Just My Type

by Simon Garfield

  Cheltenham’s principal replacements in the 1950s were far uglier – a selection of lavish script fonts that looked as if they were handwritten, either by a drunken man from the advertising agency, or by some extravagant Elizabethan. Fortunately, the Swiss were at hand, and at the end of the 1950s America began its great love affair with Helvetica.

  The most enduring modern American font – and the most likely to appear on our computer drop-down menus – is , a typeface named after Benjamin Franklin and first published in 1905. This was a sans serif face before the style became the rage in England through Johnston and Gill. The American definition of gothic is not the same as the European one: it may be a heavy type, but it has no connection with scribes or the German blackletter. Nor with heavy metal bands.

  It was made by Morris Fuller Benton, a young star at ATF who created a family of fonts that remain ever present in newspapers and magazines. His Franklin Gothic font had its roots in the German , and has survived all manner of fashionable and faddish political pressures. It is not geometric or mathematical or futuristic: it is wide and squat and sure of itself, a slightly less refined form of Univers. It was the closest American type would get to Swiss type, and it was the type that finally threw off the straitjacket of Englishness. Things ‘All-American’ have a habit of using Franklin Gothic to press their case, be it the titles on the Rocky films or the block capitals on Lady Gaga’s album .

  Benton also cut some letters for Frederic Goudy, the American type designer who had the greatest impact on the textual tone of America in the first half of the twentieth century. Partly this was down to productivity: he designed more than 100 fonts, several of them site-specific, such as Saks (for the clothing store) and Californian (for the University of California Press). And partly this was down to a bit of self-promotion. Goudy had a reputation for fast living (cars and girls), and he was one of those rare things – a prolific type designer with a penchant for the jazz life.

  This was rarely reflected in his work, which tended towards the buttoned-down. Goudy was more of a magpie than a modernizer, although he endeavoured to put his own twist on traditional inspirations. His most famous type was Goudy Old Style – a finely drawn but rather vulnerable font, nodding to the Renaissance with fluid base lines, nervy flourishes and the most delicate serifs; it is still in wide usage, including Harper’s magazine.

  Goudy’s most unusual font was (1928), a blackletter with its heart in Gutenberg’s Bible that stands quite apart from American trends. Goudy became obsessed with producing challenging variations of blackletter, and he was finicky about the results. Delivering a notorious invective regarding the type, he stated that anyone who would letterspace blackletter would ‘shag sheep’ – a phrase that has also been applied, in the design world, to letterspacing in lower case. (The German designer and head of Fontshop, Erik Spiekermann, co-wrote a book called Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works). Why is inappropriate letterspacing so despicable? Because it looks ugly, and because anyone skilled in typography takes immeasurable offence at anything that insults their vision of beauty. Quite right too.

  Goudy Text and Goudy Italic characters – playfully co-opted by William Barrett for his series of images called ‘My Type of People’

  Goudy left us other keen thoughts, too, including a description of type design that encapsulates many of the dilemmas, inspirations and heartbreaks of his trade. ‘It is hardly possible to create a good typeface that will differ radically from the established forms of the past,’ he wrote in his book Typologia in 1940. ‘The perfect model for a type letter is altogether imaginary; there is no copy for the designer today except the form created by some earlier artist, and the excellence of a designer’s work depends entirely upon the degree of imagination and feeling he can include in his rendition of that traditional form.’

  Frederic Goudy at work

  Intriguingly, similar concerns were expressed by the Italian type designer Giambattista Bodoni almost two hundred years before. ‘Letters do not achieve their true beauty when done in haste and discomfort,’ the creator of the classic Bodoni font wrote, ‘nor when done with diligence and pain, but only when they are created with love and passion.’

  Was the TIGER WOODS scandal a little too grubby for the glossy magazines? Not if his first name was set in a huge capitalized version of BODONI on the cover of Vanity Fair. Then the story would look sophisticated, classy and refined.

