AMB Album

By Christian Schwartz

Why would anyone in his or her right mind start a type foundry now? Well, to begin with, it’s often said that it’s a good idea to start a business in a recession. However, the type marketplace has gotten very crowded—there are more foundries and distributors of type in all sizes right now than at any previous time. Even the pre-machine setting peak of typefounding in the 19th century had a smaller number of foundries by many orders of magnitude. Notwithstanding all of the small foundries, a handful of large distributors dominate the general market, leaving the rest of us scrambling to find ever-shrinking niches. Why not just climb onboard with one of the big players and leave the business side to people who know what they’re doing? Would that be too easy?

At left is the Bureau des Affaires Typographiques (BAT), a foundry formed in 2009 by Bruno Bernard, Stéphane Buellet, Jean-Baptiste Levée and Patrick Paleta. Their website launched in April 2010. At right is The Indian Type Foundry, a joint venture launched in 2009 by Peter Biľak of Typotheque with Rajesh Kejriwal and Satya Rajpurohit.

It’s reassuring to know that we’re not the only ones with this crazy idea right now. There are a number of small new foundries that have just launched, or are about to launch, such as the Bureau des Affaires Typographiques in Paris and The Indian Type Foundry in the Netherlands and India.

At top is the ‘g’ from Schelter & Giesecke Grotesk, as revived in FF Bau Bold. Below is the single-story ‘g’ found in many of the clones of this typeface, including Alte Haas Grotesk and Nebiolo’s Etruscan.

My own particular story begins in 2002, when I released FF Bau with FontFont and got an email out of the blue from Paul Barnes, a designer in London, asking a very specific question about the lowercase g. I can’t find the original email, but it was something to the effect of “Where did you find your ‘g’? I’ve only seen the single story version in the historical sources I’ve seen. Did you make it up?” This was the beginning of a nerdy friendship that turned into a working relationship when Mark Porter, then the creative director at The Guardian, threw us together as a team for their 2005 redesign. This worked out well enough that we continued working together on custom typefaces for various clients, including the Empire State Building restoration, The New York Times style magazine T, and Condé Nast Portfolio, a business magazine that sadly became a casualty of the recession in 2009.

Without really being conscious of it it, several years had gone by and Paul and I were doing most of our projects as a team. What’s more the exclusivity on the Guardian family was soon going to expire and we had some decisions to make. To be honest, I don’t think we have another family like this in us. Designing Guardian, with its 6 components (some still not yet released) covering serif, sans, optical sizes, and even an agate in 4 grades, was a massive amount of work. This could be the foundation of a new foundry—a family that, if we were lucky, would sell well enough to allow us to indulge ourselves in some of our more bizarre ideas.

There are many drawbacks to starting a foundry, though, so we were reluctant to simply go ahead without exploring other options first. I’m not a graphic designer, so the idea of branding and marketing a new library just sounded like a big headache. Dealing with credit cards, tech support, bookkeeping, and talking on the phone sounded like an infinitely bigger set of headaches. Considering the hassles, the potential upsides seemed meager at first. Paul is a great graphic designer, so he was far more positive about the task of coming up with a visual identity than I was. The financial upside seemed murky at best—sure, in theory we’d make 100% of every sale, but how much would we have to spend to get to that point, and to maintain the business? And while the intangibles are nice, like the satisfaction of building something from the ground up, do they really outweigh the headaches?

Publishing with one or more established foundries

I had released families with a number of foundries over the years, and so we looked at our options there, but none of them seemed like quite the right fit for Guardian. We ruled each one out for different reasons. Some were too large, making us fear that our work might be lost in the shuffle. Did we really want to be just 8 of 80, 180, or 1080 families? Others didn’t have enough emphasis on the publication market, or had a specific aesthetic that didn’t match Guardian or much of the other work we had done together. Paul and I have eclectic but very specific taste, and we worried that our distinct point of view would likely be lost in a larger library.

The specific terms of the End User License Agreement – boring but important – were another issue. For example, Paul and I have relatively liberal views on PDF embedding, compared to many other foundries. On this and many other issues (such as web licensing) we would of course be able to state our viewpoints, but the final decision would ultimately be with the foundry publishing the work.

The round alternates in Giorgio Sans are pretty strange, but Paul Barnes took things to the next level with his extensive set of swashes and ligatures in the upcoming Dala Floda, used without swashes in the recent redesign of Creative Review.

Character sets were yet another issue. By working through different standards with different foundries for several years, seeing where my retail fonts were being licensed, and producing custom typefaces for various types of clients, I felt like I had been through an almost Goldilocks-like process of elimination: one foundry’s character set was too big, another foundry’s character set was too small, and I felt comfortable coming up with a character set that would be just right for us, with language coverage for most of Europe, (where the vast majority of our licenses sold before we launched our site) plus various bits and pieces that I think are important for good typography and convenience for the user. I am a firm believer in uppercase punctuation, for example. Being in control of our own character sets would also allow us to explore swashes and alternates in ways that an outside foundry publishing our work might not have the patience for.

Guardian Sans Headline is one example of a family featuring uppercase punctuation that we have published. Characters such as ¿, « and » are raised in all-caps text, in order to look more visually balanced. The Extra Condensed shown here was commissioned by the Vocento newspaper group in Spain and drawn by Berton Hasebe.

Finally, we realized that if we were publishing all of our work elsewhere, our working partnership would end up being a closed system. We wouldn’t have the opportunity to publish typefaces by other designers, like Lyon by Kai Bernau, for example. While it was hard to imagine a long-term future of publishing everything through a single outside foundry, continuing to publish with a variety of foundries didn’t seem ideal either. Not only would this break up our body of work, but it would also mean juggling wildly varying production workflows, character sets, release schedules and contract terms, not to mention the backlog of typefaces in each foundry’s pipeline each time we wanted to release something new.

