The Right Type of Education ∞

By Abi Huynh

Last year Mathieu Christe and Berton Hasebe wrote a very thorough article detailing the general day to day of the Type and Media masters program. With this article we hope to outline an historical overview of the course and provide a brief look at the final project typefaces from the 08/09 class.

Type Design at KABK

The Type and Media masters program has a long history at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague. The roots of the program can be traced back to Gerrit Noordzij’s Letter Programme within the graphic design department at KABK during the 1970s. Some of Noordzij’s students during that time were Petr van Blokland, Erik van Blokland, Frank Blokland, Jelle Bosma, Luc(as) de Groot, Christoph Noordzij, Peter Matthias Noordzij, Albert-Jan Pool, Just van Rossum and Peter Verheul.

The course that began as a foundation in type design evolved by the early 1990s into the Postgraduate Course in Typography and Type Design. Alumni of that era include Akiem Helmling, Bas Jacobs and Sami Kortemäki (collectively known as Underware), Paul van der Laan, Eyal Holtzman, Albert Pinggera, Corina Cotorobai, Jarno Lukkarila and Pieter van Rosmalen.

In 2002, the Type and Media program officially started in its present incarnation. Currently, the ten-month course is divided into two distinct parts, and limited to eleven students a year. The first five months comprise eight different weekly classes that expose students to numerous fundamental aspects of the type design process. The second half of the course is focused mainly on the development of individual final projects.

One of the aspects of the course that is most well known is the tradition of calligraphy classes as a foundational component of the course. Three types of writing are explored: pointed pen with Erik van Blokland, broad nib with Frank Blokland, and brush calligraphy with Peter Verheul. The primary focus of the calligraphy classes is to learn the basic rules of contrast, the structure of the letter, and to attain a sensitivity towards spacing. This part of the course is based around the legacy and teaching method of Gerrit Noordzij, and while many of the current teachers were at one point students of Noordzij, each teacher has a unique view on the application of Noordzij’s theories.

The program aims at a rounded approach, mixing both theory and practice components. The present curriculum also includes studies in stone carving, multilingual type, Python programming and RoboFab scripting, Typecooker exercises, designing type for different media and screen, and historical revivals. The practical side of type design and production is taught through various type design projects, with students becoming acquainted with programs like Superpolator, Prepolator, UFOstretch, and Metrics Machine. Ten of the thirteen teachers are practicing type designers and they convey their experiences in everything from multilingual support to hinting for the screen.

The teachers for the 08/09 year were Françoise Beserik, Peter Biľak, Petr van Blokland, Erik van Blokland, Frank Blokland, Paul van der Laan, Christoph Noordzij, Just van Rossum, Fred Smeijers, Jan Willem Stas, Gerard Unger, and Peter Verheul.

Type and Media alumni include type designers such as Frederik Berlaen, Kai Bernau, Susana Carvalho, Andy Clymer (at H&FJ), Nikola Djurek, Gustavo Ferreira, Laura Meseguer, Ian Party, Ilya Ruderman, Artur Schmal, Ludwig Übele, and Pascal Zoghbi. For a more detailed account of the history of type design teaching in The Hague the book Dutch Type by Jan Middendorp is an unmatched resource (pages 175 to 232).

Type and Media Flickr group. Type and Media official site.

Typefaces, Type & Media 08/09

In September of 2008, eleven of us gathered in The Hague to start the Type and Media MA program at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten; a mixed group from Australia, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Malaysia, and Slovakia. The experience level was equally varied—some had already released typefaces, while four of us had not even used FontLab prior to the course.

The gestation of the final project is undertaken in Peter Biľak’s classes, where we present rough ideas for thesis projects and discuss them as a class. Alongside lectures dealing with multilingual type design and typography, Peter Biľak guides us through formulating unique type families with different approaches dependent upon the constraints of the brief.

In the second half of the course we focus on our final project typeface, and attend history and theory classes with guest lecturers such as Fred Smeijers and Gerard Unger. The final project development is primarily guided by Erik van Blokland, Peter Verheul, Paul van der Laan and Christoph Noordzij, whom we meet with on a regular basis, in addition to periodic presentations to all the faculty.

