The FACIT Model – Typewriters and their Typefaces

Jens Schildt

The FACIT Model Our Form of Book Vaguely Specified Objects

Introduction A Note About the Type

The FACIT Model, A Note About the Type, Jens Schildt and Matthias Kreutzer, 2019

TYPEWRITERS AND THEIR TYPEFACES

Typewriter fonts are subject to a number of restrictions which they owe to their machine-host. Most FACIT typewriters were produced for the office space – at a desktop scale – and designed to match the industry standards of paper size and the corresponding, practical type size.

Typewriter fonts and their imprints were circulated through the machines which carried them. The machine, once purchased, was often moved from one place to another – made possible due to its size and weight – and, typically, the printed matter produced on the machines was dispersed either as originals or reproduced again by way of photocopy, stencil duplicator, or offset press. Typewriter fonts were thus highly mobile, and in this sense could be compared with digital typefaces; stored on a personal computer and shared through the cloud. However, as much as they were ubiquitous they were also in many ways specialised and exclusive; more often than not they were used for private or internal forms of communication such as letters and reports and were rarely deployed to produce text published and distributed in large editions. ¹ Although a typewriter produces printed characters, it isn’t a machine for reproduction in the same sense as a letterpress, offset press, or copy machine – a typewriter produces unique originals.

One of the recurring documents in the FACIT AB archives are the type specimens. These were made for the user to have an overview of the alphabets stored in FACIT machines. Early on in the project we decided to develop a number of digital reconstructions of FACIT typewriter fonts as part of our research. We did this in the hope of reactivating their shapes as typographic time capsules, and to put them in to use again in the context of the book that you’re holding in your hands.

This text gives a brief overview of some of the things we learned. It doesn’t have the pretension of a general survey but stays close to our findings in the archive, to provide some context and perspective in relation to the fonts which you are seeing in this book. There are a number of essays about typewriters and their typefaces which go into more detail, and which were a source of inspiration for us during the project; two examples which we would like to mention are “Type Design for Typewriters: Olivetti” ² by María Ramos, and “Modernity, Method and Minimal Means” ³ by Sue Walker. These texts contribute to the salvation of a moment in typographic history which is often discarded and marginalised, just like much of the printed material through which this history manifests itself.

N Favorit 24

The design process that brought us to the typefaces used in The FACIT Model – Globalism, Localism & Identity emerged from stored-away-and-forgotten objects. The documents which we consulted and studied were often in the form of letters; most of them part of FACIT’s internal communication and some of them sent out to customers. We also made use of the various type catalogues which FACIT produced for its users to see the different type styles and explain the specific uses for each one. As stated in a type specimen published in the FACIT Typewriting Guide from 1970 there are a number of styles “for the production of small labels, tabulations, forms, manuscripts, offset originals, overhead sheets, clear stencils, organigrams etc.” ⁴ All are office-related documents.

In her article ‘Typewriter / Typeface: The Legacy of the Writing Machine in Type Design’ María Ramos writes: “Typewriter sales grew fast and manufacturers offered typefaces for different scripts. Although the assortment of styles for non-Latin fonts was rather small, the typewriter market expanded and the machines were distributed all around the world. It was the democratisation of typesetting and printing. The new technology allowed for the relatively cheap production of printed material.” ⁵

This democratisation of the production of printed text, along with the increased mobility of the machines which produced this text, also played a considerable role in globalisation processes which affected and were affected by business and work organisation. The typewriter in this respect is a ubiquitous machine: it empowers individual expression as much as it is a tool of corporate modernism. It is rationality embodied: “With only one typeface and size, with uniform inter-line and inter-word spacing and no justification, the typewriter is… ideal, also because of its cheapness and simplicity of operation and ubiquity." ⁶

In an article published in the internal FACIT magazine Ciceronen from 1958 we can read that FACIT offered “approximately 90 different keyboards for their standard machine – FACIT T1 – and the same for the FACIT Privat”. ⁷ Furthermore it says that “In stock, there are 1000 different types of combinations and around 20 fonts (a type is the cast letter or other character that strikes the paper when typing). However, all combinations are not available in all fonts. In total, if you distinguish between the different fonts, there are about 3,700 types of Latin characters, i.e. those we use in the West, and about 300 different ‘exotic characters’.” ⁸

Iranian keyboard with the Farsi alphabet.

