dot-font: Revival Meetings of Mind

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.

How do you judge the design of a typeface that is a revival of an older typeface? This question came up (not for the first time) in New York last weekend, during the judging of TDC2 2001—the Type Directors Club‘s annual type-design competition.

Sources and Influences

Next week I can tell you about the winners of this year’s competition, but now I want to deal with the thorny question of how to handle revivals, which caused a lot of discussion among the TDC2 judges. (This year’s judges were Carol Twombly, Tobias Frere-Jones, Helen Keyes, and Robert Bringhurst. I was chair of the competition.)

Most typeface designs are based on other, earlier typefaces to one degree or another. You could argue, in fact, that all typefaces are derivative, since they are all versions of our common Latin alphabet (or of another alphabet, common to a another language and script). If a type designer didn’t make shapes that were reasonably familiar, the resulting typeface wouldn’t be readable. Designers delight in pushing this particular envelope, but if they leave it behind entirely, they’ll find that what they’re designing isn’t type.

The questions that came up in New York had nothing to do with experimental type, and everything to do with type that was very familiar indeed. Several of the fonts submitted were digital versions of typefaces that previously had not been digitized. Can such a typeface be considered an original design? The judges weren’t happy with appearing to give credit for the design to someone who had merely adapted it to the latest technology. Yet there was no question that the work—and judgment—required for such an adaptation are considerable and important, and all agreed that if the result is a success, then it should be honored.

A Category of Their Own

To solve this problem, we decided on the fly to create a new category: Type revival.

Judges do have the power to move an entry from one category to another, if they think the face was entered in the wrong category. One year, in fact, the judges liked only one of the actual typefaces in a multi-weight, multi-style type family, so they decided to consider that face by itself as a single typeface. This year, some of the judges particularly liked individual characters in a couple of the entries, but not the whole typeface. It would be going too far, however, to extract only the characters you liked and judge them separately. All the constituent parts of a typeface have to work together.

With the new category recognizing the specific nature of the entries that everyone considered revivals, the judges were willing to include two of them as winners.

Script Rewrites

Then we started considering whether to include another of the entries, which was based on someone’s handwriting, as a revival. Clearly, the design is based on an original—and the handwriting in this case was not the designer’s but someone else’s. Yet turning handwriting or calligraphy into type is no easy business; there are innumerable choices that have to be made. No one writes a single letter exactly the same way twice, so the designer has to choose which instance of the written letter will work best in a typeface. The relationships of the letters to each other will also vary in handwriting (especially in script, where the letters actually join). But in type, the exact same characters are going to be used over and over again.

Turning handwriting into type takes a type designer’s eye. The judges’ consensus was that this is essentially a process of design, not just imitation, and that it shouldn’t be considered the same way as a direct type revival.

Good as New

Of course, creating a category won’t solve all the problems, or simplify all questions. There are many more variations than came up in this particular type-design competition.

Many of the best-known fonts available to designers today are revivals—either of hot-metal typefaces from the 20th century or of foundry types from centuries before. Some of the 20th century faces are themselves revivals—such as the various versions of Janson, which were based on the 17th-century metal types of Miklos Kis.

When Robert Slimbach delved into the historical archives at the Plantin-Moretus Museum while researching the typefaces of Claude Garamond, for Adobe’s attempt to make a definitive version of Garamond (released as Adobe Garamond), there is no question he was working on a type revival. Yet he had to make choices along the way about which sizes to use as models, what tiny features would really be effective in a digital typeface, how to compensate for the lack of ink-spread in offset printing, and so on. It’s easier to be true to the designer’s intentions if you have the original punches, rather than having to rely only on printed examples (as with some early types, such as those cut by Griffo for Aldus Manutius around 1500), but even then, choices have to be made. And in the case of Adobe Garamond, Slimbach was trying not only to revive Garamond’s original fonts but also to create a family of typefaces in various weights—something neither Claude Garamond nor anyone else had thought to do in the 16th century.

If the effort is simply—”simply”!—to render in digital form a typeface originally designed for a Linotype or Monotype typesetting machine, there is much less interpretation needed. But there is always some. Compare the digital versions of Centaur or Bembo, for instance, with the hot-metal faces from Monotype used in so many books during the last 70 or 80 years. How much should the outlines of the letters be regularized for digital use? How idiosyncratically accurate should they be? Is it even possible, ever, to get exactly the same effect from a digital typeface as you’d get from the corresponding type set in metal?

As another example, consider the type family Robert Slimbach created after Adobe Garamond, as another fruit of his researches: Minion. Although it was not a direct revival of any particular punchcutter’s work, it was very much a Renaissance-style typeface. Yet it could only be considered an original design.

High Fidelity

Creativity is not at war with accuracy. But when it comes to making new typefaces based on old ones, the lines blur. I suppose the only true criterion for judging such work is the intent behind it. If it’s an attempt to take credit for someone else’s work, it should be condemned. If it’s an attempt to render that work in a new medium, it should be judged for how well it does that.

There are those who argue we should never try to revive older typefaces; that a type designer should always try to create something new. This is a minority opinion, but it’s been cogently argued by some highly respected people. There isn’t any question, however, that as type users—typographers—we have all benefited from many, many successful type revivals, and that a well-done revival easily transcends a mere copy.

John D. Berry is a typographer, book designer, design writer, editor, and typographic consultant. He is a former President of ATypI, and he is the founder and director of the Scripta Typographic Institute.
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