On Dutch case
The Realist typeface derives its name from the significant magnificence of the XVI century called Reale Romain. It is fully presented in punches, matrices and print species in the Plantin-Moretus Museum and available through the Library Catalog for the all general interest. The referenced item is the flemish spring of the High French Renaissance. This is from cut of Hendrik van den Keere, whose talent may not be overlooked — neither by his contemporaries nor by designers of our age.
'Reale Romain' or 'Parangonne Romaine' of Hendrik van den Keereand how it originally appeared in Christofer Plantin's known as 'Index Characterum', 1576.
The facts of a life always drop hints about their owner, so here are a few to open up Hendrik van den Keere the punchcutter. We know that he once broke a leg — that strictly led to his death and such a beginning of facts shows his life as untimely short, yet other fact is heavy load of metal heritage, prints of them and concepts that still remain fundamental for type design. He was a second-generation typographer, representing the second wave of Roman influence in Flanders. His father acquired the printing house of Joos Lambrecht — the bold-roman experimentalist, linguist and pioneer of typography. Bare facts show Hendrik was a person petticoated in layers of history and culture, accumulating different worldviews and traditions, with an early childhood initiation into the grand wardrobe of typography. For a certain period, he was the sole supplier of type for Christoffel Plantijn who’s print office was not only best or outstanding but on few heads upper the whole level of printing of that time. Where, under Plantijn’s treatment VdK did a lot of personal echevments and overlays even upon such a major contemporaries as Claude Garamond, Robert Granjon, Pierre Haultin… Could any better school and profound work-dialogue be imagined for a designer? But then, could we find such a custodian steward to cradle what Estienne and Le Bé had shaped? Let’s see.
By and large, the presented OFF project combines two of Van den Keere’s most precious works: Reale Romain and Double Pica Roman. To state it as an blustery oversimplification: the upper part of Realist is the Reale, and the lower part is the Pica. But, they are notedly different! In all-similar Renaissance romans, they might consolidate polar coordinates. The first, Reale Romain, is a fine tribute to his French colleagues, but much quiet and much solid in that. But the next item, Double Pica, is Goût Hollandois, — something completely new — yet, as it always goes in type, this newness is resurrecting the just-departed past that is already renewed ancient. Reale Romain holds the feeling and idea of a splendid new human of the Renaissance: the man enlightened with the Greek value of man as the measure of all things, now arose in the Bible on a whole new level. While the Reale is global, Double Pica Roman is personal and national. It is based in much residual techniques of tons of Gothic and gothic-based musical stuff, well-packed in the Antwerp archive. While the Reale gives the result of a transmission idea of Rome, Paris and then Antwerp, Pica presents the effort, high pragmatics, and hard-work of Protestant criticism rooting to VdK’s family Ghent. It might seem unbelievable that such deep ideas inherit in one master, in one man. And that is why we love all transitional periods — by the way, — by design.
Just next to the real-roman we see the native-roman of Ghent supplier: Two-Line Double Pica roman type, 1573.
The name ‘flamandes’ for blackletter shows up the obvious strong gothic tribe in Flanders. We know the story there first pages set in roman letters spoken dutch were rejected by the very dutches — they couldn’t read roman letters even in their language. That was the pages of Joos Lambrecht and the problem was resolved two generations later by his straight successor — the child who grown in home of his hart worries and attempts.
Through his typecasting activities for Plantin, van den Keere became thoroughly familiar with the French styles, and in consequence his own work derives from both schools. In his romans he combines the sophisticated French forms with something of the economical proportions and sturdy weight relationships of his familiar Flemish blackletter. These romans, introduced in Holland through Plantin's Leyden office, appear to have been the first in the family of strong, economical, 'Dutch'-style romans that reached international importance in the seventeenth century with the work of Christoffel van Dijck, Willem Janszoon Blaeu, the Voskens, Nicholas Kis, and their school — and ended in the eighteenth century with the work of William Caslon and his imitators in England.
We can, without a doubt, call Hendrik van den Keere the father of Dutch taste fonts. All that we love in Dutches is well described within his oeuvre and perfectly shows what this ‘taste’ is. Its further strains clearly seen in all later periods of history, and it is a permanent value of what we consider type to be. The ‘Dutch taste’, according to Mr. Morison, ‘a robust, space-saving necessity turned into a design principle’ was the genetic core for his Times. We at OFF find this combination of a high human ideal and its pragmatic embodiment — evenness, solidity — is the master key to the demands of our times too.
Realist itself
The Realist project is the continuing story of years spent with the Museum and its neighbours. It begun in 2017. It is fully influenced by letter-model theory of Professor F. E. Blokland (lettermodel.org) read twice through all trains and metro stations, thrown away, and engaged again as a significant part of own considerations and workflow.
— Rhythm is the dancer —
— Pixelisation and moiré —
— Grouping of letters —
— The style of cutting —
— Metaphor and mass teach each other —
The mass of the imprints
gives the dynamic foundation for
the metaphor of the Main Shape.
