Welcome to the web-site of Simon Pascal Klein, concept, graphic, and interface designer.

Proudly bending beziers since 2006

Meme: Reflections 2008

Copying Nathanael who stole if from Fiona, here’s a quick rundown of 2008, ques­tion and answer style:

Q: What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before?
A: Left the country and moved over­seas for half a year back to Germany to touch up my German, started free­lanc­ing prop­erly, co-(un)organised Canberra’s very first BarCamp.

Q: Did you keep your new year’s res­o­lu­tions, and will you make more for next year?
A: Much like Nat, I can’t remem­ber any of my new year’s res­o­lu­tions from last year.

Q: Did anyone close to you give birth?
 No.

Q: Did anyone close to you die?
During this past year not, but Blacky passing away on Christ­mas Day last year is still fresh in our mem­o­ries. We all miss the furry, barking bugger.

Q: What countries/states did you visit?
A: In Aus­tralia: Vic­to­ria for LCA, NSW a number of times for work; abroad: Germany (Frank­furt am Main, Mainz and Berlin), Turkey (Istan­bul for GUADEC) and the UK for LugRa­dio Live.

Q: What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?
A: To have have attended a number of more con­fer­ences, or rather, not missed the ones with par­tic­u­lar speak­ers, notably WDS.

Q: What was your biggest achieve­ment of the year?
A: Becom­ing more inde­pen­dent as a result of my time in Europe and sum­mon­ing the courage to get my most recent two pierc­ings.

Q: What was your biggest failure?
A: Not man­ag­ing to organ­ise a more thor­ough trip through­out Europe alone through youth hostels and the like, partly due to money, partly due to time and partly due to my own neg­a­tive mis­con­cep­tions.

Q: Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing serious thank­fully.

Q: What was the best thing you bought?
A: The AUD $1,800 return air ticket to Germany includ­ing health insur­ance, closely fol­lowed by my beloved black MacBook, Leno.

Q: Whose behav­iour merited cel­e­bra­tion?
A: Both Mum and Andy for over­com­ing more per­sonal crap than any one person should put up with.

Q: Whose behav­iour made you appalled and depressed?
A: Appalled and depressed are strong words, and I’m pretty laid back, so nothing really gets on my nerves much—and more impor­tantly I try not to let some­thing bother me for more than half a year. So, with this in mind, the name that rises to the top of the bad people cesspool in recent memory prob­a­bly include Senator Stephen Conroy for his pathetic Aus­tralian manda­tory clean feed idea.

Q: Where did most of your money go?
A: Travel costs and design books, most of which were typog­ra­phy books, nat­u­rally.

Q: What did you get really, really, really excited about?
A: My Europe trip, conferences—notably Canberra’s first BarCamp—and attend­ing Kitty in Berlin. Oh, and cur­rently still inter­nally raving about the pos­si­bil­ity of landing an excit­ing job (and thus stop­ping free­lanc­ing).

Q: What song will always remind you of 2008?
A: Kri­latie Kacheli by Evgeniy Kri­la­tov, this amazing Russian tune that was over­laid on video on a ModBlog (NSFW) video of the Russian Pain Theatre gang doing some awesome multi-​tiered suicide sus­pen­sions.

Q: Com­pared to this time last year, are you:

  • happier or sadder?—happy as a clam at the time of writing;
  • thinner or fatter?—went up a kilo or two but still thin as usual;
  • richer or poorer?—my bank state­ments would indi­cate little change, but I’ve accu­mu­lated new assets (books mostly).

Q: What do you wish you’d done more of?
A: Parkour, rock climb­ing, and trav­el­ing.

Q: What do you wish you’d done less of?
A: Nothing really… maybe sleep a little less?

Q: How did you spend Christ­mas?
A: With my Opa in Buden­heim, near Mainz (Germany).

Q: Did you fall in love in 2008?
A: Big fat nega­tory.

Q: How many one-​night stands?
A: Two.

Q: What was your favourite TV program?
A: The West Wing.

Q: Did you make a friend with anyone that you didn’t know this time last year?
A: Yes, after entirely coin­ci­den­tally meeting both Söda and his girl­friend, Eugenie from Can­berra all the way in Frank­furt. And to think in all the time I had known Söda he never men­tioned his girl­friend!

Q: What was the best book you read?
A: The Ele­ments of Typo­graphic Style by Robert Bringhurst.

