacturers and clarifying, as precisely as possible, the origin of the designs of the types in the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection has been an important component of my ongoing research into nineteenth century typographic form. One of my active projects has been the assignment of unattributed types to particular manufacturers and the clarification of their histories through physical and visual research.

Fixing a type’s origins is historically complicated by the widespread pirating of type designs during the mid to late nineteenth century. The pantograph, while fundamental to the mass production of wood type, also made it easy to copy a competitor’s designs by using the type

Beyond its substantial holdings of wood type, the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, is a unique repository of the actual machinery used to finish the raw end wood of type blocks; the Museum houses everything from end-grain wood sanders and planers to pantograph patterns and finishing tools. Engaging the actual machinery firsthand to prepare the raw end wood for routing brought to my attention the rough planing patterns on the back of each finished wood type block.

Each manufacturer by necessity created its own machinery for producing type-high wood blocks. The differences in machine construction from manufacturer to manufacturer were made evident in the unique

“ The differences in machine construction were made evident in the unique planing patterns that remained on the back of each of their type blocks.” itself as a pattern, subtly modifying the resultant copies to sell as “originals.” While copying created a great proliferation of wood type designs, working through this proliferation creates challenges in fixing a type’s exact origins.

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planing patterns that remained on the back of each of their type blocks.

These unique patterns seemed most likely a consequence of the variety of finishing machinery utilized by manufacturers.

The Kelly Collection, with its range of identified manufacturers, provides an excellent data set for testing this hypothesis. To develop reproducible results, directly comparing the patterns is proving to be the most successful strategy.

The patterns on the backs of the blocks from the entire collection have been precisely recorded in print. Scans of these prints have translated the patterns into digital files, which facilitates direct (overlapping) comparison between patterns. The results to date are not yet definitive, but are promising. The findings indicate that there is not one explicit pattern but a set of identifiable patterns that can culminate in indicating a particular manufacturer. This irregularity in patterns from a single manufacturer may be the result of ongoing maintenance to the equipment to keep the finishing blades sharp.

This method of analysis may provide the ability to resolve the identities of type manufacturers for blocks that lack production stamps, since certain manufacturers did not use stamps, and so expand the existing historical description of the Kelly Collection. I intend to develop this particular approach into a generalized method that could be shared with other curators who are attempting to clarify the manufacturer identity of wood types held in other collections, and thus facilitate an historical understanding to type designs not in the Collection.

December 1, 2011

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Doyen of Type Design The Most-Read Man in the World

By G.F.

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atthew Carter, a type designer and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, was recently approached in the street near his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A woman greeted him by name. “Have we met?” Mr. Carter asked.

No, she said, her daughter had pointed him out when they were driving down the street a few days before. “Is your daughter a graphic designer?” he inquired. “She’s in sixth grade,” came the reply.

Mr. Carter sits near the pinnacle of an elite profession. No more than several thousand type designers ply the trade worldwide, only a few hundred earn their keep by it, and only several dozens—most of them dead—have their names on the lips of discerning aficionados. Then, there is Mr. Carter. He has never sought recognition, but it found him, and his under appreciated craft, in part thanks to a “New Yorker” profile in 2005. Now, even school children (albeit discerning ones) seem to know who he is and what he does.

However, the reason is probably not so much the beauty and utility of his faces, both of which are almost universally acknowledged. Rather, it is Georgia and Verdana. Mr. Carter conjured up both fonts in the 1990s for Microsoft, which released them with its Internet Explorer in the late 1990s and bundled them into Windows, before disseminating them as a free download.

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Most fonts in use at the time were either adapted from type designed for print, or were created primarily for user interface elements. Georgia and Verdana were designed from scratch with monitor legibility in mind. But then, Mr Carter, now 73, has always been a man ahead of the times. For each successive technological revolution in type, he was among the first to create popularly used faces. An early creator and adapter of phototype designs, he worked with some of the first practical digital typesetting. These computer-driven systems lacked the horsepower to turn curves into bitmapped output. Instead, type was built on grid paper, pixel by pixel. Mr Carter designed Bell Centennial, a replacement for AT&T’s 40-year-old phone-book font, in just such a fashion.

The result was a more compact type that used vastly less paper.

