This is the personal website of Nick Simson, who writes about books, websites, and plenty more.

When an industry is dominated by a single race and gender, this not only creates a lack of diversity in peoples and experiences but ideas and creations as well. That’s why Vocal Type is working to diversify design through the root of all (good) works of graphic design—typography.

Each typeface highlights a piece of history from a specific underrepresented race, ethnicity, or gender—from the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Argentina to the Civil Rights Movement in America.

Foundry, vocaltype.co

Tré Seals is the designer behind Vocal Type, a foundry releasing original typefaces and commissions for artists, organizations, and campaigns since 2016. Each Vocal Type release is based on a historical figure or social movement and is meticulously researched from archival photos and typographic materials.

The Vocal Type catalogue includes:

• VTC Martin, a display type based on the protest signs around the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike, and following Martin Luther King Jr’s death.
• VTC James, a stencil font based on signs carried by the Congress of Racial Equality in demonstrations in St. Louis.
• VTC Bayard, a display type inspired by signs from the 1963 March On Washington For Jobs and Freedom.
• VTC Du Bois, inspired by lettering by W.E.B. Du Bois in infographics based on his sociological studies.
• VTC Marsha, inspired by the vertical signage of The Stonewall Inn and named for Marsha P. Johnson.
• VTC Tank Man, a typeface inspired by the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China.
• VTC Carrie, based on banners carried by demonstrators for Women’s Suffrage in New York city in 1915.
• VTC Garibaldi Sans Extra Condensed, inspired by anti-fascist typographic material distributed during Word War II.
• VTC Tatsuro, inspired by a shopowner’s grocery sign and resistance to Japanese American internment during World War II.

In addition to the typefaces, the studio takes on commissioned work, including but not limited to a line of sports apparel inspired by tennis icon Arthur Ashe, a book by Spike Lee, and Stacey Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign in Georgia.

I see type as a force for education, and education as a force for diversity. Someone once told me that if you condensed the world population into a group of 100 people, only one person in that group would be college educated. I only know three Black type designers in America, and according to the United States Department of Labor, Black designers only make up 3.5 percent of all designers in America. So, I’m using type to educate the graphic design community about the importance of understanding other cultures. My next step is to educate the youth in Black and Brown communities on what’s possible. My grandfather always told me that you can’t make money selling art, and a lot of the older generations in these communities feel the same way. But if you can believe that a boy raised on a farm survived two brain tumors and grew up to sell letters, then you should be able to believe that anything is possible if you work to make it so.

Tré Seals, in Communication Arts magazine

Vocal Type in use

VTC Martin was used for headings in “Capturing The Police,” a journalistic series published by The Verge.

Mike Monteiro uses VTC James for the Necessary Second Edition (Mike’s Version) of Design is a Job. Here’s my copy:

As always, Fonts in Use features some excellent design work using Vocal Type fonts. I’ve noticed a few designs combining Seals’ display type with Halyard, Dapifer, and other typefaces by Joshua Darden, another contemporary Black type designer.

More of Seals’ design work, including the latest redesign of The Nation, can be found at treseals.com.

I’ve been attempting to show italic and oblique styles for most of the type I’m featuring in the 26 Days of Type series this month. Italic type was historically influenced by cursive and calligraphic script, and began to be widely used in the sixteenth century. Owing to the influence of calligraphy, most italic forms slant toward the right and often take on a more condensed appearance from their upright Roman counterparts.

In general, italics tend to slant between 4–14 degrees. Most contemporary fonts slant between 6–9 degrees.

Design with FontForge: Italic

Since the italic form is used for emphasis and takes on a different appearance, sometimes there is no slant. These are called upright italics, and they are rare.

Literata was designed by Irene Vlachou, Veronika Burian, Vera Evstafieva, and José Scaglione at TypeTogether. The typeface was commissioned by Google in 2014 for the Google Play Book eReader and application. Literata is a hyrbrid between old-style and Scotch Roman genres. On the subject of the italics:

The secondary style is an upright italic, meaning that the letter shapes have an italicised construction and & no slant to speak of. Albeit rather uncommon in screen-fonts, this kind of genre addresses some of the inherent limitations of the square pixel grid. Moreover the resulting unusual italic adds high branding value to Literata making it unique, recognisable and easy to remember.

