Voy a contarles la historia de un diseño que siempre quise hacer, que involucra un universo gráfico maravilloso y que aborda una temática muy interesante: la escritura a mano. Se trata de una tipografía para las infancias, destinada a material lúdico, didáctico y educativo.
Comencé por preguntarme cómo son las letras en las distintas etapas del aprendizaje de la lectoescritura, desde jardín de infantes hasta el tercer año de la escuela primaria. Y cómo deberían ser: seguramente fáciles de reconocer, de leer y de escribir también.
How we collaborated on an on-going generative type system.
Deb: So, we want to write this article for Alphabettes, right?
Saachi: Yeah, to talk about our process. How we actually built Tangent.
Deb: How did we even start? It feels like we got to it so fast. Like one day we had nothing, and the next we had… a superfamily?
Saachi: Okay, let’s back up. All the way to the beginning.
Pit Stop 1: (Crossed) Pathways
It began in Kelsey Elder’s class called Variable; with the assignment Kit-Car. The brief was simple:
In the spirit of Sister Corita Kent, observe the world around you, and find a source. Look to find form in things that are, too, made up of shapes or parts. Consider toys, patterns on family heirlooms, fundamental shapes of objects, optical illusions, and so on. Create components from this source of inspiration and use them to make a set of static glyphs.
Corita Kent’s line: “learn to see the world by looking at the world one piece at a time” was basically the north star for the whole thing. Start small, start with parts.
First ideas for the project emerged in the autumn of 2024. At the time, I was doing an internship at a French type design studio. Surrounded by the rich beauty of Paris and looking at typefaces every day, I felt an increasing urge to start working on a new typeface.
Typeface brief can take shape through different processes. In my case, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to work on something experimental, a project that would create a dialogue between historical letterforms and contemporary approaches.
More specifically, I wanted to explore Vyaz, an ornamental writing style derived from Byzantine culture that played a significant role in the history of Ukrainian writing. In terms of character, I was drawn to something sharp, carved, chiseled.
Tiny Grotesk is a tiny superfamily. In a market where sans-serif families quickly grow to contain dozens of styles, sometimes over a hundred, Tiny Grotesk is an antidote, a proposal to do more with less. It covers as much ground as possible, across only twenty-four carefully selected styles.
Tiny Grotesk is in its regular width a clean, friendly neogrotesk with relaxed capitals and a round, even-keeled lowercase. The two accompanying widths, Narrow and Wide, expand it into a complex typographic toolkit. The Narrow styles, space-saving and optimised for small use, are ideal for footnotes, asides and UI elements. The Wide styles, imposing and optimised for large use, demand space, and will take that space no matter what. This pairing makes the family versatile and broadly usable while remaining as compact as possible.
Tiny Grotesk has been in development since 2019, slowly but steadily expanding in scope but not really in size. It has been used in a few print projects, on some vinyl records, and for a complex digital catalogue before its release in 2024 and expansion in 2026.
Bridging some 500 years of typographic ideas
The initial idea for the family started in a perhaps weird place: 1500s italic calligraphy and movable typefaces based on it. In these early days, the lowercase was a cursive italic. The capitals, however, were upright forms. Since the capital letters in these texts occurred relatively rarely – an average of something like once every forty characters – their presence clearly wasn’t disruptive to readers. Not disruptive enough to feel the need to draw italic capitals, which would require a whole new set of sorts to be drawn, cut and cast. I can’t blame them for wanting to be efficient.
Arrighi’s second italic, as used in Marco Girolamo Vida’s Scacchia Ludus, 1527.1
The italics by Ludovico Arrighi were the original inspiration for Tiny Grotesk, in a direct but not entirely obvious way. The proportions were taken from his second italic, and I wanted to explore them in depth. Would the typographic rhythm work in a sans-serif jacket, even with the strange width relationship between these capitals and lowercase letters?
Above: Brooke Hull. “Overlay of Fat Letterform Illustrations on Type Anatomy Guide.” 2023. Type Anatomy guide image via Material Design. “Understanding typography.” nd. https://m2.material.io/design/typography/understanding-typography.html#type-properties
How can we disrupt design canons & fight fatphobia intersectionally through embodied typography?
