In 2001 came up with this word for a workshop I was doing. I wanted a word that I could
get people to think about designing a typeface very quickly. And this is in the context of
people who don't have much experience in designing typefaces, can't do what Hertz
suggested, doesn't use pre-existing work as a starting point, start with a clean sheet
of paper. It also needed to help people get over the problem of the absence of a brief,
which we find is one of the most difficult problems with new students. Because even if
they are professionals with 10-15 years of experience, they're conditioned to respond to
a brief, read a brief, restate a brief, find out the limitations inherent in a brief. But if you
start with a complete blank sheet of paper, you have to imagine the thing yourself. And that's
a very different kind of challenge. So what we want to do is help this period of experimentation
and exploration to happen fairly quickly. I chose the word adhesion because at the time,
people were having discussions of the HNDO, which I don't think is very helpful, or hamburger
fonts, or whatever. And people forget that hamburger fonts and variants were not a design
tool. They were a testing tool. There's photographs of people that line a type of model. Looking
at these strings of characters to space and to see how the letters would fit together.
But once they had already been designed under a process that, like Jared mentioned, and
our archives here show of all types of design, and indeed Walter Tracy's, Times Europe, IS
up there shows, was extremely protracted in the early stages. There was a lot of effort
to get the basic shapes right. There was a lot of know-how to being passed on down from
the company, because there was an explicit company doing that stuff. And this is completely
absent now, so we need to accelerate this process. So the point of using adhesion was
to identify a set of shapes that would allow people to very quickly get a feel for the
style of the typeface, and also the differentiating elements in the typeface, but without having
the risk of every small change that they need to propagate through the rest of the typeface,
taking forever and leading them down blind alleys. So there's a no in the end, and the
O is there only to make a word. I don't think the O should be there. The O is an aberration
in that it is the only completely symmetrical letter. As a round counter, it's not very
helpful. In terms of round counters of letters, the D or B would be much more helpful, because
they help you decide how does a round counter stick on to a vertical stroke, which is an
integral part of the Latin typography, and is not at all answered by the O, or indeed
the N to a large degree. So one of the B D P Q letters needs to be there. The A's and
the N are very helpful to have, because you can begin to build in people the skill of
how do bits that stick out more influence the perception of shapes. So if you design
the H the same as the N, students will fairly quickly, through just these two shapes, realize
that the fact that the stem of the H ascends will make the curve of the H look different
in relation to the N. So they can begin to get some idea of how to change. The most important
letter for identity, because the H and the N and the O and at the large degree the D
are useful to give the pattern, the underlying pattern and uniformity in the time phase,
but the distinguishing feature will come much more from letters like the A, which has the
key distinction, the key decision to be made between the balance of the top and the bottom
halves within the X height, how dominant is the top in relation to the bottom or vice
versa, which we can see propagating through to the E and then the S and so on.
But also the treatment of the open stroke, is it some that is heavy at its tip, is some
that is light, is some that curves in quite a lot, leaves a big gap between its tip and
the closed bone. And also the treatment of the underlying strokes again, A, D, you can
see how these things will propagate. The E and the A build another set of relationships
of the two main letters that interrupt the zone of the X height, the band of the X height,
which is a key design feature in a time phase, and can very quickly give a lighter or heavier
filter time phase. And the S is the really tricky letter in the lot, it's the one really
difficult letter in the spot, because it has the problem of making a concave and convex
curve look part of a single stroke. It also helps you learn quite a lot about conventional
structures and where things might start. And it also gives a very quick idea of how quick
or how fast or slow the time phase might be on the page, or why the rest will make the
time phase look quite much more slow, because there will be a stronger horizontal emphasis
in the center, and narrow rest will have a diagonal stroke, which will make the time
phase look faster. There's no descenders, because the depth of descenders can change
quite a lot in the time phase, and depending on the style of the time phase and the brief,
indeed, the descenders might have different characteristics, and we have very good examples
like lexicon where time phases might have different ascenders and descenders lengths,
with no detrimental quality. But this set of letters allows people to very quickly try
out these ideas without the problems for the diagonals, BWXY, which are a set of problems
themselves, without letters that are traps like the G, which are extremely individual,
but exactly because of the individuality, you need to build them in the context of the
rest of the time phase, so that they both support and emphasize the individuality. And
it allows them to have a good enough combination of vowels and consonants so that they can
get decent letters. I'll plug Miguel Soucer's Aetesian Text website in this, because it
came out of this problem, if you have a small number of characters set, or characters, how
do you get valid text strings? He built a website that you can enter any set of characters
that will return a string of words, source from online document, or dictionaries, using
the character that you have selected, and it's now a standard design for a lot of students.
But it means that very quickly, this professional experimentation that you're alluded to can
happen for people who are not used to building variants in time phase design. And very quickly,
this is a fairly early test document by a previous student, we can begin to look at
things like that.
