Karloff (Superfamily). Peter Biľak, Pieter van Rosmalen, & Nikola Djurek, 2012. & Maria Doreuli 2013, 2017. Typotheque. Variants: Positive, Negative, Neutral.
Karloff, convergence of beauty and ugliness
Karloff connects the high contrast Modern type of Bodoni and Didot with the monstrous Italians. The difference between the attractive and repulsive forms lies in the contrast between the thick and the thin.
Karloff explores the idea of irreconcilable differences, how two extremes could be combined into a coherent whole.
At the start we looked at the high-contrast Didone typefaces which are considered by many as some of the most beautiful in existence, and the eccentric ‘Italian’, reversed-contrast typeface was designed to deliberately attract readers’ attention by defying their expectations. No other style in the history of typography has provoked such negative reactions as the Italian.
Karloff, the result of this project, connects the high contrast Modern type of Bodoni and Didot with the monstrous Italians. The difference between the attractive and repulsive forms lies in a single design parameter, the contrast between the thick and the thin.
Having designed two diametrically opposite versions, we undertook a genetic experiment with the offspring of the beauty and the beast, interpolation of the two extremes, which produced a surprisingly neutral low contrast version.
Read more about the concept in the article Beauty & Ugliness in Type Design.
https://www.typotheque.com/blog/beauty_and_ugliness
Design concept
Karloff explores the idea of irreconcilable differences, how two extremes could be combined into a coherent whole. At the start we looked at the high-contrast Didone typefaces which are considered by many as some of the most beautiful in existence, and the eccentric ‘Italian’, reversed-contrast typeface was designed to deliberately attract readers’ attention by defying their expectations. No other style in the history of typography has provoked such negative reactions as the Italian.
Read more about development of Karloff▸Styles
Karloff comes in three different contrast types (Positive, Negative, Neutral ). Karloff Negative then comes in three weights, each with its own italic, each style accompanied by Small Caps.
Authors
Karloff was conceived by Peter Biľak, designed by Pieter van Rosmalen, with assistance of Nikola Djurek in 2012. In 2013, Maria Doreuli designed the Greek and Cyrillic versions, which were published in 2017.
https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/karloff_neutral/about
Twenty years ago, mash-ups Dead History and Fudoni looked every bit the post-modern protagonists in The End of Print. Now Karloff is a less obvious kind of critical design: conceptual.
Peter Biľak argued in 2010 against the possibility of conceptual typefaces, but had second thoughts. Karloff is thus his investigation of how a non-typographic cultural idea — such as the relationship between beauty and ugliness — may be theorized using the medium of type design.
Biľak adopts a mathematical paradigm, the metafont (demonstrated in 1982 by its inventor Donald Knuth in a setting of Psalm 23 that morphed line-by-line from a small-x-height serif font to a large-x-height extended sans).
Metafont interpolation was productized as the Multiple Master font format by Adobe in the early 1990s, but didn’t catch on with the end user and was abandoned soon after. It has since become the workhorse that type designers use to generate large font families, but has rarely been taken to the next level. Typotheque published Gustavo Ferreira‘s parametric bitmap face Elementar in 2011, and now Karloff (by Biľak with assistance from Pieter van Rosmalen and Nikola Djurek).
In order to form a legitimate theorem that beauty is the mathematical inverse of ugliness — with a Neoclassical Didone at one pole of the design axis and its angle of stress rotated 90 degrees at the other (the dreaded Italian) — compromises had to be made to these 19th-century models to ensure that the median style was clean enough to offer proof of the proposition.
The proof falls short: A 50/50 interpolation made by the author reveals that, despite substantial adjustments to the Italian so that it is far from an authentic revival, significant artifacts remain in the Neutral that require manual clean up.
Being conceptual, this failure has no bearing on the usability of the individual fonts — three typefaces, really. It’s impressive enough that the Neutral comes as close as it does to a clean monoline; the ‘S’ demonstrated at left is a loose end. Many letters, such as ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘m’, and, of course, ‘O’, are near perfect. And, by its very inability to make a perfectly smooth axis between the two poles, Karloff does indeed illuminate its subject.
Here is what I’ve drawn from the experiment:
1. Neoclassical beauty is pure, conforming to a sublime archtype, but ugliness, in the way that Karloff Negative diverges from the Italian, is posited not in its own right, but as an aberration.
2. Ugliness is disfiguration; the Italian is merely topsy-turvy. Redesigned here with a rigor informed by its interpolation with the Didone, it becomes quite well ordered and refined, intellectual even.
3. Constrained by their metafont relationship, the three disparate styles emerge with authentic personalities in their respective genres — the Neutral in particular.
4. The notion of beauty parametrically wedded to ugliness is not typographically meaningful or market-friendly, and this is acknowledged by the names Positive, Neutral, and Negative, not Beautiful, Plain, and Ugly.
5. Nonetheless, might not graphic designers implement the modality which this typeface makes possible, conceiving of designs which have typographic meanings derived from ideas, not looks? A text on cosmetics, for instance, might be set in Karloff Neutral, as a statement of objectivity.
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