Notes

March’s Font of the Month: Lithographer Text

While my wife Emily was getting her master’s degree at Dartmouth College, I often found myself on campus with time to kill. I spent most of it in Dartmouth’s iconic library building, which housed a massive mural, a letterpress studio, and plenty of beautiful spots to sit and work.

Virtually every visit to the library included a stop at the Evans Map Room. There was always something interesting on display, but the real attraction was the discards pile in the corner. The library was constantly circulating maps in and out of the collection, and discarded maps were free for the taking. It turns out that “If we don’t take this, it might get thrown away!” was a pretty convincing argument for Emily and me to grab maps that we didn’t need and had no space to display. 

During the two years that we lived nearby, we collected over a dozen large-scale maps, all mounted on fabric and hung from a wooden rod—the kind of thing you might see in an old-fashioned classroom. They are mostly from the first half of the twentieth century and made in Europe, and feature locales across the world. Rolled up and standing on their side, many are taller than I am.

Recently, I’ve spent a long time staring at a German map from our collection entitled “Geologie der Erde” (“Geology of the World”). It was produced around 1921 by the Justus Perthes Publishing Company in Gotha, Germany and illustrated by Dr. Richard Rein. The photo above doesn’t do it justice…its beauty is all in the details.

I’ve been asked before if I have a dream custom typeface project, and I think my answer might be to work on a typographic system for maps like this one. It requires such an elegant balance of density, variety, and legibility, cramming so many different kinds of information and styles into one unified design. I mean, this map has got everything: serif, sans serif, low contrast, high contrast, upright, italic, a backslanting contra-italic, and even a connected super-italic!

These days all our digital maps use a few weights of a UI-ish sans for everything…that was not always the case (full image), and it does feel like something has been lost. So I could wait for the perfect cartographic client to come along, or I could just start drawing.

What I’m sending you this month is less of a usable typeface and more of a promise. The character set and features are limited, the kerning is sparse, and the drawing is rough, especially on the bold end. For next month’s edition, I hope you don’t mind if I continue to refine this design, while adding small caps, lining figures, and italics.

I think the font I’m sending you today as the foundational text styles for a larger upcoming family. I’ve tried to capture some of my favorite quirks from the map’s lettering and make them palatable for extended reading. I’m talking about the long serifs, the huge tail on the a, the horizontal stress of the g and its playful antenna, and the moments of abrupt flatness that come from a pointed pen, such as the high shoulders of letters like n and the flat top of the a. 

Typographers will often eschew “Modern” Bodoni-esque typefaces for extended text because the contrast can be overwhelming. I tried to soften things up here, so hopefully it’s not too hard on the eyes. I’ve been using it for my email and web browsing over the past month and I don’t think it’s half bad!

Longtime club members may recall that I have another long-serifed, pointed pen-inspired font in my library called Club Lithographer. (For more on that font, see also this recent review of the design and its origins by Katerina Grushka.) Club Lithographer is italic-only, and I’ve wondered whether it should get an upright companion someday.

At some point in the process of making the font I’m sending you today, it dawned on me that I was kinda-sorta drawing that upright companion, albeit one for text, without any of the maple-syrupy, display-ish details. So I’ve started to think of this design and Club Lithographer as two antipodes of the same type family. You can convince me otherwise, but for now I’m simply calling this design Lithographer, and I hope that you enjoy it very much.

February’s Font of the Month: Buckridge

This month, I’m sending you Buckridge, a contrasted sans serif inspired by the lettering on the cover of a trigonometry textbook. I encountered this book at Nancy Dole Books & Ephemera, a lovely used bookstore in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts—it’s actually the same shop where I encountered the boy scout manual that led me to make Merit Badge.

The book is the 1952 edition of Plane and Spherical Trigonometry published by Ginn & Co. (See also this post of Dwiggins designs from the same publisher.)

Anyway, here’s the cover:

I wasn’t able to find out anything about the book’s designer (please tell me if you know anything!), but I absolutely fell in love with this cover. The lettering on a geometry textbook could have easily gone in a more geometric direction, but instead the designer chose to introduce deco-humanistic elements. They create a compelling contrast with the illustration and add so much life to the design.

