Category Archives: Great Pairs

FF Clifford and Trio Grotesk

January 30, 2013 – 5:39 PM

FF Clifford, Trio Grotesk

Maybe the clearest lesson to take from this particular pairing is that generously spaced, wide sanses tend to dominate the composition, typographically speaking. Providing a closer look at this interaction are our actors, the even-colored and very readable FF Clifford by Akira Kobayashi, and the softened, cartographically inspired Trio Grotesk by Florian Schick.

FF Clifford, Trio Grotesk

As with any of these, a good place to start is to line up a few words and see what’s working, and what each face is good for.

Trio Grotesk, FF Clifford

FF Clifford, Trio Grotesk

Below, the different optical sizes of FF Clifford are shown in relation to one another: Eighteen, Nine, and Six. And if you’re wondering, all samples are set on a 6 pt baseline grid.

FF Clifford optical sizes

New Great Pairs land here on the blog every Wednesday.

By David Sudweeks | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

Glosa and Relato Sans

January 23, 2013 – 4:59 PM

Moving now to an Iberian match-up, we visit the pairing of Dino dos Santos’s Glosa and Eduardo Manso’s Relato Sans.

Glosa, Relato Sans

Our serif face is the contemporary, rationalized Glosa. Glosa offers a good set of optical sizes to choose from. Its Text weights perform well in editorial settings at normal text sizes. The refined Display weights create a striking high-contrast option for large settings. And the in-between Headline fills its headspace with an appropriate increase in x-height and slight bump in ascender height.

Glosa, Relato Sans

Together with the warm, yet somewhat reserved Relato Sans, each does its part to maintain a crisp look. Certain characteristics such as the rationalized axis, and small details, such as the counter shape in the lowercase e tie the designs together well. There is a seriffed counterpart to Relato Sans, in case you’re interested in something a bit closer in pedigree.

Relato Sans, GlosaGlosa, Relato Sans

Glosa, Relato Sans

Of course mentioning this may be a deal breaker, but I happen to really appreciate the stiff, angular structure of Relato Sans’s Triplex-like italic. At small sizes, the angularity nearly disappears.

Relato Sans, Glosa

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Youthful: Parry and ARS Maquette

January 16, 2013 – 5:54 PM

ARS Maquette, Parry

Striking what I see as a youthful balance is this pairing of Artur Schmal’s Parry and Angus R. Shamal’s ARS Maquette. Parry follows a traditional 18th-century text construction, but encourages rather than restrains certain of its elements from wobbling off axis, resulting in a sensitive and playful face.

Parry, ARS MaquetteARS Maquette, Parry

ARS Maquette is an almost geometric grotesque, providing just what Parry needs to support this kind of a relationship. I would encourage the typographer to explore Parry’s display capabilities, at both the very light and heavy ends of its weight spectrum. And of course, Parry has its own grotesque should you decide to go for a more British flavor, or allow the serif face to play the more distinguished role.

Parry, ARS Maquette

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Verdigris and Apertura

January 9, 2013 – 7:43 PM

Verdigris, Apertura

One face I’ve admired for its versatility quite a while now is Mark van Bronkhorst’s MVB Verdigris. It’s a Renaissance Roman that demonstrates a deep understanding of setting long texts. When in the hands of a good typographer it serves them well, and when worked by a novice, it’s forgiving and takes no umbrage. In case you’re wondering, it’s pronounced Vare-di-gree, similar in rhythm to pedigree.

Taking the display role is Christian Robertson’s Apertura, a contemporary modernist sans. Apertura’s easy to spot with its definitive single-story a. Together, the two faces create a bit of tension, which the typographer can harness to emphasize a classical-over-modernist quality, or just the opposite, or some well-sung harmony in between.

Verdigris, Apertura

Apertura, Verdigris

Apertura comes in a range of weights across two widths, and if you must, a double-story a drops in as an alternate via OpenType Stylistic Set. Verdigris’s strength is text between 8 and 12 point, though the characters don’t completely fall apart at larger sizes. If you’re looking for a display cut of Verdigris, it does exist, though MVB Fonts holds it exclusively. It’s called Verdigris Big.

Verdigris, Apertura

Verdigris, Apertura

Above, Apertura serves well delivering text of modest length. Below, the italic cut is faithful to the spirit of Pierre Haultin’s italic from which it’s based. Note how the blobbiness of the strokes, visible up close, disappears at size.

