Helvetica's clear, transparent appearance would seem to make it ideal for books. So why is it used so infrequently?
I watched the documentary film Helvetica last night. It illustrates how ubiquitously this typeface lives in our visual culture, and argues that typography plays a crucial role in conveying and influencing meaning. Wrong, I'd say, on both counts when it comes to books.
Clear, legible, and ordered, Helvetica was developed in 1957 at the Haas Foundry in Munchenstein, Switzerland. It gained immediate, worldwide acceptance among typographers and designer folk. Today it's everywhere. All over London and New York, on storefronts, street signs, subways, planes and trains, income tax forms, postboxes and BMWs, print and television ads, billboards, letterhead, everywhere. And there are no half-measures: designers either love it or hate it. Gary Hustwit's artful film points this out, tracing the typeface back 50 years through a series of edgy interviews which skillfully summarize the rift that has raged in graphic design circles now for decades. In one corner those who stand for typeface that is legible and unobtrusive, that doesn't interfere with communication of what the words mean; it's not about the notes, but about the space in between them. In the other, those who, like David Carson, former graphic designer of Ray Gun magazine, feel that "when they write "dog" it should bark"; who believe that just because something is legible doesn't mean it communicates. He heaps scorn on words written in Helvetica: "That doesn't say "caffeinated" - it just sits there. Nothing caffeinated about it." The film then fires passionately back and forth between designers who either hate or revere this unprepossessing little font.
All are agreed on one thing, however: Helvetica's dominating presence. This makes its absence in the world of books all the more intriguing. Of the 50-odd I checked on my shelves, only two were printed in serif-less, Helvetica-like type; both were art books, the rest contained typefaces identical or very close to Times New Roman.
Helvetica may be everywhere - on the street, in the boardroom, around advertisements - but its nowhere on the bound printed page. It seems that serifed type has been deemed easier to read by the publishing industry than by advertisers and designers. Perhaps the serifs somehow aid in hurrying our eyes along the horizontal plane. Helvetica may be more legible at a distance, hence its use outdoors. Close up, serifs may help; further away, maybe not. Who knows?
Then there's the impact that typeface and layout have on the reading process itself. If you listen to designers, all tend to agree that its significant. While this may be the case on the slippery sidewalks of advertising and design, in the pages of books I'm not so sure. For instance, last week I was in Montreal interviewing Neil Smith, author of Bang Crunch, an acclaimed collection of short stories. The ten page title piece is written without any paragraph breaks. Do you think I noticed? No. Neil had to point this out to me. Not only was I oblivious to typeface, I couldn't even see the absence of great big indentations. Perhaps this is a testament to absorbing content, but my sense is that it has more to do with transparency.
Robert Bringhurst, in his elegantly written and designed book, The Elements of Typographic Style, calls typography a craft that clarifies, honours, shares, or knowingly disguises, the meanings of a text. "In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn." Typography with anything to say, he continues, aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency, a creative non-interference. In a well made book the letters are legible and alive. They "dance in their seats." The typographer's essential task is to understand, interpret and communicate the text - its tone, tempo, logical structure, physical size - just as a theatrical director interprets a script, or a musician the score.
In short, Bringhurst says that typographers, like other artists and craftsmen, must as a rule do their work and disappear. This goal is largely achieved in the serifed, functional world of publishing. Ironically, in the wider world dominated by "clear, transparent" Helvetica, it is not. It is a fuzzy, egotistical universe that elevates the importance of appearance to the level of content in the task of conveying meaning.
Friday, 29 October 2010
Helvetica: The little typeface that leaves a big mark. NY Times.
LONDON — Question: What do American Airlines, American Apparel, Comme des Garçons, Evian, Intel, Lufthansa, Nestlé and Toyota have in common?
Answer: They all use the same typeface in their corporate identities - Helvetica. You can also spot that font on the flags fluttering from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' trucks, the album sleeve of John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," and all of the signage on the New York subway system.
It has now been 50 years since Helvetica was introduced. Even if you've never heard its name before, you would be bound to recognize the typeface, because you'll have seen it so often without knowing. We live in such a bloated visual culture that a typical Western consumer is said to see - as opposed to actually notice - more than 3,000 corporate messages every day, and many of them are printed in Helvetica.
Helvetica plays such an important part in our lives that the Museum of Modern Art in New York is celebrating its 50th anniversary by acquiring a set of the original lead type, making it the first typeface to become part of the museum's collection. MoMA is also opening a "50 Years of Helvetica" exhibition on Friday. And Helvetica is the subject of a feature documentary, which premiered last month at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.
Why make such a fuss about a typeface? In short, because it does its job so well.
"Helvetica delivers a message quickly and efficiently without imposing itself," said Christian Larsen, curator of the MoMA exhibition. "When reading it, one hardly notices the letter forms, only the meaning, it's that well-designed. It's crisp, clean and sharply legible, yet humanized by round, soft strokes. Many type designers have said that they can not improve on it."
Like all beautifully designed typefaces, Helvetica is a democratic luxury. Great typefaces - like the computer fonts Verdana and Georgia, and the gorgeous 18th-century print lettering of Baskerville and Bodoni - are of the same aesthetic and technical quality as more conventional luxuries, such as Aston Martin sports cars, Andreas Gursky's photographs and haute couture Chanel dresses. The difference is that rather than costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, they're free. You can read a typeface for nothing if a publisher has paid a nominal fee to use it in a book or magazine. And you can choose to read - and send - your e-mails in Helvetica, Verdana or Georgia, because those fonts come free with most computer software packages.
Despite its formal brilliance, Helvetica was not especially successful when it was first introduced in 1957 under its original name, Neue Haas Grotesk. It was conceived by Edouard Hoffmann, director of the Haas Type Foundry in the quiet Swiss town of Münchenstein, as a contemporary version of Akzidenz Grotesk, a late 19th-century sans serif typeface (that's one without decorative squiggles at the ends of the letters) that had become popular with Swiss graphic designers during the mid-1950s. Hoffmann commissioned a little-known typography designer, Max Miedinger, to create the new font. The result was Neue Haas Grotesk, but for several years few people knew about it.
In those days, typefaces were made by carving the shapes of the letters from metal. Anyone wishing to use a particular font had to buy an entire set of letters. This made it so expensive to develop - and to use - new typefaces, that new designs were relatively rare, and many of the most popular fonts were centuries-old, like Baskerville and Bodoni.
Enter the computer. Thanks to technology, typefaces can be designed and distributed so speedily that thousands of new ones are created every year. Their merits and demerits are then debated heatedly on blogs and Web sites. Even we "civilians" - as graphic design geeks call the rest of us - have become amateur typography experts by choosing our favorite styles from the Fonts menus on our computers.
But things were very different in 1961, when the British typography designer Matthew Carter was asked to design a modernized version of Akzidenz Grotesk for the signage in a new terminal at Heathrow Airport. Neue Haas Grotesk had been launched four years before, but he had never heard of it. "If we'd known about it, I'm sure we would have used it, since it's a much better typeface than the one I drew," said Carter, who went on to create Verdana and Georgia. "But the typesetting trade was very conservative then, and new type designs traveled slowly."
During the same year, Haas's parent company, Mergenthaler Linotype, decided to market Neue Haas Grotesk internationally and to change its name to one that would be more memorable in English. As the spruce modernist Swiss Style of graphic design was then very fashionable, they chose Helvetica, as a more accessible and easily pronounceable version of Helvetia, the Latin word for Switzerland.
The rebranding worked. Helvetica proved so popular, especially among U.S. advertising agencies, that it became the default typeface for any 1960s company wishing to project a dynamic, modern image. By the end of the decade, the designers Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda had chosen it as the typeface for New York's new subway signs. However, when the cost-conscious Mass Transit Authority discovered that a similar font, Standard Medium, would be cheaper, the early subway signs were printed in that, not Helvetica.
By the late 1980s, Helvetica was ubiquitous. A digital version of the font, Arial, was introduced in 1990. Arial has since proved popular, but design buffs dismiss it as a cheap pastiche. Half a century on, Helvetica looks as compelling as ever, whether it is on Lufthansa's fuselages or American Apparel's advertising.
"Why do some people find it so strange that a typeface should be used for over 50 years?" said Danny van den Dungen of Experimental Jetset, the Dutch graphic design team. "When something is constructed as well as Helvetica, it should last for a couple of hundred years, just like great architecture."
Answer: They all use the same typeface in their corporate identities - Helvetica. You can also spot that font on the flags fluttering from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' trucks, the album sleeve of John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," and all of the signage on the New York subway system.
It has now been 50 years since Helvetica was introduced. Even if you've never heard its name before, you would be bound to recognize the typeface, because you'll have seen it so often without knowing. We live in such a bloated visual culture that a typical Western consumer is said to see - as opposed to actually notice - more than 3,000 corporate messages every day, and many of them are printed in Helvetica.
Helvetica plays such an important part in our lives that the Museum of Modern Art in New York is celebrating its 50th anniversary by acquiring a set of the original lead type, making it the first typeface to become part of the museum's collection. MoMA is also opening a "50 Years of Helvetica" exhibition on Friday. And Helvetica is the subject of a feature documentary, which premiered last month at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.
