Skip to content



o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o

Table of Contents for

 Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works, Third Edition

 Search in book...

 Toggle Font Controls

o
o
o
o
PREV Previous Chapter

Gerry Mulligan: The best part about playing the piano is that you don’t have to lug around a saxophone

NEXT Next Chapter

Sherlock Holmes: No, Watson, this was not done by accident, but by design

Chapter 4. Type with a purpose

FF Unit Regular Italic
YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE. It’s late at night, your plane leaves at 6 AM, you’re still packing, and you just can’t
decide what to put into that suitcase.

Picking typefaces for a design job is a very similar experience. There are certain typefaces you are familiar
with. You know how they will behave under certain circumstances, and you know where they are. On the
other hand, there are those fashionable types that you’ve always wanted to use, but you’re not quite sure if
this job is the right one to experiment on. This is just like choosing which shoes to take on your trip – the
comfortable ones are not the height of fashion, but the fashionable ones hurt. You might be able to stand
them for a short reception, but not for shopping, let alone for a hike into the countryside.

Before you pack your font suitcase, you need to look at the task ahead. Strike a balance between
practicality and aesthetics – that’s what design is all about.

Gulliver is Gerard Unger’s solution for many problems in newspaper design and production. It fits
20% more copy into the columns without sacrificing legibility and is sturdy enough to be carelessly
printed on recycled paper. Quite a few newspapers around the world use it to good effect.

Coranto is Unger’s latest typeface for newspapers. Designed in 2000, it is being used for The
Scotsman as well as newspapers in Sweden and Brazil.

Tobias Frere-Jones’ work on Poynter was sponsored by the Poynter Institute to answer the same
question. He asked himself: how to retain copy without losing readers? As we read best what we
read most, the designer stuck to familiar forms and returned to Hendrik van den Keere’s
seventeenth-century oldstyle roman. As different methods of reproduction and printing may add or
reduce weight by a fraction, Poynter Oldstyle Text is offered in four grades.

While nobody has ever classified typefaces according to their problem-solving capabilities, many
typefaces we use today were originally designed for particular purposes. Some of them are
mentioned on page 33, but there are many more. Times New Roman was specially produced in 1931
for the London newspaper that gave its name to the typeface. In the late 1930s, Mergenthaler
Linotype in the USA (led by Chauncey H. Griffith) developed a group of five typefaces designed to be
legible despite the rigors of newspaper printing. They were, not surprisingly, called the “Legibility
Group,” and two of them are still very popular today: Corona and Excelsior. It might seem odd that
legibility has to be a special concern when designing a typeface, but there are plenty of fonts around
that are meant to be seen, not read; these typefaces are very much like clothes that look great but
barely protect the wearer from the elements.
Going on vacation doesn’t necessarily mean traveling to a warm climate, but it always means we can
leave behind many of our conventions, including the way we normally dress — or have to dress, as the
case may be. You pick your clothes according to what is practical: easy to pack, easy to clean, and
according to what is fun: casual, colorful, loose, and maybe a little more daring than what you would
wear in your hometown. The typographic equivalents are those typefaces that are comfortable to read, but
which may be a little more idiosyncratic than your run-of-the-mill stuff. Serifs, too, can be casual, and
“loose fit” is actually a type-setting term describing letters that have a comfortable amount of space
between them. As it happens, quite a few of the very early typefaces from the Renaissance and their
modern equivalents fit that description. They still show their kinship with Italian handwriting, which by
necessity had to be more casual than rigid metal letters. If you were a scribe in the papal office and had to
write hundreds of pages every day, you wouldn’t be able to take the time to fuss over formal capitals. So
the scribes developed a fluent, cursive handwriting, which today we call italic, because it was invented in
Italy. You will have noticed that this whole page is set in a script font, and it feels quite comfortable. A
conventional rule says that you can’t set whole pages, let alone books, in the italics of a typeface. The only
reason it might not work is because we’re not used to it. As pointed out on  page 41, we read best what we
read most. But that’s no reason not to take a vacation from our daily habits and look at something
different, at least once a year.

Some typefaces have a leisurely look about them while conforming to everyday typographic
expectations. Others were born with unusual, yet casual, shapes and make the best of it.

Stempel Schneidler combines friendly letter shapes with high legibility – you can use it every day
without it becoming restrictive like a necktie.

A typeface that looks casual, even “nice,” but is still good for real work is ITC Flora. It was designed
by the Dutch type designer Gerard Unger in 1980 and named after his daughter. Ellington, released
in 1990, is a design by Michael Harvey, the English lettering artist and stone carver. Both typefaces
are quite unusual and therefore not often thought of as useful text faces. But they are.