Naturally, the swooping curve of the R and the round form of the E were the first details to catch my eye. But there’s a lot of subtle forces at work here as well: the slight angle of the A in “AND”, the gentle flaring of the horizontal and diagonal strokes, and an intriguing mix of Art Deco and humanist features. Take for example how the S with diagonal stress and flared endings sits alongside a P which has none of that stuff and whose bowl is 100% vertically symmetrical. This doesn’t make any logical sense, but I can’t deny that it works!

The original designer leaned towards a more conventional K (see “MIKESH”). But in my interpretation, I thought it best to embrace my favorite elements and just run with them.

With this choice, I ran the risk of letting the R and K be a little too interesting for their own good. A typeface is always going to have more interesting letters and less interesting letters, but I try to avoid making fonts where there are a couple of letters that are SO MUCH more interesting than the rest…it’s essentially putting all of your typographical eggs into one basket. It’s great when they happen to be sprinkled evenly throughout the text, but it can be overwhelming when there are too many of them too close together. And when there are too few, it’s like eating the part of the burrito that is only rice.

After the designs of the R and K were settled, my job was to modulate the volume of the other letters so that a word without R or K doesn’t feel disappointing after a word that has them.

All of this talk about R and K got me interested in what this typeface would look like in Cyrillic, which has related letters such as Я and Ж. Buckridge’s Cyrillic uses a more conventional form of E to distinguish it from the Ukranian letter Є. I am grateful to Jovana Jocić (designer of Forma Cyrillic and Roslindale Cyrillic) for giving me incredibly helpful feedback on this design. You’ll also find the starting point for a Greek in there, but I just started that a couple days ago, and haven’t been able to solicit feedback from a native speaker quite yet.

I don’t know what else to say about this typeface except that it just makes me very happy. I wanted to work from this source material because I feel that it radiates with lightness and energy, and I hope I’ve captured that in my interpretation.

January’s Font of the Month: Bungee Widths

Last year, I sent you a story about how a squished use of my font Megavolt inspired me to make Megavolt Narrow. The moral of the story was that type designers should see stretching and squishing type not as a misuse, but as a challenge.

Bungee is my most widely-distributed font, and it has probably been squished more times than all of my other fonts combined. This wide distribution has put some distance between me and my creation—it was released and open-sourced nearly a decade ago, and I’ve barely touched it since. (Huge thanks to Just van Rossum and Marte Verhaegen, who did a big modernization and cleanup of the font files in 2024.)

Living in the countryside, I don’t get to see Bungee in action as much as my city-dwelling friends. But every once in a while I pass through a city and see it in the wild. After encountering some squished Bungee on a restaurant menu, I decided it was finally time to accept the challenge that was presented to me and draw some Bungee Widths.

Bungee was inspired by and designed for vertical signs with stacked letters—its vaguely-monospaced appearance, straight sides, and distinctive serifs on I and L all stem from those origins. Even though the vast majority of Bungee uses are horizontal, I love that these little vertical details seep into each use of the typeface.

But let’s forget about vertical typesetting for the moment. Don’t get me wrong…I love a font with a gimmick, and I will choose a purpose-driven “gimmick font” over a general-purpose “vibes font” any day of the week. 

But at a certain point, a gimmick font needs to transcend its gimmick and just be a font. Bungee has found its way onto everything from seltzer cans to sports programming to Pokémon books, and most of those users were not worrying about vertical text. And it has been refreshing for me to return to Bungee all these years later and not feel compelled to worry about it either.

With straight sides and open apertures, Bungee had no trouble getting narrow. I started by over-squeezing each letter, down to about 40% of the original width. Then I added back the necessary stem thickness to the outside of the shape, widening it back to about 70% of the original width. Finally, I thinned out the horizontal strokes, elongated the vertical straight segments, and un-squished each curve.

While I was revisiting the design, I also played around with reducing Bungee’s rounded corners (now available as a variable axis) and tried my hand at a lowercase too (currently available in a separate font, only for the Extra Condensed width). I’m still not sure about the diagonal crossbar on that lowercase a!

It’s also worth noting that, like the original version of Bungee, these fonts come with the Open Font License rather than my standard one. I realize that it’s a little odd to send out a font to the club that is destined to be free, but if I didn’t do it for the club, it would never happen! 

I hope that you still find some value in it, or that I can make it up to you in future months. And I hope it’s at least a little interesting to change up this aspect of the club…you can feel free to send Bungee Widths to friends, file issues on the repo, and even check out my source files if you want to. (Be warned: they are an unholy mess at the moment!) 
 

