Just My Type

by Simon Garfield

  Albertus was created by Berthold Wolpe, the bohemian and reassuringly chaotic designer best remembered for his book jacket designs at Faber & Faber, where his often purely typographic work became as treasured as Faber jackets featuring Edward Bawden, Rex Whistler and Paul Nash. Wolpe learned his craft in Germany, but he fled the Nazis in the mid-1930s and arrived in England to find his services much in demand. In 1980, at the age of seventy-five, he was honoured with a retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the display cases within held his dazzling jackets for TS Eliot, Thom Gunn and Robert Lowell (it was estimated he designed at least 1,500).

  Wolpe began work on Albertus in 1932 and it swiftly appeared on book jackets, announcing the young Seamus Heaney and William Golding as writers too good to ignore. Before Wolpe, literary novelists and poets had seldom been such visual sensations, their names taking up half the jacket; no wonder they loved him so much.

  Like Gill Sans, Albertus had its roots not on the drawing board but in the real world – in this case, bronze memorial tablets. Wolpe had enjoyed his formal training in a bronze foundry, where he learned to compose raised inscriptions, cutting away metal surrounding the letters with a chisel to form a necessary, simple and bold alphabet, something he called ‘sharpness without spikiness’.

  A classic Wolpe Faber jacket

  Albertus on CD and live in the City of London

  If the V&A show passed you by, perhaps you noticed Albertus on the CD cover of Coldplay’s , or on a DVD re-run of cult TV show , the battle between mind-control and individualism. Why Albertus for the show’s signs? Because it looked visually stunning, was perfectly suited to the unnerving psychological landscape (the old Roman world on its side), and because – even on small screens in 1960s living rooms – it was brilliantly and crucially legible.

  When Matthew Carter arrived for drinks at a private club in Leicester Square in May 2009, he was accompanied by his girlfriend Arlene Chung, and they started talking about films they might see together on their brief visit to London. Carter, a Brit long based in the US, had travelled from his home in Cambridge, Masachusetts, to see his children, and to give a lecture about revivals – the process of updating typefaces from the previous five hundred years to suit today’s needs. He was such a popular draw that his talk had to be switched to a larger venue.

  The lecture was not difficult for Carter. Now in his early seventies, the subject had occupied all his working life. But the choice of movie was more of an issue. It wasn’t the subject matter as much as the accuracy – so often when Carter sees films he notices niggly things wrong with type. How could a story set in Peru in the nineteenth century possibly have a sign on a restaurant door that had been composed in Univers from 1957? How could the film Ed Wood, set in the 1950s, use Chicago, a font from the 1980s, as the sign at the entrance of a studio? And how did the props team of a movie set at the start of the Second World War get the idea that it would be okay to print a document in Snell Roundhand Bold, when Carter, watching in the multiplex, would recognize the face as something he himself created in 1972?

  Carter finds this sort of anomaly more amusing than annoying, but others take it more seriously, and bad type in film upsets them as much as bad continuity. On a section of his website called Typecasting, the designer Mark Simonson has set up a scoring system to denote just how badly filmmakers have got it wrong. He begins with Chocolat, the movie in which Juliette Binoche opens up a chocolaterie to bring joy to a sleepy 1950s French village. But the local mayor is no fan of type: pinning up a notice preventing the consumption of all but bread and tea during Lent, he has jumped forward a couple of decades to select a typeface (ITC Benguiat) not made until the late 1970s.

  Inevitably, this sort of thing happens all the time. The Steve Martin film Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, set in the 1940s, gets three out of five stars for historical accuracy – shame about the use of Blippo from the 1970s for the cruise brochure. The Hudsucker Proxy, directed by the Coen Brothers, also gets three stars, despite its studied period feel (beatniks, hula hoops), being marred for type fans by a corporate logo set in Bodega Sans from 1991. LA Confidential (two stars) fares worse, not least because the nameplate of Danny DeVito’s gossip rag Hush Hush looks suspiciously like Helvetica Compressed from 1974.