TypeTogether: Literata Book

I particularly love the texture Literata’s italic makes with that repeating slope found in letters like a, g, h, n, m, r, and u. I used it on my website from 2020-2023 and previously described this italic form as the font’s “killer feature.”

Seria and Seria Sans by Martin Majoor also feature upright italics. These fonts feature a lower x-height and long ascenders/descenders, compared to his earlier Scala type family. Seria takes some inspiration from Dutch type designer Jan van Krimpen’s designs, including Romanée.

In Seria Italic Majoor has taken this same unusual approach, though his upright italic stemmed from a functional need, and was not meant as an homage to Van Krimpen. As Majoor explains it, in the mid-1990s a French designer had planned to set a book in Scala, but because of the complexity of the text, had the rare need for two distinct but related italics. The designer asked Majoor if a second Scala Italic could be drawn with a more extreme slope. Seeing that it would not be feasible to redraw the existing face, Majoor chose to implement the concept of two related italics – one nearly upright and one more normally inclined – in the fledgling Seria family. Seria Italic was then drawn upright in the Romanée fashion while Seria Cursive, which has not yet been published, is a more traditionally sloped letter.

Andy Crewdson, Seria’s motives

As there’s only a small number of digital typefaces with upright italics, there are similarly only a few entries for upright italics on Fonts in Use. Its a form and a variety I’d love to see more of in the world.

Literata has been available from Google Fonts since 2020. Seria and Seria Sans are available from Adobe Fonts.

We covered Old Style serifs already, in which we learned the difference between Old Style, Transitional, and Modern/Didone. Now let’s dig deeper into Transitional serif typefaces.

Transitional typefaces were pioneered in the late 18th century and remain popular today for newspaper and book printing. Compared to Old Style serifs, Transitionals typically feature taller x-heights, more contrast between strokes, and a more upright stress axis on rounded characters like the o. The default numerals in these fonts are usually lining figures, which means they sit at the same baseline and are the same height. I used to have a hard time classifying certain fonts as either Old Style or Transitional, but the key characters I pay attention to are the a, e, o, and t.

Times New Roman and Georgia are default serif fonts available to nearly every web browser and are both Transitional typefaces. Other popular Transitional designs include:

• Baskerville, a serif developed in the 1750s by English type designer John Baskerville.
• Century, a family of typefaces developed by American Type Founders in the late 19th century. This is the official font for U.S. Supreme Court briefs.
• Perpetua, a typeface designed by Eric Gill and released through Monotype in the early 1930s.

Matthew Carter has long been one of my favorite type designers, and his three serif designs Charter, Georgia, and Miller are exemplary Transitional typefaces. Charter was designed for low resolution printing (fax machines and 300 dpi laser printers) and released in 1987. Georgia was commissioned by Microsoft to be a legible font on computer monitors at small sizes, and was released in 1993.

Miller was being developed at the same time as Georgia, but was released a bit later in 1996. Miller is a true “Scotch Roman” design, one of my favorite sub-classifications of Transitional typefaces. Georgia and Miller are so similar. One of the giveaways is the ball terminal on the “ear” of the lowercase g in Miller, or by examining the italics. Georgia’s italicized lower case g is a single-story g, and Miller features thinner, longer serifs on it’s italics.

More Transitionals

• Financier, a typeface drawn for the 2014 redesign of the Financial Times, released by Klim Type Foundy.
• Harriet, by Okay Type. “It’s sort-of a contemporary reimagining of Baskerville with a dash of Scotch Roman.”
• Nimbus Roman by URW.
• PS Fournier by Typofonderie. A tribute to the typefaces of Pierre Simon Fournier, prolific French type designer in the 18th century.

1. Source: “Where Did Times New Roman Come From?” by Meredith Mann, New York Public Librar ↩︎

The script classification describes typefaces that are based on handwriting or calligraphy. In this way, it feels a bit like the geometric classification to me, since all type is based on handwriting or calligraphic forms. It’s not to be confused with the term “script” as it applies to writing systems.

In the Latin writing system, a script typeface generally takes on one of two sub-classifications: formal and casual. Quality digital script fonts should feature carefully designed ligatures, swashes, alternates, and other features so the quality of the type output looks calligraphic and handcrafted.

