Just My Type

by Simon Garfield

  The paper was following a trend: newspapers looking more like their web pages. The previous year the Guardian had also changed its type, from a mix of Helvetica, Miller and Garamond to its own Guardian Egyptian, a versatile and gentle font family comprising ninety-six variants designed by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz to accompany the paper’s move to a smaller format.

  The key, Brody said, in a strange echo of Morison, was ‘to change a newspaper entirely, but to make sure no one noticed. Our main focus was on articulation, so the layout people could use each page as theatre. When we first showed it to focus groups they didn’t notice it had changed, but when we told them it had changed, they hated it.’

  Before he adjourned for a drink, Brody told his students that he was concerned about the genericism of our culture. ‘Everywhere you go has similar spaces and signs,’ he said. ‘As designers we are complicit in this – we have to look for new ways forward. It’s all about words that we don’t use any more, like revolution and progress.’ But there were limitations to his vision, an ambition sapped by studio bills, staff wages and the need to think deeply about branding possibilities for multinational clients pushing luxury products.

  As for the Brody brand itself, the iconoclast still finds his purest refuge in type. His font designs of 2010 were called Buffalo and Popaganda, huge and beautiful architectural slabs of ink that clamber over each other in the fashionable magazines, always challenging and arresting, never content just to sit there and tell a story.

  The Interrobang is not a font – just a single character. Yet it is so powerful a symbol, and such a flawed and original concept, that it deserves a place alongside the most adventurous typographic innovations of the last century. It is an exclamation mark and question mark combined, a ligature looping the curve of the interrogation with the downward force of the expletive (which compositors and printers have traditionally called a bang). When they meld, they need only one round point at their base.

  The Interrobang has its roots in 1960s advertising. The New York ad executive Martin Spekter was looking for a way to express astonishment, and disliked the clumsy combination of ?! when he wanted to say things like ‘How much?!?!’ and ‘You’re not serious?!’ But when he expressed his frustration in a type magazine he only had the idea for it, not the name. Readers suggested the Exclamaquest and the QuizDing, before the Interrobang was chosen.

  The new symbol had rapid appeal, provoking an article in the and inspiring Remington and IBM to offer additional keyboard keys. Its success was shortlived, however, perhaps because people liked the incredulity of emphasizing ‘what the ****?!?!??!!’ with lots of punctuation, and perhaps because the Interrobang could be ugly. You can find it in Microsoft Word Wingdings 2, and there are versions for Calibri and Helvetica and Palatino. At small sizes just looks a mess, as confused as the expression it conveys. And there was another reason it failed to last. We find it very hard to accept a new type mark, particularly one as forceful as this. An underscore is just about acceptable, as is the ™ symbol, and even the ˆ sitting above the 6 on your keyboard (it is known as the asciicircum or Caret). But the Interrobang – you’re kidding right The Interrobang is truly the Esperanto of fonts.

  The one symbol that does buck the trend – although since email appeared in the 1980s we’ve not had much choice – is the ‘at’ (@) sign. The @ can be varied substantially to suit any typeface but it always looks technical, or as if it’s trying to sell you something. Yet despite its current usage, the @ is not a product of the digital age, and may be almost as old as the ampersand. It had been associated with trade for many centuries, known as an amphora or jar, a unit of measurement. Most countries have their own term for it, often linked to food (in Hebrew it is , meaning strudel, in Czech it is or rollmop herring) or to cute animals (Affenschwanz or monkey’s tail in German, in Danish, (meaning ‘the letter a, with a trunk’, like an elephant’s trunk), or dog in Russian), or to both ( in French).

  Backstage in Boston, two hours before the gig, Paul McCartney is doing what he does best – reliving the glory days. It is August 2009. He has just soundchecked at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, where, in front of an audience of eighty, he played songs he remembered from the Cavern Club and Abbey Road. ‘And this is a new one,’ he announced, as he began singing ‘Yesterday’.

