 Hello, and welcome to the San Francisco Public Library. My name is Samantha Caratobi. I'm a book arts and special collections librarian on the sixth floor, where we have much backstabilled for you to look at, and it's all cataloged. Yay. I just want to say that if you're interested in typography and the history of printing, we also have the Robert Grabhorn History of Printing Collection with letterpress, binding specimens, European and American type catalogs, paper maker catalogs, and a wonderful reference collection. We also have the Harrison Collection of Calligraphy and Lettering. So that's the other aspect of writing. Examples of over 100 artists, manuscripts, broadsides, correspondences, and sketches. It also includes leaves of medieval manuscripts and facsimiles. All right, next, our new speaker. Hey, everybody. Thank you so much, Samantha. My name is Grendel. I'm Education Director at Letterform Archive. And in case you don't know, Letterform Archive is a nonprofit institution housing over 100,000 works of graphic design history. That's a lot. Come visit us sometime and let us show you what we mean by radical accessibility. We actually learned that from the team here at SFPL. So thank you so much, Samantha, and Andrea, and Kenny, and everyone else here at the library for hosting us today. I also want to give a big shout out to Skilla Zachalini, who's greasing the gears behind the scenes at Letterform Archive. Thank you, Skilla. OK, Letterform Archive is also the home of Type West, which is our school of type design. So if you have a hidden basketball inside of you, we'll help coax it out. We offer both 10-week courses and a year-long postgraduate certificate program and type design. So set your hidden basketball free with us. We've got some more great lectures and public workshops coming up. The first one is an in-person public workshop held at Letterform Archive with veteran CCA instructor Angie Wang, who will help you get your type setting back on track. Angie tailored this workshop for beginners or anyone whose type setting skills are getting rusty as she patiently demystifies the elements of a well-designed page. Plus, she'll have Letterform Archive's collection of 100,000 pieces of graphic design handy to help support the class. Then, upcoming Letterform Lectures, Chen Huijing will let you put your handkerchiefs down forever as Huijing explains how to avoid the five stages of grief that usually accompany designing on the web with CSS. Join us online for this eye-opening and eye-soothing lecture. OK, Mexican rótulos, an endangered species. We hope not. But check in on July 25 as Romina Hernandez explains the precarious state that Mexican sign painting tradition finds itself in today. And finally, if you haven't seen our latest exhibition, it's time to roll on down to Letterform Archive and check out subscription to Mischief, which is a groundbreaking exhibition on graffiti writing in the 1990s. So just don't tag the elevator on your way out is all we ask. To help great lectures like this one today, keep on going. Go to letarch.org. slash join and become a member today. And of course, follow us on Instagram to stay on top of all our programming. Letterform Lectures are co-presented by the Letterform Archive and the SFPL. And we'd like to thank Adobe for generously sponsoring the video recording of this lecture series. OK, that's it for me. Let's extend a warm welcome to Sir Johnny Ive of Love From. Good evening. My name's Johnny Ive. It's an honor to be here this evening. I am sorry. I'm neither a librarian or a typographer. But I do want to thank the Letterform Archive and the San Francisco Public Library for inviting us to be here to share some of our work. It's a real honor, actually, I think, to be able to share work, not to try and sell work or market work, but just very simply to show you what we're doing. I think as designers, we often talk about how we do what we do. We talk about what we do. But very often we don't talk about why we do it. And I think the work that the amazing Antonio and Chris are going to show you is a wonderful example of our motivation and why we do what we do. Steve used to talk about when we design something, when we design and make something with care, it is a way for us to express our love and our gratitude for the species. And I think the work that these guys are gonna show you makes no, it really makes no business or financial sense whatsoever. If ever there was an example of a labor of love about doing something because you care about doing it, but more importantly, because you care about the people that will ultimately benefit from it, it's the work that these guys are gonna share with you. So it's such an honor to be able to introduce Chris and Antonio, dear, dear friends and amazing colleagues and teammates from LoveFrom. So thank you very much, guys. Good evening. Thanks, Johnny. Thanks for coming. Thank you, Clifford, for my archive. Thank the public library. So LoveFrom is a creative collective. Together we cover diverse mixture of disciplines that span from industrial and interactive design to graphic and type design, engineering, writing, architecture, illustration, music and filmmaking. Now, let me introduce you to my co-host tonight, Mr. Chris Wilson. Chris and I work together back at Apple. Our biggest project together, along with many other colleagues was the Apple Watch and what became known as San Francisco, the typeface for it. Chris is an art director and graphic designer and besides the Apple Watch at Apple, he worked on marketing communications and human interface on a myriad of projects. I've had the good fortune of working with Chris on a bunch of them and I'm still super, super honored and happy to be working with him now at LoveFrom. And I get to introduce Antonio. Antonio mentioned already that we work together at Apple and I had so much fun working with him on San Francisco font, which most of you probably use every day. When I was really sad when he said he was gonna leave in 2016 and head back to Milano. So when I finally left Apple in 2020 and joined LoveFrom and realized we needed to do some custom typeface work, Antonio was the only person I was gonna call in the first person we called, so yeah. I'm honored to stand with him today and yeah, great friend and colleague. So yeah, this is a type talk and so we should highlight some of the folks on the team who have been critical to the success of this ongoing project, the graphic designers. And before we dive in, I also must acknowledge that most of the work I'm about to present on the lettering and on the typeface was done with my longtime friend and collaborator, Ricardo Russo. Richie, who's here in the audience, worked with Bonnmin and myself back at Apple on the San Francisco project. So it was natural to bring him in on this project as well. Thank you, Richie. Thank you so much. So today, the agenda, we'll start with a little introduction to the project, we'll discuss the research and the design of the typeface and finally we'll share how we've been using it in our own design practice and how we are building on it. Back to Chris. So when talking about LoveFrom, Sarah, I think it makes sense to go back to 2019 when Johnny and Mark first started a conversation with Peter Savile about the LoveFrom graphic identity and since then, Peter became part of our collective. Peter had had the idea that LoveFrom should deliberately avoid the formality of a logo in favor of initiating an open dialogue which is prompted by a comma. The comma denotes the intent that the dialogue be shared and he'd initially thought that maybe LoveFrom should be set in a modest typeface, something like a common sans-Sara, like Helvetica. But however, this didn't really feel right to us and in conversations with Johnny, we wanted