T H E L I F E & W O R K O F W I L L I A M A D D I S O N D W I G G I N S
A TYPOGRAPHIC JOURNAL PUBLISHED FROM TIME TO TIME BY LINOTYPE
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L I N O T Y P E M AT R I X V O L U M E 4 N U M B E R 2 S P R I N G 2 0 0 6
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The Life & Work of William Addison Dwiggins
TYPE & HISTORY History is one of our greatest teachers. At Linotype, we peer into the historical record daily. Not only does the beauty of the past continue to enrich the present, it also helps us understand the world around us, and inspires future creativity. Our history is full of milestones; this year, for instance, marks the 50th anniversary of William Addison Dwiggins’ death. W.A. Dwiggins was the first great type designer to work for the Mergenthaler Linotype Co. in New York, and we are pleased to dedicate this issue to his life and work. Those who work with type find historical antecedents of particular importance. These help us better understand how typefaces are grouped and classified, as well as how to navigate through styles and select the right type for a given project. In addition to historical articles highlighting a number of typefaces and how they came to their place at Linotype, this second issue of the new Linotype Matrix includes several articles about the classification and efficient use of type. Following on the heels of the last issue, where we shined the spotlight on the heaviest faces in our library, we are pleased to now present the thinnest and the lightest. Furthermore, we detail the sorting system behind our various, and ever popular, collection of script faces. Diving deeper into type systems, we explain how and why they can greatly improve corporate and publication design. Enjoy this issue, and the stories it presents. Useful and inspiring, we are sure that they will earn a place in your library!
Linotype Matrix Issue 4.2 Table of Contents
01 Editorial 02 Typography hidden inside a collection of pencils 08 The Thin Girls from Linotype 12 Script Styles in the Linotype Library 16 Inside the library at the Gutenberg Museum 24 The Deberny & Peignot type foundry 32 Winning Typefaces: Selections from four of Linotype’s International Type Design Contents 36 The Life & Work of William Addison Dwiggins 48 How type systems make designing easier 56 A practical approach towards Corporate Type: The Suntory case
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The ornaments used on this issue’s covers, pages 1, 36–47, and 64 are found in the Caravan™ Borders fonts, designed by W.A. Dwiggins in 1938.
typography hidden inside a collection of
* pencils normally used to write letters on paper, pencils themselves are a peculiar surface for engraved letters or icons. most people do not usually pay attention to this, but these little writing tools—which have been our friends since childhood—deserve a closer look. (*) Brazilian graphic designer Claudio Rocha's special collection includes more than 2,500 pencils from all around the world. Text set in Avenir™ Next.
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The Q Thin Girls X from Linotype
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J Q
YZ
ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPRSTUVWX ITC Avant Garde Gothic
®
Extra Light Condensed Extra Light Condensed Oblique Extra Light Extra Light Oblique
H
K S
ave a new product, special offer, headline, or any other string of text to set large? Does it need to stand out from other big, bold examples? Maybe you want it to come across softly, perhaps with a feminine touch? You need a light, delicate typeface. This is where the Thin Girls from Linotype step in. Following on the heels of the Fat Boys article in the last issue of the Linotype Matrix, which presented some of the world’s favorite big and chunky types, we are pleased to introduce their counterparts, the Thin Girls.
ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRTUVWXYZ
X
Neue Helvetica Ultra Light Extended Ultra Light
ABCDEFGHIJKLNOPqRSTUVWYZ
cirkulus
9 ™
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™
S RV E
YZ
ABCDFGHIJKLMNOPQRTUVWX
Premier Lightline ™
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Washington
™
E
very typeface has its own unique qualities and capabilities, some of which range across multiple weights and sizes. But to get these across with just the minimum possible amount of ink on paper is a tremendous challenge. Take a look at some of the Thin Girls in our library, and see what distinctive forms our type designers been worked out for you!
S Q
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQSTUWXYZ Just Square Ultra Thin ™
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Why Square Ultra Thin ™
YZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPRTUVWX
Avenir Next Ultra Light Ultra Light Italic Ultra Light Condensed Ultra Light Condensed Italic ™
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Text set in Palatino™ Sans Informal, 11 pt
ABCDEFGHIJKLM Puritas Light ™
G WB Q ACDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVXYZ ITC Silvermoon
™
ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPRSTUVWXYZ
M Z a Palatino Sans Ultra Light Ultra Light Italic Informal Ultra Light Informal Ultra Light Italic ™
L
X
e
ABCDEFGHIJKNOPQRSTUV WXYZ ™
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY
Linotype Univers NOPQRSTUVWYZ
™
Compressed Ultra Light Condensed Ultra Light Basic Ultra Light Extended Ultra Light
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Jiffy
A
look at the current best-selling headline fonts on www.linotype.com shows that script-style typefaces are highly in demand. Since thousands of script faces are available in the Linotype Library, where is a font shopper to begin? Linotype’s type classification experts have put together this handy list to help you pick which general style is right for what project.
Brush LIN OTYPE M ATRIX
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Brush-style script fonts mimic the hand-drawn lettering styles that are made with a fine brush. BrodyTM, an old ATF face direct from the 1950s, is reminiscent of American shocard lettering. On the other hand, continental designs like ChocTM and MistralTM are French, yet give off a 1950s vibe as well. All three of these types were originally produced as metal type for hand setting, and have remained popular for decades.
Handwritten
Some people just have better handwriting than others. As unfair as this may seem, we can all feel lucky that many of those with good penmanship talents have gone into the font drawing industry. Now, we can print up personal documents using handwriting-style fonts, giving our work a personalized feeling! Wiesbaden SwingTM is a monoline script, a digitization of designer Rosemary Kloos-Rau’s handwriting. While Wiesbaden Swing looks as if it has been written out
Mistral Choc Brody Wiesbaden Swing Sketch
in the Linotype Library proportions. Staehle GraphiaTM is a similar design, which still manages to capture the stress of the writing instrument. Colombine represents another sort of handwriting-style script design. Unlike fonts presented so far, Columbine is a real “family” of faces. ColombineTM was designed by Gudrun Zapf von Hesse; her casual handwriting is thoroughly captured in digital form and spread across five weights (with alternates, the Colombine family includes 12 separate fonts).
Expectation Staehle Graphia
Colombine
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with a fine tipped pen, Guido Bittner’s ExpectationTM (which was also designed in the German city of Wiesbaden, coincidentally) appears to have been made by a rougher instrument. Fonts like this feel quite individual, almost as if their letters would look totally different if the designer would write them out again. Linotype SketchTM is an informal non-connecting script that could be combined well with contemporary text faces, as these often have correspondingly narrow
Zapfino goes r u f full
inky Inky & informal Informal ll of
“Inky”-style faces, for lack of a better term, are informal designs that seem immediately artful and full of expression. Their irregularity and unexpectedness enlivens any composition, similar to how jazz or modern dance animate a room. SaltoTM comes from the pen of Karlgeorg Hoefer, who spent most of the second half of the 20th century teaching calligraphy around the world. While Salto’s letterforms share similarities with brush-styles like Choc and Mistral, Linotype NotecTM is a script that is really full of ink – more like a style of notes that a slow-writing, thoughtful humanist would scribble to himself late at night. Linotype SevenTM appears speedier; hastily drawn, with features that would come from a wide, bristly brush, as though its scribe was in a hurry. In short, “inky” fonts are loaded with energy and spontaneity.
Artfu d Fu l an
Sa
lt o
ression p x E
Inspired kuenstler script
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Linotype seven
Ready R to gracefully
of ink Linotype NOTEC
This article is set in palatino sans
Classic Classic
a r t x E Zapfino Finally, many customers are always on the look out for classic-style scripts to use in formal applications. Kuenstler ScriptTM, originally called Künstler Schreibschrift, is inspired by the work of writing masters of the distant past. It is ready to gracefully adorn the most serious of documents, including fine menus and wedding invitations. A copperplate hand, PirouetteTM, includes elaborate, two-layer capital letters. These allow the user to print carefully set two-color type, lending special touches to formal certificates and the liked. Shelley Script, also inspired by copperplate engraving styles, was designed by Matthew Carter. Carter gave ShelleyTM Script three different complete alphabets of capital letters, each more elaborate than the other, allowing the user to choose his own level of personal expression.
one step rther Zapfino extra
by the work of writing masters Prof. Hermann Zapf’s ZapfinoTM Extra goes one step further. Every upper- and lowercase letter in Zapfino Extra’s design includes four variants; additional swash characters and ornaments are included as well. Since juggling four different versions of every glyph can be tricky when designing a piece, Linotype has a special contextually sensitive version of the font available as well, Zapfino Extra Pro. When this font is used in OpenType-savvy applications like Adobe InDesign, text can automatically set itself using glyphs taken from all of Zapfino Extra’s variants, creating as close an approximation to the variety of form found in real calligraphy as possible!
adorn the most serious of documents Pirouette
Shelley script
apital letters
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Three different alpabets of
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Inside the library at
Dan Reynolds
the Gutenberg Museum Large or small, letters seem to inhabit their own universe. Rearrangeable in any combination, they can spell out all conceivable messages, be it poetic, bureaucratic, or anything in between. But sometimes a text is just about its letters themselves, not an object to be read, but one to be looked at. Type specimens have taken various forms over the centuries, from posters to postcards and from primers to pamphlets. In fact, the magazine that you are reading now is also a type specimen, at least of some sort. In our age of input and digital output, creating type specimens has become easier than ever before. But what did our predecessors do 100 years ago, or even 500 years ago? Thanks to a handful of dedicated museums and libraries around the world, we can find out. This article is the first in a series introducing these collections and their specimens. Left: Close-Up of a single, oversize type specimen from Johann Erasmus Luther’s typefoundry, the Luther’sche Schriftgießerei. Printed in Frankfurt, Germany, 1678.
