Essays, 2005          17408 words

New Faces (Chapter Three: The East Coast)

by Emily King

The third chapter of Emily King’s doctoral thesis which focuses on typeface design in the United States, England and the Netherlands between 1987 and 1997.

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Kingston University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (1999)

Abstract
Introduction
(i) Historiography
(ii) Typographic History in the Context of Broader Design Historical Models
Chapter One: Technological and Industrial Change: Setting the Scene
Mapping Contemporary Type Design
Chapter Two: The West Coast
Chapter Three: The East Coast
Chapter Four: London
Chapter Five: The Netherlands
Conclusion
Bibliography
List of Interviews

Chapter Three: The East Coast

While I have looked at the type designs emerging from the West Coast in the light of technological innovation, on the East Coast, other models become more appropriate. The designers whose work will be addressed in this section, the Boston-based trio David Berlow, Matthew Carter, Tobias Frere-Jones and the New Yorker Jonathan Hoefler, may use technologies identical to those employed by their West Coast colleagues, but they are not using them in the context of recently established software companies or radical type ventures. Rather, these designers have been applying the opportunities offered by digital type design and typesetting technologies to one of the East Coast’s best established activities, magazine and newspaper publishing. Although none of the group of designers discussed in the following section has worked exclusively for the publishing business, each of them has derived a fair amount of income from this kind of work. The West Coast designer Sumner Stone has called his Boston and New York counterparts “the East Coast publishing mafia”.[382] It is not fair to suggest that these designers enforce exclusivity with mafia-like tactics, but effectively they have operated as a cartel, hoovering up a large part of the type design commissioned by American publications.

Employed by the East Coast’s magazine publishing houses, type designers such as Berlow, Carter, Hoefler and Frere-Jones have been engaged in the task that has been the preoccupation of those businesses over the last few decades: how to attract and maintain a target audience for their products. Working with these type designers, the successful art director Roger Black has been a key player in the pursuit through design and typography of a particular audience segment. Black was amongst the first designers to use type as an active ingredient in the identity of a publication with his innovative art direction of Rolling Stone in the early 1970s. During the 1980s publication explosion, when a large number of new publications hit the shelves each with a carefully defined target readership, Black acted as an art director or consultant art director on a great many magazine launches and redesigns, each time employing type in order to craft identity. Using type in a considered manner throughout his career, when in the late 1980s technology rendered it relatively cheap to commission typefaces for the exclusive use of particular publications, Black was unsurprisingly quick to exploit that opportunity. According to the type designer Matthew Carter, since the adoption of device-independent digital design and typesetting technologies, Black “can’t look at a publication without commissioning a typeface.”[383]

Not just a key player in terms of commissioning and using these typefaces, Black also has been active in encouraging the broader supply of new fonts. Alongside the type designer David Berlow, Black is a partner in Font Bureau (which also employs Tobias Frere-Jones), a Boston-based company established in 1989 with the original aim of supplying custom-designed faces. Involved at every stage of typographic activity, Black’s treatment of type has been significant in that rather than intending letterforms to be broadly communicative, he has employed them to speak selectively. Using type to talk with a distinctive accent to a defined community, Black’s task departs very much from the typographic traditionalist’s pursuit of neutral, absolutely communicative perfection.

The magazine in America

What has happened to type in the hands of Black and other magazine art directors who have been working in a similar manner is a reflection of broader developments within the publishing business of the East Coast of America. This is a well-established business, which first emerged in the major cities of North East America (Boston, Philadelphia and New York) in the eighteenth century. Much of the publishing business of the United States remains based on the East Coast, if anything becoming increasingly concentrated in New York during the last century. It is necessary to qualify this regionally-based account by noting that geographically specific publications have been an important part of the targeted publication boom that began in the 1980s, for example Texas Monthly or Southern Living. But while these publications might be intended to speak to local audiences, often they are produced under the auspices of a large New York publishing concern[384], providing evidence of the global/local nexus at work.[385]

Although it has remained attached to its geographical roots, through its history America’s publishing business has been subject to many changes. These have been particularly dramatic in the decades since the Second World War. Tracing the development of the American publication in The Magazine in America 1741-1990, the media historians John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman argued that since the early 1950s the industry had experienced what amounted to a “transformation”, engendered by technological, economic and cultural change.[386]

While the publishing business of the East Coast is related to some extent to the area’s long-established patrician, literary culture, it is much more strongly bound to the more recently founded opportunistic advertising and marketing cultures of Madison Avenue. This relationship was cemented in the post-war decades to the extent that, in the early 1960s, the New York Times advertising columnist Peter Bart was prompted to remark that “the concept of the magazine as a marketing entity rather than as an editorial entity has gained predominance.”[387] The increasing concern of magazine publishers with the pursuit of advertising revenues was prompted by an acceleration of the competition both for that income and for readers from other media. In the early 1950s the profits of the publishers of mass market magazines were falling dramatically, and these businesses were considering a number of new strategies to defend their territory. Through the 1960s and 1970s the trend was toward magazines which courted specialised audiences.[388] This trend was continuous, but reached increased space in the 1980s. In that decade, the response to ever more intense competition amongst magazines and between magazines and other media was the launch of an unprecedented number of finely targeted publications.

Magazine design in the late twentieth-century

Overall in their history of the American magazine Tebbel and Zuckerman paid very little attention to the design of publications. Where they did address layout, they suggested that it had become “a vital tool” in the “intensely competitive magazine world” of the 1980s.[389] Arguing that the magazine art director had assumed a role of much greater importance with more broadly defined responsibilities in recent years, Tebbel and Zuckerman implied that this new breed of art director was expanding upon tradition established by the elite band of mid-century art directors, chiefly Fortune magazine’s Henry Cleland and Alexey Brodovitch from Harper’s Bazaar.[390]

Tebbel and Zuckerman’s emphasis upon Cleland and Brodovitch is not unusual. These New York-based art directors of the 1950s have become the looming figures within the history of the design of the commercial magazine. Joined by their colleagues from the 60s and 70s – Milton Glaser, Walter Bernard, Roger Black and Fred Woodward – they are the individuals who stand out in the international historical survey Magazine Design by the graphic design historian and critic William Owen. Although Owen did acknowledge the influence of European trends, for Owen the story of the magazine is essentially one which is located on America’s East Coast. Owen’s emphasis upon American publishing can be read as a reflection of the commercial and cultural weight of the East Coast’s publishing industry: magazines and newspapers emerging from that area not only dominate American markets but are also extremely influential internationally, both in terms of design and editorial.