Verdigris Italic

Verdigris Italic

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Rational and Quirky: New Fournier and Scout

January 2, 2013 – 5:51 PM

b+p New Fournier, Scout

Let’s take a quick look into the relationship between François Rappo’s New Fournier and Cyrus Highsmith’s Scout. Scout takes its influence from lots of sources. More particularly, its letterforms tend to favor the English grotesque, while its fit and detail feel equal parts American gothic and contemporary sans.

Scout, New Fournier

b+p New Founier

b+p New Founier Italic

Pierre Fournier’s work preceded and greatly influenced the designers of Romantic types such as Bodoni. An exact attention to detail renders the face both circumspect and human, seen most plainly here in the italic.  This particular Fournier happens to include several carefully drawn optical sizes for setting headlines and display pieces as seen in the Large Headline weight below.

New Fournier, Scout

Together, each plays it straight as much as it has to, while allowing the other to indulge in a bit of play. Using composition to one’s advantage, this can show up as an occasional wisecrack or a regular piece of the typographic texture.

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Great Pairs Revisited: Freight and Edward

December 26, 2012 – 11:00 AM

The Great Pairs series started out on a whim, and turned out to be one of the things I most look forward to writing each week. Some have been rocky relationships, others, a natural fit, and with each I learn something. Just to pull out one of my favorites and offer a little postscript today, and since hardly anyone will be reading this anyway, here’s what I’ve come up with:

Great Pairs, in Edward and Freight

Freight, Edward styles

Dutch/American English/German: Freight and Edward

Here I look back at Joshua Darden’s Freight with Hendrik Weber’s Edward, and If I were to rewrite the piece today, I think I’d offer more suggestions on how to refine the pairing to achieve exactly the range one’s seeking. For example, if one wanted to take the text slightly more Dutch, I’d suggest Charles Gibbons’s Fleischman or Christian Schwartz’s Farnham. Tamer? James Todd’s Garvis. Wilder? Dino dos Santos’s Glosa. More British, perhaps William Berkson’s Williams Caslon with Matthew Carter’s Big Caslon, or Frantisek Storm’s Baskerville Original. If the sans needs adjusting here as well, Edward offers quite a lot of alternatives, for which we keep a running FontList. My advice as always is keep trying different approaches until something works. That’s all for this week. Have a great holiday. Another great pair will drop here on Wednesday.

By David Sudweeks | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

The Right Amount of Nostalgia: Minion and Telefon

December 19, 2012 – 6:47 PM

Telefon, Minion

Telefon, Minion

One of the most common pairing questions I get is ‘What goes with Minion?’ Robert Slimbach’s fantastic Renaissance Roman seems all too ready to be paired with, well, anything. Its even texture, economical width, modestly tall x-height, language support and broad distribution have made it a popular choice and one particularly well-suited to book and publication design. I’ll pair Sindre Bremnes’s Telefon with it and give my own rationale as I go.

Telefon, Minion

So the question with pairing to Minion is often the question with any text face—what kind of a part do you want it to play? If you want to use Minion’s classical feel to ground some edgy ‘right now’ design, then pair it with something that looks new, and use the composition to your advantage. If you want to use Minion’s crisp feel to sustain the contemporary aspect of a design like Telefon, one that’s rooted in a near-century-old modernist aesthetic, Minion’s happy to play that part. Just as a side note, there are a number of optical sizes of Minion you may not have heard of, such as Caption, or Display.

Telefon, Minion

What I appreciate about the working relationship of these two is that they each have both age and youth at their command, and they each give and take to and from one another as needed. Managing that kind of relationship while setting type is both enjoyable and rewarding. That’s all—a brief one this week. Happy Holidays everybody. See you with some Great Pairs mash-ups next Wednesday.

By David Sudweeks | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Unsettling: Maxime and FF Legato

December 13, 2012 – 12:59 AM

FF Legato, Maxime

As a quick follow-up to last week’s pairing faces to work in unison, I thought I’d take the topic just a hair farther, to the point where a pair grows so similar in features one to the other, it’s unsettling. I’m not advocating this for general application by the way, only pointing out that there are times when, once you’ve got the reader’s attention, you want to keep him or her on edge. Note how each of the faces below deviates from the norms of its genre in similar ways.

FF Legato, Maxime

Éric de Berranger’s Maxime, our serif, introduces a humanist element by softening its hard lines, heavily bracketing its serifs, shifting weight to the shoulders of the lowercase letters, and introducing fine painterly touches most notable in its serifs and intersections. Evert Bloemsma’s FF Legato similarly takes pressure off the baseline by rendering its characters with weight and larger than normal counterforms up high. Its humanist feel comes largely from its construction, but this quality is reinforced by accentuating the corners, stiffening up the hard lines, and deliberately and carefully placing weak points along its curves.

