I believe the influence is indirect, through old style roman type faces also called ’humanistic’.

James, I will be interested to hear what you learn and how your thinking evolves. Without knowing anything about it at all, I have never been comfortable with the idea that Underground developed from calligraphy. It doesn’t look like a calligraphic typeface to me — does it look like Flora to you? Just because the caps are proportioned less rigidly than in conventional grotesques does not somehow endow this typeface with calligraphic value. Johnston was a great calligrapher. So what? I think the sources are more likely to be found more widely in art nouveau and art deco.

I also object to the idea that calligraphy is, necessarily, in and of itself, a desirable influence on type.

And finally I am uncomfortable with the designation ’humanist’. This is a warm, fuzzy word that implies that there is something ’human’ rather than machine-like about a type. You constantly read, in font PR, about ’warm, humanist touches’ in this that or the other typeface. OK to have PR, but let’s not fall into the trap of believing it.

The word itself was developed to contrast not with the machine but with the divine, and the OED, as yet, has not recognized the use of the word in typography. (OED3 draft)

In my sometime role as reader for the OED, I will be sending my editor there a note on this because like it or not, the word has been used extensively in writing about type. Any help identifying sources for the earliest quotations using the word in its typographic sense would be greatly appreciated.

In this thread: http://www.typophile.com/node/35213

there is a fair share of nonsense. When Updike, a tremendously careful writer who would never introduce a novel term without defining it, spoke of humanist influences, he will have been using the word properly, something like ’the system of the Humanists, the study of the Roman and Greek classics which came into vogue at the Renascence’ or ’Pertaining to or characteristic of the humanists or classical scholars of the Renascence; classical.’

It’s not always easy to know what people meant when they said it.

And type people, the divine Bringhurst not excepted, have taken too many unnecessary liberties with the language in late years.

It would be great if you could separate some of the wheat from some of the chaff. Stone has really been studying this topic. I would contact him directly.

I think I know what happened to ’humanist’ in type. Someone, too clever by half (maybe Updike?) used the term humanist to refer vaguely to Renaissance-style proportioning of letters. The usage was picked up by someone who was at a loss to describe the Johnston sans serif caps. Others, not so clever, picked up on it, or, on the other hand, spotting a great potential PR manoeuver, said, what the hell, let’s go with it, even if it is daffy. It works! (and it does)

The thing is, when you use the word ’humanist’ today, to people who don’t know that all it really means is ’not Godly’, it has enormous cachet, enormous allure.

But I am firmly of the opinion that the first thing we should do in talking about type is to reject cute neologisms. Just because one has thought of them or found them clever doesn’t mean they are good enough to be used in our discourse. I am so glad that I haven’t heard Bringhurst’s ’bicameral’ lately, but maybe I haven’t been reading Typophile enough. Or is his influence on the wane? A fabulous book, but ... trust the language. I don’t like special vocabulary in philosophy any more than I like it in type, or in any field. Plain English is good enough for me!

For what it’s worth, on humanism, see

http://vlib.iue.it/carrie/texts/carrie_books/gilbert/05.html

which brings me closer to the idea that humanist in typographic usage is simply an unnecessary synonym for Aldine.

’With the invention of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century, it became possible to turn out in large quantities texts of classical writings. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the great bulk of all known classical literature, both Greek and Roman, came from the press. Although printing was not an Italian invention, most of the first editions of the classics were printed in Italy until about the time of the Sack of Rome. The greatest of the early Italian printers was Aldo Manuzio of Venice ....

humanist in type really does seem inseparable from Aldine.

But I thought Morison et al. did a lot of work to show that why what Aldus and his lot did was so great was that it _rejected_ the calligraphic in favour of the purely _typographical_. So we go back to the earliest cap inscriptions . . . . which are not calligraphic.

The upper case is originally derived from painted and inscribed letters, according to the recent account of Sumner Stone. The reflects the views of other historians, which he references. The origin of the Carolingian minuscule is undoubtedly calligraphic or chirographic, pen-driven. However, in the 15th century it was modified to make it less calligraphic, influenced by the Imperial capitals, and I think Jenson and Griffo made it less pen drawn in ways that made roman type more even in color and readable.

This makes sans in turn influenced by Jenson and Griffo’s proportions only remotely derived from the pen. Still, the pen is an important “underlying force” (as van Krimpen put it) in the letter shapes. At least that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it :)

James,

I think your terms may need a massage. I suspect that you’d get several very different answers from Frutiger, Meier, Zapf, Johnston and Stone regarding the specific models that influenced their typefaces. Specifically we know it was stone inscriptional lettering Zapf built Optima on, And I think Meier has referred to renaissance typefaces in discussing Syntax. Frutiger I very much doubt was looking at anything scribal. At the time, Frutiger was a very unusual hybrid of type forms. I actually think none of your examples are very closely related to anything scribal, they are probably all more related to other types. I especially think “handwriting” is not an appropriate term if you are trying to trace influences in these specific types.

“Humanist sans” probably is meant to suggest that the structure follows the Aldine, renaissance, or whatever you want to call those classic proportions. But I think it’s generally true that the references are to typefaces, not necessarily writing or calligraphy.

the idea that humanist in typographic usage is simply an unnecessary synonym for Aldine.