Many typefaces designed to look “friendly” tend to appear patronizing. They can be so nice that you
quickly get tired of them. When you’re looking for casual typefaces, the obvious candidates are, of
course, the scripts. Most, however, are not suited to long spells of reading, just as sandals are very
comfortable, but not when walking on rocky roads.
To make a typeface look as casually elegant as FF Fontesque takes a lot of experience and effort. Nick Shinn designed
Fontesque in 1994. It wasn’t his first design, and it shows. Cafeteria indeed started on Tobias Frere-Jones’ napkin, and he
managed to balance activity with legibility in this freeform sans serif face.
Most type is used for business communication of one sort or another, so it has to conform to both written
and unwritten rules of the corporate world. Just as business people are expected to wear a suit (plus,
naturally, a shirt and tie), text set for business has to look fairly serious and go about its purpose in an
inconspicuous, well-organized way. Typefaces, such as Times New Roman and Helvetica fit this bill
perfectly, not by their particular suitability but more by their lack of individualism.

However, just as it is now permissible in traditional business circles to wear fashionable ties and to even
venture into the realm of Italian suits that are not black or dark blue, typographic tastes in those circles has
widened to include other typefaces, from Palatino to Frutiger.

Generally, it is very simple to classify a particular business by the typefaces it prefers: the more technical a
profession, the cooler and more rigid its typefaces (Univers for architects); the more traditional a trade, the
more classical its typefaces (Bodoni for bankers).

The trouble is that there is no law against specu-lators employing a true classic, trustworthy typeface in
their brochures, lending these unsavory entities typographic credibility, although nothing else.

To show the subtle differences between fonts at this size, we’ve set the copy at left in a variety of
types, one for each paragraph. Handgloves at the bottom of this column shows them in sequence.

Frutiger, originally designed in 1976 by Adrian Frutiger for the signage at the Charles de Gaulle
airport in Paris, has become one of the most popular typefaces for corporate use.

Palatino, designed by Hermann Zapf in 1952, owes its popularity – especially in the USA – largely to
its availability as a core font on PostScript laser printers. It is nevertheless a welcome alternative to
other, less suitable, serif fonts.

Adrian Frutiger designed Univers in 1957. It was the first typeface to be planned with a coordinated
range of weights and widths, comprising twenty-one related designs, recently expanded to 59 weights
(see page 89).

ITC Bodoni is one of many redesigns of Giambattista Bodoni’s classic typefaces from the late
eighteenth century. It shows more color and stroke variations than other Bodoni revivals, and is
available in three versions for different sizes.
There is no category known as “formal fonts,” but a number of typefaces come from that
background. The text at the left is set in Snell Roundhand, a formal script from the 1700s,
redesigned in 1965 by Matthew Carter.

Apart from formal scripts such as Snell, Künstler Script, and others like it, there are the aptly
named copperplates. They look formal and distinguished and are even available in a range of
weights and versions, but they all lack one important feature: lowercase characters.

Other typefaces that owe their appearance to the process of engraving into steel as opposed to
writing with a quill or cutting into wood are Walbaum, Bauer Bodoni, or ITC Fenice. They can look
formal and aristocratic enough to make a favorable impression when printed on fine paper.

While FF Scala Jewels is an extension of the FF Scala family by Martin Majoor from 1993, which is a
contemporary interpretation of classic book typefaces, Mrs. Eaves is Zuzana Licko’s idiosyncratic
take on Baskerville, as seen from Berkeley, California in 1996. It is named after Sarah Eaves, the
woman who became John Baskerville’s wife. Licko’s Matrix Script Inline from 1992 gets closer to
American vernacular, and Rudy VanderLans’ 1993 Suburban connects classic scripts with, well,
suburban neon signs. And, as VanderLans proudly proclaims, Suburban is the only typeface in
existence today that uses an upside down l as a y.
What makes typefaces trendy is almost unpredictable – much to the chagrin of the people who have
to market them. A corporation, a magazine, a TV channel can pick a typeface, expose it to the
public, and a new typographic fashion can be born. But, like with fashion and pop music, it usually
takes more than one designer in the right place at the right time picking the right font off a web site
or out of a catalog.

