A typeface suited to digitisation In a letter bearing the greeting ‘Lieber Freund Weidemann’ (Dear friend Weidemann) 8 Frutiger responded to a 1984 survey 9 by Eurographic Press.10 Among other points, the following excerpt was published: “When drawing or designing, it has become impossible for me to ignore or forget about the digitisation process. The grid of dividing a curve into single points has become second nature to me. The experience of pixellation has become part of my knowledge and therefore it is an inevitable aspect of the creative phase in the design process. Thus the creation of Breughel was the result of the idea of a digitisation-friendly typeface.” 11 And in the Guten erg- ahr uch , Heiderhoff quoted Frutiger: “Very wide-sweeping curves were deliberately avoided, since the memories of the difficulties with the digital rendering of typefaces such as Meridien were still fresh in my mind. Nonetheless however, for a medieval antiqua, I was not prepared to replace the swelling and shrinking of a lively downstroke with a hard and straight line. This exploration resulted in the idea of having a concave curve on only the one side, although the concavity itself was more pronounced. The right-handside contour of the stem is thus a perfectly straight line, while the left-hand-side contour simulates a strong curve that is achieved through a relatively large number of pixellated steps. In the scaled-down version at reading size, however, the eye perceives the curvature of the downstroke as an organic whole.” 12
only three cuts wasn’t worth much. Besides the marketing, the cost factor played an important role as well. It takes a lot of time and money before you get a roman, italic and bold right. Once these base shapes are done, further extension is easy.13 I drew the regular and bold cuts completely myself; the medium one was done by interpolation. We also used the technological possibilities for the cursive. It was a mathematically sloped version, which, however, I refined manually. I only redrew the letters a e f g /18/. With its one-sided serifs for the lowercase letters, the cursive is a bit special. It’s so consistent – and unique – that the left part of the r serif is also missing /20/. I didn’t ask: what is allowed and what isn’t? If I thought something was good, I did it. Breughel had oldstyle numerals and small capitals in the regular cut.14 Linotype did the initial work for this and I then corrected the shapes. I designed only the oldstyle numerals 0, 1 and 2 myself, which have totally different proportions /21/ – that might have been a bit lazy.15 Apart from the technological aspects, Breughel has a character of its own. I used to call it ‘rustic’, ‘gnarly’; I felt it had something in common with the pictures of the painter Breughel 16 – that’s why I gave it his name. After Méridien and Iridium on the one hand, and the grotesque typefaces on the other, I wanted to go in a different direction. Instead of elegant and refined shapes, I was looking for something more grounded, with some meat on its bones, as it were, and with robust serifs. For a long time I used to look down on Breughel a bit, by seeing it as a transitional solution based on technological restrictions. When I look back at it today, I discover its quality: it is sturdy yet well formed with a strong character.
/14/
/15/
/16/
/17/
The transitions from the bowl to the stem in b d p q are round – the b appears a little soft due to its round shape at the bottom left.
The curves of the lowercase h m n r u feature an angular transition into the stem, which strengthens the appearance of a handwritten shape.
It is a typographic challenge to add some dynamic to the strokes of the symmetrical X-shape.
In the regular font, the & of Breughel features a slightly pretentious, unlooped shape, which is not the case for the 8 and the italic version.
bdpq
hmnru X
&8&
/18/
/19/
/20/
/21/
Only a e f g were drawn from scratch for Breughel Italic – all other shapes were inclined automatically and then refined.
While in the regular font the x has double serifs and the y has single serifs, this is exactly the opposite in the italic font.
Humanist typeface suited for low resolution thanks both to strokes tapered on one side only, and flat, slanted serifs.
As opposed to, for example, Garamond (top), only 0 1 2 are different in the two figure sets of Breughel (bottom).
hr
0123456789 0123456789
aefg aefg xy xy /22/
/23/
/24/
Apollo (top) and Breughel (bottom) display an obvious relationship in shape and construction.
The letters of the italic versions of Opéra (top) and Breughel (bottom) feature very similar shapes and serifs.
Different to the earlier Opéra (top), the transition from the curves to the stem is angular in Breughel (bottom).
ac
acehs
0123456789 0123456789
abdgpq hmn BREUGHEL
37 BREU_17_EN def_BL.indd 291
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21.9.2008 21:05:11 Uhr