Rod McDonald sat at an old wooden table in the second floor of Coach House Books in Toronto and talked about a forgotten grotesque typeface. The publishing house smelled like coffee, with hints of the wet ink and paper dust from downstairs.

For years, McDonald had been toiling on a computer in his Nova Scotia home, renovating an old typeface for a modern world to create something new.

Most typefaces are sent out to the world rather unceremoniously, online, but McDonald’s latest was going to be launched a few blocks from Times Square, at the Type Directors Club in Manhattan. It would be an important day for the man who never meant to become a type maker when he began pinstriping cars as a 12-year-old, setting his life on a winding course that led here: at 69, he’s one of Canada’s most prominent type designers, known for his modesty — and his talent.

“I don’t sound like an idiot saying I’m trying to take grotesque into the mainstream?” he asked his friends and colleagues in March, prepping for the New York talk.

Not at all, they reassured him, although one friend piped up that the average person might say, “What the hell is a grotesque?”

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For most people, “grotesque” conjures hideous creatures, but in the world of type, it’s an old name for a certain style.

When printing press technology spread to Southern Europe in the 15th century, early typographers replicated the calligraphic style popular at the time, explained Allan Haley, a consulting typographer and writer. Serifs, those small lines and feet that finish off letters, were a natural outgrowth. For several hundred years, serifed typefaces were the norm in print, until the 1800s, when a style emerged without the appendages.

There are a few theories about the name, but the widely accepted story is that people, so accustomed to serifs, found these new letters ugly, grotesque even. They were minimalist, blocky, a little grouchy and inconsistent, but you could cram so much more on a sign. Advertisers loved them, and they became an important voice of the Industrial Revolution, popular on signage, train schedules and handbills.

In the 1920s, the grotesques were overshadowed by more geometric styles, but they came back in vogue after the Second World War, until an evolution in style changed the game with a modern, homogenized look. These typefaces, like Univers and Helvetica, came from Swiss designers. Clean, simple and bright, they became the face of corporate America through the 1960s and 1970s, and remain ubiquitous today.

It seemed like the world moved on from the wonky old grotesques, but McDonald, a Canadian type designer with a love of history, always wondered about those fonts from 90 years ago. Could you smooth out some of their idiosyncrasies and transform them into a modern typeface, while still keeping their charm?

Since 2008, he had been creating a typeface inspired by these old grotesques, including the 1926 Monotype Grotesque family. He released a basic range of 14 styles in 2012, and since then, had been working on a super-family of 56 styles, set to be released the first week of April: Classic Grotesque.

When McDonald finished his dress rehearsal for the big day, Patrick Griffin, who runs the font studio Canada Type, stood up from the table. “One thing he’s not saying, because this guy doesn’t like to toot his own horn: it’s the biggest thing to ever be released by a Canadian. It’s the largest and the longest, just in terms of how much time it took.”

“That’s just because I’m slow,” McDonald said, deflecting.

“It’s the biggest thing to ever come out of Canada in terms of type design,” Griffin continued.

McDonald, dressed in grey and black, unadorned like his sans-serif typeface, unfolded his arms, and rested them on the table.

“I’m not going to say that,” he said.

By early April, McDonald was preparing to leave his home and jet to New York, feeling confident in the typeface, and trying not to concern himself with what-ifs.

“I’ve got people saying to me, ‘Oh, you’re going to be a millionaire.’ And somewhere between that — and the fact that nobody’s going to buy it — is the truth.”

From hot rods to hot type

Talk to people in the Canadian design world, and you’ll hear the same words describing McDonald. Humble. Shines the spotlight on others. Talented. A perfectionist.

“If there was someone born to be a type designer it would be Rod McDonald,” said Dominic Ayre, creative director at Toronto design firm Hambly & Woolley. “Because arguably there aren’t that many people that have put so much blood, sweat and tears into their work to then release it to the world and hope for the best.”

But McDonald wasn’t a kid who dreamed in italics.

“I’m not afraid to talk about this now, but for many years I didn’t tell people that I started as a sign painter,” he said from his Halifax-area home. “I would never outright lie, but I would just sort of fudge my way around.”

Then he began to find out that many in the profession had similar stories.

“You never heard about type designers,” he said of the early days. “The idea that people designed these was not something I even thought of.”

McDonald was born just outside Prince Albert, Sask. His father was an automotive parts man, who “knew the parts numbers for every damn part,” he said. It was akin to a photographic memory, the same skill his son would later use to pluck typefaces out of the ether when asked by a colleague, “which one is that again?”

The family moved to Chilliwack, B.C., when McDonald was a child. At 12, he read a book about hot rods and came across an article about Von Dutch, a Californian making a name for himself by pinstriping cars — painting elaborate designs by hand with thin lines. “I just wanted to do that, more than anything.” He persuaded his dad to pay $1 for a striping brush and paid him back after his first job earned him $2.

McDonald pinstriped cars and bicycles for friends and strangers, and noticed the trend was shifting when he was 14. Guys were getting names painted on their cars, usually in script, phrases like “Sweet violets,” he remembered, laughing. “Horrible stuff, absolutely gross.”

