Counterpunch is a book by Dutch author and typographer Fred Smeijers that uses the example of the counterpunch to argue that digital typeface designers should take a lesson from the historical practices of typesetting.

Background

Smeijers, who started off doing typography digitally, decided to experiment with punch-cutting, the practice of manually cutting punches out of steel, which was historically the only way to do typography before the invention of the computer and the advent of computer graphics. Among the lessons he learned from this experiment was that many of the problems faced by novice designers, and indeed, issues that experienced designers have trouble pinning down and have had to overcome in various individual ways, can be solved directly by examining from a historical standpoint why traditional typefaces look the way they do.

As the most prominent example in the book, Smeijers talks about the counterpunch, a device that was absolutely necessary for technical reasons (see Counterpunch for more detail), but which had, in Smeijer's opinion, a more significant aesthetic impact on typography. The counterpunch was used to cut negative space (such as the interior of a lowercase "a") into a punch. By reusing counterpunches on related letters, (such as uppercase "P" and "R"), typesetters gave all of the letters in their typefaces a unified look. Smeijers identifies this practice as the solution to a very common problem novice designers encounter (a designer might for example notice that his uppercase "U" and "J" look fine on their own, but when together on a page, something looks amiss).

Other topics covered include the fact that the modern practice of directly scaling fonts does not always produce satisfactory results, and that historical typesetters did not even think of two similar typefaces of different sizes belonging to the same "font".

Colophon

The typeface used in the printing of Counterpunch was designed and hand-cut by Smeijers himself, demonstrating that he gained some skill in punch-cutting.