HATCH_ Plan. Plot. Design.

De ce mb e r 2 0 1 4

Type Casting Back to Basics: Stopping Sloppy Typography Grooming the Font Typography in Saint Augustine: Searching for an Identity

Dec. 9, 2014 Volume 1

PLAN. PLOT. DESIGN.

Back to Basics: Stopping Sloppy Typography

by John D. Berry Artwork by Danielle Evans

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Type Casting

by Steven Brower Artwork by IBAN RAMON + DIDAC BALLESTER

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Grooming the Font

by Robert Bringhurst Artwork by Christian Goldeman

12 Typography in Saint Augustine: Searching for an Identity by Hannah Chittum Photography by India Stephenson

Published monthly 1621 Mohawk Trail Maitland florida, 32751

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COLUMNS Type Crimes

by Ellen Lupton Logotypes, When Type Gets Personal

by Peter Levine Studios

by Angelynn Grant Typefaces of Tomorrow

by Allan Haley Type Matters

by Thomas Phinney

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Editor Hannah Chittum Graphic Design Hannah Chittum Page Layout Hannah Chittum

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s the community of art and typography continues to grow Hatch magazine wants to make it our mission to shed light onto the ever changing world of typography. Our cover story, by Hannah Chittum, shows the talent of up and coming designers of the art world. Here at Hatch we are excited to have our viewers gain knowledge of the world of typography in this winter issue.

This December issue will be the first ever issue for Hatch magazine. I created the look and feel of this magazine to be simplistic and unified. There is this whole world of typography out there that needs to be shared. I am so pleased to finally allow others to recognized the beauty in typography and the important role it plays in our lives. I hope to see Hatch grow and become a large success within the typography community.

I would like to thank everyone who has put in a helping hand throughout this process. There would be no magazine without these amazing people who took time out of their busy lives and helped me create this magazine. I hope to see Hatch grow and become a creative outlet for all those seeking one.

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Type Casting My first job in book design was at New American Library, A publisher of mass- market books.

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t was exactly where I wanted to be. I love the written word, and viewed this as my entrance into a world I wanted to participate in. Little did I suspect at the time that mass- market books, also known as “pocket” books (they measured approximately 4”x 7” , although I have yet to wear a pocket they fit comfortably into), were viewed in the design world as the tawdry stepchild of true literature and design, gaudy and unsophisticated. I came to understand that this was due to the fact that mass- market books, sold extensively in super markets and convenience stores, had more in common with soap detergent and cereal boxes then with their much more dignified older brother, the hardcover first edition book. Indeed, the level of design of paperbacks was as slow to evolve as a box of cheerios.

On the other hand, hardcover books, as if dressed in evening attire, wore elegant and sophisticated jackets. Next in line in terms of standing, in both the literary and design worlds, was the trade paper edition, a misnomer that does not refer to a specific audience within an area of work, but, rather, to the second edition of the hardcover, or first edition, that sports a paperbound cover. Trade paperbacks usually utilize the same interior printing as the hardcover, and are roughly the same size (generally, 6”x9”).

Mass- market books were not so lucky. The interior pages of the original edition were shrunk down, with no regard for the final type size or the eyes of the viewer. The interiors tended to be printed on cheap paper stock, prone to yellowing over time.

The edges were often dyed to mask the different grades of paper used. The covers were usually quite loud, treated with myriad of special effects (i.e., gold or silver foil, embossing and de-bossing, spot lamination, die cut, metallic and Day-Glo pantone colors, thermography, and even holography), all designed to jump out at you and into your shopping cart as you walk down the aisle. The tradition of mass- market covers had more in common with, and, perhaps, for the most part is the descendant of, pulp magazine covers of earlier decades, with their colorful titles and over-the-top illustrations, than that of its more stylish, larger, and more expensive cousins.

a good opportunity to learn something about type and image.

Indeed, in my short tenure there, I employed more display typefaces in a year and a half than I will in the rest of my lifetime. And, I abused type more then I ever dreamed possible.

There, type was always condensed or stretched so the height would be greater in a small format. The problem was the face itself became distorted, as if it was put on the inquisitionist rack, with the horizontals remaining “thick” and the verticals thinning out. Back then, when type was “spec’d” and sent out to a typesetter, there was a standing order at the type house to condense all type and extend it by hand, which created less distortion but still odd-looking faces.

Once, I was instructed by the art director to cut the serifs off a face, to suit his whim. It’s a good ting there is no criminal prosecution for type abuse.

The art director usually commissioned the art for these titles. Therefore, the job of the designers was to find the “appropriate” type solution that worked with these illustrations to create the package. It was here that I learned my earliest lessons in the clichés of typography. Mass- market paperbacks are divided into different genres, distinct categories that define their audience and subject matter. Though they were unspoken rules, handed down from generation to generation, here is what I learned about type during my employ:

What I Learned So, when I made my entry into the elite world of literature, I began in the “bullpen” of mass- market house. I believed I would be afforded

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Artwork by IBAN RAMON + DIDAC BALLESTER

Typefaces Square serif Script and cursive LED faces Nueland Latin Fat, round serif faces San serif Hand scrawl 1950s bouncy type

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Genre Western Romance Science Fiction African (in spite of the Fact that the typeface is of German origin) Mystery Children’s Nonfiction Horror Humor/Teen titles

And so it went.

Every month, we were given five to six titles we were responsible for, and every month, new variations on old themes hung up on the wall. For a brief period I was assigned all the romance titles, which, themselves, were divided into subgenres (historical, regency, contemporary, etc.) I made the conscious decision to create the very best romance covers around. Sure, I would use script and cursive type, but I would use better script and cursive type, so distinctive, elegant, and beautiful that I, or anyone else, would recognize the difference immediately. (When, six months after I left the job, I went to view my achievements at the local K-Mart, I could not pick out any of my designs from all the rest on the bookracks.)

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Work by Marnich

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Artwork by Gerald Cinamon

Soon after, I graduated to art director of a small publishing house. The problem was, I still knew little of and had little confidence in, typography. However, by this time, I knew I knew little about typography. My solution, therefore, was to create images that contained type as an integral part of the image, in a play on vernacular design, thereby avoiding the issue entirely. Thus began a series of collaborations with talented illustrators and photographers, in which the typography of the jacket was incorporated as part of the illustration. Mystery books especially lent themselves well to this endeavor. A nice ting about this approach is that it has a certain informality and familiarity with the audience. It also made my job easier, because I did not have to paste up much type for the cover( as one had to do back in the days of t-squares and wax), since it was, for the most part, self-contained within the illustration. This may seem like laziness on my part, but hey, I was busy.

Eventually, my eye began to develop, and my awareness and appreciation of good typography increased.

I soon learned the pitfalls that most novice designers fall into, like utilizing a quirky novelty face does not equal creativity and usually calls attention to the wrong aspects of the solution. The importance of good letterspacing became paramount. Finding the right combination of a serif and sanserif face to evoke the mood of the material within was now my primary concern. The beauty of a classically rendered letterform now moved me, to quote Eric Gill, as much “as any sculpture or painted picture.” I developed an appreciation for the rules of typography.

The Rules As I’ve said, it is a common mistake among young designers to think a quirky novelty face equals creativity. Of course, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. If anything, for the viewer, it has the opposite of the intended effect. Rather than being the total sum of individual expression, it simply calls attention to itself, detracting from, rather than adding to, the content of the piece. It is no substitute for a wellreasoned conceptual solution to the design problem at hand.

As a general rule, no more than two faces should be utilized in any given design, usually the combination of a serif face and a sans serif face. There are thousands to choose from, but I find I have reduced the list to five or six in each category that I have used as body text throughout my career: Serif Bodoni Caslon Cheltenham Garamond San Serif Franklin Gothic Futura Gill Sans New Gothic Trade Gothic

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Artwork by Build Shop

“You should NEVER condense or extend type” You should never condense or extend type. As I stated, this leads to unwanted distortions. Much care and consideration went into the design of these faces, and they should be treated with respect. There are thousands of condensed faces to choose from without resorting to horizontal and vertical scale functions.

Do not use text type as display. Even though the computer will enlarge the top beyond the type designer’s intention, this may result in distortions. Do not use display type as text. Often, display type that looks great large can be difficult to read when small.

Do not stack type. The result is odd-looking spacing that looks as if it is about to tumble on top itself. The thinness of the letter I is no match for the heft of an O sitting on top of it. As always, there are ways to achieve stacking successfully, but this requires car. Also, as I noted, much care should be given to letterspaceing the characters of each word. This is not as simple as it seems. The computer settings for type are rife with inconsistencies that need to be corrected optically. Certain combinations of letterforms are more difficult to adjust than others. It is paramount that even optical (as opposed to actual) spacing is achieved, regardless of the openness or closeness of the kerning. It helps if you view the setting upside down, or backwards on a light box or sun-filled window, or squint at the copy to achieve satisfactory spacing.

I would caution you in the judicious use of drop shadows. Shadows these days can be rendered easily in programs such as Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator, and convincingly, too.

The problem is, it is so easily done that it is overdone. Thus, the wholesale usage of soft drop shadows has become the typographic equivalent to clip art. Viewers know they have seen it before. Rather than being evocative, it mainly evokes the program it was created in .

Hard drop shadows, ones that are 100 percent of a color, are easily achieved in Quark and placed behind the main text. This method is generally employed when the main text is not reading against the background, because of a neutral tone or an image that varies in tone from dark to light. The handed-down wisdom is: If you need a drop shadow to make it read, the piece isn’t working. These solid drop shadows always look artificial, since, in reality, there is no such thing as a sold drop shadow. There should be a better solution to readability. Perhaps the background or the color of the type can be adjusted. Perhaps the type should be paneled or outlined. There

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are an infinite number of possible variations.