He knew he’d have to learn lettering to keep up and started to hang out at the sign shop.

McDonald could reproduce any kind of letter from a book, in a way so natural he figured anybody could do it. He was hired.

“I just loved lettering, and I guess because I had started so early, by the time I was 20, there was nothing I couldn’t handle,” he said.

He moved to Vancouver in 1965 and made signs for businesses. He bought typography books to look at their alphabets, but type seemed boring. Two years later he got married, and the family would later welcome two children.

McDonald moved to Toronto in 1973 to learn more about lettering theory, hoping to become a better sign painter. He started working as a lettering artist at Mono Lino Typesetting on Dupont St., where he helped produce custom typefaces for CIBC and GM and started to read the typography books he had long stored.

When the Mac came out in 1984, he started to play around and made alphabets for ad agencies and design studios. By the late 1990s, he had befriended a few typographers around the world, and he wanted to design a typeface.

Cartier Book, a digitization of Carl Dair’s Cartier, was the first real typeface he made, heralded as a sensitive reimagining of Dair’s somewhat problematic face.

In 2001, McDonald created a custom typeface for Maclean’s magazine — Laurentian. He also worked at OCAD as a professor.

“Looking at type through his eyes was a revelation,” says Renée Alleyn, a student in 2000, now a professor with the York University/Sheridan College Program in Design. “His passion was infectious.”

In 2006, McDonald created Slate, a sans-serif typeface designed for high legibility. It was the preferred font for BlackBerry 10. In the 2000s, he also created Gibson, Smart Sans, Egyptian Slate, among other typefaces.

McDonald has been a design fellow for Monotype Imaging, one of the world’s biggest type companies, since 2007.

“He’s a person we hold in high esteem to do these revivals that are related to our legacy,” said Steve Matteson, the U.S. type director, from his office in Woburn, Mass. He began work on Classic Grotesque in 2008.

The characters behind the characters

The world of type is hidden in plain sight, but we rarely think about the person who toiled for weeks on the curve of this S, the perplexing lines of this X, and the way these letters appear beside each other on your phone so your brain doesn’t trip over them.

Gary Hustwit, director of the 2007 documentary Helvetica, has called typographers “gods and goddesses.”

“Fonts don’t just appear out of Microsoft Word,” he told the Guardian. “There are human beings and huge stories behind them.”

Rod McDonald doesn’t want you to think about him when you use one of his typefaces. He wants to build tools so designers can make beautiful layouts, and writers can craft stories that take you to another world, without impairment.

If type is a human voice in print, he said, he wants to design faces that sound as smooth as Morgan Freeman.

But creating Classic Grotesque just about killed him, he said, late last year.

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“He wants everything to be right,” said Patrick Griffin, a longtime friend who talked to McDonald almost every week during the process. “He has to question his motives and question why he is questioning his motives.”

McDonald worked on the typeface for eight years, on and off, at his Nova Scotia home. Philip Glass was his soundtrack, his cat Bembo — named for an old typeface — his companion. His wife, a nurse, was an occasional consultant — “How does this letter look?” A bit bumpy, a bit fuzzy.

Back to the computer.

Classic Grotesque was inspired by a trio of typefaces from the early 20th century: Monotype Grotesque, Ideal Grotesk and Venus.

He said it was like renovating a home from the early 1900s. When he tore up the floorboards, there were all kinds of things nobody had told him about that weren’t up to modern code: oversized fractions that wouldn’t work online, capital letters too tall for modern typography, a lack of the uniformity designers have come to expect.

He struggled with every character. They had to look like they belonged together, that they were all designed by one person. And there are only so many ways to shape an S or an A.

“You flatten something by a couple units you’re redoing Gotham, round it too much you’re doing Trade Gothic,” he explained back at Coach House Books in March, referencing other sans-serif typefaces. “One of the things you’re looking for as a type designer are not the individual letters, but the total look.”

He tested each letter beside every other. Typographers call this “running strings.” ASA, BSB, CSC, DSD.

“I’m not happy until it works beside every other character.”

And then one glorious day, he didn’t notice the letters. He read the words. He had a typeface. This is nice, he thought to himself. Then he started over. The family was made up of 56 styles, including a range of lights, compressed, condensed, and extended letters. One down, 55 to go.

The great grotesque gamble

McDonald launched Classic Grotesque on Tuesday at the Type Directors Club, on the sixth floor of a building in New York’s garment district. A table with beer, wine and crackers was at the back. Simple and casual.

The world of type design is inherently insecure, Patrick Griffin explained a couple of weeks earlier. Most of the time, you’re sitting in a dark room designing letters, wondering how the world will react.

“It’s like you’re letting go of your kid,” he said.

Classic Grotesque went online the morning of the launch, and the tweets had started to trickle in. “Two giant type launches today,” read one from a Denver design studio, also mentioning a release from a different company. “The heavy hitters showed up to play.”

