REVIEW
Gábor Kóthay’s new Schwabacher

See also: John Butler’s excellent guide to blackletters

Make that John Butler's excellent collection of outdated hyperlinks. :-(

link rot: watcha gonna do?

thanks for the nice entry. i am a young design student and i am really happy about everyone, who tries to tell the world about the beauty of blackletters

see also:
http://www.fugit-tempus.de/progothics/index.htm
(its only in german - shamefully ;-)

Very useful resource, Daniel. Thank you! Let's get on these authors for an english translation.

I deeply, deeply love Swchwabacher. Even so Fraktur always manages to beat it. Not surprising considering Fraktur was a commissioned design aimed at reasserting Germanic culture over the spreading dominance of typographic style according to the Italians at the time.

I think of all blackletters as fetishistic - a glyph fancier's delight. Schwarzkopf is great. It is more diffcult to describne than it is to appreciate it; refreshing and lyrical if you dig Schwabachers.

Schwabacher is the least-known of the Gothic* triumverate, unsung and misunderstood thru unfamiliarity, but but none the less signicant. Gothic lettering styles comprise a chronological cycle of three distinct phases, 1) Textura with all straight sides; 2) Schwabacher dispensing with Textur's 'broken' strokes in favour of all (mandorla) rounds; 3) Fraktur, combining half-broken with half-round. Fraktur is either a further development of Schwabacher or a continuation of Textur with humanist smarts. Either way, Schwabacher was the precursor and key transitional style. Rotunda provided similar clues and might also have been a model.

Schwabacher's almond-shaped mandorla rounds supposedly micked the pointed arch of Gothic architecture. Outside that context the counterbalanced asymmetric strokes once struck me as the seed for future geometric designs. It turned out this idea was sound enough to apadpt to 19th and 20th century post-industrial syndromes like slab serifs, resulting in Sentinel Type. John, I should send you samples so you can see what I mean.

>really happy about everyone, who tries to tell the world about the beauty of blackletters

I am so happy to hear somebody saying that. A shame gothic is incompatible with the neo-classical fixation of our industrial era. Its 'ugliness' is a false superimposition.

*I prefer to call them Gothic since any letter with strokes approaching the width of the counter can be called 'blackletter'.

I wonder what kind of things you set with this font. For what work is it actually useful except for some Wurst-salesman in east germany? ;)

Any links/images to recent work set in a blackletter? Tia.

The preview with no kerning looks good. How doe sit look with optical kerning? Would be even better to compare + insist on kerning before buying ;)

>what kind of things [...] except for some Wurst-salesman in east germany?

I can't think of any names or point to specific examples on the web, but surely you've seen teenage kids and young adults wearing trendy 'urban wear' tops characterized by less-than-subtle use of type and logos. Now the label itself is the logo and brand rolled into one, taking over work formerly done by fabric designers. Several prominent clothing labels use of blackletters, either straight, outline or inline, fragmented, grunged and so forth. Blackletter logo shirts are almost as popular with the skateboard fraternity as grafitti styles. Damn, I can't think of the names...

Other contemporary uses of blackletter: Album covers, signage and other collateral for hard core heavy metal and 'Goth' bands, 'Olde English' pub menus, coasters and signage, skateboard graphics, certain kinds of beer and food products that exploit the traditional angle.

Like Lowrider, for example. Scores of other urbanwear tops are done in a similar vein with one or another Fraktur or Textur. Do a Google search on "gothic logo" and you'll find plenty.

Blackletter is being rediscovered by younger generations, some of them believing they invented it outright. It's not much different from the internet and the 'reinventing oneself' syndrome - just as every generation thinks it invented sex, every generation thinks it invented a new economy.. .and a new type style that is actually very, very old.

I love blackletter. And the reason I love the Fraktur substyle most of all is encapsulated in its "o": it incorporates the dual nature of Life.

hhp

>Would be even better to compare + insist on kerning before buying ;)

How many kerning pairs are in most metal fonts?
It's all in the spacing baby! (Seriously, kerning should only come into play when the spacing and font design itself cannot resolve the inter character space issues)

> kerning should only come into play when the spacing and font design itself cannot resolve the inter character space issues

Which is a lot of the time! :-/

Kerning is rare in metal (although any decent lc "f" has it) because it's pretty "expensive" to do. A given digital kern takes seconds... and never breaks off!