If you must use a solid drop shadow, it should never be a color. Have you ever seen a shadow in life that is blue, yellow, or green? It should certainly never be white. Why would a shadow be 100 percent lighter than what is, in theory, causing the shadow?

White shadows create a hole in the background, and draw the eye to the shadow, and not where you want it to go: the text.

Justified texts look more formal than flush left, rag right.

Most books are set justified; while magazines are often flush left, rag right. Centered copy will appear more relaxed than asymmetrical copy. Large bloof centered type can create odd-looking shapes that detract from the copy contained within.

Another thing is to consider the point size and width of body copy. The tendency in recent times is to make type smaller and smaller, regardless of the intended audience. However, the whole purpose of text is that it be read. A magazine covering contemporary music is different from the magazine for The American Association of Retired Persons.

It is also common today to see very wide columns of text, with the copy set at a small point size. The problem is that a very wide column is hard to read because it forces the eye to move back and forth, tiring the reader. On the other hand, a very narrow measure also is objectionable, because the phrases and words are too cut up, with the eye jumping from line to line. We, as readers, do not read letter-by-letter, or even word-by-word, but rather phraseby-phrase. A consensus favors and average of ten to twelve words per line.

Lastly, too much leading between lines also makes the reader work too hard jumping from line to line, while too little leading makes it hard for the reader to discern where on line ends and another begins. The audience should always be paramount in the designers approach, and it is the audience---not the whim of the designer, or even the client---that defines the level of difficulty and ease with which apiece is read. As Eric Gill said in 1931, “A book is primarily a thing to be read.”

A final consideration is the size of the type. As a rule of thumb, mass-market books tend to be 8 point for reasons of space. A clothbound book, magazine, or newspaper usually falls into the 9.5 point to 12-point range. Oversized art books employ larger sizes--generally, 14 point to 18 point or more.

Artwork by Gerald Cinamon

Choosing the right typeface for your design can be time-consuming. There are thousands to choose from. Questions abound. Is the face legible at the setting I want? Does it evoke what I want it to evoke? Is it appropriate to the subject matter? There are no easy answers.

When a student of mine used Clarendon in a self-promotion piece, I questioned why he chose a face that has 1950’s connotations, mainly in connection with Reid Miles’ Blue Note album covers. He answered, “Because I thought it was cool.” I lectured him profusely on selecting type based on its “coolness.” Later, I relayed the incident to Seymour Chwast, of the legendary Pushpin Group (formerly pushpin studios). He observed that Clarendon is actually a Victorian face, which he and his peers revived as young designers in the 1950s. When I asked him why they chose to bring this arcane face back to life he replied, “Because we thought it was cool.”

Breaking the rules Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules. An infinite number of faces can be used within one design, particularly when you employ a broadside-style type solution, a style that has developed with the wood type settings of the nineteenth century. Another style, utilizing a myriad of faces, is that influenced by the Futurist and Dada movements of the early twentieth century. As Robert N. Jones stated in an article in the May 1960 issue of Print magazine: “It is my belief that there has never been a typeface that is so badly designed that it could not be handsomely

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Artwork by Anzac Tasker

Artwork by Anzac Tasker

and effectively used in the hands of the right…designer.” Of course, this was before the novelty type explosion that took place later that decade, and, again, after the advent of the Macintosh computer. Still, Jeffery Keedy, a contemporary type designer whose work appears regularly in Émigré, concurs: “Good designers can make use of almost anything. The typeface is the point of departure, not the destination.” Note the caveat “almost.” Still, bad use of good type is much less desirable than good use of bad type.

When I first began in publishing, a coworker decided to let me in on the “secrets” of picking the appropriate face. “ If you get a book on Lincoln to design,” he advised, “look up an appropriate typeface in the index of the type specimen book.” He proceeded to do so. “Ah, here we go---‘Log Cabin!’” While, on the extremely rare occasion, I have found this to be a useful method, it’s good general rule of what not to do. v

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Artwork by Kumi Yamashita

Artwork by Anzac Tasker

Steven Brower Words is an American graphic designer, and writer. His work appears regularly in international and national design annuals and books on design, and he writes for several publications. During his tenure as Creative Director at Print, the magazine garnered two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and a Gold and Silver award from the Society of Publication Designers. His work has been honored by AIGA, the Art Directors Club, the American Center for Design, the BRNO Biennale Association, and the Type Directors Club, among others. He has been an art director at the New York Times and The Nation, and his work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

BIO by Vision West Gallery http://stevenbrowerdesign.com/flash.html

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Back to Basics:

Stopping Sloppy Typography

There’s a billboard along the freeway in San Francisco that’s entirely typographic, and very simple. Against a bright blue background, white letters spell out a single short line, set in quotation marks: “Are you lookin’ at me?” The style of the letters is traditional, with serifs; it looks like a line of dialogue, which is exactly what it’s supposed to look like. Since this is a billboard, and the text is the entire message of the billboard, it’s a witty comment on the fact that you are looking at “me”—that is, the message on the billboard—as you drive past.

But, as my partner and I drove past and spotted this billboard for the first time, we both simultaneously voiced the same response: “No, I’m looking at your apostrophe!”

The quotation marks around the sentence are real quotation marks, which blend in with the style of the lettering—“typographers’ quotes,” as they’re sometimes called—but the apostrophe at the end of “lookin’” is, disconcertingly, a single “typewriter quote,” a straight up-and-down line with a rounded top and a teardrop tail at the bottom.

Artwork by Danielle Evans

To anyone with any sensitivity to the shapes of letters, whether they know the terms of typesetting or not, this straight apostrophe is like a fart in a symphony—boorish, crude, out of place, and distracting. The normal quotation marks at the beginning and end of the sentence just serve to make the loud “blat!” of the apostrophe stand out. If that had been the purpose of the billboard, it would have been very effective. But unless the billboards along Highway 101 have become the scene of an exercise in typographic irony, it’s just a big ol’ mistake. Really big, and right out there in plain sight.

The Devil Is in the Details This may be a particularly large-scale example, but it’s not unusual.

Too much of the signage and printed matter that we read—and that we, if we’re designers or typographers, create—is riddled with mistakes like this. It seems that an amazing number of people responsible for creating graphic matter are incapable of noticing when they get the type wrong.

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This should not be so. These fine points ought to be covered in every basic class in typography, and basic typography ought to be part of the education of every graphic designer. But clearly, this isn’t the case—or else a lot of designers skipped that part of the class, or have simply forgotten what they have once learned about type. Or, they naively believe the software they use will do the job for them.

Words to live by, I suppose. And, certainly, words to set type by.

Maybe it’s time for a nationwide—no, worldwide— program of remedial courses in using type.

Automated Errors As my own small gesture toward improvement, I’ll point out a couple of the more obvious problems—in the hope that maybe, maybe, they’ll become slightly less commonplace, at least for awhile.

Typewriter quotes and straight apostrophes are actually on the wane, thanks to word-processing programs and page-layout programs that offer the option of automatically changing them to typographers’ quotes on the fly. (I’m not sure what has made the phenomenon I spotted on that billboard so common, but I’ve noticed a lot of examples recently of text where the double quotation marks are correct but the apostrophes are straight.) But those same automatic typesetting routines have created another almost universal mistake: where an apostrophe at the beginning of a word appears backwards, as a single open quotation mark. You see this in abbreviated dates (’99, ’01) and in colloquial spellings, like ‘em for them. The program can turn straight quotes into typographers’ quotes automatically, making any quotation mark at the end of a word into a closed quote, but it has no way of telling that the apostrophe at the beginning of ‘em isn’t supposed to be a single open quote, so it changes it into one.

The only way to catch this is to make the correction by hand—every time.

Anemic Type The other rude noise that has become common in the symphony hall is fake small caps. Small caps are a wonderful thing, very useful and sometimes elegant; fake small caps are a distraction and an abomination.

Fake caps are what you get when you use a program’s “small caps” command. The software just shrinks the full-size capital letters down by a predetermined percentage—which gives you a bunch of small, spindle-looking caps all huddled together in the middle of the text. If the design calls for caps and small caps—that is, small caps for the word but a full cap for the first letter—it’s even worse, since the full-size caps draw attention to themselves because they look so much heavier than the smaller caps next to them. (If you’re using caps and small caps to spell out an acronym, this might make sense; in that case, you might want the initial caps to stand out. Otherwise, it’s silly. (And—here comes that word again— distracting.)

If it weren’t for a single exception, I’d advise everyone to just forget about the “small caps” command—forget it ever existed, and never, ever, touch it again. (The exception is Adobe InDesign, which is smart enough to find the real small caps in an OpenType font that includes them, and use them when the “small caps” command is invoked. Unfortunately, InDesign isn’t smart enough, or independent enough, to say, “No, thanks,” when you invoke “small caps” in a font that doesn’t actually have any. It just goes ahead and makes those familiar old fake small caps.) You don’t really need small caps at all, inmost typesetting situations; small caps are a typographic refinement, not a crutch. If you’re going to use them, use real small caps: properly designed letters with the form of caps, but usually a little wider, only as tall as the x-height or a litter taller, and with stroke weights that math the weight of the lowercase and the full caps of the same typeface. Make sure you’re using a typeface that has true small caps, if you want small caps. Letterspace them a little, and set them slightly loose, the same way you would (or at least should) with a word in all caps; it makes the word much more readable.

Pay Attention, Now There are plenty of other bits of remedial typesetting that we ought to study, but those will do for now. The obvious corollary to all this is, to produce well-typeset words, whether in a single phrase on a billboard or several pages of text, you have to pay attention.

Proofread. Proofread again. Don’t trust the defaults of any program you use. Look at good typesetting and figure out how it was done, then do it yourself. Don’t be sloppy. Aim for the best.