Q: What was your great­est musical dis­cov­ery?
A: Vibra­s­phere, an amazing pro­gres­sive psy­trance group from Sweden.

Q: What did you want and get?
A: To improve my German and a MacBook.

Q: What did you want and not get?
A: An iPhone that wouldn’t become a paper weight when I were to take it home to Oz, and pos­si­bly a roman­tic rela­tion­ship. The iPhone is being taken care of hope­fully this week.

Q: What was your favourite film of this year?
A: Death Proof, part of the Grind­house double set by Quentin Taran­tino.

Q: What did you do on your birth­day, and how old were you?
A: Cel­e­brated it in Buden­heim with my Mum, Opa, and German friends. Age: undis­closed.

Q: What one thing would have made your year immea­sur­ably more sat­is­fy­ing?
A: To be with the many friends I left behind in Oz during my time in Europe.

Q: How would you describe your per­sonal fashion concept in 2008?
A: Alter­na­tive whilst approach­able and friendly? Just some­thing dif­fer­ent I guess.

Q: What kept you sane?
A: Mum and sleep.

Q: Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
A: I don’t really roman­ti­cally fancy any celebri­ties, but was quite hot for seeing Obama get into the White House.

Q: What polit­i­cal issue stirred you the most?
A: The thought that even still in my life­time the bol­locks that’s going on in the Middle East prob­a­bly won’t be solved. That, and the afore­men­tioned pro­posed Aus­tralian Inter­net filter bol­locks.

Q: Who did you miss?
A: Chewie our aging, barking furball of a lady, close friends from Can­berra and Mum.

Q: Who was the best new person you met?
A: Eugenie Edquist, Mr. Söda’s lovely girl­friend.

Q: Tell us a valu­able life lesson you learned in 2008.
A: It goes like this:

Find your obses­sion;
Every day, explain it to one person you respect;
Edit every­thing, skip short­cuts;
And try not to be a dick.
Get better at the above.

I’ve decided to skip the last ques­tion of which song lyric most sums up my year (I don’t know nor have the time right now to figure it out).


That’s it for ’08. What about you?

Evaluating fonts: kerning

There are thou­sands of fonts avail­able and iden­ti­fy­ing the cream of the crop is not just an exer­cise of picking the most aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing. I con­stantly drool over new type­faces I come across; there’s usually a weekly dosage of five to ten that catch my eye, thanks of course to sites like I Love Typog​ra​phy.com. This has already caused a number of impulse-​buys. That, and the review of a draft article I was peering over this evening got me think­ing, what makes a good type­face?, or rather, what makes a good font? I’m dis­tin­guish­ing fonts from type­faces as the ‘physical’ (e.g. metal) or digital (e.g. font file) embod­i­ment of the design; whilst type­faces are the design of the font, the ‘face’. Here are some rough eval­u­a­tions, besides aes­thetic merit:

Unicode character support

  • Lan­guage support: how broad and faith­ful is it? (e.g. the correct glyphs for the right char­ac­ters and avail­abil­ity of the type­face in other lan­guages, such as Arabic or Cyril­lic);
  • Alter­nate char­ac­ters: lig­a­tures and styl­is­tic vari­ants (e.g. italic swash ver­sions of z aren’t uncom­mon);
  • Small cap­i­tals includ­ing small-​cap figures (rare);
  • Figures: hanging or “old-style” figures (for use in running text), lining figures, mono­spaced figures (for tabular work), supe­rior and infe­rior figures, frac­tion figures;
  • Math­e­mat­i­cal oper­a­tors and Greek letters (latter is also com­monly used in applied sci­ences);
  • And more, such as the Inter­na­tional Pho­netic Alphabet….

Format

The format the type­face is made avail­able in should also be put up to con­sid­er­a­tion. It’s a subject I’m not as famil­iar with, but general advice reads opting for Open­Type over other formats like
True­Type. As I under­stand it, many advanced fea­tures like auto­matic inser­tion of lig­a­tures (e.g. fi to fi), styl­is­tic vari­ants of char­ac­ters and more are only acces­si­ble in Open­Type (pro­vided of course the program you’re using sup­ports the advanced Open­Type typog­ra­phy fea­tures).