So why don't people do it more often, and to a greater extent? I think it's a psychological issue: people these days want Consistency, and without a method kerning just seems to haphazard to take too seriously, especially when so many users can't tell the difference anyway. But I think the real problem is that most current type designers simply are not methodical enough. The exact same thing applies to trapping, BTW.

hhp

love Well, cool, Hman. This encourages me to belive the universe actually makes sense.

dual nature of Life. That's canny ;-) Fractured on one side and smooth on the other. Life is only half harmonious.

Now that you've made me look closely I notice Fraktur's 'o' is a mirrored Fraktur 'a' with the stem curl lopped off, and no loss of readability. Schwabacher's symmetric 'o' is less challenging in that sense, but I'm still hooked on those counterposed asymmetric curves. An (artificial) comfort against my lousy sense of physical balance? Possibly.

method Should be as simple as having kerning switched on, but the poor approximation on-screen might make many users think something is 'wrong'.

not methodical They expect to make fonts quickly. A font with crap spacing is merely an alphabet.

> They expect to make fonts quickly

There's more than cost-effectiveness or laziness at play: they're artistes, and can't be bothered with technique...

hhp

"Kerning is rare in metal (although any decent lc "f" has it) because it's pretty "expensive" to do. A given digital kern takes seconds... and never breaks off!"

I wouldn't agree with this at all. The inter-character spacing of many foundry metal faces was very well considered. Especially so since the characters are rigidly locked to their metal bounderies and must interact correctly with any given partner. Where certain characters need additional kerning many foundry fonts came with alternatively sized (thicknesses) for these characters. Where you will find less instances of this are in machine composition typefaces, but even here a great deal of thought was given to the correct placement of the letter on the metal body or the matrix depending upon the system being used.

The confusion here is that only the overhung characters are called "kerned characters" in metal.

This is quite different than foundries such as P22 which seem to offer no consideration to intercharacter spacing whatsover. Their Pressig Antiqua is a disaster when used for textual composition. Compare that to the metal typeface which set perfectly.

"Not surprising considering Fraktur was a commissioned design aimed at reasserting Germanic culture over the spreading dominance of typographic style according to the Italians at the time."

Is this correct? What is the source for this?

Well, like you say, "kerning" does mean different things in metal and digital: in metal it basically means negative sidebearings, which requires more delicate workmanship, and can break during use. In digital, not only is it trivial to have a negative sidebearing, the term "kerning" means pair-wise adjustment, a great boon to quality. The equivalent of that in metal is logotypes, which are very rare (for good reason).

> The inter-character spacing of many foundry metal faces was very well considered.

Totally - and like you said, because kerning was much harder, and in fact not nearly as powerful as in the digital realm. And it's possible to think that a digital designer might be sloppier with his base spacing because kerning can patch up any problems... in theory - while in fact not going to the trouble in the end. But in terms of final spacing quality, a very good digital face can blow away the best metal work, especially in terms of tightness while maintaining the integrity of individual letterforms to a greater extent (like the "v").

The reason the average digital font has worse spacing than the average metal font I think has to do with social circumstances, not technology (which is much better now).

hhp

>Is this correct?

As far as I know this information is correct. My immediate source is Deiter Steffmann's Brief History of Fraktur

The best supporting artefacts that are Albrecht Dürer's mammoth series of woodcuts comissioned by Emperor Maximilian, The Triumphal Arch and The Great Triumphal Car; Fraktur scribed by Dürer's hand is abundant on many of the panels. Source: The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Durer, Dover Publications, edited by Dr. Willi Kurth, at the time of first imprint the foremost Dürer expert.

Can we please have a more positive word than "distress"?

How about "natural finish"? (Yeah, I know, it's really faux.)

