Mystic – Fragments of Beauty

Between Naturalness, Terribleness and Sweetness

elementi — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 07:38:32 +0000

Today, next to my morning cup of espresso, is a small opusculum, first printed, it seems, in 1949. It is a small monograph on the Centaur typeface by Bruce Rogers. My friend Chris Wakeling, an excellent English printer, sent it to me. And again, it makes me philosophize about that love of printed letterforms that I still love so much and that has been with me through all my life’s circumstances. It’s such a pleasure to look at these shapes, once so carefully drawn or engraved by hand, or more recently created digitally on a screen. And I still wonder where they came from, what it is that makes them shine so mystically for me. It’s no longer a secret that I draw my Bézier lines inspired by the shapes, curves and lines of the female body. It is something like a game between many factors. In a book about Raffaello, the Italian Renaissance painter, I read about these influences in terms of “Naturalness”, “Terribleness” and “Sweetness” that the artists of those days struggled with, to tend to either one side or the other. And I think it’s always this that shapes our designs. On the one hand, admiration of nature: how it creates “outlines” of forms guided by an inner structure, like the curve of a leaf or, yes, the beautiful sinuous lines of a female body, conditioned in themselves by bone and muscle. On the other hand, there is also a certain will to achieve an ideal form in the sense of geometry. Our eye loves it when things become symmetrical or oval shapes become perfect circles. Because, as often said, it was this striving for perfection that pushed artists to their limits. Bones and muscles, extreme bends and perspective forms were called “Terribleness”; “Sweetness” was the opposite, that is, the willingness to refine the created forms so that they became almost artificial, self-sufficient and praising more the artists than their own origins. And finally, there was “Naturalness”, which can be described as a successful balance between these tendencies. Creating forms that show their original principles, movement, strength and organicity, but without exaggerating. A balance between brutal structure and sweetness.

We wrestle with the structure and pressure with which the pen put its forms on paper, and the will to find in their inner and outer forms something that tends to be geometric, ideal or perfect.

I have always thought that this also applies to the forms of printed letters. When we draw their outlines “artificially”, imitating a calligraphic form once written, we wrestle with the structure and pressure with which the pen put its forms on paper, and the will to find in their inner and outer forms something that tends to be geometric, ideal or perfect. Above you can see some pictures of the process of creating Bézier curves for my font Signer, which is meant for text sizes. For inspiration, I used the beautiful photograph of Marc Lagrange on my desktop background. When I drew the curves of ‘9’, or rather corrected what I found when it was systematically derived from the very thin original shape, I especially liked the connections of the bowls. It reminded me of such shapes as we find in the movement of a shoulder, which lets us see clearly what forces are at work here to bend muscles and incline bones before they form the curves of their surface on the skin. I liked the way the lower part of the hairline enlarges before dipping into the main oval on the right side. But at the same time, almost unconsciously, I became aware of what was happening to the inner shape, the oval enclosed in the eye of the character, the so-called counter. I tried to round it softer, to get it closer to a circle (read also the previous post why). In a word, I was getting dangerously close to the “Sweetness”. The softer and rounder our counterforms become, the more the letter as a whole loses its structure, its stability guided by inner forces. The female body itself is the perfect example of this precarious balance. So when we draw in reality, we are always struggling, once approaching one side and then perhaps returning to the original principle. Yet the human body, at least to me, is the crown of these principles. Because when we create something, we may want it to be similar to ourselves. Credits: Marc Lagrange | Photography

Why It Is Sometimes Sill(y) to Work in Metrics Window

elementi — Sun, 25 Nov 2018 14:23:37 +0000

I guess every (type) designer has his own methods allowing him to work more instinctively, those little tricks he uses to solve inconveniences that maybe only he himself sees in the regular process of work. What personally always struck me in particular while creating typefaces is the balancing act between what is supposed to be so tiny and on what we work while it is so big. To understand that maybe it is interesting to take a look back in the history of printing typefaces and how they have done it centuries before us. The so called punchcutters whom of the last we remember a genius as Charles Malin (which my personal history, strongly connected to the work of Giovanni Mardersteig’s Officina Bodoni, brought me near) used to engrave the final forms of an alphabet in the exact size that it was meant for. Of course, as it was a technical process that didn’t allow enlargement, zoom or reducing an intermediate shape to design*. It was “simply” (and these quotation marks should be typeset in 24 points, at least) chiseling the final letter form into a piece of steel from which the letter’s matrix was derived.

What he worked on was the final size, so he took perfect control over proportions as they are meant to be seen by the eye when reading.

