‘The skill is creating a nice even consistency without any rivers or gaps,’ Pearson explained in his office overlooking an outpost of Central Saint Martin’s art school in Farringdon. ‘You don’t want unsightly line breaks or excessive white space, and as few hyphens as possible. Setting a book can be a very mundane boring process, day after day after day – and you’ll only hear about it if it’s done badly.’
Pearson says he would have liked to have used Monotype Dante for his White’s Books – ‘there’s no contest with 10 on 13 Monotype Dante for hot metal’ – but his experience with the Penguin Great Ideas project taught him that the digital version will never look as good. ‘And when you have a set of books stretching on in front of you and you have to choose one typeface, you have to know it can handle any idiosyncrasy in the text. Your choice may often come down to “Has it got a small caps italic?” So few of them do. You don’t want to fudge that small caps italic or the whole thing is just shot to pieces.’
There is another rare feature that places his books among the remnants of a type museum – the setting of a catchword at the bottom of the right-hand page. This is a preview of the first word on the next page, an aid intended to smooth the flow when books are read aloud. ‘It’s an embellishment,’ Pearson says, ‘but it shows care. It reaffirms the tradition of the book as a valuable and desirable object.’
This book – the main chapters and also this very paragraph that you are reading – is set in Sabon. It is not the most beautiful type in the world, nor the most original or arresting. It is, however, considered one of the most readable of all book fonts; and it is one of the most historically significant.
Sabon was developed in the early 1960s for a group of German printers who were grumbling about the lack of a ‘harmonized’ or uniform font that would look the same whether set by hand or on a Monotype or Linotype machine. They were quite specific about the sort of font that might fit the bill, rejecting the modern and fashionable in favour of solid sixteenth-century tradition – something modelled on Garamond and Granjon. They also wanted the new font to be five per cent narrower than their existing Monotype Garamond, in order to save space and money.
The man chosen for this task was Jan Tschichold, a Leipzig-born typographer, who in the 1920s had devised a ‘universal alphabet’ for German, cleaning up its non-phonetic spellings and advocating the replacement of the jumble of fonts with a simple sans serif. He was a modernist, an enthusiast for the Bauhaus, who had been arrested by the Gestapo for communist sympathies before fleeing Nazi Germany for Switzerland. And after the war, from 1947 to 1949, he played a hugely significant role in British book design, creating timeless modern layouts and fonts for Penguin books.
Tschichold had by this time entirely changed his mind over the ‘single font’ idea for German, dismissing his idea as ‘juvenile’, and now advocated classical typefaces as the most legible. For the German printers, he therefore crafted a font that modernized the classics and honed each letter’s fine details, particularly the evenness of the serifs. In doing so, he took careful account of the added weight needed to form a strong impression on modern paper, the mechanized machines subtly ‘kissing’ the surface with ink rather than stamping or rolling it.
Tschichold’s drawings for Sabon
The result was Sabon, which took its name from Jacques Sabon, the owner of a sixteenth-century type foundry in Frankfurt that issued the first-known type specimen book. The new typeface was issued jointly by Germany’s three main type foundries (Linotype, Monotype and Stempel) and became hugely popular in book and magazine printing. It remains a favourite among the discerning and it looks particularly good the bigger you use it, which is why magazines like and use a slightly modified version of it for headlines.
Its popularity and purpose was perhaps best defined by Tschichold himself, in his treatise .
The essence of the New Typography is Clarity. This puts it into deliberate opposition to the old typography whose aim was ‘beauty’ and whose clarity did not attain the high level we require today. This utmost clarity is necessary today because of the manifold claims for our attention made by the extraordinary amount of print, which demands the greatest economy of expression.
He was writing in 1928.
Fonts, like life, are governed by rules. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, being told to sit up straight and not covet thy neighbour’s ox, and we’d all be lost without i before e except after c. But to what extent do rules stifle individuality and creativity? What happens to the minds of a million first-year art students when faced with the task of designing a great new typeface? They too are contained by parameters, creativity blocked in like a palette knife shaping wet cement.
The most instinctive designers (the true artists) will know what works and what to discard. But the novice is hampered by the weight of history and the dead grey hand of the instruction manual. For many of the rules of type are really rules of typography, bound up not just with their appearance but with their use on a page; useful on their own, they can be destructive in combination.
To demonstrate how unappealing and under-considered these rules can be, the writer Paul Felton created an ingenious and beautiful book. Turn it one way and you get The Ten Commandments of Typography; turn it round and shift its axis, and it becomes Type Heresy. To support each side (Good v Evil), Felton comes up with a list of ‘Twelve Disciples of Type’, including Paul Renner and Eric Gill, and pits against them his own, more anarchic design heroes (‘the Fallen Angels of Typography’).
