Veer recently released Gábor Kóthay’s Incognito/Terra Incognita. I was really looking forward to it as I had seen a sneak peek on Fountain’s Fresh/Upcoming page. It feels like an addition to or extension of his voluptuous Zanzibar, that — hadn’t it been a re-release — I certainly would’ve included it as a favourite of mine in Typographica’s Our Favourite Fonts of 2004 thread.

As Veer’s promotional blurb explains, years ago, designer Gábor Kóthay discovered a rare book containing historic maps and various cartographic signs. Gábor had been quite an explorer as a child, and this antique book enabled him relive his love for the term ‘Terra Incognita’ or ‘unknown land’. Working on the Incognito typeface was a typographic — and topographic — journey into his Hungarian past and the folklore and history of another time.

The Incognito/Terra Incognita suite of typefaces consists of a roman and an italic with their respective ligature fonts, augmented with small caps for the regular and four sets of swash capitals for the italic. The dingbat font Terra Incognita rounds out the collection. I was fortunate enough to receive review copies, which allowed me to properly test-drive the faces. Which was pure joy.

At first sight Incognito looks like another fine rendition of Nicolas Jenson’s Renaissance model, similar to Bruce Rogers’ and Frederic Warde’s Centaur, with a Cochin flavour in the capitals. Upon closer inspection though, the face reveals it is peppered with numerous quirky details, the most obvious being a cute pear-shaped bottom serif on the ‘S’ and ‘s’, the leg of the ‘k’ which extends below the baseline and a striking italic ‘w’. The outright bizarre numerals with their swash-like curly endings on the 1, 4, 5 and 7 brought a smile to my face. As for the lovely small caps, they incorporate a dotted ‘i’ and ‘j’ that only makes sense in Turkish. Weird, but beautiful. Although I personally would've liked to have seen more options in the ligatures fonts, a couple of idiosyncratic combinations make them worthwhile. I am especially charmed by the italic ‘ff’ and ‘fr’.

The Terra Incognita dingbat face is an extensive collection of design elements lifted straight from historical maps: symbols, ornaments, borders, blocks, catch words, navigational instruments, silhouettes of continents, even the obligatory funny-looking whale is there.

A striking feature of the italics are the four swash variations. Their names come from the Latin terms for the points of a compass, and indicate the general orientation of the swashes on the capitals. So Septentrio has swashes oriented upwards, to the south; Occidens to the west; Oriens to the east; and Meridies downwards. The design for those swash capitals is imaginative and daring. One can set them “out of the box” in combination with the lowercase to great effect, though for the accomplished typographer there’s the possibility to combine capitals from the four variations into stunning typographical compositions. This is not for the squeamish though, as it requires skill, compositional insight and judicious kerning, but the results are extremely rewarding.

The strength of Incognito lies in how the source material was approached. It all boils down to the level of interpretation when translating the found type into a digital font. Too often type designers will rationalise the character shapes to a point where the typeface looks sand-papered to death. You could draw a parallel with formula-driven pop music: it all slides through your ears like vaseline without making any lasting impression. The same happens with typefaces that are too slick — at first sight they might look beautiful, but in the end they fail to inspire you or challenge your creativity. Even the early Picasso included jarring or disturbing details in his otherwise naturalistic paintings to catch the viewer's attention. Perfection is boring.
Incognito on the other hand looks “authentic” by staying very true to its source material. Gábor understands perfectly that scripts on antique maps are so captivating and endearing just because of the slight awkwardness in their character shapes and the weird details, as well as the energy and unrestrained joy in the swashes and ligatures. These qualities have been carefully infused into the digital fonts, which results in an honest, inspiring and simply beautiful type family.

Another notable recent release is Jonathan Barnbrook’s Tourette. When discussing the face with David, he made a picture perfect analysis. For once I'll be lazy and simply quote him.

Hmmm, well the way I saw it was that he’d drawn two fonts, one straight and one with the vocal tics often present in a Tourette syndrome person’s voice represented in visual form. I think it’s clear to understand, just not that interesting to engage with as a design and concept. The straight one reminds me of film titling typography of the silent film era actually. Tourette himself was from the 19th century so that’d fit in with Barnbrook’s noted time period.