MAINZ: For hundreds of years, this small German city along the Rhine has been known for Johannes Gutenberg and his invention—printing with movable metal type. Almost any graphic designer who has passed through Mainz has stopped at the Gutenberg Museum. Next to the city’s landmark Romanesque cathedral, the Gutenberg Museum presents the history of Western (and some Eastern) printing. Several incunabula books are on display—including three Gutenberg Bibles—as well as printing presses and bits of city paraphernalia. Lesser known is the museum’s small library, which is open to the public. Aside from trade and academic titles on printing and typographic history, the library has a large collection of type specimens from the 17th through 20th centuries. These were largely collected by Gustav Mori in the 1920s. Today, typefoundries tend to design and produce catalogs to show off their typefaces—or they put their designs online and minimize print advertising costs altogether. Centuries earlier, many type specimens tended to take another form: large, oversized single sheets, on which a typefounder would display paragraph settings of each of his types at their various sizes—almost like a poster. The Gutenberg Museum library’s oldest specimens all take this form.
Understanding classification schemes can be the key to choosing the right typeface. For example, a German Fraktur would be a poor choice for an English Pub, while almost any style could look right on a certificate, depending on its overall design.
Textura
Rotunda
The Gutenberg Museum library’s specimen collection is inclusive, drawing on holdings from all over Europe. Traditional serif typefaces (called Antiqua type in German) are to be found in abundance, as are Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, and of course, blackletter typefaces. The first type sorts cast in lead—which were, in all likeli-
Bastarda
Fraktur
Contemporary
Historical
Gotisch
Top row, left to right: The basic historical evolution of blackletter type styles—Textura, Rotunda, Bastarda, Fraktur, and Contemporary. Historical Texturas, Old English, and Gotisch designs are further evolutions of the Textura idea. Schwabacher is the style of Bastarda that has been traditionally used in Germany. Evolving out of late medieval and early renaissance handwriting, the various blackletter styles also influenced each other over time.
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Old English
Left and below: 1785–1786 specimen from William Caslon’s foundry in Great Britain. In addition to their famous serif typefaces, the Caslons cut seminal a blackletter type called Caslon Black. This forms a large part of the base of what we refer to as “Old English”-style fonts today.
Caslon Black
Letter-Founder to his Majesty. Old English
Letter-Founder to his Majesty. Agincourt™
Letter-Founder to his Majesty. Linotext™
Note that certain special characters from historical styles are not available today in every digital font, e.g., the long-s (found in most DFR fonts) and the round-r (very seldom digitized at all). Modern readers—especially readers of English—are not used to reading text with these characters in them. Long-s
And be it further hereby enacted, That the Mayors, Bailiffs, or other head Officers of every Town and place corporate, and City within…
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Old English
Caslon Black
hood, cast in Mainz—were blackletter designs. Blackletter remained immensely popular in Germany through the 20th century; even as late as 1900, perhaps half of all printed items there were still set in it. Only since the beginning of the post-war era has blackletter disappeared from the German mainstream media environment.
What styles of blackletter types can one find in this specimen collection? Mostly Fraktur and Schwabacher typefaces. Although the first books produced in Mainz were set in Textura types, Schwabacher (c. 1480) and Fraktur styles (c. 1517) would come to dominate the German trade during the 16th century. The best Textura specimen in the Gutenberg Museum Library’s collection comes not from Germany, but from Great Britain: an Old English face in an 18th century catalog from William Caslon’s foundry.
Rotunda types—the second oldest blackletter style—never really caught on as a book type in German-speaking lands, although 20th century calligraphers, as well as arts and crafts designers, have used it quite well for display purposes. However, these rounder styles were popular during the Renaissance in Italy, Southern France, and Spain—historical regions not normally associated with blackletter typography. Most remarkable is that many of the typefaces used in these blackletter specimens are available again to designers and publishers in digital format. For instance, Caslon’s above-mentioned blackletter design is sold today under the name Old English. Type from famous 17th century Frankfurt typefounder, Johann Erasmus Luther, served as the basis for Linotype Luthersche Fraktur. Wittenberger Fraktur is based on Frakturs used in Wittenberg during the 17th and 18th centuries. Fette Gotisch and Fette Fraktur are both direct interpretations of big display types that were popular all over Germany during the 19th century.
Left: Johann Erasmus Luther’s 1678 specimen (close-ups visible on page 16 and below). Below: Text set in Linotype Luthersche Fraktur™, above a close-up of Johann Erasmus Luther’s 1678 specimen. A revival of Luther’s type, Linotype Luthersche Fraktur was originally cast in metal by D. Stempel AG during the early 20th century. Subtle differences between the digital font and Luther’s actual type are noticeable— especially in the umlauted letters “ä,” “ö,” and “ü.”
mit Kummer und S¡mer”en sollen Kinder gebähren/und die Welt erfüllen. Weil dann sol¡e# dein göttli¡er Wille ist/welLinotype Luthersche Fraktur™
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Auff di, HErr, traue i, mein Gott, hilff mir von allen meinen Verfolgern, und errette mich. Daß ſie nit wie Löwen meine Seele erhaſen, und zureiſſen, weil kein Erretter da iſt. Siehe ! kein Ubels wird begegnen dir, keine Plage dein Hauß wird rühren : denn er ſeinen Engeln für und für befiehlet di zuführen, und zubehüten für Unfal, auf Händen tragen überal, daß kein Stein den Fuß ſetze. Wittenberger Fraktur™
What use are these old specimens to contemporary designers? The first lesson that old specimens can teach us doesn’t apply to blackletter designers alone: historically, punchcutters and typeface designers designed type in optical sizes. Before the age of scalable photo- and digital typesetting, type could only be set in a range of sizes that were available as cast lead (or carved wooden) letters. Founders would produce each size individually. A six-point letter looked very different from a 24-point one. These days, designers tend to use one font for every size—from caption to headline! The result? Headlines that are often too heavy and too loosely spaced, and fine print that is too light and too tight.
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Above: Christian Zinck’s specimen book from 1743—showing several Fraktur sizes, as well as a cursive script—from Wittenberg, Germany. The typeface shown on the overlay is Wittenberger Fraktur, a revival of similar type produced at the beginning of the 20th century.
Originating in Germany during the late 15th century, Schwabacher-style type became the most popular blackletter style after Fraktur. Schwabacher isn’t a separate category of blackletter, but rather a German incarnation of the Bastarda. In Fraktur texts where no cursive style was available, Schwabacher was often used to call attention to specific words, similar to the way we use italic today. Although Schwabacher remained popular in Germany into the 20th century, there are very few digital Schwabacher fonts available. Left and above: Johann Thomas Trattner’s 1769−82 specimen book. Vienna, Austria. “Garmond” does not explicitly refer to the famous type designer Claude Garamond, but rather to a type size named after him—roughly 10 point.
Preßburg EFIK123 Fette Fraktur™
Above: An 1840 specimen of a Fette Fraktur display weight from the J.B. Metzler’schen Schrift-Schneiderei of Stuttgart, Germany. The digital “Fette Fraktur” is one of today’s best selling blackletter fonts. As can be seen here, it was a mainstay of 19th century German foundries as well. Right: Specimen of a Fette Gotisch weight from J.B. Metzler’schen Schrift-Schneiderei, Stuttgart, Germany, 1840.
fett!