And yet, in another respect, he has always been behind the times. During a teenage stint in the Netherlands, he trained with an eccentric designer to cut typefaces by hand, a process that involves working at two or three removes from the final cast-metal product. Such training was unusual even at the turn of the 20th century, when machine-aided cutting was the norm, but Mr Carter counts it as invaluable. “If I were born 10 or 15 years later, I could not have had some of my experience I had with metal type,” he recalls fondly.

This respect for history is one reason he suspects that the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a 2010 fellowship, despite most fellows’ average age being around 40.

While the group never reveals its precise

with computer numerical control (CNC) wood routers. Naturally, the type is also available in digital form. Last year, it was finally cut and used at a Wayzgoose, a traditional printers’ cotillion.

“ ...Matthew Carter was among the first to create popularly used faces.” criteria, Mr Carter’s citation included a mention of him having survived through a number of changes of technology.

“Of course, it would have been hard for someone to do that if they weren’t approximately my age,” he quips.

The foundation made a wise choice.

Having already created seminal faces read and seen by hundreds of millions of people each day on screen, in phone books and wherever else letters appear, he has no desire to slow down. Last year, Mr. Carter designed a new face to be cut as wood type for the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin.

At the recent Type Americana conference in Seattle, which this Babbage attended, the project was described in a lecture by Jim and Bill Moran; the former is the museum’s director and the latter deeply involved in projects there. As usual with Mr. Carter, old and new both played a part. Success came when the handdriven pantograph cutters were replaced

Despite his types’ ubiquity and his position in the field, Mr. Carter remains as surprised as anyone about the preponderance of his Microsoft fonts. He anticipated a flood of specially designed Web faces would soon drown out his creations which were, after all, a product of an earlier technological generation. But Georgia and Verdana became embossed in the internet’s visual culture. So much so that Mr Carter regularly hears people carp about a lack of alternatives.

These may emerge with the advent of electronic book readers, for which Mr. Carter has yet to tailor a font. For now, Amazon’s Kindle uses a single face from another designer for its dedicated reader and software versions, while Barnes & Noble’s Nook reader offers three nonCarter choices. (Apple’s Nook app does include a Georgia option, and three of Mr. Carter’s faces are available in the iBooks app for the iPhone and iPad.)

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In fact, Mr. Carter doesn’t own an iPad, Kindle, or other reading device, as he is waiting for them to mature. (He does own an iPhone.) He frets that, as things stand, reading devices and programs homogenise all the tangible aspects of a book, like size or shape, as well as font. They are also poor at hyphenation and justification: breaking words at lexically appropriate locations, and varying the spacing between letters and between words. This may sound recondite but it is a visual imprint of principles established over the entire written history of a language. “Maybe people who grow up reading online, where every book is identical, don’t know what they’re missing.”

Now, Mr. Carter is looking for his next challenge, spurred by the award of the fellowship, not to mention the accompanying cheque for $500,000. Most of his recent work was bespoke for Carter & Cone Type, the firm he operates with his partner Cherie Cone. His last personal endeavour, a set of 15 display and text faces called Miller, has become the single biggest royalty source among fonts to which he controls rights. Finding a suitably ambitious project is no mean feat for a man with Mr. Carter’s resumé. But we probably won’t have to wait long before the multifaceted craftsman shows us yet another new face.

The Economist, Babbage, Dec 2nd 2010

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of the

By Jessica Karle Heltzel

his year marked the 21st anniversary of a heated debate held between Tibor Kalman, founder of the design firm M&Co, and Joe Duffy, of Duffy & Partners. Of the many contested issues in their argument about the state of contemporary design in the 1990s—art versus commerce, values and “causes” versus corporate sell-outs—nostalgia was high on the list.

Duffy celebrated its use as a persuasive and communicative tool, while Kalman berated its “fakeness” as a lie, arguing that designers such as Duffy used history without representing anything new. As Kalman put it, “Well, certainly it’s from the past, but how it’s used is the question.” Today, almost a generation after the debate, designers’ use of nostalgia is still prevalent.

In his commentary for the New Museum’s “Generational” show in 2009, Rob Giampietro of Project Projects described today’s mode of appropriation as “playing the past.” He says, “We’re riffing. We cover it in our own way. We do it to feel connection. We do it to get each other’s attention, form bonds, and share with a peer group.” If today’s designers use the past to connect with their contemporaries as well as with their audience through the familiar, how do they use the past to create something new?

Some undertake the challenge on the micro-level—with detail in typography.