Why make such a fuss about a typeface? In short, because it does its job so well.
"Helvetica delivers a message quickly and efficiently without imposing itself," said Christian Larsen, curator of the MoMA exhibition. "When reading it, one hardly notices the letter forms, only the meaning, it's that well-designed. It's crisp, clean and sharply legible, yet humanized by round, soft strokes. Many type designers have said that they can not improve on it."
Like all beautifully designed typefaces, Helvetica is a democratic luxury. Great typefaces - like the computer fonts Verdana and Georgia, and the gorgeous 18th-century print lettering of Baskerville and Bodoni - are of the same aesthetic and technical quality as more conventional luxuries, such as Aston Martin sports cars, Andreas Gursky's photographs and haute couture Chanel dresses. The difference is that rather than costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, they're free. You can read a typeface for nothing if a publisher has paid a nominal fee to use it in a book or magazine. And you can choose to read - and send - your e-mails in Helvetica, Verdana or Georgia, because those fonts come free with most computer software packages.
Despite its formal brilliance, Helvetica was not especially successful when it was first introduced in 1957 under its original name, Neue Haas Grotesk. It was conceived by Edouard Hoffmann, director of the Haas Type Foundry in the quiet Swiss town of Münchenstein, as a contemporary version of Akzidenz Grotesk, a late 19th-century sans serif typeface (that's one without decorative squiggles at the ends of the letters) that had become popular with Swiss graphic designers during the mid-1950s. Hoffmann commissioned a little-known typography designer, Max Miedinger, to create the new font. The result was Neue Haas Grotesk, but for several years few people knew about it.
In those days, typefaces were made by carving the shapes of the letters from metal. Anyone wishing to use a particular font had to buy an entire set of letters. This made it so expensive to develop - and to use - new typefaces, that new designs were relatively rare, and many of the most popular fonts were centuries-old, like Baskerville and Bodoni.
Enter the computer. Thanks to technology, typefaces can be designed and distributed so speedily that thousands of new ones are created every year. Their merits and demerits are then debated heatedly on blogs and Web sites. Even we "civilians" - as graphic design geeks call the rest of us - have become amateur typography experts by choosing our favorite styles from the Fonts menus on our computers.
But things were very different in 1961, when the British typography designer Matthew Carter was asked to design a modernized version of Akzidenz Grotesk for the signage in a new terminal at Heathrow Airport. Neue Haas Grotesk had been launched four years before, but he had never heard of it. "If we'd known about it, I'm sure we would have used it, since it's a much better typeface than the one I drew," said Carter, who went on to create Verdana and Georgia. "But the typesetting trade was very conservative then, and new type designs traveled slowly."
During the same year, Haas's parent company, Mergenthaler Linotype, decided to market Neue Haas Grotesk internationally and to change its name to one that would be more memorable in English. As the spruce modernist Swiss Style of graphic design was then very fashionable, they chose Helvetica, as a more accessible and easily pronounceable version of Helvetia, the Latin word for Switzerland.
The rebranding worked. Helvetica proved so popular, especially among U.S. advertising agencies, that it became the default typeface for any 1960s company wishing to project a dynamic, modern image. By the end of the decade, the designers Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda had chosen it as the typeface for New York's new subway signs. However, when the cost-conscious Mass Transit Authority discovered that a similar font, Standard Medium, would be cheaper, the early subway signs were printed in that, not Helvetica.
By the late 1980s, Helvetica was ubiquitous. A digital version of the font, Arial, was introduced in 1990. Arial has since proved popular, but design buffs dismiss it as a cheap pastiche. Half a century on, Helvetica looks as compelling as ever, whether it is on Lufthansa's fuselages or American Apparel's advertising.
"Why do some people find it so strange that a typeface should be used for over 50 years?" said Danny van den Dungen of Experimental Jetset, the Dutch graphic design team. "When something is constructed as well as Helvetica, it should last for a couple of hundred years, just like great architecture."
The end of typography: slow death by default. Eye Magazine.
Designing for the partially sighted: misguided guidlines. By Phil Baines
Approximately two million people in Britain have some form of sight problem. With the average age of the population increasing, this number can only grow. So in recent years, various guidelines have been published and circulated in order to encourage graphic designers to do things differently when preparing material for people with a visual disability. Since the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995 brought some force of law to these matters, several publications have attempted to tackle the issue.
i2i, produced by Action for Blind People, is a twelve-page set of guide-lines ‘for producing printed materials that are accessible for people who are blind or partially sighted’. Produced in 2002 (‘to present the top level information of more detailed guide-lines established by the Royal National Institute for the Blind’ [RNIB]) it was initially distributed only in response to enquiries. Now it is being distributed more actively, and a copy was sent to Eye for consideration. Sadly, i2i is disturbing for several reasons and, if taken literally, will result in work of great typographic mediocrity . . .
. . . worst of all, it is inaccurate as a synopsis of other fuller presentations of current thinking in this field. The RNIB produces an information pack called See it right, twelve booklets covering various aspects of making printed information accessible. The difference – in tone and content – between these booklets and i2i is striking. RNIB makes a distinction between clear and large print, and guidelines are presented as just that, guidelines with rational explanations and recommendations for their use . . .
. . . After i2i, this is a breath of fresh air, a reasoned and practical presentation of the facts. Where the general over-simplification of facts and hectoring tone of i2i is liable to put off many designers, See it right explains the problem, suggests an ideal and some alternative solutions and gets people on-side. It is certainly not perfect – I noted some errors and points that many designers would disagree with – but as an attempt to explain some of the nuances of typographic practice it is a very good start.
One problem that neither set of guide-lines tackles is that of the dynamic relationships between different aspects of typographic specification. From the point of view of readability the most crucial relationships are those of type size, line length and leading, but the production of legible type will also include a consideration of letter and word space. As designers we were all probably given some rules of thumb at college about this, and have learnt others through experience in the years since. Because we do this day in and day out, we take the subtleties of setting readable running text for granted. But in several examples of work produced according to the RNIB guidelines, the tracking of the typeface – Helvetica – was too tight and the word space too large. Word shapes were in some cases indistinct, and the leading needed to be considerably greater to provide clear lines. The involvement of software designers in continuing research into type legibility might be beneficial.
Two immediate suggestions come to mind. First, there is no good optical reason why the default word space in any program should be larger than that designed by the type designer (particularly as, in my view, most type designers / manufacturers err on the side of caution anyway). Second, a default leading of 150 per cent (rather than 120 per cent) would both meet the guidelines and be ‘positively good’. Thinking about more general document construction, it ought even to be possible to have an optional ‘safe line length’ limit of 70 characters per text box, which could automatically respond to changes in point size.
For the wellbeing of typography, and to help the needs of the partially sighted, it is vital that we, as designers, become more involved in these issues, and ensure that guidelines don’t become rules, and that the defaults that everyone uses have some genuine typographic reasoning behind them.
Approximately two million people in Britain have some form of sight problem. With the average age of the population increasing, this number can only grow. So in recent years, various guidelines have been published and circulated in order to encourage graphic designers to do things differently when preparing material for people with a visual disability. Since the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995 brought some force of law to these matters, several publications have attempted to tackle the issue.
i2i, produced by Action for Blind People, is a twelve-page set of guide-lines ‘for producing printed materials that are accessible for people who are blind or partially sighted’. Produced in 2002 (‘to present the top level information of more detailed guide-lines established by the Royal National Institute for the Blind’ [RNIB]) it was initially distributed only in response to enquiries. Now it is being distributed more actively, and a copy was sent to Eye for consideration. Sadly, i2i is disturbing for several reasons and, if taken literally, will result in work of great typographic mediocrity . . .
. . . worst of all, it is inaccurate as a synopsis of other fuller presentations of current thinking in this field. The RNIB produces an information pack called See it right, twelve booklets covering various aspects of making printed information accessible. The difference – in tone and content – between these booklets and i2i is striking. RNIB makes a distinction between clear and large print, and guidelines are presented as just that, guidelines with rational explanations and recommendations for their use . . .
. . . After i2i, this is a breath of fresh air, a reasoned and practical presentation of the facts. Where the general over-simplification of facts and hectoring tone of i2i is liable to put off many designers, See it right explains the problem, suggests an ideal and some alternative solutions and gets people on-side. It is certainly not perfect – I noted some errors and points that many designers would disagree with – but as an attempt to explain some of the nuances of typographic practice it is a very good start.
One problem that neither set of guide-lines tackles is that of the dynamic relationships between different aspects of typographic specification. From the point of view of readability the most crucial relationships are those of type size, line length and leading, but the production of legible type will also include a consideration of letter and word space. As designers we were all probably given some rules of thumb at college about this, and have learnt others through experience in the years since. Because we do this day in and day out, we take the subtleties of setting readable running text for granted. But in several examples of work produced according to the RNIB guidelines, the tracking of the typeface – Helvetica – was too tight and the word space too large. Word shapes were in some cases indistinct, and the leading needed to be considerably greater to provide clear lines. The involvement of software designers in continuing research into type legibility might be beneficial.
