FB Titling Gothic specimen from Font Bureau type catalog, available in seven weights and seven heights for a total of 49 designs.
“For me, it’s a perfect place to work—I never really liked the city
that much,” he says. “I take inspiration from the trees and landscape.
If you look closely, you can see the echoes of their shapes and forms
in my designs. In the warm months, I’m up early and back from the
beach before the tourists are awake. In the winter, it feels like being
on the tundra, but that tends to focus my energy to the screen. The
sun is also important. My house gets lots of natural light.”
SERENDIPITOUS CHARM
When Berlow draws a new typeface, it is usually the result of a
client request. Rhode, however, was a different sort of animal.
According to him, “With the design of Rhode, I was free to roam and explore a new design direction.” Berlow started with the idea
of creating a sans serif family that was a “square” design in the
condensed variants and got “rounder” as character proportions
became more extended.
Another of Berlow’s design goals posed a particularly difficult
design challenge. He wanted to keep the vertical strokes optically
the same weight as the horizontal stems of the alphabet. He
explains, “As the family gets heavier, it becomes difficult to maintain
the appearance of evenness. A typical example is the cap E.
As it gets heavier, all three hairlines don’t fit. So there is this element
in the caps A, B, E, G, R, and by implication, the F and P,
where one stroke is quite thin—introducing sudden isolated contrast
with this thin stroke. The lowercase follows a similar pattern,
with a, e, and g requiring thin strokes.” Berlow is pleased with
this serendipitous design trait: “The overall effect enlivens typography
considerably and gives a graphic designer an additional
dimension to play with.”
The Detroit News featuring FB Titling Gothic.
RAILROAD GOTHIC MEETS UNIVERS
Berlow also pushed the limits of the sans serif design concept in
his Titling Gothic—but in a different manner. Where in Rhode
he allowed the horizontal strokes to become thin, in Titling
Gothic he wanted to maintain a more traditional balance in
stroke weights. One of Berlow’s goals with Titling Gothic was to
build a large, cohesive sans serif family, the same goal that Adrian
Frutiger had for Univers. Berlow’s result, however, has more verve
and personality than the Swiss design.
The project started when Berlow drew a set of lowercase characters
for Railroad Gothic. This set the stage for the rest of the family.
Over a five-year period of off-and-on development built on the
predetermined foundation of a large and versatile family, Titling
Gothic emerged as a coordinated series of styles inspired by the
century-old design. The completed family has roman and italic
designs for seven weights and seven widths—49 designs in all.
UPDATE FOR A REVIVAL
Since Franklin Gothic has been a staple of newspaper and publication design for decades, it is only natural that Berlow would want to add this family to the Font Bureau offering. The design could
have started from scratch, but Berlow figured, “Why start from a
blank screen when you can build on an established foundation?”
He decided to approach ITC to determine if it was interested in a
reinterpretation of its version of Franklin Gothic.
ITC Franklin Display is soon to be released jointly from Font Bureau and ITC, complete with biform characters (e.g., Fretboard and Scavenging church jumple sale).
ITC’s Franklin Gothic was originally released as two designs:
one for display setting and one for text. Early digital interpretations,
however, were developed as “text/display” solutions. This is
a nice idea that provides for the same fonts to be used from tiny 6-
point to billboard-sized letters. The problem with this idea is that
it almost always compromises the typeface design, limiting its
level of performance at any given size.
Font Bureau’s proposal was straightforward yet all encompassing:
“Let us rework the ITC Franklin Gothic family, enlarge it
into separate text and display designs, then let us also offer it as
part of our library.” ITC saw the obvious value in the collaboration.
Work began early in 2004.
The project was supposed to end with the release of new text
and display designs the following year. Like so many design projects,
however, the ITC Franklin venture became much bigger, more
complicated, and more time consuming than originally intended.
Both Font Bureau and ITC hope to make the completed display
designs available in 2006. According to Berlow, “the text weights
should be done before tourists return to the Vineyard next year.”
ITC Franklin illustration, with New ITC Franklin Display at left and ITC Franklin Gothic at right. Berlow redesigned many aspects of Gothic so that it would be optimized for display.
Berlow lived and worked in the trailer at the back of his property
for several months. The house is now complete, and when he
is not walking his dogs on the beach or exploring the back roads of
the Vineyard in his pickup truck, he is in his studio happily drawing
new typeface designs.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF APPRENTICESHIP
As business developed, Berlow grew the Font Bureau staff in a somewhat
unusual way. Most of the designers that came to Font Bureau were young,
and several were fresh out of college. Berlow hired them on a freelance basis
and paid them in computers and cash. The idea was that the designers
work at Font Bureau for a couple of years, learning the business and collaborating
with the likes of Berlow and Matthew Carter on design projects.
When the employees became proficient, they could take their computers
and start their own business with the guarantee of a year’s worth of design
work from Font Bureau. Several typeface designers began their career
with work and a computer provided by Font Bureau.
David Berlow | The Font Bureau | www.fontbureau.com
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