4/18/2023 0 Comments Blackletter typeface![]() ![]() So Amador is a hybrid, looking “modern” because it reminds us of how blackletter was being used in the early 20th century, but at same time looking “old-fashioned.” None of the letterforms are too odd or alien, to the reader whose template is the roman letter. (Also, by playing on these associations, some revised blackletters are used in heavy-metal music posters.) These days, blackletter is largely used for its associations with the past: in Germany, for beer labels in England and America, for ecclesiastical tidbits and newspaper nameplates. A well-designed blackletter is actually a highly readable and beautiful typeface, for anyone used to reading it but it’s hard to decipher for those who only encounter it now and then. It was once used as a text type all over Europe, and until the Second World War it was still quite common in Germany. Modern Heavy Metalīlackletter, of course, is not a popular style of letter today. This means that, if Amador is used for a nameplate or a title, quite a long word or phrase will fit onto a single line-a possibility that’s always dear to the heart of an art director trying to set display type. Blackletter tends to be compact, especially textura, but Amador is noticeably narrower than most of the currently available blackletter faces. It’s also not surprising, given its origins, that Amador should be an especially condensed typeface. The “drawn” quality of Amador makes sense, given its development out of Parkinson’s many re-drawings of short collections of words as the names of newspapers. It’s more of a drawn letter than a written letter-a distinction that’s lost on most readers, but that gets argued about endlessly by type designers. The logic of these two influences is not necessarily to be found in the similarity of their type designs, but in Parkinson’s sense that he, like them, is working with an old tradition adapted to new uses in a new era.įigure 2: Amador owes a debt to Frederic Goudy, among others, in its approach to the blackletter design.Īmador is probably not meant to be a text face most of Parkinson’s type designs are either display faces or what I think of as “large-text” faces: useful in magazines and other publications for those short passages that aren’t really extended text but aren’t simply display type either. Parkinson specifically alludes to Frederic Goudy, appropriately enough, in describing Amador’s inspiration surprisingly, he also mentions Rudolf Koch, the famous German calligrapher and punchcutter who created new blackletter faces in the 1920s and 1930s with an eye to tradition but also an eye to the then-recent influence of Jugendstil. Amador is certainly reminiscent of some of Frederic Goudy’s blackletter designs, as well as popular revivals such as Cloister Black and Engraver’s Old English-all of which tend to reflect the English tradition of blackletter, based on early textura forms, rather than the ongoing development of blackletter in Germany up into the 20th century. The Goudy InfluenceĪmador harks back to the Arts & Crafts movement, especially its late manifestations in California in the early 20th century, rather than directly to the origins of blackletter type in Northern Europe in the 15th century. Now he has released one of his own.įigure 1: Jim Parkinson’s blackletter typeface Amador lends itself to uses such as newspaper names. Most newspapers, especially in North America, like to use blackletter for their nameplates (that is, the name at the top of the front page, which Parkinson insists should not be called a logo) it’s traditional, and it’s seen as somehow lending gravitas to the paper-or at any rate as being what readers expect.Īlthough there are a number of digital revivals of historical blackletter typefaces, there aren’t many, according to Parkinson, that are suitable for a newspaper’s nameplate. When Jim Parkinson wrote a short booklet about newspaper nameplates (which I reprinted in the book “ Contemporary Newspaper Design”), he lamented the lack of currently available blackletter typefaces. You can find more from John at his website. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.Įventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. ![]() Dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. ![]()
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