  His backstage trailer looks like a Middle Eastern souk – rugs on the walls, rich embroidery, sweet candles burning on low tables. His girlfriend, Nancy Shevell, is preparing iced tea in a large wine glass, and McCartney is sitting with his feet curled under him on a sofa. His dyed brown hair is not as unnerving in reality as it can appear in photographs. It is 2009 and he is sixty-seven, and a visitor to his lair might reasonably expect that he had long ago exhausted his stock of new Beatles stories, and his enthusiasm for telling them. But this is not the case. As so often with people of retirement age, yesterday is a little fuzzy but sixty years ago is sharper than ever, and he begins with a story of family holidays.

  ‘When I was a kid, I went with my parents and my brother to Butlins Holiday Camp at Pwllheli. I had a vision … what do you call it? An epiphany. I was by the swimming pool, and we were such a funny family, a little bit Alan Bennett. From a door in one of the buildings, I see four guys walk out in a line. They were all dressed the same. They all had grey crew-neck sweaters, tartan twat hats, tartan shorts, and a rolled white towel under their arm. I thought, “Holy shit!” Then I went to see them in the talent show, and they wore grey zoot suits, and they were from Gateshead, and they won. And I totally remember that. So when we came to be the Beatles, I said, “You know what?” and I told everyone about this epiphany. And so we ended up in suits and we all wore the same.’

  So the look wasn’t Brian Epstein’s idea?

  ‘I don’t think it was.’

  McCartney said he had always been fascinated by the appearance of things. A few weeks after his Boston show, his old band would make their first appearance in a video game, The Beatles: Rockband, which involves playing along to Beatles songs on plastic instruments and scoring points for how well you can strum with George or keep pace with Ringo. The game was being packaged with huge posters showing the band around the time of A Hard Day’s Night. The font used to display the band’s name looks like the one the band used at the time: thick black letters, small spiky serifs, the large boastful B at the start, that long T that extends below the baseline of the other capitals.

  The Beatles – boastful B, dropped T. Could be a band to watch

  This was the logo-type that Ringo pounded behind on his bass drum skin when they played Shea Stadium in August 1965, the one that came up for auction at Sotheby’s in August 1989, the logo that attached itself to most of the repackaging and merchandizing after their split. The video game designers have adapted it slightly for the drumkit that comes with their game: the B is taller, the counter space in the B and A is larger, and the bottom curl on the S has lost its serif and instead snakes devilishly towards a fine point.

  ‘It wasn’t a typeface,’ McCartney says. ‘I think I drew it when I was at school. I used to sit around endlessly with notebooks, drawing Elvis, drawing guitars, drawing logos, drawing my signature. At that sort of time we were starting the Beatles and I think in my drawings I hit upon the idea of having the T long. It’s not going to do me any good to really claim that, but it’s quite possible.’ Others have also claimed credit – Ivor Arbiter, the London drum shop owner who claims to have designed it for £5, and sign painter Eddie Stokes who worked for Arbiter painting drum skins in his lunch hour. Whoever was responsible, it seems likely that the main subconscious influence on the look of the letters came from Goudy Old Style – which would place the nameplate of the most famous English pop group of all time firmly in the heritage of early twentieth-century America.

  McCartney is more certain about the logo that came after. ‘The Wings one was me,’ he says. ‘Do you remember Tommy Walls? Walls Ice Cream had a strip in The Eagle comic, the posh comic. I lo
ved that arriving at my house. One of the characters was called Tommy Walls, he had adventures every week, and the Lucky Walls sign was [he puts his two hands together to form a W]. Linda encouraged the fans to do it, and the fans now will do that when we do a Wings song. I think I do have a branding brain. I would appreciate it when I saw an amazing logo. When I saw the Stones tongue I’d think, “Oh yeah – got that right”’.

  Logotypes and brand marks, of course, are not the same as fonts, although they may soon become them. One can download a whole alphabet modelled on the Beatles logo (or their Magical Mystery Tour writing, or Lennon’s handwriting) and if you use the letters to spell, say, or it can be rather unnerving.

