The master Letraset cutter would make letters look as though they had been carved with a single stroke. It was a process that could take six weeks for an entire alphabet, before the letters were finally deemed worthy of photographic reproduction and then mass printing on thin plastic sheets. Freda Sack recalled a two-year training period, and then taking two days to cut each letter of her ornate Masquerade. Mike Daines, another professional cutter, remembered an office high on the Beatles and marijuana when he started in 1967, and for years afterwards was unable to enjoy drawing letters in the sand on beach holidays without fearing an admonishing head-shaking from the supervisors.
But Letraset was not only a boon for graphic designers; it was also a wonderful thing for typefaces. Two years from its launch in 1961, the sticky letters were available in 35 standard fonts, while a decade later, marketed to 96 countries, there were 120 standard faces and at least 40 more in the specialized Letragraphica range. The latter was available on subscription only: designers who thought of themselves as cutting edge signed up to receive what Letraset executive Anthony Wenman called typefaces that were ‘as hot-off-the-press as one can get’.
The ultimate accolade came when the world’s leading traditional type designers, including Hermann and Gudrun Zapf (Palatino, Optima, Zapfino, Diotima, Zapf Dingbats), Herb Lubalin (Eros, Fact), and Aaron Burns (co-founder of the ITC font foundry), came all the way to Letraset headquarters in Ashford, Kent, to pay their respects. They were surprised to find a factory entirely without windows – to ensure dust-free surfaces – where men and women worked with the precision of watchmakers. It was a future in which its participants never got ink on their hands.
The company secured the rights of sixty classic fonts. Helvetica was becoming dominant in the early 1960s, and there were chart placings for Garamond, Times Bold, Futura, Caslon and Plantin. Letraset also employed its own staff to make new fonts, and in 1973 held an International Typeface Design Competition, which attracted 2,500 entries. The prize was £1,000, and seventeen faces were selected for production. They were predominantly based on traditional scripts, and had names like Magnificat and Le Griffe.
Letraset was the dominant force in dry transfer, but others also tried their hand. There was rub-down rivalry from Craft Creations of Cheshunt, who produced sheets with whole words, thus eliminating the nightmare of spacing. Sheet 103 read: – all in flowery , the elaborate capitals as wispy as horse hair swatting flies. ‘Results will vary with technique,’ a guide sheet explained with nerveless understatement. ‘Remember, practice makes perfect.’
If people outside of the design world knew the name of any fonts before Letraset arrived, they probably worked in an office and were female. The IBM Selectric Typewriter first appeared in 1961, and changed the look not only of professional documents, but also of professional desks. The machine’s keyboard didn’t look like an old Remington or Olivetti; in fact, its integral sunken keys looked uncannily like those on a laptop. And the results were similar, too. If you had the inspiration and vast amounts of patience you could write the first line of a sales order in Prestige Pica 72, the second in Orator or Delegate, and the rest of the thing in Courier 12 Italic.
The trick was the Golfball or Typeball, the interchangeable rounded sphere that you could click in and out of the centre console and get less ink on your hands than from changing a ribbon. IBM had twenty different golfball typefaces for sale, most of them sober and undramatic, but different enough to usher in the concept of corporate branding for even the smallest of businesses. IBM called its balls not fonts but ‘typing elements’, and its users’ manual confidently asserted that ‘you’ll find one right for every typing job’. It wasn’t the first to offer a choice of types – that claim lay with the portable Blickensderfer typewriter from the 1890s. But the Selectric was the first to make the switching of fonts a relatively easy option. At its peak in the 1980s, the Selectric dominated the global professional marketplace. But type always evolves. Once you could snap in a ball, or stamp, cut, emboss and rub, there was only one further thing to master: turning on Your First Computer.
The IBM Selectric’s secret weapon – its inner golfball (about the size of a £2 coin)
Even in its most basic, green-screen, fish-memory, floppy disk state – let’s say a bottom of the range Amstrad PCW – this would rapidly make everything else to do with type obsolete. Once you could use a computer keyboard and press the print button, why expect a future for a Platignum or Golfball? Once you had a calculator, what on earth was all that fuss about multiplication tables? Once you had email, why would you need a Post Office clerk to stick strips of type on a telegram? And once you had digital music, too bad for burnished sleevenotes. Hand-printing, Letraset – they didn’t stand a chance. And calligraphy is virtually gone, a craft Prince Charles is said to be keen on, hanging on grimly behind glass on the qualification certificates of quantity surveyors and chiropractors.
