Let’s look at the pairing of two successful Dwiggins revivals today, Jim Parkinson’s Parkinson Electra and Toshi Omagari’s Metro Nova.

William Addison Dwiggins’s work is marked with a distinctive American voice, and in its forms, an intense preoccupation with detail, a push to ever hold the reader’s attention with an enlivened texture. Both faces exhibit a certain fanciful approach to lettermaking that favors innovation over convention. Note how the serifed face below, Electra, compromises the construction of its lowercase g without sacrificing in the least its stateliness or legibility. Metro gets a similar clickety-clack rhythm from its varied terminal angles and gestural axes.

That’s it. The Great Pairs series continues.