About Ogg Text
Ogg Text is the complementary text face of Ogg, the seminal display serif by Lucas Sharp inspired by the hand lettering of 20th century book designer and calligrapher Oscar Ogg. Ogg Text infuses the signature calligraphic styling of its predecessor with new and old transitional and oldstyle text face models.
5 weights, 10 total fonts.
Ogg Text Construction
In late 2017, we began the first prototypes of Ogg Text. Adapting the strange and irreverent Ogg (display) original into something useful for long-form reading was no small task. While its intricate details, interconnected letterforms, 24° italic angle, and swash italic capitals would prove to be difficult attributes to translate into text, there were many moments in the roman that were well suited to this adaptation. We also wanted to capture the beautiful hierarchy he achieved with his book jacket designs, where extravagant, high-contrast display titles would give way to beautifully legible sub-headers and captions.
The transitional stroke ductus of Ogg roman made for maximum legibility with an extremely compact word-shape, even when set at 8pt and below. In this vein, Ogg Text came to take on an unmistakably Dutch flavor, given its emphasis on the calligraphic underpinnings of the letterforms, and was no doubt informed by the process of drawing an entire Bram De Does inspired Old Style text face the year before.
The multiple serif constructions of the roman lowercase stems proved to be unique devices for letter differentiation. While many of the original constructions served as uniquely functional devices for text optimization, other forms were changed completely, adapting to their new format in novel ways that maintained the character of the family while providing functionality at smaller sizes. The "y" descender above is a good example of this.
Adapting the italic from the original display to text was a much more daunting task. The 24° italic angle of the display original was first brought to a more manageable 18°, still a remarkably steep angle for a text typeface. After many months of wrestling with the 18° italic design, (pictured below) we eventually scrapped it in favor of a new Italic design.
The final italic design has a 14° italic angle and less angular bowl-to-stem joins. These changes provided improved legibility and rasterization at small sizes, and were necessary for manually hinted webfonts. Subtle references to the swashy flavor of the original display italic can be found in the text, such as the top serif of the uppercase "A". There are also subtle nods to Oscar Ogg’s caption lettering found throughout. In the future we are hoping to release a build that will include this current 14° version, as well as the 18° version which will also include a text adaptation of Ogg’s signature italic swash capitals.
The new Ogg superfamily is a bold type system that finds cohesion in wildly different typographic forms and genres. The family tracks the progression of its designer, from his early days exploring the irreverent imperfectionism of the original display, to the unexpected functionality and studied execution of the text. The superfamily is an amalgam of disparate references and ideation, both an inventive homage to one of the great underappreciated lettering artists of the 20th century, and a new take on the calligraphic text face.
Designed by Lucas Sharp in 2019 with Connor Davenport, Wei Huang, and Kia Tasbihgou.
Ogg Text was hinted by Noe Blanco
Version History:
V.1.101 Nov 2019