A foundry in name only

Starting a foundry in name only, licensing through one or more distributors, seemed like an attractive option, and appears to be finding popularity with a growing number of type designers. After all, not everybody is the type world equivalent of Radiohead, able to thrive outside the establishment while making and marketing their work on their own terms. Radiohead self-released their 2007 album In Rainbows through their own website and allowed people to pay whatever they wanted for it. Although the band declared this experiment a success, sales figures were never released and the album did later end up in record stores and on iTunes, so maybe In Rainbows wasn’t necessarily the revolution it was made out to be?

If we signed with a distributor, we would be able to have our own website for marketing and showing our work, and send people to the distributor when they actually wanted to buy a license. We would also be able to come up with our own EULA, as well as standards for character sets, technical specs, and our own release schedule. In addition to our own marketing efforts, we would benefit from the distributors’ expertise with things like advertising and marketing through social media. As we thought more about it, though, we realized that we would just be one of many labels, all jockeying for position, promotion, and attention. Ultimately we weren’t convinced that there would be enough overlap between our priorities and a distributor’s priorities, and if we did decide at some point to sell licenses directly, we were worried that we would end up competing head to head for the same customers. If we already have a good idea of who our potential audience is and how to reach them, why not spend the percentage of each sale that a distributor would take on our own infrastructure and printed specimens instead? This left us convinced that a more formal partnership, and starting a foundry of our own, was the best way forward. The first order of business was a name.

Becoming Commercial

The Barnes & Schwartz Type Foundry was the most logical choice for a name, but seemed somehow… derivative; and It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. And what would it mean when we started releasing work by outside designers? Having already committed to releasing Lyon, because it was too great to pass up, we hated to think that people would assume that, since our names were “on the front door”, so to speak, we had designed the typeface and Kai Bernau wouldn’t end up getting proper credit for the design.

After spending a full week brainstorming, the name Commercial Type came to one of us. It seemed like a perfect fit for what we were trying to do: It’s a little bit Warhol, a little bit Factory Records. We aren’t pretending that we’re artists, and it makes us seem very upfront – almost cheekily so – about the fact that we are making products for sale. Considering the limited commercial prospects of some of our current and upcoming releases, the name takes on a certain amount of of irony.

The Commercial Type logo was designed by Paul Barnes, based on Dala Floda.

It’s much easier to be an “armchair quarterback,” second-guessing everyone else’s seemingly questionable decisions regarding everything from marketing to OpenType features, than it is to deal with the actual reality of budgets, technology, and timelines. Theorizing about how and why things work is all well and good, but putting our ideas into practice is of course the real test, and it’s been a little bit scary, especially where the web is concerned. Paul and I both have backgrounds in print design, specifically publication design, so we’ve had a hard time wrapping our minds around the totally different paradigms demanded by web design. We worked with Andy Pressman and Renda Morton at Rumors, a small design studio in New York, and they did an amazing job of focusing our thoughts so they could be turned into something concrete. While Paul and I can write, it’s not necessarily our biggest strength, so our main concept for the site has been showing rather than telling, devoting as much of the screen real estate as possible to showing the type. And a bigger screen means showing even more type.

All of the specimen images extend past the right edge of the browser window… unless you like to browse at full width on a 30” monitor, I suppose.

Gauging how long it would take to set everything up proved a lot more difficult than we anticipated. We finally launched at the beginning of January this year, but we had originally planned to launch in September 2008. We had no idea that it would take more than 3 or 4 months to define our brand, get the legal stuff all taken care of, design and build a website, finish some fonts, make specimens, and be approved by an underwriter for credit card processing. Who could have predicted that this would take so long, or that there would be so much to learn!? Now that the site is up and running, we have a whole new set of challenges, like putting together advertising budgets and learning just how much marketing strategies have changed since I last worked at a type foundry. The day to day can be tedious at times, but it is never boring!

So to recap, two years ago, Paul and I somewhat reluctantly decided to start a foundry after weighing all of our options, but gained momentum and enthusiasm throughout the process, and even suddenly find ourselves with an office and staff: a type designer, Berton Hasebe, who graduated from the Type & Media program at the KABK in 2008, and in the coming weeks a new administrator and our first ever summer intern will be starting work.

In the end, we wanted control over the context our work is presented in, and felt that this was worth the headaches of tech support, bookkeeping and payroll. We would like to think we have an interesting point of view, and want our foundry to be an extension of this, so we have been drawing on many of our interests and influences outside the sphere of type design, and even outside graphic design, for the design and text of our site and specimens.

The homepage was the most difficult component of the site to design, and we went in circles for over a year before Andy, Renda, and graphic designer Abi Huynh, who also designed our PDF specimens, came up with a simple and elegant way to introduce some motion and color to the site by constantly transitioning through a rotating set of messages.

What I’ve learned

This article is adapted from a talk I gave at the ATypI conference in Mexico City in October 2009. There were a number of recent graduates from type design master’s programs in attendance, some of whom had expressed interest in starting foundries of their own. While I certainly didn’t want to stand up on stage and give advice that may or may not apply to each individual situation, I concluded by talking about some of the circumstances in my career, some of which were conscious decisions and some of which were dumb luck, that I felt had prepared me for starting Commercial Type:

1. I’m really happy I learned the ropes of production and professional practice before starting Commercial Type, both through working at Font Bureau for two years in the early ’00s and through publishing families with a number of other foundries.

