Experimental – Fragments of Beauty

Magazine Double-Pages from My University Archives

elementi — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 06:15:09 +0000

I remember cutting out these beautiful cursive text blocks in Garamond (No. 3) from photographic enlargements made with a reproduction photo camera. It took me a while to arrive at these seemingly simple layout solutions. Purely composing like a painter, with text instead of color and form. The image overlaying text blocks were enlarged and developed on transparent film material, which I carefully mounted over the color photocopies of those wonderful F. C. Gundlach photographs I had found in an antiquarian bookstore (and with whose long-gone beauties I had literally fallen in love).

In those days, there was a lot of work with scissors and montage, which in a way forced us to think about typography differently than we do today.

In those days, there was a lot of work with scissors and montage, which in a way forced us to think about typography differently than we do today. This had a lasting impact on my way of perceiving sets of text, which in turn seemed to be woven from excellent (phototypesetting) typefaces as if into a tapestry. Flipping through my old Daniel Berkeley Updike copy of Printing Types, Their History of Forms and Use recently, I suddenly realized that what I was doing resembled what the old printers of the 15th century produced with text as form, compact and as the purest element of composition. Only later did I begin to discover what Brodovitch and Liberman were doing for the famous fashion magazines. I'm still very interested in magazine layout. Although, well, I would do it differently than what I see in most magazines today. I would go back to composing with text.... Credits: F. C. Gundlach | Photography Guido Löhrer | Photography (reproduction)

Working on Girl Editor for a Balenciaga lettering

elementi — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 11:46:59 +0000

Recently I have been working on a lettering for Balenciaga. I had been inspired by those experimental looking magazine pages Diana Vreeland did in the late sixties for Vogue. Liberman used those extremely elongated semi-classicist headline typefaces even in italic variants. They look quite strange and somewhat unusual to modern eyes but if we look close they are not bare of fascination. Yes, as the word in itself seems to suppose: fashionable. Excentric. At about the same period the clothes of Spanish fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga were “en vogue” and many of the editorial pages speak about him and show his couture dresses that are surely not less daring experimental. A couple that matches. From a type design point of view, however, this is somehow hard of an excercise. The name is extremely long, set in an wide character with thin hairlines and harsh stroke contrast. This intrigued me.

Cristóbal Balenciaga · Tailoring Work

In a certain way the great Spanish couture master acted like a type designer himself. With the utmost scruples taking care of the perfect fit, specially there where tailored forms intersect with the female body.

I decided to re-work on my Girl typeface. Some letters were needed to be adapted in size as I left them in the early 2000 years incompleted. I had some beautiful ‘n’ and ‘m’s with subtle details as broken stems and slightly curved straight lines. The ‘a’ was needed to be re-done. I wanted to keep the experimental spirit using large ellipsis as counter forms, but at the same time I surely am type designer enough to give them what someone may call the forms of a “real letter”. Because it is often that you do quite easily a fascinating graphic form which however lacks the fluidness and organic quality which makes those forms fit together in a line. Which enables them to attach one to another, chains them together. A quality which is hardly explainable but comes from a long experience of looking on historic typefaces and semi-calligraphic forms. These are images from a first stage of Girl Editor (re-)design which show some adapted letter forms and the new lowercase ‘a’. There is still a long way to go… Read also
See on Letters (stefanseifert.com) Credits: Henri Cartier-Bresson | Photography (small)

The Passion of Being a Typeface Designer

elementi — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 13:26:25 +0000

A brief story about the relation between typeface and graphic design.

Typefaces and Photography

elementi — Sun, 08 Dec 2019 17:23:09 +0000

This comes a little late. But I guess it is never too late to say thank you to one of the greatest fashion photographers in history who has passed away this year. What you see here is a typeface called Next which was part of my researches for Vogue Italy in the very late nineties just before the switch of the millenium. And it clearly breathes the spirit of those times. As a photographer friend of mine uses to say it is not only that a type designer maybe inspired by photography: it is also photography who can take advantage of typographic work opposed to, or better mixed with it. I am sure in this case I couldn’t hardly add something to the brilliance of Peter Lindbergh. Nevertheless, I am proud that my creations of that period were liked by Italian art director Luca Stoppini and later on have been admired by some influencer magazine art director in Germany, as well. The character itself, apart from clearly aiming at futuristic tendencies of that particular time period, was supposed to also keep some of the fashion like classicist taste which we know to find in Bodoni and Didot. The experimental way of interpreting this fact, though, is that hairlines of Next were introduced in other places, for example in parts of their asymmetric serifs. Certainly, a typeface like this today has less if any importance, but it is just nice to remember some of the inspiration that drove both of us. The type designer and the photographer himself. Thank you for this wonderful inspiration and, in general, for your awesome oeuvre of decades, Mr. Lindbergh! Read also [German and Italian language] Credits: Peter Lindbergh | Photography Vogue Italia | Editor

