Type friends! ✍️

It’s been a little while, I know, but boy, is there a meaty issue for you this week to make up for it.

First off, a huge, heartfelt thank you to David Jonathan Ross, (a personal type-hero of mine and founder of the Font of The Month Club) for being the latest supporter on Patreon. Thank you so much, David.

One of my all-time street typography blogs, Type in Berlin, have recently published a collection of images with the theme “yellow typography”. Yes, Berlin is rich enough in typographical variety that you can easily pick a theme and come up with a whole bunch of photographic evidence. There is something uniquely beautiful about the art of putting an umlaut in a neon sign; and Berlin lets you get away with it, in style.

Fontstand has also welcome the very London-based Alias foundry to their catalog, which you can explore as of today. I also stumbled upon a wonderful book-typography-cover project, Cover to Cover, a personal project from Jenny Volvovski (also on Instagram). Jenny redesigns, according to her own personal preference, every cover of every book she reads—all heavily typographical. Definitely spend some time appreciating the immense creativity in her work.

And, just in case you haven’t heard, yet another fraudster was recently caught due to typographical-forensics: once more, forging documents from the past using modern Microsoft Word’s typefaces. Kashimir Hill is also publishing an interesting series where she blocks one tech giant a week from her life; and reports back on the horrors of using the Internet without Google Fonts.

Until next time, type friends,

You just gotta love a vintage comeback. Lydian is a 1938 “humanist” sans-serif typeface; typically, this means it tries to give the impression of being written by a human hand, but it doesn’t have any of the characteristic flourishing strokes more commonly associated with calligraphy or popular serif fonts. It’s edgy, literally speaking, and it doesn’t necessarily scream of elegance.

But Lydian has a very interesting story:

During War times, novels like Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys had dead-simple covers, with cheap materials and not much care to it — certainly a sign of the hard times. However in 1946, artist Rudy Nappi was hired by Nancy Drew publisher Grosset & Dunlap and art director Ted Tedesco to redesign the series’ cover with a dust jacket that was covered all the way around — with a bigger illustration and a more striking overall design. Lydian Bold was chosen as its title font, jump-starting a decade of the font as a go-to for commercial fiction. Here’s one more cover for your viewing pleasure.

What’s perhaps more interesting is how the typeface still found its way into different media over the following decades, from the early 60’s in television and well into the 90’s:

And we find ourselves today, in 2019, still discovering ways of turning a severely outdated typeface into seemingly good design. The cover for the very popular Against Everything by Mark Greif, from 2016, uses it ever so cleverly. Just like Kaitlin, author of this Vox article so wittingly put it, it’s like Martha Stewart die-cutting elements for a funeral invitation.

You will also find it as the cover of 2016’s In The Unlikely Event by Judy Blume, and you gotta admit it works pretty well as a whole. Andrew Martin’s Early Work is another example.

So why are we now seeing it everywhere–again?

Lydian has an academic implication, possibly because it was used all over official documents for the International Baccalaureate — the liberal arts-centric alternative to high school AP programs — until 2007. In its first era of popularity, it was all pop and pulp, but now it seems reserved for the task of adding just the slightest bit of a smirk to extremely straight-faced endeavours: elegant magazines, important books, experimental theater.

According to Kaitlin,

I also love the take from Jason Heuer, a typography teacher from The School of Visual Arts, on the popularity of Lydian:

There’s a ton more examples and use cases for Lydian, as well as a more detailed attempt at explaining the successful comeback of this vintage, quirky looking font, in the original article.

On this outstanding article for Fonts in Use, Florian Hardwig takes a very close look at the typefaces found in the Socialist newspaper first published during the 1918’s German Revolution.

In 1918, German socialist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were tortured and murdered by the Freikorps at the end of the Spartacist uprising. The very first edition of The Red Flag used, unsurprisingly, a high number of Fraktur typefaces and some very interesting typographical practices to create emphasis. I’ll leave you with a breakdown of one example below, entirely set in Fraktur with some interesting letter spacing choices:

So, in detail, and quoting Florian,

One of the reasons there’s so much to learn from looking at a century-old typographical industry is seeing the origins and ways of achieving today’s best practices; let’s take kerning, for example. While I never really paid attention to kerning in Fraktur typefaces, there was some care about it back in 1918:

There’s a few more intrinsic typographic details from this Germany era, which I encourage you to take a look at over at FontsInUse.

In this (Premium, heads up) Medium article written by Shawn Sprockett, we’re given some pretty convincing arguments as to why, contrary to popular typographical belief, a custom brand typeface may actually be a good idea.

Most of us are familiar with this experiment already: a random scientific fact about gold, written in both Baskerville and Comic Sans, with participants being asked about which one looked more trustworthy. Notably, anything written in Baskerville, a very classic serif typeface, was generally seen as more believable. But this is far from the end of the story.

Shawn makes a bold claim:

Designers learn about how typefaces shape perception in school, but the experiments confirm the role that serifs and sans-serifs play in visual communication.

Brands have been leveraging this influence for over a century. Today, tech logos lean heavily on lower-case, sans-serif type (Airbnb, Lyft, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Tinder, etc.) to appear approachable and unassuming, while banks, financial institutions, and government agencies rely on the Western traditions of serifs to project authority and security. Companies wishing to remind consumers of their founders or their creative legacy, like Coca-Cola and Disney, often prefer scripts and decorative typefaces.

Most of these companies have resorted to creating their very own unique typefaces, often, to great disaster (I’m looking at you, Youtube). Perhaps most notably, Google has been doing the most stellar job at this:

But sure, Google can afford to spend the time and the money.

Shawn got most of my attention when he mentioned something about “raising the bar for inclusivity”. In fact, here lies an opportunity to make a difference.

Vanity typefaces that rely on high contrast letterforms often sacrifice legibility to those with visual impairments. Poor kerning and leading controls in digital spaces means carelessly rendered typefaces can dramatically impact the usability of products.

My mind was blown away with something I had, perhaps shamefully, never noticed: an anti-pattern in which important text in a design is intentionally set in the most unreadable capitalised text possible, so it’s ungodly difficult to read.

Take, for example, the surgeons’ general warning in cigarettes’ packs:

A unique typeface is then not just an opportunity for a more unique branding, but also one to do good, when engaged with the mission to improve usability, readability and ease of use. There are, of course, a bunch of challenges and constraints to create a unique typeface, which Shawn goes into great detail about.

There are shortcuts, of course, which is what Airbnb recently did:

The article has a few more interesting facts about research made with dedicated typefaces in critical fields, which I encourage you to take a closer look at.

There’s a lot to feature this time. We’ll start with Radar, a typeface by Marta Sánchez Marco, a gorgeous sans-serif which is in fact a revival of “Grotesca Radio”, from the Spanish foundry Richard Gans. Radar is elegant, geometric and mono-lineal. Its design can be related to the body of creations from the early 20th century.

Pay attention to its features on the lowercase d/b/f, with a very tall but fashionable x-height:

Next up, Aleksei from Fatype truly got my attention. Designed by Anton Koovit, it comes in four weights and all of them are delicious to look at in just about any size: