Typophile - Typeface classification - Comments

It seems worth resurrecting

John Hudson — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:33:51 -0700

It seems worth resurrecting this old discussion to post this Spanish translation of my homage to Jorge Luis Borges, prepared by Miguel Catopodis:

Se atribuye ’a cierta enciclopedia china que se titula Emporio Celestial de conocimientos...’ que las tipografías se dividen en las siguientes categorías:

1. aquellas usadas para componer las palabras del Emperador
2. las que ya no estan disponibles
3. aquellas que son buenas para ’la letra chica’
4. las que has usado la semana pasada
5. aquellas que te recuerdan a tus ex amantes
6. las fabulosas
7. las de formato desconocido
8. aquellas incluidas en la presente clasificación
9. aquellas que has olvidado
10. innumerables
11. aquellas que son demasiado livianas para usar en este trabajo
12. etcétera
13. aquellas en las que la ’g’ simplemente se ve mal
14. aquellas que serán usadas para componer esta lista

timd — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 02:46:46 -0800

Gert Weischer's ff Bodoni Rough - I couldn't find a sample of this, but based on Bodoni Classic for me that would be Modern with a capital M.
BTW I think you meant Wiescher.
But this serves to indicate how difficult it is to make a comprehensive universal classification system when precision is most important, and of course classification changes through time. I would associate Humanist with sans faces like Gill, but in some classification systems would it would refer to serif faces with a sloping bar on the lower case e (aka Venetian).
Tim

Forrest L Norvell — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 11:33:53 -0800

Gah! Paul!

Fine, I was done with this thread anyway. ;)

pablohoney77 — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 06:33:47 -0800

visual communication
just for fun ;^)

Nick Shinn — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 03:59:11 -0800

>description of Barbedor, is meaningful (immediately comprehensible) and precise.

Not really. It could also describe Gert Weischer's ff Bodoni Rough, which is "modern" because it is a Didone, pen-drawn and a "script" because it looks like a drawing, and Roman, of course.

> type design is a field of tiny changes to very familiar forms

That describes the bulk of any area of design -- and ignores the more radical work.

> too much time worrying about provenance

But that is the refinement of connoisseurship, the business of typophiles.

Forrest L Norvell — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 01:33:19 -0800

The only problem I have with systems is when they become ends rather than means. I'm interested by attempts to systematically classify type because those attempts provide me with prepackaged perspectives on what type is, how it is to be used, and how it ought to be designed. There is no system for categorizing knowledge that is ultimately successful in all situations, or else the Library of Congress would be using the Dewey Decimal System. We all have to take in these systems, evaluate them, and make what use of them we can.

I think one of the most important uses of classification schemes is communication. I know very little about type next to a lot of the people on these boards, but I know enough to notice that whenever we try to discuss or compare type designs, we're forced to grasp for terms, to haltingly try to synchronize our differing vocabularies. It would be nice if there were a common jargon we could use that was both precise and ambiguous enough to encompass the rule-based but essentially amorphous creative enterprise of type design. I don't want to be stuck with prescriptive gobbledygook, but it seems to me we can do better than we have. And if we can discuss things with each other more intelligibly, the odds are good we'll be able to think about them more clearly too.

It would be neat to see a wiki built up around Cynthia Dixon's type classification scheme; I think the inhabitants of Typophile could collectively populate one with enough information to be useful relatively quickly. At the same time, any categorization scheme that tries to finally and ultimately nail down the category or type of a typeface (in other words, to completely remove ambiguity) is doomed to failure: again, type design is a field of tiny changes to very familiar forms, and attempting to objectively nail things down is likely to shed more heat than light. We spend too much time worrying about provenance as it is.

pjay — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 00:59:48 -0800

Tim, I think this type of constuctive characterization of type, i.e., your description of Barbedor, is meaningful (immediately comprehensible) and precise.

Who needs desconstuctive gobbelygook?

timd — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 05:58:38 -0800

I would classify Barbedour as modern pen-drawn Roman non-flowing script.