  Fine film, nice brochure, shame about the anachronistic font

  These are modern films, appearing at the cinema at about the same time as graphic design was becoming all the rage at art school. You could sit in the stalls and not only know that something was wrong with a magazine nameplate, but also say why – too ornate, too recent, overly wrought. And we have recently begun to say not only what works, but what we like. ‘In the past,’ Matthew Carter observes, ‘people who had a very well-defined sense of taste in what they wore or what they drove, didn’t really have any way of expressing their taste in type. But now you can say, “I prefer Bookman to Palatino” and people do have feelings about it.’

  Carter’s own taste is for suitability, and for meeting the expectations of his employers. He is not only one of the most highly respected type designers, but one of the few able to make a decent living from the trade. He is proud of a description in a New Yorker profile that tagged him as the most widely read man in the world. ‘A bit of an exaggeration,’ he reasoned, ‘but it got people interested.’ Carter is also one of the most eloquent exponents of his craft. He looks a bit like his type, a classicist with a ponytail.

  He is the creator, notably, of , whose adoption by Microsoft and Google has given it huge reach; of Georgia, the most legible and adaptable screen font; based on an eighteenth-century calligraphic style, very festive, good for ironic party invitations; , designed for the 100th Bell (now AT&T) phonebook; , a revival from the sixteenth century, tall and airy; and , which, in its Arabic and Thai versions, is used by IKEA in place of its regular font – . The calligrapher Gunnlaugur SE Briem has described Bell Centennial as ‘a bulletproof rhinoceros that could dance Swan Lake’, and the same could be said for almost all of Carter’s work.

  There are at least twenty other Carter fonts, and his clients have included the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, Time and Newsweek, the Washington Post and the Guardian. Beyond this, his work is on almost every computer in the world, and on perhaps half the western world’s advertising.

  ‘At one time I dreaded that moment at dinner parties when people asked me what I did,’ Carter says. ‘Or when I sit next to a stranger on a plane. I was always tempted to pretend that I was a brain surgeon just to avoid the whole topic. Twenty years ago, no one had the slightest idea what a type designer was. If they had miraculously heard of it, they would say things like, “Oh, I thought they were all dead.”’

  Nowadays, Carter believes, it would be very hard to find anybody over the age of six who didn’t know what a font was. ‘However, they don’t realize any human agency is involved, because fonts for them are part of the software ether that appears mysteriously on their computer, manifestations of some ghostly form. So they’re very astonished when they hear that people do this.

  ‘I’ve had some very funny encounters with people since I’ve done a number of faces for Microsoft. Microsoft gave them away, which means they are everywhere on the planet. So now people say things like, “Do you know this thing called Verdana? We’ve just had a memo come around the office saying we’ve all got to start using it …” In some companies it’s dragooned that they all have to use it so no one thinks they’re getting any advantage by sucking up to the boss by using his favourite typeface.’

  The old tools of the trade: a punch, strike and matrix

  Occasionally people will ask Carter, ‘What typeface should I choose if I want to be really friendly? Can a font make me popular?’ He tells them he doesn’t know, that he’s at the raw material end of this, and that it’s all subjective anyhow. And it’s too easy to say heavy bold gothic types are serious, gloomy and sad, while light, flouncy, ornate ones resembling human script are optimistic and
joyous. He has learned over the years that there is truth in all of this, but he has also learned that it is easier to say what works than why. Good type is instinct born of experience.

  Carter’s life in type is unusual and instructive. He has worked in three key areas of the craft. His father, Harry, was a typographer and historian, and he helped find his son an unpaid traineeship at Enschedé, since the beginning of the eighteenth century a leading banknote printer and type foundry in the Netherlands. Here he learned to become a punchcutter, and the process of cutting letters in steel taught him about the beauty of the alphabet.

