dot-font: Type Under the Knife

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.

Since writing last week’s column about Colin Brignall, who was recently awarded the Type Directors Club (TDC) Medal, I’ve thought frequently about Brignall and his extensive contributions to type.

I was discussing this with Mike Parker, who co-founded the first digital type foundry Bitstream and before that ran the type-development program at Mergenthaler Linotype, in the days of hot metal and early phototype. When I pointed out that Colin had started at Letraset in 1964, Mike said: “That period includes pretty much all of it. From hot metal to phototype to digital type to PostScript—it’s all happened in the last 40 years.”

The period also includes the use of a unique technology that was a response to the needs of designers in the 1960s, and that helped establish Letraset and Brignall as the venerable entities they have become: re-creating existing metal typefaces and creating a line of original designs, in dry-transfer form using a stencil-cutting process.

Why does this bit of type history matter now? Because it’s the context of the typographic world we live in. Most of Letraset’s dry-transfer type designs were later turned into digital alphabets, and it helps to know where the typefaces we use come from, and why they’re available in the ways they are. For designers of new typefaces today, it’s also useful to know how type has been made in the past—a past that’s not particularly old yet.

Rub Down, Turn Around

Things have a way of coming full-circle. Colin Brignall became Letraset’s director of typeface development in 1980, when the company was developing typefaces for release as sheets of dry-transfer (rub-down) letters. These letters could be applied by literally rubbing them down onto a sheet of paper or a layout board. Today, after 20 years and a few major corporate and technical upheavals, Brignall finds himself once again in charge of a program of developing new typefaces for Letraset. Only instead of rub-down letters, these new typefaces will be released as digital fonts, sold directly on the web.

At its recent award dinner in London, the TDC gave each attendee a slim booklet: Letraset & Stencil Cutting. This booklet, originally published in 1996 by International Typeface Corporation and the St. Bride Printing Library, gives a detailed account of the unique method by which typefaces were created for Letraset. The main text is written by Dave Farey and—guess who—Colin Brignall.

The Collapse of Civilization, Again

As Farey and Brignall point out, when Letraset started up, it was regarded as the “new kid on the block.” Dry-transfer lettering wasn’t considered “real” typesetting, and critics complained that “it would destroy the ‘craft of lettering’ and letterspacing in the hands of the uninitiated and would compromise typographic standards.” (All of which it probably did, in some of the less talented hands, just as desktop publishing did a generation later. But then, bad lettering and bad typesetting existed in the old days, too.)

Early on, to prove its seriousness, Letraset joined the Association Typographique Internationale (AtypI)—the main international body of the type business. It then negotiated licensing agreements with other ATypI member companies to reproduce their type designs on dry-transfer sheets. These agreements led to one of the oddest techniques ever used for duplicating a type design.

Shake, Rattle, and Roll

To begin re-creating an existing type design, Letraset would buy a case of new metal type and place it in a machine, which also accommodated a complicated arrangement of pressure-sensitive film and two layers of reinforced clear plastic, with hundreds of ball bearings in between. When the machine was switched on, say Brignall and Farey, “The noise was deafening, and a special room had to be built to house the machine.” But this bizarre method did produce accurate renditions of the metal typefaces on the pressure-sensitive film. “These enlargements were then measured, analysed, discussed, re-measured, occasionally re-drawn, interpreted and finally, accompanied with pages of notes, overlaid with Rubylith Ulano [sic] for the process of stencil cutting to start.” For the uninitiated, Ulano Rubylith is the red masking film used to block out light in printing applications.

Cut Out for Type Design

It was the stencil cutting that was the heart of the Letraset process. Letter designs were cut out by hand with a knife in sheets of Rubylith, which were then used as the masters for the photographic production of sheets of alphabets.

“Cutting curves,” say Brignall and Farey, “is done entirely freehand and begins with the knife carefully following the shape of the letter, while the other hand twists the letter to allow the cutting hand to go as far around it as possible without stopping. The skill of cutting is to know when to stop, to always make perfect joins, and not to be afraid of trimming. To be avoided at all costs is ‘the dreaded peanut,’ an in-out effect that occurs if the join between a straight and curved cut is anything less than perfect.”

This was not a craft that could be practiced on a keyboard, with the reassurance of an Undo command. “One of the fascinations of stencil cutting,” they add, “is to watch someone do it, or to watch someone watching a stencil cutter. Involuntarily, the watcher’s body language starts to mirror the cutter, the head will turn, the fingers will flex, and finally there will be an expellation of air, rather like a swimmer surfacing from under water!”

At first the Letraset type studio was simply reproducing existing typefaces, but they started issuing their own original designs as early as 1963. The company very sensibly invited their better stencil cutters to submit their own designs, since the rigorous training they had undergone in learning to cut stencils (and work with all the variety of existing typeface designs) gave them what was, quite literally, a hands-on understanding of letterforms and how they worked. Some of Letraset’s most popular typefaces came out of this system of in-house encouragement.

Back to the Future

By the time Letraset & Stencil Cutting was written, the old technology had long been obsolete and Letraset’s type library, which became amalgamated with that of ITC (another story entirely), had turned digital. The later typeface releases, under Colin Brignall’s direction, included not just a host of lively display faces but also a number of striking text families by designers such as the under-appreciated Michael Gills.

The latest incarnation of Letraset is in the midst of setting up a new website (at the moment, their link takes you to the main site of the parent company, Esselte Corporation; Brignall says to expect the new site to be up and running by the end of this month), while many of the typefaces are available at the ITC site (now owned by Agfa-Monotype.)