Came across an interesting article on Type Design in the New York Times. Don’t be fooled, I don’t actually read the Times. Rather, I was pointed there from the twittersphere – thanks @gary_hustwit. If you’d rather read this article with 50 different ads to distract you, you can do so here. Otherwise, enjoy an insightful look into the work of some fabulous type designers.
A sampling of Vitesse, a new font by Hoefler and Frere-Jones
TYPEFACE DESIGNERS WRESTLE WITH THE WORLD OF PIXELS
By ALICE RAWSTHORN
Published: January 10, 2010
NEW YORK — Imagine that you are a super-successful movie director, who’s been given hundreds of millions of dollars and lots of whiz-bang technology to make a cinematic epic. Sounds good? Not once you are told that people will have to watch it on fuzzy old black and white television sets.
Something similar happens to the text that appears on your computer screen whenever you log on to a Web site. The site’s owner has so little control over the fine details of what you will see that the typeface in which the text appears is bound to be distorted. Pity the poor designer who struggled to perfect it.
“It’s very, very complicated,” groaned one of those designers, Jonathan Hoefler. “One problem is that pixels operate differently on screen to blobs of ink on paper, so typefaces for the Web need different qualities. The bigger problem is all of the technology that delivers the font to the viewer. The Web site is delivered by one cluster of hardware to another, often with a different operating system, different browser and, in some cases, different pieces of software. That’s a very long chain. The number of variations is almost bottomless, and the results are unreliable at best.”
To see what he means, take a look at Georgia, the typeface on the IHT/New York Times Web site, on a Mac, then see how different it looks on a PC.
Like many typography designers, Mr. Hoefler and his business partner, Tobias Frere-Jones, both 39, have been wrestling with the first problem for years, mostly by adapting the shapes of the characters in their typefaces to look clearer and more appealing on screen. (One ploy is to make enclosed spaces, like those in an ‘a’ and ‘e,’ bigger than they need to be in print.) They are now grappling with the second problem — the technology — and hope to unveil the outcome later this year.
First though, they are preparing for the launch on Thursday of a new font, Vitesse. It will be the 29th type family (that’s type-speak for a full set of text with letters, numbers and symbols) they have published and the first of three new ones to be introduced in 2010. If Vitesse is anywhere near as successful as some of their other designs, which include Gotham, the suave font adopted by Barack Obama for his presidential election campaign, and the signature typefaces of the Art Institute of Chicago and Whitney Museum in New York, you will see it somewhere very soon.
Despite occasional media frenzies, such as when the Obama campaign embraced Gotham and IKEA dumped the vintage modernist typeface, Futura, for tech-savvy Verdana, typography design is still an esoteric business. Even the knowledge that we can all play at being graphic designers by choosing fonts for our computers and cellphones has done little to dispel its enigma.
Sitting in their New York studio in the charmingly ramshackle Cable Building, designed in 1892 by the flamboyant Beaux-Arts architect Stanford White, Mr. Hoefler and Mr. Frere-Jones are engaging advocates for their craft. They met in 1989, when they were working independently and found themselves hunting for the same antique typography books. “We’ve given up now because the prices have gone crazy,” said Mr. Frere-Jones. “Between us we own so many that if there’s something we don’t have, it’s either an uninteresting variation or there’s only one in the world and it costs $20,000.”
Having become friends, they often exchanged ideas, and started working together in 1999. “Type design calls for a certain perspective that’s very hard to get when you’re immersed in something,” explained Mr. Hoefler. “It’s very easy to be engrossed in the technical details, but not the flavor, or vice versa. Before we worked together I would often devote myself to one course or another without realizing I was doing so. Now, one of us begins a project as the designer, and the other comes in as editor. Knockout was one I designed, and Tobias had his eyes on. Gotham, Tobias designed, and I commented on.”
Some of their fonts were inspired by themes from typographic history. Knockout was based on the type in 19th-century circus posters; and Gotham on the old Port Authority Bus Terminal sign in New York. Others were conceived to meet a need for a particular style. Vitesse is intended to be a racy slab sans serif font, one with bold strokes at the ends of the letters.
Often their briefs are purely functional, such as Retina, which was commissioned by the Wall Street Journal to be legible in the tiny 5-point characters on its stock market pages. (The trick there was to cut little notches into the characters whenever lines intersect to trick us into thinking that the type is bigger than it actually is and to stop the ink from blotting.)
Defining the style of a typeface is only part of the design process; another is the organizational feat of ensuring that everything looks coherent. This is a daunting challenge, given that the smallest type families contain some 370 characters, and the largest run into the thousands by including obscure symbols and foreign characters with local variations for, say, the Cyrillic alphabet. Popular typefaces are also designed in different weights. There are already 66 variations of Gotham, with more on the way. “Drawing the ear of a ‘g’ has its challenges, but we spend much more time talking about whether it is dancing to the same tune as the other characters,” Mr. Frere-Jones said.
16 of the 66 Gotham variations
After all of that, you can understand why they feel so frustrated when their lovingly honed fonts are messed up by techno-glitches. That’s why they are determined to crack the technology transfer problem, and are collaborating with software engineers to do so. “We have lots of ideas, some have to do with design and some have to do with the technology that delivers the font,” Mr. Hoefler said. “That’s the secret formula we can’t talk about yet.”
