If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ve figured out I love how type and letters live in our environment. For many of us, our contemporary environment includes the digital realm.

Developments in web fonts has lead me away from the city streets (for now) and back into my HTML/CSS files. There is just too much going on not to immerse myself in web type.

I’ll return to this blog as soon as I can. If all goes well, I’ll be posting again in Spring 2012. In the meantime, visit my other work at TypographicWebDesign and GoodWebFonts.

Street scenes allow us to catch a glimpse of how type and lettering lived in a town.

This is the intersection of Union and Purchase streets, 1870,  in New Bedford, Massachusetts. (Photo courtesy of Spinner Publications.)

"Looking east down Union Street from Purchase Street." Stephen F. Adams, Stereograph, Circa 1870. Included in "A Window Back: Photography in a Whaling Port" by Nicholas Whitman. Published by Spinner Publications, Inc., 1994.

If we were to look east down Union street just after the civil war, we would see a similar scene. There are very few signs on the street. While more products are coming out of the factories in search of a buyer, and the first American advertising agency was established almost 30 years earlier, signs on the streets of New Bedford remain relatively small and flat against the building.

Why? Life is still pretty slow: it’s the time of the horse and buggy over cobblestone streets. And downtown buildings are still short — only one or two stories.

Both the speed of the pedestrian and the height of the buildings allow signs to remain legible, even when small and flat to the building.

One sign — for T.H. Ellis and Company Boots and Shoes — sticks out on an awning. It displays a mixture of sans serif and slab serif lettering.

Detail, “Looking east down Union Street from Purchase Street.” Stephen F. Adams, Stereograph, Circa 1870.

1908: BIGGER TYPE

Almost forty years later, it’s 1908. It’s six years before World War I will start, and we’re at the same intersection — we’ve just turned 90 degrees to our left and are now looking North up Purchase street. (Image courtesy of D.R. Nelson and Company.)

“Purchase Street Looking [North]” (misidentified as looking South), from “New Bedford: A Postcard History 1898-1960″ by David R. Nelson, published by D.R. Nelson and Company, 2004.

Advertising on the street has taken off! Notice the assortment of decorative typefaces. Not as eclectic as the typefaces seen on broadsides pasted up almost 60 years earlier, but the scripts and serif faces are showy compared to the slab and sans serif faces we saw in 1870.

Plus, type is getting bigger!

Detail. The Times building is five stories tall, one sign is two stories tall, the other is four!

Transportation is getting faster, buildings are getting taller. Type needs to be bigger in order to be read from a greater distance.

1945: ONE STORE, THREE SIGNS

Almost 40 years has later, World War II is coming to an end. We’re at the same intersection again, we’ve just turned 45 degrees, so we are looking at the north-west corner — at the façade of Lincoln’s department store. (Image courtesy of Waterfront Historic Action LeaguE.)

Purchase and Union Streets, 1945. Included in "Not Just Anywhere: The Story of WHALE and the Rescue of New Bedford's Waterfront Historic District" by Marsha McCabe and Joseph D. Thomas. Published by Spinner Publications, Inc., 1995.

There are more people, more buildings, more businesses. Cars are getting faster, and there’s even a streetcar system. Lincoln’s department store won’t take chances. They have three signs to help customers find their store!

Detail. Additional hand-painted signs help drivers see Lincoln's from a distance -- in plenty of time to look for a parking space.

Detail. Possibly influenced by a movement called Streamline Moderne, Lincoln's mixes upper and lower case letters.

Lincoln’s uses a mix of upper and lower case sans serif letters. No ascenders or descenders in sight.

These kinds of letterforms are often associated with Art Deco, but may have also been influenced by a parallel movement called Streamline Moderne. Much like Art Deco, Streamline Moderne was influenced by manufacturing and streamlining techniques arising from science and mass production. While the Lincoln’s sign does not incorporate the aerodynamic bullet shape often associated with Streamline Moderne, the use of square-cornered counterforms within rounded-cornered letterforms references the elements of the bullet — and goes beyond the geometric forms often associated with Art Deco.

