On the 10th November 2017, I visited the Wolpe Collection run by Monotype. They exhibit the original Berthold Wolpe’s works, his original fonts and several digital fonts based on his works including Albertus Nova.
There I could see how they created fonts with delicate care and how they did the layout before the computer age (Fig. 1). There were also many typographic examples of posters, books or signages. He created great typographic designs in the age of hand drawing and technical limitations. This provided me with useful information such as the layout to make the message stand out, the device of layout, colour and organic design based on handwriting which is popular in recent years (Fig. 2).
Fig. 1 Type and cover plan
Fig. 2 Book and poster design by Wolpe
What was interesting for me was a guideline about the street sign of the City of London (Fig. 3). In this blog, I have mentioned about public signage and bold san serif typefaces that were used. However, they made it with the bold Albertus typeface which uses a bit of a round stroke and slight serif. Serif type is the older style than sans serif and tends to be considered as a classic. This slight serif typeface is still recognisable even from a distance but it also has a peculiar taste compared to modern typefaces such as Helvetica. I believe street signs are the face of the city which represents the city itself – it appears in the street signs of Paris as well – and this Albertus font gives a classic atmosphere to the old city matching the City crest (Fig.4).
Fig. 3 The City of London signage guideline
Fig. 4 Display of street sign and Guildhall sign today
Besides the type designer Toshi Omagari of Monotype revived and updated the Wolpe’s fonts from the original works, he created lost letters, small caps, letters of other languages such as Greek and different weight (See Fig. 5). In the interview, Omagari stated “If had a problem with one typeface, the way Wolpe drew characters for other typefaces sometimes offered a solution,” (Tucker, E. 2017). He appropriated not only the same font of Wolpe’s work but also all of Wolpe’s creations to interpret Wolpe’s intention and make something new in today’s context. This methodology of appropriation was intriguing to me.
Fig. 5 Poster with new digital Wolpe Collection
Reference:
TUCKER, E. (2017) ‘The Wolpe Collection celebrates a quiet legend of design, Berthold Wolpe’. MONOTYPE. [Online] Available from: http://www.monotype.com/blog/font-stories/the-wolpe-collection-celebrates-a-quiet-legend-of-design-berthold-wolpe/