A drop cap font for Garamontio

michele casanova

I tried to create a drop cap font under the name Garamontio Capo (github and details), since I called Garamontio a fork of EB Garamond.

As a starting point I used the drop caps indicated as Reinassance-Initialen in Petzendorfer's Schriften Atlas, but I made some changes (especially to the letters G, M, P, Q, R) because the look of some letters seemed typically 19th century to me.

Do you think this is an acceptable compromise? Or are other changes needed to make the two fonts match?

I'm currently considering modifying the letter W (although there would be problems with the background decorations).

Yves Michel

I'm impressed by the quality of your backgrounds and the way they match your letters. But I find the /I/ background less convincing, not matching (filling) the square pattern as the others do. Anyway, bravo!

John Hudson

I think the /I is fine, but wish that the /H could be made a little wider. It looks pinched compared to the other letters.

michele casanova

Yves Michel said:

I'm impressed by the quality of your backgrounds and the way they match your letters. But I find the /I/ background less convincing, not matching (filling) the square pattern as the others do. Anyway, bravo!

Thanks. I tried to recreate the backgrounds following the original source (Petzendorfer), leaving some printing imperfections.

John Hudson said:

I think the /I is fine, but wish that the /H could be made a little wider. It looks pinched compared to the other letters.

Thanks. I'll try to make the letter /H a little wider, but in some cases it's difficult to make changes without leaving empty spaces or without creating overlaps with the original backgrounds (e.g. the tail of the letter Q).

C.Fransen

Congradulations on this revival. It looks very nice.

michele casanova

C.Fransen said:

Congradulations on this revival. It looks very nice.

Thanks. It's not a completely faithful revival of the original, since I changed the shape of a few letters

michele casanova

John Hudson said:

I think the /I is fine, but wish that the /H could be made a little wider. It looks pinched compared to the other letters.

New version with a little wider /H. I'm not sure if it's enough, but so far there's been no need to change the background

Christian Thalmann

Many letters don't look particularly Garamond to me (e.g., /R/, /S/). Why not start with the shapes of your regular caps?

michele casanova

Christian Thalmann said:

Many letters don't look particularly Garamond to me (e.g., /R/, /S/). Why not start with the shapes of your regular caps?

Thanks. I'm not an expert, but I'll try to do some experiments following this advice.

C.Fransen

michele casanova said:

C.Fransen said:

Congradulations on this revival. It looks very nice.

Thanks. It's not a completely faithful revival of the original, since I changed the shape of a few letters

I think it's perfectly fine to redraw certain shapes. The original creator would've probably done the same if he/she could create them again.  

Thomas Phinney

To expand on Christian’s comment, despite the name in that catalog, these caps might not feel entirely Renaissance or Garamond-adjacent because of their relatively modern proportions. Making them fit within optically the same amount of border within a square “evens out” the letter widths compared to Renaissance (and classical Roman) proportions. That makes certain letters much narrower than in Renaissance types (CDGHMOQW) and others wider (EFJS).

I haven’t spent a ton of time considering this sort of thing in illuminated manuscripts or period drop caps, but Ito the extent that I have, I have seen both approaches in period illuminated/floriated initial caps within square blocks; some make all the caps optically about the same width, others just allow more space. Jim Moran gave a talk on wood type initial caps at TypeCon in 2018, and I believe I recall seeing both approaches at the time.

Personally, if you are going with the main letterform being more traditional/typographic, I would love to see them closer to old-style proportions. If the letterforms themselves were more ornamented, then I wouldn’t care so much.

See for example this image (from the Steven Heller article in Design Observer at https://designobserver.com/initial-caps-the-birth-of-illustrated-typography/).

The O V and X are more ornamented, while the R and S are more typographic, in the sense that I mean.

michele casanova

@Thomas Phinney Thanks for the directions. Combining these with @Christian Thalmann's, I'm considering changing the starting point for the drop caps.

Do you think using Geoffroy Tory's drop caps would be a good choice?

The original alphabet is not complete, as I found less than twenty letters.However, between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the missing letters were created for the "Nouveau Larousse illustré".

Edit: a simple test

Brandon Buerkle

I’m curious as to whether the change in color affects how the proportions are perceived. While the proportions you’ve got are based on Petzendorfer's Schriften Atlas, the proportions of the Atlas initials don’t feel as exaggerated to me. Maybe that’s just me, or maybe it’s the fact that the Atlas initials are all black, whereas yours are red letters on grey ornamentation.

michele casanova

Brandon Buerkle said:

I’m curious as to whether the change in color affects how the proportions are perceived. While the proportions you’ve got are based on Petzendorfer's Schriften Atlas, the proportions of the Atlas initials don’t feel as exaggerated to me. Maybe that’s just me, or maybe it’s the fact that the Atlas initials are all black, whereas yours are red letters on grey ornamentation.

I'm not sure, but it's probably because of the different color of the letter compared to the background.

michele casanova

After several less than satisfactory attempts, I am trying to use the excellent Cormorant Garamond Medium by @Christian Thalmann as a base to rearrange some Simon de Colines' drop caps (here is the source for the letter B).

I think it could be a good match as a drop cap for a font derived from EB Garamond.

Craig Eliason

I would try breaking up the vine layer into smaller pieces like the original. Let the letter have the longest strokes and largest continuous shapes, and have a gap where vines and letter meet.

Christian Thalmann

Good choice! 

michele casanova

Craig Eliason said:

I would try breaking up the vine layer into smaller pieces like the original. Let the letter have the longest strokes and largest continuous shapes, and have a gap where vines and letter meet.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll do some experiments to see if my skills are enough to create something that isn't too ugly.