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A PLASTIC CURVE WROTE ‘POSSIBILITIES’David Bennewith

I am looking at two plastic french curves. Both are yellowedby age and covered with ink blots and smears, scratches,
Twink marks, burn marks (and burn holes), and bits of tape.
One is broken in half. At the break point, it has been patched
up with different-coloured tapes that are layered and brittle
with age. On both curves, there are light-toned marks wherebits of previously removed tape have left soft, photogram-likeimages in the plastic.
In drafting, french curves are used to create smooth and evencurves — one hand rotating the tool as the other traces
concave and convex edges to create ellipses, parabolas,
hyperbolas. In type design, they can aid the production of the‘like’, or matching, curves that help the letters, numbers andpunctuation in a typeface visually relate to each other — forexample, how the curve of a letter ‘o’ can also be referred tofor producing a matching letter ‘c’.
These french curves in front of me belonged to the SamoanNew Zealand type designer Joseph Churchward (1932-2013),
and they are now in my care — a gift from the Churchward
family on the sad event of Joseph's passing in April this year.
I began a correspondence with Joseph, initially via hisdaughter Marianna, in 2005. By this time I'd already been
introduced by friends to a few of his typefaces and had
subsequently found more by leafing through the ELAM Schoolof Fine Arts Library archive of Designscape magazine. Among
selected examples in Designscape were news items about his
type designs being licensed by the German firm Berthold in
the late 1960s, Joseph’s international debut as a type designer.
More licences to type-producing companies in both Europe
and the United States would soon follow, providing
Churchward International Typefaces with some pretty
reasonable royalties in the 1970s and early 80s.
It was in 2006 that we finally met in person, at his homestudio in Hataitai, Wellington. Even though he was no longer
running a commercial operation, signs of on-going work274		A Plastic Curve Wrote ‘Possibilites’

1. David Bennewith and Warren
Olds, ‘Churchward Video Notes
A-J’, The National Grid,
Christchurch, vol. 3, 2007, p. 57

covered the walls and most surfaces. During each meetingthese french curves were somehow always present. This is
how Joseph described the broken-in-half curve in our firstmeeting:

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2. C Winterberg (ed), Divina
proportione, Vienna, 1889, pp.
129-131, quoted by R Wittkower,‘Architectural Principles in theAge of Humanism, London’, 1949,
p. 14, in Milliard Meiss, ‘The
First Alphabetical Treatises inthe Renaissance’, The Journal ofTypographic Research, Cleveland,
vol. 3, January 1969, p. 8

3. Robin Kinross, ‘What is atypeface?’, Unjustified texts:
perspectives on typography,Hyphen Press, 2002, pp. 116-117.
The term ‘visual manifestation’used above is also derived fromthis article.

rather than explorations of the individual or the psychological.
Just as tracing Joseph’s typefaces by hand has helped meunderstand, question, and think about his work, in this essay,
I’d like to endeavour an assessment of some aspects of it
through the prism of these two curves.
On one hand, a french curve represents a play between thecontradictions of nature and culture. It is a manufactured
thing, yet it follows mathematical principles that are derived
from natural phenomena — for example in diffraction (how awave bends as it encounters an obstacle) and spiral patterns(like those found in nautilus shells or koru forms). In turn,the curve is used to design cultural products that refer to but
ultimately resist nature. Comparably, for me, a typeface incorporates this play of the contradiction between the naturally
and culturally produced; it is an abstract visual manifestation
retaining only reference to nature, while at the same time itis the implication of language becoming concrete.		Look, I still have this — my oldest instrument — thatI first got when I started work at Charles Haines [theWellington advertising agency where Joseph began hiscareer as a commercial artist after graduating in the late1940s]. The poor thing has fallen apart. I used it all thetime. It’s worth a lot to me. That’s the first instrument
I bought when I left Wellington Technical College. It’s
broken, I bashed it up, and I’m still using it! It’s over
50 years old.1
You could say that digital, vector-based type design has largely
made the french curve a redundant tool — an artefact of thehand-lettering era. But Joseph continued to use these curves
throughout his six-decade career — even after the advent of
the personal computer, yet again, changed the format of typedesign.
In his 1929 essay ‘The Biography of the Object’, the Russianconstructivist theorist Sergei Tretyakov wrote that we mightunderstand human narratives through cultural productions,

We might find evidence of this contradiction as far back as theRenaissance, when Felice Feliciano (circa 1460), Damiano daMoille (circa 1480, Parma), Luca Pacioli (1509, Venice) andSigismondo de’ Fanti (1514, Venice) compiled the first didacticaland theoretical treatises on the design of the [Roman] alphabet.
Through a process that could be compared nowadays to reverse
engineering, they attempted to prove the divine geometry ofclassical Greco-Roman lettering: to show that the alphabet
was the product of classical proportion, through which God‘reveals the innermost secrets of nature’. 2
But letters are human constructions not outgrowths 3 andparadoxically, these early attempts could never strictly apply
the ratio-dependent geometries (inspired by the Romanarchitect and engineer Vitruvius) that they referred to. The
letters of a classically designed alphabet won't fit into rigid
geometry-based boxes without visual distortion. For example,a classical ‘A’ and an ‘H’ make use of slightly different
amounts of horizontal space in their design. Feliciano evenstated that the letter ‘R’, by not conforming to Vitruvian