  Giambattista Bodoni of Parma and the Parisian Firmin Didot are the designers credited with inventing the ‘Modern’ class of typefaces in the eighteenth century, building on the ‘Transitional’ Baskerville, by introducing even greater contrast between thin and thick lines and long, fine serifs. These faces appeared in the 1790s, when improved printing techniques and paper quality enabled the punchcutter to cut far thinner strokes without a risk of cracking or disappearing on the page. If they then attached a ball to the J or the k, or sharpened the apex of A, they were confident that it wouldn’t be chipped off. Didot and Bodoni both developed fonts that became increasingly extreme in their stroke contrasts (the U and V looking particularly vulnerable), while also flattening serifs and increasing the height of their narrow capitals.

  The Moderns were designed primarily as book faces, and can look impressive with generous leading. But when increased to display size there may be no finer example of the letterfounders’ art. Certainly there is no quicker way of saying CLASS, which is why you still find them so prominent in Elle, and all the high-end fashion magazines.

  Bodoni – always fit for purpose

  Among the other great modern faces, the German nineteenth century Walbaum is still a romantic stunner today. Named after its creator Justus Erich Walbaum, it has the usual high-hat letters but also a softer and more approachable manner, and a very technical k that looks to have fallen from another font by mistake. , also owe a lot to what have become known collectively as Didone faces, while the digital variants have introduced text sizes that have slightly reduced the letter contrast.

  But where could type go after these extremes? Intriguingly it went the other way – to fonts that were fat, heavy and ungainly, to fonts that soaked up ink and boasted of their gluttony and pride. The industrial revolution was not only a thing of steam and speed, but also of grind and grime, and typefaces reflected mostly the latter. The scale of industrial and technological progress left no time for delicacy, and so the refined types of earlier centuries were discarded, replaced by letters as thickset as the participants in the bare-knuckle prizefights they would advertise. The fonts of this time – marketed with no-nonsense English names like Thorowgood, Falstaff, Figgins Antique – screamed for your attention like the plumpest towncryer.

  The Victorian poster, packed with Fat Face and Egyptian fonts, that inspired John Lennon’s ‘For The Benefit of Mr Kite’.

  These fonts, which the trade grouped as Fat Face and Egyptian, had a ruggedness suited not only to the clank and heave of the new factories (they looked particularly good on the side of pump engines), but also to the din of the fairground and early Victorian music hall. The designs would inspire many forms of flowery ornamental woodtype, but we look at them now and see mainly men in top hats with dangling watch-chains; big fat type that refuses to be modernized.

  ‘I am not bound to win,’ Barack Obama said on the eve of the vote of his historic healthcare reform bill in March 2010, ‘but I am bound to be true.’ It was a spoken address, but it came out of his mouth as if it had been .

  There are some types that read as if everything written in them is honest, or at least fair. We have been conditioned to look at Times New Roman that way, and the same goes for Gotham, which was made in 2000 by Tobias Frere-Jones for Hoefler & Frere-Jones, one of the leading type design companies in New York City (or Gotham City, as Batman fans like to call it). The font bumbled along nicely for them for several years, gaining increasing popularity as a type that managed to look both establishment and fresh, and then, at the beginning of 2008, it got the s
ort of boost that no type designer would even dare dream of.

  ‘We actually found out that the Obama campaign was using it by seeing it on TV,’ Frere-Jones says, as if he still can’t believe his luck. ‘There was a rally in Iowa, and he was on a podium and all these people were waving signs, and the type on the signs was awfully familiar.’ Obama wasn’t alone: at that point in the primary there were still seven or eight candidates, and John Edwards was also using Gotham. But as Edwards and eventually Hillary Clinton dropped away, Frere-Jones was excited to see that the Obama campaign was not only still using his font, but that it had been installed at the heart of the candidate’s graphic vision. ‘In the past,’ he explains, ‘campaigns would have one logo, and then choose a number of typefaces to go with the advertisements and the banners and the website. But the Obama campaign put the same discipline into planning its look that would go into a big corporate identity. The campaign looked the same on election day as it did eighteen months before at the caucuses.’