Kerning table

Kerning is the hor­i­zon­tal adjust­ment of glyphs in a com­bi­na­tion of glyphs (e.g. words) to ensure an opti­cally correct fit, elim­i­nat­ing large gaps or tight col­li­sions that occur with some com­po­si­tions. Notably, f is fre­quently kerned to the right, as is W and V to remove unde­sired spaces that would appear on the bottom half of the glyph between common char­ac­ters that follow it, such as the vowels.

Kerning tables are con­tained within font files and vary from non-​existent to exten­sive. It’s impor­tant to note that good kerning tables should ideally accom­mo­date for glyph com­po­si­tions that occur in other lan­guages.

Besides the drool­ing over the aes­thet­ics, kerning is usually the other aspect I pay the next most atten­tion to and if pos­si­ble test. Most sea­soned type design­ers and foundries will supply spec­i­men sheets for their typefaces—often down­load­able PDF files—with texts of various lan­guages set in the fonts of the face, at various sizes, styles and so forth. As boring as it might be, it’s impor­tant to have a look over these, native speaker or not—you don’t have to under­stand the gob­bledy­gook: just look out for large gaps between glyphs or ones that lie too close to one another. You might never write actively in more than one or two of the sup­ported lan­guages but nouns like places and people will almost cer­tainly require setting.

If there aren’t various lan­guage spec­i­mens to check over or a spec­i­men is lacking to begin with, ask to the sup­plier to throw the font(s) at a kerning test sheet and see how they do. A fun and handy exer­cise is to go through the fonts in your col­lec­tion and see how they stack up; here are some of the blatant short­com­ings of Lino­type AG’s Times and Monotype’s Times New Roman, widely dis­trib­uted on Mac OS X and Windows respec­tively:

Times kerning problems outlined.
Times kerning prob­lems (view full size).

Times New Roman kerning problems outlined.
Times New Roman kerning prob­lems (view full size).

As you can see Linotype’s Times has fewer kerning issues which is why I prefer listing it before and in addi­tion to Times New Roman in my CSS font-family stacks.

That’s it. I’d be inter­ested in seeing any kerning issues you find, par­tic­u­larly on wide­spread fonts, such as the web core fonts. Other than that, wish you a smash­ing Sunday.

Web fonts: the death of type foundries?

In the spirit of Hal­loween Jon Tan covered the ominous topic of @font-face linking in a com­pre­hen­sive article on his beau­ti­ful website.

I’ve kept the imple­men­ta­tion example to a minimum because it’s well covered by Jon, other web­sites, and the W3C. Instead, I wanted to voice my thoughts on the strug­gle between type foundries and design­ers. Feel free to skip the tech­ni­cal summary.


Implementation summary

‘Web fonts’ is cur­rently a W3C CSS3 working draft. It allows for the direct linking to font files that are then used by the browser to set text in, broad­en­ing the rel­a­tively limited palette of ‘web-safe’ type­faces. Many design­ers have been longing for direct font linking since the ear­li­est days of CSS. This is achieved with the @font-face element (fig. 1).

@font-face {
font-family: 'Desired-Font';
src: url('Desired-Font.otf') format('opentype');
}

Fig. 1. After defin­ing the @font-face element, you can directly refer to the linked font with the font-family prop­erty:

body {
font-family: 'Desired-Font', …;
}

Embedded OpenType

We’re all used to the major browsers not behav­ing in cohe­sion and web fonts is another victim of this. Presently @font-face is sup­ported in WebKit (and con­se­quently browsers that use it), Mozilla Firefox 3.1 beta and the devel­op­ment version of Opera. Inter­net Explorer (IE)—again, not surprisingly—does it’s own thing. Enter Microsoft’s pro­pri­etary Embed­ded Open­Type (EOT). EOT was an endeavor by Microsoft to allow for font file linking on the web while safe­guard­ing the type­face from being ille­gally copied by embed­ding the font, doc­u­ment to font and font to doc­u­ment. Linked fonts only are linked in one-​way, doc­u­ment to font, allow­ing users to obtain the font with little dif­fi­culty. With Microsoft firmly opposed to sup­port­ing native Open­Type linking as long as vendors object to it, EOT is set to be the only method avail­able in IE for use with @font-face.