Ihr aus den Felsenhallen und Burgen der Vorwelt hinüberschimmernde Riesengestalten der ersten Fürsten der ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQ 21 LINOTYPE MATRIX
Fette Gotisch
From Gutenberg – To Heavy Metal…! Contemporary uses of Blackletter Secondly, old specimens are beautiful pieces of history, and can act as springboards for the design of new blackletter types. For over two decades, blackletter has undergone a huge revival among designers—particularly in North America. Other than may be the case in Central Europe, one might even argue that its popularity in North America never really left. The digital revolution made blackletter democratic: now everyone can use new blackletter fonts, or even design their own!
How is blackletter used today? Mostly for display. Fonts like Fette Fraktur are used for old-fashioned headlines and beer advertising. Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch™ adorns many a wine label. Linotext and Old English are popular choices for certificates. Any of the above can be found the world over in tattoos. Pop culture is more enthralled with blackletter than ever before, examples range from newspaper mastheads (like The New York Times) to heavy metal band logos (à la Motörhead) and sneaker advertising (look no further than Reebok’s recent global “I am” campaign).
G Children of the KË RN FONTHALLA FONTHALLA
FONTHALLA
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Above: Album cover designs for the pseudo-typographic band “Fonthalla”—Children of the KËRN; The Neue Typogräphers; Small Caps, Big Dëath; and Victim of Circümflêx. Names suggested via the community forums at Typophile.com. Superfluous umlauts abound.
Instructions for the historic setting of Blackletter Typefaces Most rules below apply to German only. Special rules exist regarding the usage of the long-s (s) and the closing-s (s). The long-s should always be used when the letter s begins a word, or syllable. A long-s is also required when the letter s appears in the following letter combinations: sp (sp), st (‰), and sch (s¡). Below, only the last example is correct.
Gasthaus Gasthaus Ga‰haus
The closing-s is used when the letter s is the last letter of a word, or of a syllable within a word. Examples:
Häs¡en vor›¡tshalber The are also a number of exceptions to the long-s/closing-s rules, mostly revolving around whether the word is borrowed from a foreign languages, or includes certain prefixes or letter combinations!
About the Gutenberg Museum Centrally located in Mainz’s historic inner-city, the Gutenberg Museum is a must see for any type, book, or printing fan. The museum was founded in 1900 to coincide with a city-wide celebration of the 500th anniversary of Johannes Gutenberg’s birth, and is dedicated both to him and to his invention in general. Aside from rotating exhibitions, some of which are very typographic in nature, the museum displays an enviable permanent collection. Books, typesetting machines, and printing presses can be seen side by side. A working print shop, called the Druckladen, is even one hand as well. Inside, visitors may still set type and letterpress print by hand, a favorite for school children and book artists alike. The museum also has an excellent bookstore, which sells reproductions of pages from the Gutenberg Bible, as well as the latest typographic titles from German design publishers. The museum is open daily, closed only on Mondays and holidays. www.gutenberg-museum.de
Certain ligatures should be substituted for letter combinations when available. In the DFR character set, the provided ligatures are ch, ck, fi, ff, fl, ft, ll, long-s + long-s, long-s + i, long-s + t, and tz.
¡,¿,fi,[,fl,], =,‹,›,‰,” Example:
noch! no¡! to
The use of these ligatures is often maintained even when the text is letterspaced. Example:
geht no¡!
Lastly, the use of strings of capital letters is to be avoided, although it is common to see two capital letters next to each other, historically. In the following examples, only the first is inacceptable.
HERRN deine HErrn deine Herrn deine
Text set in Linotype Gothic™, 9 pt.
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More information may be found at www.Linotype.com.
e h t f o y c a g e The l
y r d n u o f e p ty
By John D. Berry
The history of type foundries is a history of acquisitions and mergers, caused by everything from changing family alliances to new technological and business models. This is the rich typographical background behind the Linotype Library — not only the history of the Linotype company itself but the diverse traditions of a panoply of type foundries dating back hundreds of years. Some of the most distinctive typefaces of the 20th century come from the French type foundry Deberny & Peignot; they are now part of the Linotype library because of Linotype’s acquisition in 1989 of the Swiss Haas foundry, which in turn had bought Deberny & Peignot in 1972. The history of Deberny & Peignot itself is one of absorption, including the merger of the two independent Deberny and Peignot foundries in 1923. It all gets complicated. The Deberny side of the equation begins in the 1820s with Louise-Antoinette-Laure de Berny, mistress of the famous French literary writer Honoré de Balzac. Mme. de Berny had financed Balzac’s short-lived venture into printing and publishing, which had included the purchase of a type foundry begun in the late 18th century. When Balzac abandoned the business to devote himself to writing, Mme. de Berny took it over and gave it to her son Alexandre, who in turn passed on, years later, to his illegitimate son, Charles Tuleu.
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The Peignot side begins in 1868, when Gustave Peignot bought a metal foundry in Paris and turned it into a type foundry. Gustave built his business partly by buying the inventory of failed French type foundries, which gave him a wide selection of typefaces to use and sell. His five sons took over the business on Gustave’s death, and in particular his son George led the foundry to a period of prosperity in the heyday of the Art Nouveau style in France; but illness took one son, and the trenches of the First World War took all four of the others, including George. Until George’s son Charles was old enough to join the business, it was Henri Menut who directed the company, continuing the policy of buying up old type by acquiring the original punches of the historic types of John Baskerville from the Bertrand Foundry. These punches, a treasure of English typefounding, were later returned to their nation of origin when Charles Peignot donated them to the Cambridge University Press.
Auriol Peignot Univers
Under the direction of Charles Peignot, Deberny & Peignot pioneered the creation of type designs that embodied the Art Deco style of the 1920s and 1930s, beginning with the radical display type Bifur (1928) and perhaps culminating with the typeface that took the director’s own name, Peignot™ (1937); both were designed by A. M. Cassandre, at Charles Peignot’s insistence. Earlier, under the direction of Charles’s father, George, the Peignot foundry (not yet allied with Deberny) had produced the most instantly recognizable typeface in the Art Nouveau style, Auriol™ (1903), designed by George Auriol and serving as the direct inspiration for Hector Guimard’s lettering on the station entrances to the Paris Metro. (Two heavy-weight companions were designed for Auriol in 1979 by Matthew Carter: Auriol Black and Auriol Black Italic.) The third great period of Deberny & Peignot type development was the 1950s, when Charles Peignot hired the young Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger, who went on to create both the excellent text face Méridien™ (1955) and the most systematic type family yet devised, Univers™ (1957). Charles Peignot is the key figure. As a young man, he apprenticed to all the various sections of the family foundry, learning each part of the business in turn. But his great love was the arts;
At the same time, Peignot was working with the designer Maximilien Vox to publish both a commercial periodical, Les Divertissements typographiques, to show off new type designs, and a more ambitious cultural magazine about all forms of art and design, Arts et métiers graphiques.
A sample page from a book on Peignot, 1937
Auriol
The most instantly recognizable typeface in the Art Nouveau style
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his friends and associates included some of the best known names of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century — the poet Apollinaire, the painter Fernand Léger, the composer Erik Satie — and he was a member of the seminal organization of the Modernist movement in France, l’Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM), founded in 1929. He completed the designs of two typefaces begun under his father, the Art Nouveau–style Naudin and a historical revival of the Renaissance French typefaces of Claude Garamond that eventually became the Deberny & Peignot typeface Garamont; and under his directorship, Deberny & Peignot distributed Paul Renner’s classic Modernist typeface Futura® (under the name Europe). But what interested Peignot most was the radically stylized Art Deco designs, geometrical and fashionably sleek at the same time. He commissioned Cassandre’s remarkable Bifur, which was built on a simple skeleton of geometrical capitals but took them in a bizarre direction by deleting parts of the letters and filling in many of the counters with a pattern of very fine parallel lines. As Peignot himself described it later, “There were no new or innovative typefaces which existed at the time. The ‘Bifur’ created a real scandal…at least in the small world of publishing and printing. Engraving this design was a remarkable tour de force. Needless to say, ‘Bifur’ was not a financial success, but in those happy days one could afford to take a few risks.”
The Peignot typeface The most famous typeface from the foundry in this period was certainly the one that was given the director’s own name, Peignot (A. M. Cassandre, 1937). It was considered radically modern when it debuted, and it still excites partisan feelings, both for and against, when it’s seen in use today. As an “inscriptional” typeface, Peignot was used extensively at the 1937 Paris world’s fair (l’Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne), where it became emblematic of modern French design. Its heavily weighted sans serif capitals are complemented by a lowercase that ignores most of the usual lowercase forms, instead using rounded uppercase forms with occasional extenders and lowercase elements. Nobody could mistake Peignot for any other typeface. After the Second World War, Cassandre revisited the Peignot design and came up with Touraine, a version with a more “normal” lowercase. It was issued by Deberny & Peignot in 1947.
