Geranium : inspired from Venetians

ivan louette

@Christian Thalmann Thanks for the reply. However examinating carefully Vesalius book some minutes ago I very surprizingly discovered something which shows that kind of design practice which shows a tittle resolutedly angular. Perhaps I could try to align the center of the tittle to the upper right of the /i stem which is the case here.

John Savard

ivan louette said:

If I prefer Jenson's typeface I understand why Griffo's is considered more perfect or stronger : some Aldus carefully composed pages have an impressive and metronomic almost inequalable regularity. But this regularity essentially based on verticals is precisely what I dyslike (that's my personal taste) in these best Aldus pages (but don't forget that some Aldus books are also very badly composed and this regularity broken ; that's perhaps the problem of his too fastly growing enterprises). I feel like a prisonner inside the page and on every line of De Aetna. They have a too strong hypnotic power for me.

Too much regularity is a problem for me too. The later Scotch Roman faces so popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are very unattractive in my opinion. But I have no problem with a Scotch Roman with wide proportions and which avoids an anemic weight.

Unlike the faces of earlier printers, though, today's old style Roman faces do tend to break the regularity to some extent, but they're subtle in doing so. Generally, unlike the sample page of De Aetna on one of your links, I think they succeed for the most part.

The current fashion is to say that a typeface belonging to any genre can be an artistic masterwork. And that is true, in a way. But if you take a typeface like Corona, designed to conserve space for use in newspapers, with very short ascenders and descenders, that a typeface of that kind, no matter how well designed, isn't really suitable for artistic printing would seem reasonable. Despite the existence of Antique Olive.

So, while Goudy is right that there is no simple "recognized quality", like sharp serifs, that automatically makes a typeface better, artistic typography may have its specific demands.

One obvious one is longer ascenders and descenders. Instead of having short descenders, and then adding leading to take their place when a less crowded page is desired.

Morris' Golden type, and the Jenson Old Style of ATF derived from it, don't really do justice to the typeface of Jenson, yet they're still considered suitable for artistic work. But Jenson Old Style, at least, seems to me to be approaching the appearance of an Egyptian or a Clarendon. Those typefaces developed from Roman types by omitting certain details, just as sans-serif ones did to an even greater extent, and so they're not generally viewed as suitable to artistic typography.

However, that the darker color of a Clarendon resembles that of some Jensons has led to some attempts, however ill-advised they may be, to use them as a substitute in a pinch, with results that even if subject to criticism, are not invariably wholly disastrous.

ivan louette

@Adam Jagosz Sorry for the delay and thanks for your comment !

Yes I am convinced now to draw a new italic for Geranium. I don't know what I will take for example at the moment. Perhaps my Uccello italic but I am not sure. When I was drawing that first Geranium italic the first constraint I give to me was to avoid the slanting temptation.

Now I will have to find a name for this orphan typeface… and perhaps a companion in the future

ivan louette

And a new /g more rounded for the roman

ivan louette

Geranium at work in my selfpublished novel "Le jour d'essaim". That's the first time I see it printed in offset. The size is 10.5 pts (because of its 620 pages ; I didn't want to force the readers to pay for two volumes at my first publishing) and it remains fairly easy to read at this size. Sorry for the poor image quality due to my phone :-(

NickCurtis

I find this face absolutely delightful, a real treat for the eyes. My only concern appears to be shared by others: the 9 and the 0 are both too small.

ivan louette

Thanks a lot for your comment Nick :-) You are right for the numerals ; they are not what I do the best and I should rework them.