A Typeface for Art History
Fall Facelift №1
We love the dissipation of summer. All hail the cool mid-60’s ,the back-to-school sales and the smell of sharpened pencils. At Trivium, this time of year we’re rolling up our sleeves to prep for the U.S. academic season. Last year, we added a new type of content—beginning our catalog of the world’s greatest, oldest architecture, from neolithic burial sites to New York classics. The year before we started a library of historical writings, in case you want to get your Aeneid on, or learn a spell to turn yourself invisible.
This year, our updates to Trivium Art History have been visual: a sweeping design and UX facelift that has changed nearly every page and line of code. Over the next few weeks we’ll be unpacking the changes that are underway in our Fall Facelift series. Think of it like a dev-log that is gonna get deep in the design weeds.
A history of type love
Part of the fun of designing for Trivium is being able to showcase artwork from nearly every era of human history. But choosing typefaces to support a global range of visual media has been challenging. Trivium changes often. ‘Always evolving’ is one of our product principles, and no where is that more true than our type choices.
After it’s rebirth in 2014, I set Trivium’s headlines in Jeremy Mickel’s sassy, voluptuous Superior Title—still one of my all-time favorites. It was a relatively new face at the time, having been completed in 2012 for a redesign of Travel & Leisure magazine. Our headlines were set on top of full-bleed feature imagery, and Superior’s bold weights had enough punch to cut through in large sizes. For body and interface copy I used Lato, a sans-serif by Polish designer Łukasz Dziedzic, and released for free use through Google Fonts. Nice on the pocketbook, and really lovely when set in all caps with wide letter-spacing.
Fast-forward to 2016, and it was time for a cleaner, bolder Trivium. I’d been experimenting with viewport width-based font sizing (I know, 4 years late to that hype train). To get the most out of scaling type to browser width, I moved our display face to MFred, a clumsily-named but utterly smashing vertical, all-caps sans. MFred was designed by editorial design superstar Matt Willey, first drawn for Elephant magazine, then used for Port magazine, and in my opinion absolutely mastered in the beautiful Avaunt Magazine. It is a partial face: caps only, no italic and only a few diacriticals, but it’s incredibly cheap and all purchase proceeds go to Cancer Research UK and Macmillan Cancer Support. Go, buy it.
It was also time to change up our body copy. Lato is a legible, balanced face, but its wide characters and tight letter-spacing make it fatiguing to read and creates an aggressively uniform baseline. Luckily, the market for clean legible sans-serifs was wide open, and after hours of comparison on Google Fonts, Steve Matteson’s Open Sans came up the winner for its elegant light weight, excellent rendering at small sizes and massive character set.
New fonts, new you
And now, 2018. We’ve got a clown in office, the humanities struggle for funding and the baggy 90’s are back. Can a typeface smooth this cultural rictus? No, but you can be damn sure we’re gonna try. Here’s the pitch: the world is loud, ugly and fake. Art history also fraught with sexism, inequality and colonial bullshit, but at least it’s in the past. Take a break, breathe in, breathe out. Art history should be a quiet space that fosters critical thinking and analysis. Within art history we can create room—to find inspiration, for cultural critique, or for that rarest of activities, contemplation.
This fall we’ve made lot of changes to Trivium based on the idea of creating space, and typefaces were no exception. First, we’ve removed the imposing MFred all-caps, replacing them with an often over-looked gem: Optima.
Optima may be named like a transformer, but it’s Trivium’s most historically-grounded type choice. When designing for an academic discipline there’s always the temptation to go edgy—flashy, nuance-first type to say “Hey look! We’re not boring, I promise!” Optima leans into the academic nature of art history.
Designed by the famous German typographer Hermann Zaph, who narrowly avoided WWII because of heart trouble, Optima shows Zaph’s calligraphic bent in its modulated-stroke and humanist forms. I’ve honestly never been partial to Zaph’s work, which strikes me as overly sentimental (see the study bible classic, Zapfino). But Optima was a historical exercise for Zaph, inspired by a visit to the Basilica di Santa Croci, a Venetian landmark and home to five-hundred year old funeral markers inscribed in traditional Roman capitals. I visited Santa Croce in 2010, and the graceful capitals make quite the impression. They’re perfectly cut, and everywhere. I returned with a notebook of sketches and rubbings, as I like to think Zaph himself must have.
Optima is an odd duck as fonts go, more humanist than its younger brother Trajan (though with proportions inspired by the same column) and intended to bridge the gulf between body and display, serif and sans, while not comfortably aligning with either. In my eye, Optima didn’t really come alive until pared with it’s complementary opposite.
Enter Calibre, a 2011 face by the prolific Kris Sowersby. A sans serif with nearly as much emotional baggage as Optima. Calibre is one of the new-guard sans-serifs. I’m not sure if there’s an official title for this group of ambitious newcomers, which include the impeccable Apercu and less-than-perfect Karla, both also designed in 2011. My theory is that after the sturdy, plain-spoken harmony of Tobias Frere-Jones’s Gotham, the Abe Lincoln of typefaces—type designers needed to find new territory, and they looked to dissonance.
Calibre, and its sister face, Metric, were built as an homage to German geometric, ‘engineered’ signage typefaces, borrowing their uniform stroke and wide letter spacing, but applying optical adjustments for balance, and leaning into the naiveté of these working-class faces. Imperfection, oversights, a dash of weird—that creates the personality.
And here is our odd couple, Optima the nostalgic romanesque, and Calibre, the flawed German workhorse. A better typographer could tell me why I like the way they play together. I suspect it has to do with their similar proportions and weight on the page. It may also be that neither face is screaming at you, demanding attention. These faces are introspective, giving room to the artwork that surrounds them, and giving you space to find your own focal point. They inform, then retire to the background, conflicted. Maybe I just relate to them.
And so here we are, leaning into
Up Next: Can you experience art online?
