Just My Type

by Simon Garfield

  Of course, Connare knew that both Lichtenstein and Frank Miller’s Batman didn’t use type at all, but letters that had been hand-drawn for each box. This gave it great flexibility and variety – no two letters exactly the same, the possibility of stressing a syllable by gently increasing the pressure on the nib – but Connare’s appreciation of the craftsmanship did nothing to solve the problem of Microsoft Bob. This new software required a new type interface that looked as if it had been drawn by a creative and friendly hand (a hand that would hold your hand as you clicked through). His letters would be the same every time they were used but they would still look human.

  Connare used the then-standard tool for designing type on a computer – Macromedia Fontographer – drawing each letter repeatedly within a grid until he got the style he required. He chose the equivalent of a child’s blunted scissors – soft, rounded letters, with no sharp points to snag you. He drew both capitals and lower case, and printed them out to examine their dimensions when placed next to each other. Like most designers, he had a way of relaxing his eyes so that he could concentrate on the white paper behind the letters, gauging the space between the characters, the space between lines of text and their ‘weight’ – how light or bold they were, how much ink they used on a page, how many pixels they occupied on screen.

  Comic Sans in all its childlike glory

  He then sent what he had made to the people working on Microsoft Bob, and they replied with bad news. Everything in the software package had been set with Times New Roman measurements – not only the choice and size of the type, but also the size of the speech bubbles that contained it. Comic Sans was slightly larger than Times New Roman, so it couldn’t just be slotted in.

  Microsoft Bob duly appeared in its formal state, and was not a success. No one officially blamed the unsuitable typeface. But not long afterwards, Connare’s work was adopted for Microsoft Movie Maker, a distinct hit. And thus the typeface intended only as a solution to a problem took off.

  Comic Sans went global after it was included as a supplementary typeface in Windows 95. Now everyone in the world could not only see it, but use it. Because it was irreverent and naive, it may have appeared better suited to the heading of your student essay than something with a heavier formality like Clarendon (which dates back to 1845). People also began to use it on restaurant menus, greeting cards and birthday invitations, and self-printed posters stapled to trees. It was viral advertising before such a thing existed, and like a good joke it was funny at first. Connare explained why it worked so well. ‘Because it’s sometimes better than Times New Roman, that’s why.’

  Then Comic Sans began to appear in other places: on the sides of ambulances, on online porn sites, on the backs of the shirts worn by the Portuguese national basketball team, on the BBC and in Time magazine, in adverts for Adidas boots. It became corporate, and suddenly Times New Roman didn’t seem so bad any more.

  In the new century, people began to get upset with Comic Sans, at first in a comic way, and then in a more emetic one. Bloggers turned against it, a dangerous thing, and Vincent Connare found himself at the centre of an Internet hate campaign. A husband and wife cottage industry sprang up around it, with Holly and David Combs offering mail-order ‘Ban Comic Sans’ mugs, caps and T-shirts. Alongside their own manifesto:

  The bunny gets it – hard-hitting propaganda from the Ban Comic Sans website

  We understand font selection is a matter of personal preference and that many people may disagree with us. We believe in the sanctity of typography and that the traditions and established standards of this craft should be upheld throughout all time … Type’s very qualities and characteristics communicate to readers a meaning beyond mere syntax.

  The Combs, joint authors of a book called Peel, which documents the social history of the sticker, met one Saturday at a synagogue in Indianapolis; Holly says she was smitten as soon as they started discussing fonts. Both of them were clearly fans of type with authenticity and purpose, as their manifesto makes clear:

  When designing a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign, the use of a heavy-stroked, attention-commanding font such as or is appropriate. Typesetting such a message in would be ludicrous … analogous to showing up for a black tie event in a clown costume.

  The Combs’ manifesto then began to sound like something the Futurists would write after too much absinthe, calling on the proletariat to rise up against the evil of Comic Sans, and to sign a petition for its prohibition.