to look for something that felt both functional and familiar and had a beauty and a craft to it. So this led us to explore hundreds of Sara fonts. And stylistically, Baskerville emerged as a firm favorite, however, there was lots of things that we wanted to improve as you can see on the Baskerville you get on macOS right now. So I'm gonna hand over to Antonio to talk about what we wanted to improve and how he did it. All right, thank you, Chris. So before I start, I should really mention Susie, the late Susie Taylor former librarian here at the Public Library. I last met Susie right there in this very room several years ago before I moved back to Europe and before she eventually passed away. When I was working at Apple, I would meet Susie upstairs from time to time and she was actually the first one who showed me some genuine Baskerville. I miss Susie, I wish she was here tonight and yeah, she sorely missed. All right, design. So I'll give you a very brief overview of the sources and then we'll look at the development of the typeface. When we got the input to work on Baskerville, we knew we had to do some homework. Not only was Baskerville quite prolific in his own right, but his work has been researched and revived by many people in multiple waves over the centuries, creating a vast body of work, article, books, even typefaces to study. We took very seriously the idea of adding to it. And here's the man himself. It's portrayed by James Miller in 1774, one year before he passed away. He was born in 1706 and had a remarkable life. There is ample bibliography on it so we'll have to keep it super short tonight. In his early life he was a writing master. Later on he went into the Japan business which is the making of lacquered goods which brought him great fortune. When he was in his 40s, he decided to dedicate himself to printing. But he did it in a remarkable way by making nearly everything on his own. He formulated and made his own ink, designed and made his own printing presses, had his own paper made. He developed a process to re-flatten the paper after it was printed through hot calendar rolls so it would almost look like a glossy paper. And of course he also designed and produced his own types. Here is the first book off of his press, the 1757 Virgil, which is actually right there if you wanna see it afterwards. And here's the same type as Virgil, the great primer in a later state in the much later edition of Terrence, which is also there if you wanna see it later. It is nearly 300 years old and yet to us it's immediately familiar. Now Baskerville issued a number of specimens which show different sizes of his types in various states of completion. And they help us study how we dealt with the issue of scale. But it's looking at different sizes of books from the Baskerville press that we found the most useful. Compared to Virgil and Terrence we saw earlier, this Horace is tiny and was set in a much smaller bourgeois type around eight points. It is very nice and even. Now Baskerville types were a rather important departure from the previously dominant letter forms of this time in England, most notably those of the Castelon Foundry. Castelon was influenced by the Dutch type founders. His letters were remarkably solid, hardworking and resilient. And they have great vigor. Here you can see some rather large ones, the two lines great primer on the left hand side alongside some smaller long primer on the right hand side. And notice how lively these italics are. Baskerville's italics in contrast have a very different poise to them. And so do his Romans. His choices of layouts with the wide margins and the little in the way of ornamentation all contributed to the striking new look. So striking that it had its detractors. There's a funny story which I couldn't resist putting in here. In a letter, the Benjamin Franklin wrote to Baskerville after a visit to England. Franklin was a printer. He wrote of a prank. He pulled on an undisclosed gentleman who would not shut up about Castelon's type superiority compared to Baskerville. So one day, Franklin took Castelon's specimen, ripped off the heading so he wouldn't say it was Castelon and passed it off as Baskerville. The gentleman proceeded to criticize it to bits as if it was all wrong. He said he could never read a line of it without pain. And Franklin didn't have the heart to tell him he had been pulling his leg but shared a laugh back with his friend in Birmingham. So, I mean, it didn't take long for other printers to want this style from themselves too and for founders to offer it. We can't show them all, but here's a few. This is typed by Isaac Moore. We used to work for Baskerville cutting types for the Fry Foundry of Bristol. Here's a rather large letter of his as well as a very small one. Moore and Fry were very proud of their diamond size, claiming it the smallest letter in the world. I don't know about the claim but the cutting at that scale is absolutely breathtaking to see in person. And here are the types of William Martin, also related to Baskerville and used by William Boomer. Martin's types are both narrower than Baskerville's but also more widely spaced. They have kind of a rounder feel to them. And notice the contrast between how curvy DA is compared to how straight the stems of the series are in the R and the N. Here's one of the very early imitators of Baskerville and very likely one of my own personal favorites, Alexander Wilson, no relation, of Glasgow. I find his letter quite convincing. It is darker, somewhat stronger than Baskerville and it's super vigorous on the page. I love it. Now we saw some smaller Baskerville books but he also did very large publications. In fact, here is in many ways his most ambitious project, the 1763 Bible he printed at Cambridge as printer to the university. This picture unfortunately doesn't do it much justice, I'm afraid, but it is considered one of the most beautiful books of its time and for a reason. There's actually a copy upstairs here in the Grappling Collection if you're interested. Now, as large as the Bible is, there's an even larger book as far as we know the very last from the Baskerville press, the 65 centimeter tall anatomy of the human gravity uterus exhibited in figures by Willem Hunter, published in 1774. As you may imagine, the topic of this book is rather graphic so I won't show it but it is notable to us because of the preface it's said in two lines English type, which is an interesting type. It is darker, it is more condensed and has longer ascenders and descenders than other Baskerville sizes. It also has the darkest caps, I don't know if you can see at the top, approaching almost a semi-bold weight. So there is quite a bit of variety amongst the various Baskerville types and he kept tinkering with it until the very end, something that struck a chord with us. Baskerville was a perfectionist. Now, we found it was important to study the whole period around Baskerville, not just in type, but also in lettering and calligraphy. You see, he was working at a pivotal moment where this new kind of letter was making its way from lettering and calligraphy into type. Here is Beatrice Ward in 1927, writing in the Promotional Materials for Monotype Baskerville about how Baskerville's letters had actually been clamoring outside the door of the type foundry for at least half a century. Now in England in the late 17th and early 18th century, writing manuals were large, very pretty books where the writer would show off his prowess and advertise his services in a variety of styles. Here's a writing book by John Ayers in London in 1695. Now many of them started incorporating print alphabets that replicated what people had become used to in books. They're very nice shapes. In this case, they're still very much written, especially