A sign of FACIT’s global influence was its ability to produce machines with for so many languages. One of the most specifically designed keyboards that FACIT offered was the Iranian keyboard with the Farsi alphabet. Since the Farsi language is written from right to left the machines were adapted accordingly. Arabic keyboards, used in Iran, Iraq and Egypt among others, also needed a specially designed typewriter that – on top of the carriage going ‘backwards’ – had to be engineered for half-step-typing, in order to connect the individual glyphs of the script style. Other machines were supplied with Greek and Hebrew characters, and the FACIT factory in Madras furnished machines with Gjurati, Hindustani and Tamil alphabets for the demands of the Indian market. FACIT even produced machines with Thai alphabets, despite the complexity of the language and the near impossibility of fitting the Thai character set in the type basket.

Another Ciceronen article describes the process of outfitting keyboard layouts: “When the order reaches the factory, the message is sent to the man in the type storage about which keyboard to put together. He picks up the types from a box of 45 trays in order to put them on the segment. From the warehouse the types get soldered into the segments. Soldering is checked in a projector and after nickel plotting, the type arms are re-entered into the segment. This then goes to the assembly department for insertion into the machine.” ⁹

“Ro” is for Rodrian, as in Ransmayer & Rodrian.

“Facit offers a wide range of styles for different purposes and individual preferences”

THE FACIT STYLES

“There are in the world today a number of factories devoted entirely to the manufacture of type, the main ones are Alfred Ransmayer & Albert Rodrian in Berlin (RaRo Type), Setag and Novatype in Switzerland, and Tangens Type in Germany. In addition, many typewriter manufacturers produce their own type and augment the range of type styles by also buying form various specialist firms.” ¹⁰

FACIT didn’t produce their own typefaces, but instead – as was common practise – purchased alphabets from specialised companies for each typewriter model. Most type slugs (individual pieces of metal type) used in FACIT machines were made by Ransmayer & Rodrian (RaRo), situated in Berlin, West Germany and Caracteres S.A. (CSA) (8) from Switzerland. The FACIT type specimen catalogues always listed the origins of the typefaces along with other pieces of coded information. They always include a short name for the typeface along with a piece of sample text and/or a complete alphabet and set of numerals. In the above example we find the catalogue entry “Ro 37 Plakat 10” from which we can learn the following:

– “Ro” in this case stands for Rodrian, as in Ransmayer & Rodrian. (Both were once independent factories, and confusingly continued to use their individual monograms after merging together as RaRo).
– “37” is the catalog number in the Ransmayer & Rodrian type catalog.
– Plakat is the name of the typeface (in this case it was given to the typeface by FACIT as a direct translation to Swedish from the English word Placard). The Plakat or Placard style is also named Bulletin, Display or Block by other typewriter manufacturers.
– “10” stands for the “pitch”, the number of spaces/characters to the inch which a specific style occupies.

A monogram stating the signature of the typeface manufacturer – in this case CSA – can also be found on the specimen. There are two fonts used in FACIT machines – ‘N 26 Granada’ and ‘N 24 Favorit’ – which we didn’t manage to trace back to their source*. We can only guess that the letter N stands for Novatype from Switzerland, one of the biggest typewriter type production companies around at the time, as Beeching mentions in ”Century of the Typewriter”. ¹¹

Cubic type slugs with the Charactères S.A. monogram.

Typewriter typefaces were usually produced and distributed over long time periods, and often adjustments and alterations can be found when comparing versions in specimen books from different years. For our drawings we were mostly relying on – next to the type specimens and printed matter from the FACIT archive – type catalogues by Ransmayer and Rodrian. Even though the type slug monograms for Favorit (N) and Kubik (CSA) suggest a different source – most likely Novatype and Charactères S.A. – all three typefaces mentioned are included in several editions of the RaRo catalogue. Plakat appears under the name Plakat and Plakatschrift Ro 37, Kubik as Pica-Cubic Ro 85 and Blockschrift “Pica-Cubic”, and Favorit as Elite-Block Ro 643 and Pica-Block “Toronto” Ro 44. For Cubic and Favorit both monogram and catalogue numbers don’t match, even though they appear to be identical to the typefaces used by FACIT, with minor changes in some glyphs.

From a long list of typefaces which we found interesting in terms of shape and application we selected three alphabets – Plakat, Favorit and Kubik – for the design of digital revivals. After tracing them back to their sources we started comparing the different versions we found and selected the ones which we wanted to use as blueprints for the type design process, this was usually the one which we felt was least amended, and that seemed most ‘original’.

One of many Cubic styles.