During the development of the project, instructors constantly stress the need to think about the constraints of the brief for a typeface—the variables derived from typeface’s intended function—rather than focus on stylistic detailing. We learned to concentrate on the importance of structuring a type family around specific usage scenarios in order to provide a finely tuned tool for typography.

The following section contains small samples and descriptions of the final project typefaces (sorted alphabetically by typeface name). For more information and samples of the types, visit the group specimen site at typemedia09.com (or click an image to open up that section of the site).

Acon

Holger Königsdörfer Augsburg, Germany

While conceptualizing his proposal for his final project, Holger noted that the majority of text typefaces used in contemporary book typography are typefaces that are based on the translation (broad nib) contrast. With Acon he sought to develop a pointed pen typeface that is optimized for book typography. The sharp features of Acon lend the texture a crispness that complements the openness of the proportions. The serious character of the family makes it a very capable book typeface.

Alice

Marta Bernstein Milan, Italy

Alice began as an exploration of size-specific styles in type design, a harking back to the metal type era with individual cuts for each point size. Alice is intended for magazine typography where a functional editorial typeface is often paired with more expressive typefaces for headlines, with size-specific styles Alice seeks to fill both these needs. The text weight of Alice has a reserved and functional nature while the bold exhibits a more expressive character.

Arek

Khajag Apelian Bierut, Lebanon

Khajag hails from Lebanon and is of Armenian decent. With his knowledge of the Armenian script he decided to design a typeface which addresses legibility issues with current typefaces used in school textbooks. Khajag saw that many current Armenian typefaces had overly systematized proportions (generally the same width and heights) and he researched the writing found in old Armenian manuscripts in order to reference the roots of the writing system. Rather than designing a sloped version of the upright as a secondary typeface, Khajag broke with tradition, experimenting with a “true cursive”.

Arietta

Abi Huynh Vancouver, Canada

Rooted in a fascination with detail typography, Arietta began with a thesis proposal that centred on the integration of multiple companion scripts within one family. Intended for non-fiction texts, Arietta roman required a serious and reserved character. The roman was developed by drawing the basic counter shapes first and wrapping the outer contours in order to attain a vertical stress for the counters. The multiple italics were conceived as a way to provide degrees of contrast from the primary text, the three italic companions each produce a distinct character and textural density.

BAT

Charles Mazé Angers, France

BAT was a special case amongst the typefaces this year as the BAT family was specifically commissioned by the new independent French publisher Books, Art & Texts (BAT). Charles was tasked to create a typeface with the dual purpose of being used for the books as well as the identity of BAT. Initially he chose to develop the text face with a Didot-esque structure, partially due to the particularly French nature of a Didot, but also because of the prevalent use of pointed pen (Modern) typefaces for scientific and non-fiction texts.

Buendia

César Puertas Bogotá, Colombia

César began the final project by looking at the relationships between serif and sans-serif counterparts within one type family. He was interested in a family that, in contrast to other larger sans and serif families, would provide many different voices but still retain a compact family plan. The text weights of the family are serif fonts while the extreme weights (light and black) are sans-serif. César focused on a transitional contrast incorporating rotational elements in the structure, this allowed for a friendly and soft sans-serif with a warm serif text companion.

Callie

Sueh Li Tan Penang, Malaysia

Starting with an affinity towards broad nib calligraphy, Sueh Li created a display calligraphy typeface as the primary starting point for her family. From this calligraphic base she derived a bold by further sharpening and formalizing the features and details. This process of reduction and formalization fed into the development of the regular weight which is intended for book and magazine use.

Doko

Ondrej Jób Liptovsky Hrádok, Slovakia

With his roots and interest in cartoons, lettering and illustration, Ondrej sought to create a family that was heavily influenced by those styles. Doko began with an expressive and lively italic, and those forms were used in a more subdued fashion to develop the roman. The roman is intended to be a warm, expressive text face for magazine use. Doko has a unique personality that lends itself for use in display circumstances.