Original Deberny & Peignot type specimen sheets.
A sample page from a book on Peignot, 1937
Phototypsetting In the early 1950s, Charles Peignot championed the Lumitype phototypesetting machine, a ground-breaking invention though not, ultimately, a commercial success. The technology, however, spurred Deberny & Peignot’s new type designer, Adrian Frutiger, to develop typefaces that would accommodate and take advantage of the characteristics of the new medium. At first, Frutiger was given the task of adapting the foundry’s classic typefaces for the Lumitype; in 1955, his first “mature” original typeface, Méridien, was released.
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It was Frutiger’s extensive sans serif family Univers that practically defined the look of 1950s modernism. While the Swiss “international style” relied on workaday German sans serifs from the early 20th century, and the Haas type foundry’s Helvetica™ (originally called Neue Haas Grotesk™) built on the same foundation, Frutiger invoked a more humanist calligraphic tradition in Univers, while still embodying industrial simplicity and a no-nonsense modern style. Aside from the elegance of its individual letters, and the textural precision with which they fit together, Univers was the first typeface to be developed as a systematic extended family, from the lightest and most condensed forms (Univers 39) to the heaviest and widest (Univers 83). Frutiger gave the individual fonts numbers, based on a logical system of design axes, rather than names; when the face was licensed to other manufacturers, however, they often reverted to imprecise but traditional names like “heavy” and “light.” Original Deberny & Peignot type specimen sheet.
This article is set in Linotype Meridien
Linotype Univers 930
luti
o
The richness of the Deberny & Peignot heritage can be sampled in the current library of Linotype digital fonts, but there are still gems to be revived and given digital form. Deberny & Peignot helped to shape the typographic form of the 20th century. u As an integral part of the Linotype originals, it has an op p o r t
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t y t o go on and shape the form of the twenty first.
Univers 85
Forty years after the release of the first weights of Univers, Linotype issued a completely revised version, Linotype Univers, reworked and reconsidered by Frutiger himself and Linotype’s in-house design staff for digital typesetting technology — much as Adrian Frutiger adapted earlier type designs for then-new phototypesetting technology in the days of the Lumitype. Where the original Univers consisted of 21 different type styles, Linotype Univers™ has 63, and a new threedigit numbering system. Linotype Univers recaptures both the crispness and the humanist flair of Univers, which has sometimes been lost in the compromises of the intervening years of adaptation and technological change. Linotype Univers is part of Linotype’s Platinum Collection.
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b Balder Regular
™
German-Swedish designer Lutz Baar created Balder, honored with First Place in the Display Category at Linotype’s first ITDC in 1994. Balder is reminiscent of styles of advertisement and poster typefaces popular during the 1950s and 60s. An all caps face, it is perfect for initials and headlines. Balder looks as though it were written with a broad-edged pen; the light serifs at the tops’ of most of the characters, and the slant the strokes lend Balder a dynamic feeling. Lutz Baar: “Balder is reminiscent of the Swedish name for the Nordic god Baldur. Likewise, my design expresses strength and wild liveliness; it gives text a compact appearance. Since I only drew capital letters, I decided to give each letter of the alphabet a corresponding alternate, accessible via the shift key on the keyboard. I call this the ’Gutenberg Effect.’, since Gutenberg also worked with alternate glyphs.“
e Ergo Linotype
™
Regular
Medium
Demi Bold
Bold
Bold Italic
Demi Bold Italic
Medium Italic
ABC ABC ABC ABC ABC ABC ABC ABC
Linotype Ergo was designed by American Gary Munch, winning First Place in the Text Category at Linotype’s second ITDC in 1997. Conceived as a blend of traditional and modern type concepts, it works as a legible text family as well as a lively display or headline font. The word ergo means “consequently,” but it also comes from the Greek word “ergon” for “work.” Consequently, Munch sees this family as full of energy–an ideal font for working hard to make a point, and able to get it across with friendly vigor. The strokes of the characters are carefully designed to accommodate the tendency of the eye to enlarge horizontals and perceive verticals as lighter. The lowercase forms have open, friendly counters and are enhanced by small quirks, such as the slightly leaning “s” and the wide “t.” The deep branching of curves from main strokes helps this humanist sans to be very readable at smaller sizes. Linotype Ergo has four weights including italics, and also has a clever Sketch weight for headlines.
* ) # @ $ (!?& 33
LINOTYPE MATRIX
Italic
* ) # @ $ (!?& Light
Regular
Bold
Extra Bold
AAAA BBBB CCCC DDDD !%?$@&
The Japanese type designer Akira Kobayashi, who since 2001 has served as Linotype’s Typographic Director, entered Conrad in the ITDC 1999, where it received first place in the Text Faces category. Conrad’s design is based on fifteenth-century type cut by Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, two German printers active in Rome at that time. They produced a unique, slightly unbalanced yet attractive type.
c Conrad
Kobayashi says of his typeface, “I have designed a couple of typefaces inspired from the past, but this time the original print acted merely as a reference. The distinctive lowercase ‘a’ and some other letters were inspired by Sweynheym and Pannartz’s second roman type, but I revived the type in a more informal way. Here I used the historical type as a springboard. The resulting type looks different, taking on a rather temporary and lively look. I assume that the Conrad is the first revival of the Sweynheym and Pannartz type, though it does not closely resemble the original.” As well as its strong showing at the ITDC, Conrad received a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Type Directors’ Club of New York in 2001.
™
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bBohemia ™
Bold
abc defg
hijklm nopqrs
tuvw
xyz C Italic
AB * @ !?$ Z & Y
Bohemia–under it’s working name “Argot”–received a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Type Directors Club of New York in 2004. Also, the typeface was selected for inclusion in the 21st International Biennale of Graphic Design 2004 in Brno, Czech Republic. Bohemia was later named one of the most relevant works in the Bienal Letras Latinas 2004, which took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, São Paulo, Brazil, Santiago, Chile, and Veracruz, Mexico.
35 LINOTYPE MATRIX
Regular
Argentinean designer Eduardo Manso designed the Bohemia display type family, which received one of three first-place awards at Linotype’s ITDC 2003. Bohemia‘s elegant design shows off refined letterforms that evoke the Transitional style of typeface design. The feeling given by the type is vaguely similar to faces like Baskerville, although most Baskerville revivals tend not to be as curvaceous as Manso’s! Slightly condensed, with a high amount of stroke contrast, Bohemia can function well in text settings as small as 9 point.
W.A. Dwiggins: Jack of all Trades, master of more than one. Written by Paul Shaw
1. WAD at work in his studio late 1930s.
Photograph by Robert Yarnall Richie.
37 LINOTYPE MATRIX
LEFT
In Layout in Advertising, published in October 1928, W.A. Dwiggins pointedly left sans serifs out of his survey of advertising typefaces. Gothic the newspaper standby in its various manifestations has little to commend it, he wrote, except simplicity; it is not overly legible, it has no grace. Gothic capitals are indispensable, but there are no good Gothic capitals. The typefounders will do a service to advertising if they will provide a Gothic of good design. In February 1929, Harry Gage, Assistant Director of Linotype Typography at Mergenthaler Linotype, challenged Dwiggins to design a good sans serif for the firm. Mergenthaler was eager to have a type that could compete with the new wave of European sans serifs specifically Futura®, but also Kabel™ and Gill Sans®—that had been released recently. Finding these types “fine in the capitals and bum in the lower-case,” Dwiggins agreed to try his hand at a new sans Mergenthaler’s decision to hire Dwiggins marked the first time the company had turned to an outside designer. It also marked the first time that Dwiggins had attempted a typeface.
