New Column!
The term "design" is thrown around a lot. People love design. It's an interest. A hobby. A job. At times, though, the whole notion of "design" seems incredibly inaccessible. Like any art, it's often very difficult to figure out what's good, what's bad, and what's trendy. Is it trendy because it's good? What is good? This column is intended to nail it down a little bit, though I am by no means a designer. Rather, I'm approaching all of this from the point-of-view of a fan of good design, and as a writer. I'll tackle topics that are relevant to all areas of "design," whether it be interior design, graphic design, web design, so on and so forth. I'll take a trend, concept, or product and distill it to a quick and easy to read primer. Hopefully.
For my first outing, I'm going to take a minute to talk about fonts. Or more appropriately, perhaps, typefaces. There's a difference, but it's mostly irrelevant unless you do manual typesetting. A typeface is a family of fonts. Arial for example, is a typeface. Arial bold is a font. Got it? Good. There are serif and sans-serif fonts. A serif font has those little feet, whereas a sans-serif doesn't. Times is a serif font, Arial is sans-serif.
The trend: People talking about fonts. People knowing specific fonts. A movie about Helvetica. A controversy over the Ikea catalog.
The skinny: Fonts can convey feeling and emotion. Many would say the hallmark of a good font selection is that you don't think about the font selection. Futura may be the classic "hipster" font.
Last month Ikea changed the font of their catalog to Verdana. Previously Ikea was using Futura, which could be considered the quintessential hipster font. Examples of Futura's usage in popular culture range from Stanley Kubrick's movie posters, to Wes Anderson, to Vampire Weekend and more. Outrage soon spread across the Internet, amongst designers, amateur designers, and fans of Ikea.
Common reaction: "Verdana is not a font suitable for print. It's a font Microsoft developed for computer screens and the Internet."
The skinny: Verdana indeed was created on commission for Microsoft and released in 1996, along with the font Georgia. It was intended for use on the Internet. Recently, the creator announced a retooling and update for both Verdana and Georgia. It was not intended for use as a print font. Most people agree it does look bad in the Ikea catalog. An Ikea spokeswoman says it's a more cost-effective font. Judge for yourself below.
Helvetica is a really popular font. It would likely be another candidate for consideration as the hipster font. It's a Swiss sans-serif font that dates back to 1957. In 2007, an eponymous documentary was released. This helped launch typography as a topic of conversation at houseparties. Helvetica is very popular, and serves as the font in many logos, including American Airlines and American Apparel. The IRS uses Helvetica for income tax forms.
Common misconception: Helvetica is the universal font on the New York City Subway.
The skinny: Not exactly. There's a bit of a sordid past there. Helvetica was not adopted as the "official" font for the MTA until 1989. Prior to that the font was Medium Standard. This is a fascinating article that gets to the bottom of the Helvetica versus Medium Standard debate. There are also signs on the NYC Subway in other fonts, such as Arial. It's not 100% consistent and it hasn't always been Helvetica.
There you have it, a very quick and dirty introduction to fonts and popular culture. People like to talk about fonts if they design things, or spend time thinking about design. Anyone who works with web design, newspaper layout, screenprinting, graphic design, or publishing in general will like to talk about fonts (generally). Odds are wherever you are, someone will want to talk about fonts.
God loves a cheerful giver.
A fun font-related timesuck can be found at http://cheeseorfont.mogrify.org/
I prefer London Tube myself.
http://www.fontspace.com/jonathan-paterson/london-tube
Love the idea for this column!
The type in your header for your column is getting lost. Try increasing the tracking and let's get rid of that drop shadow. please get rid of that drop shadow. Instead copy yoyur font and place a copy behind it with an out side stoke of white with a width of say, 5-10 points. next let increase the width of the header graphic to span the width of the type column.
make sure all the images you place in you post are either all left aligned, or all inset, don't do both like you've done here.
Great column, I look forward to working with you...um...er...reading it.
No you're communicating better.
Feel free to copy edit my future posts. I have 12 fingers.
when i graduated from high school my friend gave me a blank disc. i thought it was a mixed cd at first, but soon realized that it was fonts, a ton of them.
this column is going to be great.
where's john foster?
nice work dave.
now let's talk about kerning.
I like to talk about fonts.
I do have to chime in on Futura as the "quintessential hipster font."
Purely accidental. The only reason you see futura used more frequently on album covers and t-shirts is due in part that it is a system font. The same could be said that Futura is the lawyers, realtors, or economist font because of its access to amateur typographers.
There are other fonts out there that were deliberately designed, used widely and have a rich history serving as a 'hipster' or counter-culture font.
Any bickering over what type IKEA uses in their crap magazine to sell crap furniture makes me want to quit life.
I used to use the fuck out of Futura, but somewhere in my mid-twenties switch to Univers, a much more refined workhorse for my amateur typesetting needs:
Haha this is fun, what a beautifully nerdy column
Nice! I was messing around with Univers earlier today. One of the more solid fonts out there.
haha yes thank you for the comments. i threw together the image in about 5 minutes, and haven't reworked it yet. i'll have a new one for next week.
i've had terrible issues with wordpress and image alignment.
Inevitable nerdtastic comment: your examples of Futura are terribly misleading as you are exclusively showing the Bold version, which was designed much later than the original workhorse and carries with it a ton of compromises - most notably in the uppercase "E" where the middle bar moves downward to the center - something virtually unheard of in simply adding weight to a character. The result is another (more geometric) typeface altogether.
I love that there are so many variations on Univers that some carry the years they were developed in like a Pho restaurant marking history.
This should be fun.
well, i used those demos of futura (bold) because people would likely recognize them!
i enjoy that this has gotten the attention of the design nerds in the house, though.