As is always the case with any style there’s a law of diminishing returns. The more you see it, the more the public see is, the more the designer uses those typographic and graphic solutions, the more familiar, predictable and ultimately dull they become.

Rick Poyner on the overuse of Helvetica

At Emigre we acknowledge that we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, but we do so in order to reach for something new needs, new wants, or new concerns. So when we produce typefaces, tradition is not our main concern. Instead, we let ourselves be influenced by everything that visual culture has to offer. We take into account people’s reading habits, but recognize that reading is not a static process and readability is not a static attribute. People absorb a wide variety of visual messages and have an innate ability to recognize patterns–type or otherwise. This allows for a generous deviation form the readability norm established for traditional book typography.

We are not concerned with issues of purity, transparency, neutrality, or timelessness. Perfection is not a noble pursuit, but we try not to get hung up on it. Most of our fonts are not intended for use in novel-length texts, though some, with the right care, have been used successfully in this capacity. We are not proponents of one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, out aim is to make available typefaces of expressive quality that will help designers realize and enhance specific ideas in a wide variety of applications. As a result, not only has the American Institute of Graphic Arts selected an Emigre font as their official typeface; Emigre types have also adorned the jerseys of major league football and baseball teams, and can be found on the place mats of multi-national fast-food chains or silk-screened onto the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. High or low culture, at Emigre we believe that all ideas deserve a suitable typeface. We hope you’ll find one here that fits your idea.

Excerpt from Various Types, Berkeley, California, 2004

Liquidity, saturation, and overflow are words that describe the information surplus that besets us at the start of the twenty-first century. Images proliferate in this media-rich environment, and so too does the written word. Far from diminishing in influence, text has continued to expand its power and pervasiveness. The visual expression of language has grown increasingly diverse, as new fonts and formats evolve to accommodate the relentless display of the word.Typography is the art of designing letterforms and arranging them in space and time. Since its invention during the Renaissance, typography has been animated by the conflict between fixed architectural elements-such as the page and its margins-and the fluid substance of written words. Evolutions in the life of the letter arise from dialogs between wet and dry, soft and hard, slack and taut, amorphous and geometric, ragged and flush, planned and unpredicted. With unprecedented force, these conflicts are driving typographic innovation today. Typography is going under water as designers submerge themselves in the textures and transitions that bond letter, word, and surface. As rigid formats become open and pliant, the architectural hardware of typographic systems is melting down.

The flush, full page of the classical book is dominated by a single block of justified text, its characters mechanically spaced to completely occupy the designated volume. The page is like a glass into which text is poured, spilling over from one leaf to the next. By the early twentieth century, the classical page had given way to the multicolumned, mixed-media structures of the modern newspaper, magazine, and illustrated book.

Today, the simultaneity of diverse content streams is a given. Alongside the archetype of the printed page, the new digital archetype of the window has taken hold. The window is a scrolling surface of unlimited length, whose width adjusts at the will of reader or writer. In both print and digital media, graphic designers devise ways to navigate bodies of information by exploring the structural possibilities of pages and windows, boxes and frames, edges and margins.

In 1978, Nicholas Negroponte and Muriel Cooper, working at mit’s Media Lab, published a seminal essay on the notion of ‘soft copy,’ the linguistic raw material of the digital age. The bastard offspring of hard copy, soft text lacks a fixed typographic identity. Owing allegiance to no font or format, it is willingly pasted, pirated, output, or repurposed in countless contexts. It is the ubiquitous medium of word-processing, desk-top publishing, e-mail, and the Internet. The burgeoning of soft copy had an enormous impact on graphic design in the 1980s and 1990s. In design for print, soft copy largely eliminated the mediation of the typesetter, the technician previously charged with converting the manuscript-which had been painstakingly marked up by hand with instructions from the designer-into galleys, or formal pages of type. Soft copy flows directly to designers in digital form from authors and editors. The designer is free to directly manipulate the text-without relying on the typesetter-and to adjust typographic details up to the final moments of production. The soft copy revolution led designers to plunge from an objective aerial view into the moving waters of text, where they shape it from within.

Digital media enable both users and producers, readers and writers, to regulate the flow of language. As with design for print, the goal of interactive typography is to create ‘architectural’ structures that accommodate the organic stream of text. But in the digital realm, these structures-and the content they support-have the possibility of continuous transformation. In their essay about soft copy, Negroponte and Cooper predicted the evolution of digital interfaces that would allow typography to transform its size, shape, and color. Muriel Cooper (1925-1994) went on to develop the idea of the three-dimensional ‘information landscape,’ a model that breaks through the window frames that dominate electronic interfaces.

Viewed from a distance, a field of text is a block of gray. But when one comes in close to read, the individual characters predominate over the field. Text is a body of separate objects that move together as a mass, like cars in a flow of traffic or individuals in a crowd. Text is a fluid made from the hard, dry crystals of the alphabet.

Typeface designs in the Renaissance reflected the curving lines of handwriting, formed by ink flowing from the rigid nib of a pen. The cast metal types used for printing converted these organic sources into fixed, reproducible artifacts. As the printed book became the world’s dominant information medium, the design of typefaces grew ever more abstract and formalized, distanced from the liquid hand. Today, designers look back at the systematic, abstracting tendencies of modern letter design and both celebrate and challenge that rationalizing impulse. They have exchanged the anthracite deposits of the classical letter for lines of text that quiver and bleed like living things.

