Archive for Typography

Helvetica is one of the world’s most often used typeface families. This is due not only to its classic sans serif design, but also to the fact that it is the default sans serif font on the Macintosh platform (the look-alike Arial was chosen for default use on the Windows platform).

Designed in the 1950s by Max Miedinger for the Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland, the revival of Akzidenz Grotesk aimed at creating a continuously weighted family, in condensed and expanded as well as regular weights. This gave the family tremendous versatility. The name comes from the Latin name for Switzerland: Confoederatio Helvetica.

It’s impossible to grasp the power Helvetica had over designers before the digital age. If you’d like to understand its history and the love affair designers have had with Helvetica (which is often passed over today due to overuse), you’ll be interested in “Helvetica: A documentary film” by Gary Hustwit, 2007.

Shot in the US, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France and Belgium, the film mixes visuals using Helvetica with interviews of well known designers: Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter, Massimo Vignelli, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Neville Brody, Stefan Sagmeister, Michael Bierut, David Carson, Paula Scher, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones, Experimental Jetset, Michael C. Place, Norm, Alfred Hoffmann, Mike Parker, Bruno Steinert, Otmar Hoefer, Leslie Savan, Rick Poynor, and Lars Müller.

Here is a group of trailers for the film with several interview samples:

“Helvetica: A documentary film”: trailers

It’s well worth viewing. Hope you enjoy it.

Comic Sans is a hot topic in the world of typography and graphic design. It’s one of those fonts that graphic designers and typographers love to hate.

The designer of Comic Sans, Vincent Connare, strikes back with an essay on his reasons for designing the type face. He says that he designed the font for a specific project, where a comics-style font was needed. Times Roman just didn’t work in a cartoon speech bubble.

Well, on that point he is correct. Comic Sans looks fine inside a speech bubble, better than Times Roman, which was the type chosen by the progamming team before he created Comic Sans.

He goes on to say that his intention was that the font be used only in children’s projects, where its hand-drawn forms would work well. But it eventually found its way into Microsoft’s core fonts, ensuring broad – and incorrect – usage by millions of office workers and other non-designers who want to show their personal creativity, and are tired of Times Roman and Helvetica.

I’ve been surprised and shocked to see classic faces such as Helvetica and Times Roman being named as hated fonts on design forums and designers’ blogs. Obviously, overuse breeds contempt. It’s a good idea for graphic designers to become aware of type fatigue as opposed to bad type design. Helvetica, Times, Trajan, Copperplate Gothic, Optima, Palatino, etc. (all faces I have seen mentioned on type-I-hate lists) are well-designed type faces that have been overused at different times in their histories.

Comic Sans is a different story. I won’t be so bold to say it is badly designed, though it is not a type face that I have ever used (before the cartoon that accompanies this post). Again, it is the overuse and inappropriate uses of it that are the problem.

It is often used by people who want to “humanize” the look of their documents and don’t have better options available in system fonts. So a font that does look fine for few words used in a speech bubble is used as a text face, where it fails miserably to the eye of a trained designer.

Is this a tempest in a teapot? What do you think?

comic sans
typography
graphic design

As I mentioned in another post late last year, I’ve been experimenting with Textorized images since the end of last year, when I discovered the possibility on Flickr. I thought I’d share some of my favorite images so far, so you can see a little more of what’s possible.

Textorizing works by defining edges and replacing those edges with strings of type, so that normally dark areas become hollow outlined edges. This poses an issue for many images, so many of the photos I’ve tried textorizing don’t work well. It also seems to be important to use images that will make visual sense, so simple, recognizable shapes seem to work best, if you want recognition.

The length of the words used in strings also affects the final image. Surprisingly, I like longer strings sometimes, shorter strings other times. I thought I’d like all shorter strings when I began to experiment.

Overall light images seem to work well. I was surprised by the polar bear image. I thought there would be some detail inside the bear. Instead the ice field surrounding the bear shows most texture.

I’m hoping to find uses for the technique in my work. The only drawback is that textorizing only works well on a small percentage of images that I’ve tried. So, it might be hard to work it into a project. I’ll let you know as time goes on.

I hope you enjoy these images. I’ve been toying with the idea of producing some posters or T-shirts if I hear that there is interest. Please let me know what you think.