But the lettering I admired managed to avoid the rigidity that gives so many Geometrics an astringent sting, and instead, it felt warm and personable. Like Paul Renner’s Futura (1927), these letters had a clarity of purpose, at first glance suggesting the same circles, squares, and triangles of Renner’s quintessential Geometric sans. Taxonomically, the letters I admired embodied the best qualities of two different typographic genres - the Geometric and the Grotesque - without suffering the shortcomings of either. Perhaps more than anything, it was this challenge that turned me into a typeface designer, this irresistible opportunity to map out unexplored territory, and to fill what felt to me like a pronounced absence in the designer’s palette. Though type and lettering have cross-pollinated for centuries (Gutenberg’s types, after all, were modeled on lettering), it seemed possible that no typeface designer had ever attempted to capture the lettered sans serif style I’d begun to admire. Because lettering existed separately from type, it had evolved its own unique styles and traditions: lithographed posters, engraved banknotes, gilded store windows, and chiseled gravestones were lettered, not typeset, and each exhibited shapes that reflected the qualities of its medium, and the tendencies of its artists.
(Technically speaking, ‘typography’ refers only to the impression of ‘printing types,’ but this definition is woefully overdue for an update: fonts on the web are typography, and fonts on the iPhone are typography fonts are typography.) A century ago, only a book’s interior featured typography: whatever words appeared on its cover, spine, or illustrations were lettering, produced not by assembling letters, but by drawing them. While ‘type’ is the product of individual, pre-made, combinable letterforms, ‘lettering’ describes a unique and handmade composition, a one-off created to render a specific message in a specific place. I never found it, of course, because its shapes had come not from type, but from lettering. In my evenings, I lingered over these books, searching for the typeface that was my dream sans serif. PushPin’s offices were dominated by an immense reference library that included an entire wall of type specimen books, a fossil record of the tens of thousands of typefaces that had perished in the mass extinctions of foundry type, hot metal, and photo type.
When I started, what seemed like an abundance of typefaces on the early Macintosh - more than a hundred fonts! - was put into sharp relief in 1988, when I got a job at a small studio that was the sub-subtenant of The PushPin Group, the legendary design practice run by Seymour Chwast, and founded by Chwast, Milton Glaser, and Edward Sorel in 1954. Like many designers, I learned typography backwards, starting from the material at my fingertips and working my way deeper into the past.
Fashions in design had come and gone, like so many hairstyles or hemlines, but these elemental shapes endured, always managing to look current, relevant, and right. Judging from their absence in the literature of design, I seemed to be alone in my affection for them, which was bewildering given how widespread and long-lived they were.
#USE OF GOTHAM TYPEFACE FONT WINDOWS#
They animated Art Deco perfume bottles, and the occasional Modernist logo for industry, but mostly they were habitués of the mundane: they announced liquor stores and barber shops and florists, and hid in plain sight inside shop windows and elevator cars. They seemed to have existed forever: I’d seen their likeness painted on glass, cast in metal, and carved in stone, printed on urgent wartime bulletins and effervescent posters for aperitifs. The strange thing was that they didn’t have a name.
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