italics

^1.
In the first edition of the article this quote was mistakenly attributed to Jan Tschichold's «New Typography» (where it is quoted). We apologize for this mistake. Thanks to Caluã Pataca for pointing it out.

Typographic Revolution

It is strange, how Marinetti in his call for revolution against "the Poetry Book" doesn't see any problem with italics. Somehow, Roman numerals are an issue, but the use of highly decorative imitation of a 16th century pretty handwriting is a futuristic expression. It is even stranger, that he doesn't address the application of italic itself, as his idea of highlighting the page with «3 to 4 colors and 20 different typefaces» is very close to how the use of italic is regulated in the Chicago Manual. The only difference is: where Marinetti suggests «20 different typefaces», Chicago suggests only one — italic. Seemingly to achieve Marinetti's idea all that is needed is to diversify the means of text highlighting. And it's not like there are no alternative typographic traditions, which could be used to substitute the italic.

For example, nowadays all foreign text is highlighted in italic, in the days of Latin as the international language of Europe often a different combination was used — Roman for Latin and blackletter for vernacular German. In general, blackletter tradition offers a great variety of text highlighting techniques that don’t use italic (there is no italic in blackletter).

So it is rather natural, that the designers of Bauhaus, coming from blackletter-dominant German typographic tradition, seem to be the first ones to start practicing italic-less typesetting within modern Western typography. Their magazine, Bauhaus, did not have any italics, but instead a variety of other techniques was applied.

Slanted

It might be tempting to attribute the absence of italics in Bauhaus magazine to the unavailability of such styles at that time for sans serif fonts (which were mostly used in the magazine, even for longer texts), but actually italic grotesks were already quite common at that time and you can find italic sans serifs even in the 19th century specimens.

^2.
According to Bauhaus, «we write all lowercase, therefore saving time. Besides: why 2 alphabets if one achieves the same? why write uppercase, if one can't speak uppercase?» Even though we indeed don't speak uppercase, the question of whether or not we speak italic can be argued.

I would like to think that Bauhaus designers did recognize the ridiculousness of the idea of adding a style, that imitates the handwriting, to the mechanistic typeface of the future — the grotesk (though, most likely their argument against italics was that of efficiency, rather than of aesthetics — probably, italics were avoided for the similar reasons as uppercase²). But why in further development of sans serif typography almost nobody seemed to continue the Bauhaus italic-less tradition up until the digital revolution?

^3.
The term "true italics" is used to differentiate italic styles that use cursive lettershapes from oblique styles that use slanted versions of upright characters. For many reasons obliques can be still named "italic" in the font files (especially in the case of pre-OpenType font formats).

Sans serifs have italics nowadays as often as the serif typefaces, but for sans serifs often slanted styles are used instead of true italics³. It is hard to say who was the first to decide that slanted would be more fitting for Swiss Modernism, but it is possible that the trend was set by the most successful modernist sans serif — Helvetica. Why would a typeface, that represents modernity and objectivity have a style, that imitates handwriting? Though the bigger question is: why is a typeface, that represents modernity and objectivity trying to imitate the calligraphic lean?

There are a lot of arguments in favor of "true italics" and against oblique/slanted styles. Especially the mechanically slanted fonts are disliked for their distorted outlines. But wouldn't exactly the mechanical distortion (and a noticeable one) be most befitting for a modernist typeface, typeface of the machine world?

Rotation has a very interesting effect on the Latin alphabet. In theory, rotating letters sound like a simple and natural thing to do, but character rotation is unnatural for Latin typography, as it defies two fundamental concepts of Latin typesetting: the baseline and the inter-character spacing system of a proportional typeface.

First, the baseline: if you decide to rotate the characters in a line of text, what should become the center of rotation? If you try to align the letters to the baseline by their lowest points, they would appear jumping up and down and even bigger problem would be dealing with ascenders and descenders. And how should the capitals be placed in relation to the lowercase?

Adjusting metrics/kerning of the rotated typeface is an even bigger issue: instead of usual exercise of solving the familiar spacing puzzle of vertical, oval and diagonal shapes, you are presented with innumerable spacing combinations and the only good solution here is to go one step back and adapt the letter shapes themselves for the new rotated conditions.

International Italic Style

The vast majority of other writing systems don't even have the concept of italics. Will the italic style quite simply not work on the Chinese text? Or will it just slant the text automatically, ignoring thousands of years of typographic tradition? Well, of course it will slant.

In the case of right-to-left writing systems, this forced slant presents a curious question: in which direction should the text be slanted (considering that there is some reason to slant the text in the first place)?

With these considerations in mind, four new styles were designed for Panama: Monospace Italic, Monospace Iranic, Proportional Italic and Proportional Iranic (as in the case of straight cuts, proportional versions use the same outlines/letterforms as the monospace ones, only the spacing is different).