Most of our modern formal script fonts (think formal cursive invitations) are derived from a form of handwriting with a quill or a metal pen nib popular throughout the 17th, 18th and into the early 19th centuries. This style is called round hand, and many of the font names (Bickham, Snell) come from the names of the people who perfected this form of handwriting. Chancery hand is an earlier form of handwriting performed with similar technology, but much different letterforms.

Casual scripts were popularized in the 20th century, and the letterforms look as though they were executed by a brush, or sometimes a chiseled felt marker. There’s a lot of variety in this sub-genre of script. A few notable examples:

• Beverly Drive Right by Amy Hood
• Cortado by XYZ Type
• Lakeside by Mark Simonson
• Learning Curve by Jess Latham
• Relation by Jess Latham
• Voltage by Laura Worthington

There’s a lot more variety than these examples. Once again, I’m only scratching the surface in this post. One of my favorite sub-sub-genres is the baseball script, a kind of display script you usually see on athletic uniforms, usually with a decorative swash underlining the city or team name.

Scripts are good for display type, headings, or short lines of text, but can be a bit unwieldy and difficult to read at small text sizes or in paragraphs. Use your best judgment. Oh, and look out for stuff like this:

Reliable places for interesting script fonts

• Hoodzpah
• Jukebox Fonts
• Laura Worthington
• Oh No Type Company
• Sudtipos

I vaguely remember mentioning a variable font or two earlier in this blogging series, without elaborating on the topic much further. I knew it was something I wanted to dig in deeper down the road.

Variable fonts typically contain one or more axes (as in the plural of axis, not ax) like weight, optical size, width, etc. in a single font file, allowing for a variety of styles and expression without requiring multiple fonts for each variety. Nick Sherman maintains an excellent website called v-fonts.com where you can try out a variety of variable fonts.

The design I want to highlight today is Recursive, an ambitious five-axis variable typeface released under the SIL Open Font License. It was a graduate thesis project of Stephen Nixon at TypeMedia in 2018, before Nixon started his own foundry, Arrow Type. Google Fonts commissioned Nixon and Arrow Type to finish developing the project and released the typeface through Google Fonts.

The inspiration behind Recursive is a vernacular form of sign-painting called single-stroke casual lettering. These hand-painted letters are typically uppercase and forward-slanting.

A foundational style for sign painters, single-stroke casual is comprised of just a few basic strokes which are assembled together to create letters. As a result, this style is highly practical, easy to learn, and (relatively) easy to paint. Its features are deliberately informal and “unbalanced”: letters are somewhat condensed and have curved stems, stroke connections are left visibly imperfect, and midpoints are low-slung. These qualities allow a sign painter to avoid some of the aspects of letter shaping that can be most challenging: perfectly straight lines, rigid symmetry, and optically-centered elements like the spine of the letter ‘S’.

Stephen Nixon, from the Recursive type specimen (PDF)

Nixon’s initial idea was to explore what a single-stroke casual monospaced font could look like in a programming context. The result ended up becoming an ambitious project with an astounding variety of visual expression on five variable axes:

• mono: a range from Proportional (0) to Monospaced (1) with semi-proportioned and semi-monospaced characters in-between
• casl: a range from a Linear (0) engineered typefaces to a Casual (1) brush-lettered script
• wght: a range of weights from Light (300) to ExtraBlack (1000)
• slnt: a range of angles (slant) from 0 to -15 degrees for italic styles.
• CRSV: a cursive axis you can toggle on and off that replaces “roman” letterforms with more hand-written alternates like the single story a and g.

In addition to the five variable axes, Recursive is also a superplexed family:

[A]ll of its 32 instances have shared glyph width, kerning, and overall letterforms for every character. Of course, this also applies to in-between variations. The fact that characters within Recursive Sans have shared metrics ensures that line length is not affected when changing between its different font styles. This also allows smooth, animated transitions between any of the subfamily’s Weight, Slant, & Casual axes.

Stephen Nixon, Recursive “Designing Recursive“

There’s a lot going on with this one typeface, so its worth reading the manual specimen and trying it out before downloading and putting it to use on your next project. I just love the ambition and creativity on display here.

