VAN NELLE (Blueprint) — Geometric modernist sans
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☛ THE SOURCE
A re-interpretation of the 1926 geometric sans serif alphabet system reproduction by Jacob Jongert, published in a 1930 sourcebook by N.J. van de Vecht. The geometric uppercase set of the alphabet system is what would later become the famous sans serif capitals which he used for lettering throughout many of his Van Nelle materials.
☛ THE FONTSTRUCTION
Attempt at making a convincing recap of the original alphabet by Jacob Jongert as it was shown in the 1930s sourcebook, and extrapolate that into a full functional font. The decision to go with a small grid sparked a number of limitations in terms of the design freedom that forced some inevitable changes. But the general idea sort of became not to make it a revival, but rather more or less a faithful revision. One that would still be instantly recognizable yet didn't necessarily had to be all about accuracy.
☛ —The small grid design made sure this wasn't happening anyway!
But, for instance, the most striking difference between the two fonts (their weight) in fact is such a byproduct for one of those limitations. Something FS's small grid couldn't properly reproduce, so VAN NELLE (Blueprint) has a slight stronger weight, making the font somewhat of a bold style version of the original. This in addition provided me with slight extra freedom to inplement a little personal touch for further manicure of the font's finer details. Which allowed me to cope with some of the optical clunkiness that come with a fatter face and the grid based design.
Besides these circumstantial differences, which were basically beyond my control, I've also made some intentional changes to make the typeface more practical to use. The changes include things like the significantly lowered ascender height, the slight different width for certain letters, larger tittle (dot above i, j & ij), and several more. despite these changes I believe it very much still reflects what Jongerts once invisioned for the system.
☛ SOME NOTES ON THE ORIGINAL AND ITS CREATOR
Jacob Jongert(1883-1942) was a advertising designer from the Netherlands. After varied studies, including being Roland Holst’s assistant and an acquaintance and colleague of S. H. de Roos [who brought the Arts & Crafts ideas of William Morris to the Netherlands and devoted his career to book design and typography] with whom Jongert experimented with several printing techniques and discovered graphic design as his ideal art form.
¶ In 1923 Jongert rolled in a unique and long-term collaboration with the Van Nelle company, where he became head designer, a position he held until 1940. The Van Nelle company had an extremely modern approach towards advertising (they even commissioned Cassandre to do a poster) and Jongert created for the firm a recognizable image with clear shapes, powerful letters and primary colours, totally Dutch avant-garde in style, and with a strict and rigorous approach directly linked to De Stijl principles. The corporate identity he created has become a milestone in the design world.
¶ The lettering, however, is the driving force that ties it all together. The style is a straightforward set of plain, mono-linear, sans serif capitals in a style that just started to come into fashion in the late 1920s, early 1930s with the rise of functionalism and geometric type design. Yet, while these ideas were already thrown out there, its clever simplicity plus the systematic and cohesive way Jongert implemented his lettering was unusual at the time. The square and minimal construction of the forms allowed the letters to contract and expand to fit any situation, yet maintain a consistent and recognizable appearance throughout the Van Nelle line. ¶ Something we only recently have learned to appreciate is to see his hand crafted system amid the current advancements in variable-font technology, which offers a similar kind of flexibility to typeface designs. A quality that certainly placed him well ahead of its time.
What I particulary like about Jongert's original is the stuff that is going on in the lowercase set of the alphabet, which are those quirky lowercase letter inventions that are different from the more traditional modernist sans, but sadly the lowercase letters were pretty much never used in his works.
I created a simple PDF typeface specimen for those who want to see the high-resolution preview.
PDF SPECIMEN WAS DELETED
Thats all Folks ☚
☛ Cheers
VON NEUHAUS — Geometric “Bauhaus”-inspired style
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This is the latest evolution of a “Bauhaus”-inspired constructivist style typeface design that originally started 5 years, or two font versions back.
To me personally this is a long awaited triumph, that has finally materialized after years worth of been haunted by this idea, and the crazy speculations about this ghost that would never be...
Well, that was untill now... So at last, I can now finally proudly present to you this latest of arrivals to come from this unforeseen series of typeface progressions.