Words to live by, I suppose. And, certainly, words to set type by.v

John D. Jerry Author

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Type Crimes Learning how to break the rules is a designer’s rite of passage.

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e figure out how to use grids, and how to ignore them. We learn how to generate legible, readable design solutions, and then how to start all over with complex or surprising designs that challenge the user to look twice and think again.

You can’t violate a law if there is no order to begin with; you can’t be post-modern without a modern system to react against.

Nearly any rule can be broken if it’s done in a knowing and deliberate way.

Proper scaling is a sacred cow of typography. Like pooping on the floor or French kissing your mom, this is one rule that few designers are willing to break. Stretched or compressed type is a dead giveaway of ignorance and amateurism. It is a badge worn without shame by desk­top publishers, MySpace wannabes and know-it-all architects who think they’re graphic designers, too. Bad scaling often happens by accident—the perpetrator simply doesn’t know how to use the soft­ware. But just as often, bad scaling is committed in cold blood by design­ ers desperate to squeeze more text into a tight space or pump more girth into a short line.

Mismatched scaling is one of the first evils I explain to students in my Typography I course. These are smart kids, and right out of the gate they can all recognize that stretched or scrunched type looks bad—very, very bad. They are hard-pressed to answer why, however, even as they stare the devil in the face.

Their immediate explanation is, inevitably, “The proportions are wrong.” Yet that’s not quite it.

Producing letters with narrow or wide proportions was, pre­ sumably, the designer’s goal in scaling the type in the first place. There is nothing inherently wrong with narrow Helvetica or wide-assed Arial. (Well, maybe there is, but that’s another

story.) The prob­lem with scaled type is the distorted line weights.

Vertical scaling fattens up the horizontal strokes while starv­ing the uprights, destroying the appearance of uniform weight.

(Horizontal scaling yields the same atrocity in reverse.) This simple phenomenon, once revealed, dooms us to a lifetime of suffering and superiority, as our sensibilities are exposed again and again to improper acts of scaling littered across the media landscape. Such knowledge is a cross we bear.

Yet now and again, a designer refuses to be constrained by propriety and finds a way to break this one unbreak­able rule and get away with it. Rick Valicenti has been doing it for over twenty years. As part of the first gen­er­ation to work directly with com­puter-generated type, he has ignored nearly every rule out there, including this one. In his 1988 poster for Peter Sellars’s Tannhäuser, huge, vertically-scaled letters are plastered across the top. The performance itself was a contemporary inter­pre­ tation of a nineteenth-century opera; Valicenti’s poster is, likewise, a post-modern execution of a standard nineteenth-century design strategy. Valicenti centered every element in the poster, and he sized each one to make maximum use of the space available. That’s how the Victorian-era job print­ers assembled their motley assortments of display fonts into posters with an oddly pleasing rhythm—choos­ing tall, skinny type for long words and wide, heavy fonts for short ones.

In a screen-printed lecture poster (2000), Paul Sahre stretched his letters almost beyond recognition, creating text as obscurely iconic as a barcode. By pushing the type to unexpected extremes, Sahre flaunted his knowing violation of the law and thumbed his nose at the font police, acting out of knowledge, not ignorance.

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Packaging for L’eau d’Italie, a line of body care products, uses vertical scaling to create a bold and functional brand si­g­na­ture. The name of a given product (bath salts, shower gel, body milk and so on) has been compressed and stretched to fill the surface of each package, creating text that can’t be missed and a graphic identity that vibrates with variation. One wonders if the typical con­sumer of this upscale product gets the visual humor. Does the untrained shopper feel our typographic pain—and pleasure?

Scaling can serve as a harsh and knowing transgression of good taste.

As Michael Bierut pointed out in a recent post on Design Observer, Mike Meiré has been scal­ing type in his shocking (yes, shock­ing) typography for the German culture maga­zine 032c.1 Meiré is a good designer indulging in some very bad behavior. Editor Jörg Koch explains, “The stretched typography is just a small part within the over­all scheme of mak­ing a mag­­a­zine that feels sexy, mature and dangerous.

We felt that stretching typogra­phy (archi­tecture or music oper­ates with stretching too) actually clashes pro­ ductively with all the copy­cats in their modernist good taste serif designs but ulti­mately meaning­less con­­tent.

It really comes down to pro­posing a raw con­tent aesthetic for our time that feels quite aspirational to us. The confidence of the design is based on the content.” v

created by London-based designer Craig Ward

Ellen Lupton Words

Ellen Lupton is a designer, writer and curator. She is the author of Thinking with Type (2004), D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006) and numerous other books.

Her latest title, Graphic Design: The New Basics, co-authored with Jennifer Cole Phillips, will be issued by Princeton Architectural Press in May 2008. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).

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Grooming the Font Writing begins with the making of meaningful marks.

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Artwork by Christian Goldemann

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riting begins with the making of meaningful marks. That is to say, leaving the traces of meaningful gestures. Typography begins with arranging meaningful marks that are already made. In that respect, the practice of typography is like playing the piano – an instrument quite different from the human voice. On the piano, the notes are already fixed, although their order, duration and amplitude are not. The notes are fixed but they can be endlessly rearranged, into meaningful music or meaningless noise.

Pianos, however, need to be tuned. The same is true of fonts. To put this in more literary terms, fonts need to be edited just as carefully as texts do – and may need to be re-edited, like texts, when their circumstances change. The editing of fonts, like the editing of texts, begins before their birth and never ends.

You may prefer to entrust the editing of your fonts, like the tuning of your piano, to a professional. If you are the editor of a magazine or the manager of a publishing house, that is probably the best way to proceed. But devoted typographers, like lutenists and guitarists, often feel that they themselves must tune the instruments they play.

10.1 Legal Considerations

Adobe’s and Agfa Monotype’s licenses contain no such provision.

Monotype’s says instead that “You my not alter Font Software for the purpose of adding any functionality.... You agree not to adapt, modify, alter, translate, convert, or otherwise change the Font Software….”

If your license forbids improving the font itself, the only legal way to tune it is through a software override. For example, you can use an external kerning editor to override the kerning table built into the font. This is the least elegant way to do it, but a multitude of errors in fitting and kerning can be masked, if need be, by this means.

10.2 Ethical and Aesthetic Considerations

One way to refine the typography of a text is to work your way through it line by line

10.2.1 If it ain’t broke….

Any part of the font can be tuned – lettershapes, character set, character encoding, fitting and sidebearings, kerning table, hinting, and, in an OpenType font, the rules governing character sub-situation. What doesn’t need tuning or fixing shouldn’t be touched. If you want to revise the font just for the sake of revising it, you might do better to design your own instead. And if you hack up someone else’s font for practice, like a biology student cutting up a frog, you might cremate or bury the results.

10.1.1 Check the license before tuning a digital font.

10.2.2 If the font is out of tune, fix it once and for all.

Digital fonts are usually licensed to the user, not sold outright, and the license terms may vary. Some manufacturers claim to believe that improving a font produced by them is an infringement of their rights.

No one believes that tuning a piano or pumping up the tires of a car infringes on the rights of the manufacturer – and this is true no matter whether the car or the piano has been rented, leased or purchased.

Printing type was treated the same way from Bi Sheng’s time until the 1980s. Generally speaking, metal type and phototype are treated that way still. In the digital realm, where the font is wholly intangible, those older notions of ownership are under pressure to change.

The Linotype Library’s standard font license says that “You may modify the Font’ Software to satisfy your design requirements.”

FontShop’s standard license has a similar provision: “You do have the right to modify and alter Font Software for your customary personal and business use, but not for resale or further distribution.”

One way to refine the typography of a text is to work your way through it like by line, putting space in here, removing it there, and repositioning errant characters one by one. But if these refinements are made to the font itself, you will never need to make them again.

They are done for good.

10.2.3 Respect the text first of all, the letterforms second, the type designer third, the foundry fourth.

The needs of the text should take precedence over the layout of the font, the integrity of the letterforms over the ego of the designer, the artistic sensibility of the designer over the foundry’s desire for profit, and the founder’s craft over a good deal else.

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Artwork for Crown Cardnials

10.2.4 Keep on fixing.

Check every text you set to see where improvements can be made. Then return to the font and make them. Little by little, you and the instrument – the font, that is – will fuse, and the type you set will start to sing. Remember, though, this process never ends. There is no such thing as a perfect font.

10.3 Honing The Character Set 10.3.1 If there are defective glyphs, mend them.

If the basic lettershapes of your font are poorly drawn, it is probably better to abandon it rather than edit it. But many fonts combine superb basic letterforms with alien or sloppy supplementary characters. Where this is the case, you can usually rest assured that the basic letterforms are the work of a real designer, whose craftsmanship merits respect, and that the supplementary characters were added by an inattentive foundry employee. The latter’s errors should be remedied at once.

You may find for example that analphabetic characters such as @ + ± × = . - − © are too big or too small, too light or too dark, too high, or too low, or are otherwise out of tune with the basic alphabet. You may also find that diacritics in glyphs such as XXXXXX are poorly drawn, poorly positioned, or out of scale with the letterforms.

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If text figures, ligatures or other glyphs you need on a regular basis don’t reside readable text, you almost always need figures, but most digital fonts are on the base font, For sold with titling figures instead. Most digital fonts also include the ligatures fi and fl but not ff, ffi, ffl, fj or ffj. You may find at least some of the missing move them. glyphs on a supplementary font (an ‘expert font’), but that is not enough. Put all the basic glyphs together on the base font.

If, like a good Renaissance typographer, you use only upright parentheses and brackets (XXX), copy the upright forms from the roman to the italic font. Only then can they be kerned and spaced correctly without fuss.