Here are the rules, as Felton considers God intended them:
1. Thou shalt not apply more than three typefaces in a document.
2. Thou shalt lay headlines large and at the top of the page.
3. Thou shalt employ no other type size than 8pt to 10pt for body copy.
4. Remember that a typeface that is not legible is not truly a typeface.
5. Honour thy kerning, so that white space becomes visually equalized between characters.
6. Thou shalt lay stress discreetly upon elements within text.
7. Thou shalt not use only capitals when setting vast body copy.
8. Thou shalt always align letters and words on a baseline.
9. Thou shalt use flush-left, ragged-right type alignment.
10. Thou shalt not make lines too short or too long.
Flipping the book over, Felton kicks off the case for heresy himself, listing the twenty-four different fonts he has chosen for the book, before inviting the Fallen Angels to debunk each rule. There’s a particularly nice line against the Seventh Commandment: ‘CAPITALISED TEXT MAY MAKE MORE OF A DEMAND ON THE READER BUT WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THAT?’
In the introduction to the dark side, one of the fallen angels, Jonathan Barnbrook, creator of the Mason and Priori font families, observes that his old tutors at art school tried to instill rules merely to stop their students having too much fun. ‘Typography truly reflects the whole of human life,’ he maintains, ‘and it changes with each generation. It may well be the most direct visual representation of the tone of voice with which we express the spirit of the time.’
There is a long history of type instruction and discussion, a tradition stretching as far back as Aldus Manutius in the sixteenth century. In fact, there seems to be something about type design that lends itself to philosophizing.
The approaches can be fundamental and rhetorical: ‘I AM TYPE!’ Frederic Goudy declared in 1931. ‘Through me, Socrates and Plato, Chaucer and the bards become your faithful friends who ever surround and minister to you. I am the leaden army that conquers the world.’ They can be iconoclastic: ‘By all means break the rules,’ implored Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style, ‘and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.’ Or they can be poetic: ‘Type is like music in having its own beauty, and in being beautiful as an accompaniment and interpretation,’ wrote the printer JH Mason in the middle of the last century.
Dark Satanic stuff – Paul Felton’s plea for heresy
More often, especially in our Internet age, they are vituperative. ‘There’s no legitimate typographic reason to create an alphabet which looks like it leaked out of a diaper,’ reasoned Peter Fraterdeus in the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design in 1996. (He was talking specifically about ‘degenerate’ type, the sort made by the amateur mucking about with Fontographer software.) Or this observation on digital type from the design critic Paul Hayden Duensing: ‘Digitizing [the seventeenth-century typeface] Janson is like playing Bach on synthesizer.’
The typographic rulebooks began appearing in swift succession from the 1920s, the decade when we thought we had a handle on things. The type technologies were fairly settled – mechanized hot metal machines set everything in the western world from the grandest newspapers to the plainest calling card. But it was a world that seemed to get smaller each time you looked at it. Everything in the first quarter of the twentieth century seemed to have a code and regulation that guaranteed consistency and good form, but frowned upon deviation and shunned innovation. A new recruit to the fold found it almost impossible to market a new typeface until they had spent several decades theorizing about its forerunners. In this regard, type was like painting and architecture: an elitism prevailed, and what you produced was only half the story, and what you said about it counted just as much.
Working on his redesign of The Times, Stanley Morison advanced conservative justifications for holding back what he perceived as a worrying trend towards untutored individualism. The type designer and printer, he said, were engaged principally to give the public what they’re used to. ‘No printer should say, I am an artist … I will create my own letter forms.” The good type designer … realizes that, for a new fount to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty. If my friends think that the tail of my lower-case r or the lip of my lower-case e is rather jolly, you may know that the fount would have been better had neither been made.’
You can see exactly that philosophy at work in Morison’s creation of Times New Roman for The Times – a serif font modelled on a sixteenth-century face from the Plantin-Moretus Foundry in Antwerp, adapted to maximize its legibility and economic use of space. If we had been present at the meetings at which his work was proposed, we would have heard a man explaining how well his type worked at very small sizes in compact columns; it was a tight serif but not in the least fancy; it had short ascenders and descenders; its capitals were contained and unobtrusive.
Morison’s Times makeover
It was one of the most successful type designs in history – used unchanged by The Times for the next forty years, and adopted worldwide. And Morison’s principles apply equally to Matthew Carter’s Georgia, which he designed as a screen font for Microsoft (it is the serif companion to ), as a modern take on Morison’s .
Morison was not only a master craftsman, he was also one of Britain’s leading historians of type. But he lived in an age when news still travelled slowly. The modernizing and pioneering influences of Paul Renner and Jan Tschichold in Germany had clearly not yet been felt at Printing House Square, or perhaps they had been repelled along with the politically objectionable Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists. But the waves lapping in from Europe would soon have a bracing effect, bringing onshore such things as asymmetrical type and diagonally cut lines.
In mid-October 2004, the highly regarded printer, designer and writer Sebastian Carter delivered the Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture at the St Bride Institute. It had been seventy-four years since Warde had herself delivered her famous talk, and Carter’s subject was not too dissimilar, given that it was part of a three-day symposium entitled ‘Bad Type’.
