My com­puter woes are over, so now I’m scram­bling to make up for lost time. I’ll start post­ing my ATypI’08 reports and have them alter­nate with the other stuff that’s been accu­mu­lat­ing the past week. Please bear with me while I get up to speed.

Hotel weirdness

My stay at the Rossi Hotel had a few sur­real touches. My room was fine, styl­ishly dec­o­rated, albeit a touch on the small side. Some of the staff didn’t master Eng­lish very well, but they all were very friendly and forthcoming.

The first bizarre occur­rence was when I tried to log onto the inter­net late on Thurs­day night. This made Fire­fox go crazy like a… errr… fox, alert­ing me that the free hotel wifi was of ques­tion­able repute and asking me over and over if I was really really really sure I wanted to estab­lish a con­nec­tion. If I were super­sti­tious or para­noid I might’ve thought this to be an omen for the frying power cord disaster. ;)

Then, want­ing to take a shower the next morn­ing, I quickly con­sid­ered myself for­tu­nate to be nei­ther claus­tro­pho­bic nor Bald Extended. A person could seri­ously get stuck in such a tiny shower cabin with such a narrow door! And although break­fast was included in the room rate, we (the FSI crew, not plu­ralis majes­ta­tis) found out that was only half true. Every morn­ing we asked for the crois­sant, and every morn­ing we got to hear “No crois­sant, only toast”. Which was served dry with only butter, because any sup­ple­ment like jam, honey, fruit, juice, et al had to be paid for separately.

Main hall at the Beloselsky-​Belozersky Palace © Victor Gaultney

Registration

As usual at the phys­i­cal reg­is­tra­tion for the con­fer­ence we were handed the much antic­i­pated goody bag and T-shirt. Unfor­tu­nately the latter only came in large and extra large (Bald Con­densed, remem­ber). I saw many atten­dees who were also quite slim, so I think it wouldn’t hurt to have medium sizes in suf­fi­cient quan­ti­ties. Or ask for the size when reg­is­ter­ing for the event. The goody bag was a really nice red canvas shoul­der bag with sev­eral handy com­part­ments, but its con­tents proved to be a bit meagre in com­par­i­son to pre­vi­ous years. High­lights were the cat­a­log for the National Stu­dent Type Com­pe­ti­tion Ded­i­cated to the Ter­cente­nary or Russ­ian Civil Type, and a handy red umbrella. See the goodie bag dis­sected on Fredrik Andersson’s Typografism blog which switched to Eng­lish for the occa­sion. And the names on the con­fer­ence tags were set large enough, thus min­i­miz­ing the risk on “no-I’m-not-staring-at-your-boobs-I’m-trying-to-read-your-name” incidents.

After the afore­men­tioned bad news that Robert Bringhurst nor Erik Spiek­er­mann would be pre­sent­ing, the con­fer­ence kicked off in earnest with Jerry Kelly’s presentation.

Jerry Kelly pre­sent­ing at ATypI’08 © Victor Gaultney

Jerry Kelly | Type revivals

Jerry Kelly’s first slide “Type Revivals. Where did they come from? Where have they been? Where are they going?” summed up nicely the basic premise of his pre­sen­ta­tion. Although graphic design­ers and typog­ra­phers are famil­iar with the con­cept of his­tor­i­cal revivals of ear­lier type­faces, he ques­tioned how well we truly under­stand this impor­tant seg­ment of type design. And an impor­tant seg­ment it is, since accord­ing to Kelly it may well be that there are more type revivals in use today than orig­i­nal designs. Deter­min­ing what exactly can be con­sid­ered a “type revival” is not a ques­tion of right and wrong, but a ques­tion of semantics.

Kelly pro­ceeded to pin­point the very first revival. This was not easy, as there is not much doc­u­men­ta­tion to be found in early type lit­er­a­ture. A spe­cial type made in 1741 – mod­elled on early cal­lig­ra­phy – can not really be con­sid­ered a type revival as it is a fac­sim­ile of cal­lig­ra­phy. Another can­di­date is Caslon (late 18th cen­tury), which is the type­face that has been the longest in con­cur­rent use. Yet it was not a true type revival nei­ther but merely a res­ur­rec­tion, as it was not redrawn but made from exist­ing punches. Kelly con­cluded that for a type­face to qual­ify as an actual revival it must be a newly drawn ver­sion based on an old dis­used font.

