Focal, a sans serif in the uncanny valley of softness

Type is in many ways a fashion business. Taste is cyclical: x-heights rise and fall like hemlines; preferences for spacing expand and contract like people’s penchant for wide-leg over skinny jeans. Type designers mine the past for ideas while—ideally—finding something fresh and relevant to say. With Focal, Greg Gazdowicz has created an unusual kind of revival. Rather than bringing back a particular typeface or genre, Focal attempts to capture the particular quality of a lost era of print production: the 1970s, when the hot-metal era gave way to phototypesetting, and type as a whole lost some of its sharpness.

Importantly, this softness was neither mechanical nor entirely consistent, making it entirely different from the rounded typefaces that first emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, typified by Caslon Rounded and other typefaces we’ve revived for Commercial Classics; or later typefaces that made allowances for roundness in their very structure, like VAG Rounded and Frankfurter.

Focal started out as a somewhat faithful rendition of the way Franklin Gothic and its loosely related cousins (Trade Gothic, News Gothic, et al.) appeared on the Varityper, with the expected large x-height, tight spacing, gentle stroke contrast, and slightly angled terminals. “I had an idea of a typeface existing in an uncanny valley of something familiar being printed, overprinted, or xeroxed and copied over a few times until it starts to become something more organic and warm,” Gazdowicz wrote in some early notes for this essay. He soon realized that conflating medium and genre was getting in the way of this concept. “The more I worked on the idea in the direction of American gothics, the more I started realizing I didn’t want to just make a survey of American gothics seen through a Varityper lens; I wanted to encapsulate an era of softness,” he wrote. “So I had to find a new model for the concept to mesh with.”

Gazdowicz realized that what he was responding to was the particular quality of phototypesetting, and how each step of the production process in the photo era introduced a slight softness in the type forms. For offset printing, the master type drawings were shot onto film masters, which were then duplicated for distribution. From the dupes, galleys were typeset on photo paper and pasted up in camera-ready mechanicals, from which negatives were made. Those were then imposed and used to expose printing plates—after which, finally, the type was printed. The softness could be compensated for through ink traps, but never fully avoided. 

Because Gazdowicz has spent so much time reading crisp, precise letterforms on screen, the warm imperfections of phototype on paper deeply appealed to him, and he was curious to see if he could bring this subtle organic quality to type on screen as well as on paper. In a private talk at a New York design studio in February 2024, Gazdowicz said: “The feeling I wanted for this typeface couldn’t be achieved by just simply applying a unified rounding effect and calling it a day.” Every corner is rounded in Focal, but not all corners are rounded equally: inner corners have a more consistent radius, while the outer corners are vertically elongated, better capturing what happened in the photographic process.

Without evoking a specific typeface, Focal imparts a feeling of a familiar but forgotten grotesk, perhaps more European than American. Its relatively small x-height is out of step with the large post-ITC counterforms that have defined the past two decades of type design, both for fashionable and functional reasons, making it stand out among recent sans serifs. Its structural quirks, such as the splayed M, spurless G, and the gently curved leg of the R, push it away from the more rational and systematic sans serifs in our library like Graphik and Atlas Grotesk. One point of inspiration was Gert Wunderlich’s Maxima, designed in the 1960s and first produced by the East German foundry VEB Typoart in metal in 1970, before being adapted for phototypsetting and early digital typesetting. Gazdowicz also looked at Adrian Frutiger’s Univers, Bauer & Baum’s Folio, and Karlgeorg Hoefer’s Permanent, mainly to see how different designers had handled the heaviest weights with their relatively small x-heights.

Focal achieves this impression of something familiar yet slightly off, a sans serif from decades ago whose name is on the tip of your tongue, in part by sidestepping the unspoken conventions that seem to have appeared around sans serifs. In his notes on the project, Gazdowicz wrote: “Despite the lower x-height being from an older era, I feel like it brings some freshness right now by going against what has become pretty common.”