Tech­no­log­i­cally it’s not the great­est solution—see Jon’s frus­tra­tions with Microsoft’s ‘WEFT’ con­verter that pro­duces EOT files from Open­Type files (1, 2, 3) and web secu­rity analyst Chris Shiftlett’s thoughts on web fonts. There are a range of other and related issues that were dis­cussed at a W3C meeting on EOT and font embed­ding. These prob­lems will impact its chances of adop­tion as a stan­dard. In 2007 Microsoft tried to push EOT to be part of CSS but this move was rejected, and they have since resub­mit­ted it as a stand­alone sub­mis­sion. If EOT is accepted Microsoft would have to ‘open’ the tech­nol­ogy to allow for the cross-​platform cre­ation of EOT files. This will greatly hinder the adop­tion of EOT by the W3C, and for good reasons. For EOT to truly catch on it would effec­tively have to be open sourced… …leaving that thought to die lonely at the bottom of a well. Perhaps I’m being some­what too cynical; it would be a pleas­ant sur­prise if Microsoft were to open EOT.

Existing alternatives

Besides image replace­ment, there are a few other options that bring addi­tional type­faces to the web which aim to retain text acces­si­bil­ity and degrade grace­fully when viewed in unsup­ported user agents. One is sIFR and the second and more recent, typeface.js. However neither is suit­able for setting any­thing more than head­ings or a few lines; sIFR uses Flash, which isn’t a stan­dard and quickly begins to affect page load times as well as resources; typeface.js mean­while doesn’t allow the selec­tion of the ren­dered text. These alter­na­tives don’t compete with font linking if were to become a sup­ported stan­dard.

Finding opportunity in change

The tech­nol­ogy imple­men­ta­tion aside, direct font linking has raised licens­ing and copy­right issues. Most type foundries that sell fonts, or rather sell licenses for fonts, nat­u­rally pro­hibit direct linking on the web. Foundries are afraid users will make copies of the linked fonts, putting an end to the foundry as the dis­trib­u­tor. In the case of font linking, it would be simple for a user to extract the font of a web page: open the CSS, locate the @font-face def­i­n­i­tion and save the font file ref­er­enced in the src: prop­erty.

Type foundries are the product of a change in tech­nol­ogy, specif­i­cally the inven­tion of the movable type and the print­ing press. Foundries have for the past four and a half cen­turies thrived through further advances, such as lith­o­g­ra­phy in the 19th century, the inven­tion of the type­writer and again adapted with the rising pop­u­lar­ity of the per­sonal com­puter in the 1980s. Grad­u­ally the entry barrier to print­ing was lowered. To print what­ever you desired in 15th–19th cen­turies you either had to own a print­ing press or have some awesome friends; today anyone with a $1,000 com­puter and a $100 printer can print what­ever they like and if you have access to public print­ing ser­vices (your public library for instance) you could even do it for free.

Type foundries (like other indus­tries) were forced to adjust their busi­ness models with the inven­tion of each new print­ing tech­nol­ogy. Indus­tries that don’t adapt gen­er­ally whither, giving way to those that do. It’s silly to assume you can end­lessly make money selling licenses to the same thing while every­thing about you changes. This is exactly what is hap­pen­ing here.

In the fear that their revenue streams will be under­cut type foundries are react­ing adversely to the topic of font linking and even font embed­ding. Instead of seeking new oppor­tu­ni­ties in the advent of these tech­nolo­gies, type foundries are reluc­tant to support web fonts. Illegal copying and sharing of type­faces is of course a bad thing for foundries and I empathise with them on that level, but I fail to empathise with them in regards to font embed­ding. Foundries need to realise that as typog­ra­phy becomes lib­er­alised through the advance­ment of tech­nol­ogy (namely the per­sonal com­puter and the Inter­net), they must adapt and change with the rest of us. Respected typog­ra­pher and web devel­oper Richard Rutter wrote in July on the subject of font embed­ding with his article, The future of font embed­ding:

“…[I]t’s high time that font foundries and type design­ers stopped waving their hands in the air pro­claim­ing the death of their indus­try, insist­ing that every­one will be pirat­ing their fonts and installing them for free. Instead they should see this as an oppor­tu­nity to be grabbed with both hands.”

Hosting & licensing service

Font embed­ding if imple­mented cor­rectly as an open stan­dard should be seen a new oppor­tu­nity for foundries to sell fonts to a whole new market. One sug­ges­tion also advo­cated by Richard is for foundries to host embed­ded font files and sell them for use on web­sites. This would be in addi­tion to the con­ven­tional model of selling licenses to weights and styles of a type­face indi­vid­u­ally or as a com­plete family based on the number of proces­sors you intend to use them on (thank­fully most foundries have realised the mistake in this and are now selling licenses per com­puter).