Two immediate suggestions come to mind. First, there is no good optical reason why the default word space in any program should be larger than that designed by the type designer (particularly as, in my view, most type designers / manufacturers err on the side of caution anyway). Second, a default leading of 150 per cent (rather than 120 per cent) would both meet the guidelines and be ‘positively good’. Thinking about more general document construction, it ought even to be possible to have an optional ‘safe line length’ limit of 70 characters per text box, which could automatically respond to changes in point size.
For the wellbeing of typography, and to help the needs of the partially sighted, it is vital that we, as designers, become more involved in these issues, and ensure that guidelines don’t become rules, and that the defaults that everyone uses have some genuine typographic reasoning behind them.
Stephen Banham Interview. Eye Magazine.
'Helvetica has become the generic default, a safe formula under the guise of Modernism. It's all smoke and mirrors'
In the early 1990s, Stephen Banham succeeded in giving new meaning to the old idea of the ‘little magazine’. The six issues of his spiral-bound, self-published project, Qwerty, each one titled after one of the word’s letters, really were tiny – not much bigger than the palm of your hand. They immediately won over recipients as tactile objects worth keeping and suggested the arrival of an intriguing new voice.
Banham was born in 1968 in Melbourne, Victoria. From 1986 to 1988 he studied graphic design at RMIT University in the city. After a spell working freelance in various studios and time in Berlin, he launched the first issue of Qwerty in 1991.
Banham is a sometimes outspoken critic of fellow Australian designers, wittily targeting the narrowness of fashionable typographic taste.
Rick Poynor: You appear to live and breathe typography. When were you bitten by the bug?
Stephen Banham: It’s funny because when I first considered graphic design as a possible career I knew nothing about type at all. I was only taught perspective drawing in high school and I looked through the course guide and thought that I would be studying drawing, packaging and topography. So I was expecting to learn about the position of rivers, roads and such. Even during the design course I was not taught much at all about this aspect of design.
It was only after university, when I started my own experiments and research into type, that I began to appreciate the scope of type. So, even though I did go to design school, I can almost say that I am self-taught. I would read books on type, collect it, photograph it, even spend my weekends kerning photocopied type so that I could appreciate its form and tactility. That’s why I have always been quietly thankful for going through design school before the Mac really had an impact. We had more time to consider the details then.
RP: Why did you decide to start Qwerty?
SB: It’s hard to believe now, but there was very little happening in Australia in terms of typography in 1990. I began teaching typography at about this time and I would constantly see my students copy entire designs straight from Emigre or other international publications. I knew that we could create our own typographic language here so I began Qwerty. It was a series of six publications – q, w, e, r, t and y – each one a7 in size [74 x 105 mm]. This size wasn’t because I wanted to create a precious art book. It was simply the only way I could afford to have 24 pages up on a single sheet. Things were quite tough then – one week I had only $a300 in my bank account and I had the choice of paying the rent or sending the first issue to press. Over the next five years, I released the other issues. It received a lot of interest in the international design press and showed my students by example that one can create typographic work that reflects aspects of one’s own culture, though now I don’t agree with that early rather nationalistic notion of identity.
RP: Why the passionate interest in the vernacular?
SB: Possibly because of its immediacy, its accessibility. With Qwerty, it was important that I created a dialogue that my students could engage with. It was primarily about observations and the possibility of there being a culture of people who are passionate about typography. Referencing the vernacular was certainly a big part of the Qwerty project, but the price of its success has been having to overcome that label ever since.
RP: What are the unique characteristics of the Australian typographic vernacular?
SB: It wasn’t even that the content of Qwerty was quintessentially Australian but that it happened to come from our streets, which were of course Australian streets. We didn’t want to overlook the diversity of Australian society but rather to show things that may or may not be specific to our culture. Some things were, such as the betting slips from the racetrack in Qwerty no. 1, and others weren’t.
RP: What impact has the ambience of Melbourne itself had on your approach to design?
SB: Melbourne is certainly the most European of all the cities in Australia. The cooler climate lends itself to more introspection and research. It was also cheaper to live here so you had more time to gradually develop projects that didn’t have to stand on their legs economically. I wanted the design to be centred on the things that were going on here in Melbourne, such as the economic recession in Qwerty no. 1, or the growth of stencilling in the street in no. 3. We use only our typefaces on our publications, so that context tends to be a strong influence on their form . . .
In the early 1990s, Stephen Banham succeeded in giving new meaning to the old idea of the ‘little magazine’. The six issues of his spiral-bound, self-published project, Qwerty, each one titled after one of the word’s letters, really were tiny – not much bigger than the palm of your hand. They immediately won over recipients as tactile objects worth keeping and suggested the arrival of an intriguing new voice.
Banham was born in 1968 in Melbourne, Victoria. From 1986 to 1988 he studied graphic design at RMIT University in the city. After a spell working freelance in various studios and time in Berlin, he launched the first issue of Qwerty in 1991.
Banham is a sometimes outspoken critic of fellow Australian designers, wittily targeting the narrowness of fashionable typographic taste.
Rick Poynor: You appear to live and breathe typography. When were you bitten by the bug?
Stephen Banham: It’s funny because when I first considered graphic design as a possible career I knew nothing about type at all. I was only taught perspective drawing in high school and I looked through the course guide and thought that I would be studying drawing, packaging and topography. So I was expecting to learn about the position of rivers, roads and such. Even during the design course I was not taught much at all about this aspect of design.
It was only after university, when I started my own experiments and research into type, that I began to appreciate the scope of type. So, even though I did go to design school, I can almost say that I am self-taught. I would read books on type, collect it, photograph it, even spend my weekends kerning photocopied type so that I could appreciate its form and tactility. That’s why I have always been quietly thankful for going through design school before the Mac really had an impact. We had more time to consider the details then.
RP: Why did you decide to start Qwerty?
SB: It’s hard to believe now, but there was very little happening in Australia in terms of typography in 1990. I began teaching typography at about this time and I would constantly see my students copy entire designs straight from Emigre or other international publications. I knew that we could create our own typographic language here so I began Qwerty. It was a series of six publications – q, w, e, r, t and y – each one a7 in size [74 x 105 mm]. This size wasn’t because I wanted to create a precious art book. It was simply the only way I could afford to have 24 pages up on a single sheet. Things were quite tough then – one week I had only $a300 in my bank account and I had the choice of paying the rent or sending the first issue to press. Over the next five years, I released the other issues. It received a lot of interest in the international design press and showed my students by example that one can create typographic work that reflects aspects of one’s own culture, though now I don’t agree with that early rather nationalistic notion of identity.
RP: Why the passionate interest in the vernacular?
SB: Possibly because of its immediacy, its accessibility. With Qwerty, it was important that I created a dialogue that my students could engage with. It was primarily about observations and the possibility of there being a culture of people who are passionate about typography. Referencing the vernacular was certainly a big part of the Qwerty project, but the price of its success has been having to overcome that label ever since.
RP: What are the unique characteristics of the Australian typographic vernacular?
SB: It wasn’t even that the content of Qwerty was quintessentially Australian but that it happened to come from our streets, which were of course Australian streets. We didn’t want to overlook the diversity of Australian society but rather to show things that may or may not be specific to our culture. Some things were, such as the betting slips from the racetrack in Qwerty no. 1, and others weren’t.
RP: What impact has the ambience of Melbourne itself had on your approach to design?
SB: Melbourne is certainly the most European of all the cities in Australia. The cooler climate lends itself to more introspection and research. It was also cheaper to live here so you had more time to gradually develop projects that didn’t have to stand on their legs economically. I wanted the design to be centred on the things that were going on here in Melbourne, such as the economic recession in Qwerty no. 1, or the growth of stencilling in the street in no. 3. We use only our typefaces on our publications, so that context tends to be a strong influence on their form . . .
The meanings of type. Eye Magazine.
The back-stories, informed by trends, cults, philosophies and nationhood. By Steven Heller.
Not every typeface is transparent, not all typography recedes; certain types symbolise philosophies and ideologies, some represent institutions, nations, and cults, many have intrinsic meaning. In about 1540 the French monarch François I commissioned Claude Garamond to design the typeface that bears his name. Believing that standardised typography would make governance easier, Garamond’s face was ordered to be used for all official papers, and became a symbol of French enlightenment as well as the nation’s first proprietary font. Around the same time Maximilian, the German king rejected Antiqua (used in Latin manuscripts) in favour of spiky blackletter.
In the sixteenth century, blackletter stood for German protestantism and nationalism, in the 1920s it was attacked for being antiquated, replaced by the New Typography, characterised by sans serif type in asymmetrical compositions and codified in 1928 by Jan Tschichold. In 1933, however, the Nazi government revived the blackletter face, proclaiming it Volk (or the people’s) type and condemned the New Typography as un-German.
Yet in 1941, the Nazis abandoned its own Volk type in favour of more readable faces. As if to prove further how mutable such symbolism can be, in the 1940s Tschichold lambasted the ‘New Typography’ as inherently Fascist, prompting a backlash by betrayed followers who saw him as Alvin Lustig characterised him, a turncoat.
Typefaces and typography are never designed in a vacuum. Practical and commercial motivations prevail but social and political rationales are never far away. Type design and typography are routinely informed by conscious and unconscious contexts that change with time. The following are some of the back-stories that underscore the meanings of type.