Nota, A Didot Font For Vogue

elementi — Sun, 25 Nov 2018 17:09:36 +0000

Almost two decades ago, Luca and I developed this classicist beauty mixed with some futuristic elements. It contains asymmetric serif remnants which are exact clone parts of a reduced set of curve segments used to create the entire alphabet. Unlike as it may seem on a first glance we didn’t use any of the existing Didot or Bodoni digital fonts but built it from the scratch. Its basis were original historical letters cut for Firmin Didot in the eighteenth century. It had only capital letters and a set of futuristic numbers. It is a task that has fallen into oblivion now for a while as today we have seemingly so many typefaces at the hand to create expressive editorial layouts. Quite often, though, those efforts suffer from something that Luca Stoppini himself probably would have called looking “cheap”. I remember the fun it was to create many versions and ideas for a “futurizable” classicist font as this in itself is kind of a contradiction from both a stylistic and historical point of view. Thanks again, Luca, for the great possibilities you gave me to develop myself in the direction of experimental typeface design. Cheers! See also

Memoir Spacing

elementi — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 16:19:21 +0000

A very demanding task, vital for the success of a typeface is that of finding the right spaces for each singular letter. As one can easily imagine the number of possible combinations even in a Roman alphabet is very high. But, what may seem frightening to someone making a quick calculation of that number is quite a daily business for a type designer. For the simple reason that he has got used to it and of course over the time found his methods to deal with it. There are indeed several good methods for this challenge that didn’t change so much over the centuries of making typefaces, I guess. One of them is doubling letters to pairs or creating even higher numbers of copies and put them side by side. I remember the first time seeing something like that in an old book about Frederic W. Goudy, the famous American type designer and printer in the first decades of the past century. He used to print testing sheets of his metal casted letters into large rows of duplicate letters. Doing so, in the first line, does give the type designer an idea of the general room (neglecting left or right side distances) each letter has been given. On the hand this is to avoid a too deep color caused by letters tightened too much, on the other it gives us a more precise control over the inner and outer rhythm of straight lines. In an ideal, admittedly a little too rigorous sense, distances between the two (or three) vertical lines within a letter image should be the same as the one between the last one of one letters and the starting one of its succeeding colleague (remember: for all possible combinations!). By putting, initially, the same letter in a row (at least, two of them) and glancing over them it is easier to detect eventual rhythm mistakes. Having done so and given that the type designer knowing well his creation and therefor being able to center each individual letter image between its (invisible) borders he may then compare rows of different letters among each other. To settle if certain letter designs lack of sufficient space on left and right side or are set up to tight. The next step is that of comparing more thoroughly typical letter combinations or the ones that each designer depending on his individual style and preference (of course being related to his mother language, but this would fill another essay much longer than this one). In my eyes it is also important to concentrate with this on pairings that one particularly is being fond of. What may sound kind of funny, is a design truth for my opinion. Because having fun with this work or let’s even say to fall kind in love with letter pairings and combinations is part of the success story of a typeface. For the creation process is far less theoretic or mathematic as one may suppose. Simply for the fact that it takes long time, asks a lot of patience of the craftsman or a digital designer and in the end is a matter of heart. This is when inspiration comes into the game. And changing it. Personally I try to melt the glyph design process and the letter spacing to one continuous process. Like here in the Memoir ‘sa’ combination I also correct the Béziers many times after the first sketches to accord letters’ rhythm between each other. I try to intuit a certain flow that is able to chain the letter images together. In a way that also lines that cross the general rhythm of a typeface maybe be more easily handled by the human eye to fit into it. It is hard to exactly describe what this means but certainly it is also a matter of the (invisible) white spaces that place between two letters. If you are working on a digital Metrics window you may also add and delete characters, go back and forth doing so to trick the eye a little and try to intuit what happens when they change places. Close the eye a little and concentrate on vertical rhythm only regardless of which letter the consisting straight line are being part of. To be honest, in my eyes, it is kind of a fifty-fifty game. Learn about the methods and get used to them but also trust blindly in your own feelings. In the end we are not talking about reason here, we gain to achieve beauty.

