This is a great description and makes the book seem essential. I disagree with but one point, the last. I have always had the feeling that many works of art and craft owed their perpetual greatness to the overcoming of the merely temporary constraint that was put in the craftsman/artist's way at the time the work was being made. In other words, it was the constraint which inspired the artist to greatness, and that is not invalidated in later generations when the constraint is removed. Just to give some silly examples, is Shakespeare any less great because he couldn't say all the things he could have said today, and, today, would have said, just because he could have? Is Mozart's music now invalid because he didn't know chromaticism or the 12-tone system? Is Bach invalid because he had none of our modern instruments? It is interesting to note as a 'case' that Forster's unpublished novel, in which he discusses everything he couldn't, is his weakest. Is any type less good because of the technical constraints which exist at the time it was made? Are the types we make today less good because of the constraints (mostly indolence, I fear!) that exist for us today? What, for that matter, is more appealing about type than its constraints? Isn't it just because of its constraints, and the incalculable lure there is in the feeling of overcoming, that we wish to make type? Isn't constraint the very reason we are interested in type? What is Goethe's famous remark? Something like, 'Man lebt solang er strebt'? Man lives so long as he strives?

Actually, checking on the source, I see I err somewhat. It is, 'Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt' Man errs as long as he strives.

Yet in context, the words are spoken by God to the Devil, the question is the tempting of Faust. What God roughly says is, So long as man lives on the earth, you will not be forbidden to tempt him, for man errs as long as he strives.

The Devil thanks God for this sentiment politely, pointing out, in Kaufmann's translation that he wants them living, and 'When corpses come, I have just left the house--I feel as does the cat about the mouse.'

Anyway, what art/craft is about constraint if type is not?

In any given typeface (poem, painting, sonata, dinner) one needs to distinguish three formal achievements that may be present: the brilliant fittedness of form to constraint (when the the constraint becomes part of the architecture), the bravura or virtuoso overcoming of constraint (the demonstration that the constraint was not so constraining as everyone else had thought), and the optimal compromise (when the constraint can be neither worked to advantage nor overcome, but must be accepted and the best limited solution found). Of course, it is unusual to find all three achievements in a single work.

Forrest mentions Sabon, which is a very good example of a work with deliberately imposed and considerable constraints. Most people agree, I think, that the lowercase italic o in Sabon is a disaster, excusable only on account of the constraints of duplexing and unitising. Alternatively, the italic o could be considered an achievement of the third kind: an optimal compromise within the terms of the constraints. This kind of achievement is seldom valued very highly, and most people do not recognise it as an achievement at all. But there are few things more useful to consider when trying to get into the head of the maker of a thing: to examine the part that doesn't quite seem to work, to understand why it has been made that way, and to grasp that, under the constraints, it is indeed the best solution that could be found.

But the optimal compromise should be seen as the achievement that the maker would most like to replace or revise, if the constraints were lifted. There is no way that Tschichold wanted to make that italic o so wide (or the roman a -- and we have his drawings to confirm this). If the constraints were lifted, i.e. if he had the chance to revise the typeface for new typesetting systems that did not impose the particular duplexing and unitising constraints of Linotype and Monotype, but which allowed much greater refinement in the widths of letters, I have little doubt that he would have removed as many compromises as possible.

I'm not impressed by Linotype's revisions to faces such as Sabon and Optima. In particular, I like the quality they originally had of equal width roman and italic (duplexing), which I consider to be intrinsic to their design.

You aren't impressed by Optima nova, even though it was done by Hermann Zapf, too? I imagine that Optima nova is the way that he always wanted Optima to be.

I was looking at the samples of Optima Nova, and thinking
that the regular weight italic's slant to the right made
it look like it was going to fall over.

This was set in Optima nova :

" We use the letters of our alphabet every day with
the utmost ease and unconcern, taking them almost
as much for granted as the air we breath. We do
not realize that each of these letters is at our
service today only as the result of a long and
laboriously slow process of evolution in the age-
old art of writing. "

" Wir benutzen die Buchstaben unseres Alphabets
jeden Tag mit aller Ruhe und Sorglosigkeit;
betrachten sie als etwas Selbstverst�ndliches,
wie die Luft, die wir atmen. Wir nehmen nicht
zur Kenntnis, da� jeder dieser uns zur Verf�gung
stehenden Buchstaben, das Ergebnis eines langen
und m�hevollen Entwicklungsprozesses der
jahrundertealten Kunst des Schreibens ist. "

Douglas C. McMurtrie


AS

The problem with technologically imposed constraints is that they're essentially arbitrary: the machine tells you what you can and cannot do, rather than you rationally deciding what does and doesn't work aesthetically or functionally. While compositors and typesetters would have been fools to not welcome the Linotype and the Monotype with open arms, it seems undeniable to me that the work of those who attempted to design patterns for letters got a lot harder, for no reason other than that things they were easily able to do with hand set type weren't possible with the new technologies.