The main sign over the front door is affixed to the building.  It’s difficult to say what the material is. It could be stone or metal, or even wood. But plastic wasn’t in use when the sign was made in 1938, so we’ll rule that out.

The other two signs are painted on the building itself, high above the hustle and bustle of the city’s busiest intersection, so people in cars can see the signs from a distance and have plenty of time to look for a parking space. The lettering isn’t a perfect match from one sign to the next. These playful irregularities are indicative of hand-painted signs. But you can see that the use of square cornered counterforms within rounded-cornered letterforms remains consistent.

2007: LESS TRAFFIC

Type and letters live in our environment. It’s important to remember it’s not just about the time period, but also about the use of a place. The images above were of busy street corners… during the heyday of downtown New Bedford. This picture is of the same building, But now it’s July 2007, and Lincoln’s is long gone.

Lincoln's Department store is long gone. The building, renovated in 2006, now houses a magazine store at street level and loft apartments on the upper floors.

The buildings are clean of signs, there is very little lettering and type to be seen. That’s because we’re looking at a primarily residential building, on a street that no longer hustles and bustles. The Haste (green) and Eddy (brick) buildings are two of the five buildings that now house the Union Street Lofts. Restored by WHALE and HallKeen shortly before the picture was taken in 2007, the Haste and Eddy buildings currently have one commercial tenant at street level, while the  mixed-income lofts on the upper floors are fully occupied.

2007 CONTINUED

In the image below, we are still at Purchase and Union streets, and it’s still July 2007, but we’ve turned 90 degrees to our left and are looking at the south-west corner of the intersection.

The old Star Store building is now home to the New Bedford campus of the College of Visual and Performing Arts (UMass Dartmouth). Much like the awning we saw in 1870, CVPA’s signs are impermanent banners. But the type is computer generated.

UMass Dartmouth, College of Visual and Performing Arts, New Bedford campus

Detail. In 2007, signs are impermanent, with computer-generated type. The typeface, "Hard Times" by Jeffrey Keedy was created in 1991 -- the year Fontographer 3.1 was released.

CVPA is set in “Hard Times,” an experimental typeface created by Jeffery Keedy in 1991 — the year Fontographer 3.1 was released. An alteration of Times Roman in a process described by Paul Shaw (“The Digital Past: When Typefaces Were Experimental” AIGA Voice, May 19, 2005) as “hacking off and reassembling serifs and other parts,” Hard Times is indicative of Jeffery Keedy’s work.

Ellen Lupton writes in Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture, “Although several of Keedy’s own typefaces are based on historical sources, his fonts are ironic commentaries, not scholarly revivals. Keedy has argued that designers should search for the future rather than excavate the past.”

Adding an ironic twist to the story of the intersection of Purchase and Union Streets… in a city purposefully  building its future by embracing and understanding its past.

[Written for the whalingmuseumblog.org, November 2, 2009.]

Typography is the art of designing the written word. Type is ubiquitous. It is in the books, magazines, and websites we read, the street signs we use to find our way, the fonts we choose in our MS Word documents. Letters are everywhere. In the landscape, letters reflect the culture of a time and place. As a typographer I am interested in how letters and type “live” in society, and how they change as life around them changes.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been researching lettering in New Bedford, Massachusetts. New Bedford had enough wealth early on to finance documentation of the town. Later it gained enough international fame (when the movie “Moby Dick” was produced) to warrant continued historic preservation. These days, along with the National Park Services and the Waterfront Historic Action LeaguE (WHALE) — which help keep historic buildings intact — New Bedford has the Whaling Museum Library to keep historic documents and photos archived and available to those studying the history of New Bedford and the history of whaling.

New Bedford is an excellent source of inspiration because of it’s financial, social, and industrial past: originally settled by Quakers from Plymouth Colony, it has been the whaling capital of the world, a major stop on the underground railroad, and one of the biggest cotton textiles producers in the US. It is also a small city that fought urban renewal, and now struggles to revitalize it’s downtown and to re-assert it’s identity.

Finally, the longevity of the town allows me to map its history against technological, political, cultural, and even typographic developments.