If glyphs you need are missing altogether, Standard ISO digital text fonts (PostScript or TrueType) have make them.

256 slots and carry a basic set of Western European characters. Eastern

European characters such as ą ć đ ė ğ ħ ī ň ő ŗ ș ť ů are usually missing. So are the Welsh sorts ŵ and ŷ, and a host of characters needed for African, Asian and Native American languages.

The components required to make these characters may be present on the font, and assembling the pieces is not hard, but you need a place to put whatever character you make. If you need only a few and do not care about system compatibility, you can place them in wasted slots – e.g., the ^ < > \ | ~ ` positions, which are accessible directly from the keyboard, or slots such as ¢ ÷ X X X ™ ☐ X X, which can be reached through insertion utilities or by typing character codes or by customizing the keyboard.

If you need to add many such characters, you will need to make a supplementary font or, better yet, an enlarged font (TrueType or OpenType).

If these are for your own use only the extra characters can be placed wherever you wish. If the fonts are too be shared, every new glyph should be labeled with its PostScript name and Unicode number.

Check and correct sidebearings.

The spacing of letters is part of the essence of their design. A well-made font should need little adjustment, except for refining the kerning. Remember, however, that kerning tables exist for the sake of problematical sequences such as ƒ*, gy, “A, To, Va and 74. If you find that simple pairs such as oo or oe require kerning, this is a sign that the letters are poorly fitted. It is better to correct the sidebearings than to write a bloated kerning table.

The spacing of many analphabetics, however, has as much to do with editorial style as with typographic design. Unless your fonts are custom made, neither the type designer nor the founder can know what you need or prefer. I habitually increase the left sidebearing of semicolon, colon, question and exclamation marks, and the inner bearings of guillemets and parentheses, in search of a kind of Channel Island compromise: neither the tight fitting preferred by most anglophone editors nor the wide-open spacing customary in France. If I worked in French all the time, I might increase these sidebearings further.

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10.3.5 Refine the kerning table.

Digital type can be printed in three dimensions, using zinc or polymer plates, and metal type can be printed flat, from photos or scans of the letterpress proofs. Usually, however, metal type is printed in three dimensions and digital type is printed in two. Twodimensional type can be printed more cleanly and sharply than three-dimensional type, but the gain in sharpness rarely equals what is lost in depth and texture. A digital page is therefor apt to look aenemic next to a page printed directly from handset metal.

This imbalance can be addressed by going deeper into two dimensions. Digital type is capable of refinements of spacing and kerning beyond those attainable in metal, and the primary means of achieving this refinement is the kerning table.

Always check the sidebearings of figures and letters before you edit the kerning table. Sidebearings can be checked, quickly for errors by disabling kerning and setting characters, at ample size, in pairs: 11223344 … qqwweerrttyy…. If the spacing within the pairs appears to vary, or if it appears consistently cramped or loose, the sidebearings probably need to be changed.

The function of a kerning table is to achieve what perfect sidebearings cannot. A thorough check of the kerning table

Photo by Starshaped Press

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therefore involves checking all feasible permutations of characters: 1213141516 … qwqeqrqtqyquqiqoqp …(a(s(d(f(g(h(j(k(l … )a)s) d)f)g … -1-2-3-4-5 … TqTwTeTrTtTyTuTiToTp … and so on. This will take several hours for a standard ISO font. For a full pan-European font, it will take several days.

Class-based kerning (now a standard capability of font editing software) can be used to speed the process. In class-based kerning, similar letters, such as a á â ä à å ã ă ā ą are treated as one kerned alike. This is an excellent way to begin when you are kerning a large font, but not a way to finish. The combination Ta and Tä, Ti and Tï, il and íl, i) and ï), are likely to require different treatment.

Kerning sequences such as Tp, Tt and f( may seem to you absurd, but they can and do occur in legitimate text. (Tpig is the name of a town in the mountains of Dagestan, near the southern tip of Russian Federation; Ttanuu is an important historical site on the British Columbia coast; sequences such as y = ƒ(x) occur routinely in mathematics.) If you know what texts you wish to set with a given font, and know that combinations such as these will never occur, you can certainly omit them from the table. But if you are preparing a font for general use, even in a single language, remember that it should accommodate the occasional foreign phrase and the names of real and fictional people, places and things. These can

involve some unusual combinations. (A few addition examples: McTavish, FitzWilliam, O’Quinn, dogfish, jock o’-lantern, hallowe’en.)

It is also wise to check the font by running a test file – a specially written text designed to hunt out missing or malformed characters and kerning pairs that are either too tight or too loose. On pages 204-205 is a short example of such test file, showing the difference between an ungroomed font and a groomed one. (PROBABLY REMOVE)

It is nothing unusual for a well-groomed ISO font (which might contain around two hundred working characters) to have a kerning table listing a thousand pairs. Kerning instructions for large OpenType fonts are usually stored in a different form, but if converted to tabular form, the kerning data for a pan-European Latin font may easily reach 30,000 pairs.

Remember, though, that the number isn’t what counts. What matters is the intelligence and style of the kerning. Remember too that there is no such thing as a font whose kerning cannot be improved.

10.3.6 Check the kerning of the word space.

The word space – that invisible blank box – is the most common character in almost every text. It is normally kerned against sloping and undercut glyphs: quotation marks, apostrophe, the letters A, T, V, W, Y, and often to the numerals 1, 3, 5. It is not,

however, normally kerned more than a hair either to or away from a preceding lowercase ƒ in either roman or italic.

A cautionary example. Most of the Monotype digital revivals I have tested over the years have serious flaws in the kerning tables. One problem in particular recurs in Monotype Baskerville, Centaur and Arrighi, Dante, Fournier, Gills Sans, Poliphilus and Baldo, Van Dijck and other masterworks in the Monotype collection. These are well-tried faces of suberb design – yet in defiance of tradition, the maker’s kerning tables call for a large space (as much as M/4) to be added whenever the ƒ is followed by a word space. The result is a large white blotch after every word ending in ƒ unless a mark of punctuation intervenes.

Professional typographer may argue about whether the added space should be zero, or ten, or even 25 thousandths of an em. But there is no professional dispute about whether it should be on the order of an eighth or a quarter of an em. An extra space that large is a prefabricated typographic error – one that would bring snorts of disbelief and instantaneous correction from Stanley Morison, Bruce Rogers, Jan van Krimpen, Eric Gill and others on whose expertise and genius the Monotype heritage is built. But it is an easy error to fix for anyone equipped with the requisite tool: a digital font editor.

10.4 Hinting 10.4.1 If the font looks poor at low resolutions, check the hinting.

Digital hints are important chiefly for the sake of how the type will look on screen. Broadly speaking, hints are of two kinds: generic hints that apply to the font as a whole and specific hints applicable only to individual characters. Many fonts are sold unhinted, and few fonts indeed are sold with hints that cannot be improved.

Manual hinting is tedious in the extreme, but any good font editor of recent vintage will include routines for automated hinting. These routines are usually enough to make a poorly hinted text font more legible on screen. (in the long run, the solution is high-resolution screens, making the hinting of fonts irrelevant except at tiny sizes.)

10.5 Naming Conventions The presumption of common law is that inherited designs, like inherited texts, belong in the public domain. New designs (or in the USA, the software in which they are enshrined) are protected for a certain term by copyright; the names of the designs are also normally protected by trademark legislation. The names are often better protected, in fact, because infringements on the rights conferred by a trademark are often much easier to prove than infringements of copyright. Nevertheless there are times when a typographer must tinker with the names manufacturers give to their digital fonts.

Project by Starshaped Press

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Artwork by Lo Siento

Text fonts are generally sold in families, which may include smorgasbord of weights and variations. Most editing and typesetting software takes a narrower, more stereotypical view. It recognizes only the nuclear family of roman, italic, bold and bold italic. Keyboard shortcuts make it easy to switch from one to another of these, and the switch codes employed are generic. Instead of saying “Switch to such and such a font at such and such a size,” they say, for instance, “Switch to this font’s italic counterpart, whatever that may be.” This convention makes the instructions transferable. You can change the face and size of a whole paragraph or file and the roman, italic and bold should all convert correctly. The slightest inconsistency in font names can prevent this trick from working – and not all manufacturers name their fonts according to the same conventions. For the fonts to be linked, their family names must be identical and the font names must abide by rules known to the operating system and software in use.

If, for example, you install Martin Majoor’s Scala or Scala Sans (issued by FontShop) on a PC, you will find that the italic and the roman are unlinked. These are superbly designed fonts, handsomely kerned and fully equipped with the requisite text figures and small caps – almost everything a digital font should be – but the PC version must be placed in a font editor and renamed in order to make them work as expected.v

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Robert Bringhurst Words A Canadian writer, poet, translator and typographer, he is best known for his 1992 work, The Elements of Typographic Style. His numerous poetry collections include Ursa Major (2003) and Tending the Fire (1985).

