The final act at Nebiolo: the quest for a ‘universal’ typeface (2/2). Dattilo & Modulo
The idea was to start a dialogue between typography and design. All conditions were met except that it just did not happen
The teamwork continued after Forma’s release. In fact the graphic designers were increasingly acting as global consultants to Nebiolo ‘next to poor Novarese, who begrudged this situation.’[1] Several alphabets were developed independently by the Studio Artistico and submitted for discussion to the committee. These included personal creations by Novarese — such as Magister, Metropol, Stop, Sprint, Delta, and Fenice — and contributions by Luciano Agosto and Gianni Parlacino, who following Novarese’s retirement were de facto in charge of the Studio.[2]
A slab serif echoing the aesthetics of the typewriter: Dattilo
Following Forma’s positive reception, Nebiolo understandably pressed for a companion face. Tovaglia and colleagues aimed to broaden the scope of the research by returning to their initial ambitions of developing an innovative project ex nihilo in a strictly functional manner, without reference to competitors. But they needed data from which to set up objective criteria. Given the lack of resources for a broader market survey, they fell back on a more modest opinion poll among graphic designers about their preferred text typefaces. Surviving documents do not reveal what they did with the survey’s results. After some hesitations as to the best way to tackle the new design, it was decided to revert to Forma as a starting point — as Novarese had suggested back in 1969. The idea of a slab serif echoing the aesthetics of typewriter characters was Novarese’s, as was its name Dattilo. As a member of the Rencontres internationales de Lure since 1955 Novarese was aware of international trends and, following the success of Frutiger’s Serifa (Bauer, 1967), he felt the need for something more in tune with contemporary sans serif models rather than the older Clarendons (such as his own Egizio, released in 1955). The group came up with the idea of essentially adding serifs to Forma, whose proportions were adapted to the new design with minor adjustments.
Again, as with Forma, production progressed at a slow pace. Dattilo was eventually released in 1972 in three basic cuts, neretto (semi-bold), chiarissimo (extra light) and nerissimo (black), while other variants (condensed and semi-bold italic) were completed at a later stage and released in 1974.[3] Like its sans serif companion, the launch of Dattilo was accompanied by a wealth of printed matter — posters, advertisements, specimens — entrusted to the Milanese designers and in-house to Novarese. The typeface got an even more successful response from the graphic community, as confirmed by positive marketing results. Compared to Forma, Dattilo had a slight tongue-in-cheek look that made it more appealing as a titling face and for advertising. Its serifs effectively break Forma’s monotonous black/white rhythm, which was its ideological strength and its formal weakness. Not surprisingly Armando Testa, who had been critical of Forma, was among the creatives who joined the team to produce posters for Dattilo.
1970–74. The Dream Team’s changeover and Novarese’s departure
The group was by now a closely-knit collective and more experienced with the subtleties of type production. Over time there had been some changeover: Neuburg and Oriani quit the team in 1970, while Turin-based designer Giovanni Brunazzi (b. 1938) joined the group around 1974; and Gianfranco Repetti replaced Camera as commercial director of the foundry. What proved to be increasingly difficult was the relationship with Novarese. Nebiolo’s idea of opening up the creative process and marking a change from the traditional craft setting that had prevailed until then may have had its own merits, but Novarese, who had worked alone and without any restrictions for over twenty years, could not willingly accept the teamwork that the management imposed upon him. In the end, that assignment weighed heavily on him and was the main reason that prompted him to leave the company towards the end of 1974.[4] Except for a few meetings, Novarese took little part in the legibility research that the committee embarked upon between 1970 and 1972. This situation explains why young studio assistants Agosto and Parlacino were involved in the project from the beginning, and on a par with the designers.[5]
Due to Novarese’s growing impatience with ‘abstract talk,’ from around 1970 it was decided to proceed by splitting the group’s activities in two: at every meeting half of the time was devoted to examining typefaces developed by the Studio Artistico, the other half to the long-term search for the ideal alphabet, yet to be determined. Munari invited psychologist Gaetano Kanisza, known for his studies of perception, who provided a survey of legibility studies to the group. Access to this kind of scientific information was at the time very unusual for graphic designers, even more so in Italy where the English language constituted a further obstacle. Following this initiation, it was decided to carry out an experimental study from which to garner the data needed for defining the ideal alphabet.