in the lower case. Now around 15 years later, the print alphabets from people like George Shelley or John Clark here were starting to change. The caps are still rather dark compared to the lower case. The serifs show initial traces of bracketing in the upper case, which is the rounding of the areas where a stem meets a serif. But in this case, it's not quite present in the lower case yet, and the shading axis is not quite upright, but nearly so. And compared to the written shapes in Ayers, these look more drawn. Sorry. Here's Charles Snell in 1714. I just wanna call your attention to a particular detail, which is later on will become a signature of Baskerville, but we have to zoom way, way, way at the top of the page because here it is. This is the open connection in the bowl of the lower case G, which is a signature, like if you see this in a typeface, it's Baskerville or related to it. I'm not saying this is necessarily the first sample of it, but it's a rather recognizable feature. And here is Abraham Nicholas III in 1722. Notice the bottom row, which shows two shapes for the upper case U, but also the two forms of the R here. We'll come back to these. The point I'm trying to make is that there was very fertile ground for Baskerville to draw upon, a scene, if you will, which was very much a part of and which certainly influenced his ideas about letter shapes. Indeed, here's the famous John Baskerville writing master, Slate, considered to be cut by him in the 1720s, many years before his involvement in our field. The second and fourth lines are in his print alphabets. The first is in Roman, most of the lower case, and the fourth is in flourished italic caps. Now, in the Roman line, you can see how close the letters, the letter shapes look to what we showed earlier. So yeah, Baskerville was hip to what was going on and he did work in a similar vein. Now, original printed sources allow us to see the type at the right scale on the intended media. The inking, the paper and the printing quality, they all vary, which is to be expected. So it helps to study as many different sources as possible. Having original materials means you can get as close as you want to the source, so you can appreciate the ink squeeze, the depth of the impression, the quality of the paper and many other details. But this method has limitations. What you see here is a fake original. I went through a Baskerville book and then I found pairs where the text set combination that said L-O-O-V-V-E and so on until I made up this word. I photographed them and spliced them together. Now, what you get is a word which is not only type set with original Baskerville, but it's also spaced like Baskerville intended, which is important. Now, let's say you were to trace this, draw it over it, like on paper with busy outlines, that would require interpretation because the paper is not always even and the impression varies from letter to letter. The main issue is that you would end up with something that looks rather dull when you convert to black and white outlines. Now, in this case, we've blown out a text font of very large sizes, so that accounts for the white spacing and the coarse details that you see here. Another thing is to hold and examine Baskerville's own original steel punches, the stuffed and movable type starts as, because yes, you can actually do that. These punches have survived and are Cambridge University. There are also matrices and punches for Greek type over at Oxford, in fact. Now, the story of the survival of punches through the centuries is amazing and a riveting account of it has been compiled by John Dreyfus in 1949. The super, super short version, which again I couldn't resist to put in here, is that the late wife of John Baskerville, Sarah Eves, eventually sold the pressed materials to Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais over in Paris. Now, Beaumarchais's life was so eventful that the purchase of Baskerville's equipment in his career as type founder and publisher is just a footnote in his miles long biography. He was a watchmaker, a musician, a playwright, a weapons dealer, a revolutionary, and a spy. And if you've ever heard of Figaro, the barber from Sevilla, he wrote that story. Just saying. So after several changes of locations and hence in France, the punches eventually ended up at the Bernier-Peignot. And it was Charles Peignot himself who presented the punches back to Cambridge in 1953. And here are the actual punches at Cambridge. It was amazing when I saw these. They sit in several boxes and they grew by size. Not all sizes are complete. They're just remarkable objects, tiny sculptures that record each glyph shape in hardened steel. One doesn't get a more direct connection to the source as this, right? Or do they? Well, it kind of depends what one wants to do because it turns out that some of these are tiny. Like that's the tip of my finger for scale. Yes, you could look at these through a microscope but it would be fairly complex to do at the University Library in Cambridge. And photographing them is also pretty hard. Forget about capturing them with your iPhone. You must use some sort of a macro lens setup with good lighting and some ways of holding the work still. And which we couldn't do because there was COVID actually at the time, right? Enter a man by the name of Robin Hull who turned out to have done just that in the years prior and be known to us. Once we started corresponding through email and we told him about our project, Robin to whom we owe an immense debt of gratitude shared his original pictures with us so we could actually study what we could not yet see. Now please note that the macro pictures I'm about to show you, they're flipped horizontally because the punches are actually cut mirrored. Now, I don't have exact measurements for all the pictures but I do have, I know where they come from. This punch you see here is about 15 millimeters tall. It's from the five line pica, Roman. I don't think I can stress enough how much of a breakthrough these pictures were for our project and how big of a debt we owe Robin. He snapped almost complete alphabets in most of the optical sizes providing us with a plethora of source material to draw upon. Here's a five line pica, about 60 point Roman lowercase A which is about eight millimeters tall. Now take a look at this italic J. This comes from a double paragon set of punches so it's about seven or eight millimeters tall. Now, first of all, it is breathtakingly beautiful and second of all, it might look familiar because we made a few changes of course. I mean, I'll just land angle is different. The shape of our ball terminals is faster. We made a bunch of tweaks here and there but you can see where it's coming from. Now, one thing to remember is that punches were cut in anticipation of the printing process. The ink squeeze and all of that. And so, if one were to simply trace them, you would end up with rather anemic looking shapes. So anyhow, going down in size, here's double pica Roman lowercase E which is around three to four millimeters tall. And going way down, this is a non-parail Roman capital H to six point type. You're looking at a large enlargement of a piece of sculpture from the 18th century which is about 1.2 millimeters tall. Now, the level of details in the punches revealed by the macro shots is just astounding. This is a great primer of capital V so it's about 3.5 millimeters tall. And in some cases, you can even see what look like traces of the original scribe lines that they were working towards. Now, take a look here. This is a non-parail punch with an FF ligature. So we're back to the one or two millimeter scale. Now, you can see each individual to a mark. It's incredible. You can also appreciate how the shaft of the punch reflects the shape