Type journey

This from Liron Lavi Turkenich:

I will share a bit of the frustration and the fussiness included in the process of designing a specific letter or glyph. The process involves a lot of observing: looking at other typefaces, checking what was done. Expanding also to typefaces that are not in the same category as the one we’re designing, perhaps some interesting feature will be relevant. The observation part does not end while moving to the actual design, it is a back and forth process. But while starting to design, we are experimenting. How far can we go? How interesting can we make this glyph without making it a joke? Can our typeface’s style carry bravely the new feature? And after being so brave (and for some people before) we start relaxing, refining and finding a proper balance.

Some glyphs are coming more naturally. They may fit easily to the typeface’s style or they are just simple enough (although those so-called simple ones are causing the most challenges). But others, are just a nerve wracking. 

But let’s discuss the letter we gathered here for: the letter g!

At first, I designed the ‘g’ you see on the left. Funny how a letter can be so human — I got a comment that it looks sad — and I couldn't agree more! I changed the ‘ear’. Later on you can see another change. (I didn’t include here all the steps of the design, just some key ones)

Some tryouts to make the ‘g’ more harmonised with my typeface. I have short ascenders and descenders and large counters — I needed something more open, so the letter wouldn’t look cramped. 

This is how the ‘g’ looked after the changes. Not too amazing, but okay. Then, I got a feedback from Gerry Leonidas that the 'g' looks too generic and could fit any typeface. I cannot talk enough about the importance of feedback. When you are so into what you are doing, it is essential to ask other people for their opinion.

More finer adjustments: first change is adding more weight, so it would work with the other characters of the type.

I was quite happy with it, but after Gerard Unger’s feedback, I made some more changes. I already mentioned how changing the g’s ‘ear’ can create a whole different feeling, here are other attempts for it — sometimes it looks happy, and sometimes more serious.

So for now, and it might still change — this is my g!

Children’s reading and the small letter g

This, from Sue Walker:

These small-letter ‘g’s are taken from some early twentieth-century handwriting manuals used for teaching print script, which was very popular with teachers at the time.

Some teachers thought that children would find it easier to read if such letterforms were used in children’s reading books, and as a result handwritten forms were used for the text in some reading books. Many such books were written and produced by teachers using the same letterforms as they used for teaching handwriting.

Detail from L. M. Sidnell and A. M. Gibbon, Little ones’ own picture reader,
‘Blackie’s Coloured Manuscript-Writing Infant Readers’, London and Glasgow: Blackie, 1924

Detail from My first reading book, ‘The Seandar Individual Reading Books’, Leeds: E. J. Arnold, 1929

Most publishers of children reading books, however, used traditional typefaces, but several began to acknowledge a link with handwriting through the use of a single storey g and a, which became known as ‘infant characters’. To begin with many were badly rendered, often resulting in an uncomfortable fit with the other letters.

Detail from S.N.D. [Rose Meeres] Book IIA, ‘The songs the letters sing’, London: Grant Educational Company, circa 1920.

Detail from Simplified print-writing primer, Gibson’s print-writing primers, Glasgow: Robert Gibson & Sons, circa 1922

A rather good-looking small-letter g was drawn by Eric Gill at the request of a teacher, Augusta Monteith, initially for a children’s poetry book. The pink book of verse was first published in 1931, and reprinted as First poetry book in 1934.

Probably as a result of the alternative g (and a), Gill Sans was used in many children’s reading books until the 1960s. Many teachers continue to think that infant characters should be used in books for beginner readers. But, in some typefaces, such as Helvetica and Avant Garde Gothic, the o, a and g can be perceived as very similar and this can lead to confusion.

What do children think? In recent classroom research most children I spoke with were aware of different forms of small letter g. Some even made the point that single storey g's are for writing and double-storey g's are what we read. While those that thought double-storey small-letter g's (and a’s) were 'harder' than single-storey ones, this did not affect their reading performance. What was more significant was the way typefaces are used: the space between letters, words and lines. See about the project here.

What was very important for young readers was the ‘look and feel’ of a typeface. My typeface, Fabula, designed originally as a screen font for interactive multi-lingual story books for children, was designed to have an informal ‘feel’. It has a cursive small-letter g that has been carefully designed so that it is not easily confused with other characters; the double-storey ‘a’ and clear distinction between other confusable characters also helps. In testing, Fabula has been described by children as: ‘clear, so you can see it properly’; ‘normal'; ‘like an ordinary book’.

gee whiz

This, from Juliet Shen, type designer and graphic designer working in Seattle.

The small letter gee is close to my heart.
It’s endowed with unique anatomical parts. It succeeds in flaunting its personality to a degree considered to be poor taste among other minuscules. It doesn’t toe the baseline like its siblings. Here are some of the quirky gees that I love, from the early American Type Founders Company (ATF) specimen books (1895, 1906). I think they have a lot of attitude.

Top to bottom: Meriontype, American Italic, Erratick, Lafayette and Quaint Roman No. 2, Houghton

In fact Gee was a bit of a cuckoo in the nest. When it joined the alphabet family, it took seventh place from a letter that waited another two centuries to be reinstated, in last place. So you could say Zed has hard feelings towards Gee, but it’s quite obvious from its flippant ear that the feisty minuscule offspring of the usurper could care less.

Cooper black

The small letter gee gave me the courage to design my first font. I thought that 25 years of designing with numerous typefaces would prepare me to design a font, but experience turned out to be a handicap. I couldn’t think of a reason to add another typeface to the pantheon, and certainly didn’t see how I could improve on existing fonts. Then I discovered Adtype in the 1906 ATF specimen book. Look at that gee! I believed I could do better.

Cooper Black

Okay, so it wasn’t that easy to design my own gee. Here are just a few of my first attempts, and none of these made it into the final version of Bullen, now in the Font Bureau library. But look closely at my efforts and you’ll see Adtype genes at work.

Years ago a therapist told me I could improve my own attitude either by taking Prozac or taking daily walks around Green Lake, Seattle’s popular urban pond (same effect on the brain, apparently). I chose the outdoor cure, and that led to a series of small “letterscapes,” landscapes made from single letters. Here’s to you, gee.

The giraffe of the alphabet

This, from Gerard Unger’s Letters, a collection of texts from a newspaper column ‘Letter en Geest’ contributed to an Amsterdam newspaper between 1989 and 1990:

The g is the most beautiful letter in the alphabet. Not the one on the left, the one on the right. One with an eye and a loop, the other with two eyes, or an eye and a loop. But what do I mean by letter g? Sometimes so hard, as in German, sometimes so soft, as in can be in French — and certainly not the sound that g gerenerally represents in Dutch — that cross between a cough and a gargle that foreigners find so difficult and ugly. And what does beautiful mean? It is a word that we are capable of using totally blindly, and with perfect conviction. Compare: one of the most amazing creatures of the animal kingdom is the giraffe. Certainly a trotting giraffe: with long knobbly legs, crossed and uncrossed again in wide sweeps — without becoming entangled. Above them, that long, long neck, slowly and regally inclined, then held erect again. Beautiful indeed. Pure beauty. A cause for boundless lyricism. And too, a giraffe has beautiful eyes and a beautiful coat. The g is the giraffe of the alphabet: an amazing creature surrounded by quotidian quadrupeds. Most of the small letters are simple combinations of these elements: arcs and straight lines (horizontal, vertical or sloping). Only the a, g and s escape this pattern, the g most of all. Strange is beautiful.