  Their website has attracted international feedback, highlighting the far-reaching and rapid spread of a font in the digital world. One post from South Africa lamented, ‘I am forced to study a national language called Afrikaans, which is similar to Flemish. Almost every textbook is printed ENTIRELY in Comic Sans.’

  The campaign also neatly demonstrated that the public, beyond the world of type design, has an awareness and an opinion about the everyday appearance of words. The Wall Street Journal wrote a column about Comic Sans and the banning movement on its front page (in its dour Dow Text font with a crisp Retina headline), explaining that the typeface was so unpopular that it was becoming retro chic, like lava lamps. Design Week went so far as to put Comic Sans on its cover, with a provocative Lichtenstein-style speech bubble asking, ‘The world’s favourite font!?’

  The Combs don’t really believe that Comic Sans is the plague of our time. In interviews they sound reasonable: ‘Comic Sans looks great on a candy packet,’ says Dave Combs. ‘A place where it doesn’t look great, in my opinion, is on a tombstone.’ You’ve actually seen that? ‘Yes, actually I have.’ Where else was no good? ‘I was in a doctor’s office,’ Holly Combs remembers, ‘and there was a whole brochure describing irritable bowel syndrome …’

  Connare could have taken this one of two ways, but he was smart and appreciated the attention. He came to Comic Sans’ defence, but also acknowledged its strict limitations. Like Dr Johnson’s lexicographers, type designers can rarely expect acclaim, but they do well if they avoid recriminations. And they rarely receive even ignominious fame, unlike Connare, who for a while became the most famous type designer in the world.

  In the sixteen years after he developed Comic Sans, Connare has designed several other noteworthy typefaces, notably , which is a nicely rounded semi-formal humanist font ideal for web design.* But his fame rests with his original creation. ‘Most everyday people that aren’t in my industry know the font,’ he says. I get introduced as the Comic Sans Guy. “What do you do?” they ask. “I design type.” “What do you design?” “You might have heard of Comic Sans.” And everybody says yes.’

  One reason for this may be Comic Sans’ emotional attributes, not least its warmth. Connare has written a monograph about his own type hero, William Addison Dwiggins, who in 1935 designed a sturdy book face that he intended to reflect the clanking machine age, its edges like the sparks and spits from a furnace. This too was emotional type, and Dwiggins envisaged a conversation in which he would justify his ambitions. ‘If you don’t get your type warm it will be no use at all for setting down warm human ideas – just a box full of rivets … By jickity, I’d like to make a type that fitted 1935 all right enough, but I’d like to make it warm – so full of blood and personality that it would jump at you.’ (Dwiggins was a man for the catchy phrase: he is credited with inventing the term ‘graphic design’.)

  Connare can sometimes be elliptical about his fame. ‘If you love Comic Sans, you don’t know much about typography. If you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.’ And sometimes, rather than regale new acquaintances with the whole naive saga, he can email them a pdf slideshow. This shows not only odd uses of his font, but also a letter he received from the Ban Comic Sans campaigners thanking him for being ‘a good sport’; on subsequent slides he showed a letter of appreciation from Disney after it used Comic Sans at its theme parks (it was signed by Mickey Mouse). His conclusion as to why Comic Sans has become one of the most widely
used fonts in the world is arresting: people like it, he says, ‘because it’s not like a typeface’.

  By jickity indeed. This suggests that, even in the digital age, we don’t know very much about type, and may in fact be frightened of it. Here is something that has always been central to our lives, but when the pull-down menu offers us the opportunity to choose type for our own ends we appear to opt for the one that most reminds us of the schoolroom. At every opportunity our computer asks whether we might like to spend the day with , , , , , or . But we choose old .

  Perhaps this is just as it should be. In its attempt to resemble handwriting, Comic Sans has its roots in type from the Middle Ages. It is the logical conclusion to a technological breakthrough that transformed everything. Of course, if Johannes Gutenberg had imagined that his greatest endeavour would end up as a funny sign above a funeral parlour he might just have wrapped his plump stained fingers around all the printer’s ink in Europe and thrown it in the sea.