Maxime with FF Legato FF Legato with Maxime

Together, the two are different enough that they can still work with each other, but just enough alike to raise the occasional eyebrow, or cause a momentary strained stare. And if as a typographer you’ve ever arrived at this destination by mistake, you know that the way out is by playing up your pair’s differences, or changing one of the faces to a more disparate design.

Maxime with FF Legato

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Unison: Premiéra and JAF Bernini Sans

December 5, 2012 – 10:28 PM

It wasn’t too many weeks back that I made a comment about pairing sanses and serifs in unison. Since then, I’ve been on the lookout for a pair that really demonstrated the principle well.

Bernina Sans Premiéra

Tim Ahrens’s JAF Bernini Sans and Thomas Gabriel’s Premiéra seem to strike just the right balance for a humanist sans and humanist serif to agree on everything, but still keeping it interesting. Bernina Sans is shown above; half of the well-developed and, might I say, modestly priced superfamily.

Premiéra, Bernina Sans Premiéra, Bernini Sans Bernini Sans, Premiéra

 

Exploring the range of JAF Bernini Sans’s distinct personalities throughout its various widths and weights, one can take as cool or warm a tone as is desired. And while Premiéra’s options appear to be limited (it contains just Book, Italic, and Bold weights) the face is one of the few that actually works in both text and display settings. One of the nice features of a pairing like this is that either voice can take lead.

Premiéra, Bernina Sans

That’s it for now. Catch another great pair here on Wednesday.

By David Sudweeks | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Dutch/American English/German: Freight and Edward

November 28, 2012 – 6:40 PM

Freight is Joshua Darden’s robust text family, done in the style of Johann Fleischmann’s sparkling baroques, with a few of its own tricks. You’ll notice if you look through our Freight offerings, that there is in fact a Freight Sans, which pairs quite well if you’re going for more of an Americanized humanist feel, but I thought I’d stretch the range of Freight [serif] a bit more toward a British sensibility. To do that, I’m pairing it with the latest riff on Edward Johnston’s ‘block’ lettering, Hendrik Weber’s Edward. If I were keeping score, and clearly I am by the title, Hendrik is a German designer drawing from an English face, and Joshua is an American designer working from a Dutch one. Taking these additional lenses into consideration can help inform why certain characteristics of the faces are played up or deemphasized. Together, the two create an approachable and inviting atmosphere in their in-between weights, and a comical harmony when each bares its more extreme side.


Quick historical note: If you’re thinking, ‘This looks awfully familiar,’ It’s likely because it looks a lot like Gill Sans. Edward Johnston and Eric Gill were contemporaries, and their sanses look a lot alike. Johnston’s came first. End historical note. In nine weights, Edward captures well the quirks of the British sign painter and letter cutter, without trying too hard to be a faithful revival.

Because Freight comes in a range of optical sizes, you can either use them for their stated purpose, or use a more robust cut at a given size, for a coarser texture. See above Freight Micro, next to Freight Text. And below: Given the chance, Edward is quite capable of delivering texts of moderate length.

That’s all for now. Catch another Great Pairs here on Wednesday. PS. Did you spot the almost Erbar a?

By David Sudweeks | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Tight Fit: Elena and Anchor

November 21, 2012 – 5:19 PM

Though not designed in tandem, Eric Olson’s Anchor and Nicole Dotin’s Elena were drawn with an awareness of one another, and happen to pair well. I could argue that Anchor pairs well with just about any text face given its compact structure, rounded stroke endings, and nondescript style. But particularly with Elena, Anchor lets show its best qualities in this interplay between loose and taut.

Created specifically for compact, legible headers, Anchor’s warm temperament shines at generous display sizes and cools slightly in the subhead range. With Elena, Anchor takes on a slightly more serious grotesque tone, like an Univers Ultra Condensed but without losing its Americanness, like a nice skyline gothic. As one takes Anchor up in weight, its ability to keep a straight face diminishes, particularly when displaying more involved lettershapes, like its quirky ampersand.

Anchor on the other hand plays up Elena’s lively side. Note Elena’s strong diagonal motion starting from its baseline serifs upward. Elena is a fully contemporary text face, achieving its immense readability though lessons taken from Renaissance and Neoclassical types. On its own, it’s Elena’s texture more than anything that impresses me.