The distinctive use of type, which can endow a long or complex document with a sense of unified personality or behavior, also builds the identity of brands and institutions. Bruce Mau has described identity design as a ‘life problem,’ arguing that the visual expression of a company or product should appear like a frame taken from a system in motion.

The flat opacity of the printed page has been challenged by graphic designers who use image manipulation software to embed the word within the surface of the photographic image. A pioneer of such effects in the digital realm was P. Scott Makela (1960-1999). In the early 1990s, he began using PhotoShop, a software tool that had just been introduced, as a creative medium. In his designs for print and multimedia, type and image merge in dizzying swells and eddies as letters bulge, buckle, and morph. The techniques he helped forge have become part of the fundamental language of graphic design. The linear forms of typography have become planar surfaces, skimming across and below the pixelated skin of the image.

The alphabet is an ancient form that is deeply embedded in the mental hardware of readers. Graphic designers always ground their work, to some degree, in historic precedent, tapping the familiarity of existing symbols and styles even as they invent new idioms. While some designers pay their toll to history with reluctance, others dive eagerly into the reservoirs of pop culture.Tibor Kalman (1949–1999) led the graphic design world’s reclamation of visual detritus, borrowing from the commonplace vernacular of mail-order stationery and do-it-yourself signage. Designers now frankly embrace the humor and directness of everyday artifacts. In the aesthetic realm as in the economic one, pollution is a natural resource-one that is expanding rather than shrinking away.

Thirty years ago, progressive designers often described their mission as ‘problem-solving’. They aimed to identify the functional requirements of a project and then discover the appropriate means to satisfy the brief. Today, it is more illuminating to speak of solvents than solutions. Design is often an attack on structure, or an attempt to create edifices that can withstand and engage the corrosive assault of content.

The clean, smooth surfaces of modernism proved an unsound fortress against popular culture, which is now invited inside to fuel the creation of new work. Image and text eat away at the vessels that would seal them shut. Forms that are hard and sharp now appear only temporarily so, ready to melt, like ice, in response to small environmental changes. All systems leak, and all waters are contaminated, not only with foreign matter but with bits of structure itself. A fluid, by definition, is a substance that conforms to the outline of its container. Today, containers reconfigure in response to the matter they hold.

In September design felt impotent and frivolous. There is nothing inherent in our profession that forces us to support worthy causes, to promote good things, to avoid visual pollution. There might be such a responsibility in us as people. In August, when thinking about my reasons for being alive, for getting out of bed in the morning, I would have written the following down.

1. Strive for happiness
2. Don’t hurt anybody
3. Help, others achieve the same

Now I would change that priority:

1. Help others
2. Don’t hurt anybody
3. Strive for happiness

My studio was engaged in cool projects, things designers like to do, like designing a cover for David Byrne

We had a good time designing them, and since the products and events these pieces promoted were fine, I don’t think we hurt anybody who bought them.

One of the many things I learned in my year without clients, a year I had put aside for experiments only, was that I’d like a part of my studio to move from creating cool things to significant things.

The 80s in graphic design were dominated by questions about the layout, by life style magazines, with Neville Brody’s Face seen as the big event. The 90s were dominated by questions about typography, readability, layering, with David Carson emerging as the dominant figure.

With prominent figures like Peter Saville recently talking about the crisis of the unnecessary and lamenting about the fact that our contemporary culture is monthly, there might now finally be room for content, for questions about what we do and for whom we are doing it. The incredible impact the First Things First manifesto had on my profession would certainly point in that direction.

The first sentence on page 1 of Victor Papanek’s “Design for the Real World” reads: “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier: Advertising design. In persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others that don’t care, it is probably the phoniest field in existence today.”

I do know that bad design can harm our lives. From the problems this little piece of bad typography caused in Florida to unnecessary junk mail and overproduced packaging, bad design makes the world a more difficult place to live in.

At the same time, strong design for bad causes or products can hurt us even more.

Good design + bad cause = bad

Just consider this age old and powerful symbol symbol and its transformation into a very successful identity program by the Nazis.

Context is all-important: The Christian cross had one meaning in 16th century Europe and another one in 20th century India.

Bad design + good cause = good?

On the other hand, bad design for a good cause can still be a good thing. We designed the logo for The Concert for New York, a huge charity event for the fire and policeman in Madison Square Garden, involving among others Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, The Who.

From a design point of view, the statue of liberty playing a guitar is a trite cliché. I am not suggesting that the logo had much to do with the over $ 20 million raised for the Robin Hood Foundation, well, actually, a tiny portion was raised through the logo in the from of merchandize sales.

How to be good?

Well, does help by definition have to be selfless? Am I allowed to get something out of myself? If I do help, am I permitted to have fun while doing so?

I read an interview with an art director in England discussing his award winning campaign ad campaign for an association for the blind, featuring a striking image of a guide dog with human eyes stripped in.
He mentioned that he knew that a picture of a cute puppy would have raised more donations for the association, but was more interested in winning awards. He had no problems with this attitude.