  But come on Johannes, loosen up! Tell us a joke! As the Wall Street Journal observed, at least Comic Sans has stepped out from under a computer’s toolbar to become a punchline:

  Comic Sans walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘We don’t serve your type.’

  On 25th September 2007, a woman named Vicki Walker committed a type crime so calamitous that it cost her not only her job, but almost her sanity. Walker was working as an accountant in a New Zealand health agency, and there was an email to send. Regrettably, she ignored the only rule that everyone who has ever emailed knows: CAPITAL LETTERS LOOK LIKE YOU HATE SOMEONE AND ARE SHOUTING.

  It was a Tuesday afternoon. Walker pressed ‘Send’ on this instruction:

  TO ENSURE YOUR STAFF CLAIM IS PROCESSED AND PAID, PLEASE DO FOLLOW THE BELOW CHECKLIST

  Not the written word’s finest hour in lots of ways, but hardly a sackable offence. The letters were in blue, and elsewhere her email contained bold black and red. She worked for ProCare in Auckland, a company which clearly placed great pride in knowing when and when not to hold down the Caps button, though it did not have an email etiquette guide at the time Vicki Walker splurged on upper case.

  Upper and lower case? The term comes from the position of the loose metal or wooden letters laid in front of the traditional compositor’s hands before they were used to form a word – the commonly used ones on an accessible lower level, the capitals above them, waiting their turn. Even with this distinction, the compositor would still have to ‘mind their ps and qs’, so alike were they when each letter was dismantled from a block of type and then tossed back into the compartments of a tray.

  The correct use of type varies over time. These days, corporate edicts are common, and memos come down from on high like tablets of stone: thou shalt use only Arial on both internal and external communications. But who is to say that from 1982 is preferable to the way we communicated in on the pediments of public buildings in ancient Rome? And how did our eyes switch from accepting one over the other, to the point where a thoughtless choice of capitals-all-the-way became a cause of headaches and dismissals?

  The upper and lower case

  Vicki Walker was sacked three months after her email was deemed to have caused ‘disharmony in the workplace’, which would have been laughable had it not caused her so much distress. Twenty months later, after re-mortgaging her house and borrowing money from her sister to fight her case, Walker appealed successfully for unfair dismissal, and was awarded $17,000.

  There have always been rules of type, and type etiquette. Say you are designing a jacket for a new edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The book is out of copyright and so has cost you nothing, the beautiful jacket illustration of a secret garden has been done by a friend, and now all you have to do is find a suitable typeface for the title and author, and then the text inside. For the jacket type, conventional wisdom would be to choose something like which first appeared at around the time Austen was writing and looks very classy with its extreme range of fine and stronger lines, especially in italics (Pride and Prejudice). This font will fit right in, and will sell books to people who like classic editions. But if you wanted to reach a different market, the sort who might read Kate Atkinson or Sebastian Faulks, you may opt for something less fusty, perhaps Abroise Light, which, like Didot, has a stylish French pedigree.

  For the text of the book, you might consider a digital update of Bembo – perhaps Originally cut from metal in the 1490s, this classic roman typeface retains a consistent readability. And it fits the overriding principle that typefaces should mostly pass unrecognized in daily life; that they should inform but not alarm. A font on a book jacket should merely pull you in; once it has created the desired atmosphere it does well to slink away, like the host at a party.

  There are exceptions, of course, and a brilliant one is John Gray’s bestseller, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, in which the designer Andrew Newman chose Arquitectura for the male lines and Centaur for the female ones. Arquitectura looks manly because it is tall, solid, slightly space-age, rooted and implacable. Centaur, despite its bullish name, looks like it has been written by hand, has thin and thick strokes, and is charming and elegant (obviously this is gross sexual stereotyping, but Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is pop-psychology).

  Fonts have sexual stereotypes, too

  This then is another rule: type can have gender. The understanding is that heavy bold jagged fonts are mostly male (try ), and whimsical, lighter curly fonts are mostly female (perhaps from the Adobe Wedding Collection). You can subvert this form, but never the automatic associations that type infers. It’s the same with colour: you see a baby dressed in pink – that’s a girl. Type has us conditioned from birth, and it has taken more than five hundred years to begin to shake it free.

