Week 7

Twentieth Typeface

To find my twentieth typeface I went back to my research from week one, where I looked through Eye Magazines to find some cool new release typefaces. Unfortunately, none of them really fit in with my system as I needed my twentieth typeface to also be influential in some way. So I headed to Fontstand but didn't find much there as I realised I needed to do some more in depth research to back up my font choice before I picked one based solely on it's look. 

In my research endeavours so far, I've come to like and trust Typewolf the most with font recommendations as I've found their advice to be solid and covering a lot of area. I basically headed to their top font lists to get some preliminary ideas of some of the bigger fonts, because to be influential, a font kind of needs to be famous, or at least well known and recognised.

Top 10 Most Popular Serifs was the article I checked first but quickly realised that most of the fonts on the list were ones that were already included in my book or older than 10 years.

- Caslon

- Times New Roman

- Freight Text

- Garamond

- Plantin

Sans serifs gave me Futura 1927, Proxima Nova 2005, Avenir 1988 and Brandon Grotesque 2009. Proxima Nova would've been good but unfortunately designed in 2005. The rest were also too old. I sort of realised at this point that the font I chose wasn't going to be super influential yet as it is still going to be young.

The 40 Best Fonts Available on Adobe Fonts

Acumin, Termina, Gopher and Kabel were all ones on this list that I felt drawn to. To be fair I hadn't heard of any of them except for Acumin as I had used it for a previous project. Termina was designed in 2015, Gopher 2019, Kabel 1927, Acumin 2015. I decided it was either going to be Acumin, as this was the only one I had heard of before (maybe not a good judge of what is influential using this categorisation), and it was first place on the top 40, or Gopher. I felt most drawn towards Gopher as the font interested me and I felt like it would be an cool stand out typeface, but I chose Acumin in the end. Logic won out and I wanted my system to make sense more than anything.

Gopher Typeface.

Description, background, history

(https://acumin.typekit.com/usage/)

- dealing in subtleties
- subtle humanity
- both generic and new
- truly neutral for reading

- workhorse sans serifs

- job-work

- modern, generic, unfussy typography (about Helvetica)

- highly rational and austere

- utilitarian 

- egalitarian

Acumin family is larger than Frutiger's Univers family

Acumin's italics are more rigid than the 'cursive' italics from classic oldstyle typefaces

Shapes were constructed directly onscreen

Often neo-grotesque typefaces have modular qualities to easily stack tightly-spaced multi-line headlines, popular in 1950s, 60s, and 70s but Acumin breaks this restriction.

Not a variation or an interpretation but a fresh approach to neo-grotesque tradition

Sans serifs popular in the explosion of advertising in the early 19th century

Text typefaces in 20th century, under modernist influence

1950s - the term neo-grotesque became needed

The idea behind most neo-grotesques is to make the form somehow more versatile, more up-to-date, while maintaining the functional appearance that makes grotesques so popular for everyday typesetting.

At display sizes the fonts take on a hint of classical elegance.

Robert Slimbach

"Robert Slimbach, who joined Adobe in 1987, began working seriously on type and calligraphy four years earlier in the type drawing department of Autologic in Newbury Park, California. Since then, he has concentrated primarily on designing text faces for digital technology, drawing inspiration from classical sources. In 1991, he received the Prix Charles Peignot from Association Typographique Internationale for excellence in type design. Slimbach now directs Adobe’s type design program." (https://fonts.adobe.com/designers/robert-slimbach)

Acumin in Use

Poster for Chicago Design Week 2018: Design in Motion

By One Design Company and Chris Malven

https://fontsinuse.com/uses/26330/chicago-design-week-2018-design-in-motion

The Sandz Identity 2020

By Vogau Studio, Davi Friese, Carlos Marin

https://fontsinuse.com/uses/36234/the-sandz-identity

Mandatory Copy (504 words)

Acumin is a versatile sans serif typeface created in 2015 by American designer Robert Slimbach. Slimbach joined Adobe in 1987 and is now Director of Adobe's type design program. Acumin was created to be a balanced and rational neo-grotesque typeface, and it performs beautifully at both display and text sizes. The shapes were constructed directly onscreen. The typeface was first imagined as a single family containing a regular and bold with matching italics to be used on forms and online documents (the very space that Helvetica and Univers are often used), but it quickly became clear that more was needed. So, a complete set of fonts was created for a very wide range of uses. 