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Type foundries such as Type Supply and House Industries, based in Maryland and Delaware, respectively, are successful purveyors of the past, referencing earlier design eras in their work. Collectively their work includes fonts inspired by handdrawn scripts, old-school lettering, and illustrations created with analogue and digital methods of making. Type Supply’s Tal Leming and House Industries’ Ken Barber and Ben Kiel would agree that this collective referencing of visual nostalgia represents larger themes in contemporary graphic design—the capitalization on the “familiar” in design, the desire for acceptance and affirmation in the design community, and the exhaustive visual saturation happening on the Internet.

“Design doesn’t happen on its own,” Leming says. “It can’t ever be wholly new.” Referencing the past may be considered less of a choice and more of an inevitability—it’s just a matter of which reference you choose to deploy.

Each generation draws from the one before, repurposing and honing in on an aesthetic or a style to tap into the recognizable, the familiar. Design is inherently based on what one knows but often times the most inspiring influences come from unexpected sources.

Leming used an unexpected influence in his font United, released in 2007. United, which became the typeface of choice for

Fox Sports’ on-screen graphics, began with a series of old military diagrams.

House Industries (where Leming worked prior to founding Type Supply) had been struggling in-house to digitize the diagrams since the ’90s and they just couldn’t get it right. “I think it was because the designers at House were sticking very close to those diagrams.

And when I picked it up, I started over and I tried to mix the military aesthetic, which is just straight lines, with Franklin Gothic, because I love Franklin Gothic,” says Leming. Just using the diagrams as a reference wasn’t enough, there had to be innovation. “I restarted with the idea of a typeface with the salient characteristics from the specification: straight lines, hard edges, tough letterforms. After experimentation, I decided that the family’s internal structure should follow the traditional American gothic form and it should lightly reference classic American wood type.” The public has

19th-century sign painters and wood type makers popularized the half-block, octagonal style. Its traditional utilitarian style served function over fashion.

Duffy’s nostalgia reached back to the early 20th century; today’s references draw from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s—a reach back toward mid-century nostalgia, and particularly the Americana of this time period. Designers draw from sources like commercial sign painting, mom-and-pop shops and the folkmodern products of Charles and Ray Eames. “Retro” is a word that is often used to describe work emulating these eras. It’s also a word that’s been used to describe the House Industries aesthetic.

Designer Ken Barber gets riled up just hearing the “R” word. “What does that even mean?” he asks. In today’s design criticism, “retro” is often a negative descriptor. People attach a visual style to an era (most commonly American mid-

“ Critics often fail to see beyond the surface aesthetic, getting stuck on the ‘retro period’ without seeing the innovation and invention that...make them work...in the digital present.” responded well to the look—which Leming credits to the typeface’s “allAmerican” foundation. The military didn’t invent the straight-lined look—

century) and they say—that’s retro. Both Barber and Kiel have seen this criticism first-hand. Barber says, “In times where it’s been used to criticize our work, or

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‘retro’ design in general, they use it to basically say we’re not doing anything new. People said, ‘you know, they just looked at magazines or advertisements from the ’60s and ’70s and boosted it.’

And I wish that were the case, because that would have made our job so much [insert expletive] easier.”

Critics often fail to see beyond the surface aesthetic, getting stuck on the “retro period” without seeing the innovation and invention that’s required to revisit these lettering styles and mediums of the past and make them work, and work well, in the digital present. Take the website Photolettering.com, launched earlier this year by House Industries. Photo-Lettering, Inc., or PLINC, founded in 1936 by Edward Rondthaler and Harold Horman, became one of the most successful, longstanding type houses in New York City.

Lettering artists at PLINC drew alphabets with pen and ink, a process that could take up to 200 hours per alphabet, and then transferred the drawings to film strips used for typesetting individual headlines on photographic paper. This method liberated typography from the confines of metal typesetting, and PLINC remained influential until the rise of new digital technologies forced them to close their doors in 1985. The Photo-Lettering legacy—more than 10,000 type designs— went dormant until 2003, when House Industries purchased the entire collection,

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rescuing the archive from a storage facility on New York’s Tenth Avenue.