THE PROJECT: TYPEFACES OF NEW BEDFORD

My early personal interests in New Bedford were linked to the landscape: how certain street corners or buildings changed over time. (I can’t help but revel in the fact that life goes on around these buildings. Generations of people come and go. Businesses change. Tastes change. Technology changes. And thus, signs change.)

Later, in order to expand the scope of my research, I enlisted the help of some of my students. [type]Faces of New Bedford is an on-going undergraduate research project I facilitate with Juniors and Seniors at UMass Dartmouth as a typeface design project. Working with students allows me to conduct research on the role of lettering, writing, and typography over a period of 300+ years in a single place. In return, the project allows the members of my “research team” to learn about the process of designing and producing a typeface, while learning more about the history of New Bedford.

We lose a part of our history when letters are destroyed without documentation. Seeing how type lives in the context of society helps me better understand the history of my own field, and I’ve found it helps my students to identify with those that lived in the area. They begin to connect with and better understand both the history of the landscape and the history of typography.

THE PROCESS

In 2007 and 2008, students conducted research on the history of New Bedford — meeting with representatives from the National Park Service, WHALE, and the New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library. They identified inspirational aspects of New Bedford’s history and found examples of writing and/or typography related to the times/events they were most interested in studying.

Students then designed digital versions of their chosen writing/lettering and wrote abstracts explaining their research (both “scholarly” and “creative”). The final result: 30 working typefaces and a series of 30 posters, each highlighting a different time in the history of New Bedford (1705-2007).

STUDENT WORK

Thirty typefaces have been designed over the years.

Some typefaces represent lettering from buildings and signs: the Cherry and Company Building, circa 1920; Signage for the Brightman Stationary Store located in the A. E. Coffin Building, circa 1930; Lincoln’s Department Store, circa 1938; A Boiler Repair and Welding shop, circa 1958.

Inspiration: Art Deco lettering on the Cherry and Company building, circa 1920. Photo by Jennifer Soares 2008.

Inspiration: New England Boiler Repair and Welding (in the building where "Cork” is now located) circa 1958. Photo from the Library of Congress Archives. Close-up of sign inset.

Other typefaces represent lettering from printed materials: text from the New Bedford Mercury, circa 1807; a broadside for an anti-slavery meeting, circa 1853; a broadside for the labor party, circa 1920.

Inspiration: A section from The New Bedford Mercury, circa 1807. From the New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library Archives.

Many typefaces are based on primary sources students found at the New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library.

Steve Hickey based his typeface on the writing of John Akin, a town clerk in Dartmouth in 1705. Steve’s typeface is from the oldest artifact — a 300 year-old page of handwritten notes. Steve had to negotiate which letters to “use” in his final design. When we write by hand, we often form our letters differently from word to word. You can see below how John Atkin’s “o” changed as he wrote. Steve had to design an “o” to work in the context of every word.

Inspiration: A section from notes written by John Akin, town clerk in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, 1705. From the New Bedford Whaling Museum Library Archives. Note: image modified for legibility and color by Steve Hickey.

Typeface designed by Steve Hickey, 2007.

Amy Williams was inspired by the logbook kept by Seth Barlow, Jr., keeper on the brig The Nancy. Amid the day-to-day accounts about the weather, who had gotten sick or died, and the ships they saw on the open seas, she found pages of experimentation with form. Some of the letters written by Seth Barlow, Jr. where elegant script, others were bold, blocky, Roman forms. There were literally dozens of “fonts” to work with. Seth Barlow was a born letterer.

Inspiration: Logbook kept by Seth Barlow, Jr., keeper on the brig The Nancy, circa 1807. From the New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library Archives. Note: image modified (color) by Amy Williams.

Typeface designed by Amy Williams, 2007.

Eric Galvez was intrigued by New Bedford’s wealth during the periods of prosperity linked first to the Whaling Industry and later to the Cotton Textile Industry. He was amazed that New Bedford used to be the wealthiest city in the United States! He found examples of Old Dartmouth and New Bedford insurance maps at the New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library — maps that represent land ownership during prosperous times. As Eric designed a “prosperous” typeface based on one of the insurance maps, he truly understood for the first time how a typeface can communicate something more than the words on the page.