Now, almost everything we need is to be found beneath an LED or plasma screen. The tension of graphite or nib, or the fragile pleasure to be derived from running a forefinger across the opening page of a well-printed book, is fast becoming heritage. But typefaces – both their preponderance and ingenuity – have not suffered a similar decline in fortunes. Quite the opposite: it is now their almost inestimable number that is proving problematic.
When it was first published, in 1953, the Encyclopaedia of Type Faces caused waves of shock and delight in the design world. The shock, and the delight, was that there were so many typefaces in it – hundreds upon hundreds, from Achtung to Zilver Type. The book was edited by W Turner Berry (Librarian at St Bride Printing Library) and AF Johnson (Keeper of Books at the British Museum), joined for the next edition by writer and publisher W Pincus Jaspert, and offered a valuable opportunity to survey five hundred years of type history. As successive editions appeared, the featured fonts were accompanied by a little explanation: looking down the Ks, for example, you find Kumlien is a narrow roman text from 1943 by Akke Kumlien, while Krimhilde from 1934 was revealed to be by Albert Augspurg, a specialist in Schwabacher-style capitals.
For the most recent edition, marking its 55th anniversary, only W Pincus Jaspert was around to add new faces to the collection, and in his notes seems to be getting a little flummoxed by the task of cataloguing 2,000 fonts. ‘Ceska Unicals on Page 43 and Unicala on Page 229 are the same,’ he apologizes; ‘Della Robbia on Page 65 was modelled on Florentine not Roman capitals. Monastic on Page 158 is really Erasmus Initials.’ One can only empathize. It can be hard enough distinguishing Empiriana (1920) from Bodoni (late eighteenth century). With 2,000 alphabets, the task must be Herculean.
Even the jacket of the anniversary edition throws up a difficult query. It displays a huge red g against a purple background. It is a beautiful character – a double bowl, a fluid stroke, a perfect balance and a juicy comma of an ear, big enough to use as a handle. But which g is it? There are no clues on the jacket flaps, and 2,000 possible clues inside.
Identifying a particular font can be the most infuriating task, and designers can spoil their whole day by walking past a shop window and seeing something they can’t name. It is far worse than trying to identify a song from a snippet of lyric or melody.
The lower-case g can be doubly perplexing, because it is usually the letter that gives the face away. For it is with the g that designers let themselves go. It is not usually where they will begin – that’s often the a, n, h and p – but it is where a lot of big decisions are made with regards to history and expression. Will there be a simple loop (Futura), or a double bowl (Franklin Gothic)? Will the two bowls be cursive and varied in thickness (Goudy Old Style), or will they be uniform in width (Gill Sans)? Will the ear be level (Jenson) or droopy and tear-shaped (Century Schoolbook)? Will it taper (Bembo), or will it be flat (Garamond)? Will the upper bowl be more voluminous than the bottom one (Century Old Style) or vice-versa (Walbaum)? And what about the link between the bowls?
Spot the difference:
the lower-case g in (top row from left) Futura, Franklin Gothic, Goudy Old Style, Gill Sans, Jenson; (bottom row from left) Century Schoolbook, Bembo, Garamond, Century Old Style, Walbaum
These are not arbitrary decisions, but are tied to the pedigree of the type. A transitional Baskerville style, for example ITC Cheltenham, will look odd if the quirky lower bowl of its g, which has a tiny gap at the top left, suddenly closes up. With script or larger display type, the discipline is still there, but now the imagination of the designer may take flight – the solid underlining slap of a Broadway g, the generous lower slurp of a Snell Roundhand g, the supersized lower bowl of a Nicholas Cochin g.
