Friends, comrades, type fiends!
Welcome back to Adventures. I’ve missed you all but there’s not much time for hugs and well wishes because there’s far too much type to talk about. For example, here’s one design that’s haunted my nights lately:
That’s Decovar, and it sure is a peculiar beast of a typeface. It’s “a multi-style decorative variable font” intended for display sizes and it was designed by David Berlow with the help of Google. They’ve published the typeface in an open source format which is freely available for all to download and experiment with.
Anyways, the important part of this release is that it allows for an intense number of styles to be generated from a single idea. The specimen site breaks Decovar’s features into two options: “skeletons” and “terminals.” Now, terminals are pretty familiar to most designers and so, as you can see above, the very tips of the letters can be used to greatly change the flavor of the typeface. You can also change the intensity of these terminals to be invisible or prominent, but with the second variable option, those skeletons I mentioned, it’s possible to transform the typeface entirely:
With this variation, Decovar grows limbs, or stalks, that creep out of its bones like an infested plant. And so here’s a million dollar idea for the opening title of a TV show: set the name of your show in Decovar, throw a Lost-esque soundtrack in the background and let the skeleton of the font expand and distort to thoroughly creep your audience out before the show begins.
Here’s a note from the specimen site:
While Decovar’s default sans-serif letterforms may look like they’re drawn with a single contour, they’re actually assembled from dozens of smaller contours that follow a complex, modular template inspired by early twentieth-century Art Deco lettering.
I think that Decovar, and the underlying idea of letterforms built out of blocks, is peculiar, charming and freakish all at once. It hints at the possibilities for an exciting new font format that will make the web a more lively place.
In fact, I briefly mentioned this problem to Frank when I popped over to the celebration of the Type@Cooper West program earlier this week at the Dependable Press. There was a lot of beautiful work on display — type specimens and posters filled the space — but what I found particularly frustrating was this: why don’t we see this sort of diversity of type styles on the web? Where is the wit and nuance and delight that can be found so easily in showrooms like this?
Okay, so I know this is a cynical and yawn-ful subject so let’s redirect our focus on the big and beautiful in web typography for the moment: a while back House Industries released such a display face called Benguiat Caslon.
Designed to be set in big, large and huge sizes in classic TNT (tight-not-touching) style, Benguiat Caslon is dynamite for a wide range of display demands. We also included outline and drop-shadow versions as well as numerous swash caps, ligatures, contextual alternates and automatically-shifting punctuation.
And those swash caps are simply perfect:
Again, if you’re making a creepy TV show or movie then please use Benguait Caslon because jiminy these shapes make for a wondrous form of eye candy.
What I’m Reading
A short while ago, Tabitha recommended Sapiens by Yuval Harari to me and I’m only just getting into it now but holy heck is it brilliant. It’s a brief history of human development, culture and technology but the litter of facts that dot the book lift it up substantially from its relatively dry written style. My favourite section of the book, and the one that connects it tangentially to Adventures though, is where Harari describes the potential of language and why early humanoids benefited from such a complex set of communication skills:
ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been able to change their behaviour quickly, transmitting new behaviours to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change.
In other words, the development of language gave us all the ability to learn new things quickly, things that normally would’ve required a lot of energy and time to be embedded down into the depths of our DNA. Complex language, and the much later development of letters and written text, gave us the ability to learn from the dead without having to be related to them.
Anywho, I’m not sure that I’d recommend Sapiens to everyone but if serious non-fiction about how humans are ruining the world is your jam then I certainly would.
Letter of the Week
To wrap things up, this week’s letter is this capital H from OhNo Type’s Hobeaux Rococeaux:
I’m not sure why I’m digging all these weird, plant-lookin’ letters this week but now I just want to write a novel about flowers and trees, setting each chapter in a freaky plant font that grows weirder and weirder the more you progress through the story so that by the time you reach its end the book is alive with tendrils shooting out of every letterform.
Until next time!
🌱 Robin