Inspiration: Cover of a Fairhaven Insurance map from 1906 -- the height of the Cotton Textile Industry in New Bedford.

Typeface designed by Eric Galvez, 2007.

THE FUTURE

Students continue to work on typefaces inspired by the history of New Bedford. We’ve currently narrowed our focus to signs, and are working toward the day we will have a full New Bedford Typeface — a collection of various lettering styles from different periods in New Bedford’s history.

Unlike “regular” typefaces (e.g., Times New Roman), New Bedford won’t come in regular, bold, and italic. New Bedford is a type family built upon the history of a place, and will offer styles related to history, such as New Bedford 1880, 1920, and 1950.

Every semester we get a little closer to bringing New Bedford’s history to  life in a new way. Through the letters that “lived” in New Bedford — letters and signs that changed as life around them changed.

New Bedford 1920 is in production. It is based on the Art Deco lettering from the Cherry and Company sign shown earlier in this post. The typeface was designed by Jennifer Soares, and is being refined and expanded by Justin Lilak at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

New Bedford 1958 is in production. It is based on lettering from the Boiler Repair and Welding sign shown earlier in the post. Originally designed by Kayla Hardy, the typeface is being refined and expanded by Jimmy Lee at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Tobias Frere-Jones of Hoefler & Frere-Jones designed Gotham in 2000. I always thought of Broadway as the typeface of New York City — until Frere-Jones (a native of NYC) designed Gotham, which is based on lettering and signs around the city.

Gotham Medium, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000. Based on lettering from buildings and signs around the city, Gotham represents a style of lettering done by draftsman from 1930 to 1960. Screen shot from the testdriver at www.typography.com.

I love what Gotham represents: a slice of history in the U.S. from the start of the Depression to the 1960s.

The stock market crashed on Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Throughout the 1930s, the U.S. was torn between the need to simplify and survive — and the need to escape (it’s no surprise the entertainment industry continued to boom). So while Art Deco fonts continued to be used to portray quality, excitement, and entertainment, Art Deco in general was losing favor — criticized because it represented a luxury unavailable to the average person.

At the same time (1930s) Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were established to provide relief, reform, and recovery. According to Frere-Jones, many of the signs/letters that inspired Gotham date back to the Work Projects Administration of the 1930s. I’ve started researching documented WPA buildings, and haven’t found an abundance of this kind of “New Deal Gothic” lettering. Why?

According to Gabrielle Esperdy in Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal, one of the New Deal financial programs — the Modernization Credit Plan (MCP) — enabled small business owners to update their storefronts. Intended to help prime the pump of the economy, the plan impacted storefront facades all over the country.

If we don’t see New Deal Gothic lettering on stadiums, government buildings, and other big (well-documented) construction projects of the New Deal, could they be on the facades of 1930s Main Street? Gabrielle Esperdy suggests “business conditions and political programs during the Great Depression intersected and produced a new retail landscape in Main Street America.”

These facades may be documented, but I haven’t found them yet. I’ve read excerpts of Esperdy’s book online, which had all images blocked out for copyright purposes. I am awaiting a hard copy from my public library, and will post an update when and if I find out more.

STYLES AND “ISMS”

Design styles co-exist — there are no lines of demarcation. While Art Deco architecture had it’s high point between the World Wars (roughly 1920-1939), and the New Deal lasted roughly from 1933-1936, the Port Authority Bus Terminal is an “Art Deco” building with “New Deal Gothic” lettering built in 1950.

The sign for the Port Authority Bus Terminal is also the main inspiration for Gotham.

Gotham continues to gain a reputation as the typeface of New York City. It is the typeface engraved on the cornerstone of the new Freedom Tower currently under construction.

Paul T. Werner compared Gotham to Paul Renner’s Futura in Freedom Tower Type (AIGA Voice, July 16, 2004). In the article, Werner questions the decision to use Gotham, writing, “The irony is, that New Deal American Gothics had much in common with Futura and other sans-serifs of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties: all were conscious attempts at what the Nazis were to call Gleichschaltung, “planification.”

