Felix: During many of the debates we had about type design at Typemedia, often outside of class (Grote Markt or Paakschuit, for example) and very often with the participation of Ando “Daytona Mess” Borione, we were debating whether type design should be “More” or “Less”.

This debate isn’t new: throughout the decades, this dispute has materialised in most major art and design movements, embracing one or the other stance. Adolph Loss, in a radical effort for modernism, declared that ornaments were crime. John Ruskin sung the praise of the intricate beauty of gothic cathedrals.

It is safe to say that we are both more interested in the ornamental side of design. Cecilia takes inspiration from her rich Mexican heritage and I often look for ideas in graffiti and painting. When Ceci declared at Typemedia that it isn’t “less is more”, but that simply “more is more”, it encapsulated a stance towards design that really spoke to me.

In our debates and conversations, we were often trying to figure out how a more experimental and ornamental approach to type design could look today. This is challenging, because type is, first in foremost, something that needs to be functional and readable. It is only a narrow space between tradition and innovation within which interesting experimental things can happen.

Ornamental typefaces play a fairly big role in the history of type design. Certainly, these typefaces are not the most legible, but they are not pretending to be. If we use type to get someone’s attention, for example, it might make sense to reduce legibility down to a level where the viewer is compelled to stop and look at it long enough to decipher it. This might have been the idea behind the plethora of incredibly creative, decorative typefaces of the mid 19th century, drawn with complex plants or patterns inside of each glyph. Looking at old specimens, I think ornaments were also a way to show off, a way for the designer and cutter to demonstrate their level of skills and expertise (imagine engraving and actually making one of these typefaces before the advent of computers).

But the use of ornaments in type might also come from a much more functional approach. In order to save ink and thus money on printing, but keeping the size of the printed letter as large as possible, printers might have incised shapes into fatfaces and slab serifs to reduce the overall size of the inkable surfaces. The reasons might have been even more functional still: Anyone who has ever tried to print a 40 cicero face on a poster probably had to deal with the enormous frustration of the posters, especially if the paper is thin and light, sticking to the letters and ruining the entire print run. I made that experience during my time at p98a, trying to print the Fanfare in 40 cicero. In short, the larger the letters, the stickier and perhaps ornaments might have been an aesthetic solution to fix that issue.

Ceci: The process of designing Bless opened up conversations that feel deeply relevant to our practice: the balance between beauty and utility, the concept of ornament, time, tools, and collaboration.

And when I refer to beauty I’m not talking about the kind of beauty that has been insistently and annoyingly associated with the feminine or the fragile. I’m talking about beauty that captivates you, the kind that doesn’t allow you to look away.

As Marta Cerdá accurately describes in her book Sobrevivir al diseño:

"Beauty has nothing to do with utility or reason; it penetrates the murky territory of emotions in a total and catastrophic way." Beauty is mysticism; it is spirituality.

And to explain this idea she quotes Marian Bantjes:

‘There is something about ornate intricate work that seems to stir the soul in most people,’ Bantjes observes. ‘How can you look at anything by William Morris and not feel some kind of awestruck love?

‘Interestingly, the decorative arts appear most famously in religious works. There really is some kind of connection to love and inspiration there. The thousand ornamental ways that Islamic calligraphy praises Allah; the glitter of stained glass windows and the excess of carved arches in churches; illuminated manuscripts. Where there is genuine love, care and craft, I think there is something being communicated that cannot be communicated in any other way.’

When we discussed what an ornamental approach to type design could look like today, we asked ourselves: how do you define beauty, and by what criteria or idiosyncrasies do you decide the shape of an ornament that can respond to a wider range of needs?
In all the historical references of ornamental letters we studied, there were different approaches to ornament. The possibility of drawing from any of them is always there, but Bless became our tool for exploring the boundaries of those shapes and questioning how far they still belong to those traditional canons.

