About ITC Ironwork
The inspiration for Serge Pichii’s ITC Ironwork was a piece of decorative lettering done in the early 1920s by Jan Tschichold. Tschichold interlocked a series of rough-edged sans-serif letterforms and embellished them sparingly with decorative elements. He used only capital letters in the original piece, touching and overlapping both horizontally and vertically like an ironwork gate made of letters. Pichii decided to complete the typeface with a lowercase, and he gave his letters smoother edges than Tschichold’s. Although the curlicues on the ends of some letters are present in the Tschichold lettering, Pichii extended this trait to the lowercase, using as models photographs he’d taken of iron scrollwork in Vienna and Prague. There’s a starkness to the basic letterforms that is contradicted by the curvilinear elements. “A lot of attention was paid to the elements of the typeface in order to ’smooth out’ and balance proportional relations between the elements,” says Pichii. The obvious uses for the face are in signage and display type, but it was designed to hold together in small amounts of text as well. |