What we do today, instead, is working on gigantic glyphs on an extra large monitor (or even 2 of them). Which is necessary to really have control of the Bézier curves, their points’ placements and tangent handlers’ adjustment. What we still need, though, is to have, at least, the same control over the final small letter image. So what I do in FontLab is combining to different windows while drawing. The expected Glyphs window, of course, showing me the Béziers construct and the Metrics window that is meant for defining the font’s letter spaces. And I do it in a quite strange way which sometimes slightly reminds me (I admit in terms rather philosophically) of the window sills that old Renaissance painters often put in their paintings to serve as kind of a leveling means to balance their composition by adding a horizontal bases to it at the bottom of the canvas. I keep the Metrics open in the way that they fill the whole monitor and place different letter pairings on it which I think could be helpful to compare similar letter forms or simply serve me as an inspiration. The small window sill, however, that is on the bottom of my screen is the glyphs window of the character which I am focusing on. So, with on click of the mouse I can jump from one to another. I choose and activate points or curve zones in the glyph, drag its window to the bottom (make it almost disappear) and then use the arrows on keyboard to correct points position or curve rounding (by activating the curve middle part) inside the glyphs window in the pushed aside but still active foreground. While doing so I do not watch the construct itself but the image on the Metrics window (background). A more drastic way to compare the results is to copy the whole modified glyph’s Bézier construct via keyboard and then revert the font to the latest saved state. The former glyph can then be deleted (still only looking on the Metrics) and replaced by the newer result of the computer’s clipboard. Then, back and forth via keyboard and so on. Probably this may seem quite funny for someone who uses a second monitor but it is the way of working I always preferred, I don’t know why. Maybe because it does not force my head to move from left to right. And, of course, it is not always an ideal means as I quite often tend to spoil the Béziers construct harmony too quickly by elongating too much curve tangents or neglecting the fact that while moving points also their handlers have to be shortened, elongated etc. (which I would probably not, watching the oversized construct in full resolution so to say) I just guess this is on the reasons that I never have chosen the path to really become a professional type designer. As I am just doing things quite in my own way, more for the feeling of it: less calculated, more by intuition. Or, to put it in an other way, to keep some of the mystery that for my very personal of view type designing always had and will probably still have in the future.

*We would have to exclude here pantographic methods as preferred by Frederic Goudy and others which, in fact, was a solution to draw the letter in a drastically enlarged stencil and reduce it then mechanically via the pantographic machine which engraved the matrices for the final alphabet’s size.

Mystic

elementi — Tue, 15 May 2018 06:21:39 +0000

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

Incantation

elementi — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 07:13:50 +0000

As part of my research work for Condé Nast, Italy, namely for a GQ magazine concept there remained some ultra classicist typefaces that weren’t used in the end. One of them is Incantation, a daring and mostly very experimental character. It breathes the air of Didot and others referring to its extreme contrast between stems and hairlines but it looses all their curves. They were replaced by strictly rectangular diamond like shapes. Its title derived from a fashion story by Vogue Italy. Its inspiration came from couture dresses and one its most dominating elements that is that of lace material. Like few others this material reflects femininity with an air of mysticism around it. Later on I used its strictly geometric forms for a personal research about Giorgio Armani’s brand. I imagined the ‘I’ as kind of a perfume bottle or package on which mystic black and white couture shoots should be projected. Credits: Paolo Roversi, Peter Lindbergh | Photography

La Sfuggevolezza

elementi — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 10:30:07 +0000

Succede che vediamo una scarpa «alla Hepburn» in una vetrina e, passando, in un lampo, ci fa connettere a qualcosa del nostro passato; come se attraverso il velours grigio potessimo accarezzare* per una frazione d’un’attimo una parte di questa cosa che credevamo da lungo tempo perduta e introvabile. Qualcosa di effimero come una ballerina di Degas della quale avessimo potuto seguirne, come schizzato, il movimento ma della quale non saremmo stato in grado di individuarne la provenienza – mezza costruita mezza inventata. Sicché quando vi ci avvicinassimo, a fermare lo sguardo più a lungo, ci renderemmo conto che è solo una scarpa, un accumulo di pelle.

* Talvolta sembra che i nostri sensi siano troppo «precisi» per procurarci un sentimento istantaneo, quasi ce lo negassero (i loro stimoli, troppo rozzi, troppo crudeli nella loro prorompente nudità, distruggessero quel sottile legame che ci collegasse al passato per esso necessario); ma nello stesso momento abbiamo bisogno di trovare attraverso delle loro esperienze un’esempio per dar vita ad un’immagine che ci dà la memoria, che lo fa indurire questa sfuggevole materia che è il ricordo, per darle una forma. Come si usa il fuoco che è destinato a distruggere il legno anche (nella sua funzione contraria) per indurirlo attraverso la sua fiamma.
[un gioco scambievole – cui rappresentazione più formale è la metafora]

Perché quei momenti di ricordo li rivestiamo altrettanto di ricordi, ma di quelli non così specifiche ed in un certo senso più attuali che sono le esperienze dei sensi. Dandoli, diciamo, una specie di quotidianità li rendiamo più sopportabili a noi in tutta la loro (misteriosa) inafferrabilità.

Ci sono mille esempi di come funzioni la memoria. Mi sembra il suo metodo preferito sia quello di un trampolino [dal più piccolo al contesto più ampio]. Quando meno lo aspettiamo tira fuori dei punti di riferimento molto precisi e come dicevo prima in qualche modo sempre sensuali. Li usa come sassi che spiccano fuori dalle acque dell’insignificativo e su cui fa balzare i suoi pensieri a farli arrivare a dove vuole. Leggo la parola «vita balneare» in un testo e come mi apparisse subito, inaspettatamente, ma con una chiarezza incredibile, quella stessa parola «balneare» su una targa di legno della quale mi sembra di poter toccare il legno ruvido su cui il sole ha lasciato le sue tracce. E da questa scrittura rimbalza a sua volta e mi si apri una spiaggia e con essa tutti corpi mezzo nudi che vi si stendevano, essendoci stranieri ma nello stesso momento dopo una lunga stagione di ferie conosciuti come il proprio, e ai qual causa vi eravamo rimasti pieno di conflitti, di rinunce, a non poterli toccare, gustare la loro sensazione, dividerci il nostro.