East of Rome’s Glotik is a humanist sans with a medieval streak

Glotik is a sans serif typeface with six weights – from Roman up to Ultra – and 1,199 characters across extended Latin, monotonic Greek and extended Cyrillic. Its creator, Lewis McGuffie of Estonian type foundry East of Rome, describes it as less of a humanist sans and more an archaic, medieval one. The curves are generous but uneven, the stems straight, and the uppercase has a second set of letters based on medieval manuscript lettering. “The name is a portmanteau of ‘glottal’ (meaning something spoken) and ‘gothic,’ with some liberties taken with the spelling,” he explains. “The shape of the teardrop ends of the crossbars in the ‘f’ and ‘t,’ as well as the ‘r,’ reminded me of the dangly bit at the back of a person’s throat. I thought this connection between the shape of a physical feature and a sound in speech was interesting, combined with the gothic sans serif style of type.” Glotik was initially inspired by the typefaces on two Swedish book covers. From one, McGuffie imitated the lowercase of the cover’s title typeface, which is close to Clearface Gothic, an American sans serif from the beginning of the 20th century. From the other, he took the uppercase and italic of ITC Novarese, released in 1980 and named after its Italian designer Aldo Novarese. Its upright capitals and calligraphic lowercase gave the drawings an early-modern feeling from the start. He had no interest in remaking either typeface. Once he had widened the lowercase a little, he began to see a humanist sans in it, and set out to draw one that kept the thick-and-thin variation, or contrast, of Clearface Gothic. He wanted a pre-modern ‘medieval sans’ with warmth and texture and none of the historical cliché. The uppercase left less room to experiment, and McGuffie was stuck for a while on how to give it personality, until he found a German book in the country house, Sumpf und Wasservögel, with a cover set in Jessen Schrift. That typeface, drawn by Rudolf Koch for setting the Bible and released by the Klingspor foundry in 1930, pairs a blackletter lowercase, the angular medieval script, with a plain upright uppercase. He had glanced at its ‘R’ and thought he saw the curved stroke run into the diagonal at its thickest point, with no thinning where the two meet. A closer look showed that Jessen Schrift does not quite do that, but the misreading gave him a way to make Glotik’s uppercase simpler and more naive. “I first drew a sans serif version of Koch’s Jessen Schrift, thereby minimising and ‘modernising’ the letterforms,” he details, “while trying to retain the strange distribution of weight in the horizontal and vertical strokes.” Glotik’s ‘S’ and ‘W’ are closely modelled on Jessen Schrift, and its thick crossbars came from the medieval feel.