This research began as I discovered and accepted my own fat, nonbinary body for the first time at the age of 23-24. I was in graduate school having to not only expand my knowledge about the systems within the world around me but having to understand how those systems impacted my own body. As a person who has been fat my whole life, I never accepted this reality until I learned about the system of oppression known as fatphobia.
Fatphobia, as defined by Dina Amlund, is “the name of the structure and the social hierarchy that place people of size, or fat people, beneath slender people” (2017).
Fat people face proven discrimination at work, in relationships, in healthcare, and in the media (Cooper Stoll 2019). Fatphobia, like all other systems of oppression, is intersectional (Crenshaw 1989), further harming folks who embody multiple systems of oppression, like race, gender, sexuality, and disability. While learning about these intersecting systems of oppression, I wanted to use design to relate these systems to my own body and bodies like mine. This is where the idea of fat typography began.
Reflecting on the past year, we can say the number of new typeface releases was remarkable. The type market has become more diverse and competitive than ever, with new fonts hitting the scene every day. Both amateur and professional designs are eager to be in the spotlight so they can really be seen. In this hectic landscape, we find it valuable to offer insights that help identify excellence and merit within the crowd. This includes evaluating proficiency in crafting letters, the overall quality of the font, and the contributions that a new typeface brings to the table.
There are approximately four million Georgian speakers worldwide, so I am quite happy to represent my community by designing the first Georgian Alphabettes header.
Despite the relatively small size of the Georgian-speaking population, the script has a rich calligraphic history with significant developments over the centuries. The evolution of the Georgian alphabet has produced three scripts: Asomtavruli (5th century), Nuskhuri (9th century), and Mkhedruli (10th century). Over time, letterforms have transformed and shifted between scripts, allowing all three to be preserved and used in some capacity today. However, Mkhedruli is the primary script in modern use, which is why I chose to design the header with it.
Same Bold Stories? Type Design by Women and Queers in the 20th and 21st Centuries Exhibition at the Klingspor Museum, Offenbach am Main, Germany July 19—November 24, 2024
A Quick Intro
In July, I had the chance to attend the opening of Same Bold Stories?, an exhibition that explores the question: Where are women’s voices in type design that complement the existing history?
While conversations about women in type design are becoming more common, exhibitions on this topic are still pretty rare. That’s why it’s so important to acknowledge and appreciate this effort. The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the Klingspor Museum (Dr. Dorothee Ader, Valerij Ledenev, Tatjana Prenzel), design studio Turbo Type (Laura Brunner, Leonie Martin), and the feminist collective +FEM (Kristina Mukhacheva, Naomi Rado). The opening took place on July 19, and I was lucky to be there. The feedback has been very positive, with media describing it in fitting words like “Fat, brave, and cheeky!” (hr2-Kultur Review) and “Arial, Bold, Times New Roman – Queer and Feminine Font Design” (Deutschlandfunk Kultur Interview). The exhibition runs until November, with various events planned. You can check the details here.
I have been fascinated by the ways design layout is governed by a structured grid or set of rules. My curiosity extends to the exploration of typographic designs guided by specific grids. Navigating the delicate balance between creativity and legibility presents a challenge I wanted to tackle.
With my heritage in Japan, I realized that Japanese patterns on textiles consist of different ranges of shapes, which I decided to take inspiration from. One of the patterns is called “shippo” meaning “seven treasures” in Japanese. The Shippo pattern consists of endless circles overlapping each other.
Leah Rosen is a fourth year Industrial Design and Psychology student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, New York, USA. Since 2020, she has been a Student Assistant in the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection. Her roles vary from setting up the new Cary Pressroom, shelving rare books and handling archival items in the collection. This year Leah was also the Teaching Assistant in RIT’s Letterpress Printmaking course. She initiated a personal letterpress project. Despite her busy schedule, she was not discouraged to dedicate a significant amount of time and effort to typesetting and printing a calendar for 2024. She shares her process, challenges, and some valuables lessons. The outstanding outcome speaks for itself.
