#72 • The Irony Mark

Happy 2020, type friends!

We’re back. Where to even start? Lydia Weber and Zak Fisher have gifted us a wonderful typographical present for the holidays: All I Font for Christmas is a gorgeous advent calendar for typefaces, curated by 31 different artists and designers around the world; not to be missed. Fisher-Price, that iconic toy company from your childhood, has also updated their branding after so many decades, a work done by Pentagram which involved its own typeface design too.

Still with a 2019-retrospective mood, the Literary Hub have published their collection of the most beautiful book covers of 2019 — and since most of them are heavy on typographic details (as they should), it’s worth contemplating. How bold of a move by Pablo Delcan to cover up part of the book’s name with its only illustrative detail?

Kiev—a city I’ve been curious about for a while—doesn’t really have a reputation for being particularly typographically inspiring, but — and there’s always a but — its subway stations are certainly worthy of a second glance. Present&Correct collects a few for us and you should admire them for a few long minutes.

The folks at ILoveTypography have published a book review on a book about books (you can read that again), The Secret Life of Books, that got my attention right away. After reading The Book by Keith Houston, I’ll be sure to personally add this one to my list.

And for 2020, David J. Ross’s Font Of The Month is a variable font, Gimlet X-Ray, a playful and different style of typeface that just begs exploration. Don’t miss it.

From a cosy and warm Montreal café,

From the deep-end of the Internet archives, I’ve stumbled upon a very old but interesting article on LanguageGeek, about the use of apostrophes in native languages. How interesting can a simple ‘ apostrophe get, you may ask, and you should be prepared to have your mind blown away.

The apostrophe mark serves different functions in different languages. Here’s a few:

The apostrophe itself can take on different forms, depending on the font. Generally speaking, it is either shaped like a filled in number ‘9’ or a slanted line. The shape of the apostrophe no more changes its function than a two-storied a or single-storied ɑ in English; it’s simply a difference in typeface design.

Today, apostrophes are used as what it known as dumb quote ’, which has no real use, and is a hang-over from the typewriter days when the dumb quote was used as a short cut for proper opening and closing single quotation marks. This is why they’re known as typewriter-style quotation marks, too.

Because of this, a wrong usage of the apostrophe has made its way into several different languages, at least the ones using Latin typography. To remedy this, word processors and online writing platforms have included auto-correct which automatically changes dumb quotes to curly quotes: don’t becomes don’t. This works well when the only apostrophe which occurs at the beginning of words is the opening quote or 6-shaped quote.

And then there are apostrophe accents, from which I’ll quote:

It’s remarkably interesting to notice the edge case issues we can run into, and we’re given a few ways around it to consider. For example, the following:

So what are we to do? What are the lessons learned from all this? Well, I highly encourage you to read the original article in its entirety, but we can use guillemets instead («»), long dashes (—), and really, just avoiding using single quotes as a primary way to do quotations. Keep reading for more.

Keith Houston, famously known for being the author of Shady Characters, has made an unlikely appearance on Popova’s Brain Pickings blog, and I just couldn’t let that opportunity pass without telling you about it.

A punctuation for irony: it seems so obvious the moment you think about it the first time: why isn’t there, in the Latin alphabet at least, punctuation to denote irony? We have it, after all, for exclamation, interrogation and even both at the same time. Well, it’s not like there weren’t any attempts in history to do so. From Wikipedia:

In his outstanding book Shady Characters, Keith Houston does a deeper look at the history (and the story) of this truly shady character proposal, the reversed question mark. Why bother denoting irony to begin with? Quoting Houston:

From the early 19th century to nearly 200 years later, the debate about the punctuation for irony seemed never-ending. Some questioned the proposal for the reversed question mark and instead proposed a reversed exclamation mark. Interestingly enough, I learned that some Ethiopic languages possess the Temherte slaqî —  ¡ — indeed used to indicate sarcasm or unreal phrases, commonly used in those languages.

But really, why stop here? Houston again:

Maria Popova did a brilliant job condensing the book’s takeaways and major events into a great Brain Pickings post, so make sure to read the whole story.

For 24 Ways this/last year, Rob Weychert wrote an interesting piece on building typographic scales for our web designs. A quick heads up: this article is heavy on the technical side (CSS/Sass), but stick around for a bit if you’d like to learn why a typographical scale matters.