When GE gives 10 million to the WTC victim families, is it ok for them to look good for doing so?

Or, a more extreme case: Is it ok for Philip Morris to go and give 60 million to help out various charities and then spend another 108 million promoting this good deed in magazine ads?

If you are homeless and you just got a hot meal from St. Johns in Brooklyn, one of the organizations the money went to, you don’t really give a shit if the people who gave it to you tout their own horn afterwards.

Even though it really is a ridiculous case, isn’t it still preferable to blowing the entire 168 million on a regular ad budget?

And: Why are so many celebrities involved in charities?
Five years ago, my feeling was they just wanted to promote their careers. Now I am somewhat less cynical. It is conceivable that many simply came to realize the pursuit of money/fame/success does not hold the contentment it promised and are on the lookout for more significance.

Poor Sting practically ruined his career with all his do gooding, transforming himself from the cool leader of the Police to just another sappy rain forest bard

Where do the critics come in? If I make fun of Sting, do I keep other celebrities from following his lead and therefore somehow contribute to the destruction of the rainforest? If I do criticize Sting, do I have to have a better idea to help the world?

When philosopher Edward DeBono talks about values, he puts them into four equally important sections:

Me-values: ego and pleasure
Mates-values: belonging to a group, not letting it down
Moral-values: religious values, general law, general values of a particular culture
Mankind-values: human rights, ecology

I often make the mistake of concentrating on just a couple of these values in my life. We all have heard of the philanthropist who gave away millions to charity and was a genuine asshole to all his friends. Or the guy who is totally devoted to his family and friends but hates himself, drives a Suburban and works for a Nuclear Missile Plant.
Or Mr. Bin Laden himself: I am sure he is totally devoted to his religious values as well as to the values of his own culture, but does not really care about human rights much.

For a full life I would have to be involved in all four.

I do think there is a role for everyone. It does not really matter if I am the Mayor of New York, or if I design the tourist brochures for New York or if I sweep the streets in New York. There is always room to be nice to a co-worker, to send a sweet letter to Mom, to love Anni.

Of course there are different degrees of separation. The rescue worker down at Ground Zero is directly involved, when I design a pin to raise money to help the rescue worker, I’m a couple of degrees further removed. But I might just function twice as effective as a designer than I would as a rescue worker.

Well, while pondering those questions half a year ago, I got invited to participate in a media design exhibition in Vienna, Austria. One of the perks that came with the exhibit was a free, full-page ad in Austria’s best newspaper, space I was free to fill with whatever I liked.

It’s an idea for a packaging that might be applied in zones of large catastrophes, earthquakes and such. At the time I was naively thinking of far away locations, India or Africa, not for a second conceiving that my hometown New York itself might be turned into the largest catastrophe zone.

It is basically a large, hollow Lego like block containing basic foods like milk powder, water, dried fish, rice. After the food has been consumed, the empty packaging can be filled with sand or dirt and used as an interlocking brick to build a shelter.

In the ad I explained the idea and asked other designers, packaging manufacturers and aid organizations to contribute.

Responses came into my laptop immediately. Many from students who just wanted to help, some from Austrian packaging companies interested in participating and many from designers and architects offering ideas.

Also, it was an opportunity to feel and look good myself: The caring designer.

Among all the positive responses was also a violently negative one;
- the writer stating that this is the absolute worst idea he ever saw in this context, that it’s a case of designing poverty, just plain ignorant and stupid.

I got really nervous. I am just not used to having my work hated that much. Maybe I should have stuck to CD covers.

The e-mail did prompt me to get quickly in contact with aid organizations and I had subsequently a discussion with the Director of Emergency Preparedness at CARE, the largest of them all.

It turns out that in emergency cases, Care tends to buy food whenever possible locally in bulk: That way they don’t have to package, there is less garbage, they avoid shipping problems and the food will be compatible with local tastes.

And similar thinking applies for shelter: It’s to everybody’s advantage to use as much local building material as possible. Care just supplies some additional resource materials like rolls of plastic or corrugated metal sheets and utilizes the ingenuity of the population. This results in sturdier, better-built shelter.

It turns out, my e-mail writer was right:
This is a stupid idea.

SO: I have to be part of an organization, part of a problem to be able to come up with a solution. Do-gooding from afar, as a tourist, won’t do.

In the meantime in New York I was also at the center of a disaster, I was not tourist anymore. One of the tasks at hand was the creation of a symbol that could also work as a fundraiser for various charities hit hard by current events.

Our idea was a pin, made of the rubble of the World trade Center, a piece of metal that refused to be destroyed.
After the WTC disaster over 1 000 000 tons of rubble was removed from the site and brought by truck and barge to the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island.

The plan here is to make this into a large-scale project. We can raise $ 1.5 million per 100 000 pins sold.

Good Design + Good Cause = Good

Most of current graphic design done by professional design companies is used to promote or sell, which is fine, but design can also do so much more.

Design can unify

Francis Hopkinson, a writer, artist and a signatory of the declaration of independence designed the American Flag (never got paid for it though).