December’s Font of the Month: Bradley DJR Text

If you’ve sent me an email recently, you may have noticed that my response was riddled with typos. It might be because I’ve been doing a lot of multitasking this month, with visiting relatives and holiday plans. And it might be because my two-year-old twins are at an age where they are constantly hitting random keys on my keyboard. 

But it is probably because I’ve been test driving this month’s font of the month Bradley DJR Text as my default font for email and web browsing. And spending that much time looking at that much blackletter definitely takes some getting used to! But, as Zuzana Licko wrote, “You read best what you read most”. So I probably just need to stick with it for a while longer.

I feel like there are two types of Font of the Month editions: one where I declare “Here’s a thing I worked on!” and another one where I ask, “Um, should I keep working on this?” Bradley DJR Text is definitely in the latter category. 

I have no idea how you’ll ever use this, or if you’ll ever use this. (Maybe you are hosting a jousting tournament next weekend?) But I’ve been thinking about making a texty blackletter since I saw some exquisite specimens at the St Bride Library during my visit last year.
 

At first, I was going to try my hand at reviving a blackletter like these. But then I spent all of last month with the Bradley files open on my computer, and wondered if I could combine the lovely, even texture of these English blackletters with Bradley’s simplified, easy-to-read shapes.

Bradley was originally a very bold and very condensed design. My first attempt at reviving its smaller sizes emulated the original metal, which got a bit looser and a bit wider at smaller sizes, but still just as chunky.

This time, I really tried to make a true Text weight for Bradley, adding an extra upstroke to characters to bridge the gap created by the lighter, wider forms.

I played a lot with how much to open up the design, constantly switching back and forth between my type design app and my testing environment, mostly my web browser running the recently-resurrected Type-X extension. I encourage you to try it out yourself!

I tried to strike a balance between something that is actually comfortable to read in text, and something bold and narrow enough to feel sufficiently Bradley-esque. I made other moves, too—enlarging the figures, raising the sunken caps, and drawing simplified variants of a few of the more ornate shapes like A, J, and P.

Please consider this to be a beta font—nothing is settled, and I’ve spent very little time polishing the shapes and evening out the typographic color. I don’t have a working variable font yet, but I am throwing in the original Display and a couple in-between sizes as well, which I think could work nicely in smaller headlines. Enjoy it!

November’s Font of the Month: Bradley DJR Outline

For November, I’m sending you Bradley DJR Outline, a continuation of my Bradley revival that resurrects its outlined variant. American Type Founders published Bradley Outline in the late 1890s, a few years after the original design created by Herman Ihlenburg and based on lettering by Will H. Bradley.

This has been on my to-do-someday list for a long time, but never seemed like the most pressing thing. Bradley DJR is arguably the most holiday-coded font in my collection, and I needed something quick and easy to work on this month, so this seemed like the perfect moment to take my revival to the next level.

The original Bradley Outline has a charming handmade touch, giving the font a very different feel than the mechanical strokes we can easily create in our contemporary apps. My version strives to find a midpoint between the two, toning down some of the round corners and wobbly line quality that would make it jarring in a crisp, modern design, while hopefully preserving most of its appeal.

Unlike a purely mechanical outline, this stroke subtly modulates its contrast to follow Bradley’s diagonal axis of thicks and thins. On top of that, it opportunistically pinches at thin strokes and tight intersections to create a little extra space—this is most apparent in the crossbar of a, the northwest and southeast corners of s, and the tight interior space inside f. 

At the last minute, I decided to add an interior stroke that separates the Outline from the Fill. (One reason this mailing is late again...I’m sorry!) Most of the time you probably won’t need it, but in some settings I think it really helps the letters pop!

I’ve been making color fonts for nearly a decade now, but I still struggle to find an intuitive way to present them to users. 

Here I’ve included the Regular (Outline) and Fill fonts, for you to layer as you please. I’ve included color fonts with Red, Gold, and Silver palettes for you to work from, as well as SVG versions of these that will work in legacy apps. And like I did for Nickel, I’ve included a special style (“Color”) which uses the current foreground color in your application to set the Fill.

Please keep in mind that you can always upload these fonts to my Color Font Customizer or use CSS override-colors to create your own palette. And remember that you can use these layers and color fonts in combination with mechanical strokes and drop shadows to customize the look of the letters even further.

This update may be small, but it is mighty! I hope it helps you add a pop of color to your holiday designs, as well as the things you make in the year to come.