While I have found no evidence that Eric Gill did indeed follow the Caslon skeleton, or perhaps followed the English ‘archetype’ (Caslon has been and remains a wildly popular typeface), it planted the seed for Dover, years before I actually started drawing it.

Years of drawing

In 2012, I began drawing ‘my’ Caslon. A friend asked me if I had ‘anything lying around’ that was high-contrast but not Didot-esque. I didn’t, but it sounded like a fun challenge. I started with some light research and came back to Caslon, particularly the poster sizes that William Caslon drew for his eponymous type foundry. I remembered my previous attempts to combine Caslon with a nicely matched sans and failing. Now I had a real problem to solve.

I quickly split the production into two extremes: really big use, and small general use. Dover Display would be the branch for the biggest, most expressive design work, and Dover Text would be used for general text settings. With that, I was able to focus on emphasising the design idea I’d had all along: to make Caslon and Gill a family.

A matter of need

The easiest way to figure out what to draw first is to ask yourself what you need first. What I needed most was a display family: something big and bold, for titles, features and call-outs.

Now, on the surface, it may seem like a blessing for a graphic designer to also make their own typefaces. The reality of it, however, is that you are split doing catch-up work on both parts. A new poster highlights a kerning issue, a book cover reveals that you need some esoteric characters, a website shows that the rendering doesn’t look good on Windows. They call that ‘dog fooding’, where the producer of dog food believes so much in their own product that they eat it themselves. As you can imagine, if you’re into fine dining, that may not be so appealing. Such is life for the type-designing graphic designer.

So I had to get strict with myself. In the summer of 2014, after two years of drawing, I decided to delay Dover Text. All my drawing time should go into Dover Display instead. The two matters of need? I wanted a less baroque Caslon, and a Gill Sans for big use.