The personal style of cutting of Van den Keere was distilled from the sources assigned above, but the general plastic idea of the Font came from one imprint from the Allard Pierson Library. There, in fact, the bottom part of the letters held a little more ink. The memory of that (a child’s natural amazement at that look) grew into the idea to chum up Pica and Reale. A certain catching effect — the stem becomes slightly trapezoidal, which gives a stronger stand, while making the serifs shorter keeps more air compared to Granjon’s ‘bell-bottoms’. This trapezoidal boldness buttresses the rhythm of the renaissance inner viaduct repetition, and in general, this kind of shape resonates with the anatomy of the inclined bowls of the Renaissance font. That last is more fully represented in the Granjon classics, which are also on the way to shelf from OFF, but developing the further constructiveness on the very Rhythm elevates Realist into the Font of the Fonts, within Renaissance realism, of course.
On Renaissance,
it's fonts and translation
to worldview
There is an important and intriguing idea of Renaissance typefaces that arises from their apparent similarity. Even foundational authorities or fathers like H.D.L. Vervliet, when describing a particular set, resort to a simplification: marking distinctive constructional elements (a ‘single-serifed’ or ‘dog-eared’ etc). Despite the articulated attention to elements theese poor xeroxes shows the pixelisation as method of patterning, then as much as sun shines brightly Professor Blokland states rhythm as the primary formative and meaningful property of type, and all those ‘ears’ and ‘dogs” helpfully appear as well as we instantly differentiate the rhythm of a page from the 15th or 16th or 17th century. Only then does the trained eye distinguish Haultin from Granjon, or even the Estienne’s masters at first look — not by “ears”, but by eyes seeing the rhythm.
'The typographical historian faces a peculiar difficulty with sixteenth-century romans: their apparent uniformity. Masters copied masters so faithfully, sharing a common ideal of the letter, that the individual hand often disappears behind a collective Renaissance consensus of form.'
Indeed, they are similar that this very fact reveals to us a grand, remarkable, and now partly inaccessible activity: all type designers were, in essence, maintaining one face, textually unafraid to remain in History as some ‘Unknown master of a winter landscape”. Is it a good recipe for all of us to get into One rather than multiplying self-glorifying alternatives? With our Age of Connection we have not got such a consensus via Internet — we met but do not intersect each other. We proclamate ourselves by owning something accepting a single word: Buy. Yes or No. But the lesson of other level when we allow the Word to connect us by defining the Rhythm of the Master. Since our EcTd classes (which for students soon moored to Ecclesiastical Type Design or Ecclesia with Traditio Divina or even Ecclesia to Theo-Deus!) the bearing the Word is the primary factor of existence. And every one of us refrains the rhythm of the Great Viaduct. The central admiration and joy of the Renaissance was the mind amazed by this simple revelation: all humanity now belongs to a new Word — Who, being in all ways human yet without disorder, sin, did more than any human could ever conceive — Who even conquers death, Who once said the World to be, and it came into being. This is why the elder Greek sense of man as the measure renaissansed with a newly light of divine reason. This admiration and noble pace of the Renaissance is clearly visible in its font. It rests on two key principles: air and rhythm. Here, both serve as a silent side-analogy to the spiritual enrichment of man, and the expansion of this richness to the whole world and galaxy — like those continuous arches stretching across a Cézanne-regular landscape. This comes partly from one another, partly derived from the principles well-described by Professor Blokland, and partly from the restrictions of font production of that age. In all its cases, the Renaissance font better than anything illustrates the man of its time, capturing the inner sence and simple glory that is never outdated: the heavenly has become a partaker in the earthly.
On problem
of realism applied to
font production
Our Van den Keere project gathers the personal artistic style and the conceptual treasure of the little Dutch master. His other roman-style letters, such as Coronelle Romain of course, should be noted too, as well as his blackletter and his musical types. All of them took a part to distill his style of metal cutting, the decisional micro-nuancing within it, its speed, and its mildness. But the attempt to copy — to only keep and share the joy of some witnessed miracle — always collides with the problem of realism, which is another reason to name the project as such. Realism is always a reconstruction in our earthly life, like the Re-ligio that is given by the Word. This applies to all fonts, but most of all to the Renaissance ones, finding their realism on the obvious ground of religion. The idea of resurrection with a renewed body and materials in the right new world is the selfsame process established in the natural printing: doing something to be mirrored in the punch-matrix-letter-imprint sequence. And this is how we provide a uniting line through all history — finding the core idea, its logic, person and then mirroring it through the scenes of history directly your own life. ‘Revivalism’ is what font production always was and always will be. And the refrain of resurrection, or renaissance, as a method gives us a enduring type-of-facing the finite human before infinite Reality.
