Typeface analysis
(Research point: Graphic Design 1, page 87)
Choose a magazine and look at the main typefaces they use for the body text and headlines.
I had bought a number of magazines to use for the various exercises and research points and decided to use ‘Elle’ magazine for this activity. This is not a magazine I’m particularly familiar with and it seems to have a very distinctive style so I thought it would be a good starting point. I used various online tools (Identifont, WhatTheFont and Font Matcherator) with mixed success. The various searches gave five matches for the main heading:
- Nimbus Roman Modern Compress D
- Euphonia Latin
- Redeye serif bold
- Ambroise Std Francois Demi – this was the closest match as far as I could see
On further research a couple of blogs suggest it is Didot, which having seen it, I think is correct. I am obviously getting a bit typeface nerdy because this blog piece on Didot’s history was fascinating!
The brief was just the kind of challenge that Hoefler & Co. loves: we were asked to create a typeface that works like no other, a Modern which — unlike the commercial cuts of Bodoni — would have hairline serifs, and maintain them over a range of sizes. From the Didot collection we chose the grosse sans pareille no. 206 of Molé le jeune as a historical model, and extended the scant material in Didot’s 1819 Spécimen des Caracteres with quite a bit of invention: italics designed to work at large sizes, a range of different weights, and the many characters that Didot’s workshop never made. In the service of the design’s thin hairlines, we drew each of the family’s six styles in seven different “optical sizes,” each designed to be used at a different range of sizes, for a total of forty-two fonts.
The ‘July’ subhead got 9 matches:
- Vedo Book
- Irma Light, Regular & Medium
- Cyntho Pro Regular
- Relay Wide
- Family Bird
- Relay Wide Light
It looks to me like Relay Wide Light is the closest match. At the beginning of the activity I noticed I was broadly scanning the words and the typefaces but I was then looking in more detail (see the image above). The sorts of things I started picking out were:
- Bowl shapes
- Whether there were serifs
- The position of serifs – were they either side of the line or just above/below, right or left
- Where serifs sharp or rounded
- Angles – this was noticeable particularly on the ‘S’ character, did the top and bottom line up or where they slightly offset
This was another good activity for really looking at typeface construction and understanding the characteristics that enabled me to decide which typeface is the closest match. It was also interesting to see that although a magazine like ‘Elle’ has its own house style much of its content includes advertising with additional typefaces. I was struck in looking through the magazine at just how many typefaces are included; this must make presenting a consistent style challenging.
Once I had finished my typeface searches I came across this blog piece, mystery solved!
Domaine and Galaxie Copernicus in use for Elle UK by Suzanne Sykes & Mark Leeds in the UK.
Suzanne & Mark have really mixed it up with three totally different typeface families, including a forthcoming sanserif from Mário Feliciano. On paper and in theory, these typefaces shouldn’t “mix”, but in Elle they totally work. It’s a testament to the typographic skills of the designers that they’ve created a sympathetic environment for the fonts to thrive! The magazine is thoroughly contemporary, as it needs to be, and the pacing various throughout. Some spreads verge on controlled mania, others are calm and tastefully restrained.
