About Typeface
How much attention are you paying to the typeface that these words are printed in? Probably not a lot. Typefaces are everywhere, yet the only time most of us notice them is when they don't work and we can't read them. Skip to next paragraph Eduard Matamoros Not for much longer. Typefaces are becoming as fashionable in their own way as Chloé's white embroidered tunics. That's always been the case for the handful of people who are passionately interested in them, type designers who blog away about how embarrassingly ubiquitous the Mrs Eaves font has become, or whether Tobias Frere-Jones's Gotham will ever match his Interstate. To the rest of us, the world of typography has been a distant and inscrutable place. As with all elite industries, it has its own leaders and language. The king of contemporary type design is Matthew Carter, a Briton based in Cambridge, Mass., whose Verdana is one of the world's most popular computer fonts. Typography's crown princes are a few New Yorkers: Christian Schwartz, who co-designed the Guardian newspaper's elegant new face; and Frere-Jones, the creator of the Interstate and Gotham fonts, and his partner, Jonathan Hoefler, who together have designed type for Martha Stewart Living and The Wall Street Journal. When Carter started out in the 1950's, he was one of the last to carve letter shapes out of metal to create blocks of type. Technology changed all of that. Today, anyone armed with the right software package can design a typeface, albeit not very well. And whether or not we know it, everyone who uses a computer has become a type consumer, simply by dint of choosing whether to print letters or post an e-mail message in Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, Courier or any of the other typefaces that are dished out for free with software. We novices have quickly become hip to the style code. Helvetica is fine in print but not on-screen. Vice versa for Verdana. And only an uncool idiot would ever use Arial. What we are just beginning to pick up on is that, thanks to the computer, trends in typography are changing as quickly as in fashion. It started in the 1990's, when softer, curvier typefaces — like Verdana and Scala (created by the Dutch designer Martin Majoor and used in Wallpaper's earliest incarnation) — began to supplant the classic sans-serifs Helvetica and Futura. (Translation: sans-serif type has none of those squiggly bits at the ends of the letters.) Verdana and Scala are the typographic equivalent of the soft modernism of Prada's neat little 1990's coatdresses and Christian Liaigre's beige-on-beige interiors at the Mercer Hotel. By the end of the 90's, just as fashionistas were growing bored of global branding and started rummaging around vintage stores for quirky alternatives, type designers turned to their history books, too. The designer Zuzana Licko, based in Berkeley, Calif., led the way with Mrs Eaves, her reinvention of the 18th-century Baskerville typeface. Named after the woman who was John Baskerville's housekeeper and later became his wife, Mrs Eaves is gloriously ornate, with the fanciful swirls and serifs that Bauhaus-influenced designers had long considered verboten. Originally designed for the typography magazine Emigre, it appeared on everything from junk mail to Web sites and unleashed the fashion for elaborate curlicue typefaces like those in early 2000 issues of Paris Vogue and Rolling Stone. Since then, type, like fashion, has sobered up. Just as Lanvin and Rochas are making contemporary clothes seem as precious and lovingly made as vintage pieces by combining modern materials and finishes with old techniques, so too are type designers using their computers to modernize classic typefaces like Bodoni and Bembo. Take the Guardian's Egyptian typeface, designed by Schwartz with Paul Barnes, or Schwartz's new Farnham typeface in the art magazine Frieze. Simpler and more sedate than Mrs Eaves, these faces blend the crispness of digitally created type with a nod to history in their neat serifs. Type purists might wince at the analogy, but Guardian Egyptian and Farnham are the typographic equivalents of the sleek Lanvin shirtdress that I've set my heart on wearing this summer. So, what's next in type? The design historian Emily King suspects it will be the trend to digitize obscure historic faces, like Carter's beautiful title letter for this magazine. Carter redesigned the T from the current New York Times nameplate, which was inspired by early-16th-century German black-letter type. But you may have already guessed that, if you've been paying attention.
- Find three type faces online designed/used in the 80s
- Research the history of one font.
- In google docs or in word: write a brief paragraph include 1. who designed it, 2. the name of the font and 3. whether it is a serif or san serif font. 4. paste into your document a sample of all three font styles you chose and label the names of the fonts
- Share the file with me rmalik@rbrhs.org or email the word file to me at rmalik@rbrhs.org
- DUE SEPT 23 Tuesday
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