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.

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.