Plebeian is an experimental sans serif text typeface that attempts to showcase the modularity found in latin letterforms.
Based on the idea of the ‘lettermodel’ as described by Frank E Blokland, Plebeian breaks down curves into individual strokes, and treats them as if drawn with fat-nibbed marker. The result, while appearing chunky and brutish at large sizes, makes for an enjoyable reading experience at small sizes due to the squareness of its bowls and thick/thin contrast.
The original management of the separation into orders is unclear, and it is disputed when the Romans were divided under the early kings into patricians and plebeians, or whether the clientes (dependents) of the patricians formed a third group. Certain gentes (“clans”) were patrician, as identified by the nomen (family name), but a gens might have both patrician and plebeian branches that shared a nomen but were distinguished by a cognomen, as was the case with the gens Claudia.
The 19th-century historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr held that plebeians began to appear at Rome during the reign of Ancus Marcius and were possibly foreigners from other parts of Italy settling in Rome as naturalized citizens. In any case, at the outset of the Roman Republic, the patricians had a near monopoly on political and social institutions. Plebeians were excluded from magistracies and religious colleges, and they were not permitted to know.
Laws were published, written down, and given open access starting in 494 BC with the law of the Twelve Tables, which also introduced the concept of equality before the law, “often referred to in Latin as libertas”, which became foundational to republican politics. This early law also banned intermarriage between patricians and plebeians. This succession also forced the creation of plebeian tribunes with authority to defend plebeian interests.
There was a radical reform in 367–6 BC, which abolished consular tribunes and “laid the foundation for a system of government led by two consuls, shared between patricians and plebeians” over the religious objections of patricians, requiring at least one of the consuls to be a plebeian. After 342 BC, plebeians regularly attained the consulship. Debt bondage was abolished in 326, freeing plebeians from the possibility of slavery by patrician creditors.
By 287, with the passage of the lex Hortensia, plebiscites – or laws passed by the concilium plebis – were made binding on the whole Roman people Moreover, it banned senatorial vetoes of plebeian council laws. And also around the year 300 BC, the priesthoods also were shared between patricians and plebeians, ending the “last significant barrier to plebeian emancipation”.
The veracity of the traditional story is profoundly unclear: “many aspects of the story as it has come down to us must be wrong, heavily modernised or still much more myth than history”. Plebeian consuls may have been appointed before the fifth century BC. The form of the state may also have been different not taking on classical elements.
The completion of plebeian political emancipation was founded on a republican ideal dominated by nobiles who were defined not by caste or heredity, but by their accession to the high offices of state, elected from both patrician and plebeian families. There was substantial convergence in this class of people, with a complex culture of preserving the memory of and celebrating one's political accomplishments.
Throughout the Second Samnite War (326–304 BC), plebeians who had risen to power through these social reforms began to acquire the aura of nobilitas ("nobility", also "fame, renown"), marking the creation of a ruling elite of nobiles. From the mid-4th century to the early 3rd century BC, several plebeian–patrician "tickets" for the consulship repeated joint terms, suggesting a deliberate political strategy of cooperation.
No contemporary definition of nobilis or novus homo – a person entering the nobility – exists; Mommsen, positively referenced by Brunt (1982), said the nobiles were patricians, plebeians whose families had become plebeian, and plebeians who had held curule offices (eg dictator, consul, praetor, and curule aedile).
Becoming a senator after election to a quaestorship did not make a man a nobilis, only those who were entitled to a curule chair were nobiles. However, by the time of Cicero in the post-Sullan republic, the definition of nobilis had shifted. Now, nobilis came to refer only to former consuls and the direct relatives and male descendants thereof.
The Conflict of the orders (Latin: ordo meaning “social rank”) refers to a struggle by plebeians for full political rights from the patricians.
3/4 → ¾
Şi → Și
U+0031, U+0034, U+0035
45.1 → 45.1
@OTF → @OTF
“Leaf” → 🍁
“Flag” → ⚑
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The initial idea for Plebeian came to me while volunteering as a teaching assistant to Hannes Famira and his Type@Cooper Extended Program class. The students were being introduced to the typographic ‘lettermodel’ as described by Frank E. Blokland, and taught how to use its modular framework to consistently and proportionally build a majority of the Latin lowercase alphabet.
I imagined a typeface that preserved the individual segments of the lettermodel, and made no attempt to smooth out the sharp shoulders of letters like n, m, or h. A typeface that treated each segment like the individual stroke of a pen (In this case, a fatnibbed pen like a paint marker.)
A typeface that demonstrated the skeleton of the model in each letterform, leaving the building mechanism unobscured. From there, the rest of the project became a balancing act between modularity and readability.
Plebeian, in it’s earliest iteration, was first used on a poster for the film Om Dar-B-Dar, which was scheduled to screen at Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater in March of 2020. That year, my goal had been to design an original typeface or piece of lettering for a new Spectacle film poster every month. Sadly (or luckily?), this practice was put to an end when the theater shuttered abruptly in mid-March as the pandemic kicked into highgear. This early version of Plebeian was rife with indecisive choices that were eventually excised from the project. Most notably the slanted ascender strokes and terminals.
The biggest challenge came in designing an italic style complimentary to the roman. I wanted it to be a ‘true’ italic rather than an oblique, which would mean the stroke of the pen should be singular and uninterrupted. The primary conceit of Plebeian roman however, was the visible interruption of the stroke. Without the lettermodel to rely upon for modular guidance, what would the most ‘plebeian’ approach to an italic be? If the standard roman o is drawn in two strokes, and a Plebeian roman o is drawn in four strokes, I conjectured that the same rule of multiplication by two might be applied to the single stroke italic o in order to generate the Plebeian o. If the Plebeian o were to contain two strokes however, where would the best place to put the break between the strokes be?
I experimented with stroke break placement before finally coming to terms with the discontinuity of my own logic. If the standard roman n is drawn with two strokes, by my own reasoning, the Plebeian n should be drawn with four strokes—which it isn’t. I ultimately determined that stroke multiplication was the wrong way to approach thinking about generating the italic. In the end, I elected to retain the four individual strokes used for roman bowl characters, for the italic bowl characters as well. Instances of branching however, where bowls and shoulders met stems were treated more like a true italic—where the branching begins at the base of the stem or the previous stroke.
Plebeian was so named for being a simplistic approach to the latin script. An ancient Roman commoner, a simple roman typeface.
This project is deeply indebted to the gracious criticism of designers Jesse Ragan, Hannes Famira, David Jonathan Ross, Connor Davenport, Delaney Weber, and Cris R Hernandez. Thank you all.