Just My Type

by Simon Garfield

  It was rare at that time for a magazine to have custom typefaces for its entire editorial content, but the designer Roger Black asked Parkinson to do those as well. The family was inspired by fifteenth-century Italian serifs; Parkinson calls them ‘Nicolas Jenson on acid’, although there is also a lot of Cochin, a popular 1913 font, in there. When the type family was digitized in the 1990s, the attempts to register it as Rolling Stone were blocked for copyright reasons connected with the band. So they called it Parkinson. There are ten styles and weights – from Parkinson Roman to

  The walls of Parkinson’s home studio provide a checklist of the classic inspirations of American type. His shelves hold books on Caslon and German gothics, script types suggested by the Speedball pen company, and specimen books from the Bruce New York type foundry from 1882, Stephenson Blake from 1926, and Letraset from the 1970s. Nearby there are physical letters – U, F, C and K – that once graced a theatre marquee, which he found irresistible.

  ‘Too often ideas get lost because type insinuates itself between the reader and the idea,’ Parkinson says. ‘It’s not all about simplicity, because you have to always keep things interesting, but the type must never be allowed to become too important. Letters evolve by trial and error – by public scrutiny, by standing the test of time. A lot of designers today don’t have the patience for that.’

  Sometimes you just need a type that says Pleasure, possibly in French. A font for a luxury watch, maybe, or a restaurant. The name you need is Vendôme – a font designed in 1952 by a stage designer, François Ganeau, at Fonderie Olive, the foundry that also gave us and

  The face may have been named after Place Vendôme in Paris or perhaps the town along the Loire, but one thing is certain: it had to take a circumflex. Vendôme is as French as a baguette, proud and dismissive. It is modelled on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century types by Claude Garamond and Jean Jannon, but is hardly respectful of them, with its serifs of irregular lengths in the same letter (the K, L, M and N have some serifs of equal width, some shorter on the left and some on the right).

  Ganeau was a sculptor and theatre designer, and the tactile, three-dimensional element is clearly evident in his type. It looks as if it has been hurriedly cut out of black paper with no attempt to clean it up, and the result, especially in its bold and extra bold version, is a delightful statement of freedom. If you don’t want a corny old art deco sign for your mid-market bistro or café, you use Vendôme and a stylish clientele will rush to sit beneath it.

  ‘It’s gorgeous,’ says the book designer David Pearson. ‘Really sculptural and sensual. I’d like to use it more than I do. But you hardly see it in Britain. In France it is so overused that it’s been devalued, like Helvetica.’ When Pearson was asked to select one perfect letterform, he picked the Vendôme Bold C, particularly keen on the distortion that called to mind ‘ill-fitting corsets’ and a tool that removes staples. He called Vendôme his mistress. ‘Baskerville is my default, but sometimes you just have to break free.’

  Marketing for Vendôme from the Bauer Type Foundry

  Still, after all these years, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. This is a pangram, a phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, and it endures, like the Alphabet Song in Sesame Street, for the simple reason that the phrase is rare, and no one has yet been able to think of a better one. As such, it is instantly familiar to anyone in the type world – a ‘display phrase’ that will allow you to put a font through its paces, check there’s nothing untoward.

  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is not a perfect pangram, because it repeats letters. The truly perfect pangram would contain all the letters of the alphabet in the right order, but the only thing that achieves that is the alphabet. There are phrases that use fewer characters, but they are not as catchy. And this is not for want of trying. Here are two of the shortest:

  It actually happens: the quick brown fox does his thing on YouTube

  Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim.

  Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow.

  And here are a couple that make a kind of sense:

  Zany eskimo craves fixed job with quilting party.

  Playing jazz vibe chords quickly excites my wife.

  However, they are not serious rivals. Not the kind of thing that would inspire 300,000 or so people to watch the video on YouTube where the phrase comes to life. The video (and you must watch) features a fox, slightly more grey than brown, jumping over a dog. It needs a couple of attempts to make the clearance, and the dog just stands there, oblivious to its contribution to type history. But letter lovers who have seen this astounding feat have found the video world-changing. ‘Wow, this actually happens in real life,’ commented Jackewilton. And tmc515 summed it up for all time: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe our work here is done.’

