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By Bill Troop

March 2006

Up until about 1960, all type used for printing was made in hot metal, and it was optimized for the exact size it was used. For example, in metal Times New Roman, 7 point Times is quite a different design from 9 point Times and 12 point Times is also visibly different, and so on. Each size of type was designed from a different set of drawings, called a Master. Each master was drawn differently to make the font appear more readable and pleasing at that particular size.

In those days, the type designer's task was to exaggerate letterforms to maximize legibility at small sizes, and refine letterforms to maximize beauty at large sizes.

The root of the problem
Photo typesetting technology in the 1960s, and digital typesetting technology in the 1970s changed all that. In photo and digital type, a single master is used to create all sizes. In photo, that was done by enlarging a single master to different sizes with a lens. In digital, it's done by rasterizing a single master to different sizes, which is what happens each time you dial in a different point size on your computer. It doesn't matter how it's done, because the results are sub-optimal in each case. Now, instead of designing optimum type, the designer has the diabolical challenge of coming up with a single drawing for each letter that is not too illegible when scaled to 8 points and not too ugly when scaled to 36 points. The side effect is that the letters seldom look perfect at any size.

If you want great-looking type, it has to be optimized, meaning it must have a different design, or master, for each size.

Can we do it today?
Yes. Technology gives us two ways. The first is by using Adobe's Multiple Master ("MM") fonts, introduced in 1992 and still usable – albeit inconveniently – with most software today. These technological marvels are fonts with continuous masters that let you dial in any size from 6 points to 72 points, and also let you dial in other continuously variable features like weight and width. But sadly, Adobe discontinued MM font development in 2000 as part of a deal with Microsoft that gave us the OpenType standard the two companies worked out together. (Microsoft didn't want to implement MMs because it would have added additional complexity to the Office Suite.)

The second way to do it is by choosing fonts designed to be used specifically over a narrow range of sizes. A few foundries have been doing this for several years; prominent among them is David Berlow's Font Bureau, a mainstay source for newspaper and magazine publishers. Several Font Bureau fonts come in footnote, text and display masters, as do, recently, some Adobe fonts, which Adobe calls ‘opticals'. Unfortunately, Adobe ‘opticals' are also designed to be idiot-proof: the footnote font will look acceptable if you accidentally use it at display sizes, and the display font will look acceptable if you accidentally use it at footnote sizes. The result is much better than no optimization at all, but these fonts never print perfectly because there are too many compromises built in. By contrast, Font Bureau's ‘opticals' are designed to professional standards.

By George he's got it!
Sumner Stone is the font designer who has done more than anyone else in the digital era to bring size-optimized type to the public. His first big project along these lines was the popular ITC Bodoni font family in 1994. ITC Bodoni isn't an MM. Instead it's three fonts that come in three optical sizes: Bodoni 7 for footnotes, Bodoni 12 for text, and Bodoni 72 for display. With such a type, you will typically use the 7-point master for sizes between 5 and 8 points, the 12 between 9 and 16 points, and the 72 from 18 points up, though it will be a little thin at the smaller sizes.

Stone's recently released Cycles family takes the concept to its logical conclusion, with a wider range of optimized sizes. Cycles includes sizes optimized for 5, 7, 9, 11, 18, 24, and 36 points. Astonishingly, nothing like this has ever been available for computers before. Using the fonts is just like using ordinary fonts, except that it entails an extra step: for footnote type that you want at 5 or 6 points, instead of just selecting Cycles from your font menu, you have to remember to select Cycles 5, and so on. The payoff? No longer will your footnotes look mingy and cramped; they will actually be pleasantly readable and sparklingly clear, even though they are tiny.

Each Cycles font is different. Each is meticulously crafted to appear optimally on the page or the screen at and near its designated size. The result is a reading experience like no other. Now, for the first time in digital, you can create a page with a wide variety of sizes that looks as good as the old metal type used to before 1960. All this comes at a cost. Cycles took many years of painstaking work to develop. And it isn't cheap to buy today. At $299 for the complete set of 37 fonts, this isn't a typeface for those on a tight budget, but on the other hand it's reasonable for the stunning marriage of technology, art and craft that the package embodies.

Why bother? Because everything you print with size-optimized fonts will be more readable at small sizes and more beautiful at larger sizes—and that's true whether your project is for print or for screen viewing. And that reflects well on you and your work. Whether it's for your own aesthetic satisfaction, or to win a competitive edge, using size-optimized fonts helps give you the ineffable advantage that says you have competence and taste.

The fontmaker
Of the four indisputably great living type designers, Adrian Frutiger, Hermann Zapf, Matthew Carter, Sumner Stone, only the latter is an American, yet he is the least well known. And to say that a type designer is not well known is not saying much: the recent profile of Matthew Carter in the New Yorker (December 5, 2005) marks the first time a popular magazine has spilled ink about a living typeface designer and attempted to explain to the public just what it is that we actually read.

Probably Stone's most pervasive achievement is, directly, the creation of Adobe Type as we know it, and indirectly, the creation of Desktop Publishing as we know it. The five years he spent at Adobe from 1984 to 1989 as Director of Typography were a watershed. Until then, Adobe thought it was building better typewriters and designed its type specifically for low-resolution output.

Stone insisted from the beginning that digital type must be designed for high-resolution output. It was Stone who guided the talented executants at Adobe, Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly, and directed the projects that would result in such digital milestones as Adobe Minion, Caslon, Garamond and Trajan. Without Stone, Adobe might still be churning out low-res versions of established classics like Hermann Zapf's Palatino and Matthew Carter's Galliard. Stone is also responsible for thinking up Multiple Masters, and persuading Adobe to make the huge investment it required to bring the technology to daylight.

Since leaving Adobe, Stone has spent 16 years lovingly creating typeface families at the highest level of expertise. Particularly notable for display are Silica, the world's first and only beautiful slab serif, used by publishers as disparate as TV Guide and the Norwegian Railway Museum, Magma, the first important flared sans serif since Zapf's seminal Optima, and Basalt, an innovative all-cap display type originally designed for signage at Stanford University. Cycles answers every requirement of fine book and magazine publishing, with its full complement of true small caps and non-lining figures. Two related types are also interesting: Stone Print, an exceptionally compressed family designed for Print Magazine, and SFPL, a workhorse general purpose family intermediate in width between Print and Cycles, intended for general business applications. And of course the ITC Stone family is very widely used. If you're a fan of the popular ITC Stone Sans, check out the new Humanist version of Stone Sans, in particular.

Cycles is one of the two or three top choices for text setting today, along with Matthew Carter's Miller from the Font Bureau. Why? It used to be said of Caslon type that in spite of its irrationalities and crudities, it was somehow the most readable, the friendliest of all types. Cycles fulfills that function for us today. It's not a revival, it doesn't follow any rigid rules, and there is a lot that is unexpected in it if you look at it closely. But what it has above all is friendliness. You can set page after page and never tire of it. It's never oppressive, it never seems wrong. Yet it doesn't draw attention to itself, doesn't go out of its way to please. It's an organic whole that pairs the liveliness of art with the cold demands of functionality.

If you want to set happy pages, this is the font to do it in. It incarnates in type two of the best, most typically American qualities: unquenchable optimism and consummate know-how.

How to sum up Sumner Stone? Matthew Carter puts it best: "Sumner is the conscience of present-day type design: he does the right things, he does them in the right way, he only does them right, and he always does them right."

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