Started in 2016, Gothic Lab is a joint experiment between generative designer Ivan Murit and Production Type. Murit built several systems mixing organic and mechanized pattern, following his initial thesis work on Alan Turing and stochastic (i.e. random) rasters. Production Type and Murit built the protocol for the experiment around several code-processing libraries. It needed to provide great freedom and fast computing times during the exploration phase, a granular control of the visual results, a capacity to blend and feed our font production pipelines and further compliance to public font tech specs.
We first devised a typeface that would be able to bear the treatments we had up our sleeve. At that time we had just been busy with Antique Gothic, a condensed sans with the personality we had in mind for the job. So we decided to supplement the 5-styles family with a Black Rounded style, a cut so fat it would provide enough surface for the patterns. “Gothic Lab Black Rounded” is solely intended for that purpose, and will probably never be released as a standalone style.
The challenge in Gothic Lab was to not rely too much on predictable algorithms as the basis of creating patterns, and avoid detectable repetition. So we called in the randomness of organic elements like air humidity or white noise. We also hit a few walls trying to increase the definition of the embedded patterns. It seemed at first that we aimed too high, trying to turn fairly detailed outlines into workable fonts. The computing times rose, the renderings were neverending. We had to come up with different ways of manipulating type using MIDI keyboard controllers, and of compiling types that would not involve GUI, but command-based tools instead. One aspect was especially hard to pin down: the fact that the lettershape should influence the pattern—not just welcome it and blindly act as the container shape of any given pattern. This is particularly visible in a few final styles, like Gecko and Tigre.
After a solid month of heuristic search, gigabytes of data, and a stockpile of scrapped prototypes, a narrower selection of eight, then six workable styles was determined. One arbitrary name for each: Elephant, Gecko, Snake, Mantis. And Tigre, Levée’s favorite. Two typefaces from the past are among the direct references that sparked an interest in those patterned types. About fifteen years ago, Jean-Baptiste Levée stumbled upon a rather unique design from the Deberny & Peignot “Album de caractères pour le croquis-calque”, a guidebook for the hand-drawn study of letterforms. The design was called “Robur Tigré” or “Criblé” (“criblé” means “pierced by a lot of holes”), and only had a short lifespan in the D&P metal type catalog. The second reference was Keystone Type Foundry’s 1903 “Chalk Script”, which proved not only that progress had been made in punchcutting, but also that a coarse technique such as metal type could yield sophisticated and delicate textures, too. In the digital, grid-fitted realm, dotted typefaces merely perform the application of homogenous patterns to a letter shape surface. The difficulty is in maintaining a consistent space between the dots and the outer limits of the letterforms, without dots touching, or the letterform being distorted too much. Some typefaces do that very well (think Photo-Lettering Inc’s Times Square or Commercial Type’s Stag Dots.), by placing the dots on a gridded layout. A further step was taken with Constellation (and the likes of other typefaces, like the unreleased Gemeli Raster — by Production Type — or Tanja — again, by Commercial Type—), where the dots grow and evolve around a skeleton. The conjunction of observations of the distant past and recent experiences stuck around Levée’s mind and respawned in the hands of the “Production Type Research & Development Department” years later.
Gothic Lab is Levée’s second published exploration of random and dotted typefaces to date (the first one being Constellation, a 2011 crystalline typeface evoking starry skies). Just as Constellation was a reflection on the concept of simili-randomness in mathematics, Gothic Lab is a representation of stochastic rasters, texturing and skeuomorphism applied to typographic systems. A play in six acts, and a work of twelve hands, Gothic Lab’s roster shows that cold-blooded reflection and heated enthusiasm pay in the long run.
Design: Jean-Baptiste Levée, Ivan Murit.
Team: Hugues Gentile, Quentin Schmerber, Pauline Fourest, Suehli Tan.