Logotypes, When Type gets Personal A brand identity becomes our identity A heated debate took place over a notorious building in Manhattan

giant Mars. The reception area had a timeline display that showed the

several years back. The building stood prominently in Columbus Circle

evolution of the iconic M&M’s package created in the 1940s. I could

in New York and was nicknamed the “Lollipop” building for its filigree

see, side-by-side, the subtle evolution of the legendary package with

detail. This particular building was never considered great architecture.

the blocky slab serif M&M’s type reversed out of the chocolate brown

Residents complained about its awkward design, dark interiors and

background. I found the design I first knew as a kid placed around the

lack of function. In 2005, it was announced that the building would be

1960s. I didn’t just recognize it; I felt it was a part of me. That was “my”

demolished. Suddenly legions of academic architects leapt forward to

brand of candy. I felt an emotional connection. Ultimately, my beloved

write exhaustive essays expressing a personal fondness for the peculiar,

childhood version evolved on the timeline. Later M&M’s type became 3-D

“quirky” structure, putting forth the decree that it should be preserved as

with drop shadows thanks to the advent of Photoshop.

a landmark. Some stating that the Lollipop building was one of the best examples of “kitsch architecture” and that it should be protected as a

Looking at the American consumer landscape of iconic pieces of

landmark. The building was not demolished, instead it was “refurbished.”

typographic design, many brands stand out for the sheer reason that

One architectural critic called the new design mind-numbingly dull.

they have never (or hardly) changed at all. Identities for McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Dunkin’ Donuts, U-Haul, 7-Eleven, American Airlines, Crate &

I had lunch with a European art director recently. Having just returned

Barrel, Mobil have been around for decades. Their design personalities

from a trip to Paris, she wondered aloud what sort of pandemonium

are virtually “time-stamped,” between the ’60s and ’70s. You can get

would ensue if the French electronics brand, Fnac, ever got rid of the

an instant picture in your head of these type identities and you probably

hideous ochre-color square that housed their four-letter identity. She felt

could draw them with their exact colors on blank paper. Consumer

that as homely as the color was, the omni-present Fnac identity was part

researchers call this “unaided awareness”—meaning you know them

of the consumer landscape for many decades and part of the modern

by heart. These brands have embraced their graphic identities and not

history of Paris. It would be better to live with something unattractive that

budged. Most have come up with support graphics over the years to

had personal meaning rather than adopt a change.

remain relevant. And they certainly have braved time periods when they seemed hopelessly out of sync with a modern world. For example when

As Americans we tend to embrace a “move forward” attitude. But both of

American’s went “healthier,” McDonald’s didn’t try to make their identity

these examples enticed me as a designer and brand strategist to look at

appear healthier, instead they began to offer salads. When boutique

the world of design that surrounds us to try to determine if I appreciated

coffee juggernaut Starbucks expanded worldwide, Dunkin’ Donuts hung

a brand identity for its design merits, typographic style, aesthetic

tough with their candy-colored pink and orange hotdog font—they simply

application and the ability to telegraph what it stood for or for the history

added a coffee cup to the side of their logo.

of interaction and personal memories I brought to that design.

I started my career as a designer and evolved into a creative strategist.

In thinking about the place of memory and typographic design, I recalled

With both disciplines simultaneously employed, I began to consider

an amazing experience of going to visit the headquarters of the candy

different information when approaching an identity. Such as how does

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this brand speak to the desired audience? If it’s a redesign, how

were. Brand identities scrambled to find their chic, fashionable

does it evolve the old identity? How does the identity relate

sides. Coach is a perfect example of a brand that in the late

to the competitive set it exists within? What are the desired

’90s back-burnered their signature serif cartouche tag logo for

consumer responses? Affiliations? Emotional connections?

a cool, streamlined, sans serif, all cap, letterspaced identity.

They also employed a host of playful type patterns made of their initial C on products and graphics. The restaging of Coach

A great deal of my work has centered on understanding the

appealed to Generation X’s desire to celebrate “the now,” with

mindset and motivations of the three compelling generations

glamour and luxury. The dusty old leather goods brand was

of consumers that generate trillions of dollars of spending in

suddenly reinvented as a fashion brand.

the U.S. The Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964 (about 31 percent of the population), Generation X born

Today, Generation Y’s voice is gaining prominence. They feel

between 1965 and 1979 (about 17 percent of the population)

the shakiness of the world and happen to crave authenticity.

and Generation Y (born between 1977 and 1994, about

Coach has now added a vintage looking horse and buggy

33 percent of the population). Each generation is attitudinally

logo to their graphic vocabulary, a nod to their authentic

different and each

heritage. In such

brings wholly different

uncertain times,

associations and values

established

to how they perceive the

brand identities

world and certainly the

like McDonald’s

place of design in their

suddenly feel

world.

safe, secure and comfortable. Been

Baby Boomers matured

around yesterday

with the notion of

and will be here

a prescribed plan

tomorrow.

(college, job, marriage, children, buy a home,

Americans have

climb ladder, etc.) and

elected a new

by taking the proper,

President with

measured steps earned

a message of

and enjoyed success.

change. But when

Noble-looking brand

it comes to the

identities that used

graphics that are

type to communicate

the landscape of

status like Mercedes-Benz, Tiffany & Co., American Express or

our lives, we apparently are not embracing change as readily.

the iconic signature of Disney resonated for Boomers as they

Think about how the British Petroleum (BP) gasoline identity

telegraphed personal or earned achievement.

redesign—with its approachable lower case sans-serif BP, and a green and yellow sunburst flower icon—was so fresh and

Generation X was the first “screwed” generation in a sense

modern when it came out several years back. Today “new”

that they witnessed everything taken away from them. Sex

may be too fleeting. Gulf recently updated the identity of their

equaled AIDS. Working equaled no Social Security remaining

stations by keeping their old iconic orange and blue symbol but

upon retirement. Halloween equaled razor blades in candy.

tilting it to the side and adding fresh clouds to the background.

They realized early on they didn’t have the time to earn

The best of both worlds. Old meets new—comfortable change.

anything. Ultimately Gen X matured into a rebellious, cynical

Recent Pepsi posters show their 1950’s logo next to their newly

generation. They were the first generation to want to see their

redesigned logo with the refresh symbol between them. They

lives communicated through design. Wallpaper magazine

are also acknowledging the past and the present.

arrived to herald “The stuff that surrounds you.” It was a voice

We all witnessed the public meltdown of Tropicana when they

for a generation looking for a “styled life.” After all, Gen X

launched a new design. The graphics probably tested well with

grew up with supermodels and Dynasty. They wanted the stuff

focus groups that try to project how they may feel about buying

that surrounded them to look like it was as hip and cool as they

something. The new packaging probably elicited consumer

Brand cartoon photo credit: thenon-profittoolbox.com

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Photo by Hannah Furnell

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comments like “it’s cleaner, easier to tell which version it is,” and “it feels more modern.” The type treatment of the new Tropicana was certainly more contemporary—by a graphic designer’s standards; it was better designed. But against the landscape of an economic meltdown, consumers ultimately rejected that design. Tropicana did a remarkable about-face and reinstated their prior package. They clearly did not anticipate our deep emotional reactions to changing something we felt was ours.

Wal-Mart is a great example of a brand that also recently updated their identity. This time change was for the better.

They are the leader in the discount space, but their typographic identity, an all caps generic bore whose typeface could have been called “sign-maker standard” had a star between the words Wal and Mart and only communicated “Big” and “Discount.”

Leader or not, the new design had bigger ambitions. This was a clear case of a brand that wanted—actually needed—us to think of them as more. More than just a big bland discount box. Especially since archrival Target was winning on style points. Could the existing Wal-Mart consumer care less? Was the goal to reach out and gain greater acceptance with a different customer-one that may have shamefully entered the Wal-Mart store with the feeling of, “This is not my store, I’m just ducking in for a few things!” The new design answers those questions by employing a typeface that is a friendlier upper and lower case font that asks us to consider Wal-Mart as a “lifestyle” brand. The new type identity closes the space between Wal and Mart which cleverly made them a better single brand name, versus feeling like the parodies “Kwik-E-Mart” and “Mega-Lo-Mart” of The Simpsons and King of the Hill fame. They also abandoned their silly rollback smiley face logo in place of a sunburst icon, and they added the tagline “Save money. Live better.”

This is all feel good stuff and it is certainly strategic.

I apologize to designers who passionately write blog entries complaining about a new identity’s font, colors, icon and basic design execution. In my opinion that is about personal taste—the Wal-Mart redesign is smart. They are attempting to give us permission to engage in a new brand experience. They want to make their store ours through an emotional connection.

They want to make their brand “personal.”v

Peter Levine Words

Peter Levine served as principal and executive creative director and director of creative strategy at the brand identity firm Desgrippes Gobé in New York for 21 years. Levine crafted dynamic positioning and design solutions for brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Coca-Cola, Estée Lauder, Godiva, IBM, Peugeot, Toys R Us and Weight Watchers to name a few. He spent the last two years as chief creative officer at the tabletop brand Mikasa before starting Brand Forum Partners and Luxury Brand Forum as chief creative officer. Both consultancies are focused on creative strategy and design for consumer and luxury brands. Levine has taught at the Parsons School of Design and served as a board member of the Art Directors club of New York. He has won two Clio Awards and has had his work published in numerous design journals including Communication Arts, Graphis and Print.

BIO by Commarts

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Typography in Saint Augustine: Searching for an Identity Sign your Identity on our Identity

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Photo by India Stephenson

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dentity is a typographic installation in the center of downtown St. Augustine. The goal of this installation is to identify the role and importance of typography as it relates to modern society. In a city defined by its history, we hope to unveil and showcase the identities of those immersed in St. Augustine’s rich culture.

Investigation: First we discussed the different words that relate to typography, but also the role in which typography plays here in St. Augustine and around the world. We examined the different uses of typography through the various purposes it holds. The majority of typography is used in our environment as a directional reinforcement.

When looking up the world, label, and exploring the synonyms that related to label, I came across the word Identity. I then began to think about how our identity and the identity of everything around us can be seen in not only pictures, but primarily typography.

Insight: The insights achieved from my investigation supplied me with a brilliant concept. We decided to chose the word “Identity” and create our installation out of Hello my name is stickers to showcase the idea of ones role or “identity.”

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Idea: We as a group want to identify the role that typography plays in the community of St. Augustine and also within modern society. In a town overflowing with history we want to explore and demonstrate the modern day use of typography compared to the past.