2. I’m glad I partnered up with someone with a different but complementary background, rather than another full-time type designer. Paul draws type beautifully, but his background in publication design is probably more important, because it has pointed us toward the vast majority of our good (or at least interesting) ideas. I think this makes our company more than the sum of its parts.

3. I’m happy that I’ve been able to balance retail and custom projects. There’s no better promotion for yourself as a custom type designer than releasing typefaces that people like, and commissions are an excellent source of retail fonts. After all, the client has already proven that there is some demand. Very different sets of skills are used when designing a typeface for a single specific use, versus designing one intended for general use. For example, Guardian Egyptian Text was designed to be used at 8pt on 9.5pt leading on the Guardian’s presses, mainly in columns that are 54mm wide, and was thoroughly tested with their ink, paper and pressmen; whereas Graphik was designed to be used for text or display at a wide range of sizes in newspapers, magazines, and corporate design. I’m glad I get to do some of each, because they inform one another.

4. I’m really happy that Paul and I waited to start a foundry until we had more than one or two families to release. The ups and downs of each individual family’s sales matter less because they balance one another out. Before we launched the website, enquiries tended to come in groups: one week 75% of the email that came in was about Lyon. The week before it had all been about Graphik, and the week after it was all about Publico. This has continued with direct sales through our web site. We are unable to explain or predict it. It’s very mysterious.

5. I’m glad I didn’t have any illusions that starting a foundry would mean I get to spend more time drawing. The business side of things eats up a lot of time, and luckily I don’t hate it. Which leads me to my final point:

Our PDF specimen for the Austin family, designed by Abi Huynh.

6. I’m glad I had time to learn my limits and learn how to delegate. Abi Huynh works with Paul on the graphic design, because I’m a mediocre graphic designer at best. Berton very handily takes care of much of the custom work these days. Rumors did a great job designing the website and found a brilliant programmer to build it. We have a really good accountant and a really good lawyer. This means that, although I draw less than I used to, I still get to draw, because I’ve made it a priority.   

You can follow @CommercialType on Twitter.

Visit the Font Game web site.

Why did I start a type foundry?

Typography

By Paul Dijstelberge

MOVABLE TYPE: perhaps nowadays few will know the exact meaning of these two words, but until the middle of the twentieth century a letter was a small piece of lead, and to use it for printing you literally had to move it around, by hand. In the 20th century big machines like the Monotype, equipped with keyboard, were used for typesetting; but until 1900 all type was set by typesetters, by hand. This simple object: a piece of lead with a letter on top, formed the central part of Gutenberg’s invention, back in the middle of the 15th century.

To cast letters Gutenberg and all of the printers and type foundries that followed him used matrices. To make matrices you first had to cut punches, and the punch was the instrument where art and business met. The punches were made of steel — a little softer than today’s steel — that was cut with a sharp steel knife or an engraving tool. But still, to cut a letter on top of a very small piece of steel, and to do so with such precision and consistency required extraordinary skill. Remember the magnifying glass had not yet been invented and even eye glasses were very rare. To create the complete sets of more than a hundred different punches with letters, abbreviations, and other typographical signs that were all of the same size, all of the same design, and all equally pleasing to the eye when viewed en masse — it seems hardly conceivable that people were able to do just that. But they did it, and with results that we use up to this very day. The type designs we call roman are the grandchildren of one of the most beautiful romans ever created — a type created in about 1470 by the Frenchman Nicolaus Jenson, who was then working in Venice.

Roman, type 1, used by Jenson in De Proprietate Sermonis. Venice, 1476.

In the 15th century each printer made (or at least owned) his own type designs. At the end of the century specialist punchcutters started to trade in matrices and later also in type. Type design soon became the job of specialists, and if you look at 15th and early 16th century type you can easily see its development from modest albeit interesting beginnings to its becoming a great art. Many of the great type designs were created before 1550. These designs imitated the most elegant writing of their days, following the letters that were written by great humanists for kings. Scholars like Poggio imitated carolingian handwriting, mistakenly attributing these manuscript to antiquity, when in fact they were products of the ninth century.

Carolingian minuscule, 9th century.

Initials and ornaments

Until the 18th century and for brief periods in the 19th and early 20th century, books were often decorated with initials and ornaments. The earliest printed books were decorated by hand, like their written ancestors; but soon printers began to use little woodcuts that could be used year after year in thousands of copies.

Initials by the famous 16th century French printer Estienne, and his two Basle colleagues Froben & Oporinus.

These initials form a neglected form of art — an undercurrent of popular culture that has been the subject of very little scholarly research, most of it by book historians, practically none by art historians. The website we are creating is a first effort to change this. Many of these initials and ornaments are abstract, but most are figurative: little pictures that furnish unexpected insights into the thinking of our ancestors. They illustrate every human activity, and it is fun to trace the different pictorial traditions of countries and cities and all the changes they went through during those centuries. You will find musical instruments, beautiful women, defecating little angels, knights, and monsters of every kind. A town like Basle was especially rich in beautiful historiated initials — this was the influence of the famous German painter and engraver Hans Holbein (1497–1543) who designed many of them.

Book historians often use these little pieces of wood to identify printers — some of the most famous and subversive books of all ages were printed without the name of the publisher, and the research of this kind of book is a quest without end. But the sheer delight of looking at these beautiful little pieces of art is perhaps the most rewarding aspect.

Grand Gargantua

And so a grand project begins: with John (the editor of this blog), we are building a website to bring these rare treasures to everyone. Grand Gargantua — a history of typography will chart the course of typography from the incunabula. For some time, I have been photographing (in high resolution) books of the Amsterdam Special Collections, and uploading them to Flickr. Grand Gargantua will take this one step further, by organising and tagging these very high-resolution images, in addition to providing some commentary and historical perspective.