In characterising New York art directors of the 1980s and 1990s as the inheritors of the traditions of Brodovitch and Cleland, it is vital to remember that they are working in economic and cultural contexts radically different to those their 1950s counterparts. The publishers of the East Coast may still lead the world of commercial magazines, but they have retained that lead through constant adaptation. The “transformation” of the American magazine industry in the post-war decades has had a profound impact upon the manner in which publications emerging from that industry are designed. In the highly competitive magazine world of the 1980s and 90s, every design or editorial development is assessed in terms of immediate commercial impact. Against this background, the era in which Brodovitch was at Harper’s Bazaar and Cleland was at Fortune, has been remembered romantically as a “golden age” of magazine design.[391]

The freedom given to Alexey Brodovitch during his 24 year reign (1934-1958) as art director at Hearst Magazine’s fashion publication Harper’s Bazaar has no equivalent in contemporary publishing. A refugee White Russian, Brodovitch had come to the United States via Paris in the early 1930s bringing with him an understanding of European graphic trends. His designs for Harper’s Bazaar, and also for the parallel, more experimental publication Portfolio, which combined to great effect dramatic full bleed photographs, dazzling yet elegant typographic composition, and a previously unheard of extravagance with white space, have become the icons of magazine publishing.[392] Henry Wolf, Brodovitch’s successor at Harper’s Bazaar, continued the tradition established by his predecessor. Known for the attention grabbing graphic puns (definitive examples of 1960s graphic wit) and the striking photography with which he filled the magazine’s pages, Wolf used these to dramatic effect against a background composed from an extremely minimal typographic palette.

Like the work of Brodovitch and later Wolf, the work of Henry Cleland and his successors at Fortune magazine from the early 1930s to the mid 1960s has also been held up as an example of magazine art directing at its height. Amongst the qualities shared by Harper’s Bazaar and Fortune was a typographical coherence that broke with the former magazine design convention of employing a different typeface for each story.[393] At it launch, Cleland used solely Baskerville in three weight variations upon the pages of Fortune. Typographic restraint is one of the qualities most strongly associated with the magazines that were the outcome of the highly revered “golden age” and it is one which endured within American magazines through into the early 1960s.

Brodovitch’s Harper’s Bazaar and Cleland’s Fortune were authoritative publications, assured in their ability to attract readers and advertisers. Both were elite publications, but in the 1950s even magazines intended for a more general mass readership spoke with a confident voice to an assumed homogenous audience. Significant amongst publications of this sort were the illustrated news magazines Life and Look. Having covered the Second World War for a American audience, these magazines continued to tackle serious subjects of national importance. Discussing the fortunes of Look in the post-war years, Tebbel and Zuckerman called the decade between 1955 and 1965 the magazine’s “golden years”, during which it covered issues such as racial tension in the South and made room for extensive discussion of foreign affairs.[394] In design terms, the editorial weight of the magazine was emphasised through a straightforward, consistent style, using a traditional typographic palette in combination with clear pictorial grids. This approach was taken one step further when, from 1966 onward, Allen Hurlburt and his assistant Will Hopkins turned down the typographic volume of the magazine even lower. Self-proclaimed disciples of the post-war Swiss style, they emphasised powerful pictorial narratives with systematic, modular typography.[395]

But even while the format of Look was reaching maturity in the 1960s, graphic trends and economic and political events were working together to undermine the foundations upon which such a magazine was based. During that decade all the photographic news magazines lost a large part of their readership to television, and that twinned with the slackening of pace of that economy in the 60s and 70s took its toll upon magazines. Both Look and Life had expired at the end of 1971, by which time the idea of a mass, politically unified American public that they had reflected in their heyday had begun to seem somewhat dated.[396] During the years of the Vietnam War there emerged a number of alternative publications the purpose of which was to actively challenge the politics of the American government and the values of mainstream America. The graphic idioms favoured by these magazines were far from the spare, clean, authoritative styles that had been associated with the magazine’s “golden age”. Instead a new generation of art directors chose to embrace vernacular and revivalist typographic and illustrative styles.

Amongst the magazines communicating radical views with vernacular type was Fact, designed by Herb Lubalin. Set in a varied, robust typographic palette, reminiscent of nineteenth-century printed ephemera, Fact magazine published articles on controversial subjects such as abortion, police brutality and the excesses of America’s foreign policy.[397] The typography employed by Lubalin was appropriate to his task because it offered a strong contrast to the American variant of modernist typography, a style which in the post-war years had become strongly associated with the nation’s paternalistic corporate capitalists.[398]

Emerging a few years after Fact, the popular music magazine Rolling Stone is possibly the publication which is remembered best for the use of vernacular and revivalist typographic styles in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Art-directed by Roger Black, it is also the magazine which best exemplifies the contradictory sentiments implied by the use of those graphic idioms. Launched in 1967, by 1973 the magazine had developed from a foldover tabloid newspaper into a glossy publication with a worldwide circulation of half a million.[399] The design of the magazine relied heavily upon the use of a host of decorative, revival letterforms and ornamental type rules and borders. Although the design of Rolling Stone flew in the face of the modernist styles associated with corporate America, William Owen has argued the references made upon the pages of the magazine to a national vernacular were an adequate expression of “the style of the blue jean generation”, reflecting their “underlying conservatism.”[400] The rejection of the international modernist graphic language has been interpreted simultaneously as a gesture of a radical anti-corporate sentiment and of a conservative insularity.

Milton Glaser, a contemporary of Herb Lubalin, was another the graphic designer promoting vernacular and historic styles in the mid to late 1960s. A founding member of the Push Pin studio in 1954, Glaser has argued that the rebellion against disciplined modernist graphics in favour of more clamorous typographic styles was the equivalent of a desire amongst the American public for a “greasy burger”.[401] Rather than associating the graphic styles of Push Pin with political radicalism, Glaser’s analogy implies a form of rootsy American patriotism, a rejection of high ideals imposed from outside in favour of a celebration of gritty, commercial reality.