Malaussène

Laure Afchain Toulouse, France

Laure’s type family Malaussène is a novel take on the concept of a superfamily; it set out to include both a translation (broad nib) roman and an expansion (pointed pen) roman as well as a sans-serif variant. Taking into account the limited time frame of the course, she decided to establish the extremes of the family in order to show the range of weights and styles. As a family, Malaussène contains both text and display fonts in order to cover a wide range of usage scenarios.

Preto

Ján Filípek Bratislava, Slovakia

Preto was undertaken as an experiment in creating a family that explores the role of serifs in a text typeface. During the development of Preto, Ján looked at the spacing in both sans and serif typefaces and how a semi-serif could be a mixture that addresses spacing issues. The resulting family comprises of a clean sans-serif and a distinctive serif companion. The semi-serif takes stylistic cues from each end of the spectrum.

Tasman

Dan Milne Melbourne, Australia

Tasman began with the intent to create a newspaper text face with a crisp tone and a serious personality that would be ideal for the complex typography of information and editorial design. Dan researched past approaches to newspaper type and designed a sturdy, economical type family.

Thanks

Many many many thanks to our dedicated teachers: Françoise Beserik, Peter Biľak, Petr van Blokland, Erik van Blokland, Frank Blokland, Paul van der Laan, Christoph Noordzij, Just van Rossum, Fred Smeijers, Jan Willem Stas, Gerard Unger and Peter Verheul.

Thanks to our many guest lecturers and visitors: Paul Barnes, Kai Bernau, Susana Carvalho, François Chastanet, Tobias Frere-Jones, Jan de Jong, Robin Kinross, Gerry Leonidas, Mathieu Lommen, Rich Roat, Fiona Ross, Piet Schreuders, Christian Schwartz, Erik Spiekermann, Rickey Tax, Michael Twyman, Johan de Zoete and Pascal Zoghbi.

Special thanks to: Francesca Bolognini, Emanuela Conidi, Liz Cox, Berton Hasebe, Thomas Klaui, Coline Sunier, Ariaan van Walsum and our colleagues in the University of Reading MA Typeface Design 2009 class. Thanks to Underware for providing their typeface Auto for the Arek description text. For student versions of essential software: Frederik Berlaen (UFO Stretch), Erik van Blokland (Superpolator) and Tal Leming (Prepolator, Metrics Machine). Lastly, thanks to our hard working studio printer, the HP Laserjet 5000 series, and our indispensable foosball table.

The Right Type of Education

Type: A Visual History of Typefaces & Graphic Styles ∞

Reviewed by James Puckett

I was excited when Taschen announced the first volume of Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, described as “This exuberant selection of typographic fonts and styles traces the modern evolution of the printed letter” *. Such language, including the title, is disingenuous, because this book is not a history. Type does contain a short essay by coauthor/coeditor Cees W. de Jong about type history, but it is poorly written and riddled with inaccuracies. Similarly bad are the captions that introduce each specimen. Many are obvious or inane statements such as “It was an honor to have one’s name set on such a lovely publication.” (p. 88), “This printer from Amsterdam evidently had a lot of customers in the countryside.” (p. 100) and “Back in time! Two lines, two different typefaces in a fantasy world.” (p. 243). Overall the writing feels like a draft rushed to press; it should have been fact checked and edited by a historian.

If Type is not a history, than what is it? Type is a photographic odyssey through type specimens collected by the late Peter Tholenaar, a Dutch bibliophile who adored ornamental metal type. This volume, the first of two, covers the period 1628 – 1900. About two-thirds of the content is from the nineteenth century, with a heavy focus on the artistic printing movement. Most of the pages shown are cherry-picked for their ornamental letters and borders. For example, the photos of the very rare 1794 Fry and Steele specimen focus not on Isaac Moore’s classic interpretation Baskerville’s types, but on the fleurons.

