In typography, it is common to know about terms typeface family. Usually a typefamily consists of at least two or three characters, either based on weight or more recently based on axis for variable type fonts. However, sometimes the terms typefamily itself isn’t sufficient enough to represent because of many parameters used in a typefamily– such as: weight, title, books, optical size, italic, and so on, so that the term superfamily appears more suitable than type-family in accomodating these various parameters into a one group.
In my opinion, those two terms have no meaning at all other than to make it easier to classify characters technically. In practice, the most important thing in a type-family/superfamily is naming them, as much as possible having a name that is unique or at least different from the thousands of type families that have been released around the world. So, aside from technical views, type-family/superfamily has no meaning at all beyond that.
What is typeface constellations?
Unlike typefamily/superfamily, the terms typeface constellations has an important meaning and role both in technical and non-technical terms on type design process, at least for me personally. This typeface constellations term was first put forward by Marcus Leis Allion from Undt_type in a tweet on platform X (formerly twitter), he said:
“Type as a constellation of letters, not a beautiful group of letters.”
Marcus Leis Allion of Undt_type
From these terms, I begin to think more broadly, not only as a individual letters but as a whole, namely the typeface itself.
Typeface constellations are thinking framework as well as a design framework in type design process. To understood the term typeface constellations easily, we can compare the type-design process to that of a musician when making a music album where one album consists of more than two or three songs, one song is different from the others in one album, but still have one concept to tied all the songs.
Likewise, there is more than one typefaces in typeface constellations that’s differ but remain tied on the main concepts. Typeface constellations itself begins from thinking framework that is embodied in research data either in form of type-specimens or others. This thinking framework refers to three approaches in type-design by Marcus Leis Aillon, namely: exploratory, expressionism, and experimental.
Depending on which approach is taken, the results of this research will become the main concepts that will be interpreted later in type-design process. The interpretation process can produce more than one typeface. Like a musician artist who already has a concept for his album, he is able to interpret the album concept into lyrics and musical arrangements for more than one songs in one music album.
In short, one concepts in typeface constellations can be interpreted into many individual typefaces thats different either in shapes, process, function, etc but still tied as one.