Decimal Font Family was designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Sara Soskolne and published by Hoefler & Co.. Decimal contains 40 styles and family package options. Nearly all wristwatches once shared a distinctive form of lettering. It was confident, and timeless, and it’s almost completely vanished. Decimal examines this style, and explores the things that shaped it, to create a family of original typefaces that transcends its forms to celebrate its ideas. The Decimal typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Sara Soskolne in 2019. Inspired by the markings on wristwatches, whose open gestures and dilated corners help create clear shapes at small sizes, Decimal was designed to preserve a vanishing and recognizable quality of horology driven nearly to extinction by digital fonts. Decimal first appeared in 2019, in an episode of the Netflix documentary ‘Abstract: The Art of Design’ devoted to Hoefler and his work, and in 2020 became the signature typeface of both the Biden–Harris campaign and the Biden White House. From the desk of the designer: One of the telltale signs of a vintage watch is its lettering. The unique markings on watch dials, surprisingly consistent from one manufacturer to the next, evolved separately from typography: these are forms unconcerned with the needs of type designed for printing words on paper, and unmoved by the changing fashions of graphic design. Instead, watch lettering has been shaped by the curious technologies of dial manufacturing, the demanding requirements of working in miniature, and the unusual commercial arrangements that first gave rise to these remarkable inventions. Watch lettering is printed through tampography, a technique in which ink is transferred first from an engraved plate to a spongy, dumpling-shaped silicone pad, and from there onto the convex dial of a watch. To reproduce clearly, a letterform needs to overcome the natural tendencies of liquid ink or enamel held in suspension: tiny serifs at the ends of strokes can create a larger coastline, to help prevent liquid from withdrawing due to surface tension; wide apexes on characters like 4 and A eliminate the acute angles where liquid tends to pool. In the two watches above, an Omega 30T2 (ref. 2186) and a Universal Genève Aero-Compax (ref. 22414), artists have taken different liberties with the figures 3 and 7, using different approaches to maximize the openness of these forms. But the peculiar figure 4 is identical, with a low crossbar and a wide apex designed to dilate the counter, defending clarity while producing a silhouette that balances comfortably the other numbers on the dial. How is it that two unrelated watches have the same figure four? How do nearly all vintage watches have it? For all the sophistication of a mechanical movement, it’s the dial that may be the most complex part of a watch. Creating a single dial may require more than a hundred different operations, as well as the expertise to work with materials from stainless steel to mother-of-pearl (to gemstones, to feathers, to wood.) A dialmaker must know how to galvanize, electroplate, varnish, lacquer, paint, stamp, engrave, solder, and drill, and all in miniature. Dialmakers routinely maintain and operate multiple generations of the same technology, using a laser cutter in concert with a centuries-old rose engine, to create a particular guilloché pattern specified by a manufacturer. The niche skills and equipment needed by these workshops encouraged dialmakers to specialize long ago, and for most of the last century, the same small handful of prestigious dialmakers supplied watch dials to nearly all of the major manufacturers. Stern Créations, established in 1898, provided dials to Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin, Patek Phillipe, and Cartier; Singer, founded in 1919, created them for Rolex, Omega, Heuer, and Universal Genève. For all the ways in which watch lettering was a natural response to the measurable needs of the medium, it was also the product of a relatively small number of artisans, whose hands shaped the aesthetic of the entire industry. The wide-topped 4, the sharp-centered M, and the bulldog stance of the short-limbed R and K were among their mannerisms, a seamless blend of mechanical problem-solving and artistic intuition. Some signature gestures of the watchmakers’ alphabet were innovations that evolved to suit new technological features. The broad swing of the letter J, uncharacteristically topped by a serif, helps to make the letter wider, ensuring that narrow-lettered months like jul and wide-lettered ones like mar will occupy the same space on a calendar wheel. Elsewhere on a watch, alphabets are usually smaller, relegated to marking the scale of a tachymeter or telemeter, or identifying a watch as a chronograph or chronometer. The Swiss domination of the industry ensures the letters S and W on most dials (useful bellwethers for the typeface designer) but here the material ends. Few watches ever included lowercase