Typographic scales often have direct comparisons with musical scales — and rightly so. Just as our ears appreciate a good harmony with some thought and harmony applied to it, so do our eyes concerning spatial relationships; and type is no exception.

How big should your main title be, in relation to your second biggest heading? Your third biggest? Maybe a fourth? That’s essentially creating a type scale: It could be that you’ve been composing the typographic equivalent of a cacophonous symphony. And the first thing any composer will tell you to do is to get that thing on a scale.

According to Rob:

Of course, the bigger the intervals are, the more pronounced the size differences will be. If your designs need more contrast, go for a higher interval; nuanced, non-shouty designs will call for a smaller one. However, keep in mind:

An example from Typecast:

For example, the 16th century scale (which is still used widely today) was largely determined by the limitations of technology – metal type in one face, one size and one weight – and progressed as follows: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 26, 48, 60, 72. In CSS, we might transcribe this scale in the following, for example:

Rob goes into detail on how to define your own scale, although don’t forget that there are plenty of online scale creators that you can use.

The naming convention I typically use begins with –scale0, which is the body text size. The size below it is –scale-1 (as in “scale minus one”), the size above it is –scale1, and so on. Keeping the names relative to each other like this helps me move around the scale intuitively as I use it. If, say, –scale4 isn’t big enough for my h1, I can move up to –scale5 or –scale6, and I always know exactly how many steps away from the body text I am. 

For web developers out there, a simple, non-Sass way of defining a simple scale (in this example, the scale is 1.5) could be as the following:

Defining the scale in a variable, like –int above, has the added benefit of being easy to change and seeing different effects on the fly. Keep reading the original article for more tips, or jump straight into ModularScale or Type Scale to create your own and use the CSS.

KlimType have recently published a comprehensive study on newly found information on the iconic Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface, and this matters for the history books.

To begin with, Akzidenz-Grotesk pre-dates Helvetica, by… a lot. It has been released circa 1898, and it’s arguably one the most iconic, industry-shaping sans-serif typefaces to emerge since the early 19th century; after all, Helvetica was heavily influenced by it.

While Helvetica was not simply a reworking of Akzidenz-Grotesk, its initial development as Neue Haas-Grotesk in Switzerland reflected, in part, the popularity that Akzidenz-Grotesk had begun to enjoy in Western European graphic design during the immediate postwar years. As a family of typefaces, Akzidenz-Grotesk was a work-in-progress. Bauer & Co. in Stuttgart and Berthold in Berlin published its very first weight together in 1898, but it was only in the 1950s that the typeface’s use began to take off. 

Since 1998, many authors have incorrectly stated that Royal-Grotesk predated Akzidenz-Grotesk, and that it had been designed by the Berlin-based punchcutter and type foundry owner Ferdinand Theinhardt. Indeed, Theinhardt’s foundry was acquired by Berthold in 1908. Berthold kept it open in its own factory for about two years, and as a subsidiary for about twenty more. During that time, it sold both Akzidenz-Grotesk and Royal-Grotesk, as well as several more Berthold and Bauer & Co. faces. Theinhardt himself had already retired from punchcutting decades before this. He sold off his foundry in the mid 1880s, and died in 1906.

Skipping some history events, which have been in active dispute for at least 30 years until 2017 (all of which you can read in the original article), by 1911 Akzidenz Grotesk had already more than a dozen weights and widths available, giving way to typefaces like Univers and other neo-grotesque family typefaces. Akzidenz-Grotesk became available for sale in the United States around 1957. The fonts of foundry type were sold by a New York company named Amsterdam Continental, a subsidiary of Dutch type foundry N. Tetterode.

For its first half century, the Akzidenz-Grotesk family did not include any italic styles.²²Berthold only developed those during the 1950s and ’60s neo-grotesque wave. Even then, Berthold released the italic styles gradually, rather than all at once. This was not uncommon, because:

There’s so much more history to this over at Klim, so grab that (maybe a long) cup of coffee and head over to their blog.

Portada, from Type Together, isn’t really a new release, but I just stumbled upon it while researching Austrian Airlines who uses it for their branding. Designed in 2016 by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione, Portada does an impeccable job at being a great typeface for UI and long-form text — while maintaining all the charm of a rounded serif typeface.

It also comes in a whopping 18 different styles, guaranteeing that you’ll be able to find that perfect style for your hierarchy. Get it at Type Together.

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