Top: Adobe's Futura, designed by Paul Renner. Screenshot from myfonts.com. Bottom: Gotham Book, screenshot from the typedriver at www.typography.com. While both have geometric elements, Futura was designed by a typedesigner and follows a pre-conceived geometric ideal. Gotham was based on lettering done by engineers and draftsman. Notice the differences between the G, M, and R. Futura is more idealized.

Werner missed the point. Yes, both typefaces have an element of geometry. But Futura was designed by a type designer with a pre-conceived ideal. In “A Natural History of Typography” (1992), J Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton write that in the early 20th century, “Modernism invested this mode of formal manipulation with ideological significance. … Structuralist typography rejects the ideal of an essential, core letterform. By shifting the emphasis from the individual letter to the overall series of characters, structuralist typography exchanges the fixed identity of the letter for the relational system of the font.”

Gotham, on the other hand, is based on letters made by engineers and draftsman, people who were often working outside the realm of typographic theory. In fact, Tobias Frere-Jones calls Gotham a “working-class typeface.” These letters were not intended for print, but to be used on buildings. Unlike Futura, Gotham is based on physical lettering reflecting  how people (shop owners, building owners, consumers) lived at the time. Unlike Futura, these New Deal Gothics did not invest in “formal manipulation with ideological significance.”

According to Frere-Jones, “Although there is nothing to suggest that the makers of these different kinds of signs ever consciously followed the same models, the consistency with which this style of letter appears in the American urban landscape suggests that these forms were once considered in some way elemental. But with the arrival of mechanical signmaking in the 1960s, these letters died out, completely vanishing from production.”

TYPEFACE AS SIGNIFIER

President Obama used Gotham in his presidential campaign.

His designers chose a ubiquitous, working-class typeface, supposedly found in cities all over the United States. A typeface that represents a time of rebuilding, a time of surviving economic hardship after years spent “spending on the margin.”

I don’t think the Obama campaign designers consciously made the connection between Gotham and the New Deal. I don’t think they knew about it.

All the news I’ve read about Gotham describe it as “the typeface designed for GQ.” In fact, Microsoft Typography posted on February 19, 2008, “Gary Hustwit posts a Helvetica movie outtake on Gotham. ‘GQ had a dual agenda of wanting something that would look very fresh, yet very established, to have a credible voice to it,’ a good choice for the Obama campaign.”

But there’s more to it than that.

Gotham seemed to “speak” to people across the country. Could it be because Gotham has roots in cities and towns all across the country? Was it familiar to us, did it create a sense of connection?

Could words like “hope” and “change” feel stronger when set in a typeface based on lettering by draftsmen (not ideological type designers) — people who made their letters out of physical materials?

Could it be Obama’s message was simply, perfectly paired with a typeface that references a time when industry was for the sake of rebuilding and strengthening the country — not for the sake of consumerism?

I’m not trying to spin a fairy tale here. I’m not saying a typeface has the power to get a president elected.

But it opens up so many questions for me: how do we read lettering? Is the history of our country — different parts of the country — connected via history of typography? I wonder: if I’d paid attention in Detroit, would I have seen similar New Deal Gothic lettering?

Could there be a part in each us that recognized the Gotham letterforms, connected them with a certain period in our collective history, then connected them to the kind of work the new president was going to have to do? (Obama has, after all, been called a socialist, which is reminiscent of the criticism against FDR…)

I don’t know. It seems too simple. Intriguing, exciting, a little scary… but too simple.

Then I go back and remember that day Claire saw the OfficeMax logo and read it as “Clifford. The. Big. Red. Dog.”

And I just don’t know.

I grew up in Michigan, 500 miles from New York City. But I know what typeface represents the Big Apple: Broadway.

I’m not the only one who makes this connection (signifier: Broadway, signified: NYC). One of my favorite visual puns in New Bedford, Massachusetts is the sign for “Times Square.” Times Square is an office building/galleria in the old New Bedford Times building. It has no relation (nor bears any resemblance) to the Times Square in NYC.

