This Stephanie Seymor S is borrowed, with maximal expressable respect, from M/M.
Hi. I would like to take a moment of my time and yours to discuss something very important to me: the letter S. At the time of writing, I am currently uploading a series of gigantic files to a particularly sluggish web server, and I’ve been working waaaay too hard considering school just started like the day before yesterday — so hey yeah, let’s take a moment, let’s talk S.
See, when I first started drawing Cello 2, the current iteration of the typeface I’m doing for my dear associate Peter Sachon’s putative website, I was using a simple construction logic to generate these pseudo-serif terminals. By matching a simple curve that extended, say, three diagonal points across the grid with a corresponding two-point curve, I could generate modular curves that didn’t appear overwhelmingly robot-tastic … or at least, such was/is my hope. As the sample above may hint at, aligning these curves on the grid can yield anything from exaggeratedly bracketed serif shapes, through to the sort-of freakish alien chunks you see from M/M, to straight-up ball terminals and other such flourishes.
This proved to be a great trick, in this case… almost too great, because it readily yielded like 95% or so of the alphabet, almost as if it were a forgone conclusion. I drew most of it in one shot, on the Amtrak regional from Boston to New York, the day after the Fourth of July. Everything was sort of super easy in those first leadholder-on-Moleskine sketches, but the exceptions to that ease were serious problems. Specifically, I couldn’t get the N and the S to play right with the rest of the system.
I ended up making some exceptions for the N (as you’ll see soon, when I finish Cello 2 and release it bigshot style) but I thought I could outsmart the S situation. Really, I made the classic rookie mistake: the one where you think you know what you’re doing, but really you don’t.
I had noted the manner in which a good deal of serif S’s have their middle bit as thick as their counterpart letters’ vertical bits. And yeah, I am sure there are real terms for these things, but I do not feel like rooting through all of Bringhurst to figure it out… I’ll just show you, instead. Look at Amarillo USAF’s S, versus that of Mr. Crouwel’s Foundry Gridnik:
… I had always thought the Amarillo S made more sense, as it were, until I literally saw the truth about serif S forms with my own two eyes … a nice little nerd-epiphany I came to, incedentally, while staring at a bookmark from St. Mark’s Bookshop which had been set in some thunderously thick-ass bold Bodoni face. I saw that litany of S shapes and realized what is eye-rollingly basic to all you type nerds out there: that our Western Latin S is a compressed version of the German tall S (which you may also recognize as the first half of the ß character).
I know it’s just ravenously naive and sycophantic to point out how fantastic it was to realize this factoid, but fuckin’ A, what do you want? It’s my blog, and so. Really, this blew my mind. It led me to revise Gusset’s S, like so:
… In the case of which, the highlighted shapes were moved down to emphasize the S’s middle. Furthermore, Gusset’s S is the only character in the typeface that contains octagonal shapes that have their longer edges paralell to baseline.
See what I mean?? I had become that guy: the condescending new kid who dispenses pedantry beyond his means. I couldn’t get over it. Here’s an abbreviated chart of the evolutionary course of Cello 2’s tormented S:
… When I say abbreviated, I really mean it: there were a ton of minor variants to all of these, and I spent at least twice as long poking and prodding one ill-concieved S after another as I had designing the remaining entirety of Cello 2’s characters. Eventually I arrived at what I actually believed was the pinnacle of systematized S formalism — the fourth from the left in the above graphic.
WHICH WE ALL CAN SEE IS JUST A SHITTY BODONI KNOCKOFF. When I tried my doomed Pygmalion character out with its peers, I could see that it didn’t work… but I didn’t allow myself to believe it. Really. I know this sounds indulgently retarded and nerdy, but I had a really emotionally charged summer, and I ended up subjugting a lot of my tumult and anguish into letter-drawing. So there you go.
And so: it was an equally revealing thing to come back to the original Cello 2 S. I don’t care what the experts say: I like it in the mix, as it stands. Doing away with the ball terminals proved to be the final touch (and yeah, that is an editorial decision I am going to avoid exploring in any sort of metaphorical way).
So yeah. That’s how it went, and this is how it is… when Peter’s website launches next week, I’ll link you all up in there, and possibly pony up downloadable font files for all this and more. In the meantime, take a look at an S near you… or whatever your favorite letter happens to be. Shit’s crazier than maybe you thought, yeah? Yeah!
-fish
