Jonathan Hoefler

It’s so strange to still encounter this little fossil. Some typefaces produced by German foundries, or for German-speaking readers, snug the ‘c’ up against the letters ‘h’ and ‘k’, since ‘ch’ and ‘ck’ are the predominant places that the letter ‘c’ is used in German (names like ‘Carl,’ or loan words like ‘café,’ being the principal exceptions.) In English, and presumably other languages, it looks peculiar, especially alongside more evenly fitted pairings like ‘co’ or ‘ct’, shown here in the bottom line. (Though, that ‘ct’ is a little tight for my taste. Overambitious kerning, or is the right side bearing of the ‘c’ just too tight?)

It really doesn’t seem like that long ago that we were making these letters, in the small offices of The Hoefler Type Foundry at 611 Broadway. There were bursts of activity, and long reflective pauses, as font files and printed proofs went back and forth in a flurry. At first it was just me and Tobias creating Gotham, and then Jesse joined the project; in time Sara would take over the explosively expanding Gotham family, with Andy, Kevin, Wendy, Malou, Ksenya, Aoife, Erin and Colin each contributing in unique and critical ways. Somewhere in all this, the junior senator from Illinois started using the typeface, and suddenly Gotham was the typeface of the Obama campaign, and then the Obama presidency, to our immense joy and pride. Years later still, Sara (@szkolny ) would revisit the project and plot its future, including some splendidly detailed and dimensionalized versions of Gotham specially made for the @obamalibrary , seen here with this extraordinary man, this generational talent, this American Gentleman of the highest order. “For as long as I live,” he once said, “I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.” I feel this same profound sense of awe today, to see these letters that first came to life in my small, scrappy studio within the literal arm’s reach of one of our century’s most exceptional leaders. Whatever version of The American Dream endures, I’m hoping that it’s always something like this. The country I love is the one in which creative people, their works, and their dreams, can soar forever. ❤️ JH

Moments of all-caps script in Morocco

My goodness! John Wallace’s “Tangible Media Collection” is an *extraordinary* collection of physical artifacts for storing information — with countless fascinating pieces of typography, of which these are merely a few. Link in the following comment! Via @jkottke , of course: thanks, Jason!

The benevolent algorithm delivered unto me an ad for @fattorisafest , an Italian manufacturer of perforating machines, who did us designers the courtesy of publishing a *specimen* of their fourteen different alphabets. Please help me come up with an excuse for buying one of these. (Alternately, please help me convince @annieatkins to buy one for making film props of vintage passports, so I can come play with it.) I just adore these things.

Today I learned that Cambridge University has published high resolution photographs of their collection of Baskerville punches. Cue the revivals! http:hflr.io/bville

When I was working on Hoefler Text for Apple in 1992, I had for the first time the chance to automate ligature substitution, something that we now take for granted in OpenType. There was a big discussion about what other letters besides f, i, and l might collide with the lowercase f, and a list of suggestions from the engineering team that were delightfully aligned with everyone’s personalities. The young guy with the tan, blond hair, and iridescent smile suggested ‘fb’ from ‘surfboard’; the Italophile proposed ‘ffi’ from ‘Uffizi.’ And I, a New Yorker who regularly wore a black turtleneck and carried a black canvas messenger bag to meetings in Cupertino, suggested ‘fk’ from ‘Kafkaesque.’ In the ensuing years, I lightened up. Nice to have another, brighter ‘fk’ test word from my morning walking around Zürich.

No biggie, just a 155-year-old pocket watch made of wood.

Quality inlines in Zürich