A New Doric

Typefaces are never finished. Even when they make their way into the  world and start being used, we can’t help but feel a nagging need to go back and tinker with them. Luckily, the sheer amount of work that goes into a typeface and the constant pull of something new drive us away. From time to time we open up a file, play with it a little, and then close it in haste. Maybe all we do is add  a prefix like “New,” “Neue,” or “Nouveau.” The file is forgotten again, and hopefully gets buried in the sands of time. Occasionally, though, the push of a client is enough to lodge a thought in our heads. A request to make some changes to a few characters can make us stop and reconsider, and the what-ifs start to mount.

When we launched Commercial Classics in 2019, a few typefaces sat at the heart of the concept: the modern Brunel, the robust Caslon Ionic, and, of course, a large sans family, Caslon Doric. This was a reimagining of the late-nineteenth-century British sans through the twentieth-century lens of Univers (though perhaps not with Frutiger’s rigour to retain some of the original eccentricities). So not just multiple weights, but multiple widths. Not just light to extra bold, condensed to extended, but hairline to fat, condensed to super extended. And in this we made compromises: forms changed between weights and widths. The condensed, which was flat-sided, underwent some subtle and not-so-subtle adjustments in the regular and wider widths. Caslon Doric had all the tools we thought a modern design would need, and its slight, quirky inconsistencies were a positive for us. After its release, designers discovered a face that had more character than, say, Helvetica — but was it perhaps at times too much? Designers would say how much they liked it, but could we perhaps make it a little less challenging? Clients wanted something simpler and less characterful. And a comment from the Commercial Classics launch party stuck in our heads: “When is the variable font coming out?” To which we replied that it wasn’t possible, given the variety within the family. Besides, that wasn’t really the original vision we had intended. 

A few years passed. One client liked Caslon Doric enough to commission us to make some changes. Of course it was still Doric, but the terminals got flattened, and it started to seem as if the Caslon Foundry had, at some point in the fifties, looked at what was happening in Switzerland and at Haas, and decided to modernise its workhorse sans. Could you take designs that spanned from the late 1840s into the early 1900s and condense them into a singular vision? Of course, the Caslon Foundry had gone bankrupt in the thirties, but it was nevertheless a provocative idea that lingered. And so did the thought of making a variable version of Caslon Doric, where the condensed would merge seamlessly with the regular and extended. It seemed an exciting challenge: to see if we could get these parts to fit together, to try a simplified form, yet at the same time retain the charm of the original.

So we reviewed the original design and defined the space we were working in. Though we had taken great pride in the number of weights we had created for the regular widths, we understood that as the design narrowed, the number of weights had to decrease — which led us to the realisation that, in a more refined family, we would go not from a hairline but from a thin, and would stop at black rather than fat. And as the design extended, we needed to add italics that had been missing in the original, thus filling in all the edges of our design space.

But beyond this, we streamlined the design. For example, we chose to end terminals on flat horizontals rather than diagonals, much as Neue Haas Grotesk did with Akzidenz Grotesk’s angled terminals. The retention of barely perceptible inward turns on the top terminal of a or the loop of g produces a delicate but noticeable hint of something. The fishhook-like strokes of Caslon Doric’s f, j, r, t, and y are simplified. The double-storey g gives way to a single-storey form (the original becomes an alternate), while the distinctively beautiful, loopy tail of Q is reduced to a straightforward line. These changes give New Doric a new taste. Too bland? Perhaps for some. But we prefer to think of this new flavor as more versatile and adaptable.

With New Doric, the gap between the more rounded form of Caslon Doric’s regular width and the flat-sided X Condensed has been filled in with two new, useful widths — a Condensed and a Narrow — that offer the flexibility and freedom lacking in the original design. Though such a design variation is a problem in the roman, in the italic it posed a much more complicated challenge: to maintain, at all widths and weights, a smooth transition from flat sides to the roundness of the regular and extended widths. That this all appears seamless has much to do with the skill of designer Tim Ripper.

New Doric is a modernised rendition of the nineteenth-century form. It retains enough of the past to feel warm and human, and enough of the modernity of the new grotesques to feel contemporary. Caslon Doric was a well-made tool, but one that still needed a little care in how it was used. New Doric feels less complicated in its system, easier to use, with the spaces left in the old design all filled in. It’s a design from the Victorian era, remade in the twentieth-century tradition for the demands of the twenty-first.