Mergenthaler was so confident in Dwiggins’ potential as a type designer that in May 1929 they signed him to an exclusive contract (at $2500 per year) months before his sans serif was completed. The company wanted to snatch him away from potential rivals such as American Type Founders, Barnhart Brothers & Spindler and Continental Typefounders, all of whom had expressed an interest in commissioning type from him. The National Display Alphabet Co., makers of Innes Alphabets—alphabets reproduced on perforated gummed paper for printers and advertising agencies to use in mechanicals—had already hired Dwiggins as their artistic director. Dwiggins was a hot commodity in 1929. In January the American Institute of Graphic Arts had awarded him its Gold Medal and sponsored an exhibition of his work at the Art Center in New York City. He had made a name for himself as a commercial artist and advertising designer—Layout in Advertising was the culmination of his knowledge—but after twenty-five years in the field he was shifting his attention to book design, and doing so with success. Four of the thirteen books that he had completely designed since 1926 had been chosen for the AIGA 50 Books of the Year. He contributed decorations or illustrations to three other winners. Dwiggins’ decision to get out of advertising had been building for six or seven years. In March 1922 he found himself unable to complete a job for his friend Carl Purington Rollins, printer to Yale University. “I am really puzzled to
LIN OTYPE M ATRIX
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BY COLUMN, LEFT TO RIGHT: 2. Bookplate for Eva Siegfried Dwiggins, WAD’s mother. Signed DG implying that it
39 LIN OTYPE M ATRIX
was co-designed by WAD and Frederic W. Goudy. Most likely Goudy designed the ESD monogram and WAD did the remainder of the bookplate. WAD shared a studio with Goudy in Chicago for a year or two after graduating from the Frank Holme School of Illustration. 3. Measure. One of several color comps by WAD 1947. The magazine was never published. 4. The Interior (Children’s Book Number) 27 November 1902. WAD did both the border (signed WD) and the illustration (signed Will Dwiggins). 5. Modern Color by Carl Gordon Cutler and Stephen C. Pepper (Harvard University Press, 1923). Jacket design by WAD. (Book design by Bruce Rogers.) Jacket design by WAD. 6. Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Baron Corvo (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1937). Jacket design by WAD. 7. Faust Parts One & Two by Goethe (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1941). Jacket design by WAD. The only type is the translation information on the front. 8. Java Head by Joseph Hergesheimer (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1946). Binding design by WAD. 9. The Song-Child: Songs for School, Home & Kindergarten (Boston Music Company, 1909). Sheet music title page with border and illustration by WAD. Printed by The Merrymount Press. 10. Mail Pouch poster c.1900. Designed by WAD in the style of the Beggarstaff Brothers. This was probably a student project. 11. In American by John V.A. Weaver (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1939). Binding design by WAD. 12. Moving announcement 1910. The “digger” (“Il Faut Cultiver Nostre Jardin”) device by WAD, typography by D.B. Updike. 13. Ticket for a performance of Marionettes: Under The Püterschein Authority c.1933. Designed, illustrated and lettered by WAD. 14. Charles Hovey Pepper, North Country Exhibition at Doll & Richards (Boston) 11-23 March 1929. Announcement design by WAD. 15. WAD at his desk 1942. Photograph by Randall Abbott.
BY COLUMN, LEFT TO RIGHT: 16. Border for title page of Streets in the Moon
by Archibald MacLeish (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1926). Probably made from woodcut stencil elements. 17. Color comp of advertisement “The Pageant of Color / Champagne� for Old Hampshire Bond paper. The illustration is based on the work of Jean Pillement, an 18th century French artist known for his chinoiserie. 18. Illustration of Chinese junk created from acetate stencil elements. From The Travels of Marco Polo (The Printing House of Leo Hart, 1933) designed by WAD. 19. Warren Old Style Antique Laid. Page from S.D. Warren & Co. paper specimen box 1928. Illustration and lettering by WAD. 20. Bookplate for William and Mabel Dwiggins. 1908. The figures in medieval garb are portraits of WAD and his wife. 21. Illustration of the railroad tracks in Cambridge, Ohio 1903. Part of a portfolio of pen and ink scenes of the town that WAD lived in during his teenage years. 22. Stencil illustration by WAD from One More Spring by Robert Nathan (Overbrook Press, 1935). 23. WAD sitting in front of his stove late 1930s. Photograph by Robert Yarnall Richie.
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came in 1924 when Elmer Adler of Pynson Printers asked him if he wanted to design books for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Dwiggins was favorably inclined but balked at the low fees. His first book for Knopf, the deluxe edition of My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather, was done in 1926. It marked the start of a close association with the New York publisher that lasted the remainder of his life. Over the course of thirty years Dwiggins worked on a total of 329 books for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., seventeen of which were AIGA selections. At first he was called upon primarily to design bindings and jackets for Knopf. It was not until 1934 that he became the firm’s principal book designer. Although he preferred designing the interiors of books, he is celebrated for his jackets and bindings. His best jackets, such as those for Serenade by James Cain and Sea of Grass by Conrad Richter, are astonishing mixes of abstract ornament and bold lettering rendered in wild and savage colors. His bindings are characterized by stencil-derived abstract ornament and idiosyncratically lettered spines. Dwiggins but he disliked doing jackets, viewing them as “traps to tempt people to buy books”. Bindings, on the other hand, fascinated him and he spent much of his time
searching for ways to make them more modern and less expensive. The Art Deco-esque stencil designs found on Dwiggins’ Knopf bindings and elsewhere are one of his trademarks. They originated in the early 1920s as decorative elements—inspired by the “stamped congeries of sprigs and flowers“ of Indian printed cottons—cut on the plank side of maple and cherry wood and then rubber stamped in combinations to form patterns and illustrations. But this technique proved too cumbersome and by 1927 Dwiggins had discovered that cutting elements—both natural (leaves, stems, flowers) and geometric (dots, circles, triangles, lines, etc.)—from celluloid was easier. In Paraphs (1928) he assembled ornamental compositions from these basic units and in Clothes (1929), a magazine published by Filene’s, he discovered how to use them pictorially. Dwiggins later applied his stencil technique to type design, a procees explained in WAD to RR, A Letter about Designing Type (1940). In the years before he cemented his relationship with Knopf, Dwiggins designed a series of limitededition books for private presses that showed his versatility as an illustrator and decorative artist. The best of these books are Strange
41 LINOTYPE MATRIX
know what has bitten me, some kind of stage-fright, or else I am nicked for the time being in my inventive faculties. Other work has gone sour in the same manner.” The problem was not stage-fright but adult-onset diabetes, the same disease that contributed to his father’s death from pneumonia at the age of 39. Dwiggins was luckier than his father. By the time the diabetes was diagosed in 1923, insulin had been discovered. Although the diagnosis was not a death-sentence, Dwiggins used it as an excuse to change careers. In June he wrote Rollins, “Me I am a happy invalid and it has revolutionized my whole attack. My back is turned on the more banal kind of advertising, and I have cancelled all commissions and am resolutely set on starving. I shall undertake only the simple childish little things like YUP [Yale University Press] imprints that call for no compromise with the universal twelve-year-old mind of our purchasing public and I will produce art on paper and wood after my own heart with no heed to any market. Revolution, stark and brutal.” The revolution was not as stark as Dwiggins had expected. Advertising was more lucrative than book illustration or book design. He continued to do advertising work, especially for Direct Advertising (the house organ of the Paper Makers Advertising Club) and S.D. Warren, through the 1920s and did not entirely abandon the field until the early 1940s. From mid-1918 to the spring of 1919 Dwiggins had served as acting director of the Harvard University Press. The brief experience was disheartening, prompting him and his cousin L.B. Siegfried to publish Extracts from an Investigation into the Physical Properties of Books as They Are at Present Published, a withering (and hilarious) critique of contemporary book production. An opportunity to make better books
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Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1929) and The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1931) for Random House, Tales by Edgar Allan Poe (1930) for Lakeside Press, Droll Stories by HonorÊ Balzac (1932) and Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (1936) for the Limited Editions Club, The Travels of Marco Polo (1933) for The Printing House of Leo Hart, One More Spring by Robert Nathan (1935) for The Overbrook Press, and The Treasure in the Forest by H.G. Wells (1936) for The Press of the Woolly Whale. Dwiggins own Towards a Reform of the Paper Currency, Particularly in Point of Its Design (1932), an amusing but serious critique of American currency and stamp design, also belongs on this list. Dwiggins was in his late 40s when he began his career in type design. Born in 1880 in Martinsville, Ohio he spent his childhood and adolescence in a series of towns in Ohio and Indiana. He attended the Frank Holme School of Illustration in Chicago where his fellow students included Oswald Cooper and the faculty included Frederic W. Goudy. From 1901 to 1903 he shared a studio with Goudy before returning to Cambridge, Ohio to set up a private press. He married Mabel Hoyle, his high school sweetheart, in late 1904 and soon after he rejoined Goudy who had moved his Village Press earlier that year to Hingham, Massachusetts, a small town south of Boston. Dwiggins only stayed with Goudy until May 1905 before striking out on his own as a freelance commercial artist. Over the next two and half decades Dwiggins built up a thriving career doing lettering, decorative work and illustration for printers, advertising agencies, magazines, book publishers, paper mills and a wide range of local businesses. Most of his clients were in Boston
BY COLUMN, LEFT TO RIGHT: 24. “A Map from the 1704 English Edition of Los Gouditajos”. WAD’s satirical contri-
bution to Diggings from Many Ampersandhogs by The Typophiles (1937), a collection of ampersands and essays about the ampersand. WAD was poking fun at Fred Goudy, his former teacher and another contributor to the book. 25. “Willie Dwiggins” doodling by WAD 1880s in German Studies: A Complete Course of Instruction in the German Language. 26. Announcement of WAD’s availability as a freelance designer 1905. First instance of his uncial lettering that eventually led to Winchester Uncial typeface. 27. Lettering for use in Gargantua and Pantagruel (The Limited Editions Club, 1936) designed by WAD. 28. Proverbs 15:17/ A Cornhill Letter-Leaflet designed and lettered by WAD for Alfred Bartlett 1906. 29. WAD whittling in his studio. Photograph by Randall Abbott. 30. Paste-up of Metro letters. Undated but probably Spring 1929. 31. Lowercase script letters for Pictorial Review typeface 1934. The letters were assembled as paste-ups for headline use. 32. Detail of text setting of script typeface for Underwood Typewriter Company 1932. 33. Front cover of Clothes, a magazine published by Wm. Filene’s Sons, the Boston department store (1929). Stencil illustration and lettering by WAD. 34. The Occasional Bulletin of the White Elephant (1915), a self-promotional booklet illustrated, lettered, designed and letterpress printed by WAD. 35. 48-pt. Plimpton Initials. c. 1936. 36. Inked Epoch lettering which was the genesis of Winchester Uncial. 37. Proof of Exp. 264A, Winchester Uncial (1942).