And so which g adorns the jacket of the encyclopaedia of all these gs? One can narrow it down by consulting another trustworthy tome, Rookledge’s Classic International Type Finder. This breaks down hundreds of fonts according to the stresses, slopes, angles and serifs of individual letters, aiding both type identification and selection. So the g in question could be examined for its bowl, balance and ear, which eliminates about 670 specimens and leaves about thirty – including Aurora, Century Schoolbook, Bodoni Book, Corona, Columbia, Iridium, Bell, Madison and Walbaum. Walbaum looked to be the favourite for a while, but after much flicking back and forth through the pages, and looking extremely closely again, I wasn’t so sure. It could also have been Iridium or Bodoni 135 or Monotype Fournier.
I turned to a more modern search option. Inevitably, the iPhone has an app for font identification, named WhatTheFont. It allows you to take a photograph of a letter or word; then to highlight that part of the photo (the g) you wish the app to identify. It then uploads this somewhere, and offers you a choice of possible font matches. For my encyclopaedia g it offered a great many, some of which were attractive modern types – Gloriola Display Standard Fat, Zebron, Absara Sans Head OT-Black, Deliscript Italic, and Down Under Heavy – but none of which came close to being correct. Trying this again, offering another g, a computer-rendered, 72-pt Georgia g, WhatTheFont actually FaredMuchWorse, suggesting it was almost every other font in the world apart from Georgia. It could be Phantasmagoria Headless, it conjectured, or Imperial Long Spike, or Two Fisted Alt BB.
Let down by the app, I tried the more traditional route of modern knowledge – the web – where you can consult a dedicated type forum at MyFonts.com (part of the Bitstream digital foundry site). The contributors here, who go under such names as listlessBean and Eyehawk, display vast knowledge, an eagerness to help, and inestimable amounts of bile. Many sound as if Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons has been knocked over the head by heavy bound volumes of Typographica. Each day, as many as a hundred unidentified fonts are posted for identification and anyone can suggest a solution. The case is then marked solved or unsolved, or in some cases ‘Not A Font’ (because it’s a logo or hand-drawn). On the day I spent too many hours browsing, people wanted to know the name of the fonts used for, to offer a small sample, Batman Gothic Knight, Bonnie Tsang Photography, Perry Mason television titles and the Little Boulder Sweet Shop.
There was also a poser from ‘digitallydrafted’, who wanted to identify the Quiznos eatery tagline ‘SUBS SOUPS SALADS’. This elicited eleven contributions, among them:
I’m starting to believe it is Verveine (alias Trash Hand) by Luce Avérous, with some letters customized (Gincis)
I got EXTREMELY close by modifying Tempus Sans ITC, rotating the S 180 degrees … had to manually tweak the P and B (digitallydrafted)
Tempus Sans???????? You better take a closer look at TrashHand, that’s all I can say for now … (Gincis)
Looks like Good Dog (Jessica39180)
Sorry, Jessica, but it doesn’t look like any of all the Good Dog fonts (neither Bad Dog or Family Dog). Did you take a look at them before posting? (Gincis)
And so it continued, until the crushing verdict was delivered: Not A Font.
Another engaging conundrum had been presented to the forum by Starbucks. One of the members was puzzled by the round green emblem with ‘STARBUCKS COFFEE’ in a bold and blocky typeface around the rim, white on green. It is one of the most identifiable logos in the world, but is it a custom font or something you can buy? It turned out that Starbucks was not a new query on the WhatTheFont forum. There were thirty-four others – ranging from the typeface on the Sumatra coffee bag to the face on the Christmas ads to an in-house promotion of the Cinnamon Dolce Latte. The logo font query had been submitted by macmaniacttt, and the first positive sighting was by terranrich, who tentatively suggested SG Today Sans Serif SH Ultra. But he wasn’t really sure:
All the characters match, but somehow it doesn’t look exact. Maybe it’s just my own eyes?
Heron 2001 suggested that it WAS his eyes. ‘The C is way off … among other things…’
Terranrich then got all excited: ‘I’ve found it!!! HAHA!! Finally! I got the vector logo from BrandsOfTheWorld.com, straightened out the letters manually, and then ran it through WhatTheFont. It’s Freight Sans Black. :-D Case marked solved.’
Unfortunately, was designed by Joshua Darden in 2005, many years after Starbucks began. So Guess77 had some bad news: ‘Case marked unsolved.’ There was then a link to another hotbed of font analysis, Typophile. Here, one Stephen Coles laid everyone flat:
The Starbucks logo was created many years before Freight was even a twinkle in Joshua Darden’s eye. Freight Sans Black is quite similar, but the Starbucks ID is custom lettering, not a font. Note the differences in the B and S.