It's an emulation of the incidental artefacts that occur during writing, or printing.

(It may be difficult to include the blurring of phototype as "natural finish", which implies that there is some resonance between writing and letterpress.)

This face combines two kinds of "natural finish": its metrics belong to an un-refined letterpress type, while the individual characters have the "natural finish" of pen-on-paper.

These don't quite work together straight out of the box, at display size, because one would expect such nicely-formed, seemingly hand-written characters, to have equally careful contextual spacing.

But it doesn't appear to be a problem at text size in the mass - the irregularities are nicely distributed.

So this points to the reviewer's observation that the face will be fun for the typographer choosing alternates, and adjusting kerns manually, which isn't such a bad thing. That would be for display settings, and typographers should do that stuff anyway, with their own style, rather than just assuming the font takes care of it.

However, the future of scripts (especially in this kind of genre) is surely connected to OpenType. With lots of "ligatures" that might not actually join characters, but would have specially adjusted adjacent shapes for smooth fit.

Also: OpenType could potentially handle correct "long-s" setting from regular text, but no applications support this yet.

Can we please have a more positive word than “distress”?

Er... frazzle, maybe? It's a fun word, at least. Hmmm... frazzlur!

Also: OpenType could potentially handle correct “long-s” setting from regular text, but no applications support this yet.

In English, yes, because the contextual substitutions are rather simple... s becomes long-s everywhere except the end of a word. But in German it's tied to the word's orthography. The st ligatures are different in "Ausstellung" and "Austoben" because of the way the syllables divide. The best way to handle this is with an InDesign plug-in programmed in C or Applescript (C runs faster) that handles German hyphenation as well. Then there are the issues of the recent Rechtschreibreform... you probably don't want to set Fraktur in the neue Rechtschreibung. I hear it's being discarded anyway, having met too much opposition.

I suppose I should also remind blackletter enthusuiasts that typophile.com has a forum devoted specifically to blackletter. Come on in, the more the merrier. I hear the moderator is very cool.

To borrow from another thread, I'm also quite keen on Jason Walcott's Baroque Text.

for Rolf:
I thought I could not see a real use for blackletter, once (when I was 2, propbably). Then, recently, I bought a pair of German books from the 1910s or so (one is an Hebrew Grammar with lapidary and other writing examples of Hebrew which I found totally intriguing being 30 years ahead of Adolf Hitler).
The books are set in a light Fraktur face, and even if I don't know german I can at least see how nicely the text flows.
While I never agreed with Zuzana Licko on the "we read best what we read most" as a one-rule for alphabets, I now was able to see clearly how much blackletters are often way more inherently legible than Futura or Helvetica.
Futura may be "cute" or cool for many people, and easy to catch up with, but as long as you set a long text with it... ugh! The redundance of the "circle-based" lowercase is a pain in the stomach.

On the progothics webpage:
I knew it. Notice how cute: they used Bastard for their logo and also Rian Hughes Westford Oakley inside. It's really nice to see how, even if they talk of historical sources, they decided to use contemporary takes as well.

Finally,
I'm so glad you highligted Gabor's work, John.
Unfortunately buried in the nefarious T-26 library there are other Gabor faces to scream for, like Bacchus. And at IHOF the one I love most and consider amazing is his Ambient.
The quality and originality of IHOF fonts is pretty varied, but I'm really glad Richard Kegler decided to create this label.

And I'm doubly glad you bought Schwarzkopf. This makes me recall I have not been in touch with Gabor lately, so I wave him a hello! although I doubt he roams here.

You remember things like that from age 2?! Wow.

BTW, exactly the same thing happened to me! I used to think blackletter was hopeless, but then I saw a novel from 1916 set in a wonderful, light fraktur, and it hit me: blackletter is actually more readable than Roman!

> I found totally intriguing being 30 years ahead of Adolf Hitler

Why would it be intriguing? That's what Germans used until the Nazis banned it.

> The redundance of the "circle-based" lowercase is a pain in the stomach.

Yes!
So does this mean you've changed your mind about geometry in (text) type design? :-)

hhp