Our grand plan for Grand Gargantua is to gather some 50,000 samples in the next five or six years. We hope that you will follow us in our adventures. When we started out we had a small group of specialist book historians in mind as our audience, certainly not designers. But we soon discovered that many designers were interested in our work. For them we are creating an extra collection of examples of early book design. Here we will display pictures of pages and books from the 15th-19th century, sometimes accompanied by commentary. We are touched by this interest in the historical roots of a tradition that today is as alive and vigorous as it was all those centuries ago.

This work is made possible by the Amsterdam Special Collections who generously permit access to the material, The A D & L foundation and the Huizinga Institute who generously supplied the camera, a Canon EOS 5D Mark II.

Paul Dijstelberge (1956) was a restaurant cook for 14 years and an expert bibliographer for 17 years. He completed his PhD on the use of initials and ornaments in the 17th century, and currently works as an Associate Professor to Professor Dr Lisa Kuitert (History of the Book) at the University of Amsterdam; and as a curator at the Special Collections. He publishes in the field of the history of the book and also writes short stories that have been published in several literary magazines. He lives in Leiden with his wife and two daughters.

Photo credit: Bodoni punches (in the header) courtesy of Friends of the Palatina Library and the Bodoni Museum. Flickr.

A big thank you to Kari Pätilä, Grand Gargantua’s web developer.

History of the Book on Flickr.

Visit the Font Game web site.

Creating Grand Gargantua

Typography

We use way too many fonts

Though I have the utmost respect for Massimo Vignelli, and am a fan of his work, his we use too many typefaces is just plain wrong. It’s by no means the first time Vignelli has voiced these views. If you have no idea what I’m writing about, then watch this video:

For any designer to claim that a half-dozen or a dozen typefaces is enough — well that’s their prerogative. However, it’s one thing to say ‘twelve typefaces is enough for me’, but to claim ‘twelve typefaces is enough’, period; extrapolating a generalisation from a personal imposition is rarely, if ever helpful.

Taking his statement at face value, imagine a Vignellian world in which only twelve typefaces exist. Ignore for now that such an arbitrary limit would mean that a number of writing systems would be left without typefaces. Sorry, Chinese, sorry Arabic, but there aren’t enough to go round; pen and paper for you, I’m afraid. The global typographic landscape would look pretty bleak indeed. So, in deference to Mr Vignelii, let’s suppose that he is talking about twelve latin alphabet typefaces. Enough?

Let’s answer that below. For now, let us pose another related question. Why, instead of a handful of typefaces, do thousands upon thousands exist? True, a large number of them could be shredded tomorrow, and we’d probably be none the worse for their deletion. In fact, we might be better off as a consequence. Again, hold that thought, and join me in the arbitrarily selected sixteenth century. Looking around, we see that we already have more than our quota of a dozen typefaces at our disposal; in fact, there are hundreds to choose from. German-speaking countries, and a swathe of Northern Europe have numerous blackletter types, while the remainder load their setting sticks with roman types first developed by pioneers like the brothers da Spira, and honed by Jenson. We even have numerous italic styles, ornaments, some wood type, broader- and narrower-set designs, varying x-heights, and different lengths of extenders. Surely, then, we have enough? Despite all these typefaces, Caslon, Baskerville, Bodoni (inventions of the 18th century), the slab serifs (e.g. the Clarendons), the grotesques (e.g. Akzidenz Grotesk), the geometric sans (e.g. Futura and Gotham), the neo-grotesques (e.g. Helvetica), the humanist sans of Martin Majoor (e.g. Scala Sans), Adrian Frutiger’s eponymous Frutiger, Erik Spiekermann’s Meta, and a comprehensive, unified super-familiy like Lucas de Groot’s Thesis — well, none of these has yet to make an appearance. No doubt there were those in the 16th century who shared Vignellis views. Every age is populated by those who think we’ve reached the apogee of progress.

Let’s return to the why question: why are there so many typefaces? For that matter, why are there so many designs of chair? Surely a dozen designs of chair would suffice. And, while we’re at it, let’s make do with a dozen designs of houses, tables, books, bridges, teacups, salt-shakers … everything. Why, then, do we see such profligacy in design? Because that’s what we do, that’s who we are. Our restless minds are always striving for ‘better’, for more functional, more comfortable, stronger, more durable, more economical, more ornate, simpler, more complex, smaller, bigger, greener, healthier, clearer, more legible; even, more aesthetically pleasing. That’s what we do. That same spirit, that inherent desire for progress, that indefatigable obsession with creation, that’s what we do.

During the Industrial Revolution (which Vignelli mentions), there was explosive growth in the number of typefaces available, a gargantuan proliferation of new designs. Advertisers demanded new designs, so that their work could be differentiated from the competition; and type designers too created new, non-commissioned type designs; thus demand drove supply, and supply fed and elicited demand. This era gave birth to the grandparents of Vignelli’s beloved Helvetica, a typeface that would never have existed but for our desire to do better, to progress, to create.

Thousands of typefaces exist simply because they are demanded and supplied, supplied and consumed. Moreover, technological progress, the desire for differentiation, the desire for more legible types, for types appropriate for new printing techniques, for the screen, for printing on new substrates — these challenges, these changing needs demand new solutions. Vignelli is an exceptional designer, and graphic design is arguably better off for its association with him. He has succeeded despite his limited, self-imposed type palette, but the world is bigger and more beautiful than Vignelli and his twelve apostles.

Related:
Cyrus Highsmith’s Do we need more fonts?
Michael Bierut’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface.
Video courtesy of bigthink.com

Typography

Dan Reynolds’ review of Bibliothèque Typographique’s
first book, José Mendoza y Almeida

Dan Reynolds’ review of Bibliothèque Typographique’s
first book, José Mendoza y Almeida

Who is Jose Mendoza?