N Favorit 24

Plakat

FACIT introduced Plakat in schools as a tool to improve reading.

In the first round of drawings we stayed close to the printed models —which we took from the archive by way of high-resolution scans – to discover and understand the specific features of each typeface. Kubik, as its name suggests, is an angular font with rounded corners and paperclip-like openings – particularly pronounced in the lower-case –which are bent in slightly different angles for letters such as a, c, e, f, j, s, and t.

Plakat is a large and narrow font, often used for display, such as tickets, tags, labels and notices. Its most prominent feature – besides the rigid vertical rhythm and extremely narrow glyphs like M and W – are the 90 degree angles of ascenders and descenders in letters such as g, j, y and f. The Favorit typeface features probably the most surprising shapes, with a seemingly coherent, geometric overall appearance but curious variations in details, such as an egg-shaped O, G and C with almost perfectly circular lower case counterparts, and slightly bent endings of T and y – as if broken – which we at first mistook for worn-down type slugs.

Scanned letter Y of Favorit 24 (enlarged 10 times)

and early digital drawing of OPS Favorit

In the second round of drawings we started extending the typewriter character set (46 glyphs) to a basic digital character set (458 glyphs), while modulating the shapes of individual letters as seemed appropriate for a digital reconstruction. This phase of the process was about finding a subjective balance on the fine line between bringing the shapes to a more precise technology, and staying as faithful to the analogue original as possible. There were many moments where inconsistencies in the original shapes tempted us to ‘straighten out’ the character set. In most cases we embraced these idiosyncrasies rather than erasing them, and tried to make sense of them in the process of drawing the glyphs for the full character set.

There were recurring discussions about translating typewriter features into a digital typeface, such as the relation between a metal type slug and its imprint on paper. The imprint will often soften the contours of a letter – a phenomenon which in digital typewriter fonts is typically imitated by rounded corners. While round corners was something we wanted to avoid, we did make a number of tests where sharp corners where trimmed, morphing the letterforms through different stages between round and angular, analogue and digital, paper and screen. For the final versions we decided to keep the corners straight, as much a killed darling as a decision for medium specificity. Screen first.

Rounded corners in Courier (left), angular corners in OPS Favorite (right). Different corner options for OPS Favorite.

Considering the shifts between the typewritten page and the screen during the type design process made us aware of the way in which office typography precedes and informs the ways in which language is materialised and organised in the digital medium, as Gerard Unger mentions in Theory of Type Design: “Typography on the screen has a background in word processing, which in turn has a background in office typography with typewriters.” ¹²

Our digital interpretations of FACIT typewriter typefaces, which are based on the printed ephemera we uncovered from the archive, are time capsules as much as they are tools. By turning the fading shapes into new characters we let FACIT step into the digital age after all. Based on office typography documents these fonts are made to be used on the computer screen. By making them commodities once again, we hope that they can be used in new ways – on screen and on paper – by new users.

NOTES
1. With few exceptions, such as The American Institute of Physics (AIP) which changed from Monotype to typewriter composition in the 1950s for the composition of scientific papers, as mentioned in Sue Walker’s essay “Modernity, Method and Minimal Means: Typewriters, Typing Manuals and Document Design”. Journal of Design History, Issue 31 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 138-153.
2. María Ramos Silva, “Type Design for Typewriters: Olivetti”. Dissertation, University of Reading, United Kingdom, 2015.
3. Sue Walker, “Modernity, Method and Minimal Means: Typewriters, Typing Manuals and Document Design”. Journal of Design History, Issue 31 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
4. The Facit Typewriting Guide (Facits Skrivguide), 3rd edition, 1970, p. 39.

5. María Ramos Silva, “Typewriter/ Typeface: The Legacy of the Writing Machine in Type Design”, https://typographica.org/on-typography/typewritertypeface-the-legacy-ofthe-writing-machine-intype-design (last visited: 14 March 2019).6. Alistair McIntosh, quoted in Sue Walker, “Modernity, Method and Minimal Means: Typewriters, Typing Manuals and Document Design”. Journal of Design History, Issue 31 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 138-153.
7. Ciceronen #4, “90 Keyboeards for 102 Countries”. Facit, 1958. pp. 28–29.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. 10. W.A. Beeching, Centery of the Typewriter (London: Heinmann, 1974), p. 78.
11. Ibid. 12. Gerard Unger, Theory of Type Design (Rotterdam: Nai010 publishers, 2018), p. 36.