Just My Type

by Simon Garfield

He then went on to offer advice for particular situations. For a thank-you letter, Sigman suggested, one should use something straight and sincere with a buoyant air, perhaps . For a resignation letter – that depends if you enjoyed your employment (in which case an appealing font with a human edge, such as or ), but if your time in the job was hell, then it’s dispassionate .

  The best font for a love letter? Ideally something affectionate with big round Os, but you might also consider an italicized font such as which alludes to old-fashioned scribes and may possess ‘a softening emotional quality, as if the writer is leaning over to talk personally to the reader’. But beware: ‘Implementing such fonts may also serve as an aid to romantic deception’.

  And what, finally, should one use to end a relationship? ‘For clarity without harshness,’ the doctor prescribes plain old . ‘To let them down softly, italicized fonts can be employed. However, the user may unwittingly give the reader false hope. or may have a lighter, optimistic yet respectful feel to it. For those who won’t take no for an answer, or the more rigid technical fonts indicate there’s no room for misinterpretation, no going back.’

  But why trust the survey of a popular psychologist? Why not conduct a survey of your own? At the end of 2009, the design company Pentagram sent out an elaborate e-card, as their season’s greetings. Previously these had taken the form of booklets but this one was a link to an online questionnaire called ‘ (the question posed in bold Helvetica Neue).

  The survey (it is still online should you wish to take part) starts with a film-loop of your own personal font analyst in a consulting room – white painted wood panelling, Eileen Gray glass table. He is filmed from the neck down, so one notices the pad on his knee, his cufflinks and his corduroy trousers. ‘What type are you?’ the man asks in an Austrian or possibly Swiss accent (basically he’s Freud). ‘Answer four simple questions that will help you drink from the font of self-knowledge, face the truth and find out just which type you are. Fill in the required information.’ This consists merely of your name, but the analyst is impatient. ‘Quickly now,’ he says as he swivels on his squeaky chair; a tinkling piano and a ticking clock add to the mood.

  Once you have filled in your name, the four questions are: ‘Are you Emotional – someone who’s happy to say that something feels right? Or are you Rational – someone who prefers to say that something has a one-in-two chance of being right? Pick one please.’ The analyst plays with his pen.

  I click Emotional. The analyst writes down the answer on his pad. ‘You are emotional – good. Second question: ‘Are you Understated – someone who thinks the best word is a word in your ear? Or are your Assertive – someone who believes that the word in your ear is best shouted? Make your mind up please.’

  I click Understated. He writes it down. ‘Let’s move on. Third question: are you Traditional – someone who believes that ideas, like wine, are best aged? Or are you Progressive – someone who believes that ideas, like milk, are best fresh? Quickly now.’ The analyst stirs his coffee as, naturally, I opt for Progressive.

  What type are you? The analyst awaits your answers …

  ‘You are progressive. To the last question now. Are you Relaxed? Are you someone who takes any chocolate from the box and eats it whether hazelnut crunch or orange cream? Or are you Disciplined – someone who suffers the orange cream first so they can save the hazelnut crunch till last? Come on, come on.’ A fly buzzes around him as I pick Disciplined.

  Before the analyst recaps my choices and finds my type, I remember a comment from Eric Gill from the middle of the last century: ‘There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools.’ So what kind of fool am I? My analyst could have chosen Cooper Black Italic, Bifur, Corbusier Stencil or one of sixteen others on the programmed list. But my type turns out to be , and photographs of this handsome font appear with a spoken explanation:

  Designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, Archer Hairline is a modern typeface with a straightforward appearance, but one that has tiny outbreaks of elegance and tiny dots of emotion, only apparent on closer examination. If you are someone who is outwardly composed, but will occasionally run into the bathroom for a quick laugh or quiet cry before emerging to the world outwardly composed again, then Archer Hairline is your type.

  Expanded Antique, font of choice for a select group

  How popular is my type? When I subjected it to online analysis, some 278,000 people had been before me and the most common results had been (13.3 per cent), (11.4), (9.9), (9.7) and (9.5). Down at the bottom, only 1.6 per cent were deemed to be

  Surveys such as this can cause low self-esteem; too bad if you always thought of yourself as Georgia and Font Freud says you’re .

  Things have changed beyond measure since Steve Jobs put a little font choice on his Apple computers. The most basic Mac now comes with twenty-three variants of Lucida and eleven of Gill Sans, as well as ones that seldom see the light of day, such as Haettenschweiler and Harrington. And Windows users aren’t short of a face these days, either, with Arab, Thai and Tamil scripts bundled into Windows 7 along with dozens of regular fonts.

  And if none of these feel quite right to you, there is always the option of making your own. Given the patience and the desire to create an A and a G that hasn’t been made before, you can fire up one of a number of software programs – TypeTool, FontLab Studio and Fontographer are the most popular – and begin your quest.

