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edwardtufte / et-book

A webfont of the typeface used in Edward Tufte’s books.
https://edwardtufte.github.io/et-book
MIT License
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Question about italic "W" character #26

Closed AB1908 closed 3 years ago

AB1908 commented 3 years ago

The capital "W" seems a bit odd to me. Having no knowledge of typography, I'd appreciate if anyone could explain what's happening here. Is this a design choice?

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RuixiZhang42 commented 3 years ago

Are you asking about the (over-)slant of the italic uppercase “W”? That would be a design choice.

For example, Equity (designed by Matthew Butterick), which is based on Ehrhardt, also features what you’d call “overly slanted uppercase A, V, and W” in its italic: Equity-AVW

But these slants in ET Book and Equity are nothing compared to Rosart’s more aggressive tilt: Rosart-AVW

Bethany Heck wrote a piece about Rosart in her Font Review Journal, where she mentioned this “aggressive forward tilt and ‘wind sheared’ aesthetic”.

RuixiZhang42 commented 3 years ago

Side note. Admittedly, these heavily slanted forms can look odd to our 21st-century eyes, but I think this is only because many digital fonts we see today don’t feature these forms (so we are simply not used to how they look). However, if you look at the printed materials prior to the desktop-publishing era, then you can find many examples of such slanted forms.

For example, here is the caption to the illustration Disappearing Bicyclist (1906; source: https://www.geogebra.org/m/hypuahfc): disappearing-bicyclist

Then there’s Writing & illuminating, & lettering (Johnston, 1906, p. 269; source: https://archive.org/details/writingillumina00john): WIL-p269

AB1908 commented 3 years ago

Very fascinating insight. Thank you for taking the time to explain. Would you have any recommendations for books/journals on typography?