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and New England, but some were as far away as New York, Philadelphia and Cleveland. In the years before World War I the steadiest of these clients were Alfred Bartlett, publisher of The Cornhill Booklet and Arts & Crafts ephemera, D.B. Updike of the Merrymount Press, and The Cowen Company, an advertising agency. In subsequent years his major clients were the Paine Furniture Company, S.D. Warren, Direct Advertising (the organ for the Paper Makers Advertising Club), Harvard University Press and Yale University Press. The knowledge and experience that Dwiggins gained doing endless small jobs during these years—in 1914 alone he illustrated or lettered nearly ninety advertisements for Paine Furniture—provided the basis for Layout in Advertising. Through this work he honed his lettering and drawing skills, became familiar with paper stocks, and gained a broad understanding of type. He was well prepared to tackle type design when Mergenthaler challenged him. Dwiggins finished his sans serif type—named Metroblack™—in less than a year. Its originality lay in the retention of oldstyle forms of letters such as a, e and g. This was also its flaw. Mergenthaler’s customers clamored for a face that was closer to the popular Futura. Dwiggins was asked to design alternate characters for A, G, J, M, N, V, W, a, e, g, v, and w. The revised face was dubbed Metroblack no. 2 and issued in 1931. It became a success. While he was designing Metroblack Dwiggins was also working on other faces, including a modelled sans serif and a “contemporary” roman. The modelled sans serif was quickly abandoned but the contemporary roman eventually became Electra™ (1935), Dwiggins’ response to Poliphilus, Goudy Oldstyle and other soft, antiquarian types. It had electricity, sparks, and
energy like “metal shavings coming off a lathe”. Its italic, a sloped roman inspired by the theories of Stanley Morison, immediately met with strong resistance from printers forcing Dwiggins to design a “real” italic. The new design, begun at the end of 1935 but not completed until 1940, was named Electra Cursive. Dwiggins always worked on several type designs simultaneously for Mergenthaler—while also juggling book designs for Knopf and the Limited Editions Club. During Electra’s development he was trying to create a “modern version of Scotch™”. This became Caledonia™ (1938), Dwiggins’ most enduring typeface. Of the many other designs that he pursued in the 1930s and 1940s, only three were brought to completion: Caravan™ Borders (1940), Eldorado (1953) and, posthumously, Falcon (1961). The rest remained “experimentals”. Experimentals is a misleading term. Each design that Dwiggins began for Mergenthaler was assigned an experimental number. For instance, Electra began life as Exp. 29 and later was renumbered as Exp. 55 before it was released. The “experimental” tag merely indicated that the design was in progress, not that it was radical in any way. Dwiggins’ unfinished types—several of which changed both number and name—included an upright script (Charter, Exp. 222), a Rosart-inspired roman (Stuyvesant Exp. 274), a flexible interpretation of Bodoni (Tippecanoe Exp. 268 and Exp. 283), a newspaper face (Hingham Exp. 223), a Times™ Roman competitor (Exp. 267D), a rethinking of Cheltenham (Exp. 289), the previously mentioned modelled sans serif (Exp. 10, Exp. 11A and Exp. 11B), an uncial (Canterbury Exp. 264), a half uncial (Winchester Exp. 264A and Exp. 287), and four Greek types. A few of these designs were surrepti-
tiously tested out in books: Charter in The Story of Aucassin and Nicolette (1946), Winchester half uncial in Tristram and Iseult (1946), Stuyvesant in The Shirley Letters (1949), Tippecanoe in The Creaking Stair (1949), and Arcadia in Some Random Recollections (1949). External circumstances played a pivotal role in keeping so many of Dwiggins’ type designs in the experimental stage. The bleak economic climate of the 1930s made Mergenthaler very careful about which designs it carried through and the severe material restrictions of World War II effectively shut down type production. Instead, Mergenthaler manufactured precision guidance and targeting instruments for artillery. When the war ended, the company focused its attention on replenishing its existing library of types instead of issuing new designs. With permission from Mergenthaler, Dwiggins designed typefaces for others. In 1934 he created roman and script alphabets for headline use in Pictorial Review, a magazine art directed by George Macy of the Limited Editions Club. For his own book designs he made four decorative titling faces, collectively called Plimpton Initials, sometime in the mid-1930s. His other designs never made it to fruition. They include headline types for The Christian Science Monitor and for a planned rival to Life from the Curtis Publishing Company along with music types for Music Press, Inc., a publisher of sheet music, and a series of typewriter faces for Underwood Elliott Fisher, Kiplinger’s, IBM and Remington Rand. In the 1930s Dwiggins established a marionette theatre in his studio to perform plays written by himself and members of the Manuscript Club, a group of his Hingham neighbors. In carving the marionettes he discovered that he achieved more liveliness if he
simplified the planes of their faces rather than striving for verisimilitude. In a darkened theatre shadows and light tricked the eye into seeing the planes as smooth curves. While working on Hingham, Dwiggins realized that he could apply his marionette discovery to type design. By building curves out of angles and straight lines he was able to make the 7 pt. newsface appear smooth and yet crackle with “whip-lash” vitality. He christened his technique the “M-Formula”. Dwiggins died fifty years ago on Christmas morning 1956. Only five of his type designs were ever completed and of those only four are available digitally, one in an incomplete version. (There are also digital renditions of Winchester, the Plimpton Initials and his uncial lettering from The Drums of Kalkapan.) Despite this uneven digital legacy, Dwiggins’ influence on contemporary type design has been enormous. His M-Formula has inspired a generation of young type designers. Dwiggins could ask for no better legacy.
TOP TO BOTTOM: 38. M-Formula. Drawing of lowercase
h for Exp. 223 dated 25 August 1938. 39. Marionettes carved by WAD. From left to right: Azrael, Djul, Lilith and Draco (all from Prelude to Eden 1956) 40. WAD with marionette of himself. Photograph by Robert Yarnall Richie.
We would like to thank Roberta Zonghi, Keeper, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library for permission to reproduce photographs of items in the 1974 and 2001 Dwiggins Collections. All photos, except those credited, were taken by Paul Shaw.
45 LINOTYPE M ATR IX
The body text of this article is set in New Caledonia™ at 9.5 point.
LINOTYPE MATRIX
46
The above spread from the Winter 1957 issue of the original Linotype Matrix, published by Linotype and Machinery Ltd. in the UK, is reprinted at 85 percent of its original size.
William Addison Dwiggins died on December 25, 1956. The English Linotype company paid tribute to his life and work many times in the pages of the Linotype Matrix. This obituary, which took up all of page two, sums up Dwiggins’ philosophy, and highlights his three commercially-released typefaces.
How
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Chaotic, informal or systematic? Imagine bread with jam and pickles. Or strawberries with ketchup. With all due respect to each individual’s sense of taste, most of us would find such a mixture of ingredients far from palatable. In other words, it’s all about finding the right mix – not only in the kitchen. But also in matters of love or when you’re getting dressed. And in typography as well, of course. Current technologies provide us with more opportunities then ever to produce high quality texts. On the one hand, you have perfectly formed typefaces as “building blocks”. On the other hand, there is a typographic “architecture” to satisfy even the
by Silvia Werfel
systems
make designing easier
most exacting demands. There’s an appropriate typeface for every purpose or content, and a myriad of ways to structure and differentiate them. The choices are overwhelming. Advertising opts for powerful contrasts. Brash and crazy typefaces are used to draw attention to the ad; the
accompanying explanatory text makes a more sedate impression. Annual reports, reference books and textbooks all require a more unobtrusive differentiation of fonts. A unified overall look is of primary importance. Names and terminology should have a characteristic typeface, but not
so as to force themselves into the center of attention. Headings and sub-headings may have a more striking appearance, but they must still be in harmony with the surrounding typefaces. Type systems that encompass a variety of styles make this kind of design work much easier.
