Open counter connection on R & B to give more life, and a more calligraphic feel.
Brought in top bowl of B and reduced the weight slightly, adjusted the shape to match the R more closely.
Change shape of C serif to closer resemble angle and size of S serif.
Made C slightly more narrow to close large hole in wordmark, brought in the right stroke ending.
‘Kick out’ the leg of R to add warmth and width to the letterform.
Scribe and Quarterly in all caps in the same size would have been akin to yelling, so I downplayed the word Quarterly by reducing its size and placing it to the right. Then, be- cause not all the letterforms felt perfectly balanced to us, I worked with a typographer (someone who specializes in typeface design) to modify some of them—for instance, we widened out the R and adjusted the top “bowl” of the B to bring a greater sense of movement to the wordmark. At the same time, I began adjusting the spacing be- tween the individual letterforms. This is done by taking out or adding tiny amounts of space between each pair of let- terforms until there is a visually pleasing and legible word. The goal is to ensure the spacing between the characters appears even and balanced to the human eye, especially where certain letters might appear too close together or too far apart. (Counterintuitively, simply using the exact same amount of space between all the letters does not achieve this effect.) The wordmark you see on the cover of Scribe Quarterly may have taken its cue from Le Bé’s Hebraic typeface but, it was the breakthrough of digital font master Matthew Car- ter and typographer Scott-Martin Kosofsky that taught me that historic research is a worthy pursuit. Their fresh digital “cut” of Le Bé’s typeface inspired me because of its clarity and swooping beauty. As Kosofsky wrote about designing their Le Bé font: “You don’t throw out your visual culture because you’re trying to reinvent yourself. We’re a people with a tradition—why should we lose it?”
projections that appear on the strokes of the letters can help guide a reader’s eye along the lines of text, which is why serif typefaces are easier to read (and why most magazines and newspapers use them for the bulk of their articles). Different typefac- es also evoke different sensibilities, which I refer to as a “tone and flavour”; for exam- ple, a sans serif offers a more modern look while a script conveys elegance. These cat- egories are fundamental to a designer’s choice of the right typeface for a project. Designing a wordmark involves far more than settling on a typeface: there are countless decisions about size, capitaliza- tion, kerning (the spacing between letters), and configuration. After mocking up doz- ens of options, narrowing down to a list of three, and much debate, we decided to start with a typeface called Tangerine for Scribe Quarterly ’s logo. The typeface is monumen- tal in proportion and somewhere between a sans serif and serif. Its thicks and thins are reminiscent of Le Bé’s Hebraic font. Selecting it was just the beginning, however. Because the lowercase letterforms in Tangerine are quirky, I decided to set Scribe Quarterly in all caps—but setting both
In the Details Incremental tweaks to the letterforms in Scribe
Quarterly ’s wordmark.
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