  As Obama’s presidential bid gained momentum, Frere-Jones received nice emails from friends wondering whether he had seen his work employed in this important way. Gary Hustwit, the director of the Helvetica movie, sent him a picture of Obama, microphone in hand, standing in front of a banner that read, all in capitals, . In the next year, all the dynamic Obama watchwords – – would appear in these simple sans serif letters, notable for their solidity and durability. They also had unremarkability and inoffensability – a type consciously chosen to suggest forward thinking without frightening the horses. Gotham replaced the Obama team’s original choice Gill Sans, which was discarded as too staid and inflexible (Gotham was available in more than forty varieties, Gill Sans in fifteen). ‘Great choice,’ observed Alice Rawsthorn in the New York Times. ‘No typeface could seem better suited to a dynamic, yet conscientious, American public servant.’ Rawsthorn also detected ‘a potent, if unspoken, combination of contemporary sophistication (a nod to his suits) with nostalgia for America’s past and a sense of duty’.

  A font to believe in? Yes We Can Trust Gotham

  ‘That was certainly one of the qualities we set out to capture – that feeling of authority,’ Frere-Jones says. (Frere-Jones also carries a sense of authority, a type archetype with glasses, neat apparel and a proper hair parting.) ‘When we were developing it we realized it could be very contemporary, but also classic and almost severe.’ In this respect at least it is comparable with Helvetica. ‘We wanted to seize the chance to give it that range of voices, so it wasn’t going to be a performer that could only really sing one song.’

  But what if that performer had been batting for the other side? What if Gotham had been used in a campaign its maker disapproved of – would he have any way of objecting? ‘Not once they had paid for it. That did happen. The Republican Senate candidate in Minnesota, Norm Coleman, had a website to raise money for his recount campaign, and that was in Gotham Medium and Gotham Bold all-caps, exactly the same as the Obama website. I felt personally annoyed, but the guy lost anyway, so …’

  Gotham was originally designed for GQ magazine, and was inspired by the letters over the entrance to the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal, one of the many three-dimensional vernacular signs threatened by the ravages of weather and time, and by the creeping uniformity of type made possible, easier and cheaper by digital technologies. Frere-Jones calls the pedigree and practicality of these letters ‘non-negotiable’, but because they were disappearing, he made it his weekend hobby to photograph as many as possible before it was too late. In four years he thinks he got every interesting letter and sign block from southernmost Battery Park to 14th Street, some 3,600 pictures. The joy was in finding lots of regional and international variations, including a particular style of geometric sans serif that only exists in Chinatown.

  Gotham was originally designed for GQ magazine. So this is perfect unity: the font, the magazine, the President.

  The only preservation Frere-Jones witnessed was when a new sign was bolted over an old one.

  More than a year into Obama’s presidency, Frere-Jones and his colleague Jonathan Hoefler can afford to be modest about Gotham’s attributes, but during the campaign they were in pickier mood. ‘Gotham isn’t pretending to be anything it’s not,’ their website claimed in February 2008. ‘The only thing Gotham works hard at is being Gotham.’ But the same couldn’t be said for Obama’s competitors, both of whose choices carried bruised baggage. Hillary Clinton’s principal campaign poster had her name in , the font that often confers a legal endorsement. John McCain used the 1950s sans serif , perhaps an attempt to remind voters of his war record (Optima is the type on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC).

  ‘Hillary’s snooze of a serif might have come off a heart-healthy cereal box, or a mildly embarrassing over-the-counter ointment,’ Jonathan Hoefler wrote in his blog. ‘If you’re feeling generous you might associate it with a Board of Ed circular, or an obscure academic journal. But Senator McCain’s typeface was positively mystifying: after three decades signifying a very down-market notion of luxe, this particular sans serif has settled into being the font of choice for the hygiene aisle.’

