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.
1They exist everywhere. Plagued with holes, awry baselines, and font weights that flagrantly stick out. Tag clouds1 are the breeding grounds for uneven color. The newfound attention given to typography on the web addresses generic formats adapted from print, such as headlines and pull quotes. Since tag clouds were invented by the internet, there’s no original model to adapt. What designers and developers resort to are the possibilities of CSS. For years we’ve cherished the great strides the web has made for typography, but silently accept the clumsy aesthetics of its limitations. Doing so has produced messy, uncontrolled tag clouds. Continue…
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…
I love brush lettering whether it’s calligraphic or spontaneous, like the old Interview Magazine masthead. Being a practician and fan of of optical illusion, hidden symbolism, and ambiguity in design, I usually scan peculiar logos for hidden meanings. When a script logo is done right, it’s enough for me to admire the craft involved in the lettering — I normally don’t look for any hidden gems. Big mistake. The new MyFonts logo has great lettering plus some. I won’t ruin the surprise for anyone, but just think about it and look closely. What would be a perfectly iconic statement on the craft of typography, to remind us that letters are created by humans, tweaked, nudged, and redrawn obsessively, until it feels right? Put that statement about typography into a hand-crafted typographic logo for a company selling typography, and we have a winner. Gotta dig that ambiguity. It’s one of the most awesome pieces of type as illustration I’ve ever seen.