This web licens­ing and hosting service would be one dandy (and prof­itable) solu­tion. I don’t have a clear-​cut answer to this debate but ulti­mately in my expe­ri­ence the force of change is greater than any single pro­pri­etary inter­est and con­se­quently always wins. Some­times it takes a while and depend­ing how involved parties react, things can get ugly which sucks for every­one. What excites me are those who find new oppor­tu­ni­ties that flour­ish with the new devel­op­ments. I hope foundries see this as one of those oppor­tu­ni­ties and not the extinc­tion of their industry—I look forward to ditch­ing hacks in favour of stan­dard­ised and open font embed­ding, because there are bigger fish to fry.

For anyone inter­ested reading more, check out the W3C report on for and against stan­dar­d­is­ing font embed­ding.

Whose Garamond is it anyway?

Flick through various foundry cat­a­logs for a Gara­mond revival or adap­tion and you’re bound to dis­cover more than garalde type­faces. Inter­spersed amongst the many Gara­monds you’ll find erro­neously titled baroque faces works by another type designer, Jean Jannon. I decided to inves­ti­gate the affair and while doing so swept the dust off a little history of French print­ing.

Prelude: the birth of French printing

The Euro­pean inven­tion of let­ter­press print­ing with movable type by Johannes Guten­berg c. 1450 sys­tem­atized the Latin alpha­bet into indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters that could be phys­i­cally com­posed and reused. Because Latin letters amal­ga­mate into an alphabet—distinct from logogra­phies and syl­labaries—they are par­tic­u­larly well suited to be divided, cut, and finally cast into pieces of metal type that reside in wooden cases (fig. 1.). Majus­cules (capital letters) lived in the “upper case” whilst the minus­cules (small letters) inhab­ited the “lower case”. This is where we draw the syn­onyms for upper- and low­er­case from.This was the basis for the rev­o­lu­tion­ary adop­tion in place of the metic­u­lous copying of books by hand word-​for-​word and saw the estab­lish­ment of an inte­gral part of the print­ing trade: typog­ra­phy.

A reprint of a page of the one of the Gutenberg Bibles
A reprint of a page of one of the Guten­berg Bibles, from Mainz, Germany. Gutenberg’s type­faces epit­o­mize the strong gothic ele­ments that we now clas­sify as black­let­ter. The face in par­tic­u­lar is a textura black­let­ter.

Metal sorts being set with a composition stick
A sort is a single piece of metal type, a letter of one spe­cific type­face and size. In digital typog­ra­phy it has been replaced by the term glyph as digital type does not phys­i­cally exist until printed. Thus a sort of Bembo italic at 12 points is dis­tinct from another of Bembo italic 10 points. Con­versely those that seman­ti­cally share the same letter but are styl­is­ti­cally different—even if of the same family and point size—are also clas­si­fied as dif­fer­ent sorts.Fig. 1. Metal sorts being set on a com­po­si­tion stick with many more organ­ised in a job case under­neath. Photo by Willi Hei­del­bach.

The trade of print­ing quickly spread through­out Europe. It was intro­duced to France in 1470 by Johann Heynlin and Guil­laume Fichet—two pro­fes­sors of the Sor­bonne, the his­toric uni­ver­sity of Paris—who enlisted the aid of German print­ers to estab­lish the first print­ing house. Three print­ers from Mainz helped them con­struct the presses, equip­ment and began cutting type. Still in the same year they printed France’s very first book, Gas­parini Epis­to­lae (“Letters”), written by the Italian gram­mar­ian Gas­parino da Bariz­izza.

Traditional preferences

Gas­parini Epis­to­lae was set in a human­ist black­let­ter (fig. 2). The face was a hybrid from a merging of roman and gothic ele­ments. The style was rebuffed in favour of the tra­di­tional gothic prop­er­ties of black­let­ter which French readers had grown accus­tomed to; unlike the human­ist faces that were cut during the Italian Renais­sance, human­ist type­faces weren’t met as can­didly in France as else­where in Europe. French typog­ra­phy remained mod­er­ately con­ser­v­a­tive, uti­liz­ing heavy black­let­ter faces of one style or another to set most printed mate­r­ial until the turn of the century.