José Mendoza y Almeida was perhaps the most internationally active 20th century French type designer. While he also produced work for local distributors, his most significant faces were published by companies abroad, including the Amsterdam Typefoundry, Monotype, and ITC. Born in 1926, Mendoza’s career has been primarily devoted to activities in the fields of graphic design, illustration, and calligraphy. During his professional career, he has never worked as a full-time type designer, although he was a typographic educator from 1985–1990. His Pascal, Photina, and ITC Mendoza Roman typefaces are currently on the market, and each has played its own significant role in the history of 20th century type.

He’s the subject of a new book

The Paris-based Blibliothèque Typographique announced José Mendoza y Almeida in February. This is the first full-volume text in any language dedicated to Mendoza. The exquisite 169-page book offers a detailed glimpse into his type design work. Its bilingual text will hopefully ensure more recognition for Mendoza both at home and internationally.

Drawing for Photina

I must admit that before reading this book, I was not very familiar with Mendoza or his typefaces. On the occasions where I had come across his name, it was most often in connection with Photina. With so many typefaces to juggle in your mind, it is often only too easy to categorize them into little cupboards; you make associations in your head based on things you hear people say. Whenever I heard “Photina,” the bell that went off for me was, “the first good phototype family!” Yet this never drove me to the specimen books to examine Photina’s forms for myself. After reading this book, I can safely say how great a pity that was. Conceived as a kind of serif counterpart to Univers – in terms of family size and structure, not design – only eight weights of Photina were ever actually released. But Photina’s forms are ground-breakingly interesting, and this book displays them well. What would the family have looked like if all of the intended weights had been finished? How large an effect on the course of type design’s development would an enlarged Photina have had on the 1970s? Or on the 1980s? Pondering this book’s essay on Photina raises many “what if?” questions, a recurring theme throughout the text.

Why you should care

The more experience that I gain as a type designer, the more I realize how little I know or understand regarding the depths of French typeface history. Glancing at the surface of things, it would seem that there has been an unbroken lineage of excellence handed down from the past half-millennium that runs from Garamond, Granjon, and Jannon through to the Romain du Roi concept, the work of the Fourniers and Didots, across to the 20th and 21st centuries. The past 100 years alone have brought us the work of Georges Peignot, A.M. Cassandre, Marcel Jacno, François Ganeau, Roger Excoffon, Ladislas Mandel, Thierry Puyfoulhoux, Franck Jalleau, and Jean François Porchez. And this is before one mentions that the bulk of Adrian Frutiger’s career was spent working in France. There is also the writing of Maximilien Vox to consider. Several of my favorite designers from my own generation are French, including Jean-Baptiste Levée, Mathieu Réguer, and Jonathan Perez.

The problem with creating lists like the one above is that a tremendous amount is left out. History is not made up of the signposts along a trail, but rather by the footprints along the path. Rattling off a list of names offers no real understanding of why certain forms look the way they do, what drove the artisans who made them, and what all of this has to offer us in our current practice.

About the book

The strength of this book is the in-depth presentation of Mendoza’s three most-significant typefaces. Many photographs of Mendoza’s original sketches and production drawings are included in the book, artefacts that are disappearing from type design practice. Reading the book, I asked myself, how will the work of my own type-designer generation be documented by future historians? We do not leave behind the same breadcrumbs as our recent forebears.

Called the “godfather” of French type design by the authors, perhaps a more apt description for Mendoza might be “unsung hero.” His contribution to the canon of French design is significant, and may become more established with this book. Since Mendoza is not well-known to recent generations of designers—especially outside of France—more biographical information about him would have been interesting. In many ways, José Mendoza y Almeida reminds me of Fred Smeijers’ Type now. Both books have similar dimensions. The focus of José Mendoza y Almeida is narrower; it includes five essays encapsulating the process behind specific typefaces, or styles of typefaces, designed by Mendoza. The essays include:

1. Pascal (Martin Majoor)
2. Photina (Sébastien Morlighem)
3. Five calligraphic typefaces (Martin Majoor)
4. The invention of the “mécalde” (Sébastien Morlighem)
5. ITC Mendoza Roman (Sébastien Morlighem)

Above: Drawings for Mendoza Script

Below: Drawings for Père Castor

Unlike Type now, this book presents a more objective display of a designer’s body of work. The text was not prepared by the designer himself, so information is presented in a third person voice. The small, partially full-color “portfolio” section in the back of the book is less good. It feels removed from the main narrative of the book. Again, I tie mental parallels with Type now, whose end, color “portfolio” section is both more thought out, and more whimsical. José Mendoza y Almeida’s portfolio section includes images that seem to bear no relation to the main text of book. Were these images included just because they are pretty? Additionally, we see some glimpses of yearly “holiday cards” designed by Mendoza. Some other similar cards are presented on the inside flap of the back cover. Are these cards something that Mendoza designed and distributed every year? I did not find much mention of these in the text.

The French/English split of the text works well most of the time, with French texts displayed verso, English texts, recto. In captions the text is always presented in French first, followed by English. I quickly adapted to this, only being disrupted after flipping through extended spreads filled mostly with high-quality, well-reproduced images. They are so captivating that it was difficult for me to reorient my mind and my eye to reading regular text.