You will not find many important text faces of 1600 – 1900 in Type. Baskerville’s work does not appear, Bodoni is only seen in Greek, and the didones shown are knockoffs. The walbaum, scotch, and scotch modern genres are ignored. As one might expect from a collection of metal specimens, wood type does not appear. Unadorned sans types appear when they are on a specimen page with ornamented types, but no effort is made to showcase them. While ornamental designs are certainly worth exploring, they are hardly the only type of the period. I know from firsthand experience that some of these specimens include a far wider variety of type than what is seen in this so-called history.

As a companion to Type, 1,000 images of type specimens can be downloaded for unrestricted use from Taschen.com using a key card. They are of excellent quality and high-resolution versions can exceed 300 DPI at real size. For some specimens the pages found online go beyond the ornamental focus of Type. These images alone are worth many times the cost of the book; if you download two of them you have broken even on the cost of paying a library for a high-quality book scan.

As an object, Type is a winner. There is only one bad reproduction in the book and every other image looks great. Luscious paper lends gravitas to even the most ridiculous artistic printing specimens. Layouts are thoughtful, considerate of content, and never become monotonous. Now and then a specimen is stripped down to just the letters and printed in gold, a treatment type does not get often enough. If the typesetters had used f ligatures this design would be exquisite.

That a respected publisher would represent a niche collection as a survey of typographic history is disturbing. Future editions should be titled Ornamental Type: Specimens in the Collection of Peter Tholenaar, Volume 1. It needs to be proofread and edited by an expert. That said, I do not know of a better tour of ornamented type specimens, and I doubt there will be one. If you like ornament, buy Type, but let those responsible know that they owe history better.

Notes:
* Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles
Written and edited by Cees W. de Jong, Alston W. Purvis, and Jan Tholenaar
Published by Taschen, ISBN 978-3836511018
Design: Sense/Net, Andy Disl & Birgit Eichwede.
Amazon link.

James Puckett left a career in IT to study at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, where he graduated with honors. While at the Corcoran he developed a passion for typography that resulted in a thesis on versatility in type design. The interest in type design sparked by his thesis led James to pursue commercial type design after graduation. James now resides in Manhattan where he designs type for release through his foundry, Dunwich Type Founders.

More book reviews on ILT.

Type: A Visual History of Typefaces & Graphic Styles

Sex, lies, & type ∞

The Week in Type

Welcome to a slightly later than usual week in type. Lots happening in the world of web fonts — links to the best content below. There’s also free stuff, so don’t click away.

I’m thrilled by the launch of a new type foundry, Mota Italic. Congratulations to Rob and Co.

As others have noted, the shopping cart is particularly novel and intuitive. Be sure to check out Vesper, their present flagship typeface; it’s bursting with lots of OpenType features, including numerous smart contextual alternates.

This article’s header is set in Vesper Pro Italic & Heavy Italic.

Inspiration

This wonderful invitation for Ale Paul’s TDC talk on November 3:

Nancy Harris Rouemy from the NYT Sunday Magazine designed it with ten (yes ten!) of Ale’s fonts. I wonder who can name them all.

Love this series of photos from Lajos Major:

A web site from Ascender Corp., dedicated to the Frederic & Bertha Goudy:

New Fonts: A Graphic Designer’s Perspective is a wonderful piece on the H&FJ blog. I’ve always loved their specimens (both on- and off-line). A must-must read:

It’s no secret that Trajan is the movie typeface. If you don’t believe me, then take a look at this Flickr pool:

Some fine alternatives to Trajan over at FontShop. — via @zeldman

Which leads nicely on to this great piece over at the FontFeed, about the making of the Typophile Film Festival 5 Opening Titles:

I’m sure you all know Nicholas-Felton. Now he has most of his portfolio on Cargo. Nice:

I think I’m going to be buying a copy of alphabeasties and other Amazing Types (I’m sure I’ll have children one day — when they come genetically engineered not to cause trouble and puke over one’s clothes):

You can read more about it at the brilliant Grain Edit. — via Christian Schwartz.

iA (Information Architects, Inc.) has posted a great piece about their pitch for the redesign of the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. They’ve even posted the entire proposal online — a 95MB PDF:

I like their choice of Frutiger Next Frutiger Serif (Meridien), and the idea of highlighting key words in blue. Be sure to follow iA on twitter.

