200

TYPÉ: Beauty in Abstract Forms

"Good type design may be practiced only by an artist with

peculiar capabilities. The most essential of these is the ability

to discover beauty in abstract forms."—Frederic Goudy, 1938

"After four thousand years the alphabet has not reached

the end of its journey, and from all indications, it never will."

—George Salter, 1954

Do we really need another font? Some
designers, content with Times Roman,
Arial and Brush Script, would answer no. On
the other hand, many people—designers, as
well as normal people—"collect" fonts and can
never have too many. It may certainly be
argued that over the centuries almost every
conceivable variation on the alphabetic char¬
acters has already been thought up. However,
two forces conspire to ensure the continuation
of font designs for the future. The first is mar¬
ket forces and the need by foundries always to
refresh the stock on their shelves. The second
is the mania for adding one's own contribution
to the tradition of type design. There is some¬
thing unquestionably marvelous in seeing

An Exercise in Versatility

Matthew Carter on lettering and type

"There are significant differences between designing let¬
tering and designing type. With lettering—for a logo, an inscription in
stone, or a piece of calligraphy—you know ahead of time the letters and
their order. If a letter occurs more than once, you can vary its form accord¬
ing to how it combines with other letters.

"With type design, on the other hand, you don't have
the luxury of knowing the order. Typographic letters have a single form and
must be randomly combinable. And it's only in combination that letters
become type. Sometimes a student who is working on a typeface will show
me a single letter, a lowercase h for instance, and ask me if it's a good Л. I
say that I cannot judge it in isolation; it is only good or bad as it relates to
the other characters in the font. If the student sets the h next to o, p, v and
so on, then we can begin to see how it performs in context, and whether it
is good or bad, therefore.

"As the saying goes, type is a beautiful group of letters, not a
group of beautiful letters. Of course, many typefaces have had their origins
in lettering. A classic example is Herb Lubalin's Avant Garde Gothic, which
started life as a logo. The letters had to be adapted from the particular state
of a logo to the general state of a typeface, an exercise in versatility."

—Matthew Carter

words typed into a design program in a font of
one's own. I've said that it makes me feel,
somehow, like God.

If font we must, then what? Searching for
the unusual, the obscure, the rare overlooked
letter style is one approach. But the results
often are too weird for popular acceptance and
sustained usage. Most people won't buy prod¬
ucts that are too outlandish, which is why the
coolest automotive designs never make it past
the prototype stage.

Of course, there are many wacky display
fonts that have become wildly popular, but
one commercially viable option for font design¬
ers is to revive and/or tweak the classics—and
include free T-shirts and trance music CDs
with every font! It's astonishing to me, though,
how a basic-style font with a few subtle shape
variations can thrill us with its apparent
uniqueness. Christian Schwartz's Amplitude,
for example, seems at once familiar, yet brand-
new. The thirty-five-font family (two styles

BOLD FACE LYRE

Latest Quirky Sans

shown above) is suitable in all contexts and
brings both designer and foundry a nice price.

Question: When isn't Caslon Caslon?

Answer: When it was digitized sans sensitivity.
Today, virtually every historically popular
typeface is available as a computer font, but

LOGO, FONT S LETTERING BIBLE

201

buyer beware: There are vast differences in
quality! At the beginning of the Mac era, fonts
were desperately needed and many classics
were digitized hastily. Close inspection of such
fonts frequently reveals shocking flaws. If you
choose to revive a classic, try to copy it with¬
out ego, or make something different enough
that it becomes not a copy but your own.

The issue of legibility has been debated

since the beginning of type history. In Fred
Farrar's Type Book, 1927, the author writes,
"Since the origin of movable types, their prin¬
ciple function has been to express in simple,
readable type, the message of the writer,
whether it is a book or an advertisement."

Designer George Salter wrote, "In weighing
the merits of graphically inspired deviation
from assumed norms we must carefully avoid
arbitrary impairment of the act of reading for
the benefit of the joy of seeing. We must not let
the spice become the food, nor the accent
obscure the substance."

Fortunately, readers of today are said to have
become accustomed to a greater number of
fonts than in the past, and therefore a wider
variety of font styles is now legible to us.
Legibility is still important, since we designers
tend to emphasize form over function. The
designers of the 1960s psychedelic rock con¬
cert posters weren't especially concerned
about it, but the man who had something to
sell, promoter Bill Graham, was reportedly
always yelling at them about legibility.

Ken Barber, type director of House Indus¬
tries, beautifully expresses the current view.
He says, "Lettering can do much more than
simply communicate the message of an author
or a client who's trying to sell something. The
lettering itself can provide a kind of artistic or
aesthetic entry point for the viewer; it's capa¬
ble of eliciting an emotional response. I think
traditionally, the message is considered the
content and the lettering the vehicle to express

ABCDEF
aabcdegh

ABCDEF

abcdefgh

ABCDEF

abcdefgh

the content. However, lettering can be part of
the content and can also be the content—they
become one and the same thing."

The laws of typography were made to be
broken. But bear in mind that however dif¬
ferent and imaginative your fonts may be, the
underlying laws of balance, composition and
symmetry seem to be eternal. Look at Dada,
Deconstructivism, Bauhaus, Psychedelia,
Grunge, and Post Thisandthatism: The best
of the weirdest stuff still follows the basic
laws, just applying them in ways that become
harder to recognize. The only ones who think
these trends are new are either lacking in
historical perspective or are simply too young to
have experienced them the first time around.

Top left at a, enlarged from
the specimen sheet shown
in the background of page
199, are some of William
Caslon's early letters,
several printing generations
later. Their murkiness poses
a real challenge to a design¬
er seeking to reinterpret the
original style. At b, a mod¬
ern, perfunctory Caslon font,
awkward and graceless. In
contrast, at c, Matthew
Carter's Big Caslon (meant
to be set at larger point
sizes) is so scrumptious, I
want to lick it. Witness the
top of ^'s lower loop. One
can almost see traces of the
tool that engraved the orig¬
inal letterpunch. The alpha¬
bet's pen drawn origins are
also evident. This is no mere
revival of a Caslon font. To
me, this is Carter channel¬
ing the spirit of Caslon him¬
self.

Right, Jonathan Hoefler's illustration of the difficulty in creating a revival from
poorly printed samples. At a, the 6-point S of Pierre Wafflard, from the 1819 Didot
specimen book. At c, a display-size I from the same specimen. "The challenge,"
Hoefler says, "is deciding which characteristics of these vastly different letters
should be preserved. In this case, I liked the thicks and thins of the larger size,
but I preferred the proportion and curvature of the smaller original—the ser¬
ifs starting further from the baseline and cap height, the lower bowl jutting out
further, and so on." Hoefler's hybrid 5, at b, is a paean to his perspicacity.