Regarding time and tools, as someone who leans toward analog work, I value the importance of time in the craft: the artistry, the handmade, the mastery of honing a craft, and all the hours that lie behind that. On the other hand, I’m fascinated by today’s digital tools and how they can complement our work as type designers.
There is a principle about time that we learned from Petr van Blokland at Typemedia which left a strong mark on me.
How quickly can you complete a task? And, most importantly, how quickly and how well can you do it? That is the key that can truly take you to the next level, and of course, achieving that skill is not an easy path. This is where complementary skills and the power of collaboration make all the difference.

As type designers, can we create efficient tools that honor the value of craftsmanship which, in the end, is part of the foundation of what we do?

"Languages are like windows that open you up to the world. Our tools are also like languages: they allow us, as designers, to see the world from many perspectives and to discover other realities, other nuances that were previously invisible to us. A designer needs the tool in order to exist." – Marta Cerdà, Sobrevivir al Diseño

We do not aim to provide a single answer to these questions. But, through collaboration and by combining our skills and curiosity, we seek to explore these territories and the boundaries within them.

Felix: It is during Typemedia that Ceci and I made first attempts to collaborate. It made sense to combine her calligraphic skills with my programming knowledge. When Ceci showed me a sketch of some brush lettering she had made a while ago, I tried to replicate the intricate texture in python. The experiment was a success and encouraged me to further investigate the idea of combining type design and coding, for design purposes (as opposed to engineering purposes, where coding is totally normal). 

Just before Typemedia, I had been coding a lot, especially shaders. This very fundamental way of programming and drawing shapes forced me to think about computer graphics in a fundamentally new way. The more I learned about shaders, the more I started understanding core ideas of trigonometry and how to use maths to create first simple, then increasingly complex shapes.

I am not sure when the idea of “programming” shapes, to then put them into letters that could ultimately work as a font, materialised, but I do remember that the prospect of building such a thing was very exciting. From that point onwards, the biggest obstacle ahead of us became to test the idea: Sure, on a theoretical level it works, but can a font, and then software responsible for rendering it, actually deal with it? Just’s course at Typemedia was an initial sandbox where I was able to try out such ideas.

Felix: In order to get started, I used the lessons I had learned from trigonometry and drew an ellipse using sine and cosine. From this shape onwards, I was able to make variations on this base shape, showing promising results: vaguely floral or star-like shapes came to life, which really inspired us to keep exploring.

It was also clear from the start that things should be interpolated. Thankfully, I was able to make shapes that would all use the same resolution, meaning the same amount of points, meaning these could be interpolatable. Exciting! I produced some test fonts to see how these interpolations would look, and we weren’t disappointed. The simple geometric shapes, as soon as interpolated between each other, would morph into the most unexpected shapes. 

The first shapes were made only of straight lines connected by points. Later on in the process, it must have been the third iteration on ornaments, I started thinking about using bezier segments rather than just straight lines. This would mean that instead of point-point-point-point-point etc, we would now have a point-point-handle-handle-point-point etc. structure, adding rounded parts to our ornaments and improving their quality.

Another thing we considered was optical size. After the first iteration it became clear that we needed different categories of shapes. Large ones, small ones, corner ones, and so on. My first attempt was to create three size categories for one type of ornament. I tried doing this by reducing the resolution of each shape, making the smallest one really coarse and the largest one really intricate. But this didn’t really work.

So what we did was to make different shapes all together: We produced the core center shapes, the added corner shapes, and then leaf shapes. These three ornament classes, plus a more simple elliptic one, became the fundament of our project.  

Cecilia: The design of the letters for Bless developed in parallel with Felix’s work on ornaments, allowing both processes to feed into each other.

Throughout the project, we maintained a constant exchange of ideas, references, and questions, all shared through presentations, almost as if we were still presenting to our professors at Typemedia. It felt like being back in class, (and I mean this in the most positive way). This methodology helped us document and understand the stages a project goes through, trace how an idea evolves, and recognize how a single concept can generate other paths, even if, for now, some will remain in the drawer.

