i used legato semi-bold recently, knocked out of a dark background at about 7 points. worked well cos of
(a) weight of type
(b) the slightly 'pinched out' outer corners / cupped terminals etc countered background gain
(c) good registration and minimum ink coverage* for the background colour helps

*by this i mean use (eg) C40K100 rather C100M100Y100K100 etc

1200dpi scan of c.7pt

Evert's stuff always look good small. Partly because it tends to be dark, and also because it's curvy. In that "John Kelly" book Avance shines brightest in the captions.

BTW, Jan:
http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/30/54825.html

Also, those sharp corners you mention -very prevalent in the phototype era- are called thorns. At least by me. :-)

hhp

Hrant, I was aeare of that thread - It may even have inspired me to start this thread...
Do you have any suggestion on typefaces with thorns

Actual thorns are quite rare, although you could say many fonts -like Optima- have "pseudothorns".

If I remember correctly one of Nick Shinn's fonts has real thorns.

hhp

Hrant, do you refer to Shinn's "Brown Gothic" ?
Oh, I wish the bold weight was for sale separately.

The horizontal strokes look a bit weak, thou.

Yes, Brown's stuff is definitely thorns.

hhp

BTW, I once printed Eras Demi in really small size and it turned out surprisingly well due to the variation in stroke width. I can't remember what size it was, I'd guess it was about 5 or 6pt.

Too bad Eras is...um...err...Eras.

Check out Stone's new Magma, which includes a slightly darker version of each weight for the purpose of using in reversed situations.

OK, here's the best example of real thorns that I know of, from an article about GGL in Baseline issue #18:



It's the top-left of a UC "R".
Check out the trap on the inside too.

hhp

do traps & thorns that small really make a lickin' difference?

Cow's lick or lizard's lick?
I guess it's like anything else in type design: how much do details and good craft matter? It depends. But it's not surprising that a designer as picky as GGL used them; and what's notable is that -I believe- GGL wouldn't have put them in if they weren't necessary; he was a production guy more than an artiste.

hhp

Sorry, who is GGL? I think I know, but shall refrain from a possible embarrassing mis-nomer.

I ask whether they make a difference 'cos there is something in the Dutch Type book (got yours yet? bloody magic book innit!) about Mr Majoor trialling them for Telefont, but leaving them off as they were deemed unnecessary. I would love to see the trial versions, or two lots of type with and without them to compare.

Of nothing more than passing, historical (if any) interest: when studying the design of type at San Jose State in the late seventies, we were taught that those design elements (in this thread called thorns and ink traps) were included to make the type look better; to make the corners of characters appear crisper/sharper than they would appear without them. At that time, if they were published at all, they would have been, I believe, delivered as photostats for use as part of a mechanical or in film for photocomposition. Even if they were not called

Kris, GGL = Günter Gerhard Lange

Telefont is a pet peeve of mine. It should have had traps, and claiming otherwise either hides something (like what I've heard post-facto about the deadline simply being too tight) or demotes craft.

Furthermore, I think chirographers tend to have an aversion to traps, since they violate the moving front. Not to mention an aversion to [proper] optical scaling. There's a reason the scale axis is missing from G Noordzij's cube.

hhp

Thorns were specifically a phototype phenomenon: a correction to the softening of corners that occured in the photographic process. The context in which Lange employed thorns was Berthold's very highly regarded phototype system. I'm not aware of anything like thorns being employed before phototype, and very seldom since; whereas traps (or reverse thorns, if you like) have been employed in metal, photo and digital type.

Ink traps are very useful for small print, especially on newsprint. The most well-known example is probably Matthew Carter's Bell Centennial.

But I don't know much about thorns.

John do you believe that "thorns" are just a carry over and should have been abandoned with the switch to digital? Or do you believe they are just as useful as traps?

Printing negative type isn't simply about the typeface. What kind of printing process are you using? What kind of paper? what kind of black? how many lines per inch? and so forth.

What thorns do is very different from what traps do. I've not found thorns of use in digital type, but then I -- like most of our colleagues -- are making type for use in a wide range of reproduction technologies. Thorns may be useful in some specific printing processes; I don't know. But the likelihood of their being visible -- not what you want -- in other processes seems too great to recommend them as a general feature.

All photo and mechanical processes distort letterforms to some degree, even from digital type. So when you go from file to film to plate, or direct to plate, you can see the affect of these processes if you look closely enough. But two things need to be kept in mind. The first is that the different processes and the variables in the individual process make it very difficult to predict what might happen to a letterform; so most digital type design is process-independent; i.e. it tries to provide the best result possible across a wide range of output and reproduction processes. If you know the specific processes that a typeface will go through, it is much easier to optimise the design for those processes. Which leads to the second thing to keep in mind when considering thorns: the rounding of corners in phototypesetting systems was much more pronounced than the impact of digital imagesetter or other output device, so the need for specific correction was much greater. Because individual companies manufactured their own machinery and processes, they could tailor such corrections very specifically to these devices. So I would expect that thorns on Berthold phototypes might differ from thorns on the types of other manufacturers. In the device-independent digital font world, we've largely had to give up that level of control, since we can't anticipate the machines on which fonts will be used or processes to which they will be subjected.

That makes sense.

Thank you, I am less ignorant now.

I don't know how "different" thorns are from traps, but it does seem that the latter tend to be more visible, so they need to be applied more gently.

One thing though: when you print in reverse, things flip around! :-) So in superfamilies with special negative weights for example I can see thorns gaining more relevance - especially if they happen to have traps in the positives.

hhp