Typography is as much a mirror of what goes in society as the styling of cell phones or cars. Cars
still take half a dozen years from concept to production, so their designers have to anticipate trends.
As cars are the icons of our mobile society, their design, in turn, does create trends. While
technology allows us to produce a font in weeks – if not hours – from rough sketches or ideas, it still
takes a few years for a typeface to get to market and to the attention of the font-buying public. Right
now, early in the 21st century, we are seeing a return to the time-honored classics and their modern
interpretations. We have also learned to live with bitmaps, both as a necessity and as a fashion
statement. Most industrial typestyles have been exploited, from monospaced typewriter faces
through electronic font generators to industrial signage. And some of the most used typefaces were
first produced for the signs above or freeways. Interstate is Tobias Frere-Jones’ interpretation of the
white-on-green letters in the USA, while FF Din expands the model used on Germany’s autobahn.
Ironically, if a typeface has been designed for one par-ticular purpose, it seems to look really good on
anything else.
As long as you print on paper, the choice of typeface is first and foremost governed by the content of the
message, then the intended audience, and only lastly by technical constraints. When we move from almost
limitless resolution on paper to images generated by cathod rays or liquid crystals, we enter a world of
optical illusions. Those have to make up for the lack of high fidelity and trick our eyes into seeing life-like
images rather than spots of colored light (see page 132). On the screen, colors are not mixed from cmyk:
cyan, yellow, magenta, and black (the k really stands for key), but are broken down into rgb: red, green, and
blue; letters are composed of course lines or dots, and black is not an ink, but the absence of light.
Typefaces have to work very hard under these conditions. There is no room here for leisure fonts, nor for
scripts or some of the trendy faces that hide more than they reveal. The workhorses for “old” media work
well in the new. Rugged construction, clear counter spaces, easily discernible figures and well defined
weights have all been mentioned before as being prerequisites for anything which has to be read under less
than ideal circumstances. And whatever progress technology brings in the future – staring into light
coming from a screen is not what human eyes were made for.

Architectural type has to compromise between materials and legibility. A mosaic made up of
millions of pieces would allow for smoother lettershapes, but would neither be as durable nor as
affordable as one with coarser bits.

Matthew Carter’s Verdana has become a very successful face on paper as well, while Bigelow &
Holmes’ Lucida, initially designed for laser-printers in 1983, looks also great in high-resolution and
is one of the best screen fonts around. FF Typestar by Steffen Sauerteig has those rugged shapes
reminiscent of typewriter faces and suited for rough conditions on screen or paper.

All those minute details that make a good typeface pleasant to behold and easy to read, actually add
noise. The absence of these details would make the type look cold and technical, as if generated by
machines and legible only for machines.

The designer of typefaces suitable for on-screen reading has to balance the requirements of the
precise but cold medium (light emitted by all sorts of tubes, crystals, diodes, and plasms) against our
need for subtle contrast and soft shapes. And as most of what we read on screen eventually gets
printed as well, these alphabets have to offer enough traditional beauty for us to accept them against
the competition we’ve grown used to over 500 years.

Slightly extended lettershapes have more open counters and are thus more legible, but need more
space. Subtle contrast between thin horizontals and thicker verticals doesn’t translate well into
single pixels and tiny serifs may look delicate in display sizes, but on a screen will only add noise at
10pt or less.

The screen fonts offered by Microsoft and Apple work well under all circumstances, but have
become too ubitiquous to lend an individual note.
Brands have to speak their own authentic language. Type is visible language. Using a bland or overused
typeface will make the brand and its products or media equally bland and even invisible. Having an
exclusive typeface designed or adapted used to be expensive, technically challenging, and difficult to
implement. Not anymore. Whether it’s just one weight for a packaged product or a large system for
everything, corporate fonts have become a major source of work for type designers.

Some companies take an existing face and simply change the name to make it more identifiable – license
models exist for that purpose. While they’re at it, they often add their logo or other glyphs that can then be
accessed via the keyboard. And if the chairman (or his wife) doesn’t like the shape of a certain character,
that can also be adapted. All with the blessing and preferably the involvement of the original type designer.
As a lot of these people are no longer available (think Bodoni, Caslon, or Garamond), the foundry that has
the license for the particular typeface will be happy to help.

In 1990, Kurt Weidemann designed a trilogy of faces for Mercedes-Benz that was, in fact, a
comprehensive system for all their brands and subbrands. Corporate A stands for Antiqua, the serif
version for the car brand; S is Sans, intended for the trucks division; and E is Egyptienne, the slab
typeface for the engineering group. This was the first typographic tribe, a family of families. It is no
longer exclusive to Mercedes-Benz, so every backstreet garage can now have at least a premium
name over the door.

Silicon Valley Bank took the easier route: they chose FF Unit and FF Unit Slab, changed the name for
easier recognition, and got a license to distribute it to their suppliers and branches.

When General Electrics started work on its new brand position in 2004, it commissioned an
exclusive typeface to express the new direction, perhaps too transparently named GE Inspira. It
works well for a large company that makes everything from jet engines to lightbulbs.
 PREV Previous Chapter

Gerry Mulligan: The best part about playing the piano is that you don’t have to lug around a saxophone

NEXT Next Chapter

Sherlock Holmes: No, Watson, this was not done by accident, but by design

Find answers on the fly, or master something new. Subscribe today. See pricing options.

back to top

 Browse
 

 Resource Centers
 

 Playlists
 

 History
 

 Topics
 

 Learning Paths
 

 Highlights
 

 Settings
  

 Support
 

 Sign Out
© 2019 O'Reilly Media, Inc. Terms of Service / Privacy Policy