From type family to Demos semibold
Initial concepts for comprehensive type systems surfaced as early as the 1930s, yet remained the exception. In the days of hot-metal typesetting, handbooks generally recommended creating typeface mixtures from a single type family, a family being understood as including all of a typeface’s weights, such as light, normal, semi-bold, and bold, and including all of the italic weights as well. A well-rounded type family also includes small caps, tabular and old-style figures. These days, the OpenType format allows for further expansion with ligatures, letter variations as well as cyrillic and greek character sets. And type families can grow even further as needed. From a historic perspective, Adrian Frutiger was the first to develop an actual building block system. He replaced the often-vague descriptions of stem thickness or tracking used for the 21 finelycoordinated typefaces in his Univers™ family with a logical system of numbers (which never gained wide acceptance).
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f
type system
Unlike in many human families, the members of a type family always harmonize well, since they have many similar characteristics. Boldface is used to set the accents, while italics and small caps help highlight certain portions of text, such as names or terminology. Greater contrast, however, is not possible within a family, which can sometimes become a little boring.
funk Ruu R RR uunnnnd dddfffufu nnkk
If a typical roman type family joins up with an appropriate sans serif group, or maybe even a slab serif form as well, or some other mix, it’s called a type tribe or, better yet, a type system, and it expands our typesetting capabilities. The Romulus typeface designed by Jan van Kimpen for Monotype and Enschedé in the 1930s was one of the first extended type designs. It included the Roman weights normal, sloped, semi-bold and condensed semi-bold, as well as a Greek alphabet and, oddly enough, a sans serif in four weights, although that last weight was never incorporated into the program. This system was augmented by his Cancelleresca Bastarda, a beautiful calligraphic italic typeface.
Combining two styles with Linotype typesetting machines was not unusual in the 1930s. As proof, we have the double matrix (two-letter font) of the narrow Rundfunk™ Roman for setting ads) and its complement, the semi-bold Rundfunk™ Grotesk (for display texts), both of which were, of necessity, weight compatible so they could be combined in one matrix. The book “Specimen Book. Linotype Faces”, published in the USA by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, also contains numerous examples of matrices containing a normal text and a display type, for instance Excelsior™ with Gothic No. 3 or Excelsior with Memphis™ Bold.
51 LIN OTYPE M ATRIX
Rund
llee ttiibb a mppa ccoom t uunnddffuunnkk GGrroottesk h R e d esk aare both weeiigght blle annd RRundfunk re both w aattiib aannnaaanndd Rundfunk GGrroottes p m yc ey he co mp ou m aan tha ulld b eskk aarre both weightt ccoom att tth RRRoooom mso e d h h o e t y e h b g c t i o o b t e t h w u a hat they coulld d be e cco o stth mb k R so be co om ine co m b uunnk s mbbi in ed n inne d iin on ne em o ma edd x attrriix no iin ne on matr em atriix x
In the 1970s, Gerard Unger took developments initiated in the era of hot-metal typesetting and began systematically adapting them to the electronic era.
Demos Semibold
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ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPabcdefghijklmnopq123456789 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPabcdefghijklmnopq123456789 Praxis bold
The true era of type systems, however, began in the 1980s. In 1985, Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow designed Lucida® Serif and Lucida Sans specifically designed for low-resolution printers and including a screen version. Independently of one another, Kurt Weidemann and Sumner Stone began working in 1984 on the idea of a comprehensive large-scale typeface family. Stone’s typeface includes Roman, Sans Serif and a style called Informal that is similar to a typewriter font. Weidemann’s Corporate type includes Roman (A), Sans Serif (S) and Egyptienne (E). In contrast to the ITC Stone™ font, they are all weight compatible. Since 1989, Corporate has become the inhouse typeface for the multinational Mercedes-Benz company and an integral part of its Corporate Identity. That same year, Otl Aicher designed Rotis® with its four styles – serif, sans serif and two mixed forms – which appear somewhat “heady” and provoke lively discussions about the font’s legibility. In the 1990s, the number of type systems comprising two or more styles continually grew. These systems include: Officina® by Erik Spiekermann and Just van Rossum (from 1990), consisting of the duo slab serif and sans serif; Thesis by Lucas de Groot (from 1994); Martin Majoor’s Scala (from 1991); Fred Smejers’ Quadraat (from 1992); ITC Legacy® by Ronald Arnholm (1992); Charlotte™ by Michael Gills (1992); and ITC Humana™, with Script as a third style, designed by Timothy Donaldson (from 1995).
stone S S E A R N I S F
An ABC of Taxes
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Officina Officina sanserif
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In 1975, Unger designed a strong roman type called Demos™ for the Hell Digiset typesetter. In 1977, he added the sans serif Praxis™ and, in 1985, the straight italic called Flora™, both of similar appearance.
Corporate Design:
a a a a
the Compatil “Type system” – convenient and one-stop The “building block” type system Compatil™ provides flexibility, a variety of appearances and levels of distinction as well as immense compatibility since the letterspacing is identical in all styles. The system was inspired by Professor Olaf Leu, who began examining the corporate design of both small and large companies with the goal of raising the overall level of corporate communication – in everything from the business card to the annual report. There was no type family that was capable of handling the nuances of all different purposes. The idea of Compatil was born. Its name says it all. The overall concept is to achieve the greatest possible variety within a common intrinsic character. The result is four styles, each with small caps, semi-bold and true italic weights, all with identical letterspacing within each weight, making them easy to interchange.
Compatil Exquisit
AaBb123
Modelled on the classic Venetian style, the typeface is precise yet welcoming.
Compatil Fact
AaBb123
A sans serif in the style of American Gothic that is concise and functional (ideal for balance sheets and statistics).
Compatil Letter
AaBb123 A slab serif that is both concise and stable.
Compatil Text
AaBb123
An old style face between transitionals and modern face, producing texts with a cool and factual elegance.
Each style is easy to read, even in long texts set in small point sizes. In addition, Compatil Fact and Letter are especially suitable for prominent texts, like headings or sub-headings. Style changes at short notice are also easy, as all styles are weight compatible. Despite a variety of layout structures, a completed annual report seems to come from a single mold – and matches all of the company’s printed materials as well.
This article is set in Linotype Diverda
originated from a Linotype Syntax Letter
sans serif, not the Linotype Syntax Lapidar
other way around Linotype Syntax
Diverda & Co. – the buddy system
diverda diverda diverda diverda
diverda diverda diverda diverda
diverda diverda
Other “buddy systems” include Timothy Donaldson’s striking ITC Humana™ (1995), which is well suited to a wide range of uses where clarity is important yet a certain friendliness is desired, and the classicist-style Charlotte™, designed by Michael Gills (1992). Charlotte is perfect for almost any text application and particularly effective in bringing across a formal atmosphere.
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Not every typeface must be expanded into a comprehensive building block system. But the coupling of two styles has become quite common. Diverda™, designed by Daniel Lanz of Switzerland, first appeared in the Linotype library in 2004. It consists of one slab serif and one sans serif style. Diverda Sans is a geometric family of typefaces that are all free from ornament. Swiss designer Daniel Lanz optimized Diverda Sans for maximum legibility. In contrast to many other modern typefaces, which try to squeeze the traditional rounder forms of the alphabet into square designs, and which often attempt to equalize the widths of the capital letters, Diverda Sans remains true to the proper proportions of the Roman alphabet. The x-heights of Diverda’s characters are low, and the differences between curved, square, and triangular elements are very clear. Like the more calligraphic typefaces of the past, Diverda’s strokes exhibit contrast that is inspired by movements of the pen on paper; down strokes are heavier than up strokes. Possible applications for the Diverda Sans include magazine design, as well as advertising for fashion, design, or architectural products. Because of its ten different individual styles or weights, Diverda Sans is also a good fit for Corporate Identity solutions.