Many of the designers most associated with the new graphic idioms of the late 1960s and early 1970s have had very successful long-term careers. Like Roger Black, whose career was touched upon earlier, Milton Glaser also became extremely influential as an magazine art director and later a design consultant in the 1970s. His approach to magazine design strongly reflected his self-proclaimed pragmatism. With the design of New York magazine in the early 1970s, Glaser claimed to have rejected “beauty” in favour of the kind of immediacy that must “grab potential readers by the lapels”.[402] Milton Glaser has acted as art director or design consultant on a large number of magazines since the mid 1970s and in 1983 he teamed up with fellow art director Walter Bernard to form WBMG. Through the activities of that company, these New York based designers have had a huge influence on publications across the United States and in Europe. It is within the work of designers like Glaser that the graphic styles that were once ambivalently allied to American radicalism became associated unequivocally with the increasingly desperate struggle on the part of publications to attract the attention of readers and advertisers.[403]

As well as crafting new graphic idioms to reflect changing economic, social and cultural climates, in the late 1960s and early 1970s art directors such as Glaser, Black and Lubalin were also responding to the new demands and new possibilities that were created by changes in print technology. The photographic typesetting methods that had become widespread by that time prompted the creation of a varied typographic palette and allowed type to be set in newly condensed, overlapping and colourful formats. Interlocking responses to market conditions and technological change of this kind are characteristic of the publishing industry and emerge as a significant theme in the story of publishing over the 1980s and through into the 1990s.

Magazine publishing since the 1980s

Since the mid-1980s, cultural, commercial and technological factors have combined to bring about a number of notable changes to the industry. The market for magazines and newspapers has further fragmented, segmented and became more and more fast paced. Increasingly severe competition for readers has not acted to dissuade those intent on making a new launch and in the face of falling circulation numbers there has been what amounts to a boom in publications.[404] This has been in part the outcome of technological change; desktop publishing technologies have meant that costs for launching a new magazine or re-formatting an old one have fallen significantly. The direct effect of this has been a blossoming of small-scale publishing activity.[405]

Desktop publishing technologies have also had an impact upon the more mainstream end of the business. As a wave of new magazines have flooded the news stands, the identities of existing publications have come under intense scrutiny as their market position in relation to their competitors has become subject to constant shifts. Typically a new launch from an emergent low-budget publisher has caused those within the established side of the industry to reassess their own activities, and possibly to offer an equivalent. In the early 1990s this led to the creation of a growing number of publications, coming from both the independent and mainstream sectors, which targeted the interests of particular subcultures. Significant amongst these has been Time Warner’s Vibe magazine launched in 1993. This magazine, which was intended to document the culture of rap and hip hop, can be seen as a direct response to Urb, the product of a one man designer/editor/publisher outfit which covered a similar area.[406]

In the turbulent market for magazines of the last decade, the graphic and typographic identities of publications has become the focus of a great deal of attention. Design has been cast as a potent force in determining the success of a new venture, or in improving the fortunes of an ailing concern. Audiences are thought to have become increasingly sophisticated and demanding in their reading of and identification with graphic and typographic styles. This belief is very much reflected in redesigns that hark back to historic styles. Particularly significant have been the very straightforward references to their own histories in the redesigns of the magazines Harper’s Bazaar (Fabien Baron, 1992) and Rolling Stone (led by the art director by Fred Woodward 1987). Recalling the golden age’s of their publications (Harper’s Bazaar in the immediate postwar years and Rolling Stone’s in the early 1970s) the art directors of these magazines are communicating a spectrum of nostalgic impulses (for the sophistication of the 50s, or the uncomplicated rock and roll of the early 70s) as much as anything else. Assuming familiarity with certain graphic idioms, the reprise of historic graphic styles within Rolling Stone and Harper’s Bazaar are intended to appeal to a new generation of graphic literates.

The changing role of typographic identity

Looking at examples of late 80s/early 90s redesigns, it becomes apparent that the nature of the quest for a typographic identity has changed a great deal over the twentieth century, and particularly in the decades since the Second World War. This change can be illustrated in the extreme by delving back into early twentieth-century typographic history to refer to what is possibly the best known historic venture in determining the identity of a publication through type: the redesign of The Times newspaper, steered by Stanley Morison in the late 1920s. In order to determine the most appropriate typeface for the newspaper Morison undertook a programme of research into legibility. The rigour of these researches has been questioned by typographic critics, but this appears not to have affected the conviction with which subsequent generations have adopted the outcome conclusions.[407] The product of Morison’s investigations was the Times Roman typeface, a highly condensed face, suitable for printing at small sizes and robust enough to survive poor quality production. Times Roman was presented as the perfect newspaper type, and the assumption of its paramount legibility has been enough to persuade the huge number of designers (and more recently design amateurs) who throughout the century have continued to employ it as a default text face.

But while Times Roman remains an international best-seller, the business of designing and redesigning newspapers has moved on dramatically. Recent newspaper designs (such as the redesign of Britain’s Independent on Sunday early in 1997) have focused upon the introduction of typographic variation rather than consistency. Newspapers are now brimming with various headline and text faces which are scattered through layout devices such as side bars and supplements. These new formats are intended to cater for audiences who habitually draw information from the television screen. Throughout the print media it is possible to observe significant concessions to a screen-centred culture. No longer the authoritative, conservative vehicles of fact assumed by Morison and his generation, newspapers in the age of CNN vie noisily on the stands for the customer’s attention. The pursuit of typographic identity was understood by Morison to be the search for a perfect and stable typographic solution. By the end of the twentieth century it has become the creation of a set of temporary typographic signifiers which are believed to have the potential to attract the most demographically desirable readership.

Graphic and typographic identity in the late twentieth century

No longer speaking with a single authoritative typographic language, the design of newspapers reflects broader changes in the manner in which graphic and typographic identities have come to be conceived of and applied in the late twentieth century. These changes can be characterised positively: the silencing of the dominant voice ought to allow for quieter, minority voices to be heard. This view implies the assumption that shifts in graphic mode are a signal of broader social and economic change. For example, in the case of the graphic identities of corporations, the monolithic modernist identity programmes from the 1950s of companies such as General Electric or IBM are often characterised as a accurate reflection of the paternalist, inflexible values of those companies, values which were strongly identified with the of the American governments of the time.[408] In turn, the more complex, and in theory more responsive, design systems of the late 1980s are promoted as reflections of corporations who are more sensitive to the demands of their customers. In his book Corporate Identity, the designer Wally Olins suggested that the success of a design system hinges on its ability to invest the products of the company with a “life” which will prove attractive to a specific group of consumers.[409]

In the same book, Olins argued that a corporate identity would only be successful if it accurately represented the ideology of a company.[410] The implication of this statement is that design is able only to reveal and emphasise existing values, it cannot conceal or disguise.[411] Olins’s project was to answer the critics of the elaborate, multipart identity systems offered by corporate design companies in the late 1980s. While writers such as Robin Kinross argued that they were incoherent and expensive, Olins implied that they were evidence of companies that were genuinely more in tune with the needs of a heterogeneous society. However, it does not take much delving within Olins’s book to discover the limits of the ability of the corporation to take into account the needs of a diverse population. Writing in the late 1980s, Olins felt justified insisting that, in order to combat difficulties that might arise from “employing people of differing ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds”, employees ought to be required to demonstrate their “commitment” through conformity in “appearance and behaviour”.[412] Given a chance, Olins might well choose to rephrase this suggestion in the late 1990s. Quoted here, it is significant in revealing that corporate design systems are prepared to acknowledge diversity only amongst an enfranchised, consuming public. The right to be different must be bought.