  Type foundries like to ring the changes with their display phrases. Browse old specimen books, or modern online sites, and you will find a whole range of sayings, often evoking the font in question, sometimes by means of a pangram.

  A few of them are composed by type designers and reference their trade. Jonathan Hoefler reckons you could Mix Zapf with Veljovic and get quirky Beziers. While Hermann Zapf asserted Typography is known for two-dimensional architecture and requires extra zeal within every job. Zapf’s phrase also works in German: Typographie ist zweidimensionale Architektur und bedingt extra Qualität in jeder vollkommenen Ausführung. And there are other good pangrams in French (Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume, which translates as ‘Take this old whiskey to the blond judge who smokes’), and Dutch (Zweedse ex-VIP, behoorlijk gek op quantumfysica, which means ‘Swedish ex-VIP, pretty crazy about quantum physics’.)

  Type designers clearly find the pangram an important display tool, engaging the mind in a way that ABCDE does not. But what happens when a phrase becomes just too long? Is there a shorter and more arresting way of performing a similar job?

  When Paul Renner designed Futura, his display phrase was (‘The font of our time’). But that was a statement of intent; clearly not every new typeface could make that claim. One that could was Univers, the classic Swiss type by Adrian Frutiger. When this appeared in a lavish book celebrating his work, it was displayed in a text written by Frutiger himself:

  You may ask why so many different typefaces. They all serve the same purpose but they express man’s diversity. It is the same diversity we find in wine. I once saw a list of Medoc wines featuring 60 different Medocs all of the same year. All of them were wines but each were different from the others. It’s the nuances that are important. The same is true of typefaces.

  The Frutiger book is not, however, a marketing tool available to most new fonts, which at best have a narrow column in online catalogues to sell their wares. For decades one word has usually sufficed: Hamburgers or Hamburgerfont. This successfully showed off the characters of a new typeface that would most distinguish it from its competitors: the h, g and e have always expressed their own individuality.

  When Matthew Carter starts work on a new font, he usually first draws an h, followed by an o and a p and a d. It sets the tone for letters that follow, and hopefully creates the correct sense of height, width and balance. But it is only when his letters are placed side by side – when they relate to each other – that he can see whether he’s on to something or if it’s time to start afresh.

  A word like Hamburgerfont will usually tell you straight off, for it provides all the major curves and abutments in regular usage. And if you’re in the process of choosing a new type to use from a long list, then it’s handy to have the same word repeated to use as a comparison. The typeface foundry URW was based in Hamburg and may be the source of the word (it has also been Hamburgevons and Hamburgefontsiv). It has also been used in the catalogues of the other major type suppliers ITC, Monotype and Adobe. Agfa often used Championed. The Letraset catalogues favoured Lorem Ipsum Dolor.

  Now there is a new(ish) word: Handgloves.

  The d
igital type library FontShop sells many thousands of fonts designed all over the world. The names of the bestsellers will usually be followed by the letters OT, short for OpenType, which means the font is seamlessly usable on multiple operating systems. These are, unsurprisingly, mostly text faces you can actually use in approachable and professional ways (ie they aren’t mad like FF Dirtyfax, which looks as if you have pulled a sheet of A4 through a paperjam). They have been produced by different designers who have licensed their work to a chosen foundry. As with most things digital, the old order has crumbled in its wake.

  Eighty years ago, most countries had a handful of traditional foundries supplying a choice of typefaces to those who bought their typesetting and printing services.

  Do Not Adjust Your Eyes: Dirtyfax

  They would employ in-house designers, and their styles were necessarily conservative; there was no point in spending months on a fancy font that no one used. Occasionally something unpredictable broke through – Paul Renner making Futura for the Bauer Type Foundry in Frankfurt, Eric Gill making Gill Sans for Monotype in Surrey, Rudolf Koch making Kabel for the Klingspor Foundry in Offenbach – but it wasn’t like today, where it is hard to distinguish the revolutionary from the bizarre.