  You can also get a font ‘created as a tribute’ to Pink Floyd (resembling the scratchy letters drawn by Gerald Scarfe for album) and ‘a musical font that resembles one of the logos of the famous rock band’, or modelled on the lettering created by Jamie Hewlett for Damon Albarn’s cartoon band.*

  The Beatles: Rock Band video game was released on the same day as the newly mastered and repackaged versions of all the albums, and spreading all the sleeves in a line provides an informative lesson in how, when it came to type, the most original and experimental band and their designers often used the fonts that just seemed to be knocking about. There’s a heavy Letraset-application of sans serif on Revolver, embossed Helvetica for the White Album, a Univers type for the back of Abbey Road (reflecting the London street names in this style), a shaded, mildly psychedelic choice for the Red and Blue compilations.

  There were notable exceptions, not least the bulbous psychedelia of Yellow Submarine designed to look like an underwater LSD trip, and the hand-drawn nameplate of Rubber Soul from 1965 that evoked the mindbending graphics of the underground magazines of the day. The lettering artist Charles Front received twenty-five guineas (£26.25) for his Rubber Soul letters – inspired by the idea of rubber pulled downwards by gravity. In 2008 he put the original artwork up for sale at Bonhams; it went for £9,600.

  These days, a musical product with the ambition of the Beatles would never leave the management office without careful consideration of type. Despite McCartney’s early school doodlings, his group didn’t have a nameplate until several years into their career. Most artists now have a font that defines their style from the beginning, and even if they never went to art school they appear type-savvy. Some even sing about fonts.

  Lily Allen went for an apocalyptic face for her debut album Alright, Still, all irregular jagged sizes and modular spacing, but then used type itself as the main image on the cover of her follow-up, It’s Not Me, It’s You, leaning back on a huge slab-serif L as if it was a lounge chair (actually she looks a little crammed in and uncomfortable). Sometimes personalization tries too hard. The use of handwriting – nicely illustrated on the same Lily Allen cover – seems to say, ‘I’m just like you even though I’m famous and wealthy now.’

  Often it’s just better to be apart and extreme. Amy Winehouse’s debut album Frank featured her name in a sharp angular sans serif that overlapped the title. But her diva image was far better suited to the glamour of the 1930s deco lettering on her follow-up Back To Black. This custom-made type has fine Gill Sans-style capitals at its root, fattened up by a barcode of vertical stripes and bookended by another thicker line. The letters are loaded with historical significance, but the precise pedigree is hazy: an Atlantic ocean liner perhaps, or a poster announcing a new Gershwin show.

  The Back To Black font has notable antecedents: the Atlas face designed by KH Schaefer and issued by Francaise type foundry in 1933 (also known as Fatima), and Ondina, designed by K Kranke for the Schriftguss foundry in 1935. It works for Winehouse not just because it reflects her voice, which is something from a former and smokier age, but because it’s a shortcut to brand recognition. You need just see the A to recognize the product, the way you just need the long T to recognize the Beatles.

  In a crowded field, like pop music, personality can be key. To emphasize the idea that Coco Sumner is not just the daughter of Sting and Trudie Styler, but a credible performer in her own right, her pop band I Blame Coco promotes itself with a script typeface specifically based on her handwriting. Vampire Weekend, the hot college band of 2010, were so keen to associate themselves with modernist and experimental that they not only used it big on their breakthrough album but also mention the font in their song ‘Holiday’, about a girl who has never seen the word ‘bombs’ written ‘in ninety-six-point Futura’.

  Personal touch – handwriting as font

  The music world has always had an intimate relationship with the type world, but never has it been so keen to emphasize the fact. Kylie Minogue features in a song by Towa Tei called ‘German Bold Italic’, while the Boston band the Grace Period has recorded a song called ‘Boring Arial Layout’ (which, on their album Dynasty, followed a track called ‘How To Get Ahead In Advertising’). And there are at least two that would have Stanley Morison turning in his grave: ‘Times New Roman’ by the Applicants, and ‘Times New Romance’ by Monochrome.