Looking at a range of publications which cater through editorial and design for minority audiences, similar doubts arise. The extent to which these publications actually meet the full spectrum of tastes and views is questionable; in order to attract the notice of the publishing industry a minority community must be able to consume. The suspicion arises that, rather than accurately reflecting an heterogeneous society, the range of graphic and typographic identities on offer actually represent an a more sophisticated exploitation of marketing opportunities.

Another criticism of the late twentieth-century publishing industry, intent as it is on meeting every consumer preference through fine tuning graphic and editorial identities, has been that of cultural relativism. Writing about American book publishing in the volume of essays Dumbing Down, the author Kent Carroll noted an “absence of gatekeepers” within this former preserve of high culture. Addressing in particular the proliferation of manuals of self-help, Carroll argued that America’s publishers had mounted “a retreat from elitism” and no longer would “assume the moral authority that [their] position demands.”[413] Obviously the magazine has never carried the cultural weight of the book, but Carroll’s criticisms can be extended to contemporary magazine publishing: it is a business within which editorial and design are not judged against any kind of absolute standards, but where the flexible rule of the marketers is applied.

Those who subscribe to the notion of critics such as Carroll that culture is in the process of being “dumbed down” have argued that the diversity of information offered to audiences in print and on screen is actually illusory. James Twitchell, author of the book Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America, has suggested that, rather than genuine alternatives, we are actually being presented with homogeneity masquerading as choice. In terms of graphic and typographic identity, the implication of this argument is that the spectrum of finely-tuned publications on sale are in fact no more than the same product dressed in different ways. This is a suggestion that is supported by an examination of the advertisements in the pages of those magazines, where the range of goods on offer is much narrower than the range of means by which they are promoted.

Related by Twitchell to the notion of a low-level, homogenous mass culture is the concept of “Adcult”. According to Twitchell, this late twentieth-century cultural form has arisen from the fact that, within the media, “if it can’t carry advertising, it won’t survive.” In an essay in the Dumbing Down collection, Twitchell offered a “thumbnail” history of magazine and newspaper publishing, claiming that “all the innovations in these media were forced on them by advertisers” and that the demographic specialisation of print in the 1980s was “direct result of the rise of Adcult.”[414] Amongst the perceived victims of the culture characterised by Twitchell has been America’s leading news magazine Time. Redesigned in 1992, the design educator and critic Michael Rock debated whether new format, with its ample room for interchangeable, demographically specific sections, was driven by editorial concerns or market research. Rock concluded that the transformation of a “sober, grey news magazine” into “jumbled tabloid” must be a response to the demands of the advertisers, a conclusions which led him to argue that “the aura of elite, erudite journalism has been fouled.”[415]

But, putting aside fears of a commercially grounded, relativistic plumbing of culture’s lower levels, to most it would appear preferable that the newsstands of multi-cultural nations such as Britain and the United States carry publications which endeavour in some way to cater to the diversity of their populations. Weighing up the pros and cons of recent events in the publishing industry, the question that arises is whether people are active or passive consumers of identity. That is, do they use the graphic and editorial identities of the magazines on offer as ingredients with which to construct a positive identity for themselves, or are they victims of these identities, forced to consume to keep in line with the images on offer? The stance taken upon this question will determine whether the quest for typographic identity, which consumes much of the time of the type designers working upon America’s East Coast, is viewed in a positive or negative light.

Font Bureau

Amongst the most significant of type design concerns on East Coast is Font Bureau, founded in Boston in 1989 by Roger Black and David Berlow (born 1955). Art director Black formed the company in the anticipation that there would be a burgeoning demand for custom-designed type in the wake of the technological developments that had dramatically lowered the cost of font design and manufacture. Developments in the technology of print and publishing appeared to be complementing the direction in which the industry was moving as a whole: the techniques of digital publishing were rendering demographically specific activity more and more accessible. Not only from publication designers, the demand for custom typefaces was also expected to come from corporations or software manufacturers. Black and Berlow envisaged that Font Bureau would cater to the newly emerging market for original typefaces in its entirety.

Starting his career in type over a decade earlier, David Berlow became a letter designer for established industrial foundries such as Linotype and Haas in 1978. Later, in 1982, he became one of the first employees of the maverick digital type company, Bitstream Inc. Bitstream could be seen as a forerunner of the Font Bureau in its intention to supply font software, in some cases custom designed, that would function upon already existing digital type setting systems. When Bitstream was founded it took full advantage of the technological capabilities available in the early 1980s and a few years later the company actively extended those capabilities by prompting Adobe to open the PostScript language.[416] Launched at the end of the decade, Font Bureau also were skilful in their exploitation of recent technological circumstance. This was reflected not just in the markets that the Bureau courted, but also in the very structure and fabric of the company.

Harry Parker, the present administrator at Font Bureau, has called it “the most virtual company I have ever come across.”[417] By this he means that a very small proportion of the activity associated with Font Bureau takes place within its physical headquarters, a small suite of offices on one of Boston’s most fashionable shopping streets. Rather, most of the company’s designers work from home, communicating digitally and meeting, if at all, at regular bi-annual get togethers. The Boston office functions largely as the company’s administrative base, housing only a small proportion of its actual design work.

The company evolved into this form over several years. At its launch, Font Bureau was based in David Berlow’s front room at Mount Vernon Street in Boston. The company expanded fairly rapidly, and because at that point it still seemed necessary to physically accommodate employees, Font Bureau in early 1992 moved to larger premises on Tremont Street. This studio space was the most conventional that the company ever occupied, and at that time the larger part of their design activity took place under one roof, a situation which Parker has described as “condensed”.[418]

After a few years working in this studio, David Berlow moved from Boston to Martha’s Vineyard, an island off Cape Cod, and began to operate from a studio within his house. Around the same time most of the designers working for Font Bureau followed suit, retreating into their respective domestic environments, and the administrative core of the company moved to its present address. This development can be seen as the outcome of modes of thought that went alongside the increasing accessibility of the internet during the early 1990s. As more and more people subscribed to the service, communication over the net became accepted as a fully formed and viable.

