Capitals – Fragments of Beauty

That’s why we (perhaps) love circles

elementi — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 10:26:47 +0000

As promised, I will publish some posts about the ongoing work on Signer Text. However, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to present the work process in a truly didactic way. It is very difficult even for myself to keep track of what I am doing. The process is so very intuitive and must be based on something almost unconscious. Recently I saw a very interesting documentary about an American writer who once claimed that writing is the division into two parts: the work of a drunk, revised by a sober. I have a feeling that this is quite similar in the process of designing typefaces. The drawing process, which interestingly enough usually makes crucial turns and progress during the night, is revised and slightly corrected in the early morning. Consequently, it is difficult to force oneself to jot down, to photograph ideas in this intuitive, unconscious, “drunken” phase. Nevertheless, I will try to reflect some thoughts and influences that push my letter images in a certain direction rather than another. In creating the Signer Text, I’m not quite sure yet what its destination will be, what I want to express character-wise. Certainly there is the eternal inspiration of the Franklin Gothic to achieve something truly elegant, classic, dynamic, but also stable and solid.

There is the eternal inspiration of the Franklin Gothic to achieve something truly elegant, classic, dynamic, but also stable and solid.

While drawing, I noticed that I seem to be following some symmetry ideas that are particularly evident in Signer. In the capital letter ‘S’, for example, I recognized the symmetry, the balance between left and right on the upper inner form under the “ceiling” of the top turn of the lettering toward the top. This seems to give the letter some stability. So I temporarily added a new intermediate curve point that almost perfectly matched the hidden circle, which of course I only had in my imagination while I was drawing. I added the red circle later to make it easier to understand. Again, I strongly believe that these ideas should not be slavishly followed during the working process, because that would prevent us from getting into that intuitive state of mind. Since the Renaissance, the circle has had a strong meaning. It is also a metaphor for stability, harmonious movement, and even something that, on another level of perception, signifies life itself. The beautiful 19-year-old Natalia Vodianova, photographed by Paolo Roversi, might give us a clue. I put her on my desk while drawing, and as many, many years ago, she still inspires me. The rest is pure imagination… Read also [German and Italian language] Credits: Paolo Roversi | Photography Natalia Vodianova | Model

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

Working on Trussardi Small Caps

elementi — Sun, 23 Sep 2018 07:49:14 +0000

During my researches for a Trussardi brand lettering I developed a special Small Caps version of Reflection typefaces. Here is the metrics window and beautiful #Natalia as an inspiration fountain in the background. A particular task was to create a unique and special small cap ‘u’ which was hard to balance on the line without serifs. It introduces also a new intermediate stroke width between the thick stems’ weight and the ultra crossed hairlines. Which was necessary as, of course, without the serifs the ultra thin lines would not be able to create enough color on its right wing. Another subtle detail you may note here are the differently angled stroke ends which are slanted slightly towards the outside. It takes up a typical characteristic of Reflection as you may also observe in stroke ends of capital ‘T’ and other letters, as well. If you want to know more about my methods to develop small caps variants of typefaces read also [German language] Credits: Paolo Roversi | Photography

Working on Reflection ‘8’

elementi — Sat, 06 May 2017 07:52:15 +0000

When it comes to certain work processes, the evolving of a letter design, as an example, things are really getting complicated to describe, if not almost impossible. So many subtle influences slip into the mind of the designer. Glyph designs, while progressing, influence on each other, much of the drawing results appear necessary to be revised once you started with elaborating their spaces, and so on. I always played with the idea in my mind to describe those kind of things one day, so that others could follow it in a way and maybe even get something out of it for their designs. But as hard as I tried to keep taking screenshots and write little essays about phases of my work, I never succeeded. It is just to complex and the things that you see and feel about a certain curve or Bézier segment to redraw for someone else are hardly reproducible. Find an excerpt of such an attempt and let me, at least, the tiny hope to not have wasted my time entirely. And what is most important: be inspired! I decided to enlarge a little the inner center form of the upper bowl after I had inserted 4 new points to add a longer, almost straight line transitional area between the two bowls instead of connecting them by a single turning point in the middle. One reason was to adapt it better to the very fine and gracile ‘R’ of this character. By the way, I quite consciously left here the path of having exact same hairline thickness relation between numbers and capitals, at least for now. After all, for me its obvious that the strength of the excellent Renaissance fonts does not derive from their precise measures but from the outstanding capability that their creators had in making their forms match in feeling and subtleness, instead. (In addition, due to the generous ‘circles’ they seem to have embedded in their inner and outer lines). Speaking of those ‘nested circles’, the upper bowl on its inside was good enough for me right now, while the outer line on the left side (observing it with the letter image skipped upside down in metrics window) seemed to lack a little bit of blackness. […]
After all, for me its obvious that the strength of the excellent Renaissance fonts does not derive from their precise measures but from the outstanding capability that their creators had in making their forms match in feeling and subtleness, instead.
Added this (fortunately I already had an extra point in this outer curve dividing it into segments as I often do instinctively in the left down leading part in bowls like i.g. in the ‘8’ or ‘g’, before they get attached to the center part of the glyph) I felt that now the (almost) straight stroke connection had some trouble where it flows into the turning swing. This seemed only in part due to the fact that the newly created interim curve segment was too short to allow a smooth attachment, as to the well known problem of digital raster not allowing tangents to be exact on decreasing lengths. So I added some weight by pushing the curve a little bit towards the outside with the help of the direct curve segment tool (clicking and ‘dragging’ the curve in the middle between the points, which is, in fact, better done with the keyboard arrows) shifting both of the belonging tangents towards the inside a little to make them longer. At this point I returned with the view mode to the upright position in metrics window to maintain final control over the letter’s natural proportions. What I surprisingly found then was that, all of the sudden, I had much less dynamical ductus, which was originally caused by a slightly thicker stroke width on the left, right before it turns around in its swing and before entering the more straight part. I did not know at this point if this was a good thing or not. […]

Advanced

elementi — Tue, 24 Nov 2015 09:13:58 +0000

Advanced is the name of a regular text and titling typeface which has some slight remembrance of Franklin Gothic and other classic sans serif typefaces. It is fitted for flexible use containing ultra slim versions as well as tiny 10px size fonts specially adapted for use on monitor. Major focus was also pointed to negative versions on black ground for sub pixel rendering environment as well as retina variants. Find here screenshots of work process and explanations of different versions.