Mānuka design information

Early European wood type documentation is sparse. War, technology and time make it difficult, particularly in Germany. But that’s slowly changing thanks to researchers like Pierre Pané-Farré. Compared to the United States, domestic German wood type production (Holztypendruck) took a few decades to get cracking.¹ Pierre dates it to around the 1860’s when “specialised wood type manufacturers appear in the German printing trade.”² Specimens exist, but they’re rare.

So when I was foraging in Google Books a specimen of raw fonts startled me. The initial ad for sewing machines threw me off, I wasn’t sure who actually cut the fonts. My rudimentary German twigged that «Plakat-Schriften» means “poster-type”. The real specimen measures about 285 × 445 mm, not apparent from the poor quality digitisation.³ Eventually Pierre’s thorough research cleared it up: Will & Schumacher cut the fonts and J. Schneider printed the specimen sometime after 1865. ⁴ The fonts don’t have names, but are numbered sequentially. For example Blatt 1 [sheet 1] has 4 sizes of a rounded, condensed sans: Nº 1-4. Based on this system, Pierre determined the specimen is made from individual sheets printed over two separate periods, and several sheets seem to be missing.

But what remains is superb. I love this crude specimen, it’s like a typographic punch in the guts. The letterforms are big, brash and weird. You can feel the human hand getting it both right and wrong — charming inconsistencies flourish across related styles. Despite the variety, most of the fonts are bold and condensed, like branches from a common trunk. Sparse word fragments framed within the layout make the specimen a work of sublime, ancient concrete poetry.

The mid-1800s were early days for sans-serif. Like most other type makers, Will & Schumacher were still figuring the genre out, and their specimen preserves these pioneering forms. A few letters feel too wide or narrow, some are wonky, and most have minimal optical correction and overshoots.⁵ Scattered throughout the specimen are 7 groups of sans-serifs. It opens with a well-made rounded sans, Nº 1-10,⁶ but with some occasional irregular sharp corners. An early ancestor of the DIN lineage, Nº 29-51 are bold, mechanical and surprisingly contemporary.⁷ Nº 81–84 are similar, but further condensed.⁸ The strict verticality is relaxed in Nº 85–91 and closer to what we now consider a “regular” weight.⁹ Nº 124–135 & 141–149 follow the same style, but outlined and dimensional.¹⁰ So far so good, these are still familiar forms.

The Nº 254–263 fonts got my attention.¹¹ They have the same mechanical compression but very sharp joins in letters like a d h n m u — a rare and unusual detail for sans-serifs. Normally sans-serifs, especially condensed ones, favour monoline construction.¹² This detail elevated the letterforms above the usual genre tropes. Tight spacing, closed apertures and sharp joins make a compelling texture, like sunlight sparkling through a forest canopy. Vertical slivers of light shimmering amongst acute arcs planted the roots for Mānuka.

Many details were used with minimal intervention. This was refreshing, 150 year-old letterforms usually need heavy pruning to graft into contemporary digital fonts. Will & Schumacher’s sans-serifs have weathered well. Their curves remain taught and their stature proud. The elegant kick on R pre-dates Helvetica’s by a century, as does the graceful upward sweep of a. Elongating r’s terminal helps fill the inter-letter space, and harmonises with others on e c and the ear of g. The original link of g is superb, echoing the sharp joins of n with a serpentine twist. The semicircle spur on G is a sly surprise, contrasting with the chamfered top of t.

Not everything survived. I wasn’t interested in making a digital clone, just transplanting the good bits. Coming up against dead-wood gives a good opportunity to asess Mānuka as an interrelated system. The Nº 90 specimen illustrates a few problems. W doesn’t have any optical correction, it’s bolder that S and I. Best practice says to thin out the strokes and add ink-traps to visually balance the black mass.¹³ The fluid spine of S didn’t fit the rigid structure of Mānuka, further exaggerated by & — also too wide and aesthetically ill-fitting. Even the rectangular full-stop wasn’t quite right for this weight. I consider punctuation directly related to accents and other auxiliary marks. Rectangular, vertical forms like this were reserved for Mānuka’s thinner weights.

»Plakat-Schriften« are physically large letters, designed to communicate urgently with size. When poster letterforms get taller, they tend to get narrower to fit more words per line.¹⁴ This is useful for languages with long words like German. The condensed horizontal proportions are obvious in the Will & Schumacher fonts. Vertical proportions are just as important. Mānuka is designed for big sizes to emphasize mass at scale. I wanted the fonts to be stackable with minimal linespacing. This meant shaving down ascenders and descenders, and maximising the x-height. Mānuka’s proportions depart significantly from the source, particularly in the slab.¹⁵

Immediately after the sans-serifs is a stand of magnificent, bizarre slab-serifs, Nº 264–282.¹⁶ Their proximity suggests a similar genus, as do the sharp joins and general proportions. But these slabs are different beasts altogether. I’d never seen anything quite like them before — they’re truly graphic. If Mānuka and Mānuka Condensed are like a managed pine plantation, Mānuka Slab is gnarly native bush.¹⁷

Mānuka Slab’s brackets set a solid foundation, allowing deviant details pilfered from other styles to creep in. We’ll never know what possessed a 19th century «Schrift-Kunstler» to make a rogue double-bite in the t, but I’ll be forever grateful. Borrowed from the sans, the link from g joins a vertiginous rectangular ear, echoed and exaggerated in r. Expected details like the brackets on s are a good solution, transplanted to unexpected places in Mānuka Slab like ? and the numerals. The ball terminal from J is spliced into f j y, pushing the limits in the Black and Ultra weights. And the pointed, curly pig-tail from Q was simply too cute to cut.

Under normal circumstances these strange details would be edited out or sanded to a smooth polish. But the atmosphere of the Will & Schumacher fonts encouraged eccentricity. Mānuka’s dense texture helps naturalise the weirdness, like the knots and burls in seasoned, milled timber. A plank of wood by itself is dull or showy, but several dovetailed can have a sublime texture.

In 10,000 original copies I wrote about acknowledging history and continuing typographic traditions. Contemporary typeface designers are no different from any other design discipline, our past is verdant with fertile material. Humans love new things and modern design culture is no different — we love new fonts. But it’s important to remember that all modern typefaces have roots in previous centuries. Our job, as always, is to make new growth from old wood.