Stag, Granger, and Gingrich for Esquire

Early in 2005, while finishing the last remaining work on the typefaces for the Guardian, art director Darhil Crooks got in touch. He and Curcurito had just started at Esquire and were interested in commissioning a new slab serif, in a handful of heavy weights from Medium to Black. The magazine had commissioned Esquire Display and Text (later released as Mercury) under former creative director Robert Priest, using it with by Crank 8 by Greg Lindy and Henk Elenga. Neither of these had the heft that Curcurito and Crooks were looking for—the ability to flood a page with ink and let a single word have a huge presence. To add visual interest, I added bracketing on outer serifs, while leaving sharp corners where inner serifs connected to the stems to have make the lengths easier to vary. Notches are softened, to keep the forms from looking too severe. Terminals are blunt and chunky, to maximize weight while keeping the forms simple: no pointiness, no rounding.

Once these decisions were approved, they asked to expand the weight range to include a Thin, which could be useful for fashion stories. The typeface seemed to lose too much of its personality when the bracketing and blunt terminals were removed, so I exaggerated them instead, allowing the unusual effect they had on the texture to become a salient feature of the typeface.

A working beta version of Stag (its name taken from the list of potential titles founding editor Arnold Gingrich had proposed for the magazine) debuted in the September 2005 issue. Seeing how it worked in layouts was invaluable for making final refinements to the typeface—especially learning that the Medium would be used far more frequently than the other weights.

Crank 8 was soon replaced by Chester’s Apex New, which worked well alongside Mercury, but its smaller x-height and narrower proportion made it difficult to mix with Stag at similar sizes, so Curcurito and Crooks got in touch about a new sans serif. Paul proposed that I cut the serifs off of Stag, and they were thrilled with the result, so Stag Sans was added to the typographic palette at the end of 2007. I retained many of the quirks of the slab, with the blunted terminals and soft corners on ascenders and notches enhancing the family’s readability at text sizes, and later on screen. I had inadvertently landed on some of the same tricks Matthew Carter used to make Bell Centennial and Verdana so legible.

Special-effect versions soon joined the mix. Stag was transformed into a stencil by Berton Hasebe, to give the front of book style section a stronger identity of its own, and Stag Sans Round, drawn by Ross Milne, was added to make the Man at His Best section feel a little softer and more conversational.

After 5 years with Stag, Curcurito and Crooks were ready for a change. In additon to adding two new sections and replacing Stag Sans with Graphik, including its many condensed widths, they also commissioned a new serif display face called Granger, designed by Kai Bernau and Susana Carvalho of Atelier Carvalho Bernau.

The immense influence of Mad Men had touched all parts of American visual culture, reigniting interest in all things midcentury modernist. Curcurito and Crooks wanted a serif display face that could replace both Stag and Mercury—enough contrast to be elegant, and enough heft to be powerful. Kai and I had been talking about our shared admiration for Hermann Zapf’s Melior and other squarish serif typefaces that also came from the time and general place, like Stanislav Maršo’s Public and Johann Schweitzer’s Dominante, released in Germany and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, all sharing superelliptical round forms and medium contrast, enough to feel elegant without going into Walbaum territory. Granger, named for editor in chief David Granger, first appeared in the magazine in early 2011, and was soon joined by a higher contrast display variant. Granger had soft terminals to balance the crisp slabs, resembling the 1950s typefaces the designers had referenced. When the family was eventually reworked and released as Algebra, these soft terminals were blunted off, giving the crisp feeling of a grotesk that happens to have slabs.