Except, of course, for the sign:

But the sign doesn’t really bear a resemblance to any of the signs in the Times Square. Nor to typefaces generally found in NYC (either historic or contemporary). We just think it does. Just like Claire associated the OfficeMax logo with Clifford the Big Red Dog (see previous post), we’ve learned to associate Broadway with NYC.

BROADWAY = ART DECO
Broadway was designed in 1928 by Morris Fuller Benton. A prolific type designer, best known for designing revivals of classic fonts, he was also influenced by what he saw coming to life around him. And in 1928, that was Art Deco.

Often described as “purely decorative,” Art Deco represented luxury and prosperity. It celebrated new technologies and materials. It was opulent and luxurious — a reaction to the forced austerity imposed by WWI on the French artists and designers who initiated the style.

Unveiled in Europe at the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Art in Paris in 1925, Art Deco quickly spread to the United States where it continued to gain popularity.

ART DECO = PROSPERITY
In the 1920s the U.S. was feeling prosperous (even though millions of people lived below the poverty line). We had economically benefited from the war, and didn’t have to rebuild when it ended, since it was a war fought on foreign soil.

U.S. workers were more productive and paid better than before the war. Products previously available only to the wealthy (radios, refrigerators, toasters, washing machines, automobiles) became more available to the middle-class family, because mass production allowed for products to be manufactured less expensively. A new system of credit allowed families to “spend on the margin.” That is, to purchase new products even if they couldn’t afford them.

The increase in a consumer-based culture lead to a rising stock market — kept afloat by Federal Reserves that kept interest rates low in order to promote more spending.

(It’s like déjà vu all over again…)

Various cities experienced a construction boom in the 1920s. Cities strategically located along waterways were transportation hubs for materials and products. European immigration had dropped due to the war and newly imposed immigration regulations, but those that came flocked to the growing cities — providing a labor base for construction.

PROSPERITY = NYC
Dozens of buildings around the world are Art Deco. My home state boasts The Fisher Theater (Detroit, 1928)

But for some reason Art Deco and the prosperity it represents are most associated with New York City.

Could it be the number of Art Deco buildings in the city? NYC was growing rapidly when Art Deco was at its peak.

Could it be the high profile construction projects of the time?

New technologies, new materials, and increased wealth set the stage for one of the greatest races of the late 1920s — the race for the tallest free-standing building. The Chrysler building (NYC, 1928-1930) was the first man-made structure to exceed the height of the Eiffel Tower. It remained the world’s tallest free-standing building for 11 months until it was surpassed by the Empire State Building (NYC, 1929-1931). Both buildings are Art Deco.

Even during the Depression, Art Deco style buildings continued to be constructed (including the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, above). Rockefeller Center (the only major private construction project underway in New York during the Depression) no longer represented prosperity, but faith. After the stock market crash of 1929, and the subsequent withdrawal of the Metropolitan Opera from the project, Rockefeller persevered and finished construction of the original 14-building, Art Deco, city-within-a-city in 1939.

BUT TYPE IS NOT ARCHITECTURE
Even though Art Deco is a prominent architectural style in NYC, Art Deco type is not. Yes, there is an Art Deco presence, but most of it does not resemble Broadway.

SO WHY DOES BROADWAY = NYC?
Art Deco type is not representative of a single city, but of an ideal. Prosperity, luxury, opulence, quality, technology all coming together in celebration of the end of a World War.

Growing up, I associated Broadway-style lettering with the 1920s. It suggested speed, wealth, and a kind of naughty fun (speakeasies, jazz, flapper dresses). But it also reminded me of Chicago (when you grow up just North of Detroit, Chicago is the Big City). So how did I learn to associate it with New York City?

I have a sneaky suspicion the Macintosh played a role in my personal shift from signified=1920s to signified=NYC. My Junior year in college, we started to use computers as design tools. And, while I can’t prove it, I think Broadway was part of an inexpensive font package loaded onto the computers. (My main graphic design teacher studied at Basel. We only used Helvetica Neue. No other font was ever needed… but we had Broadway.)

The remember the first time I tested all the forbidden fonts. I remember thinking: this is the typeface of New York City. I don’t know for sure if I was influenced by the forms of the letters or by the name of the font.