  How were these things done in earlier years? In 1948, the year the United Kingdom introduced its own revolutionary healthcare bill in the form of the National Health Service, the last thing one would have expected from the governing Labour Party would have been an interest in fonts. There were important housing and education reforms to consider, and new foods to ration, but at some point during this radical programme someone influential decided that none of it would make a good impression unless it was presented to the nation in a carefully considered and extremely boring typeface.

  This man was Michael Middleton, a graphic designer and Labour loyalist, who believed that the right choice of font could be a vote winner. Three years after the war, he published a lavishly illustrated manifesto called Soldiers of Lead, a call for unity among typefaces and a blast against anything fancy or debauched. Type had to reflect the austerity of the day; all the better if it had a sturdy and traditional serif. Even the title of Middleton’s pamphlet spoke of history. The full phrase reads: ‘With twenty-five soldiers of lead I have conquered the world!’ A centuries old paean to the power of movable type, it dates from the days before the letter J became the last addition to the alphabet.

  Before Middleton’s intervention, most Labour literature resembled a cramped and crowded meeting room in which everyone was remonstrating at once. In 1946, a poster suggesting one should ‘Vote Labour for Progress’ used six different fonts in as many sizes, as if it had been constructed from sweeping up the discarded type on a printer’s floor. Despite the great promises of fonts like Johnston, Futura and Gill Sans, poster typography in Britain in the 1940s was still dominated by the blocky Fat Faces of the Victorians, and the Victorians, as we have seen, had shown no regard for typography at all.

  What do these reprsent? They have their orgins in medieval hand-drawn characters – they have any place in the twentieth century?

  What happens to the ‘recognition characteristics’ of individual letter when they are elongated or squashed? Can you distinguish these at a slight distance?

  The top line of lettters here Victorian, the remainder are more recent. Are they beautiful or are they ridiculous? Is it ‘clever’ to depart from the essential basic shape of a letter as much as these do?

  Michael Middleton’s admonishments on unsuitable type, from Soldiers of Lead

  Middleton’s manifesto proposed to keep everything light, simple and clear. ‘Mistrust any type of “novel” design,’ he advised his party faithful. Never use letters which are so condensed that ‘they have the appearance of striped wallpaper’. The typefaces favoured were all safe bets: Bembo, Caslon, Times New Roman, Baskerville, Goudy, Perpetua and Bodoni. You could combine them in almost any combination and not go wrong so long as there was enough space between the lines.

  Did Soldiers of Lead have any effect on
Labour’s fortunes? It is hard to judge. When petrol rationing was ended with some fanfare in 1950, the posters were set in plain Times Roman, whereas in previous years similar events were heralded in Chisel (a deep-cut gravestone style) or Thorne Shaded (a grand trompe-l’oeil raised-letter font more suited to announcing the end of the Boer War). But Labour’s narrow electoral majority of 1950 was wiped out the following year, the public voting in Churchill for a last hurrah.

  The mid-century Conservative Party seemed to care little about type reform; if the serifs could have grown any flatter and steadier on Caslon or Baskerville they would have chosen them. But they had arrived at a universal font truth: we tend to treat the traditional and familiar as trustworthy. We are dubious of fonts that alert us to their difference, or fonts that seem to be trying too hard. We don’t like being consciously sold things, or paying for fancy design we don’t need.

  Not much has changed over the years. The political documents of today are increasingly nervous things. In the UK elections of 2010, Labour went for the forward-looking Neo Sans Pro on the cover of its manifesto, but settled for a more predictable serif font inside, while the Tories again went back-to-basics with a range of old-style heavier choices that could have been composed in hot metal before David Cameron was born. (Intriguingly, when it went for a full-page graphic suggesting ‘We’re all in this together,’ they chose a distressed font that would not have been out of place during the Blitz.) Now, of course, we read it all with a cynical air, aware that we have seen their type before. The Liberal Democrats, meanhile, went for the world’s single most transferable font, putting its manifesto and iPhone app in Helvetica