Psychology and typography
The legibility study was conducted in 1972–73 by Munari’s son Alberto, researcher at the Faculty of Psychology in Geneva, in consultation with the committee which set the basic typographic parameters for the test. The aim of the test was to evaluate the reading performance of three kinds of printing types, in order to identify which typographic factors influenced legibility. The experiment’s format focused on the recognition of short strings of randomly combined letters and numbers, which were briefly shown to participants, who were then asked to transcribe which letters were actually remembered and their relative position. The test was based on a small set of variables: three typographic styles (serif, slab serif, and sans serif, using Nebiolo’s own Garaldus, Egizio, and Forma), further discriminating within each group between lowercase/capitals, and three time intervals (2, 5, 10 milliseconds). It was performed on 60 subjects, classified as average readers, who were further divided into three subgroups, each of which was assigned a predetermined time interval. Statistical analysis of data was performed following a factorial analysis of variance. The study concluded that sans serif type was more legible than seriffed ones and that lowercase letters performed better than capitals, and highlighted that in general the typeface style and time interval were the most critical factors. [6]
A legibility test with methodological shortcomings
Although the laboratory setting followed established scientific practice, the investigation was far from rigorous in its epistemological assumptions, and clearly suffered from a number of methodological shortcomings. On the one hand, the narrow set of variables taken into account and the wrongful equation between letter recognition and legibility point to an overly simplistic model, that ignored the complexity of the reading experience. On the other hand, more specific flaws include unaccounted perceptual differences in the optical size of the type samples, and the exclusion of visual variables related to the typographic articulation of text (leading, letter spacing, set width, hyphenation). Basically, the study followed the ‘popular research topic … [that is] to test a number of different typeface styles, and rank them according to the most legible.’[7] While acknowledging that it was not possible to identify which factors make some letters more easily recognizable than others, the conclusions are all the more surprising as Herbert Spencer’s The Visible Word (first published in 1969) and scholarly publications such as Visible Language and the Journal of Typographic Research specifically addressed these same issues from a design perspective and could have offered useful insight in devising the experiment.[8]
The Geneva effect: ‘Bastardone’ and Modulo
Nonetheless, the findings confirmed Nebiolo’s selling proposition for Forma (claiming to improve legibility of the sans serif) and provided ample material for discussion within the group. Using the data, Ilio Negri assembled a hybrid alphabet, affectionately known as Bastardone, mixing upper- and lowercase letters of the three families according to their legibility. In a sense, it was the study’s visual transposition. Although it was meant to be an exercise to better understand aspects of letter design related to legibility, the formal outcome had a postmodern look that unknowingly anticipated the typographic experiments of the 1990s.
Modulo was an experimental project stemming directly from the Geneva study and the Bastardone. Unfortunately, Negri passed away in 1974 and could not see the outcome of his efforts. The alphabet’s basic structure and proportions were derived from the Bastardone — made up of the most readable letters from the Geneva test — in order to “start from a classical skeleton regardless of its dress.”[9] The idea was to strip bare the skeleton (the centre line) of all the details, including serifs. The resulting design was then adapted on a 7:10 grid (the ratio of the standard UNI poster format), which equally determined the basic stroke thickness, the slant of italics, and the spacing units. Although not new, the idea of a modular design based on a mathematical ratio and without optical corrections proposed by Munari, must have appeared radical to the foundry management, who gave it their mark of approval. Geometric experimental alphabets have a long history in the 20th century, from the Bauhaus on. At the time Wim Crouwel enjoyed great popularity as only the latest designer to try his hand at modular alphabets — and the Milanese designers were certainly aware of his work. One can surmise the Nebiolo management did not fully realise the implications that such a line of research meant for a type manufacture business. Had he still been there, Novarese would have laughed at the idea.