The slab serifs: big footprints
Late nineteenth-century slab serif wood types were a response to the job printers’ need for huge and durable display letters for bills and posters, and the original types were real work-horses. Despite their Victorian origins, there is nothing prim or proper about them. Slab serif faces exuded strength and masculinity – and are today associated with the printing of old wanted posters and vaudeville fliers. But throughout the twentieth century they were revived for various emblematic reasons. In the 1930s, for example, faces such as Girder, Karnak (R. H. Middleton, 1931), and Beton (Heinrich Jost, 1931), each derived from old Egyptians, symbolised the new industry manifested by American skyscrapers. In the early 1960s, however, an inexplicable interest in quaint Victorian pastiche returned the slab serif
to curious prominence in the precincts of alternative publishing.
News Gothics – screamers on wood
The typographical term ‘wood’ is the jargon used by United States editors referring to so-called screaming headlines on tabloid newspaper front pages. The term dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Large, sans serif wood types were common on advertising posters and broadsides because they grabbed attention without flourish or ambiguity.
In 1919 the New York Daily News, the first American tabloid newspaper started by Joseph Medill Patterson, used wood to announce with great fanfare the sensationalist – murder, sex, mayhem – story of the day. What distinguished the serious broadsheet from the scandalous tabloid was, in part, the difference between elegant Roman and gaudy gothic type. The conventions have not changed much, either. Tabloid wood may now be digital, but the goal is the same – to signal the big story.
Peignot – monument to France
In the 1920s the future of typography rested on German experiments such as Paul Renner’s Futura, the typographic emblem of modernity. In an attempt to outdo Renner, poster artist A. M. Cassandre and Deberny & Peignot proprietor, Charles Peignot, launched investigations that led to a sans serif face notable for its thick and thin body, and the use of upper case letters in its lower case form, which Cassandre christened Peignot – a testament to his boss. The face was actually the offspring of two parents: the Bauhaus and the Renaissance. After many false starts, Cassandre and Peignot decided to follow traditional lines, while at the same time avoiding copies of what had been done. ‘Copying the past does not create a tradition,’ wrote Peignot. Cassandre had the idea of returning to the origins of letterforms. ‘Was there not something to be learnt from the semi-unicals of the Middle Ages?’ queried Cassandre. ‘The idea of mixing the letterforms of capitals and lowercase seemed to us to contain the seed of new developments within traditional lines.’ The result was a quirky mixture of letters, which required a period of adjustment for the public to get used to. In 1937 the typeface was launched as the ‘official’ typeface of the World Exhibition in Paris, selected by Paul Valery as inscriptions for the two towers of the Palace de Chaillot.
A fabricator produced cardboard cut-outs for making complete alphabets, and these were also used for murals and exhibition stands.
Art Nouveau and psychedelia – youth and kitsch
Art Nouveau exerted an influence on typography throughout Europe from the early-1890s to before World War i. Designers Georges Auriol, Eugene Grasset, Peter Behrens, and Otto Eckmann, among others, filled foundry specimen books with curvilinear alphabets with eccentric calligraphic conceits. The style did not represent a political revolution but Art Nouveau (France), Jugendstil (Germany), Stile Liberty (Italy), and Vienna Secession (Austria) were youth-inspired social upheavals that altered visual language and spawned new moral and aesthetic values. Former visual taboos – including a prodigious amount of nudity – nudged out staid images. Sinuous Art Nouveau typefaces and ornaments were similarly erotic.
Yet not long after Art Nouveau was introduced it found mainstream acceptance, particularly in architecture, furniture, fashion, and graphics.
In France and Belgium Art Nouveau was the de facto national style. And even today kitsch French signs and posters include Art Nouveau alphabets. In the early 1960s, studios such as Push Pin in New York reprised Art Nouveau lettering; later in the decade, psychedelic poster artists in San Francisco adopted it as the code for the sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll generation. Art Nouveau’s youth culture underpinnings were, nonetheless, not the sole motivation. Victor Moscoso, the prelate of psychedelic posters, enjoyed the formal intricacies of the letterforms and became obsessed with drawing the ornate negative spaces between letters. The lettering for his original posters was hand drawn, designed to vibrate and shimmy.
Neuland and Chop Suey: faux ethnic
Neuland, designed in 1923 by Rudolf Koch, is a family of convex-shaped capitals reminiscent of German Expressionist wood-cut lettering. Reportedly, Koch did not make any preliminary drawings, which accounts for an informal quality that, according to a type specimen brochure distributed by Superior Typography, Inc. (c.1923), ‘expresses an atmosphere of exotic “flavor’’’. In addition it states there is an ‘unusual expressiveness; a subtle harmony of . . . ruggedness and delicacy of design.’ Neuland was recommended for advertisements promoting airplanes, boats, books, coffee, gifts, lacquers, rugs, tea, and tours, and was widely used until the 1930s when it was sidelined like so many novelty typefaces. But in 1993 Neuland was revived as the logo for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. Like an ageing actor, the old typeface was offered new roles as a curiously faux ethnic representation of Africa and third world cultures used on dozens of books. Similarly, the bamboo-looking novelty typeface Chop Suey (a.k.a Far East Type) has been stereotypically wed to anything Chinese.
Sans serif vs Fraktur: the Jewish question
Type design was scrutinised under an ideological microscope during the Nazi reign. Even before the infamous 1937 ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition that ridiculed Modern art as decadent and ‘un-German,’ party ideologues dictated those typefaces that were verbotten, but many decisions were arbitrary.
A 1932 election poster featuring a stark, silhouetted portrait against black background with the name hitler in sans serif capital letters was decidedly Modern yet modern typography was later branded ‘Kulturbolschevismus’. During the Weimar Republic, blackletter was considered antiquated and ugly. Consequently, in addition to modern faces, like Paul Renner’s Futura, the humanist (and more readable) Antiqua had widespread use. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Fraktur became the government’s semi-official typeface (and a symbol of its anti-Semitism as portrayed in Der Sturmer). Antiqua was Judenlettern (Jewish type) and at least one type designer – Lucian Bernhard who was not, in fact, Jewish – was vilified for his designs. Exceptions abounded. Some bastardised sans serifs (‘Jack Boot Gothics’) were sanctioned for use in party organs like the SS magazine, Schwarze Corps. Then in a turnaround the Nazis banned the use of blackletter typefaces in 1941, citing Jewish origins. The decision to deny Fraktur’s legitimacy was actually practical: German Volk typefaces were unreadable in the occupied countries.
Futurist / Fascist type: branding a movement
During the late 1920s the wood typeface Il Futurismo Artistico produced by the Italian type foundry S. A. Xilografia Internazionale became the trademark of the Fascist movement. In hand-set and hand-drawn iterations, in various weights and sizes, this moderne sans serif face was the model and semi-official typeface for party posters, signs, and periodicals. Slogans by Il Duce were also stencilled on walls using different variants. The original designer is unknown, yet iterations created by Fortunato Depero influenced a slew of Italian graphic artists at the time. As a member of the ‘second wave’ of Futurism, Depero typographically picked up where charter member Futurists left off with their invention of the cacophonous parole in liberta, which revolutionised typographic expression, yet relied more on old fashioned type styles. Depero injected an exuberance bathed in a Mediterranean palate that introduced a playfully dynamic Futurist aesthetic into commercial and political advertising. He adamantly rejected classical types in favour of eccentric streamlined lettering that symbolised speed.
Splash panel letters: typography parlant
Hand-drawn titles of comic strips, comic books, and even some advertisements comprise a genre (dating from the early twentieth century) known as splash panel lettering – so named for theatrical, or splashy, fanfare. Splash panel lettering telegraphs content and sometimes meaning, and although each is usually customised, they stem from the same root: exaggeration. The shadowed letters forming the word ‘war,’ in the comic of the same name, doesn’t actually symbolise either the terror or heroism of warfare but it does attack the eye with an explosive charge. The title Maus announces Art Spiegleman’s Holocaust memoir with a conventional comics trope that suggests shock, mystery and tragedy. And the word ‘horror’ in
the magazine’s masthead is typical of the ersatz gothic lettering seen on old monster movie posters. Similar to architecture parlant, where a building’s structure expresses its function, this ‘typography parlant’ issues a narrative cue that tickles perception, sparks expectation and shouts a message.
Helvetica and friends: neutrality in person
If there are other typefaces that have triggered the same paroxysms of joy and fits of rage among designers as Helvetica, bring them on. Designed in 1957 by Max Meidinger, the face represents a Platonic ideal and a generic sterility. ‘Conceived in the Swiss typographic idiom, the new Helvetica offers an excitingly different tool,’ reads the promotional text in a D. Stempel A. G. Typefoundry specimen sheet (ca. 1958). ‘Here is not simply another sans serif type but a carefully and judiciously considered refinement of the grotesk letter form.’ Helvetica embodied the Modern mission to democratise visual communication, and was more effective in its neutrality than Futura (the fabled ‘type of tomorrow’). Following its introduction, first in Europe and then in the United States, Helvetica emerged as the readable, versatile, and modest typeface of choice for business throughout the multinational world. When the Soviet Union ministry of commerce needed to put a Western gloss on its ‘for export only’ publications and advertisements, Helvetica was used. When the New York City Department of Sanitation wanted to clean up its image, it specified Helvetica. When the Urban League, America’s foremost inner city Civil Rights advocacy group, wanted to appeal to white, middle-class donors, Helvetica came to the fore. Yet despite its democratic air, Helvetica has long been used to obfuscate corrupt corporate messages: such is neutrality’s double-edged sword.