By duplexing italics onto the matrices with the romans, Linotype essentially broke the ancient function of italic, which was to be a more economical alternative to roman type. Granted, that function had been lost already, largely, but suddenly it became a law that could only be broken at great cost. Next to that, losing the ability to kern seems somewhat trivial.

Yes, Sabon was a beautiful technical achievement, and Tschichold deserves much credit for creating a typeface that was both serviceable and elegant given those constraints. But take away the context in which it was designed, and you just have another garamond type. I talk about this on my blog (somewhat hamfistedly, because I'm still wrestling with this issue in my head). I believe that Sabon has the cachet among typographers that it does because of Tschichold's near-unique achievement in making an identical typeface for three different typesetting systems, rather than any inherent beauty in the typeface itself. We're praising the constraints rather than praising the product. Or so I believe.

And when you read Southall's book, you will see that attempting to grapple with technological constraints has turned promising projects into epic trainwrecks far more often than producing Sabons. Walter Tracy in Letters of Credit and Stanley Morison in A Tally of Types allude to some of these disasters as well, although not as explicitly.

The Renaissance masters sharply limited the primary colors in their palettes, and worked with very austere geometry and forced perspectives, and produced some of the greatest art the world has ever seen. But they chose those constraints, in large part (although there's an argument to be made that they were making the best of what they had, given the relative paucity of vivid pigments during the Renaissance), instead of having them arbitrarily imposed on them. I think type still has a ways to go until the technological constraints in digital typeface design are low enough that we can impose new ones of our own choosing without tangling with our technology.

None of this explains why Tracy chose to set Letters of Credit in photo Sabon, when he had thousands of other 'non-compromised' typefaces to choose from. Granted, he understood a lot more about type and typesetting than any of us.

It is very easy to say what is wrong with traditional Sabon. Those are relatively easy insights to arrive at, even though we all feel we come to them only after exhausting study. (I have no comment on the redesign.) It takes considerably more acute analysis to discover what is right about it. Why did Tracy choose just that seemingly hopelessly compromised typeface for his masterpiece? What is it about Sabon that appealed to him so greatly? What lessons are we missing here?

>You aren't impressed by Optima nova, even though it was done by Hermann Zapf, too? I imagine that Optima nova is the way that he always wanted Optima to be.

Perhaps he has always wanted a proper italic for Optima, but things don't always turn out as well as hoped.

The contribution of punchcutter August Rosenberger to Palatino and Optima was crucial; he was, after all, the designer of the incomparable (metal) Bauer Bodoni.

What Zapf may want from type at this point is almost as little known as what Heidegger wanted of God late in life. There are two fallacies here. The first is that Optima Nova represents Zapf's final wishes. The second is that his final wishes are typographically definitive.

In type, you are only as good as your collaborators. Your final wishes are interesting but do not necessarily result in better design.

Type is not art, and cannot be treated as art. There is little room for the artist's viewpoint either in design or in criticism. This is what Tracy was attempting to teach. It is really striking to me, again and again, how the best type is so often produced by people who are not great intellectuals, not great aesthetes, not great thinkers - people who can often barely spell, and probably can't write and can't really think well as we should probably define it. The best type people are often rather, well, I don't want to say strikingly grotty, or something really classist, but how else to get the point across?

Finally, just a little technical point. Anybody who thinks Zapf would consider definitive a version of Optima designed under the limitations of the Postscript grid is naive. I mean, he does have an eye.

So in type, you're only as good as your collaborators. But consider this: in digital we have so much freedom that Zapf did not have in Optima. But in Lino metal, he had one crucial freedom we do not have: infinite, seemless variation of curve and stroke, well beyond the capabilities of the ignoble Postscript grid. So one might say, although I don't like to, that in digital type, you're only as good as your maximum grid. 1,000 x 1,000 is not enough for a designer of the quality of Zapf, or anyone else really interested in achieving definitive statements. That is why some nuts today are still designing with Ikarus. A 15,000 x 15,000 grid really does let you say what you want to say - even when it is just the simple technical matter of duplicating the quality of an historical or pre-Postscript design.

>Type is not art, and cannot be treated as art.