The book is set in Lyon Text, a Commercial Type face from Kai Bernau. Lyon Text imbibes from the fountain of Robert Granjon’s work. This gives it a similar air to Mendoza’s oeuvre. José Mendoza y Almeida explains that Mendoza’s work is deeply influenced by French humanist type from the Renaissance onward; and Granjon was one of this strand’s key players. Perhaps one could imagine the book set in a Mendoza face—particularly ITC Mendoza Roman; or an authorized Brennus revival might have been appropriate. In terms of “complete” typeface families, only Mendoza’s most recent release would likely fall into this category: ITC Mendoza Roman. Released in 1991, the family includes three weights, each with a companion italic. However, Pauline Nuñez’s (the book’s designer) decision to set the text in a more neutral typeface—similar in flavor but still different—helps set the images apart from the other pages. When an image appears, you are certain that it is featuring work by Mendoza himself.

Jan Middendorp’s introduction ends with a message to designers that is particularly apt for our time. I am thankful that he included it, and think that it should be repeated here. Perhaps a similar text should be included in more design books:

“With today’s technology, making quick ‘revivals’, capitalizing on the ideas that lend these alphabets their vibrant originality, may seem a piece of cake. But if anyone decides to ‘do something’ with these alphabets, he or she should proceed with caution and respect. Their designer is still alive and well, and he may have ideas about what to do it them – and what not.”

Mendoz’s legacy

Since Mendoza’s engagement with type design has been part-time, taking place over several decades, it seems that just as many of his concepts—if not more than half—were either never published, or have been withdrawn from the market owing to the closure of type manufacturers. Two instances covered are particularly representative: Pascal’s unreleased Italic, and the discontinued Brennus family. Pascal was Mendoza’s first typeface, published by the Amsterdam Typefoundry in 1962. Before the phototype era, this typeface was only distributed in a single weight. From 1962–1967, Mendoza worked with the Amsterdam Typefoundry to develop a Pascal italic, though it never came to market.

Drawings for Pascal Italic

Would it have been published, Pascal Italic may have been the world’s first humanist sans serif italic. Perhaps this does not sound so revolutionary now, as the average graphic designer most-likely has several of these in his font folder; but in 1967, none were available. Optima’s roman (similar to Pascal) was only sold with obliques, a trend that was the rule for grotesk-style sans serifs of the time.

Brennus was a two weight design for Socotep. The family was on the market during the 1980s, but is no longer in active distribution. This design is an almost monolinear Egyptienne, with oldstyle traces. For me, Brennus is the centerpiece of a chapter on “mécaldes,” which – according to Sébastien Morlighem – represent a genre invented by Mendoza. “Mécaldes” are a combination of “mécanes” and “garaldes,” two categories of type from Vox’s classification system. The typical English-language terms are slab serif and oldstyle. After reading this book, I was really left wanting to know more about Brennus, a Mendoza typeface no longer in distribution. This is not because I felt the text on Brennus lacking, or because I feel that Brennus offers some secret key to unlocking further type design understanding. I just really like the typeface, and would like to see more of it.

Monotype Recorder, 1979

A single-page Monotype advertisement from 1979 illustrates Mendoza in the company of Morison, Gill, and Van Krimpen. The ad is in English, and I wonder which four designers a French company might have chosen as their titans of 20th century type design. Would Mendoza have made the French list? On the other hand, that the advertisement was a Monotype one is revealing. At the time, type designers tended to be bound to certain foundries, or at least partner with one at a time. No foundry could yet claim to have all of a century’s famous European designers under one roof. This is one of many differences in 21st century font marketing. The period post-1979 has seen the rise of mega companies, which absorbed numerous smaller foundries from a number of countries. In the last two decades, we have also seen the rise of font distributors that resell the products of multiple companies and individual designers alike.

Drawing for Fidelio

Like Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger, or Hermann Zapf, Mendoza’s career spanned the changes of technology that revolutionized—and then re-revolutionized—type design. Pascal was initially released in metal for hand-setting. Most of Mendoza’s subsequent typefaces were developed for phototypesetting systems, although a few of them were converted by their respective foundries into digital format. Fidelio was first released by Mecanorma as dry transfer lettering, and ITC Mendoza Roman is a fully-digital typeface family. The history of 20th century type design shows us some designers who created fantastic romans, but may have failed with their companion Italics. Mendoza is not one of these. Not only are Photina’s italics—as well those from the ITC Mendoza Roman family—excellent, lively, legible, and interesting, but Mendoza’s mécalde italics seen in the Brennus family and elsewhere are just as powerful as their roman counterparts.

José Mendoza y Almeida is a real page-turner. I went from cover to cover in two afternoons. Not only was the book a fun read, but it made me think. Blibliothèque Typographique has issued a great production. The book contains a few minor flaws, but as an object it feels lovely in the hand. It also makes for very easy reading. The texture of the paper is optimal, the type clear, the layout engaging, and the illustrations rich. I highly recommend this book to anyone in the field.   

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Reynolds was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Before moving to Europe, he received a BFA in graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Reynolds studied at the HfG Offenbach for a few years before receiving an MA in typeface design from the University of Reading (U.K.). Today, he lives in Berlin, Germany, where he works for Linotype GmbH and teaches typeface design at the Hochschule Darmstadt. His most recent typeface, Malabar, received a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Type Directors Club, a silver medal at the ED-Awards 2009, and a gold medal from the 2010 Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany competition. Dan blogs from time to time at www.typeoff.de.

ORDERING INFORMATION
José Mendoza y Almeida
By Martin Majoor and Sébastien Morlighem. With an introduction by Jan Middendorp, who also translated the French texts into English.
Paris: Blibliothèque Typographique, Ypsilon Éditeur (2010).
French/English. 169 pages.

FURTHER READING
Savoie, Alice, French type foundries in the twentieth century.
Smeijers, Fred, Type now: a manifesto, plus works so far. London: Hyphen Press (2003).