Set carefully, Elena works at modest display sizes, though it’s good to keep in mind that text faces are designed to work at text sizes.

A general note on pairing: You’ll see that I rely heavily on the text face, in this case, Elena to do the heavy lifting in my compositions, and that I allow the secondary face to serve the reader primarily in navigating the piece. As mentioned before in this series, one of the challenges of practicing great typography is learning to manage the relationships between faces that take on opposite roles. To learn what each is capable of on its own isn’t enough. One rather needs to—through experience—see how the two interact in a variety of settings.

Catch another Great Pairs here on Wednesday.

By David Sudweeks | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Disparate Voices: Fakt and Typonine Stencil

November 14, 2012 – 6:00 PM

I should have mentioned the FontShop Plugin from the start. The question it solves is one we get from time to time—How do I try out lots of options without buying everything? Install our plugin. Use it to test faces straight from InDesign, Illustrator, or Photoshop, or all three, however you prefer to work. Knowing which faces to license can be a big deal, and we want to make sure you know what you’re doing, and that you get what you need. If you have more questions about the plugin, just ask us here on the blog, or call, or tweet or read the FAQ.

Now to today’s great pair: Choosing two faces that work together well isn’t unlike pairing two instruments to achieve a particular sound, or pairing two garments—a jacket and skirt for instance—to make a certain look, or on a more fundamental level, pairing two different fibers to give the right texture to a piece of cloth.

One must take care in each case to determine which qualities will be accentuated, and which faces are best to support its pairing in playing up those qualities. In the included samples you can see that I’ve chosen a display face, Typonine Stencil, and one that’s a bit more robust, Fakt. The delicate nature of the one reinforces the strength of the other. When demonstrating that relationship, I’m careful to allow the display face to dominate the composition. If I were a more dogmatic typographer, I’d say something like, “A duet needs but one trumpet.” Striking the right balance is what you’re working toward, and however you get to it is alright with me. For the record, you can make two leading voices heard, it’s just more work, and usually involves a tertiary face playing backup.

When I start a project, I like to lay out a few styles together to see what’s working.

I could also mention that it pays to know what your type is capable of—see how Fakt’s tone warms when I enable one of its stylistic sets. (Compare above and below.)

The differences are seen easily in the text sizes, but more subconsciously felt when the same alternates are applied in text.

Above the cut line is Fakt out of the box, below it, Set 1 is selected within the OpenType Stylistic Sets menu. This allows the face to instantly span between a cooler grotesque feel, to a warmer geometric.

And I see there’s a little space at the end for questions. What’s missing from the Great Pairs series? What would you like to see more of? Let us know.

By David Sudweeks | Comments (1)

Made for Each Other: Benton Sans and Benton Modern

November 7, 2012 – 5:43 PM

There’s a theme in the requests for help we get here at the research desk, namely, “What headline face goes with the selection I’ve already made for text?” In answer, we put our heads together and came up with the idea of a Great Pairs series. Here we’ll show a good pairing in a number of settings, made to demonstrate the how and why of combining faces. Not an in-depth formal analysis of each face, but more of a quick, mostly practical bit of shop talk on function and usage.

This week we look at faces made for each other: Benton Modern and Benton Sans. Both of these Font Bureau families carry the Benton name, after Morris Fuller Benton and his father Lynn Boyd Benton, founder of American Type Founders. Benton Modern is a contemporary redrawing of the Century family of Scotch Romans / Scotch Moderns extensively developed by ATF.

Though you may not have heard of it before, Benton Sans should look familiar. It’s a mixture of mostly Morris Fuller Benton’s News Gothic, and all the others that carry a similar presence (Franklin/Alternate/Trade Gothic). The American Gothics, while charming, can come off as having a natural bent toward telling people what to do. Plainspoken, though not terribly softspoken by nature.

When working with faces that have a strong historical appeal, the use of period-specific conventions such as fully justified columns of text can be incorporated into one’s compositions to reinforce the historic aspect of the work. Or such conventions can be deliberately thrown out, resulting (if done successfully) in a fresh contrast.

Both these families are great because they offer a number of weights and widths, as well as the premium features you don’t get in old digital versions of Century or News Gothic, like small caps, text figures, etc., and yet they have a familiarity about them that, in the right hands, can be used to earn the trust of the reader.

That’s all. Catch another Great Pairs here next week.

By David Sudweeks | Comments (0)
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