Roger Excoffon

Roger Excoffon set the style for advertising typography in France in the 1950s. His own ad agency, which he founded in Paris in 1947, was widely influential, and the typefaces he designed for the Fonderie Olive in the early '50s­Mistral, Choc, Banco, Diane, Calypso­provided French typographers with the tools for a new interpretation of the spirit of the decade. As Jeff Keedy said in a recent issue of Emigre, "Excoffon articulated a stylishly modern spirit, conveying a contemporary sensibility not only of economy and speed but also of casual elegance."

This year, ITC is releasing a series of typefaces that build on Excoffon's original designs and extend them into new areas. Of the four new typefaces, three are lighter versions of the originals­Mistral Light, Choc Light and Banco Light­while the fourth, Banco Heavy, contains a lowercase for the original Banco, which Excoffon designed as a caps-only font.

The project was a collaboration between ITC's European type consultant Colin Brignall and British type designer Phill Grimshaw, who specializes in calligraphic designs. The project originated when Brignall, observing the current popularity of handwriting typefaces, felt there were unexplored possibilities in the script faces developed in Europe after World War II. He and Grimshaw at first thought they would work with script faces from a variety of designers, beginning with Excoffon's Mistral. When they realized that the next logical face was Choc, they shifted the focus to France and narrowed it to types by Excoffon.

Mistral Light

Mistral was the first of Excoffon's typefaces to be re-interpreted for ITC. Colin Brignall felt that the weight of Mistral was a compromise forced on Excoffon by the exigencies of doing display type in the '50s. "Although Excoffon's objective was to create a truly 'handwritten' effect style," says Brignall, "in truth his Mistral looks as though it has been written more by brush or by a faintly heavy felt tip." Brignall agreed with Grimshaw that a lighter version might look more like handwriting done with a pen than the original did.

Phill Grimshaw studied the metal face extensively, and started off the new type by reducing the overall weight uniformly by about 30 percent. The result was lighter, but not satisfactory; the thinner strokes became feeble and tended to disappear when printed at small sizes. So the designer increased the weight of all the thin strokes to get a more readable face. When he proofed text set in the new face at 18-point on a 600-dpi laser printer, he could see that "this new weight fulfilled all my intentions and positively exhibited the full flavour of Mistral," and does indeed capture the feel of having been written by hand with a pen.

But there was one problem. Since Mistral is a script typeface, naturally it can't have an italic. This doesn't matter in short display copy, but in running text you often need to show emphasis. The heavier "bold" original might logically be used, but it was never designed to look good at text sizes. So Grimshaw added a new set of small caps, in the same weight, for emphasis in text. Since the full cap-height numerals of Mistral would look wrong next to small caps, he also created a set of old-style (lowercase) numerals-which of course can also be used with the lowercase.

Choc Light

Where Mistral was based on modern European handwriting, Excoffon's Choc comes more out of the traditions of Japanese brush calligraphy. It's thick, staccato, suggestive. As Hutchings said about it in 1965, "This is probably the heaviest of the authentic brush scripts available to date, although it shows no lack of mobility. Its apparent casualness can be misleading: in fact, there is a remarkable consistency of weight and stroke formation throughout both capitals and lowercase and the figures." Choc is a non-joining script, so the problems of how the letters touch were absent, but the face relies so heavily on the shapes of its blackest parts that creating a lighter version presented a serious challenge. Grimshaw had to redraw it several times in different weights before he found one that seemed to work as a text face and still be true to the original.

The shapes of many of the letters in Choc are almost abstract; this abstraction doesn't always work in smaller text. Grimshaw found that again he had to modify certain characters, always keeping in mind both the original design and the calligraphic tradition that had inspired Excoffon. "Lowercase r in particular proved to be untenable in this context," he says. If he kept the form of the r from the original font, it ended up looking more like a z than an r, which would be misleading. So he redrew it "in a style which complemented the other characters in the set," while saving the "real" character as an alternate in the character set of the final font. "Other adjusted characters," says Grimshaw, "included lowercase g and w, which underwent minor changes for purposes of 'colour' and ease of legibility."

Banco Light / Banco Heavy

Mistral and Choc might be considered almost straightforward as candidates for lighter versions; Banco is not straightforward at all. It was the first of Excoffon's types released by the Fonderie Olive (in 1952), at a time when, according TK in "Types for Today," after the general exhaustion of World War II, "the general improvement in taste and typography which is gathering swift momentum in Britain and the Commonwealth, is sadly absent in France." Excoffon played a major role in changing all that.

The same source said of the then-new Banco: "As an advertising display letter it is one of the boldest and most interesting cut since Neuland." The comparison to Neuland is apt, although the strong forms of Banco look not so much carved out of wood but rolled out of sheet metal. The tapering strokes of Banco are all very upright, like a series of abrupt downstrokes made with a precise, sharp-edged, perfectly defined brush. The shapes of the counters are suggested by the placement of the curves and straight lines, many of which do not actually touch. The slight slant of all the letters, the varying heights of the upper ends of strokes, and the subtle interplay of taper and curve give Banco a distinct up-and-to-the-right motion. Like almost all of Excoffon's typefaces, Banco has the effect of being quickly sketched by a forceful hand.

Unlike Mistral and Choc, Banco was originally an all-caps typeface; Excoffon made no attempt to design a lowercase. If the purpose of a new, lighter version was to provide a companion type that could be used for text, then obviously it needed a lowercase; Grimshaw decided that in that case he would also try a lowercase for the original weight as well. Using the existing caps as a "clean, positive model on which to base an interpreted lowercase," Grimshaw deliberately "under-designed" the lowercase, "in order to produce a consistent 'color,' while maintaining the simple letterforms evident in the original."

Then came the challenge of creating a lighter version of Banco. Grimshaw found that what preserved the characteristics of Banco best in a lighter weight was to make it quite narrow, almost condensed; this way he could keep the same angles between strokes that Excoffon had used in the original face. As part of the emphasis on the tapering of the stems, Grimshaw shifted the weight of the curves slightly toward the tops of the letters. The final design is less immediately recognizable as a variation on Banco than Mistral Light and Choc Light are as variations on their sources, but at its best Banco Light expresses some of the panache of French typography from the '50s in a new form.

As Grimshaw observes of the creation of the new ITC fonts, "The entire project allowed me a rare opportunity to study typefaces belonging to one individual. It was these observations which made the job of drawing missing characters a relatively simple task, and I believe that if Excoffon could see the results of this project, he would wholeheartedly approve."

Click here to return to John Dreyfus' account of the life of Roger Excoffon.