Ravenscar type specimen

This review was published in Parenthesis, the Journal of the Fine Press Book Association, no.48 2024

This issue of Parenthesis is set in Jeremy Tankard’s new typeface Ravenscar . The specimen booklet accompanying its release is a distinguished addition to a genre that has been radically redefined by the changed conditions of the digital era. Where the immediate practical function of the type specimen (as promotional tool and reference document) has been subsumed by our rapid access to online resources, the printed specimen has become for some an increasingly important tool of ‘brand differentiation’, establishing the distinct identity and ethos of independent foundries.
When compared to the early decades of digital type production, the position of the independent type designer has been constrained in recent years. Those surviving the dominion of the ‘big beasts’ have preserved a niche role as the research branch or conceptual think-tank of the industry. True to this strategy, the specimen Tankard has designed for Ravenscar functions as an investigative document that establishes his typeface not only by demonstrating an exceptional standard of technical expertise but also by the quality of critical thinking that informs it. Now that Tankard is firmly established as one of the pre-eminent typeface designers of our time: it is illuminating to be able to focus on his work as a typographer. This type specimen is an exemplar of typographic design in which a unique and inventive organisational logic has been applied to the narrative explaining the design of a typeface.
Distinctive and original in conception and highly detailed in its execution, the design of Ravenscar is rooted in reflections upon matters of place and identity. It takes as its defining motif the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, and in particular an area of rock above Malham Cove. Tankard notes that the natural patterning of a limestone pavement ‘serves well as a text-setting metaphor (words and spaces)’ and describes ‘a dramatic, textural and graphic landscape’. A perfect explanation of ‘the textural page with its play of space between letter, word and line’. These observations are articulated in the play of vertical and horizontal elements in the design from the opening spread.
The following pages are rich in incident, dynamism and surprise, which then reveal a basis of semantic order; one that enables interaction between various streams of content. Every variation follows a consistent but highly original organisational logic, a hierarchy of contrasting paragraph stylings.
A dominant visual feature is the role of vertical elements; in the way information has actually been set on a vertical axis and also in the margin intervals of the narrow columns. Justification is managed not by traditional word spacing, but by the breaking of words at whatever point they reach the column margin. The effect upon the reading process is only intrusive to a controlled extent, arresting the attention of the reader while reinforcing the vertical intervals that reference the ‘grykes’ of the geological structure.
The layout of the page spreads reflects a closely integrated practice of writing and design. Tankard’s observations are organised according to a detailed system of typographic hierarchies, and the text has been conceived and written in such a way as to test and demonstrate the capabilities of the typeface, such as the meticulous attention given to the four optical sizes.
It helps that Tankard holds all the interdependent roles:author, typographer and type designer, with the typeface as the pre-existing constant. Together, the written text and typographic layout become the means by which the narrative is articulated, providing a unique insight into a high order of reflective design.
The designer’s designation of Ravenscar as an ‘old style slab serif’ might seem contradictory, but it is in the resolution of such tensions that dynamics occur. The term ‘old style’ has traditionally been applied to those styles of printers’ type that pre-date the ‘modern’ types of the Enlightenment (styles for which Maximilien Vox coined the compendious category ‘Garalde’), while the slab serif is distinctly 19th century idiom. Appending an unbracketed slab serif to a humanist body is a stylistic tributary in its own right, adding Ravenscar to a lineage that includes Eric Gill’s Joanna, W A Dwiggins’s Electra and the ‘square serif’ variant of Ronald Arnholm’s Legacy series. Like each of these, Ravenscar is a carefully considered synthesis of divergent stylistic ideas, which gains in vitality through the tensions it resolves.
However, considerations of ‘style’ alone seem inadequate here. Tankard notes that ‘rather than develop interesting letter shapes or choosing a specific design style’ the design is informed by close analysis of a range of examples of set text. It is a measure of the intellectual rigour he has brought to this process that the outcome is not just a diluted anthology of established norms or that his own originality of mind is so evident in the resultingletters, but that it lies in the relationships between them.
The typeface is furnished with a range of features and refinements which are demonstrated within a matrix of interdependent typographic stylings, designed to showcase them within a cohesive whole. It is this that sustains the dynamic quality of each page spread while retaining a consistent quality of spatial and semantic organisation.
The quality of any professional typeface is demonstrated less by the properties of the letter-shapes than by its relational aspects: the manner in which bold weights have been extrapolated from the ‘regular’ or ‘medium’, the conformity and contrast offered by the italic, and the effect of the letters en masse. The design of the Ravenscar booklet vividly demonstrates these relationships, and prompted me to look again at the 1924 specimen book for Caslon Old Face, and particularly those pages set successively in 72, 60, 48 and 42 point. These made use of a telling observation from Updike that Caslon’s letters ‘are not perfect individually but in mass their effect is agreeable. That is, I think, their secret – a perfection of the whole, derived from harmonious but not necessarily perfect individual letter-forms.’ Close viewing of the Ravenscar letters at scale reveals many carefully calculated inconsistencies that achieve precisely the effect Updike describes. Enlarged, they confirm that this harmony has been achieved through a wealth of individual manipulation. This includes distinctive tensile qualities and the compressedcurves and unconventional play in the stress relationships of thick and thin strokes.
