Posted by Bill Troop here: http://typographi.ca/000511.php
This was a reaction to Heine's font "Tribute" (2003),
published with a lot of hoopla at Emigre, and commented
on by John Downer.
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John Downer's essay is a masterpiece of
evasion. I feel his pain at being asked
to comment on such a self-evidently
dreadful piece of design as the
portetentously, pretentiously named
"Tribute", and I admire his tact in not
creating a category for pure junk or
tush. There is no theory of modernism,
post-modernism, or post-post-modernism,
that can justify taking the Guyot types,
which I think are amongst the most
beautiful ever made, and giving them
caps straight out of Century or Courier.
"Tribute" represents bad thinking, bad
art, bad craft, bad humor. Never were
sense and sensibility less at hand than
when this Frankenstein of a font was
created and released. Never was it more
appropriate to crack a tasteless joke
about where a designer named Heine ought
to put his misbegotten type.

Am I too severe? I think not. Guyot is
one of the few ancient mother lodes
worth mining. To treat it in this
imbecilic, dysfunctional manner shows an
appalling lack of integrity and
intelligence on the part of the designer
and the comnpany that released this
'font'. "Tribute" gives me a feeling not
of functionality or beauty or art or
craft or anything else -- except a bad
case of indigestion. Yet it has a value,
perhaps, in that it helps us to
understand the depth of art, craft, and
modernity that went into something so
reviled as, say, ITC Souvenir. 

What I find paradoxical in this is that
a far more interesting treatment of the
Guyot Roman has been released by Fred
Nader a while back. Although it is
obviously a quick sketch, quite
inadequately conceptualized, it is miles
ahead of "Tribute" in giving us some
idea of how Guyot's forms and ideas
might be brought up to date and made
relevant for the present. Also
interesting is Frank Blokland's use of
the Guyot italic. This of course was
suggested by van Krimpen, who at the end
of his career asked himself whether his
approach to italics was not entirely
incorrect, and whether he might not have
been better following the models of
Guyot, had he only been familiar with
them when he was young. The task van
Krimpen poses to the generation to come
is not at all easy. It is much harder to
make a usable italic out of Guyot for
20th/21st century technology than it is
to use one of the chancery models that
were so successfully revived throughout
the 20th century, most particularly by
van Krimpen. The problem is that they
sorted so ill with his romans; while the
Guyot italics are much more harmonious
with post-Aldine forms.

The prints of Guyot's types, especially
by Day (who seemed to have a special
genius for setting them) are quite a bit
darker than we are accustomed to, and it
may be that these types lose much of
their vast impact when they are
lightened. 

I have tried on many occasions, and
quite unsuccessfully, to do something
with the italic. (In any case, I find
the roman just as interesting, but there
I am in a minority.) Frank Blokland
succeeded best in getting the italic to
work, I think, because he completely
redrew it by hand, as he has told me.
Even so, the result, though usable, has
but a fraction of the impact of the
historical prints.

Why is it, I wonder, when these
ineffably handsome types are screaming
of their beauty and functionality to all
of us, has so little been done and
worked from them?

I really hope some designer will really
spend a couple of years getting his
teeth into Guyot. It would be sad if a
designer today looked at "Tribute" and
said -- "well, it's not worth while
doing another Guyot after that." It
would be even worse if a contemporary
designer supposed that Guyot's designs
must somehow look like "Tribute". A much
better idea can be gleaned from
Blokland's interpretation of the italic
and Nader's interpretation of the roman.

But all pales before the magnificent
pages of the books Day printed in these
types. If Emigre were to put up scans of
some of these pages on their website, it
would go some way towards repairing the
appalling slander Guyot has suffered at
their hands. One would think that a
designer and a company setting out to do
such a disservice to a defenseless
historical figure might at least drop
the attribution. After all, if the type
has any value on its own terms, it ought
to be able to stand without any
reference to the hapless Guyot, oughtn't
it? 

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