Nick Shinn — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 03:11:57 -0800

>Jonathan Hoefler's "On Classifying Type".

He makes the point that type designers are always trying to create new typefaces to "fill in the gaps". They are also trying to invent new gaps to fill in.

So part of the reason for classification systems to exist (in whatever form, even without words, inside typographer's heads) is to stimulate new type designs, and then to help understand how they fit in with what's gone before.

Regarding the "over" abundance: you can't have a few good new successful designs without a lot that fall by the wayside. (some of which, undeservedly so). The strange thing about digital media is that the warehouse and the museum are the same thing: the stuff that never sells is not melted down and the materials recycled, it remains on the catalog -- hence the gazillions of fonts to confound the neophyte. I once took a face of mine that didn't sell much (and that i didn't particularly like) off the market, and of course, a distributor soon emailed me that a cutomer wanted it.

And you never know what the market will do. One of my earlier faces that has hardly sold for 7 years has recently started to sell regularly. Beaufort, a sans serif with small serifs, one of those "fill in the gaps" ideas, or, as Allan Haley once said (of another typeface) "the answer to a question that no-one asked".

In that case, does the answer provoke the question?
Or was the question coming anyway, but the answer just arrived first?

Forrest L Norvell — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 20:52:40 -0800

Not to prolong everyone's agony needlessly, but the horribly designed, questionably edited, and erratically proofread portmanteau volume that is Steven Heller's Texts on Type has two excellent essays on the classification of type as a theoretical discipline: one of Beatrice Warde's tart, concise essays from The Crystal Goblet, "On the Choice of Typeface", and Jonathan Hoefler's "On Classifying Type". Hoefler covers most of the same ground we've hit in this thread, including a discussion of Cynthia Dixon's work, and Warde's just plain fun to read.

Forrest L Norvell — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:32:37 -0800

Barbedor doesn't really look that much like Lydian (or Stahl, Rudolf Koch's also unjustly-neglected take on calligraphic, humanist sans, which is currently only available via Gerhard Helzel). It looks more like a vertical take on cursive or italic forms, a chancery-influenced semi-serifed script. I agree, it's beautiful.

After reading Catherine Dixon's essay on typeface classification, I'd say the classification scheme she proposes is a concrete implementation of my own more inchoate ramblings. It combines sources (i.e. history) with formal attributes, and explicitly includes the notion of an unbounded list of type "patterns" (e.g. "textura" or "garalde") that are themselves combinations of sources and formal attributes. I personally like this as it reminds me of one of my favorite patterns of object-oriented software development: creation of new objects through the cloning of prototypes.

Raph, to return to mycology for a moment, the problem with DNA-based identification is that genetic analysis is still (and probably always be) an inexact way to discuss the origins and derivation of species. While we can learn a lot about where mushrooms come from by analyzing their genes, things like parallel and convergent evolution make it very difficult to build a comprehensive picture of the history of fungi from their genes alone. DNA will reliably give us the identity of an individual organism, but each step you take way from establishing identity gets you into ever-more-dubious waters.

The analogy to type is clear: especially in this, the High Era of the Humanist Sans, design constraints are going to result in the persistent reinvention and reuse of seemingly distinctive design features, and the intersection of craft and commerce means that people are still going to have to defend themselves from claims of plagiarism and uncredited influence (which are often properly made, but also often not: I honestly think the Today / Cronos kerfuffle of a few years ago is a good example of where this may be undecidable to outside observers).

So yes, most fonts are small, brown, and slimy, and a classification system like Catherine Dixon's is never going to definitively affix a typeface in its proper place in history. It might, however, allow all of us to have a more meaningful conversation about our tools and our craft, which has a lot of value. I'd love to see her scheme adopted as a standard.

Marc, it's entirely possible for a designer to build their career upon a very short list of typefaces. Jan Tschichold managed to reduce his list to one item near the end of his career, believing there was no problem in book design his own typeface Sabon couldn't solve. Derek Birdsall has gotten a lot of mileage out of Gill Sans, Van Dijck, Poliphilus, and Blado. For a long time Neville Brody used his own display typefaces almost exclusively.

