Structure in Type Design — I Love Typography Ltd

The legendary type designer Adrian Frutiger once described an epiphany he had: “When I put my pen to a blank sheet, black isn’t added, but rather the white sheet is deprived of light. […] Thus I also grasped that the empty spaces are the most important aspect of a typeface.”

This balance or tension between black and white, between form and space, between the strokes of letters and the spaces within them is the art of type design — it’s what keeps type designers up at night. This play of black and white not only defines individual letterforms but also words, paragraphs, and indeed the entire typographic page.

Fonts in the ILT store, besides being categorized within traditional categories, like sans serif, serif, and script, are also described by ILT’s very own system of type descriptors called CEDARS+, an acronym for C ontrast, E nergy, D etails, A xis, R hythm, and S tructure. You can read more about CEDARS+ in Nadine’s article, Talking about type: Introducing CEDARS+ — she invented the system.

Nadine describes CEDARS+ as “a set of type descriptors that can describe any typeface in any script based on its formal qualities.” In her approach to type design and her understanding of type in general, she prefers to “analyze the structures upon which letterforms are built and the tools that trace that structure. If the letterform is the body, then the structure is the skeleton upon which it is built. The thicks and thins created by the movement of the tool, the way that tool is cut, and the angle with which it is held create the mass around that skeleton.”

“Every good typeface contains within its outlines its own logic of creation, the reason why letters look the way they do. On a foundational level, this is driven by the structure upon which letterforms are built, the ‘writing’ tool that has traced this structure, and the speed with which this tool has moved.” — Nadine Chahine

We could, if we chose to, categorize typefaces based on the shapes of their counters — even the shape of a single representative counter, say, the one in the letter “o,” for example. Genius, you say! But there is a downside to this approach that will become evident in a moment.

CEDARS+ takes a different approach by describing the structure of the loops and the nature of the movement that created them. We’ll come to precisely what loops are in a moment. Before we do, it’s time to imagine something: visualize a geometric sans serif typeface. The name suggests that the counters will be circular or approximately circular in shape.

Now imagine that you left therapy early and you’re now bored and curious, and so you go through the entire typeface, changing those circular counters to square ones. You’ve certainly changed the appearance of the typeface, but you’ve not altered its fundamental structure. You could argue that they’re an arbitrary or superficial design change, in the same way that adding serifs to the stems of your abused geometric sans would be superficial (and weird).

“The material of typography is the black, and it is the designer’s task with the help of this black to capture space and to create harmonious whites inside the letters as well as between them.” — Adrian Frutiger

That’s where CEDARS “loops” come in, and it’s why loops are listed under structure rather than detail in the CEDARS+ system. The easiest way to understand CEDARS loops is to look at the arch of the letter “n” and how it flows from the stem. The speed of its movement affects the shape of its curve and, in turn, the shape of the counter underneath it. This loop structure is a fundamental part of the letter’s design and is repeated throughout many other letters in the typeface — think about the direct influence of n on h , m , and u , for example. Altering its geometry results in a structural change that alters the very DNA of the typeface. This is gene splicing, not nail art. Make changes to serifs, say, from slab to wedge, and you have the same typeface with different serifs — a pig in shoes. Change the structure of that arch or loop and you have something other than a pig entirely.

Loops are a repeated structural element throughout a typeface. Font credit: Rig Sans by Jamie Clarke Type

To press the point further about the limits of traditional font categorization, consider a classic Didone typeface, the kind you see in fashion magazines. Its most distinctive attributes are its high contrast and hairline serifs. But what happens when you do terrible violence to a Didone by chopping off its serifs? What does it become? According to traditional font categories, it would no longer be a Didone; you’d have to recategorize it as some kind of sans serif. However, the resulting design is closer in DNA to a Didone...