Letterform Designers

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This is what most people think "Type Design" is. It is not. The art of drawing new letterforms is only one aspect of the making of type, and considered in itself it is frequently more closely associated with the entirely independent traditions of lettering.

Insofar as it is possible, I wish here to sketch out the links between letterform designers and the many other people involved in making type. Very few people could actually do it all.

Note: I'll put Goudy here, even though he came very close to being able to do the entire process. He would himself, I think, have considered the drawing of letterforms to be his primary role. Yet he was also a pattern and matrix engraver, a type caster, and the manager of his own typefoundry. The only thing he really didn't do was the difficult process of judgement and revision in fitting and lining necessary to produce a fully commercial series of types. (Paradoxically, this was because he could do almost everything. Because he was his own casterman, he could make decisions "hot" on the caster which were not then folded back into the type design. We have good evidence that it could take a full year of work to turn Goudy letterform designs into commercial type. [2])

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[UK] J. Armstrong

J. Armstrong, "Letter Designer," wrote "The Mechanics of Producing a Typeface" which appeared in the Spring 1961 number of Intertype Interludes (Slough, UK: Intertype Ltd., 1961): 8-9.

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[US] Michael Bixler

Primarily a typefounder ( Michael & Winifred Bixler). Designed Bixler Roman in 1965, as an undergraduate.

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[US] Will H. Bradley

Primarily an artist/illustrator and page/book designer; also a printer. Not to be confused with William Aspinwall Bradley (poet, art director, literary agent, and sometime book designer).

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[UK] Will Carter

Co-designed Octavian (Monotype UK) with David Kindersley. Designed Dartmouth Capitals.

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[US] Thomas Maitland Cleland

Primarily an artist/illustrator and page/book designer; also a printer.

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[UK] T. J. Cobden-Sanderson

The Doves Type.

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[US] Oz Cooper

Primarily an artist/illustrator and page/book designer.

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[ ] S. H. de Roos (1877-1962)

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[US] Ernst F. Detterer

Ludlow Typograph (Chicago). Assisted by Middleton with Eusebius.

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[US] William Addison Dwiggins

Primarily an illustrator, letterer, and book designer.

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[FR] Roger Excoffon ()

Fonderie Olive.

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[US] Torvald Faegre ()

Designed a typeface for the Cherokee syllabary while a student at Roosevelt University, Chicago. An obituary in the Evanston [IL] Round Table, 2009-10-27 indicates that he was born in 1941 in New Hampsire, attended Roosevelt University in Chicago, and died October 14, 2009 in Evanston, IL. He was the author of Tents: The Architecture of the Nomads (1979). The obituary says nothing of his type design.

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Eric Gill

A letterer of great importance from whose designs several notable typefaces were developed.

See: Bunyan/ Pilgrim (Linotype UK), and Perpetua (Dumas, Monotype UK).

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[US] Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue

Designed Merrymount for Daniel Berkeley Updike's Merrymount Press. Initiator and co-developer (with Ingalls Kimball, Morris Fuller Benton, and (possibly) Joseph W. Phinney) of what became the first faces in the Cheltenham family, ATF No. 87, Cheltenham Oldstyle, ATF No. 82, Cheltenham Italic.

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[US] Frederic W. Goudy

Goudy Text (1928). Lombardic Capitals (1929).

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[Germany, US] Victor Hammer (1882-1967)

Hammer Unziale (1921/3). Samson (1926). Cut own punches for later types. American Uncial (1945/1952).

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[US] S. Reed Johnston

Printer and stationer. Probably designed Owl (Central). Morning Glory (Central), one of the first types cut by machine in America, was named after his daughter.

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[US] Ingalls Kimball

Director of the Cheltenham Press and co-developer (with Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, Morris Fuller Benton, and (possibly) Joseph W. Phinney of what became the first faces in the Cheltenham family, ATF No. 87, Cheltenham Oldstyle, ATF No. 82, Cheltenham Italic.

US Design Patent No. 36,905, 1904-05-03, assigned to ATF.

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[UK] David Kindersley

English letterer and stone-cutter (1915-1995). Designed MoT Serif in 1952 as lettering for traffic signs. (To the best of my knowledge this was never issued as type in his lifetime. It was cut in 2016 by Fraser Engineering for a project by artist Sonya Lacey at The Printing Museum (New Zealand)) Co-designed Octavian (Monotype UK) with Will Carter.

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[Germany] Rudolf Koch

Jessen Schrift (Bibel Gotisch). Wilhelm Klingsporschrift.

N.B., for his son, Paul Koch, see the Punch, Patrix, and Matrix Makers Notebooks.

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[ ] G. G. Lange

Solemnis (1953).

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[DE, IT] Giovanni Mardersteig

See the entry for Giovanni Mardersteig in Type Scholars and Collectors.

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[US] Russell Maret

Cancellaresca Milanese (2009 (digital); 2011/2012). Gremolata (2011/2012).

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[ ] Oldrǐch Menhart

česka Unciala (1948).

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[US] R. Hunter Middleton

Ludlow Typograph (Chicago). Assisted Victor Hammer with American Uncial.

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[UK] William Morris

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[US] Joseph W. Phinney

Dickinson Type Foundery (Boston, partner by 1885). ATF (VP, manager of Boston branch).

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[US] W. P. Quentell

Kansas City. Fl. 1895. Designed Quentell, which was cut by Nicholas J. Werner for Central Type Foundry.

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[US] Will Ransom

Primarily an illustrator, letterer, and book designer.

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[CA] William Reuter

Designed arabic numerals for Van Krimpen's Open Kapitalen, cut by Paul Hayden Duensing.

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[DE] Hiero Rhode

Hiero Rhode [Roman] (1944).

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[US] Bruce Rogers

Montaigne (1901), ["remodeling of a Caslon"] (1909), Centaur (19xx)

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[UK] Reynolds Stone

Primarily a engraver. Designed the typefaces Janet (Ca. 1968) and Minerva (Linotype UK, 1954). Biographical sketch in McLean, Ruari. True to Type (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll / London: Werner Shaw, 2000): 130-138 [reprinted there from its original appearance in a booklet for an exhibition of Stone's works at the Victoria & Albert Museum.]

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[ ] Georg Trump

City (1930),

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[DE] Karl Hans Walter

Hiero Rhode Kursiv (1954-1957).

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[US] Frederic Warde

Arrighi.

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[US] S. M. Weatherly

Washington Text.

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[US] John K. White

See the entry on White in the "Type Scholars and Collectors" set of Notebooks. The design of a typeface for the Cherokee syllabary by Torvald Faegre, while a student at Roosevelt University, Chicago, is sometimes attributed to John K. White, who initiated and supervised the project. White himself attributes the design to Faegre.

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[Germany] Dr. Willy Wiegand

Bermer Presse, Munich. [See letter by Joseph Blumenthal in Fine Print Vol. 12, No. 4 (October, 1986): 235-236) for discussion of Hoell and his association as a designer with the punchcutter Louis Hoell

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[US] Gudrun Zapf - Von Hesse

Diotima/ Smaragd/ Ariadne Initials.

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Notes:

1. Stanley Morison will be found not here but in Type Scholars and Collectors. Victor Lardent will be found in Type Drafters.

2. As reported by Claire van Vliet from her own experience in doing it for the Lanston Monotype Machine Company for Goudy's Californian (and, it must be said, Craw Clarendon simultaneously). In Belanger, Terry, ed. Proceedings of The Fine Printing Conference at Columbia University, Held May 19-22, 1982 . (NY: School of Library Service, Columbia Universiyt, 1983.) p. 79.