Another great variable font

I particularly love Fraunces from Undercase Type, also released by Google around the same time as Recursive. It’s great for display type and is like the grand-baby of fonts like Windsor and Cooper. There are four variable axes in this one: Optical Size, Weight, Soften, and Wonk. Wonk! You gotta love it, right?

In yesterday’s post I wrote about combining type and brought up the concept of a superfamily: a collection of fonts in different classifications (usually at least a serif and a sans) sharing a name and similar design features. Today I want to explore one superfamily a little further.

The Questa Project is a type design adventure by Dutch type designers Jos Buivenga and Martin Majoor. Their collaboration began in 2010 using Buivenga’s initial sketch for a squarish Didot-like display typeface as a starting point. It was a perfect base on which to apply Majoor’s type design philosophy that a serif typeface is a logical starting point for creating a sans serif version and not the other way around. The extensive Questa family includes serif, sans, slab and display typefaces.

Intro to the Quest Project specimen, available to download from thequestaproject.com

I highlighted that bit in the blockquote, because yesterday I also linked to the examples of Meta/Meta Serif and Proxima Nova/Proxima Sera, two examples of serif faces designed and released after their sans-serif counterparts. Intuitively, I think of basing a serif typeface on a sans-serif skeleton form, but I’ve never properly designed a typeface myself.

The serif

Twenty years after entering graphic design school, certain type classifications still throw me off. I wrote recently about Old Style serifs, and I understand what makes them different from Transitional serif faces, but I struggle to accurately slot certain fonts into either category. The type specimen states that Questa belongs to a group of neoclassicist typefaces, but I’m more used to seeing these called Modern or Didone.

The Questa text face is the foundation for the three other designs in the superfamily. The high-contrast faces Didot (1784), Bodoni (1796) and Walbaum were reviewed for the design, but Questa is not a revival—it is an original design. The contrast between strokes is a bit lower from what you might see in digital revivals of Bodoni, for example.

The design of the italics is also interesting. There is an angle to the italic, but it is more upright than Bodoni’s. There are more humanist, or handwritten elements to the letterforms in the Questa italic. Check out the y, the reverse-contrast z, as well as the slight curve in the captial V. Contrast also reverses in the italic numerals.

The display

Questa Grande is meant for bigger type sizes. The contrast is noticeably higher in Questa Grande, compared to the text. All the serifs are very thin, and in five weights from Light to Black, these hairline serifs stay the same thickness. The teardrop-shaped terminals in the a and g curl inward on the Grande display version.

The sans

Questa Sans was created by removing the serifs from the text face, changing the contrast, closing some of the open spaces, and optically correcting the shapes. The italics in Questa Sans are also based on the italics of Questa, so these are “true” italics, not an oblique, like many grotesques.

The slab

Questa Slab was created by addings serifs back to Questa Sans, but thicker, chunkier serifs. Certain characters like a, e, g, and s don’t have serifs at all in the slab version and could almost be interchangeable with the sans. The italic styles of Questa Slab feature “bended” stems.

There are some awesome looking design projects at Fonts in Use using type from the Questa superfamily.

Other typefaces to explore

Martin Majoor’s triumph is Scala and Scala Sans, which I believe I encountered in Ellen Lupton’s Thinking with Type book as a young design student. You can find more of Majoor’s fonts on Adobe Fonts.

Jos Buivenga designs and releases digital fonts through his foundry exljbris. I feel like Museo was popping up everywhere in 2009 and 2010, at least in my memory, but Calluna and Calluna Sans are his more triumphant designs as far as I’m concerned. You can find more exljbris fonts on Adobe Fonts.

Disclaimer: You don’t always need to pair typefaces. You can launch a revolution with one font. Martin Luther’s 95 theses and Tim Berners-Lee’s first website only used a single typeface. These days you can totally get away with a minimalist design, and use one typeface at one size, with an italic style for emphasis, and maybe a bold weight for headings for your entire document or project.

But sometimes you need (or want) to add more hierarchy and visual variety within your layout. That’s what we’re here to talk about today: combining typefaces.

Quite honestly, the best advice I’ve found for combining type was an article published late last year by Jake Giltsoff. Jake recommends three things:

1. starting with a base font or “anchor” (usually the body text font)
2. balance contrast and similarity (example: pair a sans and a serif with similar x-heights)
3. consider the job each font has to perform, as well as the emotion (vibe) it presents

I’m not going to attempt to rewrite his whole article, but instead insist that you go read The 3 Secrets to Font Pairing now, and return here for a few more augmented tips.

