dot-font: The Envelope, Please
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dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.
Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.
Last week I delved into the most poignant issue we encountered during the judging of this year’s TDC (Type Directors Club) type-design competition—what to do about revival typefaces. This week, now that the winners have been notified, I’m pleased to unveil the actual winners of the competition.
The winning typefaces in the TDC2 2001 type-design competition were an eclectic lot. Fourteen entries were chosen from a total of 135. In some cases, the judges picked entries that didn’t succeed perfectly, but that attempted something ambitious and were true to their intentions.
Familiar Faces
The judging took place in New York on Sunday, January 21. (The judging for TDC47, the TDC’s much larger competition for typography and graphic design, took up both Saturday and Sunday.) The four type judges were Robert Bringhurst, author of “The Elements of Typographic Style“; Tobias Frere-Jones, former type designer for Font Bureau and now for Hoefler Type Foundry; Helen Keyes, creative director at Enterprise IG in New York; and Carol Twombly, former type designer at Adobe. They brought a wide-ranging knowledge of type and typography, and four sets of keenly critical eyes, to the task of judging.
Entries arrived from all around the world, and in several alphabets. The winners came from eight different countries, including the United States. The winners comprised single fonts and type families, text and display faces, a charming pi font, a handwriting font, and not one but two sets of related Greek and Cyrillic type families. Winning entries ranged from funky to traditional, fanciful to far out.
Winner’s Circle
Here are the winning entries. For a look at typefaces not shown here, check out the TDC Web site, which should provide samples by the time you read this article.
Maya: A Hebrew type family with four styles (three weights and a “broken” version of the bold weight), intended for both text and display. Designed by Oded S. Ezer of London.
Litteratra: A three-member family of text typefaces (regular, italic, and small caps) with very dark color and letterforms reminiscent of Trajanus and other blackletter-influenced Roman types. Designed by Karsten Luecke of Datteln, Germany.
Zentra: A pi font consisting of pierced, blobular shapes that look like bits of clockwork from a surreal wristwatch. Designed by Vladimir Pavlikov of Moscow.
Basilica: A completely over-the-top display typeface, very condensed and with extreme contrast of thick and thin, that takes regularity and symmetry to new, appealing, almost-illegible heights. Designed by Gabriel Martínez Meave of Mexico City.
Basilica, by Gabriel Martínez Meave
ITC Aspera: A script display face that weds scratchy outlines with remarkably regular, classical underlying letterforms. Designed by Olivera Stojadinovic from Yugoslavia and released by ITC (now part of Agfa Monotype).
Terminator: At first glance it looks like a quick, blobby display face of the kind you’d see on local music hand-outs, but it eventually won over the judges, who saw the method behind its madness and discerned that it would hold up well in actual use. Designed by Michael Lee, of the Portfolio Center in Atlanta.
Warhol: Based on the handwriting of Andy Warhol’s mother, including a variety of alternate forms to simulate the spontaneity of handwriting. Designed by Pepe Gimeno of Godella (Valencia), Spain.
Really Greek & Cyrillic: Two weights each of Roman and italic, which constituted an extension of the existing Linotype Really from the Latin alphabet into Greek and Cyrillic. Designed by Gary Munch (who also designed Linotype Really).
Really Greek & Cyrillic, by Gary Munch
Eplica: A three-weight serif text family with italic and small caps in each weight, and a variety of ligatures that enforce a wide letter fit. Designed by Yvonne Diedrich of Vienna (whose cursive E in an otherwise Roman set of capital letters is becoming her signature glyph).
Warnock Pro: A text and display superfamily (Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic) with a crisp, spiky character that carries over across the three alphabets. Designed by Robert Slimbach of San Jose, California, and released by Adobe.
Hierarchy: A heroic if quixotic attempt to create a three-weight type family that is at once monospace, monoline, mono-height, and based largely (though not entirely) on blackletter forms. Designed by Rie Amaki of New York.
Linotype Conrad: A playful slab-serif text and display family that runs from very light to very heavy. Designed by Akira Kobayashi of Tokyo, and released by Linotype Library.
Linotype Conrad, by Akira Kobayashi
And two type revivals, both unnamed, created by Alex W. White of New York, and both of them digitizations of Czech typefaces of the early 20th century. One is based on Oldrich Menhart’s “Manuscript,” the other on Vojtech Preissig’s “Preissig.”
As I mentioned in my previous column, these last two faces prompted the judges to create a new category, “Revival,” so that they could acknowledge that the designs were not original but still recognize them as good examples of their craft. Turning a metal typeface into a digital one, no matter how faithfully, involves a whole host of decisions at every turn; it’s not by any means a simple mechanical process.
(Although none of us realized it during the judging, it turns out that the Preissig typeface has seen at least three other digital versions. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if all of them had come out in the same year, and all had been entered in the same competition simultaneously.)
This year, TDC is considering putting together an extra run of just the typeface pages from the annual, so that type users can have a smaller booklet that shows only the typeface winners. The idea has been suggested of printing a booklet showing the winners of the first four or five TDC2 typeface competitions, although the logistics of this might be daunting.
Type Cast
Judging type designs is never simple. The first cut may be easy (“This is junk, this one is worth considering”), but the truly interesting questions came up when the four judges had to narrow the field down to the final set of winners. Long discussions were held while everyone gazed at the typefaces under consideration. In some cases, individual judges insisted that a face should only be included if they could write about what didn’t work as well as what did, in the “Typography” annual where all the winners will be shown.
In every juried competition, everyone second-guesses the judges after the fact (“How could you choose that one? How come you didn’t include this one?”). But however difficult it may be to please all the people, the process is more than worthwhile. Contests serve to highlight what current type designers are attempting, as well as where they are succeeding. The typefaces they create will be the design resources we have to work with in the future.
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