Typography

Dan Reynolds’ review of Bibliothèque Typographique’s
first book, José Mendoza y Almeida

Dan Reynolds’ review of Bibliothèque Typographique’s
first book, José Mendoza y Almeida

Who is Jose Mendoza?

José Mendoza y Almeida was perhaps the most internationally active 20th century French type designer. While he also produced work for local distributors, his most significant faces were published by companies abroad, including the Amsterdam Typefoundry, Monotype, and ITC. Born in 1926, Mendoza’s career has been primarily devoted to activities in the fields of graphic design, illustration, and calligraphy. During his professional career, he has never worked as a full-time type designer, although he was a typographic educator from 1985–1990. His Pascal, Photina, and ITC Mendoza Roman typefaces are currently on the market, and each has played its own significant role in the history of 20th century type.

He’s the subject of a new book

The Paris-based Blibliothèque Typographique announced José Mendoza y Almeida in February. This is the first full-volume text in any language dedicated to Mendoza. The exquisite 169-page book offers a detailed glimpse into his type design work. Its bilingual text will hopefully ensure more recognition for Mendoza both at home and internationally.

Drawing for Photina

I must admit that before reading this book, I was not very familiar with Mendoza or his typefaces. On the occasions where I had come across his name, it was most often in connection with Photina. With so many typefaces to juggle in your mind, it is often only too easy to categorize them into little cupboards; you make associations in your head based on things you hear people say. Whenever I heard “Photina,” the bell that went off for me was, “the first good phototype family!” Yet this never drove me to the specimen books to examine Photina’s forms for myself. After reading this book, I can safely say how great a pity that was. Conceived as a kind of serif counterpart to Univers – in terms of family size and structure, not design – only eight weights of Photina were ever actually released. But Photina’s forms are ground-breakingly interesting, and this book displays them well. What would the family have looked like if all of the intended weights had been finished? How large an effect on the course of type design’s development would an enlarged Photina have had on the 1970s? Or on the 1980s? Pondering this book’s essay on Photina raises many “what if?” questions, a recurring theme throughout the text.

Why you should care

The more experience that I gain as a type designer, the more I realize how little I know or understand regarding the depths of French typeface history. Glancing at the surface of things, it would seem that there has been an unbroken lineage of excellence handed down from the past half-millennium that runs from Garamond, Granjon, and Jannon through to the Romain du Roi concept, the work of the Fourniers and Didots, across to the 20th and 21st centuries. The past 100 years alone have brought us the work of Georges Peignot, A.M. Cassandre, Marcel Jacno, François Ganeau, Roger Excoffon, Ladislas Mandel, Thierry Puyfoulhoux, Franck Jalleau, and Jean François Porchez. And this is before one mentions that the bulk of Adrian Frutiger’s career was spent working in France. There is also the writing of Maximilien Vox to consider. Several of my favorite designers from my own generation are French, including Jean-Baptiste Levée, Mathieu Réguer, and Jonathan Perez.

The problem with creating lists like the one above is that a tremendous amount is left out. History is not made up of the signposts along a trail, but rather by the footprints along the path. Rattling off a list of names offers no real understanding of why certain forms look the way they do, what drove the artisans who made them, and what all of this has to offer us in our current practice.

About the book

The strength of this book is the in-depth presentation of Mendoza’s three most-significant typefaces. Many photographs of Mendoza’s original sketches and production drawings are included in the book, artefacts that are disappearing from type design practice. Reading the book, I asked myself, how will the work of my own type-designer generation be documented by future historians? We do not leave behind the same breadcrumbs as our recent forebears.

Called the “godfather” of French type design by the authors, perhaps a more apt description for Mendoza might be “unsung hero.” His contribution to the canon of French design is significant, and may become more established with this book. Since Mendoza is not well-known to recent generations of designers—especially outside of France—more biographical information about him would have been interesting. In many ways, José Mendoza y Almeida reminds me of Fred Smeijers’ Type now. Both books have similar dimensions. The focus of José Mendoza y Almeida is narrower; it includes five essays encapsulating the process behind specific typefaces, or styles of typefaces, designed by Mendoza. The essays include:

1. Pascal (Martin Majoor)
2. Photina (Sébastien Morlighem)
3. Five calligraphic typefaces (Martin Majoor)
4. The invention of the “mécalde” (Sébastien Morlighem)
5. ITC Mendoza Roman (Sébastien Morlighem)

Above: Drawings for Mendoza Script

Below: Drawings for Père Castor

Unlike Type now, this book presents a more objective display of a designer’s body of work. The text was not prepared by the designer himself, so information is presented in a third person voice. The small, partially full-color “portfolio” section in the back of the book is less good. It feels removed from the main narrative of the book. Again, I tie mental parallels with Type now, whose end, color “portfolio” section is both more thought out, and more whimsical. José Mendoza y Almeida’s portfolio section includes images that seem to bear no relation to the main text of book. Were these images included just because they are pretty? Additionally, we see some glimpses of yearly “holiday cards” designed by Mendoza. Some other similar cards are presented on the inside flap of the back cover. Are these cards something that Mendoza designed and distributed every year? I did not find much mention of these in the text.

The French/English split of the text works well most of the time, with French texts displayed verso, English texts, recto. In captions the text is always presented in French first, followed by English. I quickly adapted to this, only being disrupted after flipping through extended spreads filled mostly with high-quality, well-reproduced images. They are so captivating that it was difficult for me to reorient my mind and my eye to reading regular text.