  One suspects that a fair number of these bands have been influenced by the work of Peter Saville, whose Factory Records work for Joy Division/New Order defined the use of type on album covers through the 1980s. Saville is more art director than typographer but customized the fonts for his projects and put them centre stage. And it is hard to resist the typographic combination on his cover of Pulp’s We Love Life, which combines a Victorian woodblock Fat Face with a Dymo label.

  Idiosyncratic type combo – the woodblock is taken from a series of decorative alphabets by Louis John Pouchée, who ran a London type foundry in the 1820s

  But for the most recognizable letters in modern music we should look beyond a band or its record sleeve to a man driving along in an open-top car towards his home in Oakland California. This is Jim Parkinson, baseball cap and goatee beard, designer of such fonts as Jimbo, Balboa, Mojo and Modesto, graphic embodiments of the Californian dream. Parkinson’s life is like a Doobie Brothers song, a band for whom he has designed album covers. He likes wild type, fairground type, type that speaks of the more indulgent and liberated things in life, including loud rock music and youthful rebellion. Now approaching seventy, he designs the sort of type children would design given half a chance.

  Parkinson grew up in Richmond, California, and as a child used to visit an elderly lettering artist who drew fancy certificates commemorating big achievements with loopy capitals. After art school he landed a job at Hallmark cards in Kansas, where he worked on fonts that were made to look like handwriting. He gave them names at random: Cheap Thrills, Horsey, Punk. ‘I named one of them “I Don’t Know”, just so I could say it when someone asked me what it was called.’

  He thinks he must have made fifty or sixty different styles, drawing freehand pen and ink on tissue paper. He showed me one with this (handwritten) legend:

  Though we think of our friends

  many times through the year

  And wish them happiness too

  It’s especially pleasant

  when Christmas is here

  To remember and say that we do.

  Merry Christmas.

  It was while he was creating these Hallmark fonts* that Parkinson read about the counter-culture in San Francisco. He moved back to California and took all the work he could get: posters for The New Riders of the Purple Sage, potato chip packets, type for Creedence Clearwater Revival and one for The Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus that survived for twenty years.

  On his more buttoned-down, bill-paying days, Parkinson has updated mastheads (or, strictly speaking, ‘nameplates’) for the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times – many of them classic English blackletters that needed to be moved on a century. But his most famous and recognizable lettering adorns the masthead for a magazine that once defined a generation: Rolling Stone. This is a blocky but fluid type with 3-D shading, the sort one might attempt when doodling. The R l
oops like a sustained guitar note, its tail curling beneath the o to reach the l, while the lower bowl of the g smirks as it fuses with the S. It is strong, clean and as perennially appealing as a well-wrapped tube of sweets. One letter alone identifies it on the news stand, and it can stand any amount of being obscured by the cover stars’ heads. ‘I used to dismiss it,’ Jim Parkinson says, ‘telling people I had also done a lot of other things. But now I embrace it.’

  There are few more redolent or potent graphic images of the Sixties, even if Parkinson only got to work on it in 1977. ‘This is the first one,’ he says, consulting a book of Rolling Stone covers in his studio. It was drawn by psychedelic-poster artist Rick Griffin, who received $75 for something he considered merely a sketch. Jann Wenner, the magazine’s editor, decided there wasn’t enough time to refine it; the first masthead appeared over a picture of John Lennon in army garb and a story about the missing money from the Monterey pop festival. It was cleaned up over the years, most notably by John Pistilli, designer of the Didot-style Pistilli Roman, who added more flourishes and fanciful balls to the foot of many letters. Parkinson was asked to change it for the 10th anniversary issue in 1977 (the cover image was simply a giant Parkinson-shaded X).

  Rick Griffin’s original Rolling Stone masthead

  The designer flicks through more changes, stopping at a cover from January 1981, the first where the lettering on the masthead is joined up. ‘It was a big change, but nobody noticed,’ he says. This was because readers were concentrating on the photo beneath it, by Annie Leibovitz, of a naked John Lennon curled up around a clothed Yoko, the issue that marked his murder.

  Parkinson’s redrawn Rolling Stone masthead – you need no more than the R to recognize it