Control and flexibility

At the ATypi conference in Amsterdam in 2013, I attended a lecture by Peter Bain, then a professor at Mississippi State University, about an influential lettering manual from 1949 with the trilingual title Schriften Lettering Ecritures, written and illustrated by Swiss designer and teacher Walter Käch. Clear advice on construction, contrast, proportions, and spacing are supplemented with example alphabets. Starting with Roman capitals, Käch moves briskly through Rustica, Batarde, and Fraktur up to then-contemporary styles, including a set of sans serifs (“block letters”, in Käch’s terminology) that bear a striking resemblance to a proto-Univers, nearly a decade before his student Adrian Frutiger designed this iconic grotesk family.

One thing that struck me was how much leeway this manual left for the graphic artist, letterer, or sign painter who would follow Käch’s examples. This was not like the later Lettera, where the alphabets were meant to be photostatted and pasted up into headlines; this was a jumping-off point. The letterforms were not set in stone.

I came back to Käch’s block letters in 2017 when Berton Hasebe and I were working on a pair of commissions for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. I sketched a loose interpretation of the light and bold weights, then experimented with closing the apertures, with angling them more like Akzidenz Grotesk, and with higher and lower contrast in the heavier weights. Our clients wanted to go in a different direction, selecting what would later become Review, so I put the drafts aside, revisiting them every so often to see if I could figure out what I wanted from the typeface before coming back to the project in earnest in 2022 for a refresh of Interview magazine. I spent a day in Interview’s archive with the magazine’s design director, Richard Turley; thinking about how the 1970s era of Tight Not Touching (TNT) Helvetica headlines enlarged to fit the full width of the spread helped crystallize for me what Control could do best.

Interview encompasses a wide range of tones in its content, and Control needed to be able to keep up. An article is just as likely to begin with “I was so impressed by the breadth of literary influences in your new novel. When did you start reading Henry James?” as “To start off, what’s your favorite brand of poppers?” With this in mind, I wanted the italic to add something extra to the type palette. I recalled using Los Angeles as an italic for Geneva on the original Macintosh, because I found the Mac’s artificial slant too jarring. 

The 1982 Letraset alphabet Van Dijk also popped into my head. Angular and monoline, with a narrow lower case and a wide upper case, Van Dijk made frequent appearances in strip-mall hair salons and kids’ magazines in the ’80s and ’90s. Nowadays, I’m reminded of it every winter thanks to its popularity with produce companies, particularly citrus wholesalers. It seemed like it could be an interesting model for an italic companion—if the weight, contrast, and vertical proportions match, why not have a cursive instead of an oblique? Miguel Reyes drew a test, and within a few weeks the upright and cursive appeared together in a special publication Interview produced for Art Basel Miami.

After a couple of issues, Interview editor in chief Mel Ottenberg had had enough of Control Cursive, and I drew a more conventional sloped roman italic as well. We then worked with Hrvoje Živčić to extend the weight range with Thin and Light weights.

I’ve had a hard time getting enthused about variable fonts. Interpolation has been an integral part of typeface design since the CAD-assisted beginning of the digital era in the 1970s, when URW’s Ikarus system helped Matthew Carter extrapolate the heaviest weight of Galliard. Back in the ’90s, we witnessed two attempts to put these tools in the hands of type users—Adobe’s Multiple Masters and Apple’s TrueType GX—both of which failed to catch on, largely due to lackluster implementation for end users. A few projects showed the technology’s promise: an identity for a German mobile provider designed by MetaDesign in Berlin, and the first few years of Wired magazine under creative directors John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr. Both used the flexible widths of Myriad to interesting effect. When variable fonts were introduced in 2016, they benefited from having more tech companies behind them, but the same fundamental issues arose: Will design tools unlock what these fonts can do? and will users care? The answer to both, so far, seems to be a qualified “kind of.”

Another challenge is the disconnect between what works well as in-between frames for animation and what works well as a static font in a layout. It’s possible to build variable fonts that seamlessly transition between surprising extremes—the first draft of Paul Barnes’s Spiller for the V&A identity cycled beautifully through sans, antique, Latin, and bracketed serif forms, for example. It was impressive in motion, but as static forms the in-betweens felt weirdly ambiguous and uncertain. The result was unconvincing enough that the idea was only used for an animated logo.

Weight and width axes can be useful, but the majority of users seem happy with the predefined styles carefully predetermined by a typeface’s designer. I struggled to find a compelling idea for a typeface that had to be variable, where the idea would be incomplete without the opportunity for adjustment, and where all of the in-betweens would be as useful, or even more useful, than the poles. Such typefaces do exist: like Greg Gazdowicz’s Align, Control is fully realized only in the variable version. The axes apply the idea of the lettering manual literally, allowing users to tailor the letterforms to each situation. The way the apertures, contrast, and tracking each alter the typeface’s personality seemed both useful and fun. In an ideal world, Control would have no predefined instances at all, encouraging users to consider each decision.

Anyone looking for a faithful digital rendition of Käch’s sans serif lettering examples should look to Dinamo’s Walter Alte and Neue instead. Walter Alte in particular captures the charm of the alphabets shown in Schriften Lettering Ecritures, with all their quirks. Control uses these alphabets as the origin point of a delirious trip through the past seventy years of sans serifs, touching on a range of tropes at all taste levels. It can be used as a straightforward workhorse typeface—the standard spacing is comfortable for extended reading at text sizes—or as a lettering tool that allows a high degree of fine-tuning. A handful of alternate forms, including conventional replacements for the abstracted commas and quotes, change the tone; and short versions of the ascenders and descenders facilitate tight leading to match the tight tracking.