  Johannes Gutenberg didn’t pay much regard to the gender of type when he made his first letters in the 1440s. And he didn’t much care about finding a suitable font for each new project, or even changing the course of Western history. What he cared about was making money.

  Gutenberg was born in Mainz, near Frankfurt, the son of a wealthy merchant with links to the local mint. His family moved to Strasbourg when Gutenberg was young, but the details of his early working life are cloudy. There are records of his involvement with gems, metalwork and mirrors, but by the late 1440s he was known to be back in Mainz borrowing money to make ink and printing equipment.

  Gutenberg’s vision concerned automation, consistency and recycling. He is unlikely to have known of the far earlier printing methods in China and Korea, most of which involved the one-off production of books with woodblocks and cast bronze type. Certainly he was the first to have mastered the principles of mass production in Europe, and his innovations with casting reusable letters set the pattern for printing for the next five hundred years. The book became cheaper and more available, and what was once the sole province of the church and the wealthy became in time a source of pleasure and enlightenment for all educated classes. What a dangerous tool he unleashed.

  How was this achieved? With dexterity, patience and some ingenuity. Gutenberg’s experience of smithery had taught him the principles of hard and soft metals, and of hammering hallmarks and other symbols into silver and gold. He was equally familiar with liquid alloys, and at some point in the late 1440s it is likely that an idea forged in his mind: what if all these combined techniques could be applied to printing?

  Early printers at work in this engraving from 1568. Cast type is being arranged by compositors in the background.

  All the books Gutenberg had seen up to this point would have been handwritten. To modern eyes, their script can often look almost mechanical, though this was a result of painstaking work by a professional scribe hunched for months over a single volume. Complete words could be engraved into individual blocks of metal or wood and then inked, but this would take even longer to create a book. But what if it were possible to transform this process by casting an alphabet in small pieces of movable type
that could be reused and reconfigured as often as each new page of a document or book required?

  Gutenberg’s precise method of typefounding is unknown, but popular wisdom suggests that it was at least similar to the first documented process two decades later (and the method that dominated printing up until 1900). This begins with punchcutting – carving a letter in reverse on the end of a steel rod a few inches long. The punch is then hammered into softer metal, often copper, forming an indented ‘matrix’ to be fitted into a hand-held wooden mould with the aid of a spring. Hot metal – a mixture of lead, tin and antimony – is poured into the mould with a ladle, and hardens swiftly into a single letter at the tip of a slither of type, ready to be aligned into words. Taken as a whole, a font is born, although the process of spacing, moulding and finishing is a lot more skilled than suggested here. The single regular alphabet would be augmented by many duplicate letters, as well as punctuation and spaces; it is believed that Gutenberg cast almost three hundred different letterforms for his two-volume 1,282-page Bible of 1454 – 55.

  Once the font was ready, a page would be carefully assembled (in its mirror image), and tightened in a wooden frame or ‘chase’, and once enough copies had been printed, the block was broken up and the type used again. The printing made the process swift, while the type made it economical; thus did we witness the birth of mass production.

  The scale of Gutenberg’s achievements is inestimable. He advanced not only the printing press but also new oil-based inks (thinner water-based inks failed to adhere to metal) in addition to what may be considered to be the first example of book marketing. He employed twenty assistants, some of them in a sales capacity; in an early version of the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1454, all 180 printed copies of his Bible were sold ahead of publication.

  Gutenberg’s role in the dissemination of debate, science and dissent – printing as the dual mouthpiece of human sense and human folly – was already being felt by the time of his death in 1468. (He did not die wealthy, having surrendered his printing equipment after an unsuccessful legal battle with his principal benefactor Johannes Fust.) But his role in the cutting of type is less clear, and certainly another name deserves equal recognition. Peter Schoeffer, who joined Gutenberg in Mainz after studying calligraphy at the Sorbonne, is believed to have had a significant role in the earliest experiments in punchcutting, though his contribution is largely forgotten.