Pelham Didone began with a single lowercase a. We wanted a display serif with real contrast, the kind that holds a headline at 96pt and still reads at 24pt. The first drawings were too polite. The second set had the weight in the wrong places. The third is the one that became the family.
Drawing the contrast
A Didone lives or dies by its thick and thin strokes. Draw the thin too thin and it disappears on uncoated paper. Draw it too thick and the page looks heavy and closed. We tested Pelham at 12pt, 24pt and 72pt on the same proof, because a curve that works at one size can fail at another.
The high contrast also changes the spacing. Thin strokes need more air around them than thick ones, but the rhythm has to stay even. We spent months on the word Pelham alone, moving one sidebearing at a time and printing the result. A display face is often judged on a few words, so those few words have to carry the whole idea.
We drew the roman first, then the italic. The italics are not sloped romans. They were drawn separately, with narrower bowls and a different angle of entry. That is slower, but it means a caption set in italic does not look like a mistake. It also gives the family a second voice, useful when a cover needs a line of comment beside a title.
The family has 12 styles, from light to black, with italics. The black is not simply the bold repeated with more weight. The counters are smaller and the joins are shorter, so the texture stays dense without filling in. We drew the extremes first and worked towards the middle, which is the opposite of how a text family is usually built.
Testing in print
Screen proofs are useful for shape and useless for weight. We set test pages on the same uncoated stock we use for the specimen book and looked at them under ordinary office light. Several curves that seemed right on screen were too soft in print. We redrew the thinnest joins and gave the serifs a flatter foot.
We also set Pelham against Ashby Text, because display serifs are usually paired with a text face. The two share a similar skeleton but not the same contrast, which keeps them distinct without a fight. Pelham at 48pt over Ashby at 10pt was the test we returned to most often.
Then came the unglamorous work. We checked the figures in a table, the punctuation at the end of a line, and the way an ampersand sits beside a capital letter. None of these appear in a specimen line. All of them decide whether a face is usable. This is the final check we run before a style is signed off.
- Set the punctuation at the end of a line.
- Check the figures in a table.
- Look at the ampersand beside a capital.
- Print the page on the book stock.
- Read the result at the size it will be used.
What three years bought
The extra time went into the small decisions: the shape of the comma, the way the f and the parenthesis meet, the spacing of the figures. A faster schedule would have produced a family that looked right in a proof and felt awkward in a layout.
Pelham is a display family, not a text face. Use it for headlines, covers, posters and short passages. For long reading, pair it with Ashby Text or set the text in Sable Grotesk. The typefaces page shows all eight families together, which is the quickest way to see where Pelham sits.