These are brought into particular focus by the optical sizing in the ‘tighter proportions and sharper detailing’ of the display fonts. As a key feature of professional standard typefaces, optical sizes in digital typeface design have reinstated refinements inherent in hand-punch cutting, compromised first by machine composition and more seriously in the photosetting era. The booklet makes vivid use of scale to demonstrate the highly sophisticated optical sizing across Text, Large text, Display and Fine.
The relationship between the italic and the Roman is one of the features of a typeface on which designers have taken a variety of positions, from Stanley Morison’s advocacy of the ‘sloped Roman’ to the partnering of designs on the basis of common historical period. The challenge of reconciling the opposing considerations of differentiation and harmonisation is a measure of the designer’s ingenuity and sophistication. In this, Ravenscar is exemplary. As an independent style developed ‘along a more expressive, cursive route’, the italics are a rhythmically lively relative of the Roman; close enough in texture and colour to coexist conformably within a text while distinct enough to signal difference. At scale they reveal a quality that, in Tankard’s words is ‘strong but springy’.
Another defining feature of a type’s individuality is the manner in which bold and light variants are extrapolated from the regular weight. Through the booklet each of the four weights of the typeface reveals a different aspect of its personality and its alignment with existing stylistic norms and precedents. Taken in combination with the four optical sizes, the permutations provide a three-dimensional perspective on the face and its character. The spreads show these variations in the various contexts ascribed to them by the author, providing a vivid panorama of typographic colour. If we stand back from the minutiae that characterise the practice of type design to consider this document and its relation to its subject as a gestalt, it can be read as a commentary upon the relationship of type and letters to place and history, articulated through the medium of typeface design, with the specimen as the exegesis of this process.
It would be tempting to discuss the design in terms of ‘visual poetics’ but this might suggest a concern for formal aesthetics – a typography of abstract form. In fact its aesthetic qualities reflect a more rigorous organisational discipline, a poetics of semantic order that recalls Froshaug or the ‘semantic poetry’ proposed by Themerson, whose work shares the type designer’s concern for the defining constraint, a quality common to poetry, typography and type design. The rich visual dynamics of the resulting page spreads are not ‘expressionistic’ in the sense of much ‘experimental’ typography, but grounded in semantic purpose.
A type specimen is a visual document in which the subject is also the medium, and therefore provides the designer-writer a uniquely integrated field of practice. As writer they can fashion a text devised to test and demonstrate the semantic and editorial properties of typographic variation. As a designer they can use properties of scale, positioning and alignment to give visual structure to complex relationships of meaning.
Working here as both writer and designer, Tankard has been able to move beyond secondary commentaries or the random phrases traditional to type specimens, and to use his own notes and observations as the textual material through which the type’s qualities are depicted. The reflections which form the main thematic narrative range engagingly between the universal and the particular. Tankard makes illuminating reference to a variety of authoritative sources, identifying fundamentals and governing principles common to type design as a whole, to establish the foundational context within which any new design develops.
The resulting arrangement invites multi-directional readings; I looked closely at each page before setting out to read it sequentially, and found both experiences equally rewarding. Taken as a whole this reveals an underlying poetic connection between the typeface and the Yorkshire landscape after which it is named. The crisp texture of Modigliani Neve provides the perfect substrate. The text is a rich bricolage constructed from the designer’s landscape notes and reflections on the process of type design, incorporating landscape notes, bird-calls, geological and botanical data and multiple commentaries, with each order of information ascribed its own distinctive typographic treatment.
Aligning type with landscape reveals fresh perspectives on the study of typographic style. Looking beyond the rather simplistic notion that letter profiles might evoke the contours of a landscape – as rugged, craggy, undulating – we can consider the possibility that a typeface has properties equivalent (or analogous) to those described as ‘spirit of place’ in landscape, and that this concept might be applied to the ‘personality’ of a typeface. Further enquiry into these properties could inform a kind of psychogeography of type, an imaginative navigation of the landscape of typographic style.
The Ravenscar specimen booklet is a significant contribution to the literature of typeface design, noteworthy at multiple levels: in its synthesis of contextual knowledge and originality of conception in a distinctive functional typeface, as a documentary account of a distinguished typographic mind at work, and as a visual artefact presenting a new conception of the scope and purpose of the printed type specimen in the 21st century. Lars Harmsen and Marian Misiak’s 2020 book on independent foundries (reviewed in Parenthesis 42) considered the continued vitality of the printed specimen in the digital era, proposing in its sub-title a ‘new culture of type specimens’. The idea that these artefacts might represent a culture is exemplified in Tankard’s Ravenscar document, which sets an impressive standard for the type specimen as a medium of cultural production and indeed as a creative form in its own right.
As a persuasive argument for the future of the printed specimen and the continued relevance of print, the booklet applies inventivebut rigorous typographic strategies to a high order of critical thinking, illuminating the status of typeface design as medium of reflection, commentary and creative endeavour.