Mucca Zhanna

Have you picked up a copy of Typography 32 yet? It was a project I worked on with Mucca Design back in 2011. I helped with interior layouts and caricature collecting, but more importantly I worked with Matteo Bologna in creating one of the two typefaces developed for the book: Mucca Zhanna.

How Bologna describes it in a recent post at Creative Review:

“[Mucca Zhanna] is based on a small sample of calligraphy from a Zanerian’s manual that has the same wacky/naive feel as the Chinese calligraphy from the Canal Street letterer,” says Bologna. “To preserve the spirit of the original we ended up designing a typeface with more than a thousand glyphs.

“By forcing these typefaces, which are obviously not fit for our contemporary aesthetic, to live together within a single annual design that celebrates the best typography out there, we essentially conducted an experiment as to whether or not ‘low art’ could be elevated by its context.”

www.creativereview.co.uk

This was a fun project to work on for a variety of reasons. Mucca Zhanna is a crazy, handwritten face that didn’t demand much refining and finesse once I got the strokes down. This allowed me to focus on experimentation both with the awesome new font software Glyphs, and with the Python coding for OpenType alternates. Georg Seifert (type designer and developer of Glyphs) was an immense help, as we assaulted his patience with crazy alternates-of-alternates-of-alternates coding inquiries.

There are over 1000 glyphs, with two alternates for each ‘uppercase’ letter, numeral, and ‘lowercase’ letter, as well as two alternates for each ‘lowercase’ ascender, descender and combo that could be given squiggly extensions. This means that for the lowercase ‘N’, with its four variations (no squigglys, top right squiggly, bottom left squiggly, and both squigglys) there would two additional alternates each, giving a total of 12 glyphs for ‘N’. (In theory, that means the lowercase ‘H’ would have 48 alternates— but there was a limit to our madness.) 

This of course doesn’t take into account all the diacritics we built, though admittidly with fewer alternate options. (But it’s nice that I can at least spell the Bánh mì pâté cha thịt sandwiches I regularly consume, since I sure as hell can’t pronounce them.)