The sans serif typeface Syntax™ was designed by Switzerland’s Hans Eduard Meier, based on the proportions of Renaissance type. Produced in 1968 as the last hotmetal typeface from the D. Stempel AG foundry, it has remained a classic through a variety of technical changes and adaptations. In collaboration with its creator, a gentle overhaul of the typeface was begun in 1995, named Linotype Syntax. Ultimately, after maintaining a manageable size for 20 years with semi-bold, bold and italic, the family acquired a few additions. In addition to Linotype Syntax Serif, we now have Linotype Syntax Letter (narrow type, e.g., for correspondence) and the display font Linotype Syntax Lapidar, each of which comes in numerous weights for a variety of purposes. The unusual part is that the variations originated from a sans serif type (usually it is the other way around) as well as the fact that the type family was successfully expanded to a system with four styles.
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Linotype Syntax Serif
Charlotte Humana
Syntax variations
The Syntax family – from lone warrior to team player
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A practical approach towards Corporate Type:
The Suntory case
L
inotype has been instrumental in supporting the Japanese corporate group Suntory in the
development of its new corporate identity. The expert advisory team for the selection and reworking process was headed by Linotype’s Type Director Akira Kobayashi together with British designer Matthew Carter. As of January 2005, Suntory now presents itself with an original new logo and a new corporate type, which has been adapted by Linotype to meet Suntory’s needs both in Latin and Japanese variants.
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The continuation of a vision The core business at Suntory, Japan’s leading beverage manufacturer, is primarily focused on soft drinks and spirituous beverages. For eighty years, the company has been distilling excellent whiskeys with international renown. The field of soft drinks became a similar success factor when the company acquired the Pepsi Cola bottling rights for Japan. In addition, Suntory is also involved in the floristry and gastronomy sectors. Among other achievements, Suntory developed the first rose to blossom with blue petals. Beyond business, the company founder Shinjiro Torii considerably shaped the development of Suntory with his vision of reinvesting company profits for the good of society. In connection with its core business in the beverages industry, for instance, Suntory places special emphasis on the protection of nature and environmental awareness. Among other efforts, Suntory has also opened an international art museum in Osaka as well as the Suntory Hall in Tokyo, a concert hall now known throughout the world for its unique acoustics, especially for classical music. To better suit its identity as a dynamic company with a unique commitment to society and the environment, Suntory decided to rework its public appearance. In the middle of 2003, the company began looking for international support. Masao Takaoka, a renowned type specialist, recommended Akira Kobayashi, Type Director at Linotype GmbH in Germany. After initial discussions with Suntory, Akira Kobayashi brought Matthew Carter on board as well. In his career, Matthew Carter has produced such highlights as Microsoft’s Verdana and Georgia. When he turned 60 in 1997, Matthew Carter was honored with the Type Directors Club medal for his lifelong contributions to typography.
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The Suntory redesign project For European or North American standards, Suntory chose an unusual approach to their redesign and search for a new logo. All company employees were asked to formulate in words what they found to be specifically “Suntoryesque”. The second step in their participation was the creation of 1,018 drafts of possible logos. This comprehensive and timeconsuming approach also reflected a core value of the Suntory corporate philosophy, expressed in their motto “festina lente” — which may be roughly translated as “act fast slowly”. This saying was penned by the Japanese writer Ken Kaiko and accurately characterizes the Suntory balance between acting fast in a business sense while also preserving traditional company values. When Akira Kobayashi and Matthew Carter arrived at Suntory in the beginning of December 2003, they were greeted with logo suggestions. Their challenge was to reduce this mass of ideas to a short selection of viable logo candidates. A series of criteria had to be taken into consideration in the selection. On the one hand, the logo had to be legible not only in large formats but also on small labels on bottles or cans. The logo was supposed to be immediately recognizable and innovative, yet not make concessions to short-lived trends or eccentricities, which might make the logo seem outdated in a few years. The logo also had to reflect the many facets of the company’s activities — from high grade spirits, soft drinks and mixed beverages, to restaurants and flowers. This collaboration with Suntory turned out to be a truly enriching experience for the expert advisory team. Matthew Carter found the work on the development of the logo was analogous with one of the company’s core activities — the distillation of raw materials. In narrowing down the many suggestions, the team came closer and closer to the company’s essence with every refining step which was a challenging and also rewarding process for the team.
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Distilling a new image The new logo also served as a important guide in the selection of the new corporate typefaces. Further criteria included the key values of “fluidity, nature and humanism”. Akira Kobayashi suggested a series of typefaces which could be adapted by Linotype specifically for Suntory. The six month’s refining of the font families came to a close in the fall of 2004 with the unveiling of Suntory Syntax and Suntory Sabon with a total of 12 Latin fonts as well as the Japanese families Suntory Gothic and Suntory Mincho. The overall redesign was officially introduced to the public in January 2005. Reflected in its original and refreshing appearance, the redesign marks a bridge between Suntory’s past successes and its progressive visions for the future.
“The SUNTORY Syntax typefaces appear fresh to a Japanese eye. They also are lighthearted and modern, and have a certain sense of humor. The words ‘Corporate Type’ may sound a bit too formal, but I believe that our corporate type has a friendly and tender tone of voice, which is truly appropriate to express ourselves.“ Kaoru Kasai
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Shortly after the start of the project, Akira Kobayashi and the design team were able to reduce their selection of logos to only six. After presenting their interim suggestions to the Suntory management, a further design process began which culminated with the presentation of the final logo in the middle of February 2004. Without drawing on existing font designs, the typography of the logo expresses a unique personality which is also timeless in its clarity and legibility.
A lasting impression Following is a brief description of the new typefaces as seen by Kaoru Kasai, Art Director and Vice President of the agency Sun-Ad, chief provider of Suntory’s TV and print advertising. “In the tradition of its founder, Suntory has always been interested in continuously liberalizing its corporate activities. The question arose as to which typefaces would be best suited to represent Suntory, a multi-layered company with interests in a wide variety of fields. At the same time, the corporate type should also convey a sense of youthfulness and sophistication. In the end, the selection was narrowed down to two fonts from Linotype Syntax™ and Sabon™ Next, which in a long process were adapted to work well together with Japanese characters, for instance, whenever multi-lingual texts are needed.”
“The design that has been developed for Suntory’s new logo seems to me to satisfy brilliantly these demands. The lettering is fresh and original — clearly not just borrowed from an existing typeface — and has plenty of personality. On the other hand, the practical requirement of legibility at small sizes on the labels of bottles and cans has given it a timeless clarity.” Matthew Carter LINOTYPE MATRIX
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Published by Mergenthaler Edition Linotype GmbH A partner of the Heidelberg Group Du-Pont-Strasse 1 61352 Bad Homburg Germany Phone +49 (0) 6172 484-418 Fax +49 (0) 6172 484-429 info@linotype.com www.linotype.com Linotype Matrix Volume 4, Issue 2 Š 2006 Linotype GmbH 15 Euro Designed with typefaces from Linotype. Printed in Germany on Heidelberg presses. Contributing Authors & Designers John D. Berry Nadine Chahine Otmar Hoefer Tony de Marco Richard O’Meara Dan Reynolds Claudio Rocha Paul Shaw Tiffany Wardle Sylvia Werfel All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. We reserve the rights of errors and changes. Linotype Matrix is a typographic journal published from time to time by Linotype. Distributed internationally by Linotype GmbH.
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Trademarks Linotype, Linotype Library, Auriol, Avenir, Balder, Bohemia, Caledonia, New Caledonia, Caravan, Choc, Colombine, Compatil, Conrad, Demos, Diverda, Eldorado, Electra, Linotype Ergo, Excelsior, Expectation, Fette Fraktur, Neue Haas Grotesk, Helvetica, Jiffy, Just Square, Kabel, Kuenstler Script, Linotext, Luthersche Fraktur, Memphis, Meridien, Metro, Metrolite, Metromedium, Metroblack, Mistral, Linotype Notec, Palatino, Peignot, Pirouette, Praxis, Linotype Puritas, Rundfunk, Sabon, Salto, Shelley, Staehle Graphia, Syntax, Univers, Why Square, Wiesbaden Swing, Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch, and Zapfino are Trademarks of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG, which may be registered in certain jurisdictions, exclusively licensed through Linotype GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG. Rotis is a registered trademark of Agfa Corporation. Futura is a registered trademark of Bauer Types SA. Lucida is a registered trademark of Bigelow & Holmes. Agincourt, Charlotte, ITC Humana and ITC Silvermoon are trademarks and ITC Avant Garde Gothic, ITC Flora, ITC Legacy, ITC Officina, and ITC Stone are registered trademarks of International Typeface Corporation. Cirkulus and Premier are trademarks of Esselte Letraset Limited. Scotch and Wittenberger Fraktur are trademarks and Gill Sans is a registered trademark of Monotype Typography.
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A TYPOGRAPHIC JOURNAL PUBLISHED FROM TIME TO TIME BY LINOTYPE
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The Life & Work of William Addison Dwiggins