It was true: the B had smaller fill-ins, and the S was curlier, with a swell in the middle. Ah well. As Comic Book Guy might say, ‘I’ve spent my entire life trying to decipher a typeface … and now there’s only time left to say … Life well spent!’ And at the beginning of 2011, the quest became even more redundant: Starbucks removed its name from its round logo, leaving just the female siren without letters.
It was time to post my own Encyclopaedia ‘g’ query, and I sat back and looked forward to spirited debate. There was none, for within minutes Eyehawk had an answer.
Font identified as ACaslon Pro-Regular. Case marked solved.
There are, these days, even more encyclopaedic type directories than the Encyclopaedia of Type Faces – and the most encyclopaedic of them all is FontBook, a bright yellow doorstop published by FontShop, an agency founded in 1988 to sell digital types on floppy disks and more recently online. The book is quite a cult. Search for it on Google images and you will find a whole series of mash-up movie posters, with FontBook featuring in everything from Braveheart to Lord of the Rings (‘ONE BOOK TO RULE THEM ALL, ONE BOOK TO FIND THEM’).
A copy of the directory is sitting on a shelf in the Berlin office of Erik Spiekermann, FontShop’s co-founder and a legend in the graphic design world. He is famously quoted as saying that while some men like to look at women’s bottoms, he prefers type. The FontShop directory contains much to keep him happy – more than 100,000 fonts, ready for every conceivable (and inconceivable) use. They come from eighty-one type foundries and to make the choice for the harried advertiser or art director a little easier they have split them up into loose categories, rather like a wine list. There is the ‘no-nonsense functionality’ of sans serifs such as , and or the ‘contemporary sensitivity of neo-traditional romans’ such as Scala and Quadraat, and the ‘streetwise novelty’ of and Or the ‘Ironics’: fonts like (stoned – which conjures up an endless Grateful Dead gig) or (like a sign slapped onto the side of a Middle Eastern market cart) or (a typewriter whose ribbon should have been changed ten working days ago).
In the Display section of the catalogue, there are further oddities such as Kiddo Caps (an alphabet consisting of children doing things like brushing up beneath a budgie cage and flying a flag); NOOD.less (a bowl of noodle soup without the soup); BANANA.strip Regular (letters constructed from drawings of banana skins); Old Dreadful No 7 (an embarrassing collection of metal springs, fish, snakes, darts and backs of cats in the shape of an alphabet); or F2F Prototipa Multipla (unreadable and uninter
pretable). Sometimes the names alone are enough to make you not want to go there: Elliott’s Blue Eyeshadow; Monster Droppings; Bollocks; OldStyle Chewed; Hounslow.
There are also, of course, all the classic fonts, and among these are several faces that Spiekermann has created himself – and and (ITC stands for International Typeface Corporation, FF stands for FontFont). These are the epitome of clean and efficient information – type that has helped define the look of Spiekermann’s home city of Berlin. An art historian by training, Spiekermann is the kind of designer whose enthusiasm for type and graphic systems permeates not just his own life, but almost everyone he comes into contact with. He is the type world’s most prominent educator and proselytizer. He may have been the first to use a new word to describe his condition. ‘Most people take the way words look for granted,’ he said in a BBC film about cultural artefacts. ‘Words are there to be read – end of story. Once however typomania sets in, it becomes quite a different story.’
The big yellow bible of the type world
Spiekermann’s rise to prominence coincides precisely with the rise of digital type, and also with the reunification of Germany. His fonts adorn the Berlin Transit network and the Deutsche Bahn national railway, while a short walk from his office is the Philharmonie, the home of the Berlin Philharmonic, for whom Spiekermann designed the corporate branding. But that was a few years ago, and he isn’t entirely happy with what’s happened to it since. ‘They fucked it up as quickly as they could,’ he says. He describes his design for a grid system to be used by the in-house promotions and marketing people, a template in which he hoped ‘the type could be freely organized, but still find its rhythm. Type has rhythm, just like music. But it’s like cooking – you can follow a recipe to the last gram, but if the love isn’t there it’s just flat and bland.’
Just My Type Page 11