  Every couple of weeks, FontShop staff email their clients a list of new designs. Many are stylish and practical, others look like clever graphic stunts that would seem hard to use in any context. But still they fill up the inbox every fortnight, and even the most willing recipient will have a hard time keeping up. And so a new method of display has been devised. Rather than ten letters of each new typeface showing in Handgloves and the rest of the alphabet shown beneath it, each font now comes with words unique to its character, style and possible use.

  The font Lombriz is displayed in the catalogue by the phrase – it looks a little like the Kellogg’s signature on cereal boxes.

  The font Flieger is shown off best with the words as if in chrome on the trunk of a Cadillac.

  The phrase employed to describe the typeface FF Chernobyl seems a little heartless: .

  ‘It’s one of my favourite things to do,’ Stephen Coles says at the FontShop office in San Francisco. ‘You get to play with type, pick the characters that are most interesting, and do what you want with them. For a type lover it’s like porn.’

  Coles has the title of Type Director at FontShop and he will confess to the occasional collision with an object in the street as he looks up to admire a shop sign. His official biography says he is ‘currently dating FF Tisa after breaking off a long and passionate affair with Motter Femina’. At the open-plan office in San Francisco, he produced some recent examples of new fonts, which he and his colleagues were selling with the words (for the metallic and industrial PowerStation font), (for the curly and delicate Anglia Script) and (for the lower-case very rounded Naiv).

  ‘You concentrate on what glyphs in this typeface give it its distinctiveness,’ he explained, ‘and make sure that those are included in the sample. We try to think where the font would be used. If it’s a newspaper’s typeface we might do a headline. But if it’s a fancy typeface we wouldn’t just do an invitation to a wedding, we would try to be a little more sly about it. We also don’t want to give a typeface a set use right away by limiting how it’s displayed – you want it to feel versatile. And the display is very important. You can have a font that is really well designed, but if you don’t display it well it’s not going to sell. It’s like taking a bad photograph of a sofa.’ (Coles is also a fan of classic modernist furniture.)

  I asked him about Handgloves. He said, ‘It’s got the straights in the h, it’s got the a and the g, which are the most distinctive parts of any typeface, it shows the way a curve meets a straight in the n and the d, and it’s got the round with the o and the diagonals with the v. It’s got ascenders, descenders and it feels good as a shape.’ Literally and figuratively, it contains a font’s DNA. ‘But we’re trying to come up with a new standard word now. We’re trying to drop Handgloves. We’ve had Handgloves for a while now.’

  Coles introduced me to Chris Hamamoto, who had a long list of Handgloves alternatives on his computer. Anyone in the office could add to it, but there were certain guidelines:

  The key letters, in order of importance, are: g, a, s, e.

  Then there is: l, o, I. And of lesser importance but still

  helpful: d (or b), h, m (or n), u, v.

  Verbs or generic nouns are preferable because they

  don’t describe the font (like adjectives) or confuse the

  sample word with a font name (like proper nouns).

  Avoid tandem repeating letters unless showing off

  alternatives.

  Use one word, as spaces can get too large and distracting

  at display sizes.

  The words selected by FontShop staff were: Girasole, Sage oil, Dialogues, Legislator, Coalescing, Anthologies, Genealogist, Legislation, Megalopolis, Megalopenis, Rollerskating and gasoline. Then there was a secondary list, which used at least four of the key letters: Majestic, Salinger, Designable, Harbingers, Webslinger, Skatefishing, Masquerading and … Handgloves. And for some reason that nobody could quite define – possibly familiarity, possibly because of the same visual instinct that sealed its choice in the first place – Handgloves still looked the best.