Design can help us remember

The towers of light by Julian Laverdiere and Paul Myoda, at this moment proposed as a temporary memorial down at Ground Zero, are a beautiful emotional response. They are ghost limbs; we can feel them even though they are not there anymore.

Design can simplify our lives

Everybody who had to buy tokens in the New York subway system would agree that the Metro card eased the way we go around the city.

Design can make someone feel better

After we designed the CD cover for the Rolling Stones there was quite some press interest in Europe and a number of Austrian and German TV stations came to New York for an interview. This was just around the time my Mom was celebrating her 70 Birthday. I made a T-shirt saying “Dear Mom! Have a great Birthday” and wore it during the interview. The Austrian station agreed to air the interviews exactly on her Birthday.
Mom felt better.

Design can make the world a safer place

Cipro comes with a complicated, difficult to understand information pamphlet. It could also inform quickly and efficiently about when and how to take it as well as side effects.

Design can help people rally behind a cause

Robbie Canals poster series wheat pasted all over New York in the 80-ies probably spoke to the already converted, but showed me there are other people out there who are not happy with the administration. I guess I picked these posters over the hundreds or thousands of posters designers created that would qualify as an example because I saw those actually pasted on the street.
There is this entire subsection in design, the peace or environmental poster, where only hundreds are actually printed, only dozens go up in the street and the rest is distributed to design competitions.
This of course does NOT help people rally behind a cause, it only helps the ego of the designer.

Design can inform and teach

From the abstract geometric signs and animals of the cave paintings to the graphs in the New York Times, designers give us a better understanding of the issues.

Design can raise money

As a stand in for all the promotions and ads that raised money for Non-Profit organizations I am showing here the Breast Cancer symbol which made a an impressive amount of money for cancer research.

Design can make us more tolerant

Russian designer Andrey Logvin simple poster called Troika speaks for itself.

Winter Sorbeck, design teacher and fictional main character in Chip Kidd’s new novel The Cheese Monkeys, says at one point: Uncle Sam is Commercial Art, the American Flag is graphic design. Commercial Art makes you BUY things, graphic Design GIVES you ideas.

If I’m able to do that, to give ideas, that WOULD be a good reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Despite heroic efforts to create a critical discourse for design, our field remains ruled, largely, by convention and intuition. Interested in alternative attitudes, I recently set out to examine the scientific literature on typography. From the late nineteenth century to the present, researchers from various fields—psychology, ergonomics, human computer interaction (HCI), and design—have tested typographic efficiency. This research, little known to practicing designers, takes a refreshingly rigorous—though often tedious and ultimately inconclusive—approach to how people respond to written words on page and screen.What did I learn from slogging through hundreds of pages photocopied or downloaded from journals with titles like Behavior and Information Technology and International Journal of Man-Machine Studies? Both a little and a lot.

Each study isolates and tests certain variables (font style, line length, screen size, etc.). Although rational and scientific, this process is also problematic, as typographic variables interact with each other—a pull on one part of the system has repercussions elsewhere. For example, in 1929 Donald G. Paterson and Miles A. Tinker published an analysis of type sizes—part of a series of studies they launched in pursuit of “the hygiene of reading.”1 Texts were set in 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 14-point type. The study emphatically concluded that 10 points is the “optimum size” for efficient reading—a result relevant, however, only for texts set at a particular line length (80 mm), in a particular typeface (not disclosed).

Another study by Paterson and Tinker tested ten different fonts, including traditional, serifed faces as well as the sans serif Kabel Lite, the monospaced American Typewriter, and the densely decorated, neo-medieval Cloister Black.2 Only the last two fonts—Typewriter and Cloister—caused any significant dip in reading speed. The authors’ conclusion: “Type faces [sic] in common use are equally legible” (613). Science leaves the designer more or less at sea in terms of font choice.

A 1998 study testing fonts on the screen revealed conflicts between how users performed and what they said they liked. An interdisciplinary team at Carnegie Mellon University compared Times Roman with Georgia, a serif font designed for the screen.3 Although the team found no objective difference, users preferred Georgia, which they judged sharper, more pleasing, and easier to read. A second test compared Georgia with Verdana, a sans serif face designed for on-screen viewing. In this case, users expressed a slight “subjective preference” for Verdana, but they performed better reading Georgia. Once again, the study concludes with no definitive guide.

How is typographic efficiency judged? “Legibility” concerns the ease with which a letter or word can be recognized (as in an eye exam), whereas “readability” describes the ease with which a text can be understood (as in the mental processing of meaningful sentences). Designers often distinguish “legibility” and “readability” as the objective and subjective sides of typographic experience. For scientists, however, readability can be objectively measured, as speed of reading + comprehension. Subjects in most of the studies cited here were asked to read a text and then answer questions. (Speed and comprehension are factored together because faster reading is often achieved at the expense of understanding content.)

The literature on readability includes numerous articles on whether (and why) paper is preferred over screens. In 1987 researchers working for IBM isolated and tested variables that affect text on both screen and page, including image quality, typeface, and line spacing.4 While the team hoped to successfully identify the culprit behind the poor performance of the screen, they discovered something else instead: an interplay of factors seemed to be at work, each variable interacting with others. The screen itself proved not to be the root cause of its own inefficiency; fault lay, instead, in the way text was presented—in short, its design.