This newborn addition is in fact the 3rd phase of this letter concept's evolution, and caused the font project to undergo a series of addaptations that graduatelly increasing the levels of sophistication possible by chaging it's internal structure and behaviour within the FontStruct-editor. This 3rd addaptation unlocks the FontStruct editor's “Expert Mode” full power potential.
Enabling all editor functionallity to provide the most versatile font creation capabilities available within FontStruct.
STF_BLAUHAUS was the font's very first version, created back in early 2019. It's the font's original concept as it innitially was first intended. It essentially started out as a personal study into the design of letters on a small grid. And more importantly, the creation of required composite bricks to do so.
The idea back then was to craft the most complex geometry possible without the use of any “Expert Mode” functionality whatsoever. Now, what this innitially did was still quite novel to me at that time, as this had led to the development of a FontStruction that was solely built from the extensive use of composite bricks. Not just a couple, but a staggering 272 composite bricks in total. Many of which in fact are quite intuitive and required certain amounts of careful thinkering with the maths found in it's geomtry to craft these custom brick compositions.
So as explained above, there was no use of any of FontStruct's “Expert Mode” functions. This meant that the option to nudge, flip or rotate any of the bricks wasn't available. Now this changes everything in respect to building complex fonts, since in order to get all the bits and pieces of a letter such as: crossbars, intersections, curves and corners properly aligned requires, a precisly fitting composite brick to be tailor-made. In terms of the FontStruct limitations, this cause the physical properties of FontStruct's brick composition tool to be fundamental as to how much complexity and refinement can be put into it's letter geometry. In other words this is fundamental as to how well crafted the design is going to look in the end, since there is no option to further manicure shape or form other than from within those bounds of the adjacent 16-brick-array grid squares of a selection for composition.
I've choosen to design the alphabet concept in this “Bauhaus”-inspired geometric style, simply because of the simplicity this style has in terms of its basic pure geometric forms. The final result became this simple and bold looking small grif display type with a “3-bricks” Em-size only.
but it had some crucial compromises that had to be made due to FontStruct's design limitations. Not terrible, but not quite perfect either.
One very important byproduct from this limitations as were described above was a huge collection of very intuitive custom brick compositions that offer seemless alignement and perfect fits, basically an extensive set of custom bricks that work in a very similar fashion as FontStruct's default “Connect” bricks.
Bringing us to the main reason for 2022's version of this font.
STF_BLAUHAUS (Plus) was the font's second version, and most recent state that it sat in for the last year, up till this now. In this 2022 version of the of this font design modification the FontStruct editor's “Expert Mode” functionality was introduced into the design. Hoping to further manicure some of these compromised critical area's in an attempt to see what refinements could be implemented to revise the 2019's original version.
Now that the option to nudge, flip or rotate bricks was available, new more complex geometric shapes suddenly became possible. This sparked an explosion of new characters and additional alternative forms. Although now the FontStruct editor got vastly more versatile and potent, it remained strongly limited by that still present 1:1 brick size filter setting. Nevertheless, this made possible a very substantial update of the older font, and allowed many new shaping capabilities.
STF_VON NEUHAUS is the 3rd and final evolition to have come from my earlier FontStruct endeavours; STF_BLAUHAUS and STF_BLAUHAUS (Plus)
This version basically saw the transition from a font only using 1:1 brick size filter into a font at 2:2 brick size filter settings to unlock all power potential of the FontStruct editor's “Expert Mode” functions.
I could now write another eqyually as long body of text, explaining what's new in this final version or which other improvements were made, or say about it whatever the hell I want, but I figure that the picture becomes even more apparent when simply comparing the 3 fonts from old to new, and see the evolution happening before your eyes.
Start with STF_BLAUHAUS, folowed by STF_BLAUHAUS (Plus), and witness the full glory of "next-level" FontStructing that made possible the last version STF_VON NEUHAUS.
I hope you like it,
Cheers
This is a clone of STF_BLAUHAUS (Plus)A tribute to Belgian modernist artist "Jozef Peeters" (Antwerp, 1895 - 1960).
He is probably best known for contributions to legendary Belgian avant garde magazines "Het Overzicht" and "DeDriekhoek".
The alphabet I made is based on the letters seen on the folder art for his 1921 linocut portofolio.