In the early 1980s the digital type foundry Bitstream had been founded in Boston to take advantage of the pools of skilled, cheap labour that were available in the city. The city is home to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Bitstream were able to hire graduate students to programme for them for as little as $8 an hour.[419] Bitstream were not alone in taking advantage of this resource, and Boston has remained distinct from other relatively depressed East Coast cities due to its concentration of technologically based businesses.

In spite of MIT, the East Coast’s high tech activity remains small scale in comparison to that located within Silicon Valley. By remaining east, rather than responding to pressure to move west, Bitstream were keeping a foothold in the sphere that was already occupied by the more traditional type businesses. From the start the major industrial type companies such as Linotype had been based upon the East Coast, a location which reflected their links with the area’s economic infrastructure, including amongst other things, the publishing industry. To some extent, as well as adopting Bitstream’s location, Font Bureau have also adopted their project: to take advantage of the new opportunities while maintaining established relationships. Significantly in the cases of both Bitstream and Font Bureau, Boston offered the opportunity to keep up with the latest developments of digital technology while still being entrenched within America’s print and publishing establishment.

Roger Black first commissioned a custom designed face for a magazine from Bitstream. Already a regular customer, buying faces from the Bitstream library to use within his work, Black persuaded the company to design a typeface for the exclusive use of Rolling Stone magazine. In the end the resulting face, the French inspired Cochin, was licensed exclusively to Rolling Stone for only six months and was then made available through Bitstream’s retail library. Matthew Carter, who was working at the company at the time, has remembered that even negotiating that degree of exclusivity took a great deal of arm twisting. [420] Demanding that a font become the sole property of a particular publication or corporation was still very unusual at that point. Possibly it was Black’s frustration at the fact that he was unable to claim the exclusive rights to Cochin that prompted him to launch his own foundry. For the art director, launching the Font Bureau amounted to a form of vertical integration; effectively he had taken charge of one of his suppliers.

In the wake of developments in type design and typesetting technologies, Roger Black can be credited with having formed a new understanding of the nature of typefaces and in turn reconceived the concept of typographic need. No longer free-standing sets of characters of intrinsic worth, for Black typefaces have become elements of customised, designed identities, deriving their value from their position within those identities. This notion contradicts the assumptions upon which the traditional type libraries, such as that of Monotype, were built. In the company’s heyday, those at Monotype believed that they could completely satisfy the demand for type by compiling a library of well-honed faces that would be able to meet every reasonable typographic need. In Roger Black’s scheme a free-standing library, however beautifully crafted, could not possibly cater to emerging demands. Typographic need is no longer viewed as the outcome of particular textual or design requirement – it is now seen as emerging from the demand for a specific, distinctive identity. Therefore, while those at Monotype would have assumed a set of absolute and stable needs could be met with their existing library, Black has effectively envisaged a set of relational and constantly changing needs that can only be catered for with responsive, customised design.

By the mid-1990s, with the greater number of type designers making a large part of their income from custom design, Black’s view could be said to have prevailed within the type design business. However when he launched Font Bureau in the late 1980s, it was decidedly revolutionary. Even the company who were at the cutting edge of type technology, Adobe, had assumed a much more conventional position by attempting to create the definitive library of quality PostScript fonts. In setting up a company with the specific intention of specialising in the business of custom design, Black and Berlow were running against some of the most cherished tenets of the traditional typographic establishment.

In spite of its original, revolutionary agenda, Font Bureau can be argued to have moved closer to a conventional type business over the course of the 1990s. Over those years, the company has paid more and more attention to the retail side of the business, an activity that was initially seen as no more than a by-product of the company’s custom projects. At first, Font Bureau’s retail library was built of typefaces which had once been exclusively owned by another party but for which exclusive rights had expired. Initially Font Bureau distributed these faces through companies such as Agfa and Fonthaus. Eventually, when the stock of retail typefaces became sufficient to merit an independent catalogue, the company began to handle their own distribution.

Once Font Bureau took charge of the retail of their own fonts, that side of the business began to play a more and more important role. By the mid-1990s the company was inviting submissions from outside designers and aiming to add new typefaces to their library at regular intervals. Jill Pichotta, the manager of Font Bureau’s retail library, has described the company’s selection criteria in what amount to fairly traditional terms:

“Is there a need? Is it utilitarian? Is it aesthetic? Is it well-crafted? Has it been done before? Could it be done better?”[421]

Harry Parker has argued that the retail side of Font Bureau is significant in providing a “steady and very predictable” source of income to insulate the company against the peaks and troughs that occur in the flow of custom design work. To that end, Font Bureau has applied themselves to that part of the business in order to provide themselves with an more effective buffer. This has involved building up a substantial library and establishing a well-targeted mailing list. Font Bureau’s considerable connections within the design industry have helped in the pursuit of both those goals and the relationship between custom and retail work has proved symbiotic.[422]

Alongside design for publication and for retail, Font Bureau also undertake custom work for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). Major clients of this kind tend to be software companies and have in the past included Microsoft, Apple, Hewlett Packard. Tobias Frere-Jones, Font Bureau’s senior designer, has argued that this work is “more often than not mechanical production”, citing the example of Apple’s fonts for System 7 which were designed by David Berlow. When interviewed in mid-1996, Tobias Frere-Jones had spent most of that year designing not for publications but for screen, working on fonts for Microsoft to employ within their user interfaces.[423] Generally working within fairly tight technical constraints, Font Bureau’s OEM work cannot yet be said to involve the finely graded search for identity that is the task of their work for publications. Essentially a quest to find solutions within tightly defined limits, it could be viewed as more in line with the type designers task as it has been defined by the traditionalists.

As the technology improves, design for screen is likely to allow for an increasing amount of flair and idiosyncrasy. In spite of likely developments in design potential, in the mid-1990s type designers sustained the very real fear that, as the emphasis changes from print to screen, more and more fonts would become embedded within larger software programmes, and no longer would they be free-standing, importable items. Effectively this would mean that fonts would once more become proprietary, taken from the hands of designers and put into those of software manufacturers.[424] Taking a pessimistic view, this would lead to a reversion to some of the worst aspects of the old system, such as lack of independence for designers, with none of its advantages, for example those of secure, well-paid employment. Although many type designers fear that eventual dominance of screen over print is going to bring to an end their independence, designing for print does remain a healthy concern, particularly for well-placed companies such as Font Bureau. With Roger Black’s well-established connections in the publishing industry, Font Bureau has enjoyed a consistent stream of commissions from the publishing business since its earliest days.

