NOTES ON EXTENDING MARVIN

by Mathieu Triay

After modernising Marvin, ironing out some of the kinks I could see and making a more sturdy and a little more versatile version, I set out to extend it. I started working on Marvin Visions to support Visions, a new science fiction magazine, and magazines have editorial needs that can’t be satisfied by a chunky sans. Of course the magazine would use other typefaces to do what Marvin can’t, but if Marvin was to be the identity of the magazine it would need additional flexibility.

Marvin is not naturally suited for this kind of job, like an elephant in a china shop, it tramples happily any subtelty and detail. However, Marvin is a geometric sans at its core, and despite its Art Deco influence, it looks surprisingly normal if you don’t use letters like V/A/N (without looking neutral, or ever having that pretension). Neutral-ish Marvin Big Bold

Early on I wondered what a regular weight would look like. It wouldn’t tick all the boxes but maybe that would bring enough flexibility to use it smaller, with a little tracking. That’s where the idea of the family came from, thinking I could make another master and get three more weights that would work for headlines and sub-heads.

Marvin Goes On A Diet

I had spent a very long time perfecting the skeleton of the bold weight, fixing curves and proportions. Making the bold weight had been an effort in reviving and re-interpreting, and the safety of that net was very pleasant. There was a source of truth to go back to, to hold onto. Making another weight without reference was something new and exciting but I was on my own for the first time.

Modern sans serifs come in a large variety of weights pretty much since Univers. You’ve got the bolds, the semi-bolds, the demi-bolds, the mediums and whatnot (the 60’s had different schemes, with Fat and Obese once used to describe the bolder end of the spectrum). As a result, there are plenty of references to go on to make a regular weight geometric sans serif, and not the least, the same references that were used to make the bold weight (Kabel, Serif Gothic, etc.). The main difference lied in retaining the ‘Marvin mood’ and not slip into a sanitised version of itself. However, typefaces with similar influences to Marvin seemed to be harder to find as part of a family (besides maybe Busorama).

So I started using the same skeleton I spent so much time perfecting. The proportions, the curves, everything I had refined, collapsed pretty quickly as soon as the stem width was halved.

Letters like C that had been extended a little bit started to look like they lost balance. Same thing for P/R/K and all the other letters I had spent so much time crafting. The design decisions of the original Marvin were starting to make themselves clear, with the difference in proportions between letters becoming far more apparent at a lighter weight. At the same time, my own design decisions were starting to show. The more open counters and wider curves made it far more readable at smaller sizes.

As soon as the proportions of troublesome glyphs were fixed, I started on spacing. I didn’t want to make the same mistake I had made before and start spacing too late. Because the main use was still display, I wanted to keep the tight-not-touching spacing I had for the bold weight but the spacing still had to be a little looser to accommodate the far larger counters. First version of the Marvin Regular master as of December 2017

When the first proofs were out the first reactions were ‘This is nice but, what if it was even lighter? Like, super thin?’. These were comments by designers — type users — and not type designers which made it all the more relevant. If a designer sees how they could use a specific weight of a font, sees something that they like in a regular weight but can visualise a thinner one working very well for something, it’s worth listening. I followed up very quickly with an extrapolated, auto generated, thin weight. Although it was all over the place, it was a great way to see how things might look slimmed down to the extreme with low effort. It got the thumbs up. Extrapolated Marvin Thin. Pretty banged up but good enough to know if it’s worth pursuing.

For a simple sans serif like Marvin, two masters covering the extremes (a thin and a bold) can be enough to interpolate a number of weights in between with reasonable accuracy. So I set my regular weight aside and started from scratch with a thin weight instead.

The problems I had encountered with the regular weight were only exacerbated. The same letters looked completely squished against towering others like O which pushed aside anything and everything out of sheer circularity. The spacing had to be much wider to avoid words looking like a series of barcodes on the page. The number 3 needed a completely different construction and the whole alphabet simply started to look lanky. Early version of the Thin master. Spacing is too tight.