of the face and how its shape is meant to support it. It's an actual sculpture. Now, these sources also gave us some clear understanding of what Baskerville was actually trying to achieve. Consider this lowercase O on a punch face, for instance. This is the English size, so it's about five millimeters tall. In the preface to his Milton Baskerville writes of having had ideas of greater accuracy that had yet appeared in type and to wanting to make types according to what you can see to be their true proportions. Now, if you superimpose this out contour with a geometric circle, sure, there are some deviations that you can see, but overall, especially at this scale, it feels pretty spot on. So we think what he was going for was some sort of a blend between geometry and fluidity between precision and beauty. And so that gave us both an opportunity and a challenge. On the one hand, straight lines and bezier splines are what digital fonts are made of, so it's relatively easy to make typeface look clean and precise. But on the other hand, that wouldn't capture the organic, qualitative Baskerville shapes that we wanted, and so we had to strike a balance. In other words, what we tried to do was interpret Baskerville's intentions and try to be authentic to these and not necessarily to his 18th century results, partly because the wealth of source material made us curious to explore more, partly because our means of production are radically different than he is, and partly because our main goal was to actually design a family for our time and beyond. We wanted something rooted in tradition, yes, but not necessarily beholden to it. We wanted the functional and expressive coverage of our project to exceed Baskerville's, and so we edited freely when we felt like we needed to depart from some of the original solutions, and we also added whenever we needed to. All right, so we started from the wordmark, developing our own typeface, which was the wordmark was an initial stimulus. Now, you've seen this recreation before, we didn't actually start from this, but it serves to illustrate a point, so bear with me. I would like to draw your attention to the LO area of the word, and specifically to the negative space between the letter outlines. Notice how much space there is between the L and the O. Now, part of it has to do with the morphology of the uppercase L, which has a rather long horizontal at the bottom. Now, look at how comparatively narrow and busy the FR negative area is versus the LO area. Part of the motivation to work on our own lettering was being able to address these situations. Now, proportions are a quick way to differentiate types for one another. We looked at many types in metal and digital form, and both in the Baskerville style and in peripheral styles, because there's so many good ones. We just want to acknowledge a few. The first one is Storm's magnum opus by the name of Baskerville Original, which was recently reissued as Baskerville Neo, and Matthew Carter Bigmore, they both in the first row, they struck us as the closest to their respective sources. Now, Paul Barnes over a commercial type designed a whole host of Baskerville-inspired typefaces from his derby to his marry in 1757, but specifically his Austin and Chiswick in the second row had interesting elements from sources around Baskerville time. And more recently, Baskerville with two Vs by the French Henriette school has some really fresh ideas in it. And finally, the Bay Area's own Zana Lichco seminal, Missy Sieves, which is a pioneering early digital design that has since become ubiquitous by making some bold design choices, like going with a very low excite, leaning heavily into ligatures and having two sets of small caps at different heights, which is, it's great stuff. So now, here's one which many people may be familiar with. Chris mentioned it before, the digital version of Baskerville, monotype Baskerville, which ships with every Apple device. The original metal font is a great design. It's seminal and it's largely responsible for the Baskerville revival of the 20th century. The digital version you see here, however, carries across decisions that were made nearly a hundred years ago. There's some sort of tension in the shapes, there's some nervousness that comes across in the curves, for instance, the lowercase R or the M. But more than that, when we started working on the lettering, they eventually became our word mark. We noticed how most of what we saw shared an inherent characteristic with the Baskerville genre that was actually problematic for us because we have a mixed case word with two capitals and six lowercase letters. So the caps in monotype Baskerville are rather dark and rather tall compared to the lowercase, which is again a feature of the original Baskerville. But Baskerville ever hardly did types of mixed case words and so this choice made the caps stand out too much and create kind of a choppy rhythm. And our piece of lettering here tries to restore a balance between the upper and the lowercase between the wider and the narrowest letters and make them part of a cohesive whole. By shortening the L, widening the F and making the vertical series considerably shorter, we were actually able to close a bit of that gap between the L and the O that I showed you earlier and make the area between the uppercase F and the R a little less busy. Now, with so many sources to draw upon, we set out to develop an alphabet from that piece of lettering, retaining as much of the Baskerville as we could. So here's the lowercase that we eventually settled on and here's the uppercase. We very quickly moved on to the weights. Baskerville only ever cut what amounts to a regular weight of type and we started from initial exploration to see how our shapes would react to being thick and then thinned, which is something that we had already done for our wordmark and we felt it would become an important part of giving this family the versatility that it needed. Now, it turns out that the lighter end of the weight spectrum was quite fun to use, even if it was a bit of a challenge to draw. And similarly, the bolder end of the spectrum also gave us some very expressive results which we started actually liking. Fonts as bold as these became all the rage in the beginning of the 19th century in England and were eventually referred to as fat faces. It was fun to imagine what a fat-faced Baskerville might end up looking like. And that also allowed us to interpolate a complete weight range that Baskerville never really envisioned. That far exceeded the other Baskerville interpretations and what they had explored. A very fun exercise that we ended up sticking with. But beyond weight, it was optical sizes that we knew we really wanted. This is something that we had explored already in our San Francisco project and we were keen to bring into this tariff. It's been done before in the Baskerville genre but not with our proportions and weights. Now, here's the lower case that I showed you earlier in its large size master. And here is the smaller size master and then going back and forth reveals all sorts of details that we changed across the whole character set. Serifs became thicker, the contrast got lower, the spacing became looser, but most importantly, it's almost a slab. Which is all the more apparent when you start seeing how it grows with weight. It's quite a dramatic shift if you compare it with this large size sibling, which is we saw earlier. Now, here's the nearly monolinear lightest text weight which reminded us of typewriter faces and we decided to keep. Now, the dynamic range of law from serif across weights and sizes has proven itself very useful because these weights assume very different voices depending on how and when you end up using them. So let's move on to