The book is set in Lyon Text, a Commercial Type face from Kai Bernau. Lyon Text imbibes from the fountain of Robert Granjon’s work. This gives it a similar air to Mendoza’s oeuvre. José Mendoza y Almeida explains that Mendoza’s work is deeply influenced by French humanist type from the Renaissance onward; and Granjon was one of this strand’s key players. Perhaps one could imagine the book set in a Mendoza face—particularly ITC Mendoza Roman; or an authorized Brennus revival might have been appropriate. In terms of “complete” typeface families, only Mendoza’s most recent release would likely fall into this category: ITC Mendoza Roman. Released in 1991, the family includes three weights, each with a companion italic. However, Pauline Nuñez’s (the book’s designer) decision to set the text in a more neutral typeface—similar in flavor but still different—helps set the images apart from the other pages. When an image appears, you are certain that it is featuring work by Mendoza himself.

Jan Middendorp’s introduction ends with a message to designers that is particularly apt for our time. I am thankful that he included it, and think that it should be repeated here. Perhaps a similar text should be included in more design books:

“With today’s technology, making quick ‘revivals’, capitalizing on the ideas that lend these alphabets their vibrant originality, may seem a piece of cake. But if anyone decides to ‘do something’ with these alphabets, he or she should proceed with caution and respect. Their designer is still alive and well, and he may have ideas about what to do it them – and what not.”

Mendoz’s legacy

Since Mendoza’s engagement with type design has been part-time, taking place over several decades, it seems that just as many of his concepts—if not more than half—were either never published, or have been withdrawn from the market owing to the closure of type manufacturers. Two instances covered are particularly representative: Pascal’s unreleased Italic, and the discontinued Brennus family. Pascal was Mendoza’s first typeface, published by the Amsterdam Typefoundry in 1962. Before the phototype era, this typeface was only distributed in a single weight. From 1962–1967, Mendoza worked with the Amsterdam Typefoundry to develop a Pascal italic, though it never came to market.

Drawings for Pascal Italic

Would it have been published, Pascal Italic may have been the world’s first humanist sans serif italic. Perhaps this does not sound so revolutionary now, as the average graphic designer most-likely has several of these in his font folder; but in 1967, none were available. Optima’s roman (similar to Pascal) was only sold with obliques, a trend that was the rule for grotesk-style sans serifs of the time.

Brennus was a two weight design for Socotep. The family was on the market during the 1980s, but is no longer in active distribution. This design is an almost monolinear Egyptienne, with oldstyle traces. For me, Brennus is the centerpiece of a chapter on “mécaldes,” which – according to Sébastien Morlighem – represent a genre invented by Mendoza. “Mécaldes” are a combination of “mécanes” and “garaldes,” two categories of type from Vox’s classification system. The typical English-language terms are slab serif and oldstyle. After reading this book, I was really left wanting to know more about Brennus, a Mendoza typeface no longer in distribution. This is not because I felt the text on Brennus lacking, or because I feel that Brennus offers some secret key to unlocking further type design understanding. I just really like the typeface, and would like to see more of it.

Monotype Recorder, 1979

A single-page Monotype advertisement from 1979 illustrates Mendoza in the company of Morison, Gill, and Van Krimpen. The ad is in English, and I wonder which four designers a French company might have chosen as their titans of 20th century type design. Would Mendoza have made the French list? On the other hand, that the advertisement was a Monotype one is revealing. At the time, type designers tended to be bound to certain foundries, or at least partner with one at a time. No foundry could yet claim to have all of a century’s famous European designers under one roof. This is one of many differences in 21st century font marketing. The period post-1979 has seen the rise of mega companies, which absorbed numerous smaller foundries from a number of countries. In the last two decades, we have also seen the rise of font distributors that resell the products of multiple companies and individual designers alike.

Drawing for Fidelio

Like Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger, or Hermann Zapf, Mendoza’s career spanned the changes of technology that revolutionized—and then re-revolutionized—type design. Pascal was initially released in metal for hand-setting. Most of Mendoza’s subsequent typefaces were developed for phototypesetting systems, although a few of them were converted by their respective foundries into digital format. Fidelio was first released by Mecanorma as dry transfer lettering, and ITC Mendoza Roman is a fully-digital typeface family. The history of 20th century type design shows us some designers who created fantastic romans, but may have failed with their companion Italics. Mendoza is not one of these. Not only are Photina’s italics—as well those from the ITC Mendoza Roman family—excellent, lively, legible, and interesting, but Mendoza’s mécalde italics seen in the Brennus family and elsewhere are just as powerful as their roman counterparts.

José Mendoza y Almeida is a real page-turner. I went from cover to cover in two afternoons. Not only was the book a fun read, but it made me think. Blibliothèque Typographique has issued a great production. The book contains a few minor flaws, but as an object it feels lovely in the hand. It also makes for very easy reading. The texture of the paper is optimal, the type clear, the layout engaging, and the illustrations rich. I highly recommend this book to anyone in the field.   

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Reynolds was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Before moving to Europe, he received a BFA in graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Reynolds studied at the HfG Offenbach for a few years before receiving an MA in typeface design from the University of Reading (U.K.). Today, he lives in Berlin, Germany, where he works for Linotype GmbH and teaches typeface design at the Hochschule Darmstadt. His most recent typeface, Malabar, received a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the Type Directors Club, a silver medal at the ED-Awards 2009, and a gold medal from the 2010 Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany competition. Dan blogs from time to time at www.typeoff.de.

ORDERING INFORMATION
José Mendoza y Almeida
By Martin Majoor and Sébastien Morlighem. With an introduction by Jan Middendorp, who also translated the French texts into English.
Paris: Blibliothèque Typographique, Ypsilon Éditeur (2010).
French/English. 169 pages.

FURTHER READING
Savoie, Alice, French type foundries in the twentieth century.
Smeijers, Fred, Type now: a manifesto, plus works so far. London: Hyphen Press (2003).

Typography