The challenge had just gotten harder. Thin sans were very trendy a few years back and a lot of families have extremely thin weights. But when it came to capturing the same 60’s Marvin feel, with a touch of the Art Deco, thin examples were much scarcer. I did find a few examples that I could look at but most of them dealt with proportions in extreme ways. Either everything was extended or they stuck more to the Art Deco style and ran with letters with massive differences in width. In the meantime I had also acquired the full Face Photosetting catalogue and could draw inspiration from other faces designed by Michael Chave and his team. Marvin Visions set in DJR’s Extraordinaire and Busorama Thin, both taking different direction on the Art Deco thin.

At this point, I made the decision to go with modernity. I wanted Marvin Visions to be versatile so something too vernacular might restrict it to some very specific situations. I set out to embrace the width difference but to compensate as much as possible like I did for the bold weight.

This time, the O had to forego a little of its perfection and accept to become more oval, if only for the sake of its siblings. The K and the R have their legs stick out much further, when they’re traditionally very narrow in Art Deco lettering. The C is properly extended to compensate its half circle nature. The U is wider, as are a lot of the letters, to compensate the loss of fat. If you lose weight, you gotta build muscle to replace. Differences between Marvin Thin and Marvin Bold.

This brought a couple of new things to the design. The introduction of proto-ink traps in the N, R, K, M and W to prevent their joints from darkening and causing black spots. The very graphic ogonek designed for the bold weight certainly didn’t stand the test of the thin weight and had to adopt a more classical approach.

The final result retains the Marvin feel but doesn’t tread too far into the Art Deco territory which maybe would have been the easy thing to do. Instead it feels like it veers more towards the modernist aesthetic without completely forgetting where it comes from.

Neue Kabel, Marvin Visions and Busorama (again)

Marvin Goes Under The Microscope

When the thin master was well under way I started working on individual glyphs for the purpose of interpolation. For some reason, I couldn’t get a regular weight that felt like the one I had designed earlier in the process. The thin design decisions had taken their toll on the mid-weights so I re-introduced some of my regular drawings in a middle master, bringing the total number of masters to three. This provided greater control over the look and feel of Marvin’s transition from fat to slim, playing up to different decades of art and design throughout.

It took a little over 3 months to get to a point where I was happy with the drawings and the weight progression. It looked great for display use, as intended, however, when used smaller and tracked, things started to fall apart once more.

Because of the tight-not-touching spacing, the side bearings work differently that they normally would. There is less compensation to apply for open counters because you set your space based on whether the sides of the letters are touching. As a result, whenever the new display weight were tracked to be used smaller, the spacing didn’t look elegant enough at small sizes. As the space between the letters increases, the need to optically adjust the spacing also increases. For instance, in the bold weight, you get 15 units of space on either side of the H but also on either side of the F, which would traditionally be a lot smaller to the right. But as the distance between the letters increases, the space on the right side of the F might actually get smaller because of its very open nature. Marvin Big Bold tracked 70 vs Marvin Small Bold with default spacing but with matching cap height. Notice the different distribution of weight and space.

I toyed with the idea of duplicating the weights and setting a new default spacing for use in small sizes. However, very quickly the letters appeared lanky again when used small. Everything appeared very narrow and tall, even with looser spacing.

There are many adjustments to make for a typeface to work at smaller sizes. The idea that the same design can work equally well at all sizes is very optimistic. That requirement imposes a lot of restrictions on the design of the letterforms, leading to very similar utilitarian designs. So it’s no coincidence that in the past each letter was designed separately to work at a specific size. With the advancement in screen and printing technologies, the need for this may have decreased slightly but there is such a thing as a text version and a display one.

