Eye Magazine

Sibylle Hagmann is a Swiss designer, writer and creator of Odile (2006). She teaches design at the University of Houston in Texas.

Unmatched technological advancements, complexity and sophistication drive today’s premier typefaces, which share a high degree of formal refinement invested in their development. The time of the individual genius designing fonts in the garage is over. Expertise is once again needed to craft a genuinely good typeface.

Drawing glyphs can still be a lonely and nerdy activity, but OTL feature writing, quality control, and final font production are tasks best divided between experts – like the teamwork required by complex website design. The fortunate users who manage to take advantage of (and afford) these multifaceted applications, luxuriate in copious numbers of weights, choose from a variety of numeral sets and decide upon dedicated text and display weights – an extravaganza offered, for example, by Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ highly refined Mercury family.

Trixie HD, a resurrected typewriter face first created in 1991, celebrates randomness and the potential of technology – evinced by its simulacra of simulated smudges, wobbling ribbon, dust, and the kind of irregularities impossible on a ‘real’ mechanical typewriter. LettError’s impish online trailer (letterror.com/index.html) revels in Trixie HD’s 10,824 glyphs, 1,331,370 contours and 17,193,327 points. A typewriter face, characteristic of relatively predetermined glyph forms owing to the typically monospaced setting, is, in turn, galvanised by a technological ‘type dream’.

First published in Eye no. 71 vol. 18 2009