Delegate’s functional, incidental beauty

Delegate, an amalgam of disparate ideas and influences, is Shiva’s celebration of this apparent paradox. He turned to Matthew Carter’s influential Bell Centennial for guidance, which led him back to the typeface that Bell Centennial replaced: Chauncey Griffith’s Bell Gothic, commissioned by AT&T in 1938 for use in phone books. “I was immediately transfixed,” Shiva told me. “Purely functional considerations seem to have led to its unique design, and that had in turn created an aesthetic.” He had long been fascinated by the divergent paths the sans serif had taken in Europe and the United States; for him, Bell Gothic was the closest to a “real” grotesk that an American sans had ever come. 

Shiva recalled becoming aware of a wayfinding project in Europe where the designer used Franklin Gothic for an office complex. He found it incredibly odd: Franklin Gothic—any gothic—immediately feels so quintessentially American, and he wondered why a suitable neo-grotesk wasn’t used instead. This question became an equally important part of the thinking that led to Delegate, driving Shiva’s attempt to design what might be considered a distinctly American grotesk by combining a square, gothic skeleton with the details and terminals of a European grotesk.

Erik Spiekermann’s ITC Officina Sans and FF Meta Sans provided useful avenues to explore for the mundane-but-weird “office-ness” Shiva was after, as did Spiekermann’s intimation that the boundary between text and display types is perhaps not as categorical as we would like to think.3 This is especially the case with agates, whose notches and quirks disappear at small sizes but become showy display elements when the type is set large.

Shiva started taking notes on other functionalist touchstones. He studied Classified News, released by IBM in 1968 for use with its Selectric Composer, for its contrasting widths between capitals and lowercase letters. Martin Majoor’s Telefont, made for the Dutch telephone book in 1994, provided an instructive example of an agate that didn’t feature any visible ink traps but depended instead purely on strategies of spacing and open counters. Information, published in 1953 by Stempel subsidiary Klingspor (and as a digital version in three styles by Berthold in 1993, now unavailable), served as a reference for widths and attempts at “neutrality.” He also looked at Commercial Type’s Guardian Agate Sans. And Christian Schwartz’s Amplitude was “hugely influential,” Shiva told me: “It was an agate face designed for display—balancing the two considerations (legible at small sizes, distinct at large sizes)—so it greatly informed the design details, proportions, spacing, and contrast in Delegate.” Tobias Frere-Jones’s Retina might plausibly be viewed as an important precursor: originally designed for the Wall Street Journal, the family started with the MicroPlus styles, whose exaggerated details carved out the distinct identities of letters and words. From Frere-Jones, too, Shiva borrowed the strategy of borrowing strategies, which implies “a more flexible and effective relationship with typographic history”4 than merely assimilating forms.

After Bell Centennial replaced Bell Gothic in 1978, the latter eventually found its way into design programs at places like RISD and Cranbrook. By the nineties, when designers started using Macs in earnest, they began favoring utilitarian typefaces like Bell Gothic, Bell Centennial, Alternate Gothic, and Trade Gothic for off-label uses like posters, ad campaigns, and book covers. Frere-Jones’s Griffith Gothic, originally commissioned by Patrick Mitchell for Fast Company and released commercially by Font Bureau in 1997, amplified Bell Gothic and turned it into a display face. If Griffith Gothic wasn’t explicitly meant as a response to this trend toward functional typefaces in the nineties and early aughts, it coincided auspiciously with it.

These purely serviceable faces came to be celebrated for their expressive qualities: industrious and prosaic set small, flamboyant and eccentric set large. Agates are predictive by definition; Griffith Gothic and then Amplitude were perhaps the first agates to go beyond predicting how these types would behave in inhospitable conditions to anticipate how they would behave at the hands of graphic designers. Kalman, Karel Martens, Irma Boom, Bruce Mau—all plied an ethos of working with available, functional materials (and typefaces) rather than anything rarefied or precious. 

“Kalman was very minimal in his choice of fonts and stuck primarily to gothics,” Shiva wrote in his email. “Their use in his various magazine and branding projects, and finally in his own monograph, had a great impact on me.” Delegate advances a hypothesis about how a truly American grotesk might look and perform, and a question remained in the back of Shiva’s mind as he designed the family: Could he make a typeface that Kalman would conceivably want to use?

Satisfied with the overall aesthetic and performance of Delegate, Shiva decided to add a monospaced variant with the assistance of Thomas Bouillet. The new family borrows conspicuously from the original, and has a similarly intent focus on preserving the unique identity of each letterform for superior legibility.

The shapes of r, f, and t occupy the maximum possible horizontal space; the elongated serifs of I, i, j, and l assert their presence and reach out to their neighbors, aiding readability. This leads to a full, stately texture that sidesteps the awkward blanks and gaps sometimes seen in monospaced sans serifs. Delegate Mono is quite dense, especially compared to other monos in the Commercial Type library. If Atlas Typewriter is about evenness and Publico Text Mono is about looking undesigned, Delegate Mono is about fullness.

Shiva originally designed Delegate as the house typeface for November, the design practice he runs with Juhi Vishnani. As a functional, everyday grotesk to use for invoices and other routine communications, Delegate perfectly fit the bill; Shiva never intended to publish the family. In 2021–2022, though, he took a sabbatical, spending the year as Designer in Residence at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The break gave him the opportunity to focus on pushing Delegate further and preparing it for retail release. The family comes in seven weights with matching italics in both proportional and monospaced variants, for a total of twenty-eight styles.