Discotack Type Design Process

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Always write the punchline first

Like most great jokes, the punchline came to me first. I was driving home on a sunny December day when a bundle of dried grass blew across the rural West Virginia road that leads back to our farm. This wasn’t quite your classic Wile E. Coyote-ass tumbleweed, but it was close enough that my brain said “tumbleweed”. Two thoughts entered my mind at once:

If French weed is oui’d, is French tumbleweed tumble oui’d?
Tumble Oui’d is a funny name for a new font.

Spoiler alert: I decided to change the name for a number of reasons and Tumble Oui’d became Discotack. We’ll get to that later, but the original name was a surprisingly big part of the process.

But what's the setup?

So what would a font called Tumble Oui’d look like? After doing a bit of reverse engineering, I landed on a high-contrast French Clarendon, or Italienne, with Art Nouveau/Jugendstil influences. The first sketches looked fairly monstrous. I was drawing the slabs first and then trying to connect the interior letterforms with organic, flowing lines, but they just didn’t hit the mark. Nothing that I was trying was looking Nouveau-y enough, which was part of this concept (joke) that I really wanted to explore. I needed some help to push past some of the stiffness of the French Clarendon genre.

What I needed was some solid reference material on the Art Nouveau side of things. After pouring through some specimens on Flickr and Fonts in Use, I came across Benguiat Discotheque, a lesser known face by the late, great Ed Benguiat. The typeface, released circa 1967, came in 3 weights (plus outlines) and fully embraced the natural, flowing forms of the Nouveau and Jugendstil movements of the early 1900s. The snaking path of the S, the round bottomed E, the disco-pose legs of B, K, and R…it’s a fun-loving typeface that sits equally well on the sleeve of an R&B record or the cover of a high fantasy novel. I love it and I want more of it!

Above: Benguiat discotheque (courtesy of Florian Hardwig on Fonts in use) Below: scan of some initial sketches, slapping slabs on benguiat discotheque and hints at a concept for an italic that i plan to revisit

As far as I could find, there’s no full specimen of Benguiat Discotheque available online. This was at first disappointing, but proved to lead to a more exciting exercise in creative problem solving. Using incomplete source material forced me to find my own solutions to a few letterforms rather than pulling completely from a single reference point.

Using the characters I had available from Discotheque specimens, I started playing around with adding some high-contrast slabs to the light weight letterforms; putting some big ol’ platform boots on the slender characters. A first draft of the basic uppercase character set came together pretty quickly, and I began thinking of a plan for releasing this thing.

the state of the uppercase at this point in the process

Blaze Type has entered the chat

At this point, I had a pretty solid version of this font with diacritics, punctuation, and numerals. I hadn’t really envisioned a lowercase for this and was planning to release it as a set of capitals. On a whim, I sent a rough specimen of my progress to a few foundries. One didn’t respond, one said “This is not a great fit to our catalog.” (they were right), and one, to my complete surprise, said “This is cool, we’d like to release it.” As someone who had, at this point, exactly zero published typefaces, I was positively flipping my lid, y’all. One of my favorite type foundries, Blaze Type, wanted to release this little weirdo into the world.

After some chats with Mattheiu Salvaggio and Léon Hugues at Blaze Type, I signed a contract to release this font through The Box, a side-foundry of Blaze Type that releases unique display type from designers all around the globe. Over the course of the following nine months, Léon’s feedback and advice would help me refine this typeface to a degree of quality that I simply couldn’t have achieved with my self taught knowledge (thank you, Léon!).

Pushing it further

Since there were a few releases ahead of me in The Box, I had plenty of time to keep pushing this typeface forward. With a renewed excitement knowing this font would be reaching a much larger audience, I quickly sketched out a lowercase character set. The weight and proportions were a bit all over the place, but the general forms were headed in an exciting direction!

Following Léon’s advice to look into the proportions of Clarendon as a reference point, I reworked the relative widths of the whole character set. Up until this point in learning type design, I’d been so focused on stroke weight and spacing that I ignored the importance of proportions. This process opened my eyes to how much of a difference subtle adjustments to the width of a single character can make in the overall texture of a typeface. In hindsight this seems so obvious, but you know, forest for the trees, etcetera.

After sorting out the proportions and textural balance of the basic character set (A-Z, a-z), it was time to revisit all the other glyphs: punctuation, numerals, symbols, and accented characters. Discotack, like Gayot New, complies with Underware foundry’s Latin Plus character set, which supports over 400 Latin alphabet based languages. I’m indebted to Filip Blažek’s diacritics.typo.cz and DJR’s Manicotti; two really helpful reference materials on how to weight and contrast play into drawing diacritical marks for a reverse contrast face.

some select glyphs from discotack. the addition of lowercase lead to some of my absolute faves!

Giving it a new name

Throughout the process of getting this font towards the finish line, I started to feel like the name Tumble Oui’d wasn’t the best fit. At first, I thought it was very funny that a French foundry would be releasing a typeface from a West Virginian called Tumble Oui’d, but then realized that joke might be lost on a majority of the audience. Also, oui’d is internet slang and I’m a guy in his thirties that lives in the woods. Tumble Oui’d is still a phrase that makes me chuckle, but I knew I’d regret it if the font was published under that name.

After kicking around a bunch of equally bad ideas for names, I landed on Discotack. As I mentioned at the top of this article, the forms of the uppercase are heavily inspired by Benguiat’s Discotheque. Historical references are a big part of my type design process and I want others to be able to trace those connections back to their source when looking at my type. The name Discotack obviously plays off of Discotheque, and “tack” is a word used to describe the equipment put on horses for riding (saddles, stirrups, etc.), bringing the Cowboy Western vibe to the name. Plus, it contains some of my favorite letters in the character set: /D, /s, /a, and /t.

Discotack v1.0

The initial release of Discotack is more thoughtful and better constructed than I ever imagined, and for that I am forever grateful to the folks at Blaze Type for their feedback and wisdom. I learned a lot through this process that I’m excited to apply to the other half-assed typefaces on my hard drive.

Discotack is a display face for the Psychedelic Cowboy and the Desert Disco Queen. Use it big, loud, and playfully. And please send us a note, tag us (@bigfog.co), or add your designs using Discotack to Fonts in Use! We’d love to see what you’re making with it.