An early and influential use of “humanist” for seriffed types is the Vox classification, in which, it seems to me, the term is used (invented?) precisely to distinguish Jenson-like types from Aldine ones (named “garaldes” in his scheme).

James - I’ve been researching the question of how the concept of the “humanist sans” developed (thus my initiation of the earlier thread cited above). Still a work very much in progress but if you’re interested in seeing some of what I’ve written, shoot me an email.

Thanks, all. I did find a money quote from Stone that appeared in an issue of Font reviewed by John D. Berry:

“Unlike serifed forms,” he says, “where the inscribed lettering of Imperial Rome has served as a model during the Renaissance and into modern times, there is no canonical sans serif letter. The problem of creating one is similar to the problem faced by Virgil in creating a mythological history for Rome.”

Keith Tam wrote an essay called
’Calligraphic Tendencies in the Development
of Sanserif Types in the Twentieth Century’

You can read it at Mark Jamra’s typeculture website
http://www.typeculture.com/academic_resource/articles_essays/

I think the word ‘humanist’ in this context means: ‘similar to the writing of italian humanists like Poggio Bracciolini etc.’

So you can think at humanist sans-serif as a humanist hand without contrast. I have the little book of Ann Camp ‘Pen Lettering‘ where in the first chapter ‘The Alphabet in Skeleton Form’ the first excercises are made with a soft pencil: the result is an alphabet similar to Gill Sans, without contrast and with the proportions of the ‘Roman Hand’ (after that stage you must construct a double pencil to see the effects of the pen).

>So you can think at humanist sans-serif as a humanist hand without contrast.<

Don’t you mean by humanist — i.e., Aldine — type?

Humanist sans = sans with Aldine proportions.

Where does the hand come into this?

Can we get rid of this word that seems to confuse everyone?

And please let’s not forget that Monotype created a version of Gill Sans which with something like 8 letters replaced out of 52 - - I forget how many - - made an acceptable clone of Futura. That alone is enough to put a big dent in any claim that Gill Sans is significantly humanist, renaissance, Aldine, anything but what it is, a stylish clone of Johnston. Why do we have to be more serious about it? We’re in constant danger of looking silly when we read too much into Johnston/Gill Sans, etc. See Walter Tracy, Letters of Credit, as I recall, for the quotation and illustration.

Good heavens, everyone wanted to get the hand out of anything to do with Gill. That’s one of the reasons it wasn’t cut by hand as a guide first. It was supposed to look machined. But let’s not forget the humanism applies to the difference of the human and the divine, not the difference between the human and the machine.

It’s not always easy to know what people meant when they said it.

This is true for almost all type terms it seems. Our specialist language is squishy in the extreme.

Actually when I read”humanist” I expect to see a diagonal stress present. Slight or great. An not much more. As in contrast to no stress or a vertical one. That’s all. Maybe that’s the result of the term’s overuse. But still, that’s the ad copy derived sense of the thing I have. I don’t make claims for the oprimacy of this. But I also reject the idea that another definition has primacy either. At least not yet.

I do think that given the squishy nature of the specialist terms you have to accept that unless & until you develop a body of shared terms with another type designer where you know what they mean & they you ( a shared or mutual set of definitions or touch-stones) you will not be able to use the terms all that effectively. It’s a bit sad but - too bad! That’s how it is. This is part of why new terms come burbling up!

Instead of using “humanist” or “humanist form principle” Hans Peter Willberg* has suggested the term “dynamic”. On the other hand he suggested “static” instead of “modern”
For example, Adobe Garamond is classified as a dynamic typeface, Bodoni as a static typeface. Syntax a dynamic Sans-Serif, Helvetica a Sans-Serif with the stylistic feature of a static form principle. I find this quite handy for a first classification.

* a well known typographer in Germany, died in 2003

In the Humanistic sans the pattern of thick and thin — in other words, where on the letterform thicks and thins fall — is typical of what one would gets in writing with a broad pen held at a constant angle.

For dynamic = oldstyle, Aldine, etc.
and static = modern, Didone, etc.

I ask — why? The terms are highly value-laden and the values are outside typography or aesthetics. You could reply that the terms oldstyle and modern are, albeit a few degrees less, also value-laden. So what’s the problem with Aldine and Didone? Except that neither is useful in classifying a sans. Sans serif classification is tough.

I find Peter’s view difficult to accept. There is no sans serif that has anything like the contrast of a broad pen penstroke. The first thing one learns in designing a sans is that there is only so much contrast the vernacular will allow, and it is small.

Robert Slimbach said that Chronos was not a clone of Today Sans Serif because to the extent he drew over Today, he drew over it with a felt pen and then digitized the results. Be that as it may, the two typefaces are remarkably similar. To speak of one as pen-derived and the other as not would be stretching it.

My view is that if a humanist sans has diagonal stress — which it needn’t at all have to enjoy this classification - - it derives its stress from Aldine letters, and only therefore quite indirectly from the pen. I still don’t see how any sans serif comes from the pen, except for those with absolutely calligraphic italics.

By the way, Today Sans was the first sans superfamily, not, as Martin Majoor claims, Scala Sans.

