Like Albert Jan-Pool’s FF DIN and Tobias Frere-Jone’s Interstate, both Calibre and Metric were inspired by the hyper-rational letterforms on street signage, proving, as Sowersby says, “typefaces can successfully originate from outside the canon of book-centric history.” Thankfully so.Ĭarolina de Bartolo is a typography and design history educator as well as the author of the book “ Explorations in Typography”. (Note that each one has its own lower case ‘a’, which I’ve emblazoned in my cerebral database, of course.)Ĭalibre pays homage to the seldom-seen typeface Recta, designed by Aldo Novarese in 1958. Then by a clever switch-a-roo of the glyphs C, G, J, K, M S, Z, a, c, e, g, k, s, t, z and 3, Metric takes the tone of a rational geometric whereas Calibre inclines towards the Neo-grotesque. Calibre and Metric are two distinct typefaces designed simultaneously that share a number of characters, including A, B, E, T, X, b, f, i, l, m, u, x, and y. Now it seems like anything other than this quirky little ‘a’ would leave the face flat and colorless and, possibly, far too similar to others of its genre.Ĭalibre is one of a pair of typefaces designed by the Kris Sowersby in New Zealand. But as I’ve been setting the face quite a lot in the last few months as a typesetting consultant for WIRED magazine’s redesign, it’s grown on me.
I must admit, it was not an ‘a’ I loved easily. The lowercase ‘a’ in this typeface is so distinctive and unlike any other in its category that anyone would recognize it in a second. However, there are a few faces that render my typeface identification abilities rather underwhelming. If only this magnificent skill helped me make new friends at parties, I’d be all set. Much like those contestants on the TV program “Name That Tune” who could identify a song in one note, I can often identify a typeface by one letter. The skill has its advantages: 1) An ‘a’ is a common letter, so even a small quantity of text is likely to contain one 2) Lowercase ‘a’ is often a rather distinctive letterform in a typeface, so it requires only a small fraction of my visual memory to retain a great number of them and, lastly but importantly, 3) It’s impressive. Ever since I learned how to tell the difference between the lowercase ‘a’ in Helvetica versus the lowercase ‘a’ in Univers, I’ve been cultivating my ability to identify even the most similar of typefaces by this single letter.
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