italics. Baskervilles were an absolute masterpiece, probably looking even more distinct from everything else before him than his Romans did. One note though, compared to the Capitals, they were much lighter. And in general, they were actually much narrower and lighter than the Roman as well. To us, they felt somewhat slower and slightly stiffer than the Roman. And what we just described, they shouldn't be taken as flaws. They are actually perfectly defensible design strategies, but we kept wondering if there was a way to make the two speak more of a similar language, especially with our new proportions. Our strategy eventually resulted in a few key modifications. We increased the slant angle to convey a sense of increased urgency in the letters. And we also increased the overall drawing speed, which means the counter shapes and in and out stroke were less round and more angular. The smaller size masters required some more thought to carry across the strategy correctly. We increased the sense of speed even more. We flattened the bottom of letters, like M and N, to enhance the grounding on the baseline. And we employed a few alternate glyphs that were clear at smaller sizes, like the alternate G you see here. Now, you may think that this shape of the G with that interesting head out stroke is our own invention. After all, the Baskervilles G we're familiar with looks like this. This is the one we have in our text fonts. We actually found some parts of ours in the punches, whether this is original to Baskervilles or a later addition, that is a question that has yet to be answered, but we liked the shape, and so we kept it. The round forms of V and W are very strong Baskervilles feature, but they can also be a bit conspicuous in running text. And so we added straighter versions we provide for a more seamless texture, and they also share a motive with the lower case Y. We're not saying these shapes are necessarily better overall, oftentimes you want the curlier ones for a specific effect, but having the options felt like the right thing to do in this case. Now, numbers, lot from Serif has several figure sets. The default set are proportional lining figures, that is they align with the capital letters. Our figures are a departure from Baskervilles zone in many ways. These figures are called Old Style nowadays, and they are usually meant to blend with the lower case because they have ascenders and descenders. But as recognizable as they are, they have issues. Some of them are very narrow and tall, like the five you see here, and others are wide and short like the two. It is common for figures to speak a slightly different language, formal language than the rest of the alphabet, but we felt like the curls of the two and the three called a little bit too much attention to themselves. And so here are our lining and O-style numerals, which speak similar languages, but work with either all upper case, all lower case, or mixed case type slightly better. Now the bigger issue to us arose when we started translating these figures to other weights, which again, Baskervilles never had to do. So we started editing and came up with our own set, which is the basis for the lining figures you saw earlier too. Here are some very light ones, and here are some very bold ones. We decided to retain the flat top three, which Baskervilles also had, and we also have another in the figure one, which we deploy sometimes. It feels slightly more contemporary than the default one. Now, when it came time to design the italic figures, guess what? Baskervilles didn't draw any, he never cut any. So again, this was an interesting puzzle for us. Now, these are not ours, these are the ones in Baskervilles original by storm. This solution of slanting the Roman figures is what most every other Baskervilles does, and it's a fine strategy, there's nothing wrong with it. But we felt like we wanted something that would lean more into the fluidity of the italic, which has a completely different structure. So we searched long and wide in our type and lettering sources, and we found some interesting references. This is George Shelley showing a few interesting things, a model with both the round and flat top three, several ones, and smaller italic figures at the top and bottom. Here's William Richards, and here's Charles Snell. Now, here's us, where we ended up. And if you want the full series from the italic one, it's there as an alternate. And here's the figures with some glyphs in context of their respective alphabets to give you an idea of how they work. Now, we touched on the idea of alternates in the italic and figures of our serif design. Once we started playing with them, especially after having seen the variety of the shapes in both the Baskervilles types and the other sources, we decided to make this one of the central themes of our project. For instance, we started from alternates that had functional purposes. The L in our war mark, for example, is designed to work with a lower case, meaning not to create a huge white space like we saw earlier, but it's slightly too narrow when you use it in all upper case settings. So we drew a wider one that gets swapped in contextually around capitals, like this. The T had a similar thing. It's narrow with lower case and wide with the upper case. We did a similar thing with the R, where the protrusion of the rightmost leg could create a large gap with the lower case letters. Here's the default form, and here's one designed for all upper case settings. Now, some alternates have optical size considerations in them. Like the seris in the middle of this W, they look a little busy when they're small in text, and so we have a simplified version with no seris. We also used alternates to prevent collisions. Our default Q, which is faithful to Baskervilles, has a nice swooping tail that protrudes towards the right-hand side, which is a problem when you type-set anything with a descender, like a comma, and it will make an impromptu, swashy thing, which doesn't really read properly. Now, a contextual alternate Q with a shorter tail neatly solves the issue without looking too out of place. Similarly, the lower case Y protrudes on the bottom left, which can be a problem if you have a G next to it, but then an alternate kind of neatly solves the issue, and it's almost indetectable in text. Now, we have a whole host of these collision-avoiding alternates. We have three descender heights for the J. The middle one is the default, the first line with the lower case descender, and the third sits on the baseline, so we can actually run lines of all caps text very close to each other. And this is also true in italics. Speaking of italics, the Baskervilles punches show both swashy and non-swashy versions of a few glyphs, so we decided to retain these. These are the default italic Js, but if you want the text to look more sober, you could actually go into non-curly variants of few select glyphs. The default capital Y, for instance, is rather flamboyant in italics, so you may want to go back to something more conventional. The same is true for the R, and for the K, we actually went for three alternates. Now, the default shape has both a ball terminal at the top and a curly leg at the bottom, which is fine in most situations, except when it's followed by an I. It doesn't clash, the two ball terminals don't clash, but they create kind of a noisy setting, which we didn't like. And so, a simplified top arm calms down the situation, but there's also a third alternate, which has both a straight top arm and a straight leg for an evil calmer setting. Now, some of the alternates I just showed you are coming straight from the punches and can be considered basically restorations, but others are on additions, usually for functional purposes. Now, in this specific case, I'm