Nicholas Jenson’s 15th century roman typeface represents a crucial point on the spectrum between hand-lettered calligraphy and constructed type. Structurally, it is formed by the shape of the pen nib and the movement of the calligrapher’s hand, yet it is idealized to remove abnormalities that would become distracting with repetition.

In drawing letters based on this typeface, I wanted to learn why these letterforms were “correct”, on their own terms. Applying a set of geometric heuristics, the well-resolved nature of something like Helvetica is clear, but I suspected something else was going on with serif lettering that came from a tradition outside modernist uniformity.

The process for creating the letters began with drawing them at a 5 mm x-height with a 1.5 mm nib in black ink. Each letter was drawn many times to better understand its construction and to obtain better results. These pages were photographed, one instance of each character was selected, and the drawings were cleaned up and vectorized. In some cases, a final digital glyph would be composited from a few different drawings.

It became clear through the process that the logic of the roman lowercase came primarily from the hand and the tool rather than a set of geometric rules. Angles on glyphs like the lowercase e were determined by how the pen was held, and serifs felt like a natural way to terminate vertical strokes.

At all times, a balance had to be made between cleanliness and preservation of aspects of the original drawing. The end result is not necessarily resolved — too much like handwriting by the standards of a typographer like Emil Ruder — but crucially, it does preserve marks of its handmade nature.

A lowercase set of letters with limited punctuation was fine as a proof of concept and had a certain conceptual completeness, but the constraints imposed on the user of the typeface unsurprisingly became a problem. A set of numerals was the first step in addressing the functional deficiencies, but an uppercase proved necessary.

These characters were not originally included because the formal development of the roman uppercase had more twists and turns that that of the lowercase. Instead of a progression from pen stroke to cut metal, the origins of capitals in Roman engravings (themselves perhaps based on brushstrokes, according to calligrapher Edward Catich) had to be considered.

A certain short-circuiting, bypassing the rigidity of the chisel, was needed in order to come up with capitals that matched the existing lowercase alphabet formally and methodologically. Important aspects, namely the consistent pen angle, could not be maintained were the Jenson model followed as closely as before. What followed was a process in which the final form was less predetermined.

Now that I better understood certain practical reasons for the shapes of letterforms, I wanted to test the concept of anticipation in creative work — how known is the outcome at the beginning? As drawing the lowercases was a matter of emulation, I expected all along that each lowercase Terra glyph would bear some resemblance to its Jenson counterpart. Now, for each uppercase character, it was necessary to project something that was visually harmonious with the other glyphs and true to its process but still recognizable and legible.

Once again, many instances of each character were drawn, but the stylistic range tended to be broader in this case, ranging from fluid to deconstructive approaches. Out of these, I tended to select the more traditional options somewhere in the middle. In the final character set, the differences from Jenson are not as drastic as expected. The main differences other than the “handmade” feel are missing serifs on horizontal strokes as well as a more clear relationship between pen angle and stroke width variation.

The impact of anticipation on the process was strongly felt even without direct reference to a precedent. Counting on the process itself to give unforeseen results is not a dependable strategy without developing a sort of counter for oneself against the “weight of history”. While this uppercase alphabet is not formally innovative, it has a soundness and consistency — in at least this case, perhaps things are the way they are for a reason.