Univers, designed by Adrian Frutiger and introduced in 1957, also sought neutrality in a chaotic typographic world. Though it certainly became a standard and ubiquitous typeface, it never had the same stigma as Helvetica.
Some say that Meta, created first in 1984 as the typeface for the German Post Office by Erik Spiekermann, and fine-tuned in 1995 for general application, is the Helvetica of the 1990s, and its widespread use underscores the point. Designed to be ‘neutral – not fashionable nor nostalgic,’ says the Meta website, it has yet to bear the same symbolic weight as Helvetica.
Avant Garde: behind the vanguard
Herb Lubalin’s art direction and design for Avant Garde magazine was regarded as ground-breaking in 1968. The magazine’s sophisticated marriage of alternative art and photography was framed by all manner of stylish typography, from Lubalin’s smashed-letter headlines inside to the intricately ligatured logo on the cover. The logo was so popular that Lubalin (and his partner Tom Carnase) created an entire alphabet of capitals. These were originally used for the magazine’s column heads, then commercially released by it in 1970 (with additional upper and lower case letters). Avant Garde quickly became known as the 1970s’ most emblematic typeface, with its array of quirky ligatures, used repeatedly on advertisements, magazine spreads, and posters. Maybe the name also seduced users; using it they could be avant garde, too. But it quickly became one of the most abused typefaces. ‘The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde,’ type designer Ed Benguiat once complained. ‘Everybody ruins it. They lean the letters the wrong way.’ Even Lubalin lamented that he should not have designed so many absurd ligatures.
Template Gothic: off the wall
How could a typeface whose design was influenced by a handmade sign in a laundromat epitomise digital-era typography? Timing might explain why Barry Deck’s Template Gothic (1990) became the most well known and commonly used font during the 1990s. At the time graphic design was going through a technological upheaval; Modernism was challenged by an increasing number of heretics; universality had become the hobgoblin of cultural diversity. Template Gothic ventured into areas of type design deemed taboo. ‘The design of these fonts came out of my desire to move beyond the traditional concerns of type designers,’ Deck explained in Eye no. 6 vol. 2, ‘such as elegance and legibility, and to produce typographical forms which bring to language additional levels of meaning.’ After twenty years of grid-locked design, reappraisal was inevitable. Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko of Emigre opened the laboratory doors and academic hothouses encouraged students to subvert. Conventional typeface design reprised or adapted historical models while strictly adhering to the tenets of balance and proportion. Template Gothic was literally ripped off the wall. ‘The sign was done with lettering templates and it was exquisite,’ Deck said. Although the original stencil was professionally manufactured and commonly sold in stationery stores, the untutored rendering of the sign exemplified a colloquial graphic idiom that designers previously had viewed as a gutter language. So, perhaps the best reason for Template Gothic’s success was that it did not invoke nostalgia, like itc Benguiat (1977), the emblematic type of the 1970s that drew inspiration from Art Nouveau, but evoked the present.
It also captured the conscious and unconscious needs of young designers to reject the recent past. Conceptually playful, experimentally serious, and purposefully imperfect, Template Gothic was a discourse on the standards and values of typographic form.
Not every typeface is transparent, not all typography recedes; certain types symbolise philosophies and ideologies, some represent institutions, nations, and cults, many have intrinsic meaning. In about 1540 the French monarch François I commissioned Claude Garamond to design the typeface that bears his name. Believing that standardised typography would make governance easier, Garamond’s face was ordered to be used for all official papers, and became a symbol of French enlightenment as well as the nation’s first proprietary font. Around the same time Maximilian, the German king rejected Antiqua (used in Latin manuscripts) in favour of spiky blackletter.
In the sixteenth century, blackletter stood for German protestantism and nationalism, in the 1920s it was attacked for being antiquated, replaced by the New Typography, characterised by sans serif type in asymmetrical compositions and codified in 1928 by Jan Tschichold. In 1933, however, the Nazi government revived the blackletter face, proclaiming it Volk (or the people’s) type and condemned the New Typography as un-German.
Yet in 1941, the Nazis abandoned its own Volk type in favour of more readable faces. As if to prove further how mutable such symbolism can be, in the 1940s Tschichold lambasted the ‘New Typography’ as inherently Fascist, prompting a backlash by betrayed followers who saw him as Alvin Lustig characterised him, a turncoat.
Typefaces and typography are never designed in a vacuum. Practical and commercial motivations prevail but social and political rationales are never far away. Type design and typography are routinely informed by conscious and unconscious contexts that change with time. The following are some of the back-stories that underscore the meanings of type.
The slab serifs: big footprints
Late nineteenth-century slab serif wood types were a response to the job printers’ need for huge and durable display letters for bills and posters, and the original types were real work-horses. Despite their Victorian origins, there is nothing prim or proper about them. Slab serif faces exuded strength and masculinity – and are today associated with the printing of old wanted posters and vaudeville fliers. But throughout the twentieth century they were revived for various emblematic reasons. In the 1930s, for example, faces such as Girder, Karnak (R. H. Middleton, 1931), and Beton (Heinrich Jost, 1931), each derived from old Egyptians, symbolised the new industry manifested by American skyscrapers. In the early 1960s, however, an inexplicable interest in quaint Victorian pastiche returned the slab serif
to curious prominence in the precincts of alternative publishing.
News Gothics – screamers on wood
The typographical term ‘wood’ is the jargon used by United States editors referring to so-called screaming headlines on tabloid newspaper front pages. The term dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Large, sans serif wood types were common on advertising posters and broadsides because they grabbed attention without flourish or ambiguity.
In 1919 the New York Daily News, the first American tabloid newspaper started by Joseph Medill Patterson, used wood to announce with great fanfare the sensationalist – murder, sex, mayhem – story of the day. What distinguished the serious broadsheet from the scandalous tabloid was, in part, the difference between elegant Roman and gaudy gothic type. The conventions have not changed much, either. Tabloid wood may now be digital, but the goal is the same – to signal the big story.
Peignot – monument to France
In the 1920s the future of typography rested on German experiments such as Paul Renner’s Futura, the typographic emblem of modernity. In an attempt to outdo Renner, poster artist A. M. Cassandre and Deberny & Peignot proprietor, Charles Peignot, launched investigations that led to a sans serif face notable for its thick and thin body, and the use of upper case letters in its lower case form, which Cassandre christened Peignot – a testament to his boss. The face was actually the offspring of two parents: the Bauhaus and the Renaissance. After many false starts, Cassandre and Peignot decided to follow traditional lines, while at the same time avoiding copies of what had been done. ‘Copying the past does not create a tradition,’ wrote Peignot. Cassandre had the idea of returning to the origins of letterforms. ‘Was there not something to be learnt from the semi-unicals of the Middle Ages?’ queried Cassandre. ‘The idea of mixing the letterforms of capitals and lowercase seemed to us to contain the seed of new developments within traditional lines.’ The result was a quirky mixture of letters, which required a period of adjustment for the public to get used to. In 1937 the typeface was launched as the ‘official’ typeface of the World Exhibition in Paris, selected by Paul Valery as inscriptions for the two towers of the Palace de Chaillot.
A fabricator produced cardboard cut-outs for making complete alphabets, and these were also used for murals and exhibition stands.
Art Nouveau and psychedelia – youth and kitsch
Art Nouveau exerted an influence on typography throughout Europe from the early-1890s to before World War i. Designers Georges Auriol, Eugene Grasset, Peter Behrens, and Otto Eckmann, among others, filled foundry specimen books with curvilinear alphabets with eccentric calligraphic conceits. The style did not represent a political revolution but Art Nouveau (France), Jugendstil (Germany), Stile Liberty (Italy), and Vienna Secession (Austria) were youth-inspired social upheavals that altered visual language and spawned new moral and aesthetic values. Former visual taboos – including a prodigious amount of nudity – nudged out staid images. Sinuous Art Nouveau typefaces and ornaments were similarly erotic.
Yet not long after Art Nouveau was introduced it found mainstream acceptance, particularly in architecture, furniture, fashion, and graphics.
In France and Belgium Art Nouveau was the de facto national style. And even today kitsch French signs and posters include Art Nouveau alphabets. In the early 1960s, studios such as Push Pin in New York reprised Art Nouveau lettering; later in the decade, psychedelic poster artists in San Francisco adopted it as the code for the sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll generation. Art Nouveau’s youth culture underpinnings were, nonetheless, not the sole motivation. Victor Moscoso, the prelate of psychedelic posters, enjoyed the formal intricacies of the letterforms and became obsessed with drawing the ornate negative spaces between letters. The lettering for his original posters was hand drawn, designed to vibrate and shimmy.
