Many type foundries and type designers have focused their craft on creating type for a world with far fewer boundaries, which demands recognition of written scripts outside the Western lens. Rosetta, an award-winning type design studio, bakes this into their mission: “to create original fonts for a polyphonic world.”
The studio’s newest typeface experiment takes the polyphonic idea and asks: Can we study the relationships of characters within the Latin script and use them to create a myriad of typeface variants so that everyone can get a unique one? Only Yours and Softly Yours, affectionately known as The Yourses, the result of that experiment, were officially released this fall.
The generation of a new font variant works not unlike the building blocks of DNA, where a multitude of characteristics and genetic factors come together to create a unique human. The Yourses leverage a myriad of Latin-script letterforms and design features to create unique fonts all formed by the same universe of possibilities. Rosetta releases nine new variants each day. There’s scarcity baked in, but this process also makes matching of font to the designer-customer less random. If you connect with a variant and license it, that particular font is no longer available. The Yourses essentially delivers a custom typeface to each customer.
Not only does this project challenge the traditional retail model, but it also takes into consideration our highly mutable digital creative lives. Could this be a way forward for the type of the future?
Only Yours, left; Softly Yours, right
I had the opportunity to chat with David Březina, Rosetta Type’s managing director. Our chat is below, lightly edited for length and clarity.
In a blog post about The Yourses, you talk about the desire to ‘treat typefaces as more mutable to bring back a sense of uniqueness into digital typeface design.’ What sparked this line of inquiry?
Rather than a spark, there were several conditions that brought it about. My PhD research was studying visual coherence in typeface design. This led me to pay attention to typeface-design traits that are neither global, such as weight or contrast, nor specific to individual letters. In another yet-unpublished project (Sacco), I have included a lot of alternates. It felt wasteful leaving them tucked away as alternate glyphs. Some of them have the potential to create an entirely new stylistic impression, some are more subtle, but all are viable, coherent members of the stylistic space. Designing a single typeface and including all the alternates seems like compressing a manifold of styles into a single package. Why should we do that?
So, I started pondering if one could design and offer all the variant typefaces directly. This had been on my mind for a few years. It seemed like too much work, and what would be the point? Why offer many variants? Then, also after years of planning, I finally managed to attend a Bob Dylan concert. I am not a major aficionado, more of a mid-weight fan, but I knew that he tends to rewrite his songs. His rewriting goes beyond ephemeral improvisation; the songs are codified to a degree, not randomized. The goal, in my humble opinion, is to keep the songs alive, authentic to his most recent self, and refreshing to the listeners. Moreover, he does not allow mobile devices at his concerts, which further ensures the performances are unique and personal.
When I thought about that, it all clicked. What if the variants were exclusive to individual customers to create a sense of authenticity?
Only Yours
Only Yours
Designing a single typeface and including all the alternates seems like compressing a manifold of styles into a single package. Why should we do that?
Was type as unique as your individual DNA the original goal of this project? Or did The Yourses evolve naturally into this territory as you tried to solve a different problem?
It was there from the beginning, but the vocabulary of how we talked about it has evolved during the project. I have heard the parallel to DNA used to explain the theory of the universal myth by Lévi Strauss. It is not that all myths are identical; rather, they use a set of identical narrative blocks to create unique stories.
It is not that all myths are identical; rather, they use a set of identical narrative blocks to create unique stories.
Only Yours randomized grid
As a writer, one of the things that strikes me about a book as a physical object, is that it is only a launching point for the story that the reader will co-create. The meaning-making of the story is written over and over again with each reader. It strikes me that The Yourses are an expression of this same idea in type.
I like that! A strict parallel for this would be a single font being seen differently by different readers, but what’s related is the acknowledgement of divergence in human experience, which is contradictory to simplistic automation and which I am trying to explore. Recently, I have read a paper discussing how problematic it is to look for central tendencies in multilingualism. People are more complex than deviations from a norm, and we now have techniques to study that, and it is true of software too. Our applications and fonts can be more personal. Only Yours is just one example of how it could be done.
Softly Yours
Softly Yours
How does the mechanism work (if that’s even the right word for it)?
There are two aspects of it: the design and the delivery. Rather than building numerous different alternate characters, the system uses alternate building blocks. Those are put together to create well-formed character shapes. Avoiding potential glitches and incompatible characters was quite a challenge. We have developed our own tools to produce the individual variants and to test them.
Another challenge was quality control. Since there are over a million variants, we could only check the key ones. Some of the blocks that change occur in many letters, others occur only in a single character, so that makes the checks easier. The delivery happens on the server. Each of the potential variants can be identified by a string of numbers, describing its peculiar design traits. We call this a seed. It would not be feasible to offer a million variants at once, so every day, we release nine new variants and keep them in the shop for 24 hours. When someone buys a particular variant, we record its seed, match it to the customer in our database, and block it from further sales. This way we can generate the fonts for the customer, provide them with updates, or provide additional weights if need be.
The whole delivery mechanism is not unrelated to NFTs. Unlike NFTs, fonts are actually useful. The fonts have vast language support and multiple weights.
You reference a yearning for unique creative expression, in the vein of analog craft such as letterpress and calligraphy. Could the idea of “designing for variants” within one type family be a digital antidote to the flatness of AI, for example?
Definitely. The goal is to comment on the mechanization of something as personal as our (hand)writing and explore a way to bring a bit of that back. Machine learning is one of the tools that could help us explore our diversity (as opposed to the central tendencies I mentioned earlier) and instead, the products that use it seem to aim at average. Or is it how people use it?
I also can’t help but think of this type of mechanism that enables designers to create for a multitude of neurodivergences, cultural lenses, people living with disabilities, etc.
I like your note regarding, say, customization. There are some uses of variable fonts in this direction. Perhaps this form of variation, or rather permutation, could be useful too. Something to ponder in the future.
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