  If you click on ‘New Font’ in the Fontographer program, you get a grid for every conceivable letter and character, along with every accent in almost every language. You might click on ‘a’, and the grid opens up to a larger square. There are side-panels packed with tools to help you measure, triangulate, blend, retract, merge, hilite and hint. But basically your task is the same as it has been for centuries: you must make something beautiful and readable.

  I asked Matthew Carter whether computers have made the life of a type designer any easier (Carter, you’ll recall, began life as a punchcutter in the style of a latterday Gutenberg, and has worked with practically every typesetting method since; his greatest digital hits have been Verdana and Georgia). He replied, ‘Some aspects get easier. But if you’re doing a good job you should feel that it gets harder. If you think it’s getting easier, you ought to look out. I think it means you’re getting lazy.’

  When personal computers and typographic software were in their infancy, Carter became involved in a quarrel at a type conference with the designer Milton Glaser (the veteran designer who made the I logo and the hand-drawn typefaces Baby Teeth and Glaser Stencil). ‘He was very resistant,’ Carter remembers. ‘His point was that you can’t sketch with a computer, you can’t do a woolly line – everything that comes out of a computer is finished. I didn’t disagree with that, but on a computer there are other ways of sketching. All type design programs have these very crude tools that allow you to take a shape and flip and flop it and stick it here and there. And if I’m designing a typeface and I’ve drawn the lower-case b, there’s information there that I can use for the p and the q, so why not flip and flop it? It’s done in seconds, and it gives me a chance to clean things up and resolve matters. And if I’ve done a lower-case n, I’ve got a lot of information about the m and the h and the u. Why wouldn’t I use that? In the old days when I was drawing it, I would also use that information but it would be much more laborious. Computers are not the answer, but they’re a help.’

  Milton Glaser’s Baby Teeth

  What then is the answer? After 560 years of movable type, why is our job not yet done? Why is the world still full of serious people trying to find great names for different new alphabets? The answer lies in another question. In 1968 the influential graphic design review The Penrose Annual asked exactly the same things: ‘Aren’t we done yet? Why do we need all these new fonts such as … Helvetica?’

  The answer, then and now, is the same. Because the world and its contents are continually changing. We
need to express ourselves in new ways.

  ‘I’ve got a whole talk called Why New Typefaces?’ Matthew Carter adds. ‘It’s the most frequently asked question I get. There are only thirty-two notes on a tenor saxophone, and surely to God they’ve all been played by now. It’s a bit like that with type – we are slicing the pie thinner and thinner. But at the same time, there are more good type designers now on the planet than at any other time in history.’

  New technologies are making us familiar with new fonts and fonts previously obscure. The BlackBerry has BlackBerry Alpha Serif, Clarity and Millbank. The Amazon Kindle uses Monotype Caecillia. The iPad handles the same fonts as other Apple devices, and while its iBooks application carries a restrictive choice of fonts, there is a lavish app called TypeDrawing, which takes even the plainest fonts to exciting new heights; it may be the tool that teaches children about type – the modern version of the John Bull printing kit. You type in a phrase, or perhaps your name, and use your finger to paint a swirling picture with those word patterns on the screen. You can choose your colour, size and font – from to – and the results provide a whole new flowing definition of movable type.

  TypeDrawing fun on your shiny new Apple device

  Online you can also play Cheese or Font, a childish, fruitless and frustrating game in which a name appears on screen and you have to guess whether it’s a … yes, quite. Castellano? Molbo? Crillee? Arvore? Taleggio? You might do well to prepare for this by purchasing a set of Type Trumps – the designer’s version of the kids’ card game, with each font card rated for legibility, weight and special power.

  After this it may come as a relief to waste at least five minutes of your time in the online company of ‘Max Kerning’. Kerning is obsessed with kerning, the eradication of sloppy text by the correct proportional spacing. He speaks with a hybrid Dutch and German accent, wears a tie beneath a gold-coloured jumper, and seems to have plastic hair. The video shows him vacuuming, and removing lint from his sleeve with a roller. ‘Clean type is godly type,’ he says. ‘I care about text. Some people say that I care too much. They say to me, they say, “Max, you are too strict!” That is what sloppy people say. When text is clean, well-spaced and organized, it is then, and only then that I find perfection.’

  Know your fonts with Type Trumps

  In a small office in San Francisco’s Market Street, one great new hope of type design is pushing a new array of letters around a computer screen in search of the future – or at least something that will pay the office bills. He is Rodrigo Xavier Cavazos (or RXC), principal of PSY/OPS Type Foundry, a place responsible for fonts such as and – each exploring new and inspiring boundaries of what type is capable of.

  Cavazos is fond of saying that when he is not working on a font, he can be found working on another font. He has designed his office to resemble an ambient chill-out space in a club, lots of lava lamps and soft furnishings, and many of his types reflect this dreamy, slightly hallucinogenic mood. Every chair has a little sloping desk close by, like a miniature architectural drawing board. When we met in mid-morning, these chairs and desks were empty, but as the day progressed PSY/OPS staff arrived one by one, and with hardly any noise placed their Macs on the tables and began working, defining the type of tomorrow.