Neuland and Chop Suey: faux ethnic
Neuland, designed in 1923 by Rudolf Koch, is a family of convex-shaped capitals reminiscent of German Expressionist wood-cut lettering. Reportedly, Koch did not make any preliminary drawings, which accounts for an informal quality that, according to a type specimen brochure distributed by Superior Typography, Inc. (c.1923), ‘expresses an atmosphere of exotic “flavor’’’. In addition it states there is an ‘unusual expressiveness; a subtle harmony of . . . ruggedness and delicacy of design.’ Neuland was recommended for advertisements promoting airplanes, boats, books, coffee, gifts, lacquers, rugs, tea, and tours, and was widely used until the 1930s when it was sidelined like so many novelty typefaces. But in 1993 Neuland was revived as the logo for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. Like an ageing actor, the old typeface was offered new roles as a curiously faux ethnic representation of Africa and third world cultures used on dozens of books. Similarly, the bamboo-looking novelty typeface Chop Suey (a.k.a Far East Type) has been stereotypically wed to anything Chinese.
Sans serif vs Fraktur: the Jewish question
Type design was scrutinised under an ideological microscope during the Nazi reign. Even before the infamous 1937 ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition that ridiculed Modern art as decadent and ‘un-German,’ party ideologues dictated those typefaces that were verbotten, but many decisions were arbitrary.
A 1932 election poster featuring a stark, silhouetted portrait against black background with the name hitler in sans serif capital letters was decidedly Modern yet modern typography was later branded ‘Kulturbolschevismus’. During the Weimar Republic, blackletter was considered antiquated and ugly. Consequently, in addition to modern faces, like Paul Renner’s Futura, the humanist (and more readable) Antiqua had widespread use. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Fraktur became the government’s semi-official typeface (and a symbol of its anti-Semitism as portrayed in Der Sturmer). Antiqua was Judenlettern (Jewish type) and at least one type designer – Lucian Bernhard who was not, in fact, Jewish – was vilified for his designs. Exceptions abounded. Some bastardised sans serifs (‘Jack Boot Gothics’) were sanctioned for use in party organs like the SS magazine, Schwarze Corps. Then in a turnaround the Nazis banned the use of blackletter typefaces in 1941, citing Jewish origins. The decision to deny Fraktur’s legitimacy was actually practical: German Volk typefaces were unreadable in the occupied countries.
Futurist / Fascist type: branding a movement
During the late 1920s the wood typeface Il Futurismo Artistico produced by the Italian type foundry S. A. Xilografia Internazionale became the trademark of the Fascist movement. In hand-set and hand-drawn iterations, in various weights and sizes, this moderne sans serif face was the model and semi-official typeface for party posters, signs, and periodicals. Slogans by Il Duce were also stencilled on walls using different variants. The original designer is unknown, yet iterations created by Fortunato Depero influenced a slew of Italian graphic artists at the time. As a member of the ‘second wave’ of Futurism, Depero typographically picked up where charter member Futurists left off with their invention of the cacophonous parole in liberta, which revolutionised typographic expression, yet relied more on old fashioned type styles. Depero injected an exuberance bathed in a Mediterranean palate that introduced a playfully dynamic Futurist aesthetic into commercial and political advertising. He adamantly rejected classical types in favour of eccentric streamlined lettering that symbolised speed.
Splash panel letters: typography parlant
Hand-drawn titles of comic strips, comic books, and even some advertisements comprise a genre (dating from the early twentieth century) known as splash panel lettering – so named for theatrical, or splashy, fanfare. Splash panel lettering telegraphs content and sometimes meaning, and although each is usually customised, they stem from the same root: exaggeration. The shadowed letters forming the word ‘war,’ in the comic of the same name, doesn’t actually symbolise either the terror or heroism of warfare but it does attack the eye with an explosive charge. The title Maus announces Art Spiegleman’s Holocaust memoir with a conventional comics trope that suggests shock, mystery and tragedy. And the word ‘horror’ in
the magazine’s masthead is typical of the ersatz gothic lettering seen on old monster movie posters. Similar to architecture parlant, where a building’s structure expresses its function, this ‘typography parlant’ issues a narrative cue that tickles perception, sparks expectation and shouts a message.
Helvetica and friends: neutrality in person
If there are other typefaces that have triggered the same paroxysms of joy and fits of rage among designers as Helvetica, bring them on. Designed in 1957 by Max Meidinger, the face represents a Platonic ideal and a generic sterility. ‘Conceived in the Swiss typographic idiom, the new Helvetica offers an excitingly different tool,’ reads the promotional text in a D. Stempel A. G. Typefoundry specimen sheet (ca. 1958). ‘Here is not simply another sans serif type but a carefully and judiciously considered refinement of the grotesk letter form.’ Helvetica embodied the Modern mission to democratise visual communication, and was more effective in its neutrality than Futura (the fabled ‘type of tomorrow’). Following its introduction, first in Europe and then in the United States, Helvetica emerged as the readable, versatile, and modest typeface of choice for business throughout the multinational world. When the Soviet Union ministry of commerce needed to put a Western gloss on its ‘for export only’ publications and advertisements, Helvetica was used. When the New York City Department of Sanitation wanted to clean up its image, it specified Helvetica. When the Urban League, America’s foremost inner city Civil Rights advocacy group, wanted to appeal to white, middle-class donors, Helvetica came to the fore. Yet despite its democratic air, Helvetica has long been used to obfuscate corrupt corporate messages: such is neutrality’s double-edged sword.
Univers, designed by Adrian Frutiger and introduced in 1957, also sought neutrality in a chaotic typographic world. Though it certainly became a standard and ubiquitous typeface, it never had the same stigma as Helvetica.
Some say that Meta, created first in 1984 as the typeface for the German Post Office by Erik Spiekermann, and fine-tuned in 1995 for general application, is the Helvetica of the 1990s, and its widespread use underscores the point. Designed to be ‘neutral – not fashionable nor nostalgic,’ says the Meta website, it has yet to bear the same symbolic weight as Helvetica.
Avant Garde: behind the vanguard
Herb Lubalin’s art direction and design for Avant Garde magazine was regarded as ground-breaking in 1968. The magazine’s sophisticated marriage of alternative art and photography was framed by all manner of stylish typography, from Lubalin’s smashed-letter headlines inside to the intricately ligatured logo on the cover. The logo was so popular that Lubalin (and his partner Tom Carnase) created an entire alphabet of capitals. These were originally used for the magazine’s column heads, then commercially released by it in 1970 (with additional upper and lower case letters). Avant Garde quickly became known as the 1970s’ most emblematic typeface, with its array of quirky ligatures, used repeatedly on advertisements, magazine spreads, and posters. Maybe the name also seduced users; using it they could be avant garde, too. But it quickly became one of the most abused typefaces. ‘The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde,’ type designer Ed Benguiat once complained. ‘Everybody ruins it. They lean the letters the wrong way.’ Even Lubalin lamented that he should not have designed so many absurd ligatures.
Template Gothic: off the wall
How could a typeface whose design was influenced by a handmade sign in a laundromat epitomise digital-era typography? Timing might explain why Barry Deck’s Template Gothic (1990) became the most well known and commonly used font during the 1990s. At the time graphic design was going through a technological upheaval; Modernism was challenged by an increasing number of heretics; universality had become the hobgoblin of cultural diversity. Template Gothic ventured into areas of type design deemed taboo. ‘The design of these fonts came out of my desire to move beyond the traditional concerns of type designers,’ Deck explained in Eye no. 6 vol. 2, ‘such as elegance and legibility, and to produce typographical forms which bring to language additional levels of meaning.’ After twenty years of grid-locked design, reappraisal was inevitable. Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko of Emigre opened the laboratory doors and academic hothouses encouraged students to subvert. Conventional typeface design reprised or adapted historical models while strictly adhering to the tenets of balance and proportion. Template Gothic was literally ripped off the wall. ‘The sign was done with lettering templates and it was exquisite,’ Deck said. Although the original stencil was professionally manufactured and commonly sold in stationery stores, the untutored rendering of the sign exemplified a colloquial graphic idiom that designers previously had viewed as a gutter language. So, perhaps the best reason for Template Gothic’s success was that it did not invoke nostalgia, like itc Benguiat (1977), the emblematic type of the 1970s that drew inspiration from Art Nouveau, but evoked the present.
It also captured the conscious and unconscious needs of young designers to reject the recent past. Conceptually playful, experimentally serious, and purposefully imperfect, Template Gothic was a discourse on the standards and values of typographic form.
Inclined to be dull. Eye Magazine.
It may be the world’s most popular sans, but Helvetica has many deficiencies – not least its lack of real italics. By Martin Majoor
Fifty years ago Helvetica was released under the name Neue Haas Grotesk. It seemed to have come at the right time in the right place, and after it was renamed Helvetica in 1960 it quickly became even more ubiquitous, with a popularity it retains to this day. The typeface is even the subject of a new film, Helvetica (dir. Gary Hustwitt, 2007). But is Helvetica really so good that it justifies its worldwide use on such a large scale?
The dawn of sans serifs
Long before the first serif-less types for printing appeared, house painters and cartographers were painting and engraving sans serif numbers and letters. It was around 1816 that the English type foundry of William Caslon IV released Two Lines English Egyptian. This display face contained only capitals and it is not clear from where the rather clumsy forms originated.