By the way, if there’s something intrinsically humanist about a sans roman, such as, presumably, Frutiger, and you then slant the roman to get the italic, what is it about the slanted version of the italic that is not humanist — except in the mind of a PR guru? At just what degree of slant did it lose its humanity? For, as we know, the only italics that count as humanist are those that are explicitly calligraphic or, in practice, chancery-derived.

There’s another point where the humanist label fails. Strictly speaking, it ought to mean the same thing for an italic and for a roman, yet it doesn’t. Indeed, it ought, probably, to apply either to the hand-derived 15th century italics, OR to the 15th century purely typographic romans, considering that they were not, then, when humanism was actually happening, paired types, but entirely separate types. When you try to use the label for both, it’s particularly difficult to tell what you might be meaning by it.

I don’t know how much use this is, when I look at a sans I focus first on the shape of the o they are based on. The oval o (and narrower n) is more ’humanist’—based on old style serif types. The circular o is ’geometric’, and starts in the 1930s. And the wider, somewhat squared off o is from the 19th century ’grotesque’. This is just a rough starting point, because there is a huge variety of treatments, but still it’s a start.

So William, is this independent of stress? (To the extent stress is detectable?)

Bill: There is no sans serif that has anything like the contrast of a broad pen penstroke.

Look at the cube (see image above). Everything you need to know about the difference between ’grotesque’ and ’humanist’ sans is shown there. What is important to understanding the difference is what happens in the rest of the cube, because the contrast of the actual sans letters is so low that the stroke dynamic isn’t obvious. But once you see the whole picture, you realise that ‘grotesque’ sans correspond to the construction of expansion based stroke letters, while ‘humanist’ sans correspond to the construction of translation based stroke letters. Sans serif letters are, apart from their obvious lack of serifs, typically letters with greatly reduced stroke contrast. But if one takes letters created with a split nib pen (expansion stroke, ‘modern’, ‘didone’, ‘romantic’) and systematically reduces their contrast one ends up with a grotesque sans. If one starts with letters created with a broad nib (translation stroke, ‘humanist’, ‘garalde’, ‘renaissance’) and similarly reduce the contrast one ends up with a humanist sans.

The terminology that we apply to these forms is cultural and, hence, freighted with associations (as you note with regard to ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’). This isn’t a bad thing, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for understanding of letterform construction.

> Everything you need to know about the difference between
> ’grotesque’ and ’humanist’ sans is shown there.

Codswallop.
The most significant thing about that cube is what’s missing.

hhp

when Hans Peter Willberg – like Erich Schulz-Anker in his introduction to Syntax Antiqua – describes tyefaces as static or dynamic he does not refer to varying stroke thickness but to the underlying architecture:

thinking of typefaces in such terms is – at least to me – more useful than tagging labels as Humanist to them.

I thought the cube was there for a joke. I find it unconvincing.

The thing that is wrong with all of these arguments is that the Aldine sans has two parents: secondarily, the Aldine roman, but primarily the Modern sans.

It is the Modern sans which overwhelmingly sets up the possible vernacular of the sans serif. It is what prevents us from having high contrast sanses. They just don’t look right. I’ll try to illustrate later what I mean with some old drawings from a study for Romanee sans. The Aldine sans is not a thing in itself, but a very minor, very subtle variation of the Modern sans.

We could have a true Aldine sans — that would be my claim — only that nobody would want to see it.

Bill, faces with low contrast conceal the differences in their approach to contrast styling by definition, but John is right when he states: “if one takes letters created with a split nib pen (expansion stroke, ‘modern’, ‘didone’, ‘romantic’) and systematically reduces their contrast one ends up with a grotesque sans. If one starts with letters created with a broad nib (translation stroke, ‘humanist’, ‘garalde’, ‘renaissance’) and similarly reduce the contrast one ends up with a humanist sans.” The difference, though subtle, is fundamental and readily perceivable from a contrast-styling point of view.

In the sans serif, history is reversed: the first sans serif typefaces are the grotesques or Modern sans. Bringhurst calls them Realist. Than there is the Geometric Modernist sans which takes the Realist sans and applies geometric rules of construction associated with the perfect circle and the square. Finally the Humanist sans substitutes a pre-Modern (in the Oldstyle / Transitional / Modern sense) contrast styling for the Modernist contrast styling of the traditional or Realist sans in some or all of the letters.

The descriptive protocols for contrast implicit in the cube provide an important handle on gauging formal features.

John, the Noordzij cube is interesting and informative, but I don’t think it is “Everything you need to know about the difference between ’grotesque’ and ’humanist’ sans.”

Here are the lower case bold o’s from Helvetica, Futura, and Myriad. These are usually taken as examples of Grotesque, Geometric, and Humanist, right?

.
Now all of these have vertical stress. There is no evidence of the slanted stress here from the broad-nibbed pen, including in the “humanist” Myriad.

But you do see clearly in the outline the more squared o of the grotesque, the circular geometric, and the more strictly oval interior of Myriad—as I mentioned in my earlier post. And in the regular weight the exterior of Myriad is also a narrower oval, more similar to the interior.

Now overall, I just don’t think it is worth getting very exercised about these classifications because none of them is “right”. They are just more or less helpful in different circumstances, and in shedding light on different aspects of design. It is the nature of innovation in design to break through neat categories, so I think the categories may be most useful to identify different aspects: stress, proportions, openness of counters, etc. and get an understanding of a design. But one ’right’ classification? No.

