FontShop Blog

Following up on last year’s note celebrating International Women’s Day is this one, highlighting the work of another three women who design type.

Veronika Elsner, in the first conversation I ever had with her said straightway, “And I am the first woman to digitize type.” She did it in her home, in the mid-70s, before personal computers—by carefully touching in order a digitization device’s stylus to each of the marked points on a tightly-drawn character sheet. Veronika with her partner Günther Flake are the foundry Elsner+Flake.

Zuzana Licko’s leading charge during the first digital design revolution carves out a deserved spot in the history books, but her work presses on. I credit Zuzana for first introducing me to John Baskerville’s mistress (and later, wife) Sarah Eaves, after whom she names a very popular cut of Baskerville. Pronounce Licko with me—it’s Litchko.

Laura Worthington is my most recent acquaintance of the three, and FontShop’s most recently added library fitting the category of exclusively female-designed type. Laura’s type work draws naturally from her hand work, carefully documenting the feeling of each of the various styles.

And the list goes on, but I’ll stop here. Thanks Tiffany Wardle de Sousa for compiling the list, by the way.

Mark Frömberg’s Canary just arrived from Gestalten this week. Canary is a script face – but unlike most script faces – one quite capable of setting text in its regular weight. (Alice Savoie’s understated Capucine comes to mind as another face in the same vein, as well as Calcine, also from Mark Frömberg.)

One area where Canary shows its strength is in its extensive collection of alternate forms and ligatures for lowercase, small caps, uppercase, and mixed case. See them all by selecting ‘Character Set’ below the Specimen tab on the product page. Canary comes in a range of weights from Light to Extra Black.

February brought us loads of great new faces, a bit heavy on novelty, but not without its finds. Here are three script faces that stood out to us, and if you’re still left wanting, see the complete list. Now on to the good stuff.

In Filmotype Havana, Charles Gibbons masterfully gives new life to this casual signage hand from the mid-20th century.

Feel Script by Alejandro Paul of Sudtipos brings back some of the wonder of 1950s-era ad lettering.

Stephen Rapp’s Shoebop similarly explores a fifties feel, but carries itself with an awkward adolescent gait. Though highly expressive, the letterforms’ introverted gestures are careful not to stick out too much.

Doug Wilson’s Linotype: the Film premiered in San Francisco Tuesday night to two back-to-back sold out audiences. The subject of the film is the historical impact of the Linotype typecasting machine on its trade, and on society.

Director Doug Wilson (in shirt and tie) talks as film attendees fill the venue.

I was first introduced to Doug Wilson through his writing. In The Eighth Wonder, published in Codex, Issue 1, his story revolves largely around the personal misfortune of Linotype inventor, Ottmar Mergenthaler. While its design and mechanical precision was undoubtedly the work of genius, Mergenthaler’s proneness toward its constant improvement put him at odds with the project’s principal backer, newspaper man Whitelaw Reid. Reid wanted a finalized product that could be sold and shipped. In the film, Reid is resoundingly pronounced a tyrant, ruling ‘with an iron hand.’  The resulting product, despite its complexity, eventually succeeded in mass production, and became the foundation of an enormously profitable business, as well as “the pinnacle of late-Victorian mechanical engineering.”

Diagram detail from The Official Manual, Linotype Machine Principles, 1940.

Most notably, the movie wasn’t some sad story about a few sweet old men left behind as the history of their trade was lost. Though some genuinely sweet old men make up the cast of the documentary, the tone of the film is hopeful. One bit of evidence was the small but much younger group of ‘second generation’ Linotype operators. Another was presented like this: With the use of the Linotype, the work of one man was now equal to that of 6 hand-typesetters. While this initially spelled ruin to the typesetting trade, within a decade of its introduction all these workers and more were called back to the industry, as the many new volumes of books, magazines, and newspapers – now produced and sold at a much more affordable price – needed someone to make them.

After the film, the director answered the audience’s questions, including “How much did a Linotype cost?” and “Is anyone making new matrices for the Linotype?” The answers took a bit of explaining. The first typecasters sold for the equivalent of a house, “between $10- and $50,000.” This expense could be made up in the case of a newspaper, for example, in a couple of years. The ‘matrices’ – mats, in Linotype terminology, underwent 63 machine processes in their production. All of the custom machinery that made the mats was scrapped with the close of the Linotype factory’s hot metal era, thus “even with today’s technology, their reproduction would be completely nonviable, impossible.”

The film was received entirely positively. Its release to DVD happens Summer 2012.

Taking a couple hours to get up to speed with the recently updated FontBook App this morning, I found what makes the new version better, and worth the upgrade. Its new collections give you more and easier ways to find what you’re looking for, and even if your typographic knowledge is expert, plenty of opportunities to be surprised along the way. Keep reading for some news about our favorite app for iPad.

Without a doubt, the top feature of FontBook 2.0 is its auto update. Now instead of holding a fixed number of fonts (albeit a very large fixed number), the new version quietly updates itself with the latest from FontShop.

Getting into the two new buttons on the opening screen, News & Trends, and Usage, I first went to see what Usage was all about. By Genre, I found list after list of descriptive categorizations, mainly organizing the faces by formal characteristics: Distressed Sans, Dotted, Multiline, 3d Embossed, etc.. I’ve linked to the corresponding FontLists.

Browsing by Period allows the researcher to flip through types based on more than classification or year of release, but by popular association to a given period. The ‘Art Deco,’ or ’1950s’ set for example contains not only types designed during the period, but also those most evocative of it.

The Award Winners section within News/Trends  makes for a fantastic browse, turning up no lack of new and very good text faces for sophisticated, understated typography.

Speaking of, we’ve just this morning learned that FontBook’s creators have been honored with the Certificate of Typographic Excellence from the Type Directors Club at their annual TDC Communication Design Competition. We’re very happy to hear the news.