Amongst the first Font Bureau typefaces was Belizio, commissioned in the late 1980s for Roger Black’s redesign of California magazine and designed by David Berlow. Belizio can be viewed as fairly representative of the Bureau’s output in that it appears shamelessly bold on the page, yet reconciles that quality with an intelligent exploration of typographic history. The Belizio typeface family includes a real Clarendon italic (rather than a slanted version of the Roman), a venture inspired by the 1955 typeface Egizio, in which the designer Aldo Novarese undertook a similar task.[425] The sturdy appearance of the Clarendon-style face clearly brings to mind American jobbing printing of the mid- to late- nineteenth century, known to the large part of any potential audience through its recreation within cinema or upon television. In the case of California magazine, this face might appear to evoke the spirit of life at America’s western frontier. In tapping into that particular strand of screen-inspired nostalgia, Black and Berlow demonstrate their skill in negotiating existing webs of cultural association to target their designs directly to a specific audience. Belizio is an example of demographically driven design.

Another of Font Bureau’s early commissions was the Belucian typeface for Smart, a short-lived, upmarket men’s lifestyle magazine. Commissioned in 1989, this family of types was inspired by a headline face designed by Lucian Bernhard in 1925. David Berlow developed the headline style Belucian Demi from Bernhard’s designs and then went on to expand the family by adding a Book and a Book Italic version. Since it was first released, the Belucian family has been augmented with Demi Italic and Ultra faces.[426] Supplying variants of a face to meet demand is characteristic of Font Bureau’s policy; rather than completed sets, typeface families have been seen as growing entities. With its high contrasts, looping strokes and flyaway serifs, Belucian is a distinctively decorative family. It retains a 1920s flavour, again negotiated for most of us through a host of subsequent revivals, and is able to evoke the idea of some kind of pre-depression, moneyed innocence. Arriving at the very end of the 80s, as recession bit the tail end of the decade, Smart’s typography and editorial content might have seemed dated. Elegant though the magazine undeniably was, it folded after a single year.

One of Font Bureau’s best used typeface families has been Bureau Grotesque. These faces were developed in 1989 and licensed to Roger Black Inc. (Black’s design consultancy), The Tribune Companies (a newspaper group), and Newsweek (the well known weekly news magazine). Later the entire family was sold to the extremely high circulation magazine, Entertainment Weekly, who commissioned a number of extra weights, and by 1993 it had been expanded to include twelve fonts.[427] The design of Bureau Grotesque was based on that of nineteenth-century sans serif faces, particularly models drawn from the catalogues of the Stephenson Blake foundry. Text in the Font Bureau specimen book suggested that these faces had “tooth and character”, which presumably distinguishes them from modernist sans serifs, many of which were making explicit bids for anonymity.[428]

Within popular American magazines the Bureau Grotesques refer to a robust traditionalism, a brashly commercial straightforwardness, but used in other contexts they begin to take on very different meanings. The Bureau Grotesque family has been employed by the German design group Cyan within the former East German design journal, Form + Zweck. Appearing in tightly set, often coloured, blocks against Form + Zweck’s layered and extremely dense pages, the Bureau Grotesques become an element within the complex set of meanings that are being communicated through the journal. Since the unification of Germany, the pages of Form + Zweck have been devoted to exploring the forms of modernity that were promoted by the former regime.[429] In those circumstances, the use of a pre-modernistic sans serif face immediately implies a questioning stance. While the faces of the Bureau Grotesque family are always distinctive, their resonance is not singular.

Roger Black has had a long standing connection with the men’s magazine Esquire and in the early 1990s commissioned a typeface family for that magazine. The result was the Village series, inspired by a typeface family of the same name designed by Frederic W. Goudy in 1932. Font Bureau’s Village, designed by David Berlow, includes niceties such as an Italic Small Caps Titling version and was intended to be used throughout the magazine for both text and display purposes.[430] Flicking through the pages of the August 1997 issue of Esquire magazine, the Village typefaces appeared in a variety of typographic modes. Sometimes they were set within three well-behaved, ruled columns and at others they were part of looser layouts which flow freely around pull quotes and illustrations. Typographic texture and the magazine’s liberal use of illustrations and photographs notwithstanding, the consistency of Esquire’s typographic palette does seem to suggest that the magazine has a textual emphasis, and so allows it to make a bid for the upper end of the market. This typographic approach is in marked contrast to other men’s magazines, for example Details where quirky graphics are used to break up blocks of text, the emphasis being firmly upon the sound-bite.

Roger Black has described his own art direction as “traditional magazine design with a heavy helping of 1920s book typography.”[431] This approach is reflected in the design of Esquire, where the quiet and bookish sits alongside the clamouring and commercial. Black pioneered this double-headed approach on the pages of Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s, the typographic style which William Owen argued simultaneously pandered to the nostalgia and the conservatism of the blue jean generation.[432] This is a generation of which Black could be considered a part, but rather than viewing his references to traditional typography as the outcome of an underlying conservatism, more charitably they could be viewed as the product of a genuine passion for type. Black has been a long-term collector of historic type specimens and other typographic ephemera and his type-driven art direction could be seen as a means of putting into practice a connoisseurship of the most traditional kind.

The numbers of subtle variations of typeface demanded by Black for the pages of his magazines could be seen as the result of his devotion to the letterform. Even on the pages of the most mainstream of publications that have fallen into his hands, typographic subtlety abounds. For example in the pages of Premiere magazine, a high circulation movie magazine for which Black commissioned the typeface family Eldorado from Font Bureau, elegant italic titling faces provide captions for standard, glossy shots of Hollywood stars.

In spite of Black’s evident passion for type, he is far from a through and through traditionalist. In some cases his disregard for convention has won him criticism. In his article on the 1992 redesign of Time magazine, the critic Michael Rock argued that the new format would make “typography lovers squirm”. Rock lamented the passing of Time as a serious news magazine, suggesting that the introduction of new typographic styles was accompanied by the displacement of the discussion of current events by tabloid-style reporting.[433] In justification of the design of Times Text, the face used after the redesign, David Berlow argued that it was intended to be “newsy, authoritative and relaxed”. This is a phrase which, although positive, does reflect the lightening of tone that was being pursued through the redesign.[434]

When commercially appropriate, Black has been happy to tamper with some of the most cherished values of American publications. Black’s approach to magazine design, and that which guides Font Bureau’s activities in the area, has always been led by a consideration of the market. This approach, which might be considered an anathema to those who hold with the idea of absolute typographic value, is one which corresponds very closely to developments within publishing industry as a whole. It is appropriate to view Black’s attitude to type as a product of his long-term involvement in that industry.

