Everything good about the romans remains. What the italics bring is more functionality and more style; not just a logical expansion to the family, but also design ideas worth exploring for me. The idea behind Tiny Type Co. has always been to try to do as much as possible with limited palettes, and that also means that an expansion of a type family has to do more than just pad the numbers. A straight-up italic for all styles would not mean anything to me, it would be boring to draw, and I can’t see the added value for a creative designer. With that in mind, the new Narrow and Wide italics in particular are work worth doing, and hopefully provide more flavour while keeping the total family limited.

Tiny Grotesk remains a very compact neogrotesk superfamily. It covers an even wider range than before. The subfamilies stand on their own, now with nicely matching italics, and each style, across the whole family, covers the exact same typographic and linguistic features.

☛ See, try and buy Tiny Grotesk, starting at €50 per style

Tiny Grotesk is in its regular width a clean, friendly neogrotesk with relaxed capitals and a round, even-keeled lowercase. The two accompanying widths, Narrow and Wide, expand it into a complex typographic toolkit. The Narrow styles, space-saving and optimised for small use, are ideal for footnotes, asides and UI elements. The Wide styles, imposing and optimised for large use, demand space, and will take that space no matter what. This pairing makes the family versatile and broadly usable while remaining as compact as possible.

Tiny Grotesk has been in development since 2019, slowly but steadily expanding in scope but not really in size. It has been used in a few print projects, on some vinyl records, and for a complex digital catalogue before its release in 2024 and expansion in 2026.

Bridging some 500 years of typographic ideas

The initial idea for the family started in a perhaps weird place: 1500s italic calligraphy and movable typefaces based on it. In these early days, the lowercase was a cursive italic. The capitals, however, were upright forms. Since the capital letters in these texts occurred relatively rarely – an average of something like once every forty characters – their presence clearly wasn’t disruptive to readers. Not disruptive enough to feel the need to draw italic capitals, which would require a whole new set of sorts to be drawn, cut and cast. I can’t blame them for wanting to be efficient.

The italics by Ludovico Arrighi were the original inspiration for Tiny Grotesk, in a direct but not entirely obvious way. The proportions were taken from his second italic, and I wanted to explore them in depth. Would the typographic rhythm work in a sans-serif jacket, even with the strange width relationship between these capitals and lowercase letters?

A 20th century neogrotesk – something in the style of Helvetica, Univers or Folio, sans-serifs more rationalised than their predecessor Akzidenz-Grotesk – felt like the appropriate form. Unlike the cursiva humanistica, which is directly inspired by calligraphy, these newer grotesks are now a few steps removed from any handwriting. There are still implied rules on ductus – which parts are thick and why – but many of them are different from the rules of cursive italics from 1500. The newer grotesks also feature more graphic than calligraphic drawings, with more focus on geometric shapes, such as uninterrupted quarter-circle turns and horizontal cuts at the ends of strokes.

Finally, these neogrotesks were designed around typographic weight. Arrighi’s work was intended for book setting, at text sizes, in a single weight and style. The 19th and 20th century brought us the rotary steam press, posters, graphic design, magazines and visual identities, and with it variety. The new grotesks have thin styles, bold styles, black styles, and often matching italics for all. They even have widths, which became my next focus.

Expanding the idea into distinct styles

While I found the mismatched style of wide capitals and narrow lowercase charming, it was more a gimmick than a design I felt had a lot to offer. The success of the experiment was encouraging, however. The grotesk forms on the narrow lowercase width worked well, and I knew that was worth expanding.

The regular width started by stretching the narrow until the forms felt ‘normal’, or at least normal to me.² Then, it felt logical to see what stretching it further could look like. The wide styles are an extrapolation: the same increase from narrow to regular is optically doubled. Now, the three widths started speaking for themselves. The narrow styles, rooted in book design, were already proven in small use – Arrighi’s proportions do the hard work there. The regular styles became a middle ground, a more general-purpose design with friendly proportions. The wide styles made the same conceptual step as before: if the Narrow side of the axis is for small use, Wide should be designed for big use.

With this new focus, the project began to take proper shape. It would be a superfamily in the narrowest sense of the term: multiple widths, weights and styles, but only as few of each as possible. To do a lot, with very little – which is also at the heart of the Tiny Type ethos. I believe in the versatility of my tools, and that a good designer can squeeze a lot of value out of a single style. It’s why my families tend to remain small. I’d rather pick a few clear ideas for designers to work with than to provide a range of options many of which they may never use.