I think of humanist sans faces being further towards the “written” rather than the “constructed” pole than other sans types. The aforementioned contrast styling and dynamic letter structure certainly push it that way. I would add that other details do, too.

The 45-degree diagonals in Gill’s Q tail and t top (among other letters) help to evoke the pen, for example. And the u having a stem implies a letter written with two strokes, not plotted out mechanically as in Futura.

Perhaps it is a measure of the success of humanist sans faces’ implication of “writtenness” that this thread started with the assumption that there is a written hand at their roots.

“I’m looking for more information on the roots of Johnston’s Underground, Frutiger, Syntax, etc. “

on Syntax there is Erich Schulz-Anker’s “Formanalyse und Dokumentation einer serifenlosen Linearschrift auf neuer Basis: Syntax Antiqua”, a 20pp-brochure published by D. Stempel AG in 1969. as the title suggests, it’s in German.
in Fine Print on Type there is an article by Sumner Stone, “Hans Eduard Meier’s Syntax Antiqua”.

To Bill Berkson: o is the least informative letter shape, and it is also the one in which axis is most likely to tend toward the vertical even in some typefaces with a slanted ductus. But slant is irrelevant to the contrast issue, since expansion model strokes can also be written at a slant (this is one of the characteristics of the Gabriola typeface that I showed at TypeCon): it just happens that they were not during the neo-classical and romantic periods in which they flourished and influenced typography.

***

To Bill Troop: you’ll have to elaborate on what you find ’unconvincing’ about the cube. It is a demonstration of visual relationships between shapes of greater and lesser contrast; as such, it enables you to ’see’ the contrast patterns inherent in shapes with low contrast. But you can also do it yourself: start with a high contrast letter and systematically reduce the contrast to see what you come up with. If you start with a renaissance-style humanist minuscule, such as Arno Pro, you end up, not surprisingly, with a ’humanist sans’.

It has been a while since I read Johnston’s account of the design of the London Transport letters, but I believe this was basically his approach: to start with a mental model of humanist letters and to reduce their contrast to produce a new style of sans serif.

The Aldine sans is not a thing in itself, but a very minor, very subtle variation of the Modern sans.

The post-romantic or ’modern’ sans popularised the style, most importantly by demonstrating how lowercase letters could convincingly be made, which earlier experiments in sans serif lettering had not managed. But I disagree that the ’humanist’ sans is a variation per se of the post-romantic letter. It has a different underlying architecture. To some extent, the reason for that difference is moot, but the stroke contrast model allows one to say some meaningful things about the letterforms that vague historical or self-referential labels do not.

Oh, and this is something I really love, to which not one single talking-head in the Helvetica movie drew attention. The shape of the Helvetica lowercase a, which is one of the most distinctive characteristics of the whole typeface, is pure Didot expansion stroke.

Even the dynamic of the top arch, the way it sags slightly on the right, is identical.

So could you draw a truly monoline letter (that is, one that had not low contrast but rather no contrast) that read as “humanist”?

John, you’re right that the o can be vertical when others are slanted stress. And that it’s less informative—but look at how different they are, and how this ’DNA’ propogates through the design!

But my point was that Gerald proportions and shapes are also different, and these are reflected in ’humanist’ designs.

I would guess that you can find designs that have very little contrast, and vertical stress, but humanist proportions. Or larger contrast and Didone proportions. Or slanted stress and didone proportions etc.

The point is that the ’humanist’ faces relate somehow to the gerald serif style, but may do so in different ways. My argument is that looking at several different factors—proportion, contrast, stress, etc., is more informative than labeling one ’humanist’.

John, the illustration for the a is marvellous. My problem is that my mindset was pretty much set by Tracy’s retelling of the turn-Gill-into-Futura story. As all my books are in America, could you possibly look that up and tell us which characters had to be replaced?

I’m less convinced by your e illustration. Those little dings that Robert likes to have poking out of his e’s always put me in mind of a flasher in a raincoat.

Bill [B]: is Gerald a typo? The actual Vox designation is Garalde — combining the Gar of Garamond and the ald of aldine. This compares with Didone, which combines Didot and Bodoni.

Bill [T]: in Bringhurst’s section on unserifed faces in The Elements of Typographic Style the single most convincing example of a humanist sans in the sense that John and I have been putting forward — a sans based on translation — is Volkler Küster’s 1988 Today. See the lowercase “o” and “e” for intstances of a clearly humanist axis. The humanist — translation derived — axis is consistent throughout the lowercase.

Bringhursts calls this neo-humanist.

It has been a while since I read Johnston’s account of the design of the London Transport letters…

John, do you happen to remember what that account has been republished in?

Peter, please do not bring up Today Sans Serif again! I was the first and only person to write an article about it, and I was the one who tried to persuade Adobe to license it around 1996. As Fred Brady, the director of the type department at that time said, ’If you like Today, you’re going to love Cronos.’ (Search Google for the grotty details, some of which emerged on Typophile.)

