The fol­low­ing arti­cle was writ­ten for FontShop by David Berlow, founder of Font Bureau.

Cal­i­for­nia mag­a­zine hired Roger Black to pro­pose a redesign in 1987. The tech­nol­ogy of the pub­lish­ing indus­try at the time was pro­pri­etary hard­ware and soft­ware, and was not par­tic­u­larly open to typo­graphic inno­va­tion as we know it today. But with the recent arrival of the Post­Script PDL and Mac-to-Typesetter output, Black believed that custom fonts were pos­si­ble within the time con­straints of the redesign. He con­vinced the client that a unique look and feel, par­tially achieved through typog­ra­phy, would be a valu­able addi­tion to the redesign. Black felt that Fred­eric Goudy’s Cal­i­forn­ian and the bold Claren­dons of the Nebi­olo foundry, hereto­fore unavail­able as dig­i­tal fonts, would give the mag­a­zine that Cal­i­for­nia ambiance with style and “punch.” He found that Carol Twombly of Adobe had exper­i­men­tally dig­i­tized por­tions of Cal­i­forn­ian. But Adobe was busy with the devel­op­ment of other faces so Black received Adobe’s per­mis­sion to con­tinue devel­op­ment of Cal­i­forn­ian on his own. Mean­while, the client agreed on the revival of Cal­i­forn­ian, and also to a bold serif that became Belizio, and a “go ahead” was given for design devel­op­ment of custom type­faces.

The Process

In con­sult­ing Cal­i­for­nia mag­a­zine on their redesign, Roger Black engaged me to become respon­si­ble for the com­ple­tion of the Cal­i­forn­ian family of type­faces. It was agreed to quickly com­plete the type­face for the exclu­sive use of the mag­a­zine for a two year period after which the Font Bureau, my com­pany, owned the rights to the faces. I noted from Roger’s enthu­si­asm that a faith­ful revival of the face and con­cien­cious addi­tion of char­ac­ters and styles was required.

As Goudy proudly never used a straight line in the face, I had to deci­pher and emu­late Goudy’s intent to care­fully blend non-​geometric letter fea­tures into a face. I also needed to let­ter­space accord­ing to hot metal spec­i­mens of Cal­i­forn­ian, and com­plete the roman char­ac­ter set. The seem­ingly erratic though bril­liant italic, and a com­pli­men­tary Bold Roman, were drawn to the same char­ac­ter set as the roman. Black, I and others soon real­ized that many text faces, includ­ing Cal­i­forn­ian, seem “clunky” at sizes over 12 or 14 point. So I drew ver­sions of Roman and Italic designed specif­i­cally for dis­play use.

The Results

To date, the Cal­i­forn­ian family includes Roman, Italic, Bold, Black, and Expert for text, midrange use, and dis­play. The Dis­play ver­sions were designed over the period 1991–1996 to suit par­tic­u­lar client needs, and thus, the Dis­play Italic is reg­u­lar­ized and more steeply angled as com­pared to the Text ver­sion. As men­tioned above, Cal­i­forn­ian is also the first Font Bureau family to include an expert set. This Expert font con­tains old style fig­ures, mon­e­tary signs, math sym­bols, roman small caps and punc­tu­a­tion to match the Roman. The old style fig­ures are sug­gested for use in text, a prac­tice now common after an absence in the early decades of the dig­i­tal era.

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