But I think it was the latter.

When my daughter Claire was two, I took her on an errand to Office Max. She started jumping up and down and pointing at the cart. “Mommy! Mommy! I know what that says! I know what that says!”

She ran her finger along the OfficeMax logo.

“Clifford. The. Big. Red. Dog.”

At two, she didn’t know how to read words. She didn’t even know her letters yet. But she knew how to read a typeface. Mornings spent in front of our local PBS station and evenings spent curled up with her favorite books had taught her that shapes like these:

mean the same as these:

I don’t know why I was so surprised at her ability to “read” the typeface. Perhaps it’s that she did it on her own. Later, she needed help learning the letters of the alphabet. Later still, she needed help learning how to string the letters together into words. But she created this particular connection between form and meaning independently.

Claire is 8 now. I would have forgotten that day in OfficeMax if it weren’t for all the hoopla over Gotham — a gorgeous sans serif typeface used by President Obama’s election campaign. I know. He’s been in office for almost a year. Probably the last thing anyone wants to read about is the typeface his campaign used. But there is something there. A story I want to better understand and share with others. It involves war, peace, the depression, a recession, architecture, digital fonts, and a whole cast of characters. But first, let me lay a foundation and ponder the question: how do we “read” a typeface?

TYPEFACE AS SIGNIFIER

In “A Natural History of Typography” (1992), J Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton write, “What sort of semiotic system is typography? What are its signifiers, and what are its signified?”

Semiotics is the study of how signs work (how we communicate with them, how they happen). A sign is something that stands for something else. For example, the word “dog” is a sign. It stands for the general concept: “a furry, domesticated, barking animal with four legs and a tail.”

A sign is made of two parts. The signifier is the thing that does the standing. For example, the word “dog.” The signified is the thing that is being stood for. For example, the general concept “a furry, domesticated, barking animal with four legs and a tail.”

The word dog has no meaning without the concept it represents. One could argue the concept being represented has no meaning if we don’t have the word to communicate it. Thus, we need both the signifier and the signified to form a whole sign.

Early in the essay, Miller and Lupton state, “Writing is thus a language depicting another language, a set of signs for representing signs. Typography, then, is removed one step further: it is a medium whose signified is not words themselves, but rather the alphabet.”

In many ways, this interpretation fits: the job of typography is to represent a set of signs (letters) which, in turn, represent sounds. The letter “d” represents the “duh” sound. It is a sign. As are the letters “o” and “g.” These sounds/letters, when strung together, create signs (words) that represent concepts. Thus, when we string d-o-g together, we get the sign for “a furry, domesticated, barking animal with four legs and a tail.”

But typography is a medium whose signified is more than the alphabet. A typeface can represent a concept removed from the content. That is, the forms of the letters — their design — can represent something beyond the letters themselves. Miller and Lupton refer to this throughout the essay, but continually refer to typographers‘ intentions behind signifier/signified dyads.

I’m interested in how regular people create these dyads, these “understandings” or “readings” of a typeface.

Two-year old Claire saw the word “OfficeMax” and came up with “a really big, red, furry, domesticated, barking/talking animal with four legs and a tail.” Why?

I think part of the answer is in the opening pages of “A Natural History of Typography.” According to Ferdinand de Saussure (the grandfather of linguistics) the meaning of a sign is developed based on its relation to other signs. Saussure says we learn connections between signifiers and signified by experiencing what the sign isn’t. For instance, the word “dog” is not dug, nor dig, nor bog, nor pig.

Thus, regardless of a typographer’s intentions, typography is a medium like all mediums. Its signified will always depend on what people have experienced and/or learned.

If we follow Saussure’s argument, Claire “read” the bubbly, slab serif (red) OfficeMax to mean “a really big, red, furry, domesticated, barking/talking animal with four legs and a tail” simply because she had not yet learned what the sign isn’t.

“Clifford. The. Big. Red. Dog.”

I learn and remember things visually, so memorizing a bunch of names and dates in school didn’t help me understand how things fit together.

For me, “learning” history has always been a bit like trying to understand a city by subway—trying to build a mental model of what’s above-ground when I haven’t walked the paths between the stations.

