questions about requiem for jonathan hoefler

I think in Courier, but I dream in Requiem.

I so clearly remember my first glimpse of it. Never before had boilerplate Latin appeared so glorious to me. I studied the hell out of those four HTF catalog pages – or at the very least, I sure stared at them. The poise and sensuality of the lower case, roman a; the capriciousness of the little p, whose bowl nudges nonconformingly past the stem; the dazzling array of letter combinations in the italic, comprehensive enough to pacify the most demanding polyglot. Not only is sauerstoffflaschen a word, apparently, but it can be set precisely as it deserves.

Designer/author/teacher Jessica Helfand revealed her passion for Jonathan Hoefler’s Requiem in an email exchange: “Requiem...is nothing short of perfection. I would be perfectly happy to use it for everything I ever design the rest of my life. Period.” I suspect that more than a few other designers and users feel the same way.

Perhaps I am more of an ascetic than most. I approach Requiem like I do fettucine alfredo: they’re both so delicious that I feel I must save them for only the best of occasions. In treating myself so infrequently, however, I’ve not come to know Requiem like I should, so I decided to ask Jonathan a few questions. And he was kind enough to answer.

JC: For me, Requiem closed a gap that I perceived among types in this genre. For my work, I needed something like a Centaur, but a superior cut, and I needed a better, more optically correct Bembo; Requiem fit the bill perfectly. Did you see a void as well, and was Requiem your attempt to fill it?

JH: I wish I could say that Requiem had such lofty beginnings, but alas it didn’t: like most of my studio’s work, it began with a practical request from a client.

In 1990, Fred Woodward at Rolling Stone faxed me a page of initials that he liked, and wanted to see developed as a typeface – these were the Arrighi capitals from Il Modo, which have been variously reproduced. By the time I’d finished some other obligations and got around to developing a prototype, the folks at Rolling Stone had discovered Adobe’s new “Trajan” typeface, and thought it suitable enough for their purposes. But a few years later, the project was revived when Giovanni Russo at Travel & Leisure inquired about having a custom typeface developed. It was then that the font gained a lowercase, and ultimately an italic. The ornaments, italic ligatures, and “optical size” masters for small sizes (Text) and very large sizes (Fine) were done as a labor of love, in preparation for bringing the fonts to market in 1999.

JC: The type is, as you state, “derived from a set of inscriptional capitals in Il Modo de Temperare le Penne.” Furthermore, Arrighi’s chancery italic is revived in that of Requiem. But what was your precedent for the roman? How much of it was derived from historical interpolation vs. your own preferences for a compatible roman?

JH: The roman lowercase is basically caprice, as I really couldn’t find a suitable historical model. Arrighi did draw the occasional bit of roman lowercase, in both Il Modo and La Operina, but I find them to be overly calligraphic and generally contrived. [I’ve included some scans, which are very old and therefore pitiful by today’s standards, but they’re hopefully better than nothing. Here, see Arrighi.] In the beginning of the project, I spent some time experimenting with Cresci’s lowercases [Cresci], but found them a little too bitter to go with Arrighi’s saucy caps – there’s a staid, “constructed” quality to Cresci’s lettering that seems at odds with Arrighi’s esprit.

I did see a model that I liked at the British Museum, which has a marvelous collection of sixteenth century manuscripts. One of them, Marcantonio Flaminio’s La Paraphrasi [Ruano]*, is especially sparkling. It seems to bridge the gap between the typographic and the calligraphic very smartly, and in a useful and unexpected turn, it demonstrates capitals, upper- and lowercase roman, and italics all on the same page – a rare example of a modern typographic family, rendered in pure calligraphy.

In the end, there wasn’t much in Flaminio’s lettering that made it into the Requiem lowercase, though studying it did help me diagnose one of my font’s early problems. Most printing types designed in upper- and lowercase presume that the primary function of capital letters is to serve as initials, and that the bulk of what is read will be printed in lowercase. The widths of these lowercase letters differ greatly, so that their composition produces a sort of modulated effect. Aside from obvious outliers like I and M which are bound by their basic design, most of the capitals hew to a narrow range of widths.

