Look at the four words on the left and say them out loud. Go on, really — read it aloud. Clearly pronounce the first, second, third and fourth word. Then you may continue to the next paragraph. Go on, I’ll wait…
Good. Now how many of you failed to notice that the last word is not a name, but a regular word? Yes, the first three are names, but the last is a simple adjective. If you ended up pronouncing it incorrectly, you should be ashamed of yourself. Or maybe not, everyone does it.
When we see letters, we can’t help but read them. When we’re asked to look at letters and complete a cognitive task other than reading, it goes against our very nature. The Stroop test taught us that. So here’s a challenge. Designers are used to seeing the name of a typeface set in the font itself. Can we identify the typeface used when the word is, say, hamburger? Easy. But what if the word is the name of another font? Let’s take a moment to turn off our left-brained urges and put our typeface-identification skills to the test. Because our brain only has a handful of colors to choose from in the original Stoop test, I’m limiting the type choices to just three heavy weights of classic typefaces: Clarendon, Bodoni, And Franklin Gothic. They’re different enough to be obvious but hopefully similar enough for my mischief.
Instructions: When the test starts, identify the typefaces that the words are set in. You have 10 seconds.
1 With not many “serifless romans” to choose from save Doyald Young’s Young Finesse and Palatino Sans by legendaries Hermann Zapf and Akira Kobayashi, I decided that my first true typeface design will be the suave sans you see to the right.1 It’s far from finished, but I think it’s well along enough to post. The intentions are for it to be mainly a display face, but not so fancy that it won’t be usable at text size.
Besides the serifless roman influence, I admit there’s a bit of that square sans trend sneaking into the curves of the lowercase b shapes and some of the capitals. The face’s primary features are 1. rounded endcaps on the strokes, 2. a large x-height, 3. slight flourishes on the terminals, and 4. squareness. The flourishy curves and squareness sound like they contradict, but that’s the challenge I’ve set out to solve. Continue…
Welcome to Notes on Type. I didn’t spend much on the name since I was so psyched to design the masthead. When the sketching process started, I set a few parameters for myself. Since the subject matter of these notes is typography, the masthead has to use letters. Duh. The second is that it has to be unique. I mean really unique. I wouldn’t be happy taking a sweet typeface and setting it huge and beautiful. Sure, (only) other designers appreciate that, but shouldn’t we expect more from each other? The third parameter was that it had to have wordplay. That’s easy. I can take the literal route and show the “notes on type” by having my blog notes, lay on the typed masthead, hiding it in a self-referencing way. Can’t get enough of that ambiguity!
Continue…