Form languages and curve tensions

Between the six core styles, there are at least five distinct drawing styles. The curve tension of the regular widths, even-keeled with balanced curves and straight lines, is the calm heart of the family. The classical proportions, roughly based on the Aldine typefaces³, have a bit of swing to them, with more variation in the capital widths than most neogrotesks – compare M to N, E to O. These proportions bring a softness to the sans-serif curves. There can be a coldness in neogrotesks, a clinical and ‘neutral’ intent⁴ – but those fonts already exist. Tiny Grotesk should be friendly.

When it became clear that narrow would mean small, I had a goal for that too. A lot of small-use designs (often labeled as ‘Caption’ styles) have a wider set width than the larger-use styles, helping them look stylistically consistent – one of many optical illusions in type design. But there is no reason that smaller can’t mean narrower… if narrowness is the point. The letterforms are narrower than the regular width, but the spacing is increased, to keep forms open and uncluttered. There are subtle ink traps⁵ that give the styles a bit of bite when used larger, but mostly serve to lighten busy joins at smaller sizes. The italics add an occasional subtle cursive detail, to help differentiate them from the romans. This shows prominently in letters such as e n u a. The slant angle of 10° is slight, as greater slant degrees became too loud for my tastes. That allowed some of these small flourishes, for flavour and distinction.

Because the wide styles are a sort of inversion of the narrow styles, a counterbalance in the family, they had to be the opposite in many conceptual ways. So, wide = big use, that’s easy. The wide spacing of the narrow styles would become tight. And the ink traps translate to very thin joins, as thin as 3% of the body size – very visible in letters like G b d p q. The oval forms of the narrow are turned 90°, and the italics are now slanted to a severe 24°, making those styles as loud and fast as possible.

A lot of range in a small package

The three widths are optimised for their different use sizes. The Narrow styles are used as footnotes, sidenotes and other typographic metatextual elements. The Regular widths are the general-purpose neogrotesk, ready for running text from 10 to 20 points. Then, for large and eye-catching use, such as headlines, logos and quotes, the Wide styles can go as big as you want. But nobody’s going to stop you if you mix things up, of course.

Tiny Grotesk is as compact a neogrotesk superfamily as it can be, and provides a genuinely useful wide range of functions with only twelve styles. Despite being designed as a holistic family, the subfamilies do stand on their own, and each covers the exact same typographic and linguistic features.

☛ See, try and buy Tiny Grotesk, starting at €50 per style

ATypI 2020: All Over

For years I’ve been simmering an idea I’ve been having: isn’t ‘revival’ kind of a strange word for what we would otherwise label a copy or a hommage? And, if we take these old works as seriously as we do, are there things we’re forgetting? For the ATypI 2020 conference I decided to explore this further and articulate some of the thoughts and concerns I’ve had about our use of historic materials. Since the conference was entirely digital, I recorded my talk ahead of time, and released it after the conference was over. You can watch it on YouTube, or see the embedded version below.

Recently, ATypI also uploaded their recording of the session, including a Q&A where we tackle other questions. It cuts off early, but is worth a watch if you’re curious.

Dover Serif Text references Haas Caslon¹ for its spacing and general proportions. It feels more appropriate for long runs of text, more restrained and less bouncy. Many of its quirks have been toned down, but largely it feels the same.

Dover Sans Text is essentially a Caslon Sans, drawn to match Dover Serif in the same way that Johnston and Gill ended up using Caslon as the base of their design. This means that the sans is drawn to do the same things the serif can do: from proportions and letter skeletons, all the way up to general design features like small caps and language support. Dover Sans Text is a fully-capable text typesetting face.

Dover Text branched off from my earlier Dover project in 2013, and started appearing in print in 2015. These projects helped focus the family and gave me the confidence to keep working on it.

The Text family is optimised for printing sizes from 6 to 16 points, and on screen looks best starting at 12 pixels. When setting above 16 points or 20 pixels, gentle negative tracking values help to keep the text looking great.

Dover Text is a relatively dark-setting typeface. The regular weights of typefaces have gotten lighter over the past century, and Dover Text is my modest proposal to bring back some of the good old textures. It also lets me make a nice heavy bold that provides plenty of contrast with the base weight.