(…) vedevo emergere un ovale bianco, degli occhi neri, degli occhi verdi, non sapevo se fossero gli stessi che mi avevano già deliziato un momento prima, non potevo metterli in rapporto con una data fanciulla ch’io avessi separata dalle altre e riconosciuta. E quest’assenza, nella mia visione, del distacco che avrei presto stabilito fra loro, propagava attraverso il gruppo un ondeggiamento armonioso, la traslazione continua di una bellezza fluida, collettiva e mobile.

– Marcel Proust, All’ombra delle fanciulle in fiore

Alternative Letters

elementi — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 08:02:45 +0000

For every type designer, I guess, it is tempting to do alternative letters for his fonts. Sometimes during the development he might encounter nice ideas for certain letter forms he is quibbling about. And even if in the end most probably many of those will be neglected it is sometimes nice to look back at them and think by yourself “Wow, this one wasn’t so bad, also!”. That’s because design is always also a habituation process. You draw and work over certain lines until you get so familiar with them that any other possibility, once easily scratched, fades away in comparison. While, in general, I guess this is a good process because – even if “narrowing our view” in a certain way – it sharpens our design idea. You need the courage to abolish certain forms to make your alphabet grow in a reasonable way. But as we are speaking about the mysterious world of creativity we might also say: “Damn this whole thing, I’ll keep them anyhow! Just because … I don’t know why.” Above two alternative ‘e’s from Girl character which both did not make their way into the final font. Read also

All Those Numbers

elementi — Thu, 31 Aug 2017 10:21:35 +0000

Once a professor of mine in university said to me about typeface design: “Did you know that the most difficult task in designing typefaces is that of drawing the numbers?” This remark clearly aimed at pointing out that I was about to touch a field of design that would have its own mysteries and, besides, was definitely not very much supported by the concept of our institute back in those days. In other words some kind of a warning (I laugh) that should point out that I wasn’t very prepared for this task (which was definitely true) and better should leave my hands off before getting into deeper trouble. Well, the troubles I took into account and I definitely had my fair share. Which means I was fighting the rest of my time in university to make type design my favorite branch and bending all their tasks that they gave to me to make them head in that specific direction. And as if this kind of ‘dark’ reminder was an additional incitement buried in the back of my mind, I always find myself focusing a lot on the design of numbers when I am beginning a new typeface. So over the years many of my font creations always had complete sets of numbers while often leaving blank spaces in my font charts, namely of many letters that didn’t interest me very much. In particular, my more experimental creations have stylish numbers sometimes on the brink of readability, I admit. The one above is number ‘8’ of a character called Romantic after a story in Vogue Italy and had numbers consistent of exclusively crossed straight lines and a singular curve shape. It matches the Yohji Yamamoto dress that served to me as an inspirational fountain. Credits: Mario Sorrenti | Photography

The Dark Forms

elementi — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 05:22:07 +0000

I enjoyed working also on something that we could call “dark forms” when I did these sans serif letters. In order to make our letters harmonize in details we may also compare parts of their forms that we wouldn’t usually take into account as I did here with the inner bowl of the ‘a’ and a “straight” stroke in the number ‘4’. This is an exaggerated example, of course, more an experimental study but it may show that designing typefaces has many hidden aspects. And, if we want to make our letters lively and special we may consider and lay more weight on those aspects. Just as it seems the photographer (Paolo Roversi) did here by emphasizing the dark background forms enclosing this beautiful woman’s face. Credits: Paolo Roversi | Photography

Backwards—Forwards

elementi — Sat, 10 Jun 2017 09:35:51 +0000

Another blast from the past. This is Forward. One of my very first (computer) typefaces. It came out in the times of a Miuccia Prada revolutionizing the concept of fashion just on the break of the new century with weird and witty shapes praised to be the new futurism. It is far from being a “good” typeface in the sense of correctly connected Bézier curves and other things, but it made a perfect stand those times being used by some of the major Italian ad agencies. Among others it ornamented the 2000 Riccardo Gay model agency calendar.

Today we live in a time where throwing out new typefaces in million places over the web has become a normality.

I remember its forms came very spontaneously to me and just as a rockstar maybe, fighting for the rest of his life with his early breaking hit, I always was measured by it by my friends and followers. Today we live in a time where throwing out new typefaces in million places over the web has become a normality, but back in those days it was an awesome and thrilling task to experiment with new alphabet shapes and so it earned its name, I guess.