Type is both art and craft, not purely one or the other. Some are greater artists, such as Goudy and Zapf, and some are greater craftsmen, such as Benton.

Though I have not seen it in action, to my eye Optima Nova is a definite improvement on the old metal face. The original Optima is a fabulous artistic achievement, but had craft problems - it was too light and grey at smaller sizes. The new version seems to correct this fault, though as I say I have not seen it in action.

It doesn't come down to imperceptible details.
Now there are obvious serifs on the Optima Nova roman "a" and "c", where there were none before, just a slight flare. It was that subtle treatment of those terminals that I always admired, and, IMO, made the face the marvelous "neither fish nor fowl" that it was. Now that state of grace has been lost.

>Now that state of grace has been lost.

Nick, something may have been lost in elegance at large sizes, but we still have the original design in digital. I suspect that at smaller sizes the new version works better. But designers can try both and see which works better for their purposes, I guess.

It hasn't been lost, Nick, because the old version of Optima (and of Sabon and Frutiger, and any other of the new/next/nova Linotype types) is still available. What we have are additional versions of these types that might be useful for specific projects and purposes.

In the case of the new Sabon, the redesign is very thorough, going back to Tschichold's sources and his drawings for the foundry version, before he adapted the design to the unitised widths of mechanical setting. I think of it less as a new Sabon as simply a new Garamond. However one looks at it, it is an additional typeface for designers to work with, and not something that replaces the older Sabon.

Well said, and for the curious, there is a fabulous and as yet unreleased Linotron version of Optima optimized for very small sizes by ... Matthew Carter.

I didn't intend to suggest that the original Optima is no longer avaialble. My point is that the "Optima" quality has been lost in the new version, by over-serifization.

As for italics, IMO the "proper" italic for Frutuger Next is far more successful than that of Optima Nova, especially in the heavy weights, which are quite gorgeous. The synergies which make one update a success but not another are enigmatically circumstantial.

John, I think most of us agree that the new "Sabon" is really more of a Garamond, so closely was the personality of Tschicold's design of the original invested in the openly-fitted, duplexed roman+italic kind of layout in which it excelled. Bill, there is something about that kind of layout which must have appealed to Tracy.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having Italic and Roman with the same character count. It's a very modernist idea, and you will find that the mid 19th century moderns (Scotches) have this feature of an equivalence in tonality and count. The idea, mid 20th C, that a sloped roman was a desirable form of italic, had a lot going for it. After all, this was the dominant form of the 20th century sans italic (sans Gill Sans), and a matching form of serifed italicization is logical.

I'm not sure how much bearing my criticism has on the usefulness of Optima Nova today, but I think that when typographers familiarize themselves with typefaces, they do form an impression based, not just on the functionality of the way the face behaves, but also on an awareness of the personality and virtue of the letterforms under close scrutiny.

Ultimately, my take on revivals is that tinkering is a mistake. A revival should be either scrupulously faithful to the original, or respect it enough to put some design distance between the two, with a consistently new interpretation based on a fresh insight into the way things have changed between then and now.

>something about that kind of layout which must have appealed to Tracy

Was Tracy the supervisor of Sabon for Linotype? If so, then there is an obvious reason: Linotype machinery, I have read, requires that the italic character is the same width as the corresponding roman character.

Your point about revivals is plausible, but I don't know it it's true. I personally am happy that Zapf had a chance to re-make the face in the way he thought most appropriate for digital. Time will tell, I guess, how useful it is compared to the original digitization. I guess I would be interested in whether the serifs on the a and c were Zapf's idea or Kobayashi's. I suspect they were Zapf's.

Text and display.

Text.

I also prefer the original scooped out "f". That feature is an example of a constraint (no f_ ligatures) causing an interesting character shape (same idea in Palatino). It's an integral part of the typeface's personality; changing it changes the personality of the typeface; with their longer arms and angled trim, the r and f of the Nova alter the open, even color of the type, taking the initial simple rigor in a smoother and more complex direction. This is a quality of digital type (measurable, no doubt, by Fourier patterns) which has its merits, but in a pre-digital era typeface design, it doesn't appeal to a purist like me.



Enough of criticizing Hermann Zapf, how about some praise? Speaking of the way that technology and opportune collaboration influence the design of type, what more awesome example is there than Zapf and Twardoch's "Zapfino Extra Pro", with its mind-boggling deployment of OpenType contextual alternates?

(measurable, no doubt, by Fourier patterns)

yer too funny, nick! :^D

I got a flyer from Oak Knoll saying that Printer's Type in the Twentieth Century is available here in the US, published jointly by Oak Knoll.