In a second paper the IBM team proved that the efficiency difference between page and screen could be erased entirely if the screen were made to more closely resemble the “normal” conditions of print.5 This study presented black, anti-aliased typefaces on a light, high-resolution screen—features that became more or less standard in the 1990s. The IBM research thus established that design conventions evolved for print effectively translate to the realm of the screen.

While such work confirms the commonality of design for page and screen, other research defies some of our most cherished assumptions. Consider the burning typographic questions of line length and the appropriate number of characters per line. The Swiss modernists have long promoted short, neat lines as ideal for reading, from Josef Müller-Brockman (seven words per line) to Ruedi Rüegg (forty to sixty characters). Such rules of thumb have become basic instinct for many designers.

Science, however, tells a different tale. One study determined that long line lengths are more efficient than shorter ones, concluding that columns of text should fill up as much screen real estate as possible.6 (Grotesque images swim to mind of marginless, unstructured pages of HTML, expanding to fill the screen with one fat column.)

Another study compared texts with 80 characters per line to texts with 40 characters per line. The 80-character lines were created—get this!—by collapsing the width of each letter, thus jamming more text into the same space.7 Despite this unforgivable crime against typography, the study found that subjects could read the denser lines more efficiently than lines with fewer—albeit normally proportioned—characters. Ugliness, we learn, does not always compromise function.

Upsetting assumptions is not a bad thing. Although the research cited here may not tell us exactly how to set type, its conclusions could be useful in other ways. For example, it was once progressive to promote the use of “white space” in all things typographic. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the value of density, from page to screen to urban environment. Down with sprawl, down with vast distances from a to b, and up with greater richness, diversity, and compactness among information and ideas, people and places.

What we might expect from the science of type is a seamless web of rules. Such is not forthcoming. In its drive to uncover fixed standards, the research has affirmed, instead, human tolerance for typographic variation and the elasticity of the typographic system. Science can help ruffle our dogmas and create a clearer view of how variables interact to create living, breathing—and, yes, readable—typography.

Notes
1. D. G. Paterson and M. A. Tinker, “Studies of Typographical Factors Influencing Speed of Reading: II. Size of Type,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 13, 2 (1929): 120–30.
2. D. G. Paterson and M. A. Tinker, “Studies of Typographical Factors Influencing Speed of Reading: X. Style of Type Face,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 16, 6 (1932): 605–613.
3. Daniel Boyarski, Christine Neuwirth, Jodi Forlizzi, and Susan Harkness Regli, “A Study of Fonts Designed for Screen Display,” CHI 98, 18–23 (April 1998). Not paginated.
4. John D. Gould, Lizette Alfaro, Vincent Barnes, Rich Finn, Nancy Gischkowsky, and Angelo Minuto, “Reading is Slower from CRT Displays than from Paper: Attempts to Isolate a Single-Variable Explanation,” Human Factors, 29, 3 (1987): 269–299.
5. John D. Gould, Lizette Alfaro, Rich Finn, Brian Haupt, and Angelo Minuto, “Reading from CRT Displays Can Be as Fast as Reading from Paper,” Human Factors, 29, 5 (1987): 497–517.
6. Robert L. Duchnicky and Paul A. Kolers, “Readability of Text Scrolled on Visual Display Terminals as a Function of Window Size,” Human Factors, 25, 6 (1983): 683–692.
7. Study by Kolers et al, cited in Carol Bergfeld Mills, and Linda J. Weldon. “Reading Text from Computer Screens,” ACM Computing Surveys, 19, 4 (December 1987): 329–358.

About 15 years ago I graduated from the High School of Arts with a seriffed type design. It was never released and I now realize it was a sort of preliminary study for my later typefaces. I subsequently designed three major families, Scala & Scala Sans, Telefont and Seria & Seria Sans. Looking back, I now see that my ideas about type design have not changed fundamentally. Maybe it is time to set down some impressions on my type design philosophy.

The Headache of Mixing Type
It is my conviction that you cannot be a good type designer if you are not a book typographer. I am not talking here about display types but about text types. A type designer must know how type works in a piece of text, he must know what happens with the type on different sorts of paper, he must know how a typeface behaves with different printing techniques.

As a book designer I made several complex books where more than one typeface had to be used in order to clarify things in the text. It was mostly quite useful to take a sans and a serif typeface, but the problem was always which ones to choose. Mixing Times New Roman and Helvetica in the same piece of text has often been done simply because these fonts were available everywhere. It is not even the worst possible combination one can think of. Using sans serifs like News Gothic, Gill Sans or Futura as text type is very acceptable, but with which seriffed faces should they be mixed? Numerous combinations have been used without any idea of style or knowledge of history. From an aesthetic point of view some combinations produce a severe headache (Garamond with Univers, Bodoni with Gill Sans). It is only in advertising, where a headache can be useful, that these combinations are possible. It became clear to me that the best solution for text was to use a combination of a serif and a sans that derive directly from each other. The only remaining question was which combination of serif and sans could meet this criterium?

