Art consists in limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. —Gilbert K. Chesterton
Decided to play around in Illustrator with some typography tonight. It had been far too long.
A few weeks ago Errol Morris asked a question on The New York Times blog, stating he was conducting a survey to determine if people were optimists or pessimists. Turns out the quiz was a cover for a larger experiment he was conducting: do typefaces affect peoples feelings, or more specifically, do certain fonts convey a feeling of truthfulness over others. To do this, a script ran that served the question to the viewer with a different typeface each time, including Times, Georgia, Helvetica, Baskerville, Comic Sans, Trebuchet, and Computer Modern. The result? Baskerville overwhelming conveyed a sense of belief:
Is there a font that promotes, engenders a belief that a sentence is true? Or at least nudges us in that direction? And indeed there is.
It is Baskerville.
I’m fully behind the notion that typefaces affect how people perceive information but I’m not sure one face can represent “truth.” A lot of the tools used by graphic designers – color, scale, shapes, typefaces – affect how a viewer perceives information but the reasons why are largely unknown. Why is blue more calming? Why is a triangle seen as powerful but upside down seen as unstable? Michael Beirut weighs in:
Once upon a time, regular people didn’t even know the names of typefaces. Then, with the invention of the personal computer, people started learning. They had their opinions and they had their favorites. But until now, type was a still matter of taste. Going forward, if someone wants to tell the truth, he or she will know exactly what typeface to use. Of course, the truth is the truth no matter what typeface it’s in. How long before people realize that Baskerville is even more useful if you want to lie?
“The truth is the truth no matter what typeface it’s in.”
Peter Bil’ak on designing type systems:
Univers creates a situation in which there are a’s of many different shapes, and each has to be positioned on the axes of weight and width, distributed sufficiently far away from the next, but no further, in order to create a usable system. How heavy ought the Medium to be in order to leave space for yet another weight, the Bold, and how will this translate into a design with condensed proportions?
The above image is the type specimen created by Deberny et Peignot in 1964 and illustrates the relationship between the different weights and shapes of each version of the typeface. Univers has always sat up there with Helvetica as one of my favorite typefaces, largely because of this type of variety within the face.
Talking Heads’ (Nothing But) Flowers official music video directed by Tibor Kalman at M&Co.
Lewis Carroll’s The Mouse’s Tale is a concrete poem, mixing visual form and text, from Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland. Bonus fact from Wikipedia:
The poem is a “quadruple pun”: besides being a tale about a tail, the poem is also typeset in the shape of a tail and its rhyme structure is that of a tail rhyme.
I absolutely loved this short talk from type designer Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler & Frere-Jones. One-half of arguably the most prolific type foundry of the current generation, Hoefler has spend the past two years preparing their entire collection to be used on the web. Taking a much more philosophical approach, Hoefler views typography as a design system that must be altered and refined depending on the medium. This was an incredibly inspiring and refreshing talk and I look forward to seeing more webfonts with this sort of thoughtfulness.
Christian Annyas has a great gallery of the evolution of the Chevrolet speedometer design. They had some great ones during the sixties.
I remember watching Thunderball a few months ago and loving the speedometer on the car Bond was driving.
“Content is at least as important as form, the ideas we express as important as how we express them. Still, there are typefaces which haven’t been made yet and which we need. Type that reacts to our present reality rather than being constrained by past conventions; type for non-Latin scripts that gives its users more choices; type that brings readers from previous media to new ones. It is time to think about why we design type, not just how we design it.”
Katherine Eastland, for The Daily:
It’s in State Department memos, vintage pages of Woman’s Home Companion and your inbox: Times New Roman, the most widely used typeface in the world — and one of the most controversial. For more than half a century, it was attributed to a titan in the field of typography, Stanley Morison. But in the late 1980s, a Canadian printer discovered that Morison might have plagiarized the classic font.
A puzzling history for one of the most common typefaces.
Design Indaba has posted an excellent conversation between two design legends (and personal heroes of mine), Massimo Vignelli and Milton Glaser. Drawing on decades of work, it’s impossible for a conversation between these two to not offer some wisdom, especially considering the different career paths the two have taken:
Massimo: Sometimes you might see trends reflected in certain solutions and things that you do. If it is too trendy, you must throw it away because you don’t want to be caught in that trap. Lella is very good at pointing trends out all the time.
Milton: It also depends on what products you are in. If you are not conscious of trends, you should not be in the design business. I mean trends are what the design business lives on. Fashion lives on trends.
Massimo: Fashion lives on trends, but not design.
Milton: Typography is trendy. All this stuff is trendy because they are of the moment. On the other hand there are those things that you hope will transcend their mobility, but that is not much of the field. Most of the field is based on acknowledging what is around and responding to it – that is the biggest part of the work.
Massimo: In my work, I really react strongly to clients in explaining why it is important that something is not trendy because I feel a responsibility toward the client to design something that is going to last a long time and doesn’t have to be thrown away in a few years from now.
I would die for an opportunity to be in a room with these two. What I like about both of them is they each have a thoughtful approach to their craft. Though their work is drastically different, they both think intensely about what they do and why they do it.
This is great video from PBS on typography featuring some great designers like Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, Paula Scher, Eddie Opara, and Julia Vakser and Deroy Peraza. It closes beautifully with a great quote from Scher:
Words have meaning and type has spirit and the combination is spectacular.
Designer Christian Schwartz is releasing a restored version of the original Helvetica, “Neue Haas Grotesque”:
Helvetica’s detractors rail that it is boring, but after spending time working on Neue Haas Grotesk, Schwartz argues that Helvetica “was never intended to be the cold, perfect, rational typeface people believe it is. There is a subtle warmth in the shapes that was lost over the years. When designers use existing digital versions of Helvetica, they are using a compromised version of Miedinger’s original drawings and Hoffmann’s original ideas, and while I don’t think the original should replace what has come after it, I think it’s nice to have the choice.”
If you were around me at anytime over the past two months, you probably already know that for my Advance Typography class I’ve been spending the majority of my time designing a typeface. So I’m proud to show what eventually became the last project I turned in for entire college career: Fuller Display Light.
“A book is a flexible mirror of the mind and the body. Its overall size and proportions, the color and texture of the paper, the sound it makes as the pages turn, and the smell of the paper, adhesive and ink, all blend with the size and form and placement of the type to reveal a little about the world in which it was made. If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it.”
Short piece from The Guardian on Woody Allen’s favorite typeface:
“He adored Windsor-EF-Elongated. He idolised it out of all proportion.” Uh, no. Make that, “He romanticised it out of all proportion.” Oh, and it might have been a heavier weight of EF Windsor Light Condensed rather than EF Elongated.
If my admiration for Allen wasn’t enough, I also love filmmakers who are obsessive about typefaces: Kubrick, Wes Anderson, J.J. Abrams. I love this story about how Allen came to start using Windsor:
The story goes that Allen was looking for a typeface for Love and Death (1975). At the time he ate breakfast in the same New Jersey diner as Ed Benguiat, the great American typographer (and jazz percussionist), who recommended Windsor. Allen liked it, and that was that. Windsor became a signature of his films, along with old jazz tunes, thick-framed specs, fast-paced dialogue and neurosis.
By the articles count, Windsor has been used in 36 of his 46 films, which sounds about right to me. I’ve always felt if I start a Woody Allen movie and the first thing I see isn’t Windsor, set in white on a black background, it’s just not a complete Woody Allen experience.
