An occasional review of type at work in design, advertising and publishing. By: Neil Macmillan
Issue 4 Zadie Smith's first novel, White Teeth, published in paperback by Penguin, is an enjoyable read made even more so by the publisher's choice of types. White Teeth is typeset in 11/13pt Monotype Dante and it's good to see that this is acknowledged by the publisher. Dante (1954), Giovanni Mardersteig's third type design for his private press, Officina Bodoni, resembles Bembo in the roman but has a more sympathetic italic influenced in design by the renaissance type cutter Francesco Griffo. Dante was taken on and released by Monotype for machine composition in the late fifties with additional sizes and semi-bold and titling weights. A young Matthew Carter assisted Monotype and Giovanni Mardersteig in the development of Dante Semi-bold by hand-cutting trial characters. Digital Dante is available from Fontworks through Agfa Monotype in four weights, Roman with italics, Medium with italics, Bold with italics and Titling. Expert and alternate sets are available in all but the Titling weight. White Teeth and Dante, nice one, Penguin. The current press campaign for Ernest & Julio Gallo Turning Leaf wines features an interesting typeface. Casablanca from Steve Jackaman's Red Rooster foundry is a revival of Electra. Electra, not to be confused with the type of the same by W A Dwiggins, is a geometric lineale designed by Carlos Winkow for the Nacional foundry (no date given in my favourite source of reference, The Encyclopaedia of Typefaces by Jaspert, Berry and Johnson). This typeface has some very pleasing character shapes. Look out for the ads. The Gallo ad appears in the first issue of the redesigned glossy Guardian Weekend. With such a popular predecessor, there will be mixed opinions about this change of format. There's no change of types however. Griffith Gothic survives the transition but Matthew Carter's Miller, the dominant text face, struggles. Buy the Saturday Guardian and see for yourself. Eight sections plus a great smell of ink from the glossy mag for 85p. Can't be bad. I do like the redesigned Radio Times. Gill Sans is the dominant typeface. Timeless Gill is such a great type family. I set a wee job in it myself recently and an enjoyable experience it was too. Radio Times' companion text face is Electra, this time the Dwiggins version, which works so well in Jason Shulman's Sunday Telegraph mag. Electra is, I'm sure, Dwiggins' attempt at disciplined mechanical hand-lettering. Unfortunately Electra's hairlines struggle to survive the Radio Times' printing process. Awareness of this potential problem by the art director and some sterling work by Fontworks Special Projects Team ensured that this didn't happen at the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. Having enjoyed working with Poetica by Robert Slimbach and Richard Lipton's Bickham Script, I was pleased to have the opportunity recently to use Linotype Zapfino . What a privilege it was to investigate this ultimate software expression of Hermann Zapf's calligraphic genius. The Zapfino fonts contain a cornucopia of delightful alternates, ligatures and ornaments. Zapfino is based on calligraphy Zapf did for a sketch book in 1944. This was digitised by Gino Lee in Boston in 1993 with the intention of using it in technology similar to OpenType. The programming proved too complex and the project was suspended but Linotype Library have picked up the pieces to offer typographers and font users a unique experience. Disclaimer:
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