The Origin of the Sans
Before the mixing of serif and sans in text can be explained, it should first be made clear where sans serif typefaces originate from, as it is only for about the last one hundred years that they have been used substantially. Officially, the very first sans serif typeface to be used for printing was published around 1816 by the William Caslon iv English typefoundry.

This display face only contained capitals and it is not clear where the rather clumsy forms came from. As a design this sans serif typeface has little value.

Much more interesting is Akzidenz Grotesk, published in 1898 by the German Berthold type foundry in Berlin.

This sans serif immediately became a great success and was soon imitated by several typefounders. Like all sans serifs of the time, Akzidenz Grotesk was meant to be used as a display face (the German word Akzidenzschrift means display face or jobbing type), however as it also included a lowercase it was suitable for text too.

But what was the basis for Akzidenz Grotesk? The first printing types date from the 15th century, and they were all seriffed typefaces because they were imitations of handwriting. When the sans serif typefaces appeared in the 19th century they could only be based on the seriffed typefaces in use at that time.

Akzidenz Grotesk was probably cut by some experienced but anonymous Berthold punchcutters rather than designed by an individual type designer. This means the punchcutters had to have a general idea for the serifless forms, and they could probably only derive these ideas from the then popular classicistic typefaces such as Walbaum or Didot. This can be seen clearly upon superimposing Walbaum and Akzidenz Grotesk characters. Yet these classicistic typefaces were far from good examples on which to base a sans serif. In Walbaum the thin tail-ends in characters like the c and in numbers such as 2 and 5 were elegant, but when these thin parts were simply made thicker the result was a sans serif typeface with extremely ‘closed’ forms.

In 1928 Paul Renner designed his Futura.

It was the first time a sans serif typeface was not based on the watered down classicistic letterforms on which Akzidenz Grotesk was based; instead he started his drawings from scratch. It would seem that the Futura was influenced by the ideas of the Bauhaus movement and by constructivism. Its letterforms look very much constructed but in fact they were not constructed at all. Renner based his Futura on classic principles, like roman inscriptional capitals, rather than basing it on Bauhaus principles. This was one of the reasons for its success, it is a very well balanced text typeface, yet it has the aura of the then popular Bauhaus movement.

In 1957 Univers, Helvetica and numerous look-alikes were published as a sort of reaction to pre-war geo-metric faces like Futura. These typefaces were all based on the old Akzidenz Grotesk, and they became extremely popular in a short period of time. Basing a sans serif on another sans serif is rather cheap, and it is therefore not strange that these typefaces had hardly any new features compared to Akzidenz Grotesk.

They pretended to be better than Akzidenz Grotesk, but instead they were bereft of every bit of character and the charming clumsiness of Akzidenz Grotesk. However Univers, designed by Adrian Frutiger, had one strong feature that was new in type design: it was made up of an almost scientific system of 21 weights and widths that could be mixed perfectly. It was an answer to the jungle of different sans serif faces that lacked a clear system of weights and widths. Univers was completely redrawn a few years ago and now has more than 60 versions. Unfortunately this has not been an improvement; there are now too many superfluous versions, the justification is too tight and the italic that was already too slanted has been slanted even more. Redesigning an old successful typeface is something a type designer maybe never should consider.

The form of the italic in Akzidenz Grotesk is nothing more than a slanted version of the roman; but why was the italic not based on a real italic? It would not seem too difficult to make an Akzidenz Grotesk italic based on the Walbaum italic.

A real italic has a different form principle than the roman. Probably, with the huge competition amongst typefoundries, the 19th century punchcutters were under great pressure to produce fast, and therefore they had to imitate others. A real italic version was probably too much work or too difficult to make, while a slanted roman was relatively easy to copy from the roman. The strange thing is that, even today, this slanted roman is a sort of standard for sans italics. Typefaces like News Gothic (1908) and Helvetica all have slanted romans. Consequently, even a great type designer like Adrian Frutiger made slanted romans with his sans serif designs, and it was only recently, when his Frutiger typeface (1977) was redrawn in 2000, now with a real italic instead of a slanted roman, that he acknowledged that a real italic makes a better contrast with the roman. Typefaces like Futura have slanted romans too, but in this case it is much more understandable as there was no real old seriffed model on which to base it. A more interesting italic is that of Gill Sans. It is the first among the sans serifs that has true italic characteristics. His first italic sketches show some very calligraphic features.

Eric Gill was, by all standards, an extraordinary type designer who started his career cutting letters in stone. When he began designing printing type he knew by heart what a seriffed typeface should look like. He designed Gill Sans in 1928, and although this is a sans serif he used his experience as a letter-cutter. While he may not have realized it, he based his Gill Sans on the seriffed typefaces in his head. Mixing Gill Sans with his seriffed Joanna (1930) would provide perfectly harmonious type. You could almost say that Joanna is a sort of Gill Sans Avec!

Had Eric Gill planned Joanna and Gill Sans as one family he would have been the first in history to design a family of serif and sans, but he made them as separate designs with separate names.

