A type family story

A type family story

Unless you are a typeface designer it is unlikely that you are paying much attention to the shapes of the letters that make up this sentence. This is at it should be. Letterforms in text should not attract attention to themselves. They should be quiet, orderly, & familiar so that the focus can remain on reading. A typeface which contains characters that stand out or look odd is distracting & annoying.

The eye of a typeface designer is more likely to dwell on the shapes of the letters themselves. If your craft is making text typefaces you must notice things that most people do not notice. The smallest details of the forms & the spacing of letters have a significant overall efect. The letterforms are repeated over and over many times in diferent combinations. They must appear harmonious when they are combined into words, paragraphs, and pages & yet each form must be distinct. The design of text typefaces is an unusual art because it is successful if the work is not noticed.

The Stone Type Foundry version of ITC Stone family included Small caps and Old style figures.

The task of integrating distinct forms applies not only to individual characters, but also to groups of characters such as capital and minuscule letters. The use of roman capitals with minuscule is such a deeply ingrained convention that we think of them as being part of a single style, but actually the invention of the capital alphabet preceded the invention of the minuscule by hundreds of years. The two styles were not used together until the ninth century when scribes began the process of making them work together. Letter designers have been working at making them compatible ever since.

Of course, it is important to preserve some of the essential differences which motivated the simultaneous use of different styles in the first place. A balance between diversity & uniformity is important to achieve the highest level of legibility.

The style we call italic – usually used in conjunction with a roman (upright) typeface – is another example of the historical process of integration. When the first italic typefaces were developed for Aldus Manutius in fifteenth-century Venice, they were used as the sole type style in a book. Only when printers began to use italic as a secondary typeface accompanying the roman did type designers start to make the two styles together with similar global characteristics such as character height and stroke weight (thickness.) This integration results in what we now call a typeface family.

The phenomenon of the type family is not restricted to Western writing systems. The Japanese routinely combine three different writing systems – Chinese logographs, called kanji in Japan, & two diferent syllabic systems called kana. One syllabic system, hiragana, is used to inflect kanji, The second syllabic system, katakana, is used among other things to transliterate foreign words. Both hiragana & katakana evolved from kanji, just as our Latin minuscule letters evolved from the roman capitals. A designer of Japanese type confronts the task of harmonizing all three systems – kanji, katakana, and hiragana – just as a contemporary westerner designer must harmonize capitals, roman lower case, italic, & sometimes other styles as well.

According to our current notion of using Latin scripts, a typeface family can contain capitals, lower case, & small capitals for a roman typeface as well as a companion italic plus bold versions of the roman & italic. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, many new styles of alphabet design have been introduced. Some of these styles are now commonly used together in order to solve complex typographic problems. One of the most common type mixtures we find in texts today is that of serif & sans serif typefaces. Generally when serif & sans serif designs are used together, they have diferent roles.

The process of integrating serif and sans serif styles in a single family of type has already begun. The first such design seems to have been done by the Dutch designer Jan van Krimpen in the early 1930’s. Gerard Unger created Demos and Praxis, a related serif & sans serif in the 1970’s. Since then the a number of other designers have created typeface families which contain serif & sans serif versions: from Ed Benguiat with ITC Benguiat & ITC Benguiat Gothic, 1979 to FF Thesis by Luc(as) de Groot, 1994. ITC Stone created in 1987, contains a style called Informal which was designed to be used for documents produced in an ojce environment. Rotis created in 1989 by Olt Aicher contains a Semiserif, which is similar to a style called The Mix in the Thesis family.

Sumner Stone in Italy.

The most recent family of which contains serif & sans serif versions is Le Monde, by Jean François Porchez. The family was originally designed for use in the newspaper of the same name where it made its debut in 1995. Since that time the family has continued to grow & it now contains new versions of the serif faces specifically designed for use in books, & a style called Courrier which has its roots in the tradition of typefaces which were made for typewriters.