Acknowledgements

Dover Text was made possible by generous support from Kai Bernau, Frode Helland and Wei Huang. I also need to thank my sister-in-law, who gifted me a wonderful specimen of Caslon Antiqua, and every person who has been beta-testing these fonts in the years leading up to completion.

☛ See, try and buy Dover Text, starting at €50 per style

Typography is concerned with the use of typefaces to elucidate an idea. Normally, we use an upright, roman style for the primary text. Then, we add layers of meaning, using italics, small caps and bolder weights. But then, when we exhaust the design possibilities in the first typeface family, the fun starts. We start matching.

A good combination of typefaces is more than just practical: it can enhance the idea, the feeling and the branding of whatever you’re designing. Think of it like cooking: a single flavour can be delicious, but more often than not, what we consider a good flavour is actually a complex layering of different flavour compounds that work well together.

So you can imagine that designers pride themselves in their skill at matching the right typefaces. This is where Dover started.

A strange match

While typesetting a zine, I tried to match sans and serif faces, to make the most of a very cheap print. A lot of combinations are problematic, such as wildly varying vertical proportions — when you need to massively adjust the font size just so the sans doesn’t look shouty next to the serif, for example. I skipped over Caslon and Gill Sans similarly. The digital versions that we have available are all a little mismatched and often need a fair amount of adjusting.

But something stuck about the combination. I kept returning to it. I noticed, after some time, that the proportions of the capital letters were eerily similar, almost as if Gill Sans had modelled its caps off of Caslon (fig. 3). And I noticed the same for a large part of the lowercase. The whole thing… it seemed too coincidental. As if Gill Sans was a ‘Caslon Sans’.

While I have found no evidence that Eric Gill did indeed follow the Caslon skeleton, or perhaps followed the English ‘archetype’ (Caslon has been and remains a wildly popular typeface), it planted the seed for Dover, years before I actually started drawing it.

Years of drawing

In 2012, I began drawing ‘my’ Caslon. A friend asked me if I had ‘anything lying around’ that was high-contrast but not Didot-esque. I didn’t, but it sounded like a fun challenge. I started with some light research and came back to Caslon, particularly the poster sizes that William Caslon drew for his eponymous type foundry. I remembered my previous attempts to combine Caslon with a nicely matched sans and failing. Now I had a real problem to solve.

I quickly split the production into two extremes: really big use, and small general use. Dover Display would be the branch for the biggest, most expressive design work, and Dover Text would be used for general text settings. With that, I was able to focus on emphasising the design idea I’d had all along: to make Caslon and Gill a family.

A matter of need

The easiest way to figure out what to draw first is to ask yourself what you need first. What I needed most was a display family: something big and bold, for titles, features and call-outs.

Now, on the surface, it may seem like a blessing for a graphic designer to also make their own typefaces. The reality of it, however, is that you are split doing catch-up work on both parts. A new poster highlights a kerning issue, a book cover reveals that you need some esoteric characters, a website shows that the rendering doesn’t look good on Windows. They call that ‘dog fooding’, where the producer of dog food believes so much in their own product that they eat it themselves. As you can imagine, if you’re into fine dining, that may not be so appealing. Such is life for the type-designing graphic designer.

So I had to get strict with myself. In the summer of 2014, after two years of drawing, I decided to delay Dover Text. All my drawing time should go into Dover Display instead. The two matters of need? I wanted a less baroque Caslon, and a Gill Sans for big use.

The serif styles of Dover Display are a rationalised version of Caslon’s ideas, and the italic, while still quite wobbly and curly, is much more straight-laced. The sans counterpart is a more generally useful execution of Gill Sans: the x-height is taller, and the weight is distributed more like a modern humanist sans-serif. I like to think that I addressed my needs.

Dover: a piece of historical design fiction

On July 1st of 2016, I finally released Dover Display. An exploration of how to match serif and sans, based on a years-old hunch that, maybe, sometime in the 1920s, Eric Gill looked at the Caslon types with a tilted head and thought to himself, ‘I want something big and bold, but not too baroque’, and started drawing. This is my design fiction: what if?

Dover Display is available starting at €50 per style, exclusively from the Tiny Type Co.

To cut things short, to cut poetry with purpose, I decided to do something about my cloud gazing. Starting today, you can buy my fonts. I’ve been sitting on these for a long time – some of them a very long time indeed – and I think it’s time to set them free.

The launch catalog is small, and the fonts are for big use. If you’ve known me for a while, these are familiar faces. If you’re new to me and the Tiny Type Co, let me introduce you to the vanguard.