For the next eight years, designers at House Industries painstakingly parsed the thousands of film specimens, lettering catalogs and original plates to hone in on a select series of original PLINC alphabets and transform them for the digital world. House Industries set out to construct a digital tool that matched the delivery of craftsmanship, innovation and design established by the original company. Barber explains, “The idea evolved to create a service that would be a new incarnation of the original service, where you wouldn’t buy typefaces per se, but you would actually buy a setting.” This service would allow users to generate the words they need while also adding color, changing weights, manipulating scale and more, customizing the alphabets on the fly from directly within the online interface. “We thought, well…wow, these aren’t typefaces, so let’s push the fact that they can do things that typefaces can’t do.”

When House Industries, in partnership with Erik van Blokland and Christian Schwartz, launched the Photo-Lettering site in April, PLINC’s legacy was reborn.

Photolettering.com received much praise in the months following the launch of the site. To Ben Kiel’s dismay, the word “retro” got immediately assigned to it by a number of bloggers and tweeters, but people like it precisely

because it is familiar in a nostalgic way. It willingly conveys a sense of the history and whimsy found within the original alphabets and an aesthetic that reflects the time period from which they originated. Still, there is much more to the site than how it looks—the real strength lies in what it can do.

At the core of photolettering.com is the Lettersetter engine, created by Erik van Blokland and Tal Leming. This new

“ With photolettering. com, House Industries shows its respect for typography’s history, and in turn helps guide its future.” tool allows letterforms to do things that traditional desktop fonts cannot. The lettering style D’Amico Gothic, which operates on six masters, allows the user to interpolate weight and width to any spot on a spectrum, right on a sliding scale on the interface, essentially allowing the user to create a unique version of the lettering style. Designers can now access a visual library of lettering styles, edit them and

download custom lines of type. Sounds simple, but simple doesn’t take eight years.

With photolettering.com, House Industries shows its respect for typography’s history, and in turn helps guide its future.

Before the digital era, learned skills such as typesetting and lettering were often considered more of a trade than an appreciated craft. As far as Barber and Kiel are concerned, these trades are crafts and there’s a lot to be learned from them. “There’s a wealth of knowledge from these trades that have come and gone that we’ve forgotten about, these trades that weren’t really associated with the profession of graphic design, for example, lettering artists. When graphic design made this leap in the 1950s and ’60s from a trade to a profession, much of the knowledge surrounding the trade kind of got forgotten, and it is forgotten in design teaching now,” says Kiel.

For them, designers’ un-informed use of visual nostalgia is of great concern.

Leming relates the work of designers today who appropriate these styles or methods of making to the “uncanny valley.” The uncanny valley, a robotics term coined by Masahiro Mori in the 1970s, suggests that when human replicas look and act, almost, but not perfectly, like human beings, it causes a sense of revulsion among human observers. Humans can sense that it’s inauthentic—and it’s creepy. Leming views lettering in the same way.

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“If you draw it on paper and it has an obvious hand feel—then it feels natural and alive. If you digitize it and you don’t finish it all the way—meaning bring it back so that it looks like it was made by hand and in doing so, tell the truth about its origins—it’s in an uncanny valley. Where it looks really digital, but not digital, because it looks handmade, but not handmade enough…it’s just this weird thing that happens.” Making something truthful

“ It’s not about being sentimental for the methods left behind, and it’s not about nostalgia. It’s about humanism and infusing work with a human touch...” and authentic in a time where filters, scripts and automation in computerassisted programs provide the designer an easy way out is becoming something of a rarity because it requires a valuable resource: time. It took Leming a decade of thinking and four years of drawing to bring his font Burbank to life. Four years of drawing, revising, going back

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redrawing and revising again, all in effort to make it “not look digital.” Why? It’s not about being sentimental for the methods left behind, and it’s not about nostalgia. It’s about humanism and infusing work with a human touch, fueling the desire to maintain authenticity—to preserve some remnant of the creator within the digital interface.

Smart design solutions that reference the past and use nostalgia are not just copying a style—there’s innovation and ingenuity in the reinterpretation.

Contemporary firms like Type Supply and House Industries use the past in the right way, for the right reasons.

They bring the value, history, and craft associated with these references to contemporary design and advocate for the value of these integral components of graphic design’s history as something to learn and learn from.

And perhaps, most importantly, they think like craftsmen in the realm of contemporary design and use these references with careful skill.

AIGA, October 25, 2011

Book design:

by Libby Swofford Typography: Baskerville

by John Baskerville HWT Slab Antique

by Hamilton Wood Type Foundry HWT Unit Gothic

by Hamilton Wood Type Foundry © Fall 2016 Miami University Oxford, Ohio

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