  Cavazos himself is in his mid-forties. He started PSY/ OPS in the mid-1990s, its name inspired by the pseudoscientific term for clandestine military propaganda and mind-manipulation. ‘Type is a powerful behaviour modification tool,’ he explains. ‘Transparent to the consumer; transcendent to the designer who knows how to use it.’ His most famous client is Electronic Arts (EA), the computer games company, for whom he made a sans-serif for use in many of their sports games. It is an industrial, slightly collegiate font, but much of his foundry’s output is better suited to layouts for avant garde magazines and tattoo catalogues.

  Cavazos’s fascination with type began as a child when he received a ‘magical’ toy printing press. He tries to communicate this naive sense of excitement when he teaches type design at the California College of the Arts, instructing his students to start by doodling letters on a napkin. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there. ‘A lot of genius in a doodle is in the fuzz,’ he regrets. ‘As soon as you have to define something and make it cleaner, say the thickness of a point, then things start to dry up. Then it becomes a matter of balancing the inspiration – keeping in the spirit of the design, while having a workable, lovely treatment with good constructions.’

  But how do you teach someone to make a great new font? Partly by looking at the past – at the Garamonds, the Caslons and the Baskervilles. The walls of the PSY/OPS office are covered with traditional letterpress posters, another art Cavazos tries to instill in his students. ‘It’s essential to have some visual knowledge of what’s gone before, the classic types,’ he says. ‘You look at a classic design and there’s a reason it’s still strong centuries later. But on the other hand, those designs have already been created, and you want to make something new. There has to be a structure and a heart that underlies it, and then you combine that with naive accidents, and it creates a liveliness and a special quality. You need to observe, look and draw. You need to get a muscle-sense.’

  The devil is in the detail: Retablo, designed by RXC

  On another continent, other forms are taking shape. In a garden in Berlin, the Dutch type designer Luc(as) de Groot tells me why he began to spell his name with parentheses. It is a few days after his forty-sixth birthday, and there is still a little cake left, decorated with his name in dry capital sans serif letter biscuits from Russia. I eat a piece of parenthesis and an a.

  De Groot is one of the leading lights of contemporary type design, someone who is setting the tone of how our words may look in ten or fifteen years’ time. His interest began young: his father grew and sold tulips, and he remembers he used Letraset Baskerville Italic on special offers for his bulbs. He was also fascinated by his dad’s Golfball typewriter – by the way you could change the way words looked on a page. He made his own first ‘crappy’ font at the age of six.

  For the most part, De Groot makes fonts we find very useful. In his youth he had a vision for a typeface, perhaps made of symbols, that could be used universally throughout the world to reflect peaceable and warm communication, and he still nurtures such ideals. ‘I like to think my type has a friendly atmosphere,’ he says. ‘Humanistic with soft curves, something that helps people communicate in a friendly way.’

  De Groot has several claims to fame. He made the Thesis family of typefaces, an entire ‘typographic system’ combining , and fonts in a vast and cohesive array of weights and possible uses. (He says he has seen this font family on condoms, toilet paper, soap packaging, a bank in Poland and much of the east German city of Chemnitz.) He has redesigned logos for VW and Audi, and the masthead for Der Spiegel. And he has also made fonts that tread the outer limits: the crazy and aggressive font Jesus Loves You, for example, all thorns and barbed wire, or the soft floating , made up of bubbles.

  Jesus Loves You font

  Luc(as) de Groot, designer of the world’s most widely-used font – and it’s not the Helvetica letters on the wall behind him …

  It was in 2002, however, that De Groot began his most significant work – a design that was to become another step-change in the history of type. He remembers a phone call with ‘a go-between who asked me to design a font for a very secret client. I found out afterwards that it was Microsoft. It was a great feeling – I immediately started knocking down walls and redoing the office. But it was a one-off payment, and if I had known it would have been used the way it was I probably would have asked for more money.’

  Microsoft had called De Groot because it was looking for new fonts for its ClearType initiative, a new technology that offered increased clarity on a screen, and which was developed initially for ebooks. De Groot offered them , a highly stylized font that offered the apparent simplicity of a typewriter style such as Courier with a depth and warm
th not normally associated with such a utilitarian face. This swiftly became an integral part of the company’s Vista operating system.

  But it was the type that De Groot designed next, , that made most impact. In fact, it’s fair to say that it has changed the whole look of mass communication. Calibri is a rounded, pliable sans serif with great visual impact, and in 2007 it became Microsoft’s font of choice, the default not only for Word (where it replaced the serif Times New Roman), but also for Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel (where it replaced Arial).

  Calibri rules the western world – for now

  This made it the most widely used font in the western world. But did it also make it the best font? Or the most versatile? Or the most seductive, surprising and beautiful? Of course not. That font is yet to come.

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