Tanrie Type Family
Description
My type family revisits 20th century American book jackets to explore how particular lettering traits can be distilled across a contemporary typeface. I was inspired by the covers of The Charlatanry of the Learned (lettered by W.A. Dwiggins), The Thomas Mann Reader (lettered by George Salter), and an assortment of covers from Philip Grushkin. Across these covers, I admired the idiosyncratic qualities derived from the calligrapher's pen—yielding a texture composed of inky blobs and angular moments, combined with expressive letter proportions.
Currently the family includes four styles: headline, headline italic, text regular and text bold. The initial style, the headline, began by pulling in characteristics from the aforementioned source material, and continually exploring to push the forms and simplify traces of the broad nib pen. The headline features tall, decisive strokes and angular transitions. This style was then translated into an italic to add an additional narrative voice into the family. For the regular text style, contrast was reduced and transitions were smoothened to minimize the amount of textural noise in longer passages of text. The bold text style borrows from the regular's skeleton and adds just enough weight to retain the design's DNA, providing another voice and typographic tool. Although both text styles work well at smaller sizes, they also retain enough character to be expressive at larger scales. The variety in styles provide a useful toolkit for a wide range of settings, ranging from editorial to logo uses.
