The first time I set this typeface was in a basement printshop in Antwerp, winter of 2016. The compositor handed me a case of metal type and pointed to the specimen sheet pinned above the workbench. Forty-eight uppercase letters, each one a small building. I spent the next three hours trying to make them interlock the way Lubalin intended, and failed completely.
A System Built on Negative Space
What Carnase understood — and what most digital revivals miss entirely — is that the letterforms were never designed to stand alone. The capital A exists in tension with the capital V. The interlocking pairs are not ornaments but structural joints. Remove them and the system collapses into a collection of competent but lifeless geometries.
“The capital A exists in tension with the capital V. The interlocking pairs are not ornaments — they are load-bearing walls in an alphabet built like a cathedral.”
I returned to the original specimen sheets last March, at the Lubalin Study Center in Manhattan. The drawings — ink on translucent paper, filed in manila envelopes — reveal a process most contemporary type designers would find maddeningly analog. No bezier curves, no interpolation, no variable axes. Just a ruling pen, a T-square, and obsessive attention to the space between strokes.