Nick Shinn’s pre­sen­ta­tion at ATypI’08 | The Old and The New was one of the kind I par­tic­u­larly enjoy. He pre­sented his new Scotch Modern design and gave us insight in the research, con­cep­tion and devel­op­ment. I remem­ber sim­i­lar pre­sen­ta­tions at pre­vi­ous con­fer­ences as being high­lights for me – Mario Feli­ciano inves­ti­gat­ing Span­ish types and show­cas­ing his his­tor­i­cally inspired designs, Chris­t­ian Schwartz’s account of the gen­e­sis of the Guardian type­faces, Dino dos Santos trac­ing the his­tory of Por­tuguese cal­lig­ra­phy and dis­play­ing the result­ing type­faces, amongst others.

Nick Shinn in a con­tem­pla­tive mood © Victor Gaultney

Nick Shinn | Scotch Modern, Fact & Fiction

Besides being a pre­sen­ta­tion of his revival of a mid-19th cen­tury type­face, Nick Shinn’s paper also touched upon the his­tory of a genre of types – the Scotch Modern. His inter­pre­ta­tion care­fully bal­ances the demands of authen­tic­ity (his­tor­i­cal and cul­tural) against those of inven­tion (meet­ing the needs of exten­sive Open­Type fea­tures in mul­ti­ple encod­ings – Latin, poly­tonic Greek, Cyril­lic includ­ing Asian).

Nick Shinn’s jour­ney began with the acqui­si­tion of the 23rd Annual Report for the Year 1869 of the New York State Cab­i­net of Nat­ural His­tory. He’d bought the vin­tage book for $45, more for the type­face it was set in than for the beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions. It made him decide to create a fac­sim­ile of the type­face. This is in con­trast with his ear­lier revivals which had been pri­mar­ily con­cep­tual exer­cises – Arte­fact is a post-​ironic exer­cise in ver­ti­cal stress reduc­tion on the Cen­tury model; Beau­fort is an enhanced sans with “leg­i­bil­ity” pro­por­tions based on Times Roman; Bodoni Egypt­ian is a mono­line slab serif ver­sion of the neo-​classical stan­dard; the small-​text work­horse Good­child is Nicholas Jenson’s sem­i­nal type of the 1470s with large x-height and short cap­i­tals; the faux finish of the con­densed Wal­baum revival Wal­burn dis­creetly apes the look of let­ter­press; and World­wide is a type­face in the Cen­tury idiom, designed with present-​day pub­lish­ing in mind.

The tran­si­tion of a let­ter­press orig­i­nal to a dig­i­tal type­face for offset always cre­ates an extra layer of dif­fi­cul­ties. Due to incon­sis­ten­cies in paper and print­ing, the out­lines of the char­ac­ters can often be quite blurry. Having no access to the actual fonts or matri­ces, the designer is left to wonder what the pre­cise shapes were. This means a fair amount of guess­work and inter­pre­ta­tion comes into play. Nick Shinn opted for work­ing from the orig­i­nal book and do live draw­ing, sketch­ing the char­ac­ters directly into Font­Lab. The results were then eval­u­ated by print­ing sample pages and check­ing them against the source material.

Nick Shinn explained the genre’s phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics through a theory of con­tex­tual press gain. Refer­ring to the ques­tion in the title Nick Shinn sit­u­ated where exactly the Scotch Modern style of type­faces orig­i­nated from: Modern or Didone faces – with Bodoni (1800-1910) being the most well-​known exam­ple – and the Scotch faces like Austin-​Foulis (1825), Lino­type Scotch (1903), Cale­do­nia (1940) and FB Scotch (1993). He pro­ceeded to show a couple of Scotch Modern faces in use in Vanity Fair (1935), Esquire (1934), and Woman’s Day (1953), con­clud­ing that con­tex­tual effects inform aes­thet­ics and dura­bil­ity, and rec­og­niz­ing new tech­nol­ogy in fos­ter­ing this new look.

Work on his own Scotch Modern had only started, and soon the audi­ence began to grasp the extent of the work involved. After fin­ish­ing the stan­dard char­ac­ter set in five styles – a Dis­play weight, and a Reg­u­lar and Bold with match­ing ital­ics – Nick started work­ing on the Cyril­lic char­ac­ters. As he didn’t have any ref­er­ence mate­r­ial he designed them by com­par­ing sim­i­lar faces and extrap­o­lat­ing those shapes. After get­ting advice from Maxim Zukhov amongst others, the design evolved and became more authen­tic. Nick found out after­wards that his Cyril­lic was sur­pris­ingly sim­i­lar to type­faces found subsequently.

Design­ing the Greek proved to be more dif­fi­cult. The prob­lem with the plain Didot Greek types is that – although the cap­i­tals cor­re­spond to the inter­na­tional Scotch Modern style – there is no strong model for the low­er­case. The con­trast of letter forms between straight and italic lacks a con­sis­tent scheme, and char­ac­ter count is incon­sis­tent between straight and italic. In Nick Shinn’s Scotch Modern the straight Greek fol­lows the upright pos­ture of the inter­na­tional Scotch Modern, while the italic has the lively Baroque stress of tra­di­tional Greek types.

During the design process Nick Shinn was look­ing for con­sis­tency in style but dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between scripts. At some point he was con­fronted with the phe­nom­e­non of glyph pro­lif­er­a­tion. Because of the many InDe­sign options he didn’t want to look as if there was stuff miss­ing. This meant he kept adding glyphs and fea­tures: ten figure styles; swash cap­i­tals in all three scripts; Latin char­ac­ters for translit­er­a­tion of Arabic and Devana­gari; aes­thetic alter­nates; sym­bols; context-​sensitive dia­crit­ics and punc­tu­a­tion. Nick also incor­po­rated lay­ered styl­is­tic sets in Greek and ortho­graphic alter­nates in Cyril­lic. After having over­whelmed us with the com­plex­ity and com­plete­ness of the char­ac­ter sets for his Scotch Modern, Nick Shinn con­cluded his pre­sen­ta­tion by show­cas­ing the final ele­ment; a uni­case ver­sion that worked through­out the three dif­fer­ent scripts – Latin, Cyril­lic and Greek. This effec­tively reduced the number of char­ac­ters from 160 to a com­pact set of 53 which he dis­played with this beau­ti­ful graphic.

As I wrote in my intro­duc­tion, Nick Shinn’s pre­sen­ta­tion was infor­ma­tive, highly enjoy­able, and grounded in his­tory. It made the audi­ence real­ize what a mam­moth task it can be to design an inter­pre­ta­tion of a his­tor­i­cal type­face and turn it into a fully devel­oped feature-​rich mul­ti­script Open­Type type family. Fur­ther­more the result­ing family of type­faces is gor­geous, more ele­gant than your reg­u­lar Didone, with expan­sive serifs that almost work as con­nec­tors, espe­cially in the ital­ics. Dis­cov­er­ing all the nuances in the design and the many trea­sures to be found in the glyph palette was a true joy.

More ATypI’08
ATypI’08 | The Old and The New
ATypI’08 | Jerry Kelly and John Downer on Type Revivals

Header image: ATypI people way below St. Peters­burg © Titus Nemeth