not entirely sure that the straight leg R, like the one on the right-hand side here, are actually Baskervilles' own. They could be later additions. We can be sure about the straight leg Roman Rs, because we actually see them in printed books, like the R at the top and the one in the center here. And that is the reason why we have both a straight leg one and one with the foxtail, we say. They both have their short version and long leg version. Now, we mentioned that the Q has a long tail and a short tail version. We also have a simplified non-curning Q on the left, and the one on the right is non-descending. So again, you can set lines or capitals very close to one another without the center's closing, flashing with the line below. These are our own. Now, the italic question mark in Baskervilles' punches felt kind of too ornate for everyday use. We retained the original shape, which Chris and I affectionately refer to as the Willy Wonka question mark, but we made an alternate, which is more simplified. Okay, so as far as washes go, we try to keep as many of the ones we saw, either in punches or printed materials, like the A, you see here, or the N and the M. The T, Baskervilles used it very often, so of course we kept it, and also the Vs and Ws. This capital Z felt a little too delicious to not interpret and keep, but then some felt a little bit too adventurous even for us, and we decided against having them in our specific set. I haven't seen this one in the book, but I've seen his sibling, the Elvis hair F. We didn't keep this alternate, but it's there in the source material. So lastly, a typeface is not just uppercase, lowercase, and figures, of course, but there's a whole host of other glyphs that need to be drawn. We won't go through all of them tonight, just a few. So for these, we plunge as much as we could into the original sources we had, where it made sense. For instance, for some reason, this italic ampersand is seldom seen in the actual Baskerville revivals. We adapted it to our proportions, of course, but the morphology is faithful to the source. The punches differentiate between the treatment of an F on the left and a long S on the right, specifically if you see the little fin on the left-hand side of the long S. We actually retained it when we drew the German asset. You really need to type-set an italic AE ligature, but we found this shape intriguing, so we kept it. And we also enjoyed this construction of the C with the cedilla, which looked like two Cs on top of each other. It's possibly a later addition to the Baskerville punches when they came into French hands, but we kept it. You get the idea. We retained many of these odd sorts from the materials we consulted. Now, we consider this typeface as a framework, as a platform to build upon. We often take letters from this type and modify them into pieces of custom lettering. Chris will show you some of these in a second. There is also a small underworld of derivative versions of the typeface for different uses. We can show a couple like this stencil, for instance, which is loosely based on the Nizoletti, the street name signs in Venezia, and it was a fun project. The Steve Jobs archive uses a custom condense we drew for their website. This is part of a larger set of widths that we've been working on. The specific weight became the basis for the actual lettering for their war mark. And last but not least, our teammate Patch Kessler, who's here, has been developing a method to automatically smooth the corners of our typeface. Can you see the difference between the corners of the shiny object? Two corners provide a smooth reflection on the dots, and two corners provide an interrupted reflection, in which dots seem to trip over an invisible line. This image shows what this method can do. The original letter is on the left, and the modified letter is on the right. The orange lines show the curvature of the letter. Now, we'll talk more about this project in your course, but it is incredibly exciting work that we can't wait to share. So, as you can imagine, we consider this a living project. Because it's internal to us, we keep tweaking, revising, adding to it, just like basketball used to do. The ability to have an input on the way the type is used, even if it's not directly by us sometimes, informs how the type ends up evolving in a continuous feedback loop. So, thank you, back to Chris. He's got my clicker going. There we go. Okay. Well, thanks, Antonio. That was pretty incredible. Really beautiful work, and I've got to say, I use the typeface every day, and it's such a privilege to be able to use something that's clearly been made with so much love and care, and I think I can speak for the other graphic designers on the team of how great it is to have access to such a great tool. And thanks to Johnny as well for actually putting together such a creative collective, which includes type designers and engineers like Patch amongst the rest of our team. So I'm going to start with some internal projects. Some of these you may have seen before out in the world, and some of them you may not have. Firstly, I wanted to start with our website, which you saw the animation at the start. We officially revealed love from Seraph and our identity back in October 2021 with this website. It's a pretty simple website. It's not a portfolio, and there's no contact details. It's just a statement. It's a statement about who we are, what we do, and why we do it, and it took us a long time to write it. I think you'll see here that it... We used the large optical size that Antonio showed you earlier for the body copy, and there's a nice little feature that takes advantage of the variable weight. So when you scroll at the bottom of the website, you get this lovely rubber banding effect that scrolls between the 300 and the 550 weight. We also make a lot of books at Love From. We love making books. We use them as a tool for documenting and sharing ideas with each other and with our partners, collaborators, and friends. It's a medium that Johnny, especially, was really curious about from the start of Love From, and they've become an important part of our process and our culture at Love From. So at Love From, we like to make things for each other, and this is my son, Roland, at about three weeks old, and he's rocking a Love and Fury onesie. That was a gift from my teammates. It was clearly an easy decision for where to put the word love on this one, but does anyone got a guess of where we put fury? Yeah. Yep. You guessed it. So thanks to Biotz on our team who's not here tonight, but she artworked this, and I thought she was a nice attention to detail the way the wire lines with the cut of the onesie too. So nice one. So this is actually the first publication to use Love From, Sarah, in print. It's a book that tells the story of Richard Rogers as building for his friend, Patti McKillan, and the book wasn't designed by us at all, but we helped out a little bit with donating the typeface and some guidance on the type usage. Richard's wife, Ruthie, is a close friend of Johnny's and shared an early draft of the book that was using a sans-serif, and Johnny asked if the designers working on the book would like to try an early version of Love From, Sarah. And it looked really great, and it made its way into the final version of the book, and it was a really nice way to see some of the early work that Antonio and Ricardo were doing and really stress-tested in a piece of print. It was a limited run, but there is some copies available at the River Cafe online store, if anyone's looking for a copy. Next, Terra Carter. This is our first project for His Majesty, King Charles III, and it was launched in January 2021. This is what we call the Terra Carter seal, which is awarded to global companies that