Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface

For the first ten years of my career, I worked for Massimo Vignelli, a designer who is legendary for using a very limited number of typefaces. Between 1980 and 1990, most of my projects were set in five fonts: Helvetica Future, Garamond No. 3, Century Expanded, and, of course, Bodoni.

For Massimo, this was an ideological choice, an ethical imperative. "In the new computer age," he once wrote, "the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture. Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest." For me, it became a time-saving device. Why spend hours choosing between Bembo, Sabon and Garamond No. 3 every time you needed a Venetian Roman? For most people — my mom, for instance — these were distinctions without differences. Why not just commit to Garamond No. 3 and never think about it again? My Catholic school education must have well prepared me for this kind of moral clarity. I accepted it gratefully.

Then, after a decade, I left my first job. Suddenly I could use any typeface I wanted, and I went nuts. On one of my first projects, I used 37 different Free Fonts on 16 pages. My wife, who had attended Catholic school herself, found this all too familiar. She remembered classmates who had switched to public school after eight years under the nuns: freed at last from demure plaid uniforms, they wore the shortest skirts they could find. "Jesus," she said, looking at one of my multiple font demolition derbies. "You've become a real slut, haven't you?"

It was true. Liberated from monogamy, I became Stock Photography promiscuous. I have since, I think, learned to modulate my behavior — like any substance abuser, I learned that binges are time-consuming, costly, and ultimately counterproductive — but I've never gone back to five-typeface sobriety. Those thousands of typefaces are still out there, but my recovery has required that I become more discriminating and come up with some answers to this seemingly simple question: why choose a particular typeface? Here are thirteen reasons:

Big Fonts

Sometimes “the standard” just isn’t good enough. Sometimes we need special tools to do the job right. Type designers understand that graphic communicators often want more choice of characters than the standard font set contains. As a result, more and more fonts are being released with large, non-standard character sets.

Since a digital font is still (technically) limited to 256 characters, additional letters and characters are frequently put in another digital font file. However, if there are additional characters that complement the font, these are provided in a “linked” font at no additional charge.
Additional characters usually fall into one of several categories: swash or alternate characters, expert set characters, custom ligatures, or logotypes.

Swash Letters

Swash letters were born out of calligraphic lettering. These characters have fancy flourishes that replace terminals or serifs, and usually come in one of three varieties.

Beginning and ending swash letters are specifically designed to begin or end a line of copy. These are usually designed for cursive or calligraphic type designs. Avalon, Civilité and Ludovico have a variety of beginning and ending swash letters.

Demonstrative swash letters show an open regard toward surrounding letters and characters. Character strokes that wrap affectionately under or over adjacent letters are typical of these forms. You can find lots of these in fonts like Cruz Swinger, Long fellow, and Fine print.

Fancy caps are uppercase letters with one or more swash characteristics. Buccaneer, Loire, and Buccardi are just a few of the Creative Alliance typefaces that have fancy caps in their fonts.

Alternate characters are usually meant for display typography. Like swash letters, alternate characters can also be divided into groups.

Biform letters are either capital letters with lowercase letter shapes or lowercase letters with capital letter shapes. The Monolith and Planet families possess two very different interpretations of biform characters.

Alternate characters also include simple substitutions like the sets of R’s and K’s in Diablo; or characters in typefaces like Epicure, Kolo, and Little Louis, in which each character is a creative tour de force.

Expert Set Characters

These are important characters for setting fine text typography. They usually include lowercase numbers, small caps, and ligatures.

Numerals are commonly available in two styles: uppercase and lowercase, sometimes also called “lining” and “oldstyle.” Most of us use the uppercase variety more frequently.

These numbers all have the same height, and match the uppercase letterforms in weight and proportion. Lowercase numerals are designed to be used in blocks of text copy. The main body of these numerals is generally the height of the lowercase x-height, and some of the forms have ascenders and descenders.

Small caps are letterforms drawn to approximately the x-height of the lowercase letters, but with the design of full-height capitals. They are, however, much more than merely downsized capital letters. Small caps are designed proportionally wider and heavier than the full-size capitals so that they create uniform tonal quality when set with lowercase letters.

Standard ligatures are joined, or linked, letter combinations many of which are associated with typesetting specific languages. Ligatures commonly used in setting English and German are shown below.

Custom Design Training

Custom Design Training, on the other hand, are much more diverse. They take the idea one or two steps beyond what you get in average character sets. Custom Design Training found in Aeneas, Palazzo Caps, and Gill Facia are shown below.

Logotypes

Even complete logotypes can be included in a font. These are usually short words that have been designed as a complete unit. The most common are shown below.

Other kinds of additional characters are available. For example, there are faces like Industrial Gothic that provide the tools to make a variety of banners and institutional headers; and Science and Martini At Joe’s come with great sets of retro ornaments.

There are scores more “big Free Fonts” and hundreds of special characters offered in the Creative Alliance collection. Check them out!