ATypI Brisbane 2024 | David Sargent | Embedded Elements of Place and Time—A Typeface Revival

A set of well-worn ‘Fat Face’ Roman wood type sorts currently lives at the Museum of Printing in Armidale, regional Australia. The set has warped surfaces and some finer details broken during its past life as a working letterpress typeface. Due to this condition, any contemporary impressions contain a great deal of texture unique to this set. As with all manufactured metal and wood type used in Australia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this typeface is an import, not a local design. It is possibly Sixteen Line Roman circa 1865, distributed by W.H. Bonnewell & Co., London.

However, while the origin of the typeface is not Australian, the physical type sorts are intertwined with our colonial printing history. This presentation discusses a typeface revival project that attempts to extend Olocco and Patané’s ‘synthetic’ and ‘literal’ approaches to type revivals by embedding a sense of place and time into the outcome. The revival aims to recreate these particular letterforms’ tactile, well-worn, and damaged nature—infusing the digital design outcome with its history. The digital typeface uses variable type technology to embed a ‘texture’ axis, allowing users to slide across time—from crisp and newly imported to worn and forgotten letterforms.