Why did she pour the milk
off
Such religious writings are ‘a bit off’ for nowadays — out of date — like a milk that is off. We totally understand it even to call OFF ourselves and represent the woman with a jar by Vermeer (Milkmaid). Why did she pour the milk? A jar is not a bucket from under the cow so so why pour it again? It is in some tureen now, and it is only made to thick it to curd, to dispense all the water, to create a bold hardened cheese of that milk that Apostle Paul wrote, to Corinthians.
I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh.
And we still have St. Augustine as the main reading size — all the philosophy of Europeans might be reduced to polemics with his statements, but now more than ever we need words of inwardness, personal conviction — the milk liberated from all the water and thickened to most orthodox cheese and joy. In these terms OFF transits into Our-Font-Farm where we stand for ‘organics’ and glad to feed You up with honest labor of thickened fermentation of form with viscous and mellow nature.
From this point of Religion –as the human renaissance given by the Word– we may look at the present when such words as post-humanism have appeared, and the most contemporary AI models use the serif to bear their words. It is high time and in the truest manière du goût hollandois, to remember the consistency of Humanism itself and establish its ideas in their better form. This is how Realist concludes itself. With Gijsbrecht Leytens and Vermeer seen behind closed eyes — and yes, with a book of Rubens’ drawings on top of one’s lap, with remembering that it was one of the very first books of one’s childhood and still a wallpaper on the luqid but crystal screen.
This way and in the result, opposite its direct historicity, the Realist font is extremely new, and answers the today need.
What Realist is, and what it is not
The concept of the quiet, calm pearl provides the major principles from most dear peaces from the all of art. Look at Van den Keere—he is not so outstanding as Granjon, not so representative as the Estienne cutters, not as extremely functional as Haultin, nor as blustery as his predecessor Lambrecht—but we return to him again and again.
This is what we want to embody: the font carring the warmth of a mother's hands. Like what we see on a Vermeer canvas. We see the obvious anual grow of auctions that shows not only inflation but the simple encreasing of the value and of the need for the Past. Only now, and more day by day, — considering the whole criticism of beauty of 20th century — with its conceptually threadbare eating of the glass on winter cold minus, we may refine a much more gentle answer for that hart-need, understand and simply see how strictly beautiful one little master of winter landscapes is.
Here, and more of it in the section of File, we must speak of the contour, file and the definitions surrounding it. How I put the task on the table and how I judge the outcome. The main aim is to not imitate: the imprint shape or metal cut or stamp of the matrices, but in the same time it stays to be opened to it. (Do You ever notice how vector tracing, its curves, has an astonishing seeing similarity to carving edges of letters on copper matrices!) The second important statement is building the type from the curent day and base it on the real demand of practicing designer and his layout. But the other point of previous one is gently arouse the Old master — keep the dialog with fathers and their inventions. Here is better way to describe what Realist is to show the visual roots of realism itself. And here is some names mentioned in this article and to let them to speak visually in this art project.
Realist for OFF
And this is how Realist reveals one general principle of Renaissance fonts—it is not just another serif that differs, but drawn to be The Font: the only shape for the Word.
But just from there arises an amusing and contradictory effect—Realist has become complementary to almost any font pairing. It fits naturally with any Swiss, heavy or regular, as well as with the most distinctive experimental or fancy display. It doesn't contain some curly details catching you to buy it and then replacing the room for a need of something to contradict it, — you will never feel empty room with Realist. Its elasticity revealed in the task of a contrasting italic. It became another huuuuge (as Professor Blokland says) challenge but successful and coming to light as the Poet typeface project. You can sign up for Poet—a probable italic-fitting for Realist, but also a self-sufficient font—following this link.
From this singularity arises the concept of one style font, or One Face Family. It exactly reborns the situation of plantinian times there the need of tonal bold or rythmical inclination of the text was not surpassed by the exaggerated generation of 'regular' but called some organicaly darken civilité or gothic cut. This is nice and clever because it contradicts cultures between the styles in their real contrasting natures. It is honestly. So the principal of OFF is to not provide reluctant styles only because there is a room for them in some names system. And of course we line up the parallel to us who are all unique and regular and real sober contrast reveals the common in all the natures.
Reality
These are mostly general principles for OFF and my own personal favors, but for Realist (and Poet), they became a manifestation and a Pillar.
Type design is the most contemporary art form of our day. It is formal yet non-representational; it does not depict an object, it is the object itself. This status—being a "thing, not a picture of a thing"—is a unique ontological position. Yet, it escapes pure abstraction by being inherently anthropomorphic, residual-instrumental, and demanding a binary response: yes or no. At the same time, it can simply shift territories into the hard-edge abstraction of Ellsworth Kelly. It is equally conceptual, fueled by a parallel lattice of context—history, technology, and psychology. Word persist at the intersection of every stratum of human activity, and therefore, it impacts everything. In our current age, when most words have already been spoken and their endless reinterpretation only thins out their meaning, the context becomes the definition. Reality is the Face.