About Choc Light
Where Mistral was based on modern European handwriting, French designer Roger Excoffon’s Choc comes more out of the traditions of Japanese brush calligraphy. It’s thick, staccato, suggestive. In creating Choc Light, English designer Phill Grimshaw had to redraw it several times in different weights before he found one that seemed to work as a text face and still be true to the original. The shapes of many of the letters in Choc are almost abstract, and this abstraction doesn’t always work in smaller text. Grimshaw found that again he had to modify certain characters, always keeping in mind both the original design and the calligraphic tradition that had inspired Excoffon. “Lowercase r in particular proved to be untenable in this context,” he says. If he kept the form of the r from the original font, it ended up looking more like a z than an r, which would be misleading. So he redrew it “in a style which complemented the other characters in the set,” while saving the “real” character as an alternate in the character set of the final font. |