Matching serifs and sans-serifs as a type family concept is a relatively young idea¹. It’s certainly too young for William Caslon the elder. Now imagine an alternate universe, a typographic fantasy, where William Caslon and Eric Gill, perhaps the two most famous British type designers, were one and the same. This is where Dover Display started: Caslon and Gill, brought closely together, to explore Britishness from the outside in.

☛ See and buy Dover Display, starting at €50 per style

Piet Zwart, the Dutch industrial designer and typographer, is known for a stark and stylised approach. But the lettering he designed for his friend and peer Berlage is very quirky.

To date, there has been no digital version of this charming lettering style. Monumental Grotesk is my attempt at righting that wrong. With broad language support and a wide set of typographic extras, it can find a new life for many more people.

☛ See and buy Monumental Grotesk, starting at €40

Open for business

So: today has three pieces of good news. Piet Zwart’s spirited lettering is finally given life with Monumental Grotesk. A typographic historical design fiction is fleshed out with Dover Display. And last but not least, the Tiny Type Co. has started business. I hope to show you a lot more type to come.

Monumental Grotesk is a revival of the spirited lettering work of Piet Zwart. Most of his typographic work is different for each project, and is thus more like lettering. In Monumental Grotesk, the typographic core is given centre stage: now, it really works like a typeface.

Piet Zwart was one of the first proper Dutch graphic designers. He was a graphic artist, working with stylised photography, letter sorts in lead and wood and minimalist layouts, in an era where Art Nouveau was just wearing off. Art Deco and its cousin Bauhaus laid the foundations for twentieth century graphic design.

When Hendrik Berlage designed his buildings, all laying the ground work for, among others, De Stijl and the Amsterdam School, he commissioned Zwart to design the lettering.

This style, which we’ll refer to as the Berlage letters, has a softness that is perhaps uncharacteristic for Zwart’s regular graphic design work. Nonetheless, it is clearly his product. They were drawn around the same time – the Laga poster was printed in 1922, and the monument on Buitenhof was erected in 1923. The lettering on the façade of the First Church of Christ, Scientist was delivered in 1926; Piet Zwart even collaborated on the interior design.

Where the Laga font—seemingly made with left-overs of linoleum—has a rough but mechanical quality to it, the Berlage letters are soft, almost too soft for the hard material they came to be cut in. The reasons for the sharpness of Zwart’s poster work are obvious: he worked in linoleum and letterpress, materials that are hard-edged and of high contrast. Perfect materials for a modernist who is trying to throw off the yoke of the overly decorative arts, attempting to inject some heart and soul into abstract imagery. The Berlage letters, which I believe are sculpted and enameled (please contact me about this if you know better), achieve this. They have an inherent softness due to their finish, and their dimensionality feels entirely natural.

And this is the appeal, to me: a grotesk cut in an era of brutally geometric designs, based on a similarly coarse, fat grotesk, but stripped of its rough edges, and in fact turned into a friendly face.

Acknowledgements

Without the support of Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland, I might never have started. Without the support of Håvard Gjelseth, I might never have finished it. Florian Hardwig provided me with words of support and pointed out that maybe a flat-topped 8 could be a pretty cool design. I agreed completely.

☛ See and buy Monumental Grotesk, starting at only €40 per style

With every revival, new eyes assess old ideas. Some of these ideas remain strong, and those may be exaggerated. Conversely, some of the original design ideas just don’t seem to make much sense anymore. To juggle this responsibly and respectfully is a humbling task.

Dover started development in 2012. A range of prints from very large Caslons, idiosyncratic design variations within the different point sizes of the lead Gill Sans, a few scans from the Haas Caslons (courtesy of Kai Bernau) for text, Penguin book covers – it covered a wide gamut of reference. I mixed all of this with the vague notion of what they were ‘supposed’ to look like, and a few months later scrapped it all to start over.

From the start, Dover would be matched across its styles: sans and serif would both come with the same range of OpenType features, glyphs and language support. It takes some of the guess-work out of matching typefaces, and expands on what the basic repertoire of a sans-serif typeface can be.

Acknowledgements

Dover Display would not have been possible without the endless support from Kai Bernau. I received valuable feedback over the years from Frode Helland, Stefan Ellmer, David Jonathan Ross, Erik van Blokland, Christoph Bergmann and Håvard Gjelseth.

☛ See and buy Dover Display, starting at €50 per style