Bella Typeface

I absolutely love this new typeface designed by British designer Rick Banks of Face37. I came across it in the latest edition of creative review - and what I especially found interesting was the more in depth article on the website where you can see some evidence of his work process. I am becoming increasingly interested in type design of this nature and have myself just downloaded a trial of Fontographer as I want to experiment with using some software of this nature in my practice next year. I have recently been trying to research how typographers tend to go about creating their fonts once they've got the designs on paper, because until now I have been making it up as I go along.










Bella is in the classical French Didot style, but based on letterforms by Herb Lubalin, John Pistilli and Jan Tschichold who I have actually been looking at as part of my dissertation research.

Banks explains;

"I've always loved the ridiculous thin hairlines that featured a lot in New York in the 60s and 70s,"

"Herb Lubalin and Louis Dorfsman were masters at hand drawing thin hairlines," he continues. "There aren't that many digital fonts that deal with these extreme hairlines. Possibly due to the complexity of creating them in Font Lab."

I found this interesting that perhaps fonts such as this are less common could be down to technical restraints. I think that this is a shame seeing as 20 years ago a designer might not have even had a computer, let alone software such as FontLab, so they wouldn't have felt this restriction. This doesn't mean to say that they wouldn't have felt other restraints based on the technology (or lack of) that they had at that point in time, but isn't new technology supposed to inspire us rather than restrict us?























I am interested in attempting to have some kind of communication with Rick Banks, based on his love of 60's and 70's typography and his ambitions to create beautiful type like this despite the difficulties faced in using the more widely accepted technology of the 21st Century. I think it would be interesting to get his opinion on this for my dissertation research.