Today remains a special case — the world’s first sans superfamily (in spite of Martin Majoor’s insolent claim to the contrary). If you look at the wonderful books that Scangraphic published to announce Today, you will see that Küster very definitely was working with the forms of the Bembo typeface which he loved and had spent much loving time redigitizing for Scangraphic.

I would argue, however, that Küster’s goal was to put as much of Bembo as he could into a sans serif whilst remaining within the vernacular parameters established by the 19th century gothics. These parameters are strict in my view, applying to many specific shapes, contrast, stroke weight, x-height, and more.

However, it would be best to get his own, or Albert-Jan Pool’s input on this. Last I heard, Albert-Jan was on vacation, so he might not be available for comment just now.

An even more extraordinary adventure to the extreme of what is possible with the fixed vernacular we have been handed down from the 19th century is Unger’s magnificent typeface Argo.

Küster looked at Bembo; Unger looked at Electra and Swift, which is his contemplation of Electra. (This is not strictly my view; it is Unger’s view which I have direct from him; Carl Crossgrove, my duenna, has been seeking confirmation from Interpol; we hourly await his results.) None of these people seem to have been interested in nibs, broad-based or otherwise, or any of these other far-fetched rationalizations. And Frutiger, as Nick Shinn has helped me to understand, is an absolutely unique event in type that really does represent an original break with the past.

One of the problems with this thread is that everybody is trying to discover things about typefaces without asking the people who designed them what was going on in their heads at the time. Since so many of the decisive players are still around, why not give them a call?

Mea culpa! I find that I am guilty of recklessly using the term humanist in my articles on Today Sans (1997) and Argo. However, at least I defined the term as I was using it.

’ ... sans serifs based on humanist models—an important concept which means that the letter-forms are based on the proportions that grow out of Italian Renaissance typefaces like Bembo.’

Bad, but at least it’s there.

Here’s what I quoted from Albert-Jan’s lyrical article in Norton’s Types Best Remembered/Forgotten (with permission, my duenna):

It disobeyed all of the rules that I had thought to be appropriate for such a sans serif design. It looked so irregular, with each character featuring its own peculiarities. To my eyes it was sparkling with detail in all of its elements. It was one big idiosyncrasy. I showed Volker my design and told him that I was striving for evenness and harmony by repeating as many forms as possible. Volker explained to me that he was doing exactly the opposite in order to achieve the same goal. This was how I started to get a visual grip on the interaction of readability and legibility, and this is why for me Today Sans Serif is best to be remembered.

It’s interesting that Albert-Jan mentions readability and legibility here . . . . . and highlights idiosyncrasy. In his article as printed in Norton, there are some interesting bits about Frutiger but I don’t have the book with me.

Today remains a special case — the world’s first sans superfamily (in spite of Martin Majoor’s insolent claim to the contrary).

Bill, you said that twice now; you’ve made your point but I don’t think it’s a very good one. I don’t think Martin ever claimed Scala Sans to be a “superfamily”. Although, as far as I know, the term has not yet been precisely defined, it was coined to describe multi-style families that have compatible sans serif and serif versions, and often a third style such as the semi-serif (TheMix) in Thesis or the slab serif (confusingly called Nexus Mix) in Martin’s latest superfamily Nexus. Today Sans was never a superfamily, because it was always only a Sans; unless you want to claim the term to have the meaning you choose it to have, of course.
As for the uniqueness of your article: you mention Albert-Jan Pool — he wrote about Today Sans in Types Best Remembered, doesn’t that count?

Hello, Jan, here:

http://www.typotheque.com/articles/interview_martin_majoor.html

Majoor states,

’I get my inspiration from certain (and sometimes very old) traditions in type design, but at the same time I am ‘inspired’ by the possibilities and speed of today’s software. Small capitals come from an old tradition, but designing something like Scala Sans Italic Caps was not done before. Old style figures have an even longer tradition, but making them for a sans serif (like in Scala Sans and in Seria Sans) was only done before by Paul Renner for his Futura.’

Neither of these statements is true. Small caps and italic small caps were in Today and so of course were OSF. It’s practically inconceivable that Majoor (or Bilak) was unaware of Today Sans at the time this interview was published, and in the meantime, it has been up on the web for years without correction. Today included every possible typographical feature and refinement, including two optical sizes and of course inktraps in the text size.

>As for the uniqueness of your article: Albert-Jan Pool wrote lovingly about Today Sans in Types Best Remembered.

Yes, Jan, that’s why I said it was a quotation. It was Albert-Jan who provided me with the Scangraphic books and all the background information; he also reviewed the article closely. What is your interest in uniqueness per se here? It was a 1200 page article with 120 given over to Albert-Jan — more or less. I’m certainly not claiming it as serious writing about type. It was for a Desktop Publishing magazine and was designed to get people to buy Today Sans. I was not writing for type designers, who don’t as a rule buy much type. I once encouraged Carol Twombl(e?)y to buy Miller, and I think she did, but that’s exceptional.

(I wonder if Majoor is ever going to fix those single quotation mark kerns?)