Video

http://www.odedezer.com/typembrya.html

Typembrya by Oded Ezer from www.odedezer.com on Vimeo.

LAIKA, the dynamic typeface:

And a little more info about the project at Laika.ch.

I like this video promotion for Neuforma:

We’ve had Helvetica the documentary; now:

No comment. And, if that’s not enough Comic Sans for one day, here’s an entire book set in Comic Sans. Someone had to do it.

Be sure to check out Jos Buivenga’s Wild Type Gear:

New faces

At last, sans-serif companion to Mrs Eaves. Meet Mr Eaves Sans:

And if that’s not enough, there’s Mr Eaves Modern. Thank you Zuzana Licko.

A redesign and update of Linotype Really. Meet Really No. 2:

This is fun. A slabby Western by the name of Cowboyslang, from Hype for Type:

Featured face

First up is the lovely Starling from Font Bureau:

An interesting back story to this typeface. You can read more about it over at FontShop (scroll almost to the bottom of the page).

The wonderful Aunt Mildred:

Specimen from FontShop’s Flickr stream.

Web fonts news

Lots to report. In addition to growing support for the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF) specification, there’s this wonderfully exciting taste of what the future holds, and how browsers will one day begin to take full advantage of OpenType features: read After Firefox 3.6 – new font control features for designers and be sure to watch the video.

WOFF sample page — you will need the latest development version of FireFox to actually see the fonts at work (or wait until FF 3.6). Let’s hope the other browser vendors get behind it, and start implementing support for WOFF.
Boing Boing Redesign Uncovers Web Font Ignorance

Where to get Web fonts

Better Postscript CFF font rendering with DirectWrite.

Typotheque has now released its Web fonts. Comes with a 30-day free evaluation, so why not give it a go:

I used it while they were testing the service, and It’s pretty easy to set up.

If you’re wondering how it all works, then watch the video:

They also have a comprehensive FAQ.

From Typotheque to Typekit — nice use of David Březina’s Skolar. Site designed by Jason Santa Maria for Liz Danzico:

Type links

An interview with Rob Leuschke
Ellen Lupton on 90s typography
Web typography techniques
Designing a font to preserve a vanishing language:

League of Type voting
The awful new Hilton logo
Covering the Good Books
Matthew Carter and Hamilton Wayzgoose
I have seen the shadow of the moon
Serene Infoboards
The Art Institute of Chicago — Pentagram
NBC Sued in Font-Related Flare-Up — via

Need a new wallet? Look no further than:

via @danoliver

Events

Type as Object — Oct 20 through Nov 20:

Typo Zürich
Typographic Exploration in Hangul
Adopt a Bodoni

On a lighter note

Think you can tell Helvetica & Arial apart? If you read my Helvetica versus Arial from the archives, you’ll be well-prepared for the Ironic Sans’ Arial-Helvetica quiz:

via @typophile

And the winners are…

Congratulations to Dan Reynolds for winning gold in the Designpreis Deutschland for Malabar (his third award for this typeface):

And another three cheers for David Březina for winning first place at the Gransham International Type Design Competition for Skolar Pro (Cyrillic):

Available for purchase later this year from Type Together.

Free stuff

Seb Lester has kindly agreed to give away one of his wonderful prints. The winner gets to choose from Tits Arse or Hellfire.

To be in with a chance to win one of these great prints, simply be following @seblester and me, and tweet about this post. Be sure to add the hashtag #ilovetypography, then I can find you and enter you into the draw. I will announce the winner early next week.

And finally

If you haven’t already RSS-subscribed, then you can do so with a mere click of your mouse. Would be nice to see ILT squeeze past the 50,000 mark. Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this week’s the week in type. Have a productive and happy week.

Sex, lies, & type