Tobias Frere-Jones

Since joining the company in 1992, Font Bureau’s Senior Designer Tobias Frere-Jones (born 1970) has tended to divide his time between custom design work of the kind described above and other self-driven activity. A graduate in graphic design of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Frere-Jones became interested in type well before he reached design school. At RISD he was disappointed by the lack of attention given to type design within the graphics syllabus and so built up his own course, inserting his own typefaces into other projects and independently seeking out criticism from established type designers. In this way Frere-Jones came into contact with the designer Matthew Carter, who was at that time working at Bitstream, and in turn Carter encouraged him to approach David Berlow with a request for work experience. The outcome of this request was that Tobias Frere-Jones began working for Font Bureau immediately on completing his degree at RISD.

Frere-Jones has described his early days at the Font Bureau as being akin in some ways to a traditional apprenticeship: “picking things up as I went, looking over David’s shoulder.”[435] However he has acknowledged that the quantity of design experience that he was able to gain from the outset is incomparable to that of designers in the era before PostScript. Beginning his career in the 1950s, the designer Matthew Carter had to wait ten years before he was given access to the tools to create a functioning typeface.[436] That the designers of Frere-Jones’s generation have had the means to design and distribute their own fonts even as students has dramatically changed the relationship between traditional typographic lore and actual design practice. Frere-Jones has remarked that often he would “stumble across principles on my own”, a kind of serendipity that would probably have been curtailed in the drawing offices of the industrial typesetting manufacturers.[437]

In the 1990s, Tobias Frere-Jones was unusual amongst his generation of type designers in that, rather than being an independent, he was a full-time waged employee of Font Bureau. In spite of that status, which has become almost an anachronism in the contemporary type world, in many ways he has shared an agenda with other young designers. Frere-Jones’s work has displayed an engagement with the vernacular letterform that has been a concern of young designers internationally, including Barry Deck and Jonathan Barnbrook. Frere-Jones has designed three typefaces for the Font Bureau retail collection that pursue this theme: Interstate, Garage Gothic and Cafeteria.

Interstate, designed in 1993 and available in twelve versions, is based upon the signage alphabets of the United States Federal Highway Administration. The Font Bureau specimen book suggests that the familiarity of the Interstate letterforms might render the face extremely legible, the suggestion being that, even taken out of context, this alphabet retains the qualities that it has derived from its position on roadside placards up and down the nation.[438] This argument seems somewhat disingenuous, Interstate proves a comfortable text face largely because of the subtlety of spacing and other design work put in by Frere-Jones. While a typeface such as Deck’s Template Gothic aim to jar readerly expectations, with Interstate Frere-Jones has skilfully recast a set of vernacular letterforms into a smooth, workable face. The typeface has proved very popular, and is particularly well used within art publications. As the text face of the catalogue to the graphic design exhibition ‘Mixing Messages’, Interstate offers a perfect example of the kind of graphic ambiguity explored within the show.[439] Plucked out of context, familiar visual idioms are able to present audiences with entirely new sets of meanings.

Frere-Jones’s other outings into the vernacular are more straightforward celebrations of the quirks of the everyday letterform. Garage Gothic, designed in 1992, retains the “irregular contours and rough alignments” that were characteristic of its source, tickets distributed at city parking garages, and Cafeteria, designed a year later, is an outing into the animation of the amateur hand-painted sign.[440] Again, these faces are very different to comparable ventures by his contemporaries. Unlike designers Deck or Barnbrook, who venture into the extremities, Frere-Jones has always retained a concern with the “disciplined and restrained.”[441]

As well as exploring the contemporary vernacular, Frere-Jones has also mined the typographic canon for material, sometimes offering direct digital revivals. Frere-Jones’s sources have ranged from early European modern typography (in 1993 he designed a digital version of Nobel which was based upon a 1920s Dutch sans serif) to the Font Bureau favourites: nineteenth-century American Type Founders catalogues (in the same year he revived the ATF’s Art Nouveau face Epitaph). With these revivals, Frere-Jones has made historic letterforms accessible to the digital generation, engaging in acts of technological translation that have been the preoccupation of those in the type business since the onset of mechanical production.

In spite of his preoccupation with some of typography’s traditional tasks, like many of his contemporaries, Frere-Jones has described his mode of practice as exploratory:

“I make a point of going through as wide a range as I can handle – if the last face I drew was a really hard geometric sans serif, I would want the next thing that I drew to be as little like that as possible. It makes it more interesting and I learn more moving through as many different modes as I can. I am a firm believer in self-education, that it is what makes it interesting to me.”[442]

Frere-Jones’s historical revivals and reworkings of the vernacular have not been undertaken in the pursuit of typographic resolution. Rather than seeking to establish absolute typographic truths, Frere-Jones has worked to extend the contemporary discussion around the letterform. Given that this is a discussion that focuses upon notions such as context and identity, Frere-Jones’s approach has fitted well with the increasing levels of self-consciousness that have emerged around commercial publication design. Finding experiment and business reconcilable, seeing commissions starting points for exploration, Frere-Jones has remarked that “the custom jobs that I get most excited about are the ones that take me into territory I have never been in before.” The coincidence between theoretical enquiry and commercial pursuit within his work raises questions about the blurred relationship between commerce and academia encompassed within the, largely American, postmodern typographic project.

In the mid 1980s, certain American graphic designers began incorporating deconstructionist theory into their work. In this context, literary theory was most often applied to graphic form in order to justify the rejection of singular (modernist) communication (the established task of graphic design) in favour of the pursuit of a more diffuse, more personal communicative mode. This theoretically suggested brand of graphic enquiry was not immediately applied in a commercial context. For example, amongst the best-known earlier pieces of this kind of work was a 1986 issue of Design Quarterly, the journal produced by the not-for-profit Walker Institute, designed by April Greiman. Offering an image of her own body overlaid with scattered fragments of text and illustration, Greiman’s design spells out the belief that, through their work, the graphic designers lay themselves bare. Emerging from art schools, in the beginning this kind of graphic language appealed only to public institutes like the Walker, but during the late 1980s and early 1990s they were to become much more visible. To a degree this was because of the hunger within the mainstream graphic design community for new styles.[443] The issue of formal novelty aside, it was also the case that academically driven quests for more personalised modes of communication had something in common with attempts by commercial publications to define and appeal to a particular sector through graphic style.