Mixing Serif and Sans
In my opinion, mixing serif with sans only makes sense when the seriffed typeface and the sans are designed from the same basis, or even from the same skeleton. It sounds simple: take a seriffed design, cut off the serifs, lower the contrast, and there you have a sans serif. But of course there is more to it than just that. I believe the most logical order when making such a family is to start with the seriffed design. From that basis a sans serif can be made. The first attempt to design a sans based on a seriffed typeface was undertaken by the Dutch type designer Jan van Krimpen. In the early 1930s he designed the seriffed Romulus, totally with a sans serif design. Superimposing the serif upon the sans shows how literally Van Krimpen based them upon each other. Romulus Sans was cut in four weights but unfortunately it remained at an experimental stage, as it was never released.

Scala and Scala sans. Two typefaces, One Form Principle
I started designing Scala in 1987. At that time I was working as one of the two graphic designers for the Vredenburg Music Centre in Utrecht, a large concert hall that programmed more concerts than any other hall in the Netherlands. We worked on one of the first models of Apple Macintosh, using PageMaker 1.0, and we could choose from 16 typefaces. I was typographically educated with lowercase numbers (also known as old style figures), small caps and ligatures, none of which were available in these 16 Postscript-fonts. The concert programmes, booklets and posters contained very different information, such as composers, titles, conductors, orchestras, soloists, time, date and place. To design this information in a good way I needed these lowercase numbers, small caps and ligatures. And so it happened that I decided to design a typeface especially for Vredenburg to be named after the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

The form principle of Scala was definitely influenced by humanist typefaces like Bembo and by typefaces from the mid-18th century French typographer Pierre Simon Fournier. But I wanted Scala to have low contrast and strong serifs, as I had learned that most Postscript-fonts were too thin. The italic was based more on 16th century Italian writing masters like Arrighi, although to a large extent the details were closely related to the roman.

Scala Sans was literally derived from Scala, so it was also ‘humanistic’ in appearance.

Until then this had rarely been seen in sans serifs, the only notable exceptions being Gill Sans and Syntax (1968, Hans Eduard Meier). The Syntax roman is truly one of the most beautiful sans serifs ever, but unfortunately the accompanying italic was a slanted roman.

Probably it was too early for Meier to free himself from some generally accepted ideas about sans serifs. During the design process of Scala one thing was obvious to me: I wanted the lowercase numbers to be included in the normal fonts, and not in the Old Style Figures (osf) fonts. I also designed lowercase numbers for the sans serif, and I discovered that until that time lowercase numbers had not been seen in sans serif typefaces, even Eric Gill never made them for his Gill Sans (although in the 1990s they were superadded by Monotype). Strangely enough, Paul Renner was the only one who designed them for his Futura, though they were seldom used.

The Scala Sans italic follows the forms of its seriffed counterpart quite literally. There are italic small caps, ligatures and lowercase numbers, making Scala the first family with all these features in both a seriffed and a sans design and in both roman and italic.

When I was designing Scala and Scala Sans I had great freedom in executing my ideas on serif and sans. My motto became: ‘two typefaces, one form principle’, which can be demonstrated when the skeletons of the roman and the italic are isolated.

I did not work for a typefoundry, the music centre trusted me completely and there was no time pressure. Under these circumstances I was able to think very freely about the whole concept of serif and sans. Many of the generally accepted ideas did not seem logical to me and luckily I was not obliged to follow them.

Scala was released in 1990 by FontShop International as its first serious text face. It was only when Scala Sans was issued three years later that the family became extremely popular. The use of a seriffed typeface and an accompanying sans proved to be a very happy combination for graphic designers around the world.

Telefont - My In-between Sans
In 1993 I designed Telefont List and Telefont Text for the Dutch national telephone book. The typeface I had in mind was a sans serif. Here I did not use a seriffed typeface as the basis for the sans, although I was able to use the experience I had gained in designing the Scala family. However, compared to my work on Scala Sans, I had to think in a much more restricted way. Telefont List (which I designed first) was going to be used in a small size on cheap paper, it had to save a lot of space and it had to be much more readable than the worn-out Univers that PTT (Post, Telefonie, Telegrafie) had used until then. Simultaneously I thought about the typographic redesign of the phone book itself. This was a great advantage as I could now fine-tune the typeface as a result of the changes I made in the four-column grid and, what is more, I could adjust the page layout after I had made changes in the typeface. One could almost call this interactive design. In any case my experience as a book designer came in handy.

Telefont List is a real workhorse, to be used in the automatically generated phone book listings, while Telefont Text was designed for the custom-made introductory pages using many more typographic refinements such as small caps and lowercase numbers. I want to put it as follows: ‘The most-used type-face has the least possibilities; the least-used typeface has the most possibilities’.
Telefont List and Telefont Text have been used exclusively for the Dutch phone book since 1994, but it is not inconceivable that they will be released in the near future. However I am not planning a Telefont Serif as I do not believe in deriving a seriffed design from a sans.

Seria and Seria Sans. A Literary Typeface
I made the first sketches for Seria on the train from Berlin to Warsaw in the summer of 1996, using some table napkins from the dining car.

There were two main reasons to start working on a new typeface. The first had to do with my dissatisfaction with the use of Scala in a more literary way. As a book designer I could not use Scala for the more literary books or for poetry, as I found it was too stubborn with too short ascenders and descenders. I had thought of making a version of Scala with longer ascenders and descenders, but then found I wanted to change more than a few details at the same time. I decided that Scala is Scala and if I wanted to make changes I must make a new typeface. This new typeface had to have long ascenders and descenders (I was not planning to make the most economical or space saving typeface).