The first gen­uine type revival was designed in the late nine­teenth cen­tury by William Morris, specif­i­cally for his pri­vate press edi­tions for Kelm­scott Press. Morris pur­sued the ideal form of a roman type in books printed by Nico­las Jenson around 1470-76. But instead of merely copy­ing Jenson’s roman Morris attempted to master its essence. He called the Venet­ian revival his Golden type. Kelly explained that this very first exam­ple reveals the four key ele­ments of a true revival: research­ing the finest spec­i­mens avail­able, using pho­to­graphic enlarge­ments to appre­ci­ate the true forms, seek­ing the essence of the design, and adapt­ing the design for cur­rent use (omit­ting for exam­ple the archaic long ‘s’).

By 1900 Morris’ meth­ods were adopted by others, and soon even copies of copies began to emerge. Amer­i­can Type Founders’ 1907 Bodoni cut ush­ered in the golden age of type revivals which lasted from 1915 to 1990. Clas­sic exam­ples are Deberny & Peignot’s Gara­mond (1912–1928), the Bauer revivals, et al. Mono­type also had its own revival pro­gramme over­seen by Stan­ley Mori­son from 1922 to 1932. The gen­eral con­sen­sus back then was that the finest type to base your finest revivals on were Jenson’s late fif­teenth cen­tury romans. Yet Mori­son didn’t share this opin­ion, as he pre­ferred the first roman cut by Francesco Griffo and used by Aldus Manu­tius for the pub­li­ca­tion of an essay by the Ital­ian scholar Pietro Bembo – Bembo.

Yet the search of the purest ver­sion of a type­face to work on couldn’t pre­vent errors being made in early revivals. Now and then there were mis­takes in the avail­able ref­er­ence mate­r­ial. Some­times those sources were copies of copies, or even included the odd char­ac­ter in the wrong font. Kelly showed for exam­ple a printed spec­i­men that served as a basis for Monotype’s Plan­tin, and it was obvi­ous that the two low­er­case a’s were dif­fer­ent. Accord­ing to him Mono­type used the wrong ‘a’ in the ref­er­enced orig­i­nal, while Matthew Carter’s ITC Gal­liard which draws on the same source has the cor­rect ‘a’ shape. The most errors were made in the numer­ous revivals of Gara­mond, which led to the pecu­liar sit­u­a­tion that the most faith­ful one is not even named Gara­mond, but Granjon. Of course one of the main dif­fi­cul­ties is which point size to use as ref­er­ence, as there are dra­matic dif­fer­ences in their design. This can still be seen in the opti­cal sizes of con­tem­po­rary digitizations.

Kelly called the two most suc­cess­ful revivals Carter’s ITC Gal­liard and Jonathan Hoe­fler’s Requiem, although Kelly con­sid­ers the latter, being based on cal­li­graphic type, not a revival in the strict sense of the word. After men­tion­ing Epi­gram­mata which he holds in high regard, he con­cluded that there are still enough inter­est­ing models to be dis­cov­ered to base revivals on. It is inevitable that – beside fine modern designs – there will always be room for good revivals.

Having Jerry Kelly go first was an excel­lent choice by the con­fer­ence organ­i­sa­tion. The con­fer­ence theme being “The Old and The New”, Kelly set the bench­marks for all con­sec­u­tive pre­sen­ta­tions involv­ing type revivals; defin­ing the con­cept, clar­i­fy­ing the ter­mi­nol­ogy, and ground­ing it in his­tor­i­cal con­text. He struck exactly the right tone, deliv­er­ing a thor­oughly enjoy­able and amply illus­trated pre­sen­ta­tion which was acces­si­ble with­out being dumbed down.

Dis­cussing the eth­i­cal aspects of type revivals and the per­ceived value of type with John Downer (center) and Ken Barber (left) © Victor Gaultney

John Downer | Revivals Revisited

After Jerry Kelly’s his­tor­i­cal obser­va­tions on type revivals, it was John Downer’s turn to look into the eth­i­cal aspects. The sub­ti­tle of his pre­sen­ta­tion – “Type Design­ers and The Sub­cul­ture of Free­load­ing” – imme­di­ately set the tone. Downer set out to inves­ti­gate what is fair game for revivals and what isn’t. He referred to the very inter­est­ing arti­cle he wrote for Emigre to coin­cide with the release of Tribute by the late Frank Heine. John Downer did some leg­work and made some sug­ges­tions for Frank Heine as Heine already was very ill when work­ing on Trib­ute. Although the type­face looks authen­tic it is not a strict revival. Downer cat­e­go­rizes it more as a car­i­ca­ture, a parody. The source mate­r­ial was very crude with tremen­dous room for inter­pre­ta­tion, so Heine made a humor­ous take.