Alongside the pursuit of personal identity, many theoretically engaged American graphic designers had become engaged in other tasks associated with the postmodern project. Significant amongst these was the promotion of multi-culturalism (or the decentering the subject, to refer to the justification of the activity that had been derived, loosely, from literary theory). Within the mainly white design communities of art schools, such as Cranbrook and the California Institute of the Arts, for the most part this meant promoting vernacular, American graphic idioms in the face of modernist form; the concern of designers being the relationship between dominant and disenfranchised cultures. Bound up with the now defiled notion of ‘political correctness’, this kind of graphic enquiry also made its way into more mainstream contexts. Publications hoping to appeal to certain, more marginal segments of consumers have often used the abrasive graphic languages concocted by those concerned with the challenge to the perceived dominance of the modernist styles that are taken to be allied to mainstream corporate culture, an obvious example being the widespread mainstream use of Barry Deck’s Template Gothic.[444]

The overlaps between recent academic and commercial typographic projects are evident. With their shared rejection of absolute typographic value, their questioning of traditional typographic hierarchies and their pursuit of personal or group identity through type, both could be described as postmodern. However, the co-option of the commercial world by the forms developed within the academy has not been entirely unproblematic. Transferred from an art school context onto the pages of a mainstream magazine (or even onto an annual report in the case of Template Gothic[445]) the designs intended as biting commentaries on late twentieth-century culture are bound to have become somewhat a little blunted. Designing expressly for a mainstream, Frere-Jones does not encounter that particular contextual problem, but it could be argued that, by working for mass-market publications, Frere-Jones’s work is denied a critical edge. It certainly is the case that the body of Frere-Jones typefaces do appear smooth and conciliatory in their tone, yet without being directly confrontational, Frere-Jones teases the seams of typographic conformity.

Frere-Jones has welcomed the opportunity to develop his questioning approach to typography within non-mainstream contexts; for example by contributing to the British based experimental publication Fuse. Frere-Jones’s Fuse fonts include Fibonacci, an exploration into the concept of typography as a self-contained, formal scheme, and Reactor, a font that plays upon the notion of grunge by disintegrating as you type. These contributions notwithstanding, Frere-Jones has not subscribed to the wholesale cultural despair of Fuse’s editorial team. The essays that have accompanied Fuse tended to adopt the premise that the forces of commerce are at best blandly reductive and at worst dangerously violent, views which Frere-Jones cannot share.

In a talk delivered at the first Fuse conference, Tobias Frere-Jones began by identifying himself as more commercially engaged than most of the other participants, admitting to being “closer to the bleeding edge of publishing”[446], and went on to outline his ideas about the communicative possibilities being offered by new digital technologies. While not unreservedly enthusiastic, the tone of Frere-Jones’s talk put him closer in line with the techno-optimism promoted within magazines such as Wired than the techno-nihilism espoused by Jon Wozencroft and his ilk.[447] Where Wozencroft has assumed that prevailing commercial circumstances mean that technology will be employed for the worst, Frere-Jones has implied that global capitalism need not always promote the poorest ends.

As a type designer whose preoccupation has been with crafting functioning faces, Tobias Frere-Jones has become part of a community of professional type design specialists: a community which, according to Matthew Carter, has not expanded over the last decade in spite of the new accessibility of type design tools.[448] Alongside maintaining a level of professionalism that has enabled him to turn around a functioning font in a few days, Frere-Jones also has established himself within an international community of designers who are intent on questioning the assumptions of the typographic profession. Frere-Jones has seized upon opportunities offered by contemporary technology and commercial circumstances to cast himself in a new role of independent, type professional: an individual who is able to translate commercial commissions into rewarding projects.

Jonathan Hoefler

Slightly younger than Frere-Jones, Jonathan Hoefler (born 1971) fixed upon a career in type design at a similarly early age. As a student at New York’s Hunter College High School, Hoefler developed an interest in type that was focused first upon Letraset stencils and catalogues and slightly later upon newly emerging digital formats. He was able to develop his interest at that point because of the ready accessibility of these kinds of typesetting technologies. To some extent, Hoefler’s early ventures into type could be seen as parallel to the independent explorations by certain young people into other areas of digital communication technologies. While type design is altogether a less controversial activity than hacking into the White House computer, like other computer whizz kids, Hoefler was able to reach remarkable levels of sophistication in his chosen activity at a very young age.

Bypassing further education altogether Hoefler went to work for the art director Roger Black immediately after graduation from high school. Like Frere-Jones he has compared his early work experience to that of a traditional apprenticeship. For a year and a half, the eighteen year-old Hoefler sat at the computer screen cleaning bitmaps, an activity he has described as the “the digital equivalent of cutting mats and filling glue pots.”[449] Also like Frere-Jones, Hoefler was able to establish himself as a designer in his own right very early in his career. Leaving Black’s employment, Hoefler began working as a freelance designer, trading under the name The Hoefler Type Foundry. Starting out as a graphic designer with a specialism in type, Hoefler concentrated increasingly upon font design and now only ventures into graphics in order to design his own type specimen books.

Starting his career in the midst of the publishing boom of the mid-to late 1980s, amongst Jonathan Hoefler’s earliest commissions were those for the redesigned Rolling Stone magazine. After 1987, under the guidance of the art director Fred Woodward, Rolling Stone had developed a “voracious appetite” for fonts.[450] In line with Woodward’s revisiting of the broad palette of historic display fonts that the magazine had employed during its early 1970s heyday, these commissions tended to be for digitisations of existing types, many drawn from nineteenth-century catalogues. One such face is the 1990 design Egiziano Filigree, which is based upon the nineteenth-century face Egiziano Nero. With this face, Hoefler negotiated many layers of historic interpretation. Named to reflect the contemporary fascination with Egyptology, the actual appearance of the slab seriffed Egyptian faces of the nineteenth century had very little to do with ancient civilisations. Revived in the twentieth century, these letterforms once again were adapted in a manner that had more to do with contemporary sensibilities than any historic source. With its chubby swashes and irregularly shaded 3D drop-shadow effect, Hoefler’s Egiziano strongly refers to revivalist typography of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rather than a strict formal revival, the face addresses the activity of reviving.

Hoefler’s work is for the most part historically-based, but he has claimed that his interests lie not purely in historic form but in the “opportunity to excavate historical circumstances and to comment on those.”[451] Another early commission, the Champion Gothic family designed in 1990 for the magazine Sports Illustrated, offered him the chance to do just that. Based on nineteenth-century sans serif wood types, Hoefler developed a family that encompassed versions of the face for which there were no actual historic precedents, but which he believed might “engender the same kind of feeling.”[452] The very light Bantamweight and bold Sumo versions of Hoefler’s Champion Gothic, rather than being revivals of form, are intended