are actively leading the charge to create a climate and nature-positive future. There's natural references in here that are intertwined with custom lettering by Antonio and the elements reinforce the sense of harmony and fertility, allowing the flora and the fauna to gently take control in what's a vibrant celebration of nature and beautifully animated to. So taking inspiration from the 1215 Magna Carter, which was written onto a sheepskin parchment and authenticated with the Great Seal of King John, we designed a document which we called the Sumerian, which summarizes the 18-page mandate for the Terra Carter. This printed Sumerian really put an early cut of love from Seraph to the test at using all three optical sizes and multiple weights, and quite daunting working on such a historical document, so we're really proud of this one. And then if you will take a closer look at the seal at the bottom, which has some nice typographic features which I just wanted to point out, some Romanesque alternates for the Latin text around the bottom. And then there's actually custom lettering for the T's, R's and A's. These didn't even make it into Antonio's because these are custom widths, so. At first glance, all the characters look like they're the same standard width, but if we look closely here, this lockup, in order to make it feel justified and balanced with a pleasing vertical alignment, we did the bespoke widths for each character. So it's really hard to see here, but if I sort of, we overlap the each characters, you can see how different they actually are. And then when you look back at this, I don't think anyone would ever notice we did that. And when we're talking about craftsmanship, I think it's a good moment to look at the beautiful illustration by one of our teammates, Peter Horridge, and some, the print production on this project was insane, sculptural embossing and microperforation on the printed seal, affectionately known as the dangler, which was printed by Imprimary de Moret. And then this is a book, make something wonderful. Some of you may have seen this on the internet. It was launched a few months ago now, but it's a book we designed for the Steve Jobs archive. It's a curated collection of Steve's speeches, interviews, and correspondence. And it was a Steve quote about making something with a great deal of love and care that inspired the name Love From, so it was an honor for us to design the book and typeset it all in Love From Surf, and Richard on our team did a lot of the heavy lifting on this project. The physical book was another great stress test for the font family. It's, we really got to see how well it performed in print. And the physical book isn't commercially available. It was a gift from the Steve Jobs archive to Apple and Pixar employees and select group of others, but if you're looking to read a copy, you can either go on eBay and probably pay a lot of money. There's a lot of them on there. Or head to book.stevedjobsarchive.com where there's a digital copy of the book. It's not an e-books, it's not an e-book, but it's a digital book that's been optimized for the web. Mike on our team led the design of this and there's some wonderful details that the Polaroid animation you saw at the start and the interactive table of contents on the side. Another interesting feature is the browser will set the appropriate optical size depending on what your window size is or device you're on. So that takes advantage of all the amazing work on optical sizing. And then, I think finally, I'm gonna click, I'm gonna just one more click here. The Coronation 2023. This was our second project for His Majesty the King. We created the official emblem for His Coronation in May and the emblem it pays tribute to the King's love of the natural world unifying the flora and fauna of the four nations of the United Kingdom. The flowers come together to create the shape of St. Edward's crown in the middle. But as this is a type talk, I'm gonna find out some cool stuff that Antonio did. I think that there's radially distorted lettering around the perimeter of this that it takes a huge amount of work and it was something we thought was really important to do knowing how important this project was. And those bespoke modifications to the character widths in the word Coronation in the 6th of May helped us create some symmetrically justified texts. So it really has a lovely, lovely balance to it. And we even had to make a Welsh language version which thankfully was also a good character count to do some vertical symmetry. Thanks Antonio. And traditionally these emblems are made available royalty free for anyone to use for street parties and memorabilia to commemorate the coronation. So you would see them on everything from flags also known as bunting in the UK. I don't think, I think I said that to someone at one point and they didn't know what I was talking about. So yeah, bunting, plates, umbrellas and things like pens. If you take a look on Etsy, there was some horror shows on Etsy of what was happening with our beautiful emblem. But I think this is a great example of, you know, another example of optical sizing where we created a smaller optical size by simplifying the fidelity of the illustration and setting the radial lettering to the small optical size. And you can kind of see it a little bit better when you put them side by side but it's designed to perform at really small sizes. And it worked really well. And as much as it was daunting to put this out into the world and just let people do what they wanted with it, the results were pretty good. A few of us went to London and we had a photographer go out and document what they saw out in the world. And it was really cool to see the emblem becoming like the part of the fabric of London for a few weeks. Seeing it on flags and banners and juxtaposed with London buses and London cabs. Even on iconic buildings, historic buildings in Trafalgar Square in Piccadilly Circus. And finally, seeing it projected onto Big Ben was pretty cool. And that is a good place for me to finish and I think Antonio put this lovely slide together. So yeah, thank you very much. Okay guys, don't go away yet. We have time for a few questions. Now today's Q&A is gonna be a little bit different than usual. We're asking, first of all, that you just ask questions about fonts, typefaces, design, and avoid asking about that big company whose icon is a fruit. So the other thing is if you would like to ask a question, raise your hand and Skilla and Klata will go around and give you a piece of paper. And so you have to write the question in your most legible handwriting. Oh, okay, what does that say? Oh, good question. Okay, first up, you guys wanna get back up on stage here? Yeah. Okay, the first excellent question is what about the aspirand? In other words, the at sign. What do you wanna know? Who asked the question? Yeah, what about it? I guess we can jarek something. Hang on a second. Hang on a second, I think I can. It's beautiful, man. That's all I'm gonna say. Let's see. Okay, let's go to the next question. Check it out. Woo! Okay, here's more. We didn't have that, we have to invent it. Yeah, it's a little small, who said that? Okay, second quote, thank you. Next question, you didn't mention John Handy. That is true. So, whoever asked this question, you're right. I am really sorry. I had to chop a bunch of the history apart because there's so much about the basketball. John Handy was the punch cutter who, well, one of the punch cutter who worked with John Basketball, we don't actually know if he was the only one. There's a, who was reading a book where they were saying somebody was visiting the basketball house and Basketball was actually fixing, I think it was justifying a major or something like that. It's not clear