But in alphabets which have no lowercase, this modulation must be effected through the capitals themselves. Inscriptional letters such as those found on the Trajan column exhibit wildly different character widths: Es and Ss are nearly half the width of Ns and Rs, so that capital inscriptions (“SENATVS POPVLVSQVE ROMANVM”) can achieve the varying rhythm which is apparently most comfortable for reading.

The difficulty in outfitting a font of capitals with a lowercase is that caps of dramatically different widths aren’t particularly comfortable with the same lowercase. A lowercase ‘n’ designed to accomodate a narrow cap S will be dwarfed by a wide cap H, or vice versa. (Most of the various Trajan-with-a-lowercase fonts suffer this problem as a fundamental design defect.) The problem is exacerbated by a small x-height, which is a characteristic of renaissance letters such as Arrighi’s.

Flaminio cleverly sidestepped the problem by combining his capitals with a lowercase of unusually large x-height: a sufficiently large lowercase ‘n’ is at home with both a narrow ‘S’ and a wide ‘H’. I borrowed this strategy for Requiem, additionally lengthening the font’s ascenders and descenders to help camouflage the large x-height, and give the font the grace that Arrighi’s caps deserve. Of course, a large body is exactly what you don’t want in a chancery italic, and it wasn’t long after Requiem’s roman was completed that the order came in for an italic. Reconciling Requiem’s roman and italic required a bit of chicanery, as close admirers of the font might have discovered.

JC: A requiem is most commonly known as a musical composition or chant in honor of the dead. Is the face meant to be a typographic requiem of sorts?

JH: I suppose it’s as elegiac as any other historical revival. Something about the name Requiem seemed in keeping with the spirit of the typeface, and I’m especially fond of musical names for typefaces: somewhere on the drawing board are Oratorio, Novena and Plainsong, as well as a medieval thing I’ve been calling Burana. Incidentally, quite a few type designers are also musicians, most locally my partner Tobias Frere-Jones, who manages to move between Bezier curves and waveforms with annoying effortlessness.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll also admit to having settled on “Requiem” because it contains a few of the font’s signature letters, R, E and Q among them. If at all possible I’d have snuck a Y in there as well.

JC: A few years have elapsed, now, since Requiem was released. No doubt, you’ve had an opportunity to see it used in a variety of settings, from signage to book covers, to extended text. Are there some applications of it that have especially pleased you, and conversely, are there some that you have found to be simply egregious?

JH: Maybe it’s because I’m especially pleased with the font itself, but I tend to be especially happy seeing Requiem in use. I’m surprised that I haven’t seen the ornaments and cartouches used much: designers who visit our web site seem to single these out for praise, though I think I’ve only seen them in print once. But I regularly see the font being used with great aplomb: lots of carefully spaced capitals, thoughtfully leaded text settings, and judicious use of the decorative end of the family.

Somehow Requiem seems to have escaped the sorts of violations I’ve witnessed of the other fonts, though I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I see fake caps-and-small-caps, scaled 60%, and slanted. But rest assured that the designers in my office are awaiting this offense, with ticket books in hand.

*N.B. After I posted, John Downer kindly wrote to Jonathan and to me and informed us that Marcantonio Flaminio was the author of the text only, and did not produce the lettering shown in the sample. He added, “Ferdinando Ruano was the scribe most experts think deserves credit for the lettering. He was amazingly adept at producing a ‘typographic-looking’ bookhand by employing quills of two sizes – the larger to form the stems and bowls; the smaller to add serifs. (It’s very laborious to execute lettering this way, but the results can be magnificent, as seen in Ruano’s work.)” The link has therefore been changed from Flaminio to Ruano.

07-February 2003