We began by researching specimens of ornamented letters and the origins of fatfaces. Many of our references were fatfaces derived from modern faces, with heavy stems, high contrast, and a vertical axis. We wondered whether ornaments were directly tied to this style, or whether they became associated with it more organically during the development of fatfaces.

In this search, we came across a fascinating lecture by Sébastian Morlighem, Professor and researcher in typography and graphic design, in which he explores the origins of bold type and fatfaces. He explains how, in the 19th century, these letterforms began to appear; he showed some of the first examples in use in theater posters, playbills, and later in newspaper advertisements. He explained although the design of the first bold type is often attributed to Robert Thorne, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when they were introduced, since it was not a single design but rather several that emerged almost simultaneously from different British foundries.

This style spread quickly. By around 1812, printers were already aware of the new approach and began experimenting with Bold typographic hierarchies, varying weights and sizes. Around the same time, wood engravers also began exploring variations within the fatface concept. In their work, letterforms were far more ornamented and complex, and based on other styles.

The Alard Pierson references we had from our visit with Mathieu Lommen belong to the collection Ornamented Types: Twenty-three Alphabets from the Foundry of Louis John Poucheé, printed from the original blocks at the St. Bride Printing Library (1992). Another selection of images we had as references comes mainly from specimens of the Fonderie de Laurent et de Berny, which I consulted during a visit to the BNF in Paris.

In all these specimens, some of the letters reach another level of extravagance and detail. There is a bit of everything, from simple touches to the extremes of ornamentation. As always, something begins simply, and then comes the inevitable human impulse to push things to their limits. An idea and territory that we both clearly feel drawn to.

We found references where the letter contains the ornament and the ornament adapts to it using different shapes and hierarchies of those shapes to give structure to each part of the letter. On the other hand, there were also letters where it is the ornament itself that defines the letterform and this is where the design moves away from the Modern Faces. Both possibilities coexist: the shape defines the ornament, and the ornament defines the shape, but also we found examples where sometimes the letter is just a canvas that can contain anything even if it seems not to fit.

This made us think about the infinite possibilities of shapes and motifs that these ornaments can represent. In that same talk, Sébastian quotes Paul Barnes with the following phrase:

"The fat face is the joyful expression of an idea - to make something as bold as can be - executed with real vigour and the utmost conviction." — Paul Barnes

As an example, he mentions typefaces like Isambard (Commercial Type), and he talks about others that explore new territories of what is considered a fatface, saying:

"A fatface might be a genre, but I would say it’s also a state of mind because it can also be something mainly derived from the original source but it's going elsewhere, like Margarita by Alejandro LoCelso and Zloy by Daria Petrova. Margarita looks like a historical typeface, but it is something else, still contemporary. A fat face can be a lot of things."

This resonated with our project, not only in the shapes of the letters but also in the design of the ornaments. Just as a fatface can be a lot of things, the ornaments that these letters contain can be many things as well.

Building on this, when we asked ourselves what the letters containing these ornaments should look like, we instinctively also asked what else they could be, and whether they could be something other than a Modern Face. Before arriving at the final design, we explored other territories with simpler shapes. In this process, we came across a new reference: an ornamented Neuland letter.

What if we experimented with more geometric, low-contrast shapes? After discussing this and looking at the references, Felix shared some of his progress with the ornament tests. The letters he used to test were simple, geometric shapes that fulfilled the most basic element we needed: space. That made us think whatever the shape is, we needed as much space as possible, the maximum mass to contain the ornaments.

We started wondering what would happen if we pushed this idea to the extreme. Could we, for example, remove the counters entirely? How much contrast is necessary? And does that contrast matter for the ornaments, considering that the ornaments were already adding another layer of complexity?

With these questions and Felix’s initial shapes in mind, I went back to looking for simpler, more modular, geometric and no counters references and I did some sketching based on that. At the same time, he showed me a test of the ornaments in motion. The range of possibilities was huge, from sharp and pointed to floral and organic shapes, and all of them with a lot of contrast and detail, this only reinforced our idea that the letters themselves needed to stay as simple as possible.

