In 1912, Deberny + Peignot, bought the original punches of Didot, making the font newly accessible to designers. An Italian foundry, Nebiolo, issued a new cut of Bodoni in 1901, and ten years later the largest American foundry, ATF, issued its own very popular cut of Bodoni. After fading from view, Bodoni and Didot made a comeback in the early twentieth century, partly because their geometric clarity seemed modern again. A second and not minor value is to be gained from sharpness and definition, neatness and finish.’ Bodoni’s prescription would be equally at home in a classical treatise on type, or in a 1950s book on proper grooming for debutantes.ĭidot and Bodoni dominated printing until the late nineteenth century, when the Arts and Crafts movement returned to the solidity of humanist letterforms and the texture of Renaissance printing (William Morris called Bodoni’s letterforms ‘shatteringly hideous’). Bodoni described the ‘beauties of type’ as ‘conformity without ambiguity, variety without dissonance, and equality and symmetry without confusion.
Bodoni and Didot exaggerated the height and verticality of the ascenders and descenders of the letterforms, lending the characters an architectural grandeur. The result is abstraction and precision, echoing their Enlightenment origins. The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century typefaces of the Frenchman Firmin Didot and the Italian Giambattista Bodoni are classified as modern because they introduced an extreme contrast between thick and thin elements, achieving a radical consistency among letter shapes by subjecting the variety of the alphabet to a thick / thin autocracy. Over the twentieth century, carrying into the present, one can observe competing aesthetics of modernity, traceable through different uses of the ‘modern’ typefaces of Didot and Bodoni and the ‘avant-garde’ aesthetic of sans serif grotesques. This phenomenon is observable in the arena of fashion, where serif and sans serif tyefaces have articulated a certain landscape among fashion magazines and fashion brands. Such patterns of use can become so pronounced that they shape our understanding of typography. ‘What is so feminine about Optima?’ he asks, as he wonders whether these gendered associations inhere in the forms of the typeface, or evolve from patterns of use. He checks his work against the competition by making a trip to the drugstore and discovers that Almay, L’Oréal, Revlon, Cover Girl and Maybelline follow an almost uniform typographic code, most sharing the stylistic root of the typeface Optima: he knew the ‘right’ typeface before he realised he knew it. After working to produce an appropriately ‘feminine’ logotype he arrives at a high-contrast sans serif that intuitively feels right. Type designer Tobias Frere-Jones once recounted his experience developing a logo for a company that produced hair products, false nails and perfume. Yet, as typefaces and lettering are employed in related contexts, the associations of these contexts bleed into our understanding of the typeface itself.
Barring letters that have an overt figurative origin (characters made of branches or rope), the domain of typography and lettering is refreshingly content-free, a matter of style, history and functionality. The Black weight in particular has the spirit of having been drawn in 1970s New York, maybe by Herb Lubalin.Typefaces are abstract. The result is that the Bold and Black weights get quite compressed and the type takes on a different character, that of more expressively, robustly graphic Modern and Fat Face forms. For the bold weights the idea was simply to increase line weight and ball terminals at the same-ish ratio (they are normally reduced), while maintaining the condensed character shape as much as possible. In many ways the type isn't a Didot at all, the italic in particular jumbles styles, the numerals swap between Didot, Bodoni and made-up shapes. As well as its condensed shape this type was to have a sparse severity, such as the sharp angular connection between vertical and horizontal. Typefaces such as Ambroise were close in style but with an extra softness, such as in the bracketed serifs in its upper case. Having done some quick online research there interestingly didn't seem to be such a type available.
The client had reference for a few upper case characters of a condensed Didot, and wanted to explore developing these into a font. Alias Didot was a proposal for a redesign of a fashion magazine.
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