Other sans display faces followed. Vincent Figgins was the first to use the word sans serif when he designed Two-line Great Primer Sans-serif in 1832. Two years later, William Thorowgood was the first to design a lowercase with his Seven Line Grotesque, introducing at the same time the word 'Grotesque'. From a design point of view these typefaces have little value, but it is interesting to note their existence.
In Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, the Grotesk (the German name for sans serif) gained popularity fast. These Grotesks turned out to be the most influential faces in the history of the sans serif, much more so than their English counterparts. Several German type foundries published their own Grotesks, some only in regular, some in bold or light, some only in one size, but always more or less lookalikes. They had names such as Royal Grotesk, Breite Grotesk and Lilliput-Grotesk, and the fact that most of them included a lowercase made them suitable as a text typeface, too. As type foundries merged with others or started taking over smaller ones, along with their typefaces and matrices, they tried to put all the different Grotesks together, often renaming them in an effort to create one family. But even for lookalikes the differences were huge, and it was impossible to create a coherent family of typefaces as we would know one today.
Jobbing type
In 1896 Berthold, which had become the biggest German type foundry, started releasing the Akzidenz Grotesk family, built up from existing and new Grotesks. In the years that followed Berthold managed to make a coherent family out of all the different Grotesks it had acquired, and Akzidenz Grotesk became a success. Like all sans serifs from that time, Akzidenz Grotesk was meant to be used as a display face (the German word Akzidenzschrift means display face or jobbing type), but because it also included a good lowercase and different weights it was used more and more as a text face.
The different versions of the Akzidenz family were produced by anonymous punch cutters, which makes it hard to appreciate that the Grotesks were actually designed by people. One name, however, did survive: that of Ferdinand Theinhardt, who is known as the designer of Royal Grotesque and Breite Grotesque, two typefaces that later became members of the Akzidenz family.
It is tempting to imagine that Theinhardt was the first in Germany to design a sans serif typeface. Whoever did, on what did he base the shapes of his new letterforms? Did these sans serif forms just cross his mind or did he have some sort of model to base them on? As there was no other sans serif design available at that time, any model would have been a serif typeface, but which?
Theinhardt and all the unknown punch cutters would have been familiar with seriffed typefaces such as Walbaum and Didot. This can be seen clearly when characters of Walbaum and Akzidenz Grotesk are superimposed upon each other. The ground form or skeleton of both typefaces is almost identical.
But these classicistic typefaces were far from an ideal base for a sans serif. In Walbaum, the thin tail ends in characters such as the 'C', and in numbers such as '2' and '5', were elegant, but when these thin parts were made thicker to create a sans serif form, the result was a sans serif typeface with almost 'closed' forms. And that is exactly what can be found in Akzidenz Grotesk.
Where the roman of the Akzidenz Grotesk is derived from Walbaum-like typefaces, the italic is nothing more than a slanted version of the roman. Why was the italic not based upon a real italic? It is not so difficult to make an Akzidenz Grotesk italic based on Walbaum italic. Maybe with the huge competition going on among type foundries, the nineteenth-century punch cutters were under pressure to produce easy-made italics. A real italic probably was too much work or too difficult to make, while a slanted roman was relatively easy to copy from the roman.
The strange thing is that this slanted roman became a sort of standard for sans italics, even today. Typefaces such as News Gothic (1908) and Helvetica all have slanted romans. Even the great type designer Adrian Frutiger made slanted romans with his sans serif designs. Only recently has he acknowledged that a real italic makes a better contrast with the roman, when his Frutiger (1977) was redrawn in 2000 with a semi-real italic instead of a slanted roman.
Futura (1927) has slanted romans too, but this is more understandable since there was no real old seriffed model to base it on. As a constructed typeface, Futura borrows its forms from squares and circles, and is therefore an original design.
Charm and clumsiness
In 1957 Max Miedinger made Helvetica. In fact it was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but for marketing reasons the name was changed to Helvetica in 1960. Miedinger based his design on other Grotesks, one of which was Haas Grotesk (1912). But Haas Grotesk had been based on Akzidenz Grotesk, so it is fair to say that Helvetica was based on Akzidenz-like typefaces. But what is 'basing on', when the whole Helvetica looks extremely close to Akzidenz Grotesk? At least Akzidenz Grotesk was based indirectly on a seriffed model, which makes it and its contemporaries 'original' typefaces.
Compared to Akzidenz Grotesk, Helvetica has hardly any new features. Though claimed to be an improvement on Akzidenz Grotesk, it lacks all the character and charming clumsiness of Akzidenz Grotesk. Helvetica is blunt and colourless; the fact that its italic is slanted makes it even blunter. What a missed opportunity!
Aggressive marketing
Why is Helvetica so popular? This question is not so difficult to answer. First, Helvetica was aggressively marketed in the 1960s. Second, Helvetica became almost the only typeface to be used by the Swiss typographic style of that era, which continues to be very influential. The third reason is that Helvetica is neutral and colourless; it is not dangerous. This makes it easier for graphic designers to use as a display face. A typeface that already has a lot of character determines the character of a poster or a book jacket. With neutral Helvetica, the character must come from the typographic designer. This makes Helvetica beloved by many. One can make a good poster with a bad typeface, but one will not automatically make a good poster with a good typeface.
In the past 50 years there have been many beautiful graphic designs using Helvetica, but this has more to do with the quality of the designers using it than that with the quality of Helvetica as a typeface. Frutiger explained its popularity with the words: 'Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket. Helvetica is here to stay.'
As a text typeface Helvetica is an awkward creature. It is only because it is available on all computers that it is used by so many people around the world. You cannot blame them – they have no typographic education. They just have to set some text in some typeface. Unfortunately, Helvetica is about the worst choice one can make for text. Paul Rand, the American graphic designer, advised his students to use Helvetica only as a display face, and never in text, 'because Helvetica looks like dogshit in text'.
A system for the sans serif jungle
If Helvetica was regrettable, then there is a whole range of typefaces that were designed in the 1950s that deserve the same criticism. Again, as in the 1900s, all the type foundries followed one another, afraid as they were of losing market share. The result was a range of neutral typefaces such as Folio, Venus and Mercator.
Univers was designed by Adrian Frutiger and released in the same year as Helvetica. Many Univers characters echo the problems that are found in Helvetica, especially in the almost closed forms and in the fact it had a sloped roman instead of an italic. But Univers was a much more original design, with one strong feature that was new in type design: it was made up of an almost scientific system of 21 weights and widths that could be mixed perfectly. It was an answer to the jungle of different sans serif faces that lacked a clear system of weights and widths.
A few years ago Univers was completely redrawn, and now has more than 60 versions. Unfortunately, this has not been an improvement: there are too many superfluous weights now, the justification is too tight and the italic that was already too slanted has been slanted even more. Redesigning an old successful typeface is maybe something a type designer never should consider.
In the 1980s computers started to penetrate the world. Helvetica came free with Adobe PostScript printers, but when other manufacturers cloned PostScript they could not use Helvetica. Instead, they substituted the hugely unoriginal Arial, which is very similar to Helvetica.
Designed for Monotype in 1982, Arial was originally marketed as follows: 'A contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial-style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance.'
Love and hate
Regrettably, Arial is now found on every computer. The popularity of Akzidenz-like typefaces has not faded, and Helvetica remains immensely popular. In 2002 Lars Müller published a little book Helvetica - Homage to a Typeface. (See review in Eye no. 47 vol. 12.) This year Helvetica, a feature-length documentary directed by Gary Hustwit, will be released [www.helveticafilm.com]. Buttons, T-shirts, weblogs, animations and games about love and hate for Helvetica are endless.
Since 2000 there has again been a revival of the Akzidenz-like typefaces. The American designer Christian Schwartz based his FF Bau (2002-04) on a nineteenth-century Grotesk from Schelter & Giesecke, a former Leipzig-based foundry (Miedinger followed some of its forms for his Helvetica). Unfortunately, the italic is a slanted roman again. Akkurat (2004-05) by Swiss designer Laurenz Brunner is another Akzidenz-like design, with influences from Neuzeit Grotesk. Swiss designer François Rappo used his Theinhardt revival in the book We make fonts, a 2006 project by the University of Art and Design, Lausanne.
In the future there will probably be more of these Akzidenz-like Grotesks, simply because we have been indoctrinated by Helvetica for the past 50 years. But as long as these 'revivals' are so similar, they don't really contribute to development in type design.
The best way to design a sans serif is to base it on a serif typeface. Akzidenz Grotesk and its contemporaries were indeed based on serif typefaces, however indirectly. But Helvetica, Arial and the Akzidenz-like remakes from the 1950s and later could have been much better.
Helvetica was a bad idea. We can only hope that in the still-young history of the sans serif, things will change in favour of more intelligent, more original sans serif typefaces.
This is a new version of an article originally published by the Polish magazine 2+3d in 2005.
The dawn of sans serifs
Long before the first serif-less types for printing appeared, house painters and cartographers were painting and engraving sans serif numbers and letters. It was around 1816 that the English type foundry of William Caslon IV released Two Lines English Egyptian. This display face contained only capitals and it is not clear from where the rather clumsy forms originated.