A sample of the humanist blackletter hybrid from Gasparini Epistolae
Fig. 2. A sample of the human­ist black­let­ter hybrid from Gas­parini Epis­to­lae, Har­alam­bous, Y., 2007, Fonts & Encod­ings (p. 375), English edition, O’Reilly Media Inc., Cal­i­for­nia, USA.

There are two note­wor­thy inter­ludes between the end of the 15th century and the cutting of garalde faces in the early 16th century. In 1477 came the first book printed in French, an unusual and con­tro­ver­sial venture as French was con­sid­ered too vulgar to be set in print. Typ­i­cally Latin was used for the written word, even in Germany at the time. It was set in cute bas­tarda (or Schwabacher) by Pasquier Bon­homme. Then in 1529 Geofrey de Troy, the per­sonal printer to King François I, took the next steps that led to the broader adop­tion of roman with the print­ing of his book, Le Champ Fleury in which he put forth his theory that letter forms and human anatomy are closely linked.

The Garalades and Garamond

By the mid 16thcentury print­ing was a solid indus­try. Cer­tainly print­ing was still expen­sive, however it had become more eco­nom­i­cally viable and less time-​consuming than the the pre­vi­ous option of employ­ing scribes. Fol­low­ing the clas­si­cal human­ist type­faces, typo­graph­i­cally in the 16th century came the garalde (or old-​style) faces, paying homage to Claude Garamond and Aldus Manu­tius. These fea­tured a heavier weight and stronger empha­sis on the down­wards strokes than their antecedents (fig. 3). The weight can be attrib­uted to a more oblique axis of the pen; garalde faces in no way loose their human­ist ele­ments. Today the best known gar­aldes faces are Gara­mond and Bembo, the former of which there are many ver­sions of. Other notable digital ren­di­tions include Adobe Gara­mond, Granjon, Sabon, and Stempel Gara­mond.

Comparison between Centaur and Stempel Garamond
Fig. 3. Top: 72 point Centaur, cut by Bruce Rogers in 1912–1914 and based on cuts by Nicholas Jenson made in the height of the Venet­ian Renais­sance, 1469; bottom: 72 point Stempel Gara­mond, a true Gara­mon­dian revival by the Stempel Foundry, 1924. It was later dig­i­tized by Lino­type.

The other Garamond

A century after Claude Gara­mond came Jean Jannon (1580–1658). Jannon was a French Protes­tant printer who began cutting type in the Protes­tant Academy in Sedan, France. He cut his type during the French Renais­sance but did so ille­gally under the Catholic regime and con­se­quently had his casts seized in 1641 by agents of the French crown, under orders of Car­di­nal Riche­lieu (who iron­i­cally used Jannon’s work to later to set his own memoirs, Prin­ci­paux Points de la Foi). Jannon’s work sat locked-​away for two cen­turies before seeing the light of day again. When they were uncov­ered they were misiden­ti­fied as cuts by Claude Gara­mond, and hence named there­after Gara­mond. Many digital revivals still carry on this error: ATF ‘Garamond’, Lanston ‘Garamond’, numer­ous ver­sions of Mono­type ‘Garamond’ and Simoncini ‘Garamond’. Jannon’s work is baroque in nature; it is easily dis­tin­guished from Claude Garmond’s; sharper serifs and an almost wild vari­a­tion of axis and slope (fig. 4, 5).

Comparison between Monotype Garamond and Adobe Garamond
Fig. 4. Top: 72 pt Mono­type Gara­mond, digital revival based on Jean Jannon’s cuts; bottom: 72 pt Adobe Gara­mond, dig­i­tally revived by Robert Slim­bach and based on Claude Garamond’s cuts.

Comparison between Simonici Garamond and Stempel Garamond
Fig. 5. Top: 72 pt Simonici Gara­mond, another digital revival based on Jean Jannon’s cuts; bottom: 72 pt Stempel Gara­mond again, based on Claude Garamond’s cuts.

Historically befitting

So if you’re writing a piece on the intro­duc­tion of French print­ing and want to set it in an appro­pri­ate type­face, a Gara­mond revival is most apt—of course you could pick a heavy gothic with which Johann Heynlin and Guil­laume Fichet began France’s print­ing ven­tures but no one would com­fort­ably read it today (and ulti­mately the black­let­ters are more Ger­manic than French). Con­versely if you’re writing a piece set three cen­turies later, cov­er­ing the French Renai­sance, select one of Jannon’s revivals and pay tribute to a man almost for­got­ten by history.

Have a won­der­ful weekend every­one!