Signifier is a Brutalist response to 17th century typefaces.
English Roman from the Fell Types. Stanley Morison, “The Roman Italic & Black Letter Bequeathed to The University of Oxford by Dr. John Fell”, Typophile Chap Book Nº 25, (1951): 10-11.
Signifier began as a revival of English Roman from the Fell Types. The Fell Types are a collection of metal fonts that currently reside at the Oxford University Press. Their storied history is fascinating. In 1668 John Fell installed printing presses at Oxford University. He wanted good fonts for the press, but there wasn’t anything suitable or available in England.² In the 1670s he sent Thomas Marshall to Europe to obtain type. Marshall returned with several different fonts, subsequently identified as cut by many greats of typography: Voskens, van Dijck, Garamont and Granjon. These fonts partially comprise what is now known as the Fell Types. For a long time the fonts remained “untouched and unnoticed”, until 1863 when they were re-cast because ‘Old style’ fonts were back in fashion. Seeing the actual printed forms is magnificent. One of these fonts caught my attention: English Roman.
“A Star Chamber decree of 1637, and the subsequent Printing Act of 1662, had limited the practice of letter-founding to four printers and the University presses of Oxford and Cambridge”. Ould & Thomas, “The Fell Revival”, (2000): 2. Caslon was the first competent cutter and caster of typefaces in England. His success virtually stopped the importation of European, particularly Dutch, type from about 1720.
Signifier, version 1.
English Roman was cut some time in the 17th century. Stanley Morison identifies it as Dutch, but the punchcutter is unknown.³ The font is about 13.5pt by today’s measure. Its atmosphere and aesthetic are dark and assured on the page. Naturally I started to digitize it, hoping to capture these qualities. The first version of Signifier was a close copy, I sympathetically digitized the best version of each letterform. Because of the analogue origin I drew lots of curves, and only straight lines where I imagined the original punchcutter would want them.
A “punchcutter” is analogous to a “typeface designer” today. Punchcutters engraved a letter in steel. Each of their steel punches was then struck into a metal bar to create a matrix. The finished matrix was placed in a mould, which molten lead was poured into. The result was a piece of type. This was the “type founding” process. This is an excellent punchcutting video.
55 English Roman lowercase a from a single page.
Once again, I came up against the age-old revival problem of “which is the true source?”⁴ One of the decisions revivalists face is which font to base their design on. Before digital fonts each point size was cut specifically to create necessary optical adjustments in letter shapes, spacing and proportions. A typeface might be made up of several sizes of regular, for example. Even if a letterform is exactly the same shape, printing ink on paper creates variation.
The numerous variations provide options, but only within the parameters of the original metal shape. Often the original letterforms in English Roman weren’t quite right, so I borrowed from other Fell Types like Great Primer Roman and Double Pica Roman. I realised I was starting to Frankenstein.⁵
English Roman.
English Roman.
English Roman.
Great Primer Roman.
Great Primer Roman.
Great Primer Roman.
Double Pica Roman.
Double Pica Roman.