So we moved aside from the “no counters" experimentation and we made our first rough sketch, and from there we began refining the letters. Initially, the shapes had somewhat undefined contrast, tending toward low contrast compared with a modern face, and we had triangular shapes functioning as “serifs.” These triangles create diagonal counters, which influence the texture of the typeface. As a result, the counters began to take center stage, and in this case, we wanted the opposite: the ornaments are meant to be the star of the show, so we again toned this down toward a more regular texture.

We started by comparing the shapes and contrast of the ornaments with the contrast in the letters, searching for a point of balance between the two. To bring them closer together, we softened the curves so the letters would feel a bit more fluid and organic, like some instances in the ornaments. We also debated whether to use ball terminals, as one might expect in a Modern Face, or to retain the sharper, triangular serifs. Since the ornaments range from spiky to rounded, we felt it made sense for the typeface to carry both features as well.

Felix kept working on the ornaments and experimenting with different numbers of axes: we tested what happened with more or fewer, we saw which shapes appeared in between, and which instances looked the most appealing. This was a very exciting process and felt like an endless playground to explore. It was during this process that we came up with the idea of selecting certain instances as sets, ranging from simple to more complex, so that users could implement them without losing the freedom to experiment with the sliders and find the right balance for their needs.

At this stage, we began designing layouts to test with real texts and compositions, which provided even more insight into the project’s potential. We decided to maintain the typeface in three styles, Bless Black, Bless OO Var, and Bless Var, with the goal of allowing as much experimentation as possible, both with layering colors and with the textures created by the ornaments themselves.

Regarding the letters, the process first led us to want to explore new territories, and later brought us back to something simpler. In the end, the complexity of the ornaments shaped the simplicity and contrast the letters required, and the more we explored the ornaments, the more we found ourselves moving towards a Modern face, while still retaining a slightly sharper spirit shaped along the way by our own perspective on an ornamented Fatface.

As for the ornaments and the project as a whole, I believe there are endless possibilities still to explore within this idea, just as we have seen in those specimens: a display of extremes, possibilities, motifs and unknown territories. We hope this project will bless us with much more to explore ;)

Felix: After sharing files on dropbox for a while, and increasingly more versions of the typefaces started accumulating, we realised that it would be best to shift the project to a git repository. As this was a first project in collaboration, it also seemed like the cleanest way to work on something together and to avoid mistakes or misunderstanding.

Over time, I put together a complex pipeline that helps us inject the ornaments into each update or change that we make to the base font. By automating as many steps of this process as possible, we’ve found a great way to accelerate the build of all three final fonts.

Felix: Designing, assembling and releasing the BM Bless system has first and foremost confirmed that making this sort of project is technologically possible. Releasing it will hopefully give us more data on how people use it and perhaps what ideas there are on improving and developing this system.

A few additions seem obvious: How about an italic and how would the ornaments have to look if they were to be slanted? How about a width dimension, especially useful for highly display applications, and again, what would happen to the ornaments,
especially if the whole were to be a variable font? Extending the glyphset might also be an option: it would indeed be exciting to see how these letters would look in Greek or Cyrillic. Arabic maybe?

All of these developments are possible and we will see what makes sense in the future.For now, the state of the project is enough to get an idea of how this whole thing will resonate with the outside world. In the meantime, if you are interested in some custom changes to the font for a specific project, don’t hesitate to contact us at info@beamtype.com. 

Cerdà, Marta. Sobrevivir al Diseño. Contexto, memoria y tiempo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_face
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X2tz6ZDYwg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0YycXKyDeQ
https://oa.letterformarchive.org/item?workID=lfa_antiquarianfacsimile_0008&targPic=lfa_antiquarianfacsimile_0008_001.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20151222083754/http://imimprimit.com/wp-content/uploads/Prospectus-all-cropped-small.pdf