  Carter then returned to London, and found there wasn’t much demand for skills rooted in the 1450s. So he began to paint signs, another archaic art. At the beginning of the 1960s he went to New York, and his journey into modern typography began. (Technically speaking, typography is concerned with the appearance of type on a page or screen, while type design is concerned principally with the form of the letters.) After a while he was offered a job at the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in Brooklyn, the leading supplier of typesetting machines, and he set about improving their type library.

  His subsequent career took him naturally into the new processes of phototypesetting and designing for the computer. In 1981 he co-founded Bitstream Inc, the first significant digital type foundry, and a decade later he left to form Carter & Cone with his business partner Cherie Cone. It was here that he was commissioned – newspaper by newspaper, typeface by typeface – to establish the new look of much of what we currently read in print and online.

  Businesses and institutions employ Carter because there aren’t many font designers who have such an intricate knowledge of type history. For a man specializing in revivals this is obviously a prerequisite – and it is an attribute often lacking in the generation that followed him. Computers have obliterated the manual labour of casting letters by hand, but it is not just the craft that has disappeared; it may be the rounded worldview that such craft brings. Carter says he once went to a fair where someone was offering a poster from the 1840s advertising a forthcoming sale of slaves. He knew immediately it was a fake – its typeface originated from the 1960s. Once again, type can tell you much more than words on a page.

  Harry Carter (left) and a young Matthew Carter punchcutting

  In September 2010, Matthew Carter was awarded a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship. But where did his knowledge begin? With his mother, who just loved the shape of letters. Before he went to school and learned to read or write, his mother had cut out the alphabet from linoleum. She had trained as an architect, and drew beautifully. Many years later, he found the remains of these letters in a box. ‘They were Gill Sans,’ Carter says, ‘and they had tooth marks on them.’

  At the end of August 2009, an unusual thing happened in the world: IKEA changed its typeface. This wasn’t so strange in itself – big companies like to stay looking fresh, and this is often the easiest way to do it – but the odd thing was that people noticed.

  Most customers didn’t like the switch. There was rudeness on websites. Newspapers wrote about it in cutting ways, and there were frank exchanges on BBC radio. It wasn’t a revolution on the scale of Gutenberg’s printing press, but it did mark a turning point, one of those moments when a lot of people found they cared about something they had never cared about before.

  One walked around IKEA and felt a little queasy – or rather, queasier than normal. The place still sold cheapish stuff with Swedish names, the restaurant still offered meatballs, and the IKEA sign was still up there on the side of the building in its yellow and blue proprietary IKEA logo. But there was something unfamiliar about the signage and catalogue. IKEA had abandoned its elegant typeface Futura in favour of the modern Verdana, and the switch had caused consternation not only among type geeks, but real people. Suddenly there was a font war.

  Font wars are usually little spats among the and very welcome, too; they generate publicity and informed debate. But this war had spilled out beyond its normal narrow confines. Not so long ago, the talk in the IKEA queue was predominantly about scented tea-lights: they seem great value at first, but they tend not to burn for very long. But in August 2009, people began talking about their love of one typeface and distrust of another.

  A few months before, at a corporate meeting in IKEA headquarters in Älmhult, the Swedish furniture company had decided that a move to Verdana would be advantageous. IKEA’s decision was chiefly about using the same typeface in print that they used on their website: at the time, Verdana was one of very few ‘web-safe fonts’ (though, ironically, less than a year later, Futura too was available as a webfont), and it had been designed specifically for use in small sizes on the web (one reason why it draws so much ire in IKEA’s usage is that it looks ungainly at large sizes – it wasn’t meant to be used large and hi-res).

  For many months this decision didn’t raise an eyebrow, but then the new catalogues started arriving on type designers’ doormats (Thud! The new Ektorp Tullsta armchair cover only £49!!), and instead of looking industrial and tough, the catalogue looked a little more crafted and generously rounded. It also looked a little less like a Scandinavian enterprise founded on the promise of original design, and a bit more like a sales brochure from a company you wouldn’t think twice about (a company that has become part of the furniture).

