Commentary

Stone ReCycles

Typographica on March 3, 2004

Sumner Stone has released a long-awaited revision to his Cycles — a significant set of book typefaces. With 6 optical cuts for text and display sizes, Cycles joins his excellent ITC Bodoni and some Adobe Originals as one of the few designs to reawaken the metal era in which type was designed specifically for its size.

The original Cycles was available to a few lucky designers, including Kent Lew who was enamored enough to call it one of his “desert island fonts.” Early versions of the optical sizes can be seen in ATypI’s journal.

4 Responses to “Stone ReCycles”

Hrant says:

03.03.04 at 9:06 am

I be dissectin’ this one – no doubt!

BTW, can you spot the mistake in the Text price list?

hhp
John Butler says:

03.03.04 at 10:34 am

Cycles has been the body copy in Daedalus for a while now, a sample PDF of which can be found here. The sample article includes four different optical sizes of Cycles: 9, 10, 11 and 24.
Hrant says:

03.03.04 at 3:44 pm

I just did a quicky comparison of the optical scaling in Cycles.

Here’s the Display set.
It looks fine except the 24 and 18 are the same… Maybe a problem with the PDF?

And the Text set.
Nice big jump down to the 7 – I like that.

Stone has applied the classical techniques of making the smaller sizes heavier and larger on the body. I haven’t measured the spacing, but visually it does seem like he’s applied looseness to the smaller sizes as well. As for making the forms wider, although it doesn’t seem like he’s done that in the x-height, just the fact that the extenders become smaller with size means the overall appearance will indeed become wider.

What I don’t like is the overly long descenders in the Text set, and the spacing seems off in places. And the design itself actually doesn’t happen to speak to me – but anyway I’m in it for the technique, and in that realm Cycles is a highly welcome development. Bravo!

hhp
Hrant says:

03.15.04 at 2:37 pm

Stone has now fixed the missing 24 in the PDF (as well as the error in the Text price lists), so I’ve updated my comparison. Just do a refresh on the Display link above.

hhp