Braff
Michael Harvey’s typefaces are full of jazz: Ellington was released in 1990, and other designs named Strayhorn, Mezz, Conga Brava and Moonglow followed. Now, as a tribute to the great cornet player Ruby Braff, Harvey has created Braff, an outline display face that harmonizes strains of British grotesques with the flared terminals of Optima. The result is a new, unique design that “graphically echoes the sound of Ruby’s cornet,” says Harvey.
The origins of Braff go back more than forty years to 1961, when Harvey was beginning his career as a stone carver and graphic designer. One of his clients was Methuen, the British book publisher. Harvey’s assignment was to design a series of titling capital letters that could be used to set book jackets. He recalls, “The letters were derived from preliminary drawings made for my lettercutting work, where I thickened outlines to suggest depth.”
Many years later, the production manager who commissioned the book jacket alphabet suggested that Harvey revive the design as a digital font, with a lowercase and full complement of characters. Harvey liked the idea. Rather than work from his original drawings, however, he decided to build on the foundation of a more recent design, Strayhorn (named after Duke Ellington’s friend and songwriting collaborator, Billy Strayhorn).
“The process of designing a typeface has changed radically since 1961,” says Harvey, “but using Adobe Illustrator, then Fontographer, and drawing on Strayhorn, I got something close to the Methuen letters.” This look back at some of Harvey’s first lettering is also an homage to a great jazz musician, and is now available as a digital font.