(I made use of a couple of lower case letters to make slight variations similar as seen on the original artwork but most lower case are simply copied from the upper case letters.)
Fauxhaus — Geometric minimalist modernism sans-serif design
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[INSPIRATION]
As the name already suggests, this indeed was inspired by the Bauhaus-typograpy towards functionality style.
More specifically by Austrian artistic polymath Herbert Bayer's 1925 experimental "Universal" alphabet.
The alphabet he designed became somewhat synonymous with the school's identity, and probably is the most well known Bauhaus typeface, and truly epitomizing that typical simplified "Form follows function" Bauhaus-minimalism style. It was also used for the new Bauhaus-building signage.
Some key features in Bayer's original form are those easily recognizable geometric sans-serif letterings, with letter composition based on strong basic geometry, having eliminated all decorative elements of the letterform composition for that crisp industrial, slight mechanical minimalist aesthetic. Bayer's original Universal alphabet also eliminated the need for a upper case letter, further simplifying it towards more of a functionality-driven standardization. Bayer developed multiple revisions and variations of the alphabet. Sadly Universal was never cast as a font, as during that era they weren't manufactured into printing typefaces, and the designs would only exist as drafts (as was the case with all Bauhaus-typefaces). Nonetheless it served as a lettering model for Bauhaus students, colleagues, and followers alike, and they were regularly re-used for signs, book covers and publications by many of its members, but even beyond institution walls the typographic style began to gain a foothold. Throughout the years we have seen a multitude of revivals and other Bauhaus-inspired typeface designs. Some of which that try to be faithful digitizations of the original, whereas others taking a more artistic approach to the style by providing their own personalized reinterpretation of the Bauhaus-aesthetic. So even to this day, many decades later, it repeatedly continues to inspire and influence designers time and again.
Bayer, First a student and later junior master of the printing workshop, was one of Bauhaus’s most influential attendees, advocating the integration of all arts throughout his career. Though not trained as a typographer, he was also assigned with the task of creating a universal visual & typographic identity for the school.—a task Bayer took very serious.Sparking perhaps the most mythic typeface to ever come out of the Bauhaus, which is "Universal"—one that at that time strove to be as idealistic as the school itself
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[THE "FAUXHAUS" FONT]
This is an artistic reinterpretation of Bayer's "Universal" alphabet.
Aiming to preserve the unmistakable style and simplistic geometric stylistic properties of the original, while in the same time allowing a more 'free-form'-approach towards crafting the letterform compositions. This of-course as long as they remains in-line with the stylistic properties of the original. And for the lack of having a better explanation;
—To do sort-of a 'faithfully different' artist depiction of Bayer's original Universal alphabet.
Some notable differences made in Fauxhaus compared to Universal are the re-introduction of a upper case form and the slight de-simplification and inclusion of subtle decorative nuance.
In some cases I've choosen to compose certain specific characters to be more or less identical as to how Bayer originally intended them, whereas others may be entirely different looking. And for some characters have one or more alternative form as well. Some of which are more 'ad hoc'- compositions drawn as we went when new ideas popped up. But others were specifically created to preserve and / -or include certain distinctive and unmistakably identifiable letterforms from Bayer's original Universal alphabet.
Greek & Cyrillic characters included in Fauxhaus were solely added for my personal experimentation purpose only, and they serve 'zero' function as to additional language support of the font.
"Use at your very own risk"— as these could very easily be gone the very next update.
Each letterform was meticulously composed from a random collection of the various memories, which after some thirty Bauhaus-inspired and / -or -revival works including their respective 'shared' research I have accumulated over time for Bauhaus typography like Bayer's work.
No source reference image was used as guidance for creating this FontStruction, everything came straight from the knowledge I gathered from the many previous Bauhaus related projects I did.
So to draw solely from memory alone somewhat a convincing and reasonably similar personal reinterpretation of an original 'Bauhaus' typeface at this stage has gotten pretty easy for me.
For this project in particular I've choosen to construct the letterforms on a medium sized grid, using the linear interpolation 'faux'-Bézier method. So beware that when using this font at very large point size rendering the remnants of this process will become visible!
That's all for now, I hope you like it so far,
Cheers
This is a clone