Mea culpa again, but I introduce a quote from my embarrassing article on Argo, because it raises the issue that a humanist typeface (how can Argo not be humanist?) is not necessarily based — at all — on renaissance letterforms - - thus making nonsense of the terminology yet again:

Virtually all previous humanist sans serifs are based on the letterforms of classic Renaissance typefaces like Bembo and Garamond. Not so Argo. Unger is a great admirer of the American designer W.A. Dwiggins (____-____), whose text typefaces Caledonia and Electra were amongst the most widely used and highly esteemed in American publishing from the 1930s up until the 1960s. Neither typeface made a particularly convincing transition into either photo or digital type—they remain at their best in good metal settings. That is perhaps the main reason why they are no longer so popular. Unger has utilized some of the best of Dwiggins’s ideas, and successfully applied them to digital type. With Argo, Unger decided, essentially, to make a sans serif out of Electra. The result is fascinating.

I may have mentioned this before, but it seems pertinent to repeat.
When I designed Shinn Sans in the early 1980s, it seemed to me that most available sans serif faces were not very chirographic.
At the time, that wasn’t the term I would have used, and I can’t recall whether I was aware of the term “humanist” either.
But I had been practising calligraphy, and it seemed to me that it would be interesting to take some of the chirographic features I had noticed in one or two faces—in particular some of the Gill characters such as “a” of course, and go a bit further in that direction.
I was influenced by Bernhard Gothic, very much aware in my studies of type history that this was the anti-Futura, with much less severe and reductive geometry. Kabel, Metro and Syntax, for some reason, were not influences.

Perhaps it comes down to intuitive responses, and personal circumstances. I felt an affinity to the Bernhard shapes, had been doing a lot of calligraphy, and at the time developing my first sans serif along similar lines seemed like a reasonably unusual, and therefore worthwhile pursuit.

Lots of interesting stuff in that face. What I like is that it’s one of those faces where you do a lot of things you would never do when you knew better. On another plane, that’s what van Krimpen did with Lutetia. We’re now all so incredibly sophisticated about type that it’s easy to poke holes in a typeface like this - - but I must say I like it, and it’s undeniable that it works for its purpose - - which is what a typeface is supposed to do.

Jan - - this Q/A (Bilak/Majoor) occurs in that same link:

Q Seria is obviously based on the skeleton of Scala, have you considered making this connection more pronounced by naming it for example ‘Scala Literary’, or do you want people to think of it as a completely different font?

A First of all: Seria is not based on the skeleton of Scala, most characters were drawn from scratch. Secondly Seria is a completely different font. Look a little bit closer and you will wonder why you asked me this question in the first place. Asking a question like this to Gerard Unger would make more sense, it must be said that most of Unger’s typefaces are derived from each other, changing the forms slightly and replacing the form of the serifs. I don’t believe in this way of designing a typeface, maybe in the same way as I don’t believe in attaching serifs to a sans.

What is that remark, if not insolent, considering that Unger’s designs are overwhelmingly the most successful Dutch typefaces of the 20th/21st centuries? He’s dissing him completely!

Craig Eliason: So could you draw a truly monoline letter (that is, one that had not low contrast but rather no contrast) that read as “humanist”?

Yes, because what would be retained and would give the letter its ’humanist’ character would be the proportion and shape.

Which leads nicely to Bill Berkson’s comment: But my point was that [Garalde] proportions and shapes are also different, and these are reflected in ’humanist’ designs.

But what is the origin of those proportions and shapes? It is the translation stroke contrast of the renaissance formal manuscript bookhand. This of course is parachirographically interpreted by punchcutters, is translated into a new medium, but the most distinctive characteristic of these shapes — when contrasted with those derived from the expansion stroke contrast of the romantic period — is their open forms, which are evident in both manuscript hand and type. The relatively closed forms of the romantic and post-romantic types (Didot, Bodoni, Walbaum, the various Scotch Romans) — which is translated into post-romantic sans serif types — are interesting because they are not determined by the split nib, but they are enabled by it and they become a primary characteristic of the late 18th and 19th century styles, again in both formal writing and in type.

So I’m basically in agreement with you, Bill, about the contribution of the shape and proportion of humanist serif letters to the character of ’humanist’ sans, but want to draw attention to where those shapes and proportions came from.

The proof of the pudding is in trying to write a Scotch Roman letter such as a lowercase e with a broad nib pen and a fixed translation stroke (a really skilled calligrapher could fake it reasonably well with some rotation and/or a nasta’liq lift). The lower right terminal will always end up heavy instead of the characteristic hairline of the Scotch type, which is only possible in the expansion stroke model. To avoid this heaviness with a translation stroke, you have to avoid closing the shape, hence the open forms of the humanist bookhand, which become the open forms of the renaissance typefaces, and then become the open forms of the ’humanist’ sans serif types.

James, if I recall correctly, the development of Johnston’s London Transport type is well recounted in the biography written by his daughter, Piscilla Johnston. But it is a long time since I read it.

Bill, after citing Majoor’s “it must be said that most of Unger’s typefaces are derived from each other”, you write:
What is that remark, if not insolent, considering that Unger’s designs are overwhelmingly the most successful Dutch typefaces of the 20th/21st centuries? He’s dissing him completely!

The fact that Unger’s typefaces are successful does not render Majoor’s description wrong, nor does it forbid criticism. If Majoor does not like the way Unger designs, he is free to say so. Other people may not like Majoor’s method of constructing letters. Different designers, different approaches, different opinions.