An ideal alphabet in a material world
Its development, over three years in the making, was anything but smooth. Significant differences within the group meant that each designer carried out research on his own, which was then shared at meetings. Grignani, for instance, developed his own geometric alphabet as opposed to the approach championed by Tovaglia and Munari.[8] Modulo was designed in five weights taking as reference (like Forma and Dattilo) the semi-bold or #2. As the stroke width of the various weights was derived from the 7:10 module, without any optical corrections, heavier cuts posed serious optical problems, filling the counters almost completely. For this reason only Modulo #1 (light)and #2 (semi-bold) went into preproduction. By that time, however, the Nebiolo company was again almost bankrupt and in 1976 it was bought by Fiat.
Despite the acquisition, work on Modulo went on uninterrupted and was actually the only project still running at the Studio Artistico. Tovaglia’s sudden death in 1977 brought it to a halt, until Iliprandi assumed the role of coordinator in a rush to complete it. There were even plans to make it Nebiolo’s first electronic release suited to the new technology of CRT typesetting, but the company was doomed. It should be clear at this point that the sustained effort and the number of people involved in such an extended project were aimed at just producing a new typeface for hand setting — which by 1977 was a dead technology. It wasn’t a nostalgia operation, it was almost suicide. While major type foundries were already shifting from photo- to digital/CRT photocomposition, Nebiolo’s prolonged support for such an ameturish plan shows its management was in disarray and disconnected from the real world.
Fiat and the Nebiolo wind up
By 1978 Fiat was ready to discontinue parts of the company, including the type foundry, which was closed down — thereby ending the whole project. Nevertheless, two new series of Modulo were developed specifically for Fiat. After quitting Nebiolo in 1976, Parlacino went into partnership with the foundry’s publicity manager Grazia Schenone to set up a graphic design studio. Through Schenone, who kept her position in Nebiolo under the new management, Parlacino established a solid relation with Fiat, receiving numerous advertising and design commissions. Working on a new identity for the automobile company, Parlacino was able to promote Modulo as the basic corporate typeface, for which he and Agosto designed an italic and an intermediate roman (equivalent to grade #2½ in the original system). Unfortunately, when the remnants of the Nebiolo company were finally wound up by Fiat in 1981‑82, the typeface was dumped along with the identity.[9] In 1979 ADI awarded Modulo its prestigious Compasso d’oro as a posthumous celebration of the ambitious but unsuccessful project.
Modulo was, for better or for worse, the culmination of the far-reaching research process that Tovaglia, Grignani, Munari, Iliprandi, Neuburg, Negri, Oriani, Brunazzi, Agosto and Parlacino had undertaken together with Novarese to create Forma. Despite their prolonged efforts, what went missing was an open dialogue between the two professional worlds of typographers and graphic designers, which could have lead to far more significant and long-lasting results. As Mario Piazza and Silvia Sfligiotti aptly sum up: “Forma is the quintessential example of the incommunicability of the two worlds … The idea was to join their respective skills, but the result proved the dialogue between the technical culture of traditional typography (Novarese) and the industrial design culture was impossible. Although dominant and successful, the designers were inexpert in the issues of typographic design.”[12] All conditions were met except that it just did not happen. In part because of personality clashes, but above all because of the rigidity and weaknesses of their respective ideological positions. In a sense, the whole story seems to revolve around and revert to the vexata quæstio at the very root of modernity — the ambivalence of attraction and repulsion exerted by traditionalism and positivism.