  As a result, the members of online discussion groups found they had a new hot topic in their forums. Some were just plaintive: ‘So predictable, so dull, so corporate, so please bring back Futura!’ And some were clever and funny: ‘The round forms in Futura’s O really mimicked the Swedish meatballs before. Now we’re left … yearning for the glory days when IKEA embraced continuity between their typography and meat products.’

  The arguments showcased the classic battleground of font warfare: new type, old type; a pure intention versus an Evil Empire; an old company seen to be deserting its roots for financial gain; a supremely beautiful typeface battling against a supremely functional one. But this time, they had the ear of the media. The joked that it was ‘perhaps the biggest controversy to ever come out of Sweden’. Wikipedia wasted no time in accepting a new page called Verdanagate. It became the hot topic – a fontroversy – in Graphic Tweets. The passion some people displayed when it came to type seemed tribal, like the passion of sports fans.

  Futura (top) gives way to Verdana

  The two fonts in question had much to do with this. Futura (of which more later) has a quirkiness to it that Verdana does not, with a pedigree linked to political art movements of the 1920s. Verdana, on the other hand, despite being a superb font, designed by Matthew Carter, is linked to something modern and commonly reviled: Microsoft. Verdana is thus available on almost every PC and Mac, and is one of the most widely used fonts in the world. Along with a handful of other prominent typefaces, it has been directly responsible for a homogenization of the public word: a sign over a cinema looks increasingly like one over a bank or hospital, and magazines that once looked original now frequently resemble something designed for reading online. This is what had happened at IKEA: the new look had been defined not by a company proudly parading its sixty-six year heritage, but by economies of scale and the demands of the digital age.

  Nothing wrong with that; it’s a business. A new font is unlikely to have a detrimental effect on sales; what should we care if the label describing the Billy Bookcase is Futura, Verdana or Banana so long as the price is right? Like the bookcase, Verdana was also in almost every home, and becoming something you barely noticed. But that, for dissenters, was the point: Verdana was everywhere, and now it was in one more place. It was becoming a non-font that we don’t even register. Which is precisely why it was so effective, and exactly why it was chosen.

  In 1969 Matthew Carter’s father Harry published a book called A View of Early Typography Up to About 1600. It is not exactly a page-turner, but it was well crafted in Monotype Bembo and it explored a crucial element of our literary past. And Harry Carter was a man who
knew his type. Initially a barrister, he turned to design and learned to print, engrave, to cut punches (he made a Hebrew text while on military service in Palestine), and after the war became chief designer at His Majesty’s Stationery Office.

  As a historian, Carter was particularly interested in the bountiful fifteenth-century collision between, on the one hand, the burgeoning technological knowledge and abilities of typefounders and printers, and on the other, the clamouring demands from publishers and the reading public. A map of Europe at the end of the book shows the sites of printing in Europe in 1476, and the map is busy: just twenty years since Gutenberg, there are books and pamphlets running off presses in Oxford, Antwerp, Strasbourg, Lubeck, Rostock, Nuremberg, Geneva, Lyons, Toulouse, Milan, Rome, Naples and about forty other towns and cities. Even secret knowledge travelled fast: every court and university demanded not just the latest publications but also the means of producing them. With matrices, moulds and type, there was suddenly a new commodity on the market, and the centre of trade and the heart of printing was Venice.

  In Venice, more than fifty printers competed for the passing merchant’s attention, and clarity was a strong selling point. The da Spira brothers from Germany established their Venetian type in the city in the 1460s, a flowing and orderly face that broke away entirely from the gothic weights of Gutenberg, Schoeffer and Fust: it is easily readable to us today, the eye gliding rather than snagging along it, the first truly modern printed font. In the 1470s a Venetian scribe feared that he would soon be out of business, complaining that his city was ‘stuffed with books’. And things would get worse: by the end of the century about 150 presses had produced more than 4,000 different editions – about twice as many as Venice’s most proficient rival, Paris.