East of Rome’s Glotik is a humanist sans with a medieval streak — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Glotik is a sans serif typeface with six weights – from Roman up to Ultra – and 1,199 characters across extended Latin, monotonic Greek and extended Cyrillic. Its creator, Lewis McGuffie of Estonian type foundry East of Rome, describes it as less of a humanist sans and more an archaic, medieval one. The curves are generous but uneven, the stems straight, and the uppercase has a second set of letters based on medieval manuscript lettering. “The name is a portmanteau of ‘glottal’ (meaning something spoken) and ‘gothic,’ with some liberties taken with the spelling,” he explains. “The shape of the teardrop ends of the crossbars in the ‘f’ and ‘t,’ as well as the ‘r,’ reminded me of the dangly bit at the back of a person’s throat. I thought this connection between the shape of a physical feature and a sound in speech was interesting, combined with the gothic sans serif style of type.”

Glotik was initially inspired by the typefaces on two Swedish book covers. From one, McGuffie imitated the lowercase of the cover’s title typeface, which is close to Clearface Gothic, an American sans serif from the beginning of the 20th century. From the other, he took the uppercase and italic of ITC Novarese, released in 1980 and named after its Italian designer Aldo Novarese. Its upright capitals and calligraphic lowercase gave the drawings an early-modern feeling from the start. He had no interest in remaking either typeface. Once he had widened the lowercase a little, he began to see a humanist sans in it, and set out to draw one that kept the thick-and-thin variation, or contrast, of Clearface Gothic. He wanted a pre-modern ‘medieval sans’ with warmth and texture and none of the historical cliché.

The uppercase left less room to experiment, and McGuffie was stuck for a while on how to give it personality, until he found a German book in the country house, Sumpf und Wasservögel, with a cover set in Jessen Schrift. That typeface, drawn by Rudolf Koch for setting the Bible and released by the Klingspor foundry in 1930, pairs a blackletter lowercase, the angular medieval script, with a plain upright uppercase. He had glanced at its ‘R’ and thought he saw the curved stroke run into the diagonal at its thickest point, with no thinning where the two meet. A closer look showed that Jessen Schrift does not quite do that, but the misreading gave him a way to make Glotik’s uppercase simpler and more naive. “I first drew a sans serif version of Koch’s Jessen Schrift, thereby minimising and ‘modernising’ the letterforms,” he details, “while trying to retain the strange distribution of weight in the horizontal and vertical strokes.” Glotik’s ‘S’ and ‘W’ are closely modelled on Jessen Schrift, and its thick crossbars came from the medieval feel.

While he was drawing Glotik, McGuffie was thinking about the late classical and early medieval period, Byzantium and the Dark Ages. He associates a typeface with a time or a place whenever he draws one. It’s a personal habit that does not always show in the finished letters, but that helps him with the feeling, and even with the words that end up in the specimen at the end. For Glotik, he imagined a distant province a long way from a capital that was falling apart, where the proportions of the classical world were drifting out of memory, the rules were coming loose, organic pagan forms were creeping in, and scholarly monks had retreated to windy islands.

The influences behind Glotik include Vanished Kingdoms, Norman Davies’ history of half-forgotten Europe, W.H. Auden’s poem The Fall of Rome and many episodes of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time. As the work of drawing a typeface is long and repetitive, he tells us that thinking this way is partly what keeps him sane. To reinforce all that medievalism, he added a set of alternative uppercase letters, switched on when you want them, across all three scripts, drawn as impressions of uncials, the rounded capitals of early medieval manuscripts, and not copies of one particular historical source. He called them the Sillion alternates, after ‘sillion’ – an old-fashioned word for the thick, voluminous and shiny soil turned over by a plough. Dark, glossy curves pulled up out of the ground struck him as a good description of the alternates. “I don’t think I went far enough with the Sillion alternates, and if I come back to Glotik again, I will add more of them,” he notes. “The stranger and more arcane the better!” Glotik’s mascot is one more historical reference, taken from François Desprez’s illustrations for Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, a 1565 book of grotesque woodcut figures published under the name of the French writer François Rabelais, who had died more than a decade earlier, and McGuffie calls the mascot ‘frog boy.’

A letter at 72pt looks very different from the same one at 9pt. Oddities can disappear at small sizes, so McGuffie developed the lowercase in pursuit of weirdness. From drawing Greek, he already knew that a curved stroke can be made far thinner than expected as long as the weight it loses is put back elsewhere in the letter, so where the curve of a ‘c’ or an ‘e’ thins on its left-hand side, the stroke that exits along the baseline is extra heavy. Against those uneven curves, the downstrokes are strictly regular, which grounds the design and keeps a rhythm across the line. “Various fonts I had made in the past – Columba, Tekst A, Komplekt – have all imitated the inaccuracies and effects of printing,” McGuffie tells us. Those are earlier East of Rome typefaces, and imitating print means flaring the stems slightly, avoiding straight lines and implying a lean towards the reading direction, all of which make a typeface look warm. Having used the trick several times, he left it out of Glotik. “So, while there are tiny incised-like turns in the vertical strokes, the overwhelming effect of the vertical stems is of being straight,” he continues. “Which has a nice visual contrast with the very rounded bowls and curves, I think.”

“Glotik is, by and large, a humanist sans serif of which there are many examples to draw from in Greek and Cyrillic,” he details. “However, the underlying structure and style of Greek is generally different to Latin.” Greek letters are also drawn with the pen held at a different angle, so the Greek was the harder of the two. “Whereas Cyrillic is a very close cousin of Latin and has very few forms unique to itself,” he continues. “So, it was much easier to achieve an archaic, medieval quality in the Cyrillic by imitating what was already done in the Latin.” Alongside the three scripts, Glotik has small capitals, fractions and numerals in three styles, including tabular ones that line up in columns, so it works in long text and tables as well as at display sizes. “With decent spacing, correct letter proportions and the right weight for reading a typeface can be full of strange and irregular forms,” he concludes. “If anything, it makes a typeface more enjoyable to read compared with one that is overly manicured and regular. Hopefully Glotik finds that balance between overly kooky and garden-variety boring.”