A quintessential example of incompetence
From an industrial/historical perspective, after over a century in the printing business Nebiolo failed due to its own management’s incompetence. Lack of foresight prevented the company — and the type foundry — from tackling the challenges at a time of major technological transition, thereby determining its demise. Nebiolo’s interest in its type foundry had been waning since the late 1960s, and the dialogue with the designers was more an investment in terms of image rather than a real expansion strategy. Franco Camera, the type foundry director, was an engineer whose commercial and technical experience was far removed from the world of typeface manufacture. After Novarese’s retirement, the Studio Artistico was entrusted briefly to his former pupil Gianfranco Uberti and apart from a short-lived consultancy by Umberto Fenocchio, was then left without any direction. [13] Some time in 1972–73 Compugraphic had offered Nebiolo a partnership to take over and digitize their catalogue, but their offer was turned down because the foundry management feared giving up control over their main source of revenue. It could have been a key alliance for Nebiolo, opening up the emerging market of digital fonts, and most likely changing the foundry’s fate.
In all this confusion, in the early 1980s Nebiolo matrices and casting equipment were acquired by a new company named Italiana Caratteri, owned by printing industry businessman Orazio Samoggia. This firm continued to produce Nebiolo types up until the late 1980s — that is, as long as hand composition remained a viable technology. Eventually, Nebiolo’s original materials first went to the Haas foundry, then to a joint partnership between Schriftenservice Stempel (Rainer Gerstenberg) and Swiss entrepreneur Walter Fruttiger, who holds the copyright to this day.[14]
Nebiolo’s heritage. A call for a critical assessment
Unfortunately, the rapid dismantling of the company and the dispersion of its business archives — its archive and library apparently ended up in a landfill — deprived future researchers of a key source to retrace the history of Nebiolo. Given this lack of attention from design historians, publications are generally limited to summary catalogues of Nebiolo typefaces.[15] These invariably reflect the views of Novarese, who as Nebiolo’s last art director, has been all too often ‘celebrated’ rather than properly investigated. Such bias is to be explained partly by the international recognition Novarese enjoyed in the 1980s, partly as a consequence of his own autobiographical writings. Eventually, the common sentimental leaning of his contemporaries made scholars uncritically endorse his personal, if not partial, account.
A critical assessment of the heritage of the Nebiolo type foundry would be a timely addition to scholarly knowledge and a valuable corrective to current typographic histories, which are biased towards north-European foundries. The recent reappraisal of oral history as a relevant research methodology in design history opens the way to a promising exploration of the oral testimonies as an alternative source.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to express his warmest thanks to the following people, without whose help this article would not have been possible: Luciano Agosto, Giovanni Brunazzi, Giancarlo Iliprandi, Till Neuburg, Gianni Parlacino, and Maria Grazia Schenone for sharing recollections, opinions, and documents; Vittorio Merlo, Nebiolo’s General Manager from 1978 to 1981, and Boris Pesce, both authors of studies in the history of Nebiolo, for elucidating the circumstances of Nebiolo’s demise; Lorenzo Grazzani, curator at Aiap’s Centro di documentazione del progetto grafico for granting access to Ilio Negri’s archive; Sandro Berra, curator at Tipoteca Italiana, printing and type design museum in Cornuda, for granting access to Aldo Novarese’s fund; Archivio Tipografico, letterpress printshop and graphic design studio in Turin, for providing pictures featuring Dattilo; Andrea Amato, graphic and type designer, co-owner of Tipiblu, for sharing his research Forma. Breve storia dei caratteri lineari e il caso studio del Forma (M.A. thesis tutored by Andrea Braccaloni, Politecnico di Milano, July 2009); Gaetano Donato, former employee of Fonderia Caratteri Nebiolo, for sharing his collection of official company photographs at http://gaetanodonato.blogspot.it/; Riccardo Olocco for sharing a wider and long-standing research on Nebiolo under Alessandro Butti’s direction. The views expressed in this article, including possible omissions and misreadings, are entirely the author’s.
Footnotes
1. Giancarlo Iliprandi, interview with the author, 24 June 2013.
2. Already in 1968, when Parlacino started working at Nebiolo, he and Agosto were Novarese’s only assistants other than the photographer in charge of the darkroom. Besides their work on Novarese’s own creations (for which they have so far received hardly any credit) and Forma nerissima (black), Agosto and Parlacino developed or contributed substantially to typefaces such as Boxer (a compact titling face for newspapers, loosely inspired by Berthold’s Block), and a Bodoni revival which was halted before production. They played a more active role within the committee working on the extended project that led to Modulo (Gianni Parlacino, interview with the author, 24 September 2013).