By choosing the world Identity we aimed to determine a pixel that would reflect the idea of “Identity”. We first played with the concept of using thumbprints, but quickly ended up with the plan to use Hello my name is stickers. This pixel not only allows one to identify themselves within the piece, but also permits the action of interaction within our installation. We very much liked the idea that the viewers would get to become apart of the installation and not just examine the piece.

Research Research was an important factor in understanding the meaning behind this project. First I needed to familiarize myself with the purpose of type and how we see it in society. Typography surrounds us; it’s the gateway to understanding and learning; it not only represents knowledge, but has also altered its initial purpose form only informational use, to become an esthetically pleasing for of art. We can see that with our

project that is typography displayed in a nontraditional artistic setting instead of the familiar environmental use.

The typography that is a fundamental part of our lives today is the culmination of improvements over time, as techniques evolved in time so do our methods of production.

After educating myself in the forms of typography I needed to see the historical use of it in St. Augustine’s history. Being that type plays a large role in communication its clear to see its role in the growth of St. Augustine. Without Henry Flagler’s monopoly on the railways he would not have had the ability to transport the amount of advertisement through the post office. He developed mass communication through typography in the form of magazine ads. These ads not only used type as a form of information, but also as an esthetically pleasing art form to draw the viewer in. Overall Flagler’s ability to control the post office worked greatly to his advantage.

Once I had seen the historical side of typography in Saint Augustine I wanted to explore the many uses of type throughout the city. There are many typeface varieties throughout town and each possesses a distinct personality. Some typefaces are sharp and bold

conveying authority, while others are loose and seem playful. Typeface usage can therefore tell a reader the attitude in which the message is trying to be expressed through.

The word identity defines typography not only in regards to St. Augustine, but also in our everyday experiences. We need typography to identify each other and the rules and regulations of the world we live in. Being that St. Augustine is a college town we are all finding our identity through the knowledge we are learning in class from the textbooks we read.

Typography relates to everything around us in the same way the identity of ourselves, our town, and our surroundings relate to each other. Without typography there would be a lack of common ground between everyone.

Strategy Our Idea focuses mainly on the idea that our identity is something we like to share or communicate with others.

We allow the viewer to become part of our art by creating our pixel out of Hello my name is stickers. This pixel gives our viewers the opportunity to go up to our piece and take a sharpie to write whom they are. They could either write their name, their role in society, or

Photo by India Stephenson

even their life story. We are setting our installation up in the center of downtown on two of the busiest streets in St. Augustine. With the art walk bringing in people from out of town we hope to catch the traffic of the exciting festivities.

Challenges The real challenge of this project didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t arise until after all the hard work had been completed. Yes it was challenging gluing corrugated cardboard along flat cardboard, and yes finding a place to store these gigantic letters was quite challenging, but the over all challenge with this project was having to face the law.

After finishing all eight letters and having only the task of securing our location we thought we could relax, little did we know. India, one of my group partners had gone and talked to an officer about our location and whether or not we had their permission. The man she had talked to said as far as he knew if would be fine to hang our letters up on the corner wall of St. George and King Street. We then realized we needed a signed statement from an officer so that if any gave us grief the night of we could just show him we had been granted permission.

Photo by India Stephenson

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On the eve of our installation presentation, India an I went back to the police station to collect the written statement we need to feel confident in the location we had chosen; If only it were that simple. Right away we knew things were not looking to go our way. The first lady we spoke to seemed unaware of the officer we described giving us the initial permission and went back to go find someone to talk to us. When she came back she had two other officers following. We stated our request and right away they said no. We then tried to explain how we had an officer give us the right away but that did not matter to them. They told us that the city of Saint Augustine has very strict signage rules and even if we were only hanging our installation for a couple hours it would be against the rules.

After walking out the doors of the police station India and I looked at each other in a panic. What were we suppose to do? We had already given our location to our professor and she had published it in a pamphlet with all the other locations. We went back to the studio where we had a minor freak out session for a solid thirty minutes. After calming down we made our decision; we were going to do it anyway. Honestly we had no choice but to break the signage rules and

Photo by India Stephenson present our presentation at our original location. It was the perfect location for our concept and we knew no other place would give it justice. In the end we presented without any complications and our viewers loved it. Overall Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m pleased with our decision-making skills and ability to overcome such challenges.

Effectiveness We received outstanding approval form our viewers; way more then we could have imagined. The people loved the interactive component of our installation and the over all concept. We had many say to us we should expanded this project past just for class and create a bigger movement. I consider this project a great success. Not only did our group work well together but in the end we produced an amazing piece of art with a meaning. I would tell anyone and everyone who will listen that this project is worth every dollar.v

Hannah Chittum Words Attends Flagler College as Graphic Desgin major in her third year and plans to graduate in the year 2016

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Studios It Takes a Village Nurturing a new wave of innovative type designers at Incubator

In the past decade, “incubators,” businesses where the experienced help nurture the new, have been popping up in a wide range of fields, from tech startups to nonprofit creative arts organizations. The aptly named Incubator is one of the first such programs specifically dedicated to type design. It’s one part of Village, a small, independent type distributor, publisher and type design studio based in the Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) area of Brooklyn.

The name Village derives from its original location in New York’s East Village and its structure as a collection of member-foundries with a cooperative connection. It includes top type designers from around the world and membership is by invitation only. Just as carefully selected, the “Incubatees” are up-and-coming designers who come to the attention of Village founders Chester Jenkins, former partner of Thirstype, his wife Tracy and other members of the group.

Launched on Village’s three-year anniversary in 2008, Incubator helps designers develop their typographic voices and get their fonts ready to sell with “gentle guidance” from Village members. “We were already kind of incubating before Incubator,” recalls Jenkins. He and longtime Village member Christian Schwartz of Commercial Type mentored Kris Sowersby, now a Village member in his own right, while he was preparing his debut release, a curvy serif called Feijoa, for his foundry Klim in the mid-2000s. “Christian and I each worked on a custom type project with Kris, and I worked with him on the technical aspects of bringing Feijoa to market. We had already committed to having a dedicated slot for Kris in Village and he has always been an incredibly talented and skilled designer, but preparing type for market is much more involved than most people realize, even those who have self-published type.” Another pre-Incubator incubatee was Hugo d’Alte. “We worked closely with him to prepare his typeface Kaas for publication in 2005 and released that through the Thirstype label,” Jenkins says. So the idea to incubate fell out naturally from the process of guiding

typefaces to market. But Incubator as another foundry within Village was not officially formed until the release of Jeremy Mickel’s Router in 2008.

Typefaces can take years to design and most new designers need support through the process. Jeremy Mickel began drawing what would become Router (left) in the summer of 2006, working from a photo snapped from the #6 train of a New York City Subway sign at the 33rd St./Park Avenue South station (center). Even before Incubator helped him to publish the typeface, Cooper Union instructor Hannes Famira nurtured the design process through private weekly lessons at Famira’s apartment, where the two would mark up the drawings together (right).

Mickel found inspiration for Router in some handmade signage under the streets of New York: words router-etched out of plastic in the subway station at 33rd and Park. Mickel was familiar with Village; he and Jenkins had previously met at what Jenkins calls “type geek nights in NoHo” back in 2006. Because Village specializes in a hand-picked and varied collection of type styles, Jenkins could see that Router would be a nice addition to the roster. “We knew that we wanted to release Router,” notes Jenkins, “but didn’t feel that it fit into any of our existing channels. Which is when we lit upon the idea of having an incubator, which would allow us to publish types—usually first designs, sometimes student work, always interesting—without the kind of ‘marriage’ that is involved in having a foundry slot at Village.”

Both Jenkins and Schwartz gave Mickel feedback, each focusing on different aspects of the design. “I had gotten to know Christian Schwartz and he became a mentor for Router,” says Mickel. “He’s listed as my Village Counsel as he answered many technical questions and gave drawing feedback during its development. But Chester was also very involved, offering his opinion and expertise the whole way

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Photo by Karen Day

through.” The one-on-one counseling came at a good time for Router. “I still had a lot to do. I think I had completed a full draft of Router Book and Book Italic and done sketches of the other weights. But it was about a year after I first agreed to publish Router with Village that it actually got released. Village understands that good type takes time, and they have never pressured me to release anything before it was ready.” Mickel is now a full Village member with his foundry MCKL, and Router was included in the 2012 exhibit Graphic Design—Now in Production , co-organized by Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and the Walker Art Center.

Incubator has grown in the past five years to eight releases, with many more coming up. Lucas Sharp, another Incubatee, gives a good description of the easygoing nature of Village. His project is Sharp Sans, a geometric, humanist sans serif. “I submitted it directly to the designers of Village, who got back to me that they were interested in publishing it after a few meetings. I actually met Chester in person when I ordered all the specimen books off the Village website and, since I was working out of a studio in Dumbo at the time, he hand-delivered them to me on his dog walk. I was originally mentored by Joshua Darden and worked as a draftsman at the Darden Studio before I went independent, and Chester picked up where Josh left off in terms of my typography education. There isn’t any kind of pairing system, but Chester and Tracy make themselves available to look at work, and if you want to get another Village designer’s take, you can just e-mail them and they are responsive. I’ve found that indie type designers in general tend to be friendly, helpful and accessible.”

Even with the generous design feedback, Incubator is not a type design school. As Sharp explains, “Incubator is more of a publisher than a mentor. Yes, they are very helpful and can really help take burgeoning talent to the next level, but they are not finding talented novices off the street and turning them into world-class type designers. If you get into Incubator, you obviously have something going on and are looking to get away from the corporate typeface-reseller publishing scene. Most people start on one of the other behemoth type resellers that simply throw your font on a pile of millions of fonts and take half your sales. That model tends to favor quantity over quality since resellers are constantly promoting the newest releases, in some cases, from a completely non-curated and constant stream of mostly garbage from all over the world. In that world, it actually makes fiscal sense to do two mediocre fonts instead of one quality font in the same amount of time. There is always a diamond in the rough, but the model definitely promotes disposability over timelessness. Village is a great example of a viable alternative to this issue that is actually inclusive of new talent.”