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A plastic curve wrote ‘possibilites’

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A plastic curve wrote ‘possibilites’

4. Milliard Meiss, ‘The First
Alphabetical Treatises in theRenaissance’, The Journal ofTypographic Research, Cleveland,
vol. 3, January 1969, p. 15

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5. David Bennewith and WarrenOlds, ‘Churchward Video Notes
A-J’, The National Grid,Christchurch, vol. 3, 2007, p. 56

geometry, is a sort of second-class letter.4 These ‘innermost
secrets of nature’ in our alphabet that Feliciano and company
were searching for would remain elusive.
This introduces an interesting and important detail about how
we, as humans, relate to the designed alphabet. Beyond its
objective-seeming geometries, a designed alphabet needs
many small corrections — and even a fallible human hand —to produce what is generally regarded as a ‘good’ or ‘working’typeface. Interestingly Churchward suggested that this qualityof a typeface ‘working’ is somehow already present in theoutset of its design — that it is something that you have to‘find’. 5 There are of course typefaces that do adhere to strict
grid systems, like the ‘dot-matrix’ typefaces — designed forelectric signs and early home computers and printers, forexample — that today, ironically, evoke a lo-resolution or retro
charm. Rapid improvement in display technologies ensures
their gradual disappearance.
It seems, after all, that a typeface needs to incorporate thesuggestion of ‘gesture’, or the hand-made, in order for us torelate to it more easily. This idea is what gives type design —as a practice — qualities that I often experience as mysterious.
And this ‘mysteriousness’ of type design lies within a very
subjective (and ever-shifting) idea of what constitutes a ‘good’typeface, which then begins to hint at why our 26-letteralphabet has been revisited or redesigned so many times, by
so many different people. It’s perhaps no wonder that typedesign usually requires an obsessive personality. It is in thiscircumstance that I begin to optimistically speculate that, in
utopian thinking, perhaps typefaces should never be owned
or subject to copyright.
But — even when it has been designed to look ‘hand-made’ —the typeface creates a multifarious system that is constantly
in negotiation with the concept of standardisation. This isbecause a typeface has become, foremost, a product, andinherent to the idea of a product is the requirement that itmeets certain standards and makes a kind of ordinary sense.

A typeface is an intermediate object: employed to put acrossinformation via certain media. Therefore its design is often
defined by what is legible, compatible and available. As adigital file, a typeface has a sort of latent quality, waiting tobe ‘activated’ and used.
Still, between design and use, a type designer struggles tofind a relative balance between subjective and objective
considerations. A typeface often both embodies and exploits
its own call to neutrality. This call to neutrality I understandas being the typeface’s privilege to be chosen and applied,
and the expectation to serve the words it is typed in.
Sometimes a typeface’s own internal system threatens todescend into visual chaos. The type designer may pushlegibility and logic to an edge that reminds us about ourexpectations of these ubiquitous ‘things’, at the same time as
it challenges them. There are examples in Joseph’s catalogue
where this is certainly the case: Churchward Maori (where wesee the natural and cultural koru motif in action), Churchward
Ta Tiki, Churchward Roundsquare, to name just a few. InJoseph’s hands, the french curve, used to create the exacting
standardisation (mass-)production and reproduction requires,
could also be manipulated to produce strange signs of humancreated fluctuation and distortion.
Which leads me — after a long meander — back to Joseph’scurves. It is safe to type that these curves accompanied thedesign of every one of his typefaces: around 695 of them.
A really large body of work (greater, Joseph often claimed,than that produced by any other individual typographer) that
presents both repetition and variation many times over. Theyare inextricably tied to his obsessive commitment to thereinterpretation — and therefore questioning — of the alphabet.
They suggest how the form of a letter or a typeface can be as
flexible, malleable, and negotiable as language itself.
But a curve cannot completely account for the hand that
operated it, as Joseph’s varied explorations of the alphabet

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demonstrate. I have a vivid image of the very particular way
Joseph would flick his right wrist as he described a penstroke. Sixty years earlier, this same wrist (and hand) had
accidentally smashed through the glass panel of a swinging
door at Wellington Technical College — a horrific end to afriendly chasing game.
Joseph’s nearly severed hand was reattached to his wrist,
but the tendons were permanently shortened, resulting in
restricted movement in his drawing hand and a loss of feelingto parts of it. The accident changed the way he held a pen,which must have significantly altered the manner in which hedrew his letters. Was this restricted hand able to mimic thetight movements of a machine, creating an even more riddlingconnection between his hand and his french curves, between
the hand-made and the mechanical?
Joseph’s curves have certainly been pushed to the limits of
their manufacture, and I'm amazed that he never replaced
them. But, as a designer, I can also understand his attachment
to them. Looking at them now, on my desk, maybe for too
long, I'd even suggest that they have a kind of ‘magic’ aboutthem.
What would happen if I began to use them?

Essay set in Churchward Newstype