Feeling like I needed to learn more about what designing for small sizes entailed before I jumped back, I got hold of the very useful Size-specific adjustments to type designs. The book takes a very exhaustive approach to the different things that can affect how we perceive letters. Essentially the very things that made the display weights of Marvin interesting were also detrimental to their use in text size. The letters needed to be squatter, shorter and wider, and the weight progression needed to be less extreme. The thin weights needed to be bolder and the bold weights needed to be less bold. The three display masters were redrawn to create three small masters. They’re a little bit shorter, wider, and even larger counters. The diacritics have been repositioned and redrawn to match the new looser spacing adapted to small sizes. Marvin Big Demibold tracked 60 vs Marvin Small Bold default spacing. Shorter, squatter, lighter letters.

For the same reasons, I drew an alternate round top A that would distribute space around itself a bit better. The slopping A created too much space at the top and while it still works, the round top A sometimes look more comfortable. There’s also an alternate V and slopping A for both optical sizes. These had already appeared in the original version thanks to a simple flip, for instance in the logo for the Teatre Victoria in Barcelona. Alternate A and V. You’ll also find a swash Q if you look for it.

Marvin & The Shape-Changers From Outer Space

Of course, Marvin Visions is not meant to be used for extended text, but as the smaller weights were shaping up I could see these being used for captions or running heads. Usually type families will have display and text sub families but this wasn’t adapted to Marvin Visions which has a cruder grading and no text pretensions. Following the advice of David Jonathan Ross, they were named with a more playful ‘Big’ and ‘Small’.

With six interpolating masters, three ‘small’ and three ‘big’, I could generate many more weights than were initially promised in the pre-orders. I chose a grading of 6 weights for ‘big’, and 4 weights for ‘small’, essentially cutting out the extremes and increasing the thickness of the middle weights.

There were a lot of challenges in keeping things point compatible in the K, 3, and a few others, but that paid off. Glyphs, the software I used to make this font, offers beta support for variable fonts out of the box. As a result, every family pre-order and purchase includes a variable font based on the 6 masters with two axis: weight and optical size.

The variable fonts aren’t supported in InDesign just yet which makes its usefulness for the magazine somewhat questionable, but for designers, and I’m thinking mainly about the use of the more extreme weight ends of the small optical size, this opens new possibilities. And if your browser supports variable fonts, you’ve been enjoying the Marvin Visions variable font throughout. Purely for web performance, a woff2 of Marvin Visions variable is 32kb and the 10 weights in woff2 amount to 230kb. You can read on the other benefits of variable fonts in an article I wrote earlier this year.

Marvin Meets His Maker

In my previous Notes on Reviving Marvin, I put a call out to get in touch with Michael Chave, the original designer. Having failed to reach out to him after all my trails had dried up, I was sort of resigned. However, thanks to Florian Hardwig of Fonts In Use who managed to find a way to contact him, I was able to get in touch with Michael and exchange a few emails about type design and the type industry of the 60s/70s. Here’s what he said (links added for the reader).

I started my first job at Letraset’s type design studio in 1964, spent 6 months learning to stencil cut type @ 100mm cap height, but we couldn’t work on our own designs. So my ideas I kept in a portfolio with drawings and scraps of type I had seen. When I met John McConnell a year later, talk of Face Photosetting started within 6 months and I moved into John’s studio in Covent Garden (1967). This is the time I started working on my own alphabet, within 6 months we had 30 new faces to mix in with the VGC fonts from America. Face started early 1968. I ran production. I had a little spare time during the day to work on new faces, but as Face grew I had no time at all. We decided to have a separate type design department away from production. This about the time I started work on Marvin. Going to the design of Marvin, it has its roots in Art Deco, it was more of a construction than a design, drawn with a ruler and compass, without any visual correction. A lowercase would have been impossible, the figures 4 and 8 prove the point, the face was not stencil cut, but drawn as black and white artwork, it looked better! We also drew up ‘Matra’ at the same time and with the same method. Most faces were drawn in pencil, then cut with Ulano Rubylith, which gave a very sharp edge.