  On the day I visited, Hamamoto was working on an email display of some fresh type specimens. He said he drew inspiration from books, Internet searches and rap music. I had received his latest email the day before, which included , a font by British designer Jonathan Barnbrook working at the Virus foundry, whose work was influenced by nineteenth-century slab-serif Empire fonts and was described by Hamamoto as political, and which he had illustrated with the phrases and

  There was also Aunt Mildred, which had a spidery feel and was shown with lines of gothic poetry, and xenxietta, Samuels, from the flowery hand of a Swedish calligrapher, which had reminded the FontShop staff of old-fashioned candy wrappers: ‘The capital E is really gorgeous!’ Stephen Coles said. But the one recent font that the people at FontShop seemed most excited about was . As their blurb went, ‘New typefaces by legendary designer Matthew Carter come few and far between, so Rocky naturally grabbed our attention.’ The design had come about because Carter had been wondering why no Bodoni-style fonts (the face with the high contrast thick and thin strokes) had Latin serifs (which were almost triangular). Rocky was the answer, and came in forty different styles, including , , and .

  Rocky was displayed in the catalogue with the obscure hip-hop phrases and . It looked exquisite, but the words appeared meaningless; clearly, the type was in control now.

  We’d need another book, of course, to do this justice. And where would one start?

  Fonts are like cars on the street – we notice only the most beautiful or ugly, the funniest or the flashiest. The vast majority roll on regardless. There may be many reasons why we dislike or distrust certain fonts, and overuse and misuse are only starting points. Fonts may trigger memory as pungently as perfume: can summon up exam papers. TRAJAN may remind us of lousy choices at the cinema (you’ll see it on the posters of more bad films than any other font) and gruelling evenings with Russell Crowe. There was a time when it looked as though he would only appear in films – A BEAUTIFUL MIND, MASTER AND COMMANDER, MYSTERY, ALASKA – if the marketing team promised to use Trajan in its pseudo-Roman glory on all its promotional material (There is a funny and rather alarming YouTube clip about this: search for ‘Trajan is the Movie Font’.)

  Most of the time we only notice typeface mistakes, or things before or behind their times. In the 1930s, people tutted over and predicted fleeting fame; today we may be outraged by the grunge fonts and but in a decade they may be everywhere, and a decade after that we may be bored with their blandness.

  Fortunately, choosing the worst fonts in the world is not merely an exercise in taste and personal vindictiveness – there has been academic research. In 2007, Anthony Cahalan published h
is study of font popularity (or otherwise) as part of Mark Batty’s Typographic Papers Series (Volume 1). He had sent an online questionnaire to more than a hundred designers, and asked them to identify:

  a) the fonts they used most,

  b) the ones they believed were most highly visible,

  c) the ones they liked least.

  The Top Tens were:

  Used Regularly:

  1. (23 respondents)

  2. (21)

  3. Futura (15)

  4. (13)

  5. (11)

  6. (10)

  7= Bembo; (8)

  9. Minion (7)

  10. (6)

  Highly Visible:

  1. (29)

  2. (13)

  3. (9)

  4. (8)

  5. (7)

  6. (4)

  7. Futura (3)

  8= ; ; (2)

  Least Favourite:

  1. (19)

  2. (18)

  3. (13)

  4= ; (8)

  6= ; (6)

  8. (generic) (5)

  9= (4)

  11. (3)

  The Least Favourite survey contained brief explanations. Twenty-three respondents said the fonts were misused or overused; 18 believed they were ugly; others found them to be boring, dated, impractical or clichéd; 13 expressed either dislike or blind hatred.

  This was not the first such survey to be conducted. There seems to be a new one every year online, but they tend to concentrate, rightly, on best fonts. Occasionally a novel theory emerges, such as the opinion expressed by the designer Mark Simonson on the Typophile forum. Simonson believes that some typefaces are ‘novice magnets’, possessing properties that draw in those with an untrained eye but a desire to impress. ‘To the average person, most fonts look more or less the same. But, if a typeface has a strong flavour, it calls attention to itself. It’s easy to recognize and makes people feel like they know something about fonts when they recognize it. And it looks “special” compared to normal (ie boring) fonts, so using it makes their documents look “special”. To the experienced designer, such typefaces have too much flavour, call too much attention to themselves, not to mention the fact that they often carry the baggage of being associated with amateur design.’