You write (in order of appearance):
you will see that Küster very definitely was working with the forms of the Bembo typeface [...] I would argue, however, that Küster’s goal was to put as much of Bembo as he could into a sans serif [...] Küster looked at Bembo

Do you refer to images given in the Scangraphic specimen (showing Bembo, Today and Gill Sans)? These are for comparison, to locate the style of Today, in relation to renaissance antiqua, as represented by Bembo, and to Gill Sans. The caption points out that renaissance antiqua and Today share a stroke contrast as created by writing with a broad nib pen, while Gill Sans is constructed. Küster is a very good writer, he does not need an existing typeface to create a new one, as your suggest.

The other part of one of the above remarks is obviously wrong:
I would argue, however, that Küster’s goal was to put as much of Bembo as he could into a sans serif whilst remaining within the vernacular parameters established by the 19th century gothics. These parameters are strict in my view, applying to many specific shapes, contrast, stroke weight, x-height, and more.

I cannot find the “whilst” part reflected in Today. It is antiqua in sans clothes, this means: it does have antiqua shapes, contrast (though low in the upright weights), x-height, and what’s more important: proportions. No vernacular parameters.

Karsten, you’ll discover what the vernacular parameters are if, as all of us have done, you take the serifs off a face like Bembo (or better yet, something like Romanee, which is lower in contrast), and realize that the typeface is completely unusable.

Relatively high x-height is one of the crucial components of the sans vernacular I am talking about (one of the reasons why Futura is not much used for text today is that the high-x-height versions, designed for text setting in metal, have never been digitized). Other parameters are low contrast and absence of stress.

Here are some ghastly examples of experimental work I did in 1993 and then abandoned after a day or two because it seemed clear that the literal approach I was testing was never going to work. With apologies (not least for no fitting!) and also with the idea that such mistakes are often the best way to learn:

and

>But what is the origin of those proportions and shapes?

John, I grant you that the shapes are influenced by the broad pen. But I suspect that the narrower widths (compared to Didone) and the proportions of the Carolingian miniscule are not dictated by the pen, but other factors. One is economy—fitting more text on a page, and the other is readability.

I acknowledge that this is one of my pet theories—that faces are based on the oval rather than circle are inherently more readable—but I do think it is a factor.

I don’t see why the broad pen dictates the narrower letter forms. I think they could have done wider if they wanted to.

I am guessing that with the Didone style, these shapes are more dominated by aesthetic considerations, rather than originally being derived from writing of extended text. That is, most written text in this period was written in cursive, and hand writing and lettering in roman was really more for display. The Didone forms are unquestionably very elegant, but in many versions I and many others have felt that they are less readable for text.

...inherently more readable...

That wasn’t what Didot et al were thinking.
Here’s what Austin had to say in 1819 about the coming of the modern (didone):

“The modern ... printing type at present in use was introduced by the French, about twenty years ago: the old shaped letters being capable of some improvement, it was judged expedient to re-model the alphabet to render them more agreeable to the improved state of printing…”

So, new, high-tech printing made the old-style unpalatable.
Those were revolutionary times. How quaint, irrelevant, and unreadable the old style must have seemed, and even a few words would have tormented the reader with the burden of centuries.

’This of course is parachirographically interpreted by punchcutters’ ...

Of course.

Does mean we need a paragnost onboard, a ’person credited with paranormal powers of obtaining knowledge’ such as the meaning of newly invented words?

Not to mention what is being practised here,

chirognomy, ’the alleged art or science of estimating character by inspection of the hand’,

this alleged art or science to be performed by regulated chirosophers (’learned in the subject of the hand’), or even chirosophists (who practice sleight-of-hand), resulting in the last extreme, in chiromachy (hand-to-hand combat), an ancestral art of the flame.

I haven’t invented any of these words.

I guess metachirography sounds too much like a certain typeface...

Nick, I completely agree that what the Didots were doing had everything to do with improved printing (hairlines being possible in mass printing) and very little to do with anything else. It’s notable that for the Didots, everything had to be high contrast, whilst for Walbaum and to a lesser extent for Prillwitz, display sizes of type could have dazzling contrast but text sizes must have considerably lower contrast. ’What attracts attention immediately and only for a few moments’ vs ’What can comfortably be read over a period of hours’ — both embodied in metal Walbaum, and digitally in the difference between Berthold’s Walbaum Standard (text) and the inaptly named Walbaum Book (display).

This happens over an incredibly short time; Vafflard’s transitional premiere maniere type comes into use about 1783 (transitional according to Updike; Aldine according to Unger) (www.typophile.com/node/47453 for examples and a cite to Unger); by 1789, the Didots already have fully developed their ideas about modern type. So all it takes is six years. (Also see Veyrin, cited probably by Unger.)

I don’t believe this has got anything to do with chirography, but perhaps I am too influenced by early writers such as Morison and Updike. Nor should I really be speaking since I really don’t know anything about it. But Hudson once admired my hand, the g in particular, and I have been dreadfully conceited ever since. It’s all his fault!

If parachirography is, more or less, ’along parallel lines with the scribal’ then metachirography, the permutation of the scribal into type, could perfectly describe what was happening in late 15th century Italy, the bartering of script for the genuinely typographical.

