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Steven Heller’s Font of the Month: Exentrica

“Those old guys stole some of our best ideas”, was Frederic Goudy’s witty pronouncement with a wink and nod to revivalist type designers who find much solace in forms from a bygone age. The quote is relevant today because there are so many typefaces that have characteristics borne of another’s hand from a different time. When Nick Cooke saw the quintessential Viennese Secession (art nouveau/Jugendstil) letters hand-drawn on posters, magazine covers, and signs, he was intrigued by their ingenuity and invention. He also saw that given the bespoke essence of these forms (i.e., they represented a movement but were also unique expressions of their respective makers), there was a lot of room for letters to be expanded into updated families of varied weights.

Nick Cooke’s Exentrica typeface in action.

With the Exentrica family, Cooke expanded the stylistic ideas of Koloman Moser, one of the Secession’s leading graphic designers, by including variations on his own reinterpretation of the emblematic design. Few of the letters are directly copied from the original source, but they are rather imaginative projections of how a full font family might look. There are enough options to suit any design need.

Nick Cooke’s Exentrica typeface in action.

 
I was long interested in Moser’s original alphabet because it seemed as though it were a bridge between Jugendstil and Art Deco — the missing link, so to speak. It was both curvilinear and rectilinear in the same font. But more special, such variations as Exentrica Extra Light Monoline could be used with Excentrica Medium Monoline without being ham-fisted. I am particularly charmed. By the “R”, “A” and “B” characters for their sublime quirkiness and appreciated the variations on the “Ts”, “Os” and “Ys” for allowing a kind of oscillation from large to small cap heights.
 
Excentrica is, first and foremost, a fun face to use — to mix and match the weights to achieve a modulating sensation that can excite the eye while it titillates the typography on the page or screen — and who among us doesn’t like to be titillated from time to time?

Font of the Month: Exentrica
Designer: Nick Cooke Foundry: G-Type

Steven Heller is nothing short of a legend in the design community. Award-winning graphic designer, author and editor of hundreds of books (yes, 100s!) and one of the world’s foremost authorities on graphic design history; and arguably its best design commentator. Follow Steven on the must-read The Daily Heller and read his latest book, Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York.



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