![](/imager/media/54498/Ver-Sacrum-cover-smaller_dbf8d6a38dd21a4600d81f78eddca413.jpg)
Exentrica: The One That Nearly Got Away!
G-Type’s Nick Cooke tells the story of ‘losing’ a typeface and how he painstakingly re-assembled his latest release from previous social media posts!
“During a visit to the MAK: Museum für angewandte Kunst, (Museum of Applied Arts) in Vienna I couldn’t help but be impressed with the work of the Viennese Secession artists Kolomon Moser, Josef Hoffmann, Gustav Klimt and Josef Maria Olbrich from 1898 to 1903. I was particularly drawn to the style of lettering by these artists who adopted a similar aesthetic, although not the same as each other.
I bought the Ver Sacrum book and studied the lettering throughout. An idea began to form; I could distil the overall style into one typeface with many different variations via the use of style sets which could all be interchangeable to give a huge typographic variety. I further expanded this idea by incorporating two distinctly different styles of type: Monoline and Contrast.
![IMG 7833](/imager/media/54515/IMG_7833_5ae402c9837860cd6e4f65e304b3a5fa.jpg)
I did an initial sketch identifying different versions of the same letter and ligated combinations, of which there were quite a few. I established the style for the Monoline and Contrast variants fairly quickly and then developed the weight range in each, going from Thin to Medium via three intermediate weights. I was pleased with the results so I posted them on Twitter on January the 11th. I posted more images on Twitter and LinkedIn throughout January. It was progressing really well. I worked the whole of January solely on this new typeface which I now called Exentrica.
![Exentrica sketch](/imager/media/54502/Exentrica-sketch_5ae402c9837860cd6e4f65e304b3a5fa.jpeg)
![3wts A Z](/imager/media/54519/3wtsA-Z_5ae402c9837860cd6e4f65e304b3a5fa.png)
![Allsets](/imager/media/54527/Allsets_5ae402c9837860cd6e4f65e304b3a5fa.png)
At the beginning of February… Hold on, what’s this? My machine isn’t booting up. The progress bar stalls halfway. I try various troubleshooting methods gleaned from the internet, but it just refuses to start. So I take my Mac to a specialist repairers but they are unable to retrieve anything. Thankfully I had my external hard drive which automatically backs up via Time Machine.
Phew! What a relief!
But! It hadn’t backed up since 17th of December, and I hadn’t noticed because I naturally assumed that Apple products are so reliable and I had never had any problems in all the long years of using them.
So all was lost. An entire month of work on one typeface. Bugger!
![O Tchars](/imager/media/54535/OTchars_5ae402c9837860cd6e4f65e304b3a5fa.png)
![E1 Light](/imager/media/54573/E1-Light_5ae402c9837860cd6e4f65e304b3a5fa.png)
I was pretty annoyed, but thought it could have been worse; I might have lost everything. So I downloaded all the images I had posted on social media and started again. I remembered everything I had done, and was able to recreate the whole font virtually identical to the original.
![Zeitschrift2](/imager/media/54584/Zeitschrift2_5ae402c9837860cd6e4f65e304b3a5fa.jpeg)
![5wtsbothstyles](/imager/media/54592/5wtsbothstyles_5ae402c9837860cd6e4f65e304b3a5fa.png)
I worked on the various features using mainly contextual alternates to produce ligated pairs and other style sets. After careful consideration I arrived at seven style sets:
SS1: Up and Down
SS2: Curvy bottoms E, L
SS3: Long stretched S
SS4: Alternate Curved E
SS5: Alternate M, N, V, W, Y, Z
SS6: Fancy ampersand
SS7: Round topped M
All style sets work with each other, giving endless combinations of typographic experimentation using OpenType. I also created a variable font, incorporating all styles and weights in one interactive font.”
Exentrica is now available to licence on the master font page:
https://g-type.com/fonts/exent...
![FQOPV9 M Xw Aov Lc K](/imager/media/54414/FQOPV9MXwAovLcK_5ae402c9837860cd6e4f65e304b3a5fa.jpeg)