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Large foundries like FontFont and Monotype also give support to type designers starting out, but in general, they can’t afford the amount of time it takes to get a typeface by a fledgling designer ready for sale.

More importantly, those newly minted type designers would be small fish in a big pond. Incubatees may be small fish in a small pond, but it’s a special pond: Incubator fonts benefit from being part of a select group.

“Incubator is a dedicated spot for new designers. It’s a chance to be part of a curated group of typefaces,” says Mickel. Schwartz explains how this model works for all members: “We each get to benefit from the audience that the others bring in. Someone might come looking for my typeface Stag and also license Tal Leming’s sans serif Torque, or they might come looking for Router and license Giorgio Sans from my library as well. There is more potential for discovery because of the variety of work in the combined library.”

Jenkins expresses a similar view of the advantages of the Village approach. “I hope that Village is doing something different in the world of type; we set the group up to be a kind of co-op, with each member contributing to the overall success. I am a type designer myself, and have been through the process of releasing work with other foundries. Those foundries tended to be run on a day-to-day basis by businesspeople, not necessarily type people.”

Having people behind you who are experienced in intricacies of selling type is a huge advantage. “Chester and Tracy singlehandedly manage Village,” reflects Schwartz, “so they have to triage every day. And you would not believe how demanding people can be when they want to license a font! I suppose you could say that Village is not a true co-op, since each foundry only receives revenue from their own license sales.

But part of the revenue of everyone’s sales goes into promoting the coop as a whole, maintaining the site, etc.”

Incubator imposes no timetables. It’s all about the quality of the typeface. Schwartz puts it this way: “I think both Village and Incubator have grown more slowly than they could have, but I see that as a strength rather than a weakness. The library is broad enough to solve a lot of typographic problems, but narrow enough that the choices aren’t overwhelming. Starting a typeface is easy, but finishing it is difficult and I wouldn’t say Incubator releases have been rushed out before they were really ready.” Jenkins agrees. “Good work takes time to make and, for the most part, our Incubatees have full-time jobs and/or families that keep them busy with more important things,” he says.

Village members advise each other when asked and are sensitive to any overlapping of projects. “We do tend to share a lot of work-in-progress with each other and are always open to input and advice,” says Jenkins. “We’re also aware of the Village ‘landscape’ and avoid stepping on each others’ toes. If one member has a Garamond-esque design, the other members are not going to pursue another Garamond-esque design.” And critiquing each others’ work benefits both designers, whether Incubatee or full member. “It’s a two-way street,” notes Mickel. “By articulating something about someone else’s work, I better understand what my own intentions are.”

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And Mickel has found success since “graduating” from Incubator and becoming a member foundry. “Being part of the Village community has made my type design career possible. Having other foundry members suggest me for projects and throw work my way has allowed me to dedicate myself to type-making full-time. I would have had a much harder time transitioning into this kind of work without that early support. Village is a great distributor and Router is continuing to sell five years after its initial release.”v

Angelynn Grant Words Angelynn Grant is a Boston-based graphic designer, writer and educator. She has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, the Art Institute of Boston, Simmons College and MIT. You can e-mail her at designsharp@angelynngrant.com. In addition, Grant is the host of a jazz program on MIT radio, WMBR. BIO by Commarts

Art by Emil Ruder

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TypeFaces Of tomorrow Must designers look to the past to inspire the fonts of the future?

G

ame-changing typefaces are virtually impossible to predict—you almost never see them coming.

Helvetica was just a tiny family when it was first released in 1957; ITC Avant Garde Gothic started life simply as a magazine logo; the Rotis family was released from Agfa Compugraphic, a company not known for trendsetting new designs; Erik Spiekermann’s FF Meta family was designed as a custom typeface for the West German Post Office; and Gotham was a reimagining of New York street signage for GQ magazine.

So is there a game-changer on the horizon now? We invited several prominent typeface designers and foundries to weigh in on trends they see in the marketplace and discuss some of their newest offerings. Then, since the success of a typeface is ultimately determined by the people who buy and use it, we reached out to communication designers known for their masterful use of type and asked them to reveal their favorite type styles and what they look for in a font. The common threads among their answers give us some clues to characteristics that might define the next revolutionary typeface.

THE GREAT AND ONGOING SERIF VS. SANS DEBATE The topic on which there is the least agreement between producers and consumers of new typefaces might actually be the best indicator of the next big sea change in typography. Virtually every designer we spoke to leans toward sans serif fonts, but among the type creators, a focus on serifs was nearly unanimous. Patrick Griffin, co-founder of Canada Type, dismisses sans serifs as “the flavor of the day”

and says, “We see high-contrast Didot and Bodoni designs being used more and more.” He points out that neoclassical designs like these are virtually ubiquitous in fashion industry magazines—and have been for years—and they are now showing up on blogs and a variety of digital environments, often having been specially developed for digital imaging.

Sumner Stone of Stone Type Foundry also notes the growing popularity of Didone typefaces and their kin and says that for text typefaces, the classic serif type styles will be major influencers for new designs. “The trends in typography are probably best divided into the multifaceted markets for typefaces,” he says. “Text typography is the most conservative of these, and although the sans serif has made some inroads in this area, I think it is likely that Aldus/Griffo, Garamond, and their many revivals and imitations, will continue to dominate the field for a long time to come.” And though Griffin says that the slab serif trend of the past five years or so is on its way out, Steve Matteson, type director at Monotype, counters by paraphrasing Mark Twain. “The reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated,” he says. “We have a number of slab serifs in the works—all based on customer requests.”

Many of the most promising new designs take a cue from classic san serifs, from Monotype’s yet-to-be-announced sans serif companion to Eric Gill’s original Joanna, to the versatile Brandon Grotesque family from Hannes von Döhren, to several fresh faces by Kris Sowersby of Klim Type Foundry in New Zealand.

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Gotham and Trade Gothic—typefaces that celebrate sturdy, blue-collar sans serif character shapes and proportions—are still go-to designs for Carin Goldberg and Gail Anderson. Here Goldberg employs Gotham for an article in the Gallup Management Journal (left) and Gail Anderson layers Trade Gothic in a chromatic book cover design for Allworth Press (right) .

TAKING THE LONG VIEW Given that every designer we interviewed preferred sans serifs, are the type foundries simply out of touch with their customers?

The likely answer is no. It seems that they are looking further into the future and seeing the result of another common trend among designers: they shared a dissatisfaction with newer sans faces and voiced a preference for sans serifs with roots in classic designs—or simply stuck with the classics themselves. “It’s hard to beat a face like Gotham,” says Carin Goldberg, principal of Carin Goldberg Design. “It tends to be overused, but it’s so perfect, it’s hard to resist.” Pentagram partner DJ Stout says he rarely purchases new typefaces, though when he does, he is a fan of Kris Sowersby’s Klim Type Foundry, particularly the Galaxie Copernicus, National, Karbon and Tiempos designs because they are “a great melding of classic and fresh features.” AdamsMorioka designer Sean Adams prefers older sans serifs because he finds many of the new families too uniform. “They don’t have the soul of the grotesques,” he says. “Sure, grotesques are a little wonky, even the new cuts, but they have a handmade, human quality. Classic grotesques like Trade Gothic and the Monotype grotesques of the 1970s intrigue me. A lot of the old ITC typefaces, like ITC Caslon No. 224 and Fenice, also have a special charm.” AIGA award-winning designer Gail Anderson shares his sentiment, choosing sans serifs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because “there is an honesty to the designs.” The Trade Gothic family is her go-to sans, but she also likes Hannes von Döhren’s newer Brandon family.

“Although it’s obvious Brandon was influenced by the geometric sans of the 1920s and 1930s,” she says, “it has more of a human quality.” desire for the human touch that the designers seek in the classically rooted sans families is, in fact, exactly why Stone is looking toward serifs. “I think that the popularity of the remade nineteenth-century sans serifs may soon reach its peak, if it has not already,” he says.

“Helvetica and its many look-alikes are expressions of an industrial, corporate culture that now seems dominant, but when it comes to aesthetic pleasure, they have little to offer.”

Revivals, reimaged typefaces and fresh new designs—serifs have not fallen out of favor with type designers. Patrick Griffin of Canada Type is betting on serifs with his recent revival of Mauritius (middle) and a number of redrawn and remastered originals from the late Jim Rimmer (bottom left). Monotype also looks to the past to create this new glyphic family with a large suite of alternate characters, tentatively named Masqueliran (top).

Graphic designer Sean Adams favors ITC New Esprit (right), a recent overhaul of Jovica Veljovic’s calligraphy-inspired charmer from 1985.

REVIVALS, REINVENTIONS AND REINTERPRETATIONS The preference for classic type designs accounts for another trend that came up often among both type designers and their customers: revivals. Griffin recently completed a revival of the Mauritius typeface family that was based on an old specimen designed by Georg Trump for the C.E. Weber foundry in 1965.

Griffin took Trump’s original three designs and enlarged the family with additional weights and condensed versions. “The result is a family with strong calligraphic and old-style overtones that should perform equally well in text and display applications,” he says. Griffin has also resurrected a suite of typefaces based on the work of Canadian type designer Jim Rimmer that Canada Type acquired from the P22 foundry, which he has seen used in everything from mainstream books and magazines to posters, packaging and wedding invitations. “The rights to Jim’s fonts didn’t come cheaply,” Griffin says, “but in less than two years, we made back about 40 percent of their purchase price—and we’ve only rereleased about half of them.”

