Marlon

Marlon is a revival of a revival. My first assignment at EsadType, I had to interpret a font of my choice from an early 20th-century Caslon specimen. The only rule was that I could only draw in the font editor, without any background images. This came as a challenge to me since I usually rely heavily on sketching with pen and paper to hammer out a concept.

To keep things interesting, I selected a 9pt cut that bore little resemblance to the types cut by William Caslon I. In fact, it looked more like something from an ATF catalog of the same vintage. I thought it was terrible and splotchy. Detached from any delusions of grandeur, I felt free to explore some new shapes and cast aside my preconceived notions of how Caslon is supposed to look.

Drawn as a warmup exercise in the autumn of 2022, Marlon was one of my last forays into the genre of classical, serif text type. Marlon was a coming-of-age project for me: I had done a few revivals, my drawing skills were shaping up, and I was starting to develop my voice as a type designer. Now that I had a handle on the basics, I dedicated the remainder of my time at the ésad to questioning the status quo and finding out what I wanted to say with my work.

The biggest lesson that I learned was about spacing. Overall, my source was spaced much looser than I would tend to space 9pt type. Whether this is an artifact of the design or the justification, I am not sure. In any case, it made me think more critically about the color produced by my drawings.

The source material featured a lowercase ‘a’ with an extremely square shoulder. Not only was this a major departure from the original Caslon types, but it also went against my instinct of using the letter ‘n’ as a template. In order to preserve the proportions, I had to treat it as a completely different shape, opening the door for some variation in patterning.

This project offered me an opportunity to approach some letters from an entirely new perspective. The elongated link of the ‘g’ was uncomfortable at first, but it worked great in text, giving the letter a little extra buoyancy.

Drawing from the lessons that I learned from the ‘a’ and ‘g’, I ran with the idea of sprinkling the typeface with variety. Usually, I would tend to homogenize the appearance of the terminals. Instead, I chose to adapt each one to complement its respective letter.

For me, the ‘b’ is one of the most iconic shapes from the original Caslon types. This is one of a few traces of the ‘goût hollandais’ that made it unscathed into the 19th-century interpretation. I made sure to build this counterform into the drawing.

Not every letter needs to be polite. Early on, I tried to tuck in the leg of the ‘R’ to balance its counterspaces, but it lost its personality. In this case, the unbalanced distribution of space strengthened the letter and the word image as a whole.

At this point, I had already converted to the French style of drawing diacritics as my default. I discarded whatever—if any—accent marks were included in the original specimens and replaced them with a vertical system based around a Garamond-esque acute. With Hugues Gentile as my advisor, I took a few cues from Production Type’s method of homogenizing the proportions, including a taller-than-average tilde.