GOOD HISTORY / BAD HISTORY
Last week my type students and I were discussing one of my all-time favorite essays on design, “Good History / Bad History” by Tibor Kalman, J Abbott Miller, and Karrie Jacobs. It always reminds me of my own personal struggles with design history, and gets me ready to fight the good fight. Written in 1991 (the year I graduated from college, although I didn’t “discover” it until much later), I make my juniors read it every Fall.

According to the authors, design history lacks context. We have a lot of coffee table books, cheap to produce, easy to write and read (design writers, the authors say, only write captions), and beautiful to look at. But this is not history.

I agree.

As a student, when I struggled with other kinds of history (World, American, Art), I could turn to multiple resources for insight. These resources helped me build the “paths between the stations.”

I wasn’t able to do that with design history. The school library was full of “best of” and other award books, but nothing to connect these contemporary examples with the names and dates provided in class.

Kalman, Miller, and Jacobs also highlight a problem with history in general. (in)visibility. History is a lens through which we view what really happened. What is recorded (written down, collected, published, shared) is visible. Other things get left out.

Again, I agree.

If something is visible, it can be acknowledged, considered, recognized, reinforced. Visibility can be mistaken for existence, or truth. And invisibility can be mistaken for non-existence.

For example, the picture below is of AF Wilde’s store in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The photo is from April 1909, although the signage (and thus the type) obviously dates earlier than that. And if we focus on the lettering on the lower sign… it’s sans serif.

But when I was 19, I learned sans serif type is modernist. Post World War I.

So the first time I saw something like this picture, my brain sort of popped.

What the hell were these sans serif letters doing on an OLD sign from the late 1890’s or early 1900’s? I thought Sans Serif type wasn’t “invented” for another 20+ years! I know I learned this! London Underground. Gill Sans. Geometric Modernism. Futura. Competition between foundries. Definitely 1920’s.

Did anybody else know that sans serif type existed before World War I?

(Had I found the Holy Grail of Type History?)

It took me a while to realize my knowledge of design history was flawed. Not just because I wasn’t good at it, but because my instructors had developed a lens through which I had been taught to look—and to believe.

WHAT CAN I DO?
Twenty years later, and I’m asking myself, “How do I contextualize type history (or type and history), not just for me, but for my students?”

One idea was to start HistoricType.com.

I’m interested in how lettering and type “live” in the environment. How signs change (or don’t change) as life in a community changes around them. But type in the environment gets lost over time. Images get lost in photo archives under obscure catalog numbers, or are cataloged under other subjects. Some images are in personal collections, inaccessible to those who would love to learn from them.

So HistoricType.com was born. “A community-based image database, dedicated to collecting, documenting, and preserving images of type and lettering on old signs and buildings in the United States.”

I’m hoping that keeping it community-based will mean I don’t become guilty of constructing a lens. Most of my research is in New Bedford, Massachusetts (with an occasional foray into Providence, Rhode Island, or NYC). The typographic landscape would be different elsewhere. Aware of the possibilities of information anxiety, the whole community-based thing might not work out, but we’ll give it a chance.

Of course, just having pictures to look at doesn’t solve a damn thing.

As Good History / Bad History so eloquently points out:

Most design history is not written, it’s shown. There’s a lot to look at, but not much to think about. Maybe this is because designers don’t read. That particular cliché (which like most clichés, has a basis in truth) provides a good excuse for a lot of hack work in publishing: collections of trademarks, matchbooks, labels, cigar boxes, you name it—volumes and volumes of historical stuff with no historical context.

So far, HistoricType.com doesn’t contextualize its images. It’s a bit of a coffee-table site. It’s probably more valuable as a place to find wallpaper for your iphone than it is as a site to contextualize the history of anything.

There is so much to learn. To think about, to write about, to share. There are “paths between stations” waiting to be discovered. I think context can be built. Not between every image, and I can’t do it on my own, but there must be others out there who are interested in the same journey, who have started collecting and learning about how letters and type live in the environment. Not just pictures to look at, but the stories to go with them. We’ll figure it out.