Other sans display faces followed. Vincent Figgins was the first to use the word sans serif when he designed Two-line Great Primer Sans-serif in 1832. Two years later, William Thorowgood was the first to design a lowercase with his Seven Line Grotesque, introducing at the same time the word 'Grotesque'. From a design point of view these typefaces have little value, but it is interesting to note their existence.
In Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, the Grotesk (the German name for sans serif) gained popularity fast. These Grotesks turned out to be the most influential faces in the history of the sans serif, much more so than their English counterparts. Several German type foundries published their own Grotesks, some only in regular, some in bold or light, some only in one size, but always more or less lookalikes. They had names such as Royal Grotesk, Breite Grotesk and Lilliput-Grotesk, and the fact that most of them included a lowercase made them suitable as a text typeface, too. As type foundries merged with others or started taking over smaller ones, along with their typefaces and matrices, they tried to put all the different Grotesks together, often renaming them in an effort to create one family. But even for lookalikes the differences were huge, and it was impossible to create a coherent family of typefaces as we would know one today.
Jobbing type
In 1896 Berthold, which had become the biggest German type foundry, started releasing the Akzidenz Grotesk family, built up from existing and new Grotesks. In the years that followed Berthold managed to make a coherent family out of all the different Grotesks it had acquired, and Akzidenz Grotesk became a success. Like all sans serifs from that time, Akzidenz Grotesk was meant to be used as a display face (the German word Akzidenzschrift means display face or jobbing type), but because it also included a good lowercase and different weights it was used more and more as a text face.
The different versions of the Akzidenz family were produced by anonymous punch cutters, which makes it hard to appreciate that the Grotesks were actually designed by people. One name, however, did survive: that of Ferdinand Theinhardt, who is known as the designer of Royal Grotesque and Breite Grotesque, two typefaces that later became members of the Akzidenz family.
It is tempting to imagine that Theinhardt was the first in Germany to design a sans serif typeface. Whoever did, on what did he base the shapes of his new letterforms? Did these sans serif forms just cross his mind or did he have some sort of model to base them on? As there was no other sans serif design available at that time, any model would have been a serif typeface, but which?
Theinhardt and all the unknown punch cutters would have been familiar with seriffed typefaces such as Walbaum and Didot. This can be seen clearly when characters of Walbaum and Akzidenz Grotesk are superimposed upon each other. The ground form or skeleton of both typefaces is almost identical.
But these classicistic typefaces were far from an ideal base for a sans serif. In Walbaum, the thin tail ends in characters such as the 'C', and in numbers such as '2' and '5', were elegant, but when these thin parts were made thicker to create a sans serif form, the result was a sans serif typeface with almost 'closed' forms. And that is exactly what can be found in Akzidenz Grotesk.
Where the roman of the Akzidenz Grotesk is derived from Walbaum-like typefaces, the italic is nothing more than a slanted version of the roman. Why was the italic not based upon a real italic? It is not so difficult to make an Akzidenz Grotesk italic based on Walbaum italic. Maybe with the huge competition going on among type foundries, the nineteenth-century punch cutters were under pressure to produce easy-made italics. A real italic probably was too much work or too difficult to make, while a slanted roman was relatively easy to copy from the roman.
The strange thing is that this slanted roman became a sort of standard for sans italics, even today. Typefaces such as News Gothic (1908) and Helvetica all have slanted romans. Even the great type designer Adrian Frutiger made slanted romans with his sans serif designs. Only recently has he acknowledged that a real italic makes a better contrast with the roman, when his Frutiger (1977) was redrawn in 2000 with a semi-real italic instead of a slanted roman.
Futura (1927) has slanted romans too, but this is more understandable since there was no real old seriffed model to base it on. As a constructed typeface, Futura borrows its forms from squares and circles, and is therefore an original design.
Charm and clumsiness
In 1957 Max Miedinger made Helvetica. In fact it was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but for marketing reasons the name was changed to Helvetica in 1960. Miedinger based his design on other Grotesks, one of which was Haas Grotesk (1912). But Haas Grotesk had been based on Akzidenz Grotesk, so it is fair to say that Helvetica was based on Akzidenz-like typefaces. But what is 'basing on', when the whole Helvetica looks extremely close to Akzidenz Grotesk? At least Akzidenz Grotesk was based indirectly on a seriffed model, which makes it and its contemporaries 'original' typefaces.
Compared to Akzidenz Grotesk, Helvetica has hardly any new features. Though claimed to be an improvement on Akzidenz Grotesk, it lacks all the character and charming clumsiness of Akzidenz Grotesk. Helvetica is blunt and colourless; the fact that its italic is slanted makes it even blunter. What a missed opportunity!
Aggressive marketing
Why is Helvetica so popular? This question is not so difficult to answer. First, Helvetica was aggressively marketed in the 1960s. Second, Helvetica became almost the only typeface to be used by the Swiss typographic style of that era, which continues to be very influential. The third reason is that Helvetica is neutral and colourless; it is not dangerous. This makes it easier for graphic designers to use as a display face. A typeface that already has a lot of character determines the character of a poster or a book jacket. With neutral Helvetica, the character must come from the typographic designer. This makes Helvetica beloved by many. One can make a good poster with a bad typeface, but one will not automatically make a good poster with a good typeface.
In the past 50 years there have been many beautiful graphic designs using Helvetica, but this has more to do with the quality of the designers using it than that with the quality of Helvetica as a typeface. Frutiger explained its popularity with the words: 'Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket. Helvetica is here to stay.'
As a text typeface Helvetica is an awkward creature. It is only because it is available on all computers that it is used by so many people around the world. You cannot blame them – they have no typographic education. They just have to set some text in some typeface. Unfortunately, Helvetica is about the worst choice one can make for text. Paul Rand, the American graphic designer, advised his students to use Helvetica only as a display face, and never in text, 'because Helvetica looks like dogshit in text'.
A system for the sans serif jungle
If Helvetica was regrettable, then there is a whole range of typefaces that were designed in the 1950s that deserve the same criticism. Again, as in the 1900s, all the type foundries followed one another, afraid as they were of losing market share. The result was a range of neutral typefaces such as Folio, Venus and Mercator.
Univers was designed by Adrian Frutiger and released in the same year as Helvetica. Many Univers characters echo the problems that are found in Helvetica, especially in the almost closed forms and in the fact it had a sloped roman instead of an italic. But Univers was a much more original design, with one strong feature that was new in type design: it was made up of an almost scientific system of 21 weights and widths that could be mixed perfectly. It was an answer to the jungle of different sans serif faces that lacked a clear system of weights and widths.
A few years ago Univers was completely redrawn, and now has more than 60 versions. Unfortunately, this has not been an improvement: there are too many superfluous weights now, the justification is too tight and the italic that was already too slanted has been slanted even more. Redesigning an old successful typeface is maybe something a type designer never should consider.
In the 1980s computers started to penetrate the world. Helvetica came free with Adobe PostScript printers, but when other manufacturers cloned PostScript they could not use Helvetica. Instead, they substituted the hugely unoriginal Arial, which is very similar to Helvetica.
Designed for Monotype in 1982, Arial was originally marketed as follows: 'A contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial-style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance.'
Love and hate
Regrettably, Arial is now found on every computer. The popularity of Akzidenz-like typefaces has not faded, and Helvetica remains immensely popular. In 2002 Lars Müller published a little book Helvetica - Homage to a Typeface. (See review in Eye no. 47 vol. 12.) This year Helvetica, a feature-length documentary directed by Gary Hustwit, will be released [www.helveticafilm.com]. Buttons, T-shirts, weblogs, animations and games about love and hate for Helvetica are endless.
Since 2000 there has again been a revival of the Akzidenz-like typefaces. The American designer Christian Schwartz based his FF Bau (2002-04) on a nineteenth-century Grotesk from Schelter & Giesecke, a former Leipzig-based foundry (Miedinger followed some of its forms for his Helvetica). Unfortunately, the italic is a slanted roman again. Akkurat (2004-05) by Swiss designer Laurenz Brunner is another Akzidenz-like design, with influences from Neuzeit Grotesk. Swiss designer François Rappo used his Theinhardt revival in the book We make fonts, a 2006 project by the University of Art and Design, Lausanne.
In the future there will probably be more of these Akzidenz-like Grotesks, simply because we have been indoctrinated by Helvetica for the past 50 years. But as long as these 'revivals' are so similar, they don't really contribute to development in type design.
The best way to design a sans serif is to base it on a serif typeface. Akzidenz Grotesk and its contemporaries were indeed based on serif typefaces, however indirectly. But Helvetica, Arial and the Akzidenz-like remakes from the 1950s and later could have been much better.
Helvetica was a bad idea. We can only hope that in the still-young history of the sans serif, things will change in favour of more intelligent, more original sans serif typefaces.
This is a new version of an article originally published by the Polish magazine 2+3d in 2005.
Tuesday, 12 October 2010
The reading Experience.
Canny observation about how a given medium can alter or even transform the experience of content. I similarly caution designers who assume that one day digital media will provide the same presentation fidelity as the printed page; even if we could create truly digital replica of say a newspaper, the experience would be substantially different from a printed newspaper.
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