whether he was cutting as well or not. But definitely, yeah, John Handy, major figure, critical part of the story amongst others. We barely mentioned Sarah Eaves, his wife, which is also super important, and many other characters. There's so many stories. So, thank you for mentioning it. Yeah, they only had an hour, you guys, so cut him some slack. Okay, oh my God, the questions are pouring in. Let's see, did you have technological challenges while doing the type family, more specifically the variable font? Yeah, the variable font actually not so much, but one of the issues we had, and we keep struggling with, is the way we drew the very light lights. We basically go kind of against the grain of the digital fonts, meaning we had to keep fractional coordinates, which sounds ominous, once we know what it is, it just means that it's a bit awkward to draw the very light lights, and when you build them into fonts, it's always kind of a problem. So we had to push sort of a little bit of boundaries there. But other than that, this was mostly, it was a kind of conceptually hard project rather than technically, and then, of course, there's the part the patch is working on, which is technically incredibly challenging, which we're still working on it. But yeah, I hope that answered your question. Okay, this is a good one. Do you dream in typefaces, Anpernia? No, but I have nightmares about typefaces. I'm sure our type-west students can relate to that. Okay, is it difficult to release a new typeface for public use into the world to let go of it? Yeah, that's why we're not letting go. Ah. No, I mean, we give it to select partners and friends of the studio. We use it ourselves. It's kind of like, it's very nice to be able to see how it's been used, and also consult with the people, because most of the times, some people would be like, oh, well, I actually need an alternate or whatever, and we'll make it for them. So that's why the project keeps growing. Okay, how many rounds of feedback did you have from the Royal Family? Johnny, you want to take this one? Yeah, okay, yeah. Okay. They loved the font, man. They loved it. They were on board with it. Okay, what was the most controversial letter to settle on within the Love From Font, and why? I mean, we had very long discussions. We still do about which versions of the RMVs should be defaulted. Chris has opinions, I have opinions. We fight pretty often about these. I think the Rs and the Vs are, because they have both technical and voice ramifications. And so, yeah, Vs, I think. I win most of the fights. What? Well, we'll see about that. Okay, let's see. What do we have here? Are there writing utensils, pens, et cetera, that pair especially well with this font? Utensils? They said utensils. I'm just reading it. The basketball stuff was done at a time where the pointed pen was kind of the dominant instrument, even though, funnily enough, at this time there was another kind of pen which was both pointed and broad-edged, which is very interesting instrument. And yeah, so I guess these, the ones that react to pressure because just the broadening pen gives it kind of an even surface and so it doesn't really capture what these shapes are about. And also, if you look at the calligraphy manuals, like even the basketball slate but the calligraphy manuals at the time, they're all had copper plate stuff which was all done with the flexible nib, essentially, in the pointed pen. So yeah, that makes sense. Use the tools and materials at the time, right? Well, I mean, yeah, if you want to write to kind of go with this, of course, but yeah. Okay, you mentioned the continuous curvature adjustments to the original basketball. Are there any other mathematical techniques you use in type design? Woo! Sure. I mean, proportions-wise, I don't think we really use sort of mathematical techniques. We really, I mean, personally, we eyeball most of the stuff that we, we start from like mathematical shapes and then we look at them and we tweak them depending on what they need to do. So yes and no, essentially. The circle stuff, yeah, we kept that. We kept it in another project that you may have seen in these slides which is the sense we're working on. That's much more about geometry than this project was. But yeah, not really, I would say. That was probably from a type West student who's mouth's open. Sounds like it. Yeah. Okay, can you talk about the currency signs? Sure. So we, this is something that we really spent a bunch of time in San Francisco as well and usually the currency signs, they tend to be designed separately, individually and we try, Richie and I try to design as a set usually. And so here we actually kind of, again, we departed a little bit by what would be considered normal in basketball just because we felt it didn't, for instance, like the pound. There's a typical shape that is used in this period but we actually didn't go for something like that. We went for something more contemporary. So yeah, these are a super interesting puzzle. They were and they still are. And what can I say, they're great. Okay, when did the shift from research to production happen? Did you have a hard deadline? The beginning we sort of did, but that we'd never really ended. Meaning like we keep going back and forth. We keep looking at new materials all the time. And that's what I'm saying. This is a living project. We keep adding to it and revising some of the older stuff like basketball used to do, which drives Chris nuts. But no, I mean, we feel that it's right to the source to kind of work in this way. And so we didn't really stop at one specific point and we didn't sort of stop it. Oh, we're just gonna look at these sources and we keep looking because this field, this 17th century, 18th century England, that's the whole world. It's hugely super vast. There's so much variety. So yeah. Okay, two more questions. Whoa. Can you elaborate on how the continuous curvature is implemented? No. No, that's a patch question. We want to elaborate publicly. We will soon when it's ready, but not now. Okay, moving on. My patch. Yeah. Okay. Just checking in. How involved were other disciplines in the making of the typeface? So industrial designers, engineers, motion designers? I would say very much so. I mean, of course we would review stuff with Johnny all the time, but even thinking about, this typeface was designed for a product design studio. So we thought about stuff like machining it from the very, very beginning, which is very unusual for my field of my discipline. And so yeah, we've been using it on everything we've been doing for years. And some of the reviews we did, I mean, most of the ones were like us, the graphic design people, but some of them were with the larger team and everybody had input. So like, you know, and we felt like that was the right thing to do, because the team is amazing, it's incredibly diverse, and the different perspective really brought the project to life, I think. So yeah. Okay. Are you planning on reverse engineering some steel punches? Is that a question on the paper or your? It was on a paper. Ha, ha, ha, ha. We, maybe, who knows? The punch project is, the punches are in Cambridge, they're amazing materials. We surely want to engage more with them in various ways. They're actually being cataloged right now and 3D scanned. So yeah, who knows? Okay, one last secret question. What other language supports do you have or envision? So right now this type of design for Latin only. We thought about other scripts, but the need didn't come, so we sort of left it for a later exercise. We'll see, depends on where the projects that come our way. So right now it's Latin. Okay, that's it. Thank you everybody for coming. Thank you everybody. This was awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you.