The second reason came as a direct question from a French art critic, Hector Obalk. In 1996 he had invited me to give a lecture on type design in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and during a chat afterwards he told me of his love for Scala. In fact he liked it so much that he wanted to use it in a book he was writing, containing transcriptions of all Marcel Duchamp’s correspondence, radio talks, interviews, etc. But he needed something special to use in Duchamp’s hugely complicated texts: an extra-slanted italic. He asked me if I could make something like this for Scala and I immediately thought of an upward italic, because an extra-slanted Scala italic is impossible.

I soon found myself working on a completely new typeface. The upward italic has become a major feature of Seria, but a ‘normal’ italic (which I am calling Seria Cursive) has been made for a forthcoming release of Seria versions. Seria was issued in 2000 by FontShop International and it came too late to be used in the book on Duchamp, but thanks to Obalk I designed a typeface with an italic and a cursive.

The individual characters of the Seria family have a lot of subtle details and unconventional curves which can best be seen when used in a large size.

In small sizes while one cannot see these details, one can maybe ‘feel’ them. The rather edgy curves make Seria ‘wittingly irregular’ a principle that was used by W. A. Dwiggins, the American type designer, and also by my Dutch colleague Bram de Does. It comes from the belief that a certain degree of irregularity leads to better legibility.

The need to augment Seria with a sans serif version became immediately obvious to me. Using a black marker and some white paint, I changed the seriffed characters into a sans. Seria Sans has the same long ascenders and descenders as Seria and this is very unusual for a sans. The strength of Seria Sans is that its derivation has been done in a very consequent way, something that is obviously seen most clearly in the italics and bold italics.

The Contemporary Sans Serifs
Most of the older sans serifs were based on an empty-headed idea of how a sans should look. These designs are more or less imitations of each other, without their designers knowing why their forms are as they are.

It was not until the 1980s that serif/sans families started to appear. The seriffed versions are based on a long tradition, however I would call the sans serifs contemporary sans serifs. To mention a few: Lucida (Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow, 1984-1985), Stone (Sumner Stone, 1987), Rotis (Otl Aicher, 1989), Charlotte (Michael Gills, 1992), Legacy (Ronald Arnholm, 1993), Quadraat (Fred Smeijers, 1992-1996), Thesis (Lucas de Groot, 1994), Eureka (Peter Bilak, 1995-2000).

The last 15 years have in a way been revolutionary for the sans serifs. More and more type designers have become aware of the basis of sans serifs and for the first time sans serif designs have become full partners of seriffed designs. I can best sum up my type design philosophy by saying: ‘Shake hands and work together in harmony’ .

First published in tipoGrafica, No 53, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2002

An article by Hrant H Papazian.

In evaluating a font, it would be nice to have a good test phrase.

Pangrams (like “The quick brown fox …”) are nice, but they tend to sacrifice too much for compactness; a somewhat more elaborate sample text would make evaluation much richer.

So I started thinking about what constitutes a good test phrase, and here are the factors which I think need to be balanced against each other:

1. It should be short.

2. It should show each letter in the middle of other letters. This is to facilitate evaluation of spacing, noting that by “propagating” the evaluation chances are much better for arriving at a firm conclusion. For example, in the word “major”, if the “aj” is loose, you could look at other words that have an “a*” (and so on) to figure out where the problem is. It’s not water-tight, but it helps.

3. The letters should occur alphabetically (for easy location).

4. It shouldn’t necessarily have a self-contained coherent meaning, but it should be a “normal” English sentence: using words that occur frequently, and no kinky Egyptian sex, please. But some awkwardness is probably inevitable.

5. It should contain some extras like: punctuation, quotes, apostrophe*, hyphen, and some special-case words like “the”, “I” and “a”" (the latter two especially helpful in evaluating an italic).

6. It should be easy to memorize.

* The most frequent words containing an apostrophe are: “don’t”, “it’s”, “I’m”, “that’s”, “I’ll”, “couldn’t”, “can’t”, “you’re”. And I think “I’ll”" provides the biggest spacing challenge.

In trying to maximize the “normalness” of the phrase, I talked to my good friend, Linguistics, and compiled the list of the most common [English] words containing each letter (as a middle letter):

a: that
b: about
c: which
d: made
e: they
f: after
g: through
h: the
i: with
j: major
k: like
l: all
m: some
n: and
o: for
p: people
q: require
r: are
s: these
t: with
u: but
v: have
w: two
x: next
y: system
z: size

Since the more common letters occur in many words, I managed to reduce this list down to 16 words. (BTW, this is where I decided that it should be two sentences - that and wanting to put in more punctuation.) *However*, in the case of frequent letters, this list was more of a hindrance than a help, and it was more effective to just think of common words myself; but for the less frequent letters, it helped a lot.

So, after a good amount of wrestling, here’s what I’ve ended up with:

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Incredibly, he makes a major life-change! For example: “I’ll require that the system have two sizes.”
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This reminds me of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.