The idea behind most neo-grotesques is to make the form somehow more versatile, more up-to-date, while maintaining the functional appearance that makes grotesques so popular for everyday typesetting. Some examples of fonts that fit into this category are Helvetica, Univers and Museo Sans, amongst others. Slimbach arrived to the challenge hoping to make his new neo-grotesque more "human" by softening and personalising the characters. He soon realised that "humanism" isn't really what neo-grotesques are about though, they are functional because of their neutrality and architectural structure. Still, in a very subtle way, he introduced warmth and humanity into the Acumin family.

Before the explosion of advertising in the early 19th century, sans serif typefaces were not widely used, and at this point they were called grotesque. Later in the 20th century, sans serifs began to be used as text typefaces under modernist influence, specifically from the Bauhaus. Bare typefaces were considered beautiful as they didn't contain any decorations or unnecessary additions due to their no-nonsense anatomy. In the 1950s, the term neo-grotesque was created for a new category of emerging typefaces, including Helvetica and Univers (1957). These typefaces are widely used for job work, and are sometimes referred to as 'work-horse sans serifs'.

When designing this family, Slimbach attempted to make Acumin a fresh approach to the neo-grotesque tradition. It is not a variation or an interpretation of any exisiting typefaces. Often neo-grotesque typefaces have ascenders, caps and dots on the i and j that all align to the same height. These modular qualities easily stack tightly-spaced multi-line headlines, popular in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Acumin breaks this restriction as it has lower case letters that ascend above and below the cap height which Slimbach believes makes the typeface "truly neutral for reading", as well as more elegant for display use. 

Other interesting features are the slightly angled terminals on baseline crossbars, as well as a J that doesn't curl like a candy cane, and numbers that are proportional and slightly shorter than the cap height. At display size, the fonts take on a hint of classical elegance. As Jeffrey Zeldman says, "Enjoying Acumin is like developing a taste for exceptionally good water." It is so good at not having a personality, which makes it great for book design, where the typeface needs to be readable and unspectacular.

Expressive Cover/Section Opener

Pages from Typography: Exploring the Limits

A nice handwritten style.

Two distorted type styles.

I started searching for modernist typography examples because of how the modernists forged a wider area for sans serifs to occupy, and also because Acumin feels like the ultimate modernist typeface. It is functional, but not spectacular, it does the job excellently without even drawing attention to itself.

Source: Pinterest

Taking inspiration from this pinterest image, I trialled these section openers.

I kinda like these but feel they're not working for the section opener. Maybe they will be better as part of the twentieth typeface sample.

Source: Pinterest

Not so keen on this iteration.

Source: Pinterest

I actually really like both these iterations. I feel that they play on the overlapping type thing that is another thing so common with modernist typographic samples*.

* Source: Pinterest

Source: Google Images

The classic modernist slant, and my take on it. Not sure if this would work for my section opener either because it's definitely not timeless, like the rest of my book.

Source: Google Images

Source: Google Images

Colour Theory

Thinking about changing the main colour of my book. Still want it to be a warm colour though as I feel this gives it more energy and humanism.

Purple - dark purple is the colour associated with royalty and wealth, while lavender tends to be romantic. Both associated with creativity and imagination.

Green - down to earth, new beginnings, growth, renewal and abundance. But also jealously, envy, and lack of experience. Balancing and harmonising effects in design. Dark greens are the most stable and representative of affluence.

Red - fire, violence, warfare, love, passion, the Devil, anger, but also importance (red carpets for important people at important events). Darker shades are more powerful and elegant. It also seems to be a main colour of the modernist movement. This red is a shade darker than the one I was using previously. 

I'm going to stick with the darker red, as I like the purple but I don't think it has as much contrast as the red, mainly because the black gets lost a little.

Tried duotoning the images, just to see if it would provide more a system to each page but I actually don't like the look at all with the red. Grayscale is okay but pretty boring, especially when some of the images are so beautiful with full colour.