3. Information based on a raw chronology of minutes of the meetings, courtesy Giancarlo Iliprandi.
4. After his retirement, Nebiolo granted Novarese office room where he could continue work on his own projects, which would usher in his second career as independent type designer (Gianni Parlacino, interview with the author, 24 September 2013).
5. Account based on conversations with Gianni Parlacino (24 September 2013) and Luciano Agosto (14 June 2013).
6. ‘Stralcio della Relazione di Alberto Munari’ (1973) in Archivio Iliprandi, Milan (courtesy Giancarlo Iliprandi).
7. Sofie Beier (2016), ‘Letterform Research: an academic orphan,’ Visible Language 50; 2: http://visiblelanguagejournal.com/issue/202/article/1372 (consulted April 2018); see also Luciano Perondi, Walter Gerbino, Beppe Chia, Roberto Arista, Giovanni Pignoni, Giammarco Gaudenzi (2017). ‘Tipografia parametrica e Developmental Dyslexia,’ in MD Journal, 3: 88–113 — available at: https://articles.c-a-s-t.com/print-readability-and-dyslexia-b862cdbdcc06.
8. Overall, the study did not provide any indications as to which factors made some letters more easily readable than others: ‘The complex nature of the influence of the typeface style on the process of recognition of alphanumeric signs makes it difficult, if not utopian, to make a definitive choice in terms of letterform or graphic devices that can ensure optimal readability in any type of situation’ (La natura complessa dell’influenza del tipo di carattere sul processo di ricognizione dei segni alfanumerici rende difficoltosa, se non utopica, la scelta definitiva di forma o di accorgimenti grafici che possano assicurare una leggibilità ottimale in qualsiasi tipo di situazione); excerpt from the Report, courtesy Giancarlo Iliprandi. The study has remained unpublished.
9. Giancarlo Iliprandi, interview with the author, 24 June 2013.
10. Excerpt from the minutes of the 39th meeting, Milan, 2 April 1973 (Aiap, Centro di Documentazione del Progetto Grafico, the Ilio Negri fund, folder: Gruppo Ricerca Caratteri).
11. Vox populi has it that Fiat had taken over Nebiolo only because it was eager to secure Nebiolo’s new factory in Settimo Torinese. The company was sold to Cerutti, a leading manufacturer of rotogravure printing machines in Casale Monferrato. This solution did not halt the decline of the company, which in the following years went through several ownerships until final bankruptcy in 1993 (Vittorio Merlo, email exchange with the author, 10 October 2013).
12. Mario Piazza, Silvia Sfligiotti, ‘Dopo Novarese. Il disegno di caratteri contemporaneo in Italia’ in Paola Lenarduzzi, Mario Piazza, Silvia Sfligiotti (eds), Italic 1.0. Il disegno di caratteri contemporaneo in Italia. Milan: Aiap edizioni, 2002 (pp. 4–15).
13. Maria Grazia Schenone, email exchange with the author, 6 October 2013; and Gianni Parlacino, interview with the author, 24 September 2013.
14. Indra Kupferschmid, email exchange with the author, 16 October 2013. A handful of matrices, styles and sizes are still available from Gerstenberg’s type foundry in Darmstadt (http://www.rainer-gerstenberg.de/).
15. Manuela Rattin and Matteo Ricci, Questioni di carattere. La tipografia in Italia dal 1861 agli anni Settanta (Viterbo: Stampa Alternativa, 1997) is to date the most comprehensive account of 20th-century Italian typography; an updated new edition is due to appear later this year. While the authors offer a fairly detailed overview of the historical development of the Nebiolo typefoundry (pp. 62–65; 95–105), when dealing with their most significant typefaces released after 1950, they relied almost exclusively on views expressed by Aldo Novarese: in recent years these have been shown to be strongly biased and, in some cases, outright false.
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