Principled typefaces – Morison’s Times New Roman and Matthew Carter’s Georgia
This was the rulebook in reverse, or white on black. Carter began by running through several notable instruction manuals on type and typography, which had ‘a way of imposing solutions and limiting choices’. He discussed the value of the jobs undertaken by small presses and extolled the worth of ephemera. Carter himself ran the small Rampant Lions Press in Cambridge, where he (and his father, Will, before him) produced exquisite work. But he also championed the not-such-a-great-job, the pieces of design and printing that didn’t turn out to be beautiful or clear, merely interesting. He illustrated his talk with some items that were ‘pretty cruddy’, and suggested that these too had a place in our world. ‘I would not want to live in a world of exclusively good design at the bus-ticket level,’ he said.
Carter was preceded onto the platform by Nigel Bents, a senior lecturer at Chelsea College of Art and Design, who pronounced that he had had enough of perfect type, wrought according to perfect rules. In its place he proposed a love letter to disaster. ‘What we need is a manifesto,’ he told his audience of designers, ‘set diagonally and vertically, all script caps with soft shadows, outlined and underlined, with poor punctuation and hundreds of hyphens, stretched to the edge and cropped at the sides, printed in yellow on day-glo paper, trimmed badly and poorly presented.’
Thus armed, ‘the designers of tomorrow will not look back; we give them the chance to fail abjectly and completely; they’re all in the typographic gutter and some of them are looking at their scars.’ The result, of course, would bring forth more failure, but also types of originality and brilliance. ‘We could become a nation of typographic genii through a litany of design atrocities,’ Bents reasoned.
But is that what we’ve got now? Does the type you see around you enhance your day? A survey of manifestos and guide books suggests that our hands can only be held so much, and for the rest we must trust to inspiration. The only intractable, invincible basic rules of good type? Make it interesting, make it beautiful, and bring out both its humanity and its soul. Make it tasteful and witty and apt. And readable.
Or change your name to Neville Brody. If you were Neville Brody you could join a London-based magazine called The Face in 1981 and transform its rather predictable design to such a degree that your impact would be felt not just on the look of magazines but on books, music, and many aspects of commercial product design for decades to come. If you were Neville Brody you could set up a design business called Research Studios with offices in five countries and rework the retail look of high-end fashion and perfume brands, and take up the post of head of Communication Art & Design at the Royal College of Art. You could give your typefaces monumental names like Typeface Four or Typeface Six and you could continue to wear a ponytail long after everyone else in the design world apart from Matthew Carter had been ridiculed into chopping theirs off.
Brody studied at the London College of Printing in the late 1970s, where he fell under the spell of punk and the possibilities of non-conformity, and where he was almost thrown out for designing a stamp with the Queen’s head placed sideways. This was not just the punk of the Sex Pistols and their designer Jamie Reid’s scissorly disrespect for old typography, but also the anarchy of his hero Alexander Rodchenko, who suggested that creativity was simply the force that people who made rules disapproved of.
The Eighties writ large – Neville Brody’s trademark covers for The Face
Brody found his first expression in record sleeves, learning from Barney Bubbles at Stiff Records and Al McDowell at the design studio Rocking Russian. His work at The Face pushed, pulled, squeezed and bent type as it explored the edge between structure and legibility, and it sat well alongside the magazine’s unusual use of Futura, Gill Sans Bold Condensed and Albertus. The wild geometry of his designs originated in the traditional way (drawing and cutting out shapes, working with Letraset and copiers) but it was the boldness of his display that shook people – text occupying an entire page, the overlapping of type and a crashing of styles, the way the word ‘contents’ would gradually disintegrate across five monthly issues. He disliked the restrictions suggested by Beatrice Warde and Jan Tschichold, and he would try anything to sha
ke off their suffocating influence.
By the time Brody got to work on Arena magazine in 1986 and the Victoria and Albert Museum displayed his typography two years later, his daring visual jokes and eagerness to confound had entered the consciousness of graphic design students throughout the world. His embrace of digital possibilities continued to produce stunning fonts – from his Futura-style and fluid in the early 1990s to his hard-edged Peace in 2009 – and they were often accompanied (in Brody’s mind at least) by a weighty emotional or political message.
Contents graphic from The Face, 1984.
To hear Brody address his adoring students today – at London’s Design Museum in the shadow of London Bridge – is to realize how little his worldview has changed. At fifty-two he still carries a fizzing resentment towards conformity, and expresses the hope that the economic crisis will usher forth a comparable cultural rebellion to the one that fired him thirty years before. ‘Where is the language of protest now?’ he asks. ‘We have been led to believe that culture was only there as a financial opportunity.’ He talks about danger and originality as the screen behind him flashes images from Man Ray and the Factory Records designer Peter Saville.
Brody conducts a swift slide show of his recent hits: the titles for the Michael Mann film Public Enemies, recent designs for Wallpaper* and the typography magazine Fuse, a wall of surveillance cameras for his Freedom Space downstairs in the London Design Museum’s Super Contemporary show. He pauses at an image of The Times from the nineteenth century, comparing it to his own redesign of the paper in 2006. He said he intended to give it greater clarity and energy, and one of his tools was new type – 8.5pt Times Classic for the main text and Obama’s campaign face for the more compressed sans serif headlines.
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