The term parachirographic was introduced by Peter Enneson — on the ATypI member discussion list I believe — to qualify the relationship of type design to writing and to get beyond notions of ’chirographic type design’ (I had already rejected ’calligraphic’ as an adjective since calligraphy implies writing as art not as text). I believe that almost all type design is parachirographic in one way or another — which is not to say that it must be so —, while very little type design is purely chirographic (implying direct reproduction in type of handwritten forms). In parachirographic type design, the structure and characteristics of written forms, as derived from gesture and tool, are referenced but are modified by the designer to achieve either stylistic or technical goals (adapting shapes for size-specific designs is an obvious example). I’ve found it a useful term if one wants to be reasonably precise in characterising different design processes.

Bill: Relatively high x-height is one of the crucial components of the sans vernacular I am talking about .... Other parameters are low contrast and absence of stress.

The ’absence of stress’ is a function of low contrast; in fact, there are few designs with a complete absence of stress, since there are few designs with a complete lack of contrast. As soon as you have any contrast at all, you introduce stress, however minimal or even optically unapparent. Why are almost all sans serif types low contrast? I think basically because that’s the only way you can make stable letters with straight, serifless stems. Once the serifs are gone, the thin stems become unstable, they either need to be flared as in Optima, or they need to be made heavier. If you make them heavier, you start to close up the inside of the letter, so you compensate by making the thick stems lighter, and hey presto you have a low contrast letter.

The x-height issue is an interesting one. I think it is worth noting that, prior to the revival of renaissance type styles in the 20th century, x-heights had, on average, been getting larger for a period of 250 years. After Garamond, they could hardly have gotten smaller! By the time Scotch Roman and ’Egyptian’ types develop in the 19th century, their x-height is pretty large, so there is a direct precursor in serif type to the large x-height of the post-romantic sans. There is also a practical consideration that arises in the Egyptian slab serif style and which applies also to sans: once you start increasing the weight of thin strokes to reduce overall contrast, you need to make room for them vertically. This is especially the case for letters like a and e, in which the only way to keep the counters open as the stroke weight is increased is to make them taller. Although ’humanist’ letterforms are typically more open, they are also subject to this condition when their stroke contrast is reduced, and so they share a similarly large x-height in their sans guise.

This is a pocket book printed by the Didots in 1800, by stereotype.
The text is 10 on 12, and the stock is a very creamy-coloured laid paper.
While there have always been typographers who have played up the sparkle of the didone style, and that is certainly the 20th century meme, it’s not the impression one gets from reading this—although the quality of typography is nonetheless sharp and precise.
What is most striking is the exquisite mise en page. It’s very hard not to be captivated by just how perfect everything about the book is. That first line of text breaks so perfectly...de rigueur. The attention to detail—everything working together meticulously—holds one’s attention, assures its readability.

The overall effect is pointedly anti-chirographic. The cool, understated neo-classicism of the layout has the quality of ancient Roman lapidary inscriptions. At the same time, the neatness of the type’s impression has the quality of high-tech engineering, not the pen. One finds the same fusion of ancient and modern in the origins of the sans serif, contemporary, so it would appear to be a driving force.

When the pendulum swung the other way later in the 19th century, the context was a Morrisonian disgust with industrialism. No humanist sans serif just then, as the sans genre itself was too tainted by its association with the modern world. When modernism became acceptable again, c.1930, there was really no call for an organic, chirographic-looking sans serif, as that rather defeated the purpose of the new modernity. So when did it become acceptable for a sans serif to overtly reference chirography?

Well, I don’t think the pioneering “humanist” faces did that. They were referencing the organic and hand-made, but not necessarily the pen. Although they may have employed forms that are chirographic, that was incidental. Consider Eras. It was originally designed in the 1960s, and has never been touted as a humanist face, as far as I am aware. If anything, the sophistication of its drawing gave it a very sleek and streamlined up-to-date look.

Sorry James, I must echo Bill’s first post, that the “development of sans serif humanist type” is a pretty weak and haphazard concept, prior to the influence of Gerrit Noordzij. Probably originating as a convenient term of categorization for a few odds and ends, rather than anything more purposeful.

Who is James? Is James John?

John, I love your latest post - - ingenious. However, I cling to my position at least as a historical position. It has been better stated largely by Nick. Nick also makes a point I was about to make, ’“development of sans serif humanist type” is a pretty weak and haphazard concept, prior to the influence of Gerrit Noordzij.’

In my words, whatever the merits of my position on past typefaces, I accept that going forward there is a great deal more sophistication in the field and that the rules henceforth could well be different. I propose caution when applying contemporary knowledge, taste, attitudes to historical phenomena.

That leaves us with the question of how to classify Argo. Or even something like Scala. Take the sharply diagonal humps on m and n. Do they remind you of pen strokes? They remind me of the same gesture in one of Monotype’s early metal Century cuts more than anything else. I see the affect as an industrial era, a late Victorian fillip, not as a questing for the pen. I have always loved that mannerism, and longed to employ it somewhere, but who wants to be accused of stealing from Scala, which now effectively ’owns’ the form, however it was arrived at? Also, because I knew the form well before I ever saw Scala, I naturally inferred that it must come from that particular typeface. But it could have come from plenty of other sources, not excluding the pen.