Typeface Design – Mau Gothic

I was approached by Bruce Mau Design to create a bold weight of W A Dwiggins’ Gothic.

They were creating the graphics for a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario called Oh! Canada. Chris Rowat, the art director on the project, found that applying bold in Quark was entirely unsatisfactory. The spacing and kerning ended up looking hideous, and some characters were more problematic than others. The m, n, and u had too little white space in them, the $ had almost no counters, the bar on the G bumped into the left hand stem, and the swash on the Q presented similar problems. 

Applying the “Change Weight” command in Fontographer proved to be only marginally better. While it was acceptable as a starting point, many features needed to be altered and corrected. With a face as condensed as this, the areas in the counters proved to be the biggest cause for concern. Since this face was going to be read on screen as well as on paper, I had to be doubly aware of this fact. Much of what I did consisted of expanding them (a percentage point or two at most) and entirely redrawing certain letters to be slightly wider – the m, n, and u, and G and Q. I added ink traps in characters like the M, N, V, W, X, Y, v, w, x, y. The stem in the $ was angled slightly, and the counters redrawn so that they at least showed. The angles in the K, M, N, R, and k were skewed slightly to increase the white space. Other finicky little things like the space between the double quotation marks were attended to. A small number of missing characters were created, and finally, unhappy with the way the original was spaced, I respaced and kerned the whole thing.