Matteson says Monotype is looking back in time as well, researching Bruce Rogers’s original pen-and-ink drawings for Centaur in order to create a new adaptation that reads well on digital screens. His design team has also gone back to Eric Gill’s original Joanna typeface and is in the process of developing a sans serif companion.

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Many of the most promising new designs take a cue from classic san serifs, from Monotype’s yet-to-be-announced sans serif companion to Eric Gill’s original Joanna, to the versatile Brandon Grotesque family from Hannes von Döhren, to several fresh faces by Kris Sowersby of Klim Type Foundry in New Zealand.

On the designers’ side, Adams casts a vote in favor of revivals as well. A recent favorite of his is the ITC New Esprit family, a complete updating and reworking of Jovica Veljovic’s original 1985 blend of classic proportions with the charm of calligraphic lettering.

Type creators noted the continued popularity of high-contrast Didone typefaces and their kin in the fashion industry (bottom left) and a trend toward layered, polychromatic typefaces, such as Core Circus by S-Core (top) and Pizza Press (bottom right), a custom font developed by CP+B and Monotype for a major pizza chain. Adobe Originals’ Rosewood and Zebrawood introduced the first polychromatic digital fonts in 1994, but Canada Type’s Patrick Griffin observes that “layered, stackable type seems to be making its way out the door.”v

A FRESH LOOK AT FONT FAMILIES Anderson is particularly taken by the work of Laura Worthington, which, while not reviving old typefaces, does hearken back to an older, more handmade aesthetic. “Laura seems to be redefining the idea of a type family,” Anderson explains. “Many of her typeface families are not a variety of weights—italics, etc.—in a single style, but rather a wide-ranging assortment of styles designed to complement each other. The Charcuterie typeface is a great example. It’s like a French bistro menu, with its quirky Victorian mixand-match style. The fonts are all drawn in by a single hand, which gives them an additional level of coherence.”

Allan Haley Words

Stone believes that the next era of type design may involve a journey even deeper into the past. “Sophistication and refinement has brought us a certain distance down the typographic road since the introduction of the personal computer in the ’80s,” he says. “I think that process is also carrying us back to the eighteenth century.” Not all the designers and typographers might agree with him, but it does appear as though the next game-changing font might have one foot—with serif or without—in the past. ca

Allan Haley (allan.haley@monotype.com) is the director of words and letters at Monotype Imaging. He is responsible for strategic planning and creative implementation of just about everything related to typeface designs, as well as editorial content for the company’s type libraries and websites. Haley is also president of the board of the Society of Typographic Aficionados and a past president of the Type Directors Club. A prolific writer, he has authored five books on type and graphic communication and is a frequent contributor to CA’s Typography column.

BIO by Commarts

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Type Matters

By Thomas Phinney

If you are a designer who cares about typography, odds are that you regularly try to explain to somebody-whether a client or someone at a party-why anybody should care about typography.

“What do you do?”

use of color, images or abstract graphics in creating a brand, and this is usually easy to explain.

“I’m a typographer.”

“Oh, you’re a topographer. So does that mean you have a geology background, or you mostly work with maps?”

“Erm, not exactly. I’m a typographer, I work with fonts.”

“Funds? Like an investment banker?”

If you are a designer who cares about typography, odds are that you regularly try to explain to somebody–whether a client or someone at a party–why anybody should care about typography.

Web designers are beginning to face these same questions that have long plagued graphic designers, thanks to new Web technologies such as @font-face and CSS3 typography features.

In the past decade, awareness of fonts and typography has become a bigger part of mainstream culture than it once was, thanks to such things as Gary Hustwit’s documentary film Helvetica, frequent news coverage of people who hate Comic Sans and type designer Matthew Carter winning a MacArthur “genius” grant. But all too often one is met with a blank look and/or confusion as to why anyone would bother about such things. Having encountered this regularly in my professional career as a typographer, I thought I’d share some of the ideas, arguments and information I’ve marshaled over the years: explaining branding, analogies about film, fashion and furniture, and summarizing recent research.

Even subtle differences in typography, such as appropriate small caps, old style figures, kerning and ligatures can measurably affect how people react to a document, as shown in this experiment by Larson et al.

Why care about typography and fonts at all? The branding argument is an easy one to make. The brand is the unique personality that identifies a product, service, person or place.

Design gives us the visual instantiation of a brand. The selection of typefaces and the arrangement of them can be as important as the

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But wait, your client says, “I already have a logo. Why worry about fonts and typography everywhere else?”

New York-based designer James Puckett had a great explanation when we discussed the issue on Typophile.com: “I always tell people that the difference between good typography and [bad typography] is the difference between work that looks professional and work that looks like someone threw it together in MS Word.

One reason Apple’s stores look so good is the careful and consistent application of [the typeface] Myriad. But Kmart’s careless mashup of Helvetica, Gill Sans, News Gothic and Gotham looks like, well, Kmart.”

OK, so being consistent is good, but why not just be consistent with Times or Courier? Why do people keep designing new fonts anyway, don’t we have enough already? Hasn’t everything already been invented by now?

Typography is like fashion, or furniture. With rare functional exceptions, the world doesn’t “need” new clothing or furniture designs, but people want to look different or evoke a particular feeling or fit with a particular “look,” and there are trends and styles. While true innovation is rare, people consistently come up with variations on existing themes, or combine existing elements in new ways, whether in type design, clothing or furniture.

The kinds of clothing designs we see on Paris runways are usually the fashion equivalent of display typography—usable only in narrow situations, creating a memorable style that communicates quite strongly. Everyday clothing styles are a different matter, communicating more subtly, like body text choices in typography.

Typography’s I like to use fashion and furniture analogies for another reason: Typefaces, too, are artifacts that can be aesthetically pleasing and functional at the same time. A great chair is not only visually

attractive, but comfortable to sit in; a great typeface can be pleasing to the eye, and perform other functions as well, such as being legible for printing a newspaper, or on screen at body text sizes. Like furniture and clothing design, type design is a craft, blending art and science.

“Sure, that’s all very well, but I hardly notice the difference between this Aerial and Gill Sans, and I’m sure my customers won’t either. Same with all these fancy features you talk about, like ligatures and old-fashioned numbers.”

It would be great to answer this objection by quoting differences in reading speed and comprehension from good typography. But it turns out that even aesthetically unappealing choices rarely make a difference in those kinds of objective measures. One has to go to serious extremes to have a major impact on such variables.

Even so, as psychiatrist/philosopher Paul Watzlawick said (oft-quoted by Erik Spiekermann and others), “One cannot not communicate.” Applied to typography, this suggests that even using system fonts and default settings in Microsoft Word is a choice that has an effect. Viewers don’t have to be consciously aware of the details to experience the collective impact of typography.

Even if the effective communication of the typography is “this is a typical office document.” That is a statement in itself, and one that can matter—particularly if the desired communication is “this is a menu from a fun restaurant.”

Once clients or acquaintances are convinced that typography matters, often they want to do things that we might consider, well, cheesy.

Or at least excessive. In an online discussion, Italian designer Andrea de Franco observed, “There’s a general urge for something that shouts the communication as loud as possible, confusing accessibility and clarity with mere visual pollution.” Of course, there is a place for evocative typography, but unless one is being deliberately campy, there are limits.

So how does typography communicate without people noticing typography? It’s like watching a film: The average movie-goer knows little or nothing about camera movement and film editing, and rarely consciously notices these things, yet directors can still affect viewers by using these techniques. Similarly, people can be affected by good typography without being actively aware of it.

Yet if good typography doesn’t affect reading speed or comprehension, what difference does it make, and how do we know?

More sophisticated research techniques are beginning to show how good typography affects a reader’s mood and even performance on other tasks. Microsoft may not have a great rep with creative

professionals, but they deserve props for having Kevin Larson, a cognitive psychologist on staff who focuses solely on reading, fonts and typography. Microsoft sponsors all sorts of research in this area

by Larson and others, notably the set of studies by Larson, Hazlett, Chaparro and Picard published as “Measuring the Aesthetics of Reading,” results of which were first presented at the ATypI conference in Helsinki in 2005, and later published in 2006.

In short, they found two ways to measure the impact of good versus bad typography. One was “reduced activation in the corrugator muscle” (people frowned less), and the other was “improved performance on creative cognitive tasks” tackled after reading. Again, this was with documents that did not produce differences in reading speed or comprehension.

Until not long ago, most research on typography, and especially research on legibility in type design, was lacking. Luckily, there is a whole new wave of psychologists and typographers doing serious experimental research on the effects of good typography, and even what constitutes good typography or legible typeface design, and doing it in ways that are not leading to ridicule from typographers and type designers. Sofie Beier, for her PhD at the Royal College of Art in London, has done some fabulous research (published as a paper with Larson in Information Design Journal, 2010) on designing letterforms for legibility. Cognitive psychologist Dawn Shaikh, who has an extensive background in typography and legibility research, is now a user experience researcher at Google.

Other recent Micosoft-sponsored research looks at new ways of measuring eye fatigue during reading, which also seems likely to show dividends from good typography. The orbicularis oculi is the big muscle around the eye that we use for blinking and squinting, and hooking sensors up to it during reading allows measurement of what we might think of as eyestrain.

Initial results from this line of research tell us that black on white text is more legible than gray on gray, and also that twelve point text is usually better than nine point. I like to cite these points because they support my own pro-legibility prejudices, but I will be the first to note that they do not necessarily mesh with current typographic fashion, especially in Web design.

Orbicularis research notwithstanding, as best as we can tell, most of what passes for typographic wisdom has a strong basis, not only in the tradition and culture of typography and design, but even in recent science. Many years ago I found it frustrating to justify why typography matters, but today I relish it. v

Designed by Martijn Boskamp from the netherlands

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