McDonald had a meeting with a potential buyer at lunch. It went really well, he said, zipping out for caffeine before his talk. Asked to name a geometric-looking typeface inside the coffee shop, like a party trick, McDonald took off his glasses and appraised it for three seconds: “Avenir.”

Type designers can license their typefaces independently, or through a variety of distributors. In McDonald’s case, he splits the royalties from any sales Monotype makes, and the money comes in quarterly — that’s how he makes his living.

It’s the same kind of relationship between an author and a publisher. The company sets the price.

The target audience is corporations and graphic designers that may be looking for an alternative to sans serifs already in wide use. (Helvetica, now owned by Monotype, is one of the most ubiquitous — 3M, American Apparel and The North Face are just a few of the companies that have used some version of it.)

Lately, there is a trend toward pre-Industrial Revolution style, sort of a homemade, crusty, letterpress look, said Monotype’s Matteson.

“I think Classic Grotesque enhances this later trend ... but still with clean, refined typography,” he said from his office.

McDonald has exiled some of the weirdness, and he expected some pushback on that.

“Everybody says, well I love this (old grotesques), but then you find out nobody buys this and uses it,” McDonald said. “I’m trying to push beyond that and see what happens.”

Back at the Type Directors Club, Allan Haley introduced McDonald, comparing the Latin alphabet to a symphony that conductors interpret. “They make their thumbprint on it, and don’t disturb the music. That’s what Rod does.”

The lights dimmed and McDonald talked about the beguiling threads in the history of grotesques, and the questions still unanswered. In the dark sat 40 or so designers, many just beginning their careers, some already well established, like James Montalbano, who worked on the ClearviewHwy typeface used on Toronto street signs.

They laughed at all the niche places, like when McDonald talked about the struggle to choose the right height for the horizontal line in the uppercase G, moving it up and down for a month until one day, he just wore out. “I wish I could say I had some great insight . . . but one morning I woke up and said, that’s fine.”

McDonald explained that he wanted these old typefaces to have a chance.

“I think they were good typefaces, they had problems, but let’s see what happens if they have a fair shot.”

After his talk, half of the 40 or so people stayed behind to chat until the lights were turned out. The club’s director, Carol Wahler, had a train to catch, and everyone hastily grabbed their coats. Diego Vainesman, a past president of the club, called the talk “fantastic.”

“It’s nice when you meet the face between the typeface,” he said, as everyone huddled into an elevator.

McDonald and an old friend walked into the crisp New York evening, talking about old typographers like Gill and Goudy. Eight years of work, and now, his typeface was on its own in the world. McDonald was relieved. He could rest.

Evolution of grotesques

1816: The first commercially available sans serif, “Two Lines English Egyptian,” is produced by the Caslon foundry in Britain. “It appears unlikely they realized the groundbreaking nature of what they were doing,” writes Simon Loxley in Type: The Secret History of Letters. Nothing much happened with sans serif until the 1830s, when the type industry started to produce bold styles and realized it could make strong, blocky letters that fit together tightly, without the serifs, a benefit for advertisers.

1898: The first grotesque typeface to achieve wide popularity came from German type foundry H. Berthold. Accidenz-Grotesk, later Akzidenz-Grotesk, was a seminal face, not as condensed as earlier efforts. It was designed for commercial uses, business cards and advertising, explained Allan Haley, the former director of words and letters at Monotype. Many of the popular sans serifs of the 20th century trace their roots to Accidenz-Grotesk, including Helvetica.

Early 1900s: Venus and Ideal Grotesk were early 20th century grotesques that seem to have been made from the same matrices, but by different foundries, McDonald said. These faces had an art nouveau look with extremely high crossbars (the horizontal lines in the H and the A), and they were used for business cards or display copy, not books or long-form text.

1926: Monotype published the Monotype Grotesque typeface family. The family is inspired by Venus and Ideal Grotesk, but the crossbars on letters were lowered. Like many typefaces of the era, it did not have consistency among sizes and styles. “The older grotesques were sort of a montage of shapes and sometimes the looked like they were from completely different typefaces,” says Monotype’s U.S. type director, Steve Matteson.

1950s: The Swiss International school changed the game with “neo-grotesques,” in the 1950s. Univers was released in 1957. That same year, Max Miedinger at the Haas Type Foundry released Neue Haas Grotesk, later named Helvetica. These faces had smaller capital letters and were more homogenized. “The idea behind Univers and Helvetica: it faded into the background,” Haley said. In the 1950s, Monotype didn’t have a face like this, so it licensed Univers. “I think the decision was made to just leave the grotesques alone,” McDonald said.

1970s-1980s: Printer manufacturers like Xerox and IBM wanted a wider range of typefaces for their technology, so they went to type foundries. Linotype, by now, owned Helvetica. Monotype needed a typeface to compete, and went back to their 1926 grotesque family for inspiration in designing Arial. “Arial was drawn to have a little bit more warmth than Helvetica,” Matteson says. “(Designer) Robin Nicholas’s hand shows up more in Arial than the grotesques did in the end.”