Level one: Try a suggested font pairing or proven font pairing.

Every typeface entry on Typewolf includes a suggested font pairing, plus examples of websites (or screenshots, it’s a decade+ old project now) using that font along with the other fonts on a particular site. Fonts in Use similarly features a range of print and digital projects for each typeface in its collection.

For any typeface you can imagine, there are range of font pairings that have already been tried on successful projects. I like to use these websites as starting points, not necessarily to lift type combinations verbatim, but to get an idea of the what’s out there, and similar combinations to explore.

Check out books, magazines, etc. to see what combinations work and don’t work and use this as inspiration for your own designs.

Level two: Use a superfamily.

A superfamily is two or more typefaces with the same name, but different classifications. Examples include the IBM Plex family (Sans, Sans Condensed, Serif, and Mono), or Adobe’s Source Sans, Source Serif, and Source Code Pro. Typefaces in superfamilies are usually drawn with the same skeleton and share proportions, optical sizes, shapes, and flavor. A few of my favorite superfamilies include:

• FF Meta and Meta Serif (designed decades apart!)
• Proxima Nova and Proxima Sera (also designed decades apart!) by Mark Simonson
• The Freight Collection (serif in a number of optical and display sizes, plus a sans) by Joshua Darden
• The Panel family (Serif, Sans and Mono for each) by Mark Caneso
• The Questa project (Serif, Sans, Slab, and Display/Grande)

Level three: Consider fonts by the same designer/foundry.

Beyond using two typefaces designed to pair together, you can also get interesting results trying out fonts designed by the same person, or released by the same foundry. While the genre or approach may be different, the designer’s hand will be in both drawings and inform the look of the letterforms. Here’s a few example combinations:

• Founders Grotesk and Tiempos, both by Kris Sowersby
• Miller Display and Verdana, both by Matthew Carter.
• Equity and Advocate, both by Matthew Butterick
• Knockout for headlines with Sentinel for body text, both by Hoefler & Co.

Level four: Use something like the font matrix.

Oliver Schöndorfer has an extensive article and video on the font matrix, based on the ideas of typographer and educator Indra Kupferschmid. The idea behind the font matrix is that it groups fonts by relationship to things like the skeleton of the letterforms, the contrast of the strokes, and finer definitions (shape of serifs, inline features, texture, etc.). I think of the font matrix as the homework for Jake Giltsoff’s 2nd secret, balancing contrast and similarity.

All levels: Test, test, test!

Combining type is notoriously difficult. Because it isn’t easy, I think it’s worth doing well, and not outsourcing to something like AI. And I mean testing type combinations with real content, not abstract dummy text like lorem ipsum. It takes a human eye to figure out what feels right. Two typefaces that seem right on paper may not have the desired effect when put together.

Sometimes marvelous things happen. I paired two Google fonts for an earlier iteration of this website, and their names were Epilogue and Literata. And it worked! I added a third font, IBM Plex Mono (which has some typewriter heritage) for supporting text. There was no clear relationship between these three fonts, except I wanted to pick a sans, a serif and a monospaced font with fallbacks to Arial, Georgia and Courier.

Advanced level type combinations

I never contemplated using four or more typefaces in a single design until I read this wonderful article by Bethany Heck eight years ago.

Don’t design for other designers, design for your audience. Using multiple families can mean you have to make fewer compromises, and it gives you an opportunity to create rich, distinctive palettes. Every typeface you add makes your visual language more nuanced, which can aid, instead of hinder, clarity for your audience and establish an aesthetic that is unique.

Bethany Heck

The key rule for using more than two typefaces in a design is to make sure you are picking each font for a single purpose and using it consistently: One typeface for body text; One typeface, one weight for headlines; One typeface, one weight for sub-headings; One typeface, one weight for captions; One typeface, one weight for block quotes; One (monospaced) typeface for code samples, etc.

You can use a completely separate set of typefaces for a book jacket versus the interior of a book (often its two different designers in two different departments working on these). I always find it satisfying when there is a typographic connection to the inside of a book with it’s cover.