However, if you start browsing the Web for designers' lists of "essential typefaces", you'll quickly realize there's a disturbing lack of consistency among them. Typefaces, as products of premeditated acts of creation, inescapably have their own personalities, and different people will respond to different personalities. I personally think Gill Sans, Clarendon, American Uncial, and Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch are typefaces all designers should have available to them (among others), but I don't expect many other designers to share this conviction. Obsessively prowling through specimen books or font websites can be a distraction and cloud designers' minds when they should be working on other things, but it can also be its own reward. The best way to learn about type is to play with it and work with it, and if you just take somebody else's recommendations on faith, you'll miss a lot of opportunities for creative design.

Mark Simonson — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 06:56:38 -0800

>More seriously, the assertion that all fonts are copies of other fonts is an overstatement. But I think it is important to acknowledge the strong influences from fonts that have gone before. I did not mean to trivialize the process of designing fonts.

Thanks for the clarification. I was overreacting a bit.

Regarding the abundance of typefaces...

It depends on how you think about type.

On one hand, it has a very utilitarian aspect: To convey information. If this were its only use, we could probably get by with a handful of fonts and be done with it forever.

On the other hand, typography can be expressive, conveying mood, context, voice, attitude, etc. and for that there are never enough typefaces.

(The designers who use only eight typefaces their whole career are rare and probably only eat eight different things, too.)

Nick Shinn — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 06:46:33 -0800

Marc, think of type like colors.

"The public" has no names for colors other than a basic few. Yet most people can see the difference when two similar colors are put side by side.

As a designer, you use type as part of your design palette. You may even derive ideas from the formal or cultural properties of a typeface which can stimulate and inform the unique personality of you work as a whole.

"The public" is not your only audience. Any public work is seen by others who are not in the target market. There are also your peers, associates, and yourself, who derive value from the work. And the work has an integrity of its own. These are all responsibilites, contributing to the wealth of culture by making it rich, complex, and dynamic.

William Berkson — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 06:36:55 -0800

The difference in typefaces is helpful partly for practical and partly for aesthetic reasons.

For example,one designer, Matthew Carter, has designed Bell Centennial, for phone books, Verdana, for computer screens and 'Postoni', a headline face for the Washington Post Newspaper. Use any one of these for the other purpose, and the result will be much inferior.

Aesthetically, such faces as Caslon and Zapfino will give very different impressions.

No doubt it is valuable to learn to use a few typefaces well. But the availablity of a variety for different puposes and moods represents an opportunity. Knowing a broader pallette and how to use it must be an advantage. However, typefaces are only one ingredient in graphic design, so obviously you have to budget how much time you want to put in on this one ingredient.

marc — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 05:44:52 -0800

Thanks for the the feedback by the way. This thread has exceeded the informaton which I wanted, but has led to other questions that I need to be asking myself about type.

I am studying graphic design and I have become interested in typography and type design. I started this thread because I wanted to understand font classification that exists. After stumbling on this site I have been introduced to an emourmous number of new typefaces and I would like to ask you another question:

I respect the fact that many of you are type designers who make a living from creating new typefaces. But is creating "Font B with a different x-height" of any use to me as someone solving visual communication problems?

I've heard of designers using only 8 typefaces throughout their entire career. Personaly I believe that each job requires the right font for it to communicate propperly and this requires a much wider range of typefaces.

However, the more I am exploring type design the more I am finding very similar designs which I believe I will never use. You could argue that such an overwealming number of typefaces is overcomplicating the design process.

I don't mean to offend anyone here but I am trying establish whether I (as a graphic designer not a type designer) I should be spending time looking at typefaces which are identicle in the eyes of our target audience, the public.

Typeface classification

marc — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 08:01:16 -0800

I read an interesting piece last week on different views on type categories. Especially when it comes to Humanists and sans serifs.

How many categories do you believe there to be and what are their titles?