At this point I was very glad to have my suspicions about the design of Marvin confirmed. If you take a look at the original 4 and 8, the counters are already incredibly small so going any bolder would take a redrawing and also include some visual corrections.

Marvin and Matra together in the Face Photosetting catalogue.

The second half of the 60s was a great time to be in the arts, it just took off, a whole new freedom of expression in all forms of music, photography, design, painting. Type had just broken free from ‘metal set type,’ with its limitations of spacing and boring old fashioned styles. Hand lettering, Letraset and photosetting opened up lots of scope. Fonts were designed and made quickly, in a few days, the big metal type foundries would take years to bring out a new face! The down side to this urgency was, not every typeface had enough consideration, and some just poorly designed. Face Photosetting was thought to be the best in type design and the finished headline. We attracted most of best publishers, design groups, record companies. Ad agencies slowly catching up later. We couldn’t copyright typefaces, too expensive, also it would mean copyrighting each character! So other photosetting companies would copy our original faces and just change the names, Marvin would become Marvine! We just had to roll with it. I had a great team working with me. Some I had lured from Letraset, Pat Hickson, Steve Jackaman, Les Lawence. Our clients would also design typefaces, Tony Geedes worked at BBC TV graphics (Wood Lane), he designed about a dozen in all. One of my own designs was ‘Cupid’ which was first published as a caps only, but a couple of years later I added a lowercase and it sold much better. It’s one of my favourites.

Specimen of Cupid, drawn by Michael Chave, from the Face Photosetting catalogue.

Early in our conversation, I mentioned to Michael my plans to expand on Marvin and turn it into a family. We also discussed the idea I had very early on to maybe add a lowercase (but relented).

I was thinking about what you said about adding a lower case to Marvin Visions, it would be possible if the weight was a little bit lighter and the x-height of the lowercase was large in relation to the cap height. So it makes sense to leave Marvin Visions as it is and design a lighter weight, or even a family of ‘Marvin Visions’. I found from experience that if a family is to be developed, it is best to work on all the variants of weights at the same time, starting with the basic forms (O-I). The hardest character to design in a family of weights is the upper and lower case S. To keep the overall look of the shape of an ‘s’, without it becoming too narrow, and the internal counters should look the same.

Michael has been extremely generous with his time and even took a look at my proofs of the new weights for Marvin Visions and gave me this feedback which made this whole project worthwhile.

I have studied the 6 weights of Marvin Visions and I think it looks fantastic, I really like the Extra Light, it shows the bones of the body, looks great, very readable with style. I wish I had thought of doing it in the 1980’s! Regular and medium weights can look bland, but yours have kept the interest.

Following on from this very nice compliment, Michael also sent me his sketch for a lowercase that he’s made after our conversation.

A sketch for a lowercase for Marvin by Michael Chave (2018).

Having tried and failed to draw a satisfactory lowercase ‘a’ myself, I was taken by this elegant solution that fits so perfectly and effortlessly with the Marvin mood.

Marvin Goes on Holiday

The project is finished. This is already much more than I ever thought I could do and it’s time for me to let Marvin be for a little while. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll find the time to finish the oblique axis I started? Or complete the lowercase alphabet? In the meantime, the family will get free updates based on the needs of the magazine.

I want to thank David Jonathan Ross for his invaluable feedback on the family but also his general guidance in the type world. Thanks to Toshi Omagari who took the time out of his insane schedule and video game fonts to send me a very helpful list of fixes to make. Thank you to James Jones for designing these lovely posters that showcase the new capabilities of Marvin Visions. And thank you to the good people of Diacritics Club for taking a look at my proofs months after month.

Particular thanks to Claudia Toia, Matthew Young, Tom Etherington and Francisca Monteiro for their continuous support, encouragement and always spot on feedback.

Finally, thanks to Michael Chave for his generosity, time and insight. It’s been a real privilege to chat.