John Downer’s arti­cle Call It What It Is breaks down type revivals in two main cat­e­gories: designs closely based versus loosely based on exist­ing designs; in other words knock­ing off versus reviv­ing. Downer’s posi­tion on the matter is very straight­for­ward: only dead and obso­lete type­faces are eli­gi­ble for revival. What’s more, he strongly advo­cates the pro­tec­tion of intel­lec­tual prop­erty being extended to at least one gen­er­a­tion. For legit­i­mate revivals the designer must get per­mis­sion when per­mis­sion is needed.

Downer then pro­ceeded to show exam­ples of strict and loose revivals. His com­ment about free­load­ers being par­a­sites fore­shad­owed that his pre­sen­ta­tion would be quite con­tro­ver­sial. With regards to extend­ing the pro­tec­tion of intel­lec­tual prop­erty he pro­posed a period of 100 years start­ing from the orig­i­nal release of a type design. His ratio­nale was that 100 years is a nice round number, and he humor­ously added that anyone who makes 100 is doing very well. Elab­o­rat­ing on his main point Downer explained that gen­er­ally a type designer cre­ates his first good type­face at 30 years of age, and has had all his chil­dren by 50. So by the time the copy­right expires those chil­dren are at least 80 years old and have fully ben­e­fited from the fruit of their parent’s labour.

Taking the work of Adrian Frutiger as an exam­ple, Downer men­tioned the well-​known recent case of Microsoft’s appli­ca­tion for pro­tec­tion of Segoe as orig­i­nal font designs, which was rejected by the Euro­pean Union trade­mark and design office because the design looks like an almost direct copy of Frutiger. Who decides if a design resem­bles an exist­ing one too closely? Indeed it takes a trained eye to dis­tin­guish the dif­fer­ences, and we need experts to assist the judges in their deci­sions. Downer repeated that the orig­i­nal design must be cold to be eli­gi­ble for revival. If the body is still warm type design­ers shouldn’t touch it.

That’s when tech­ni­cal prob­lems arose, as if John Downer were not allowed to reveal any more exam­ples of rip-​offs. The carousel of the slide pro­jec­tor he was using for his pre­sen­ta­tion jammed. During an attempt to get it work­ing again, all the slides sud­denly fell out of the carousel, making it vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to get them in order again in the lim­ited time that was left. As a result the end part of his pre­sen­ta­tion was very con­fus­ing, with slides jump­ing from one sub­ject to another and back again. He talked about design­ers in the eight­ies mim­ic­k­ing Zuzana Licko’s bitmap fonts, and rip-​offs inspired by Arial, which itself is a clone of Hel­vetica, thus making those rip-​offs copies of copies.

Downer ended his pre­sen­ta­tion with the (in)famous quote by Fred­eric W. Goudy: “The old fel­lows stole all our best ideas” and touched upon the unau­tho­rized lan­guage exten­sions of pop­u­lar type­faces. His state­ment “Get per­mis­sion!” was a not to be mis­un­der­stood stab at cer­tain Cyril­lic and Greek exten­sions pop­ping up with­out any com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the orig­i­nal designer. Indeed those are a shorter bridge than Arabic or Hebrew lan­guage exten­sions, as many char­ac­ter­is­tics and even com­plete char­ac­ters in Cyril­lic and Greek are (nearly) iden­ti­cal to their Latin counterparts.

Because John Downer mis­un­der­stood the ques­tion I asked him during his pre­sen­ta­tion, I asked again what were his thoughts on type design­ers appro­pri­at­ing not the design but spe­cific fea­tures of pop­u­lar type­faces. I explained that when I orig­i­nally saw the extended lig­a­ture sets of new type designs by Kris Sow­ersby and Dino dos Santos, I was taken aback by the sim­i­lar­ity with the extended lig­a­tures set in the wildly pop­u­lar Mrs Eaves. After over­com­ing my ini­tial shock, I remem­ber won­der­ing if Licko could actu­ally claim intel­lec­tual prop­erty on the con­cept of spe­cific letter com­bi­na­tions as lig­a­tures. Downer’s stance was clear and con­sis­tent with his pre­sen­ta­tion – he was adamant that those design­ers should at least ask per­mis­sion to Licko and acknowl­edge her as being the orig­i­na­tor of this spe­cific feature.

More ATypI’08
ATypI’08 | The Old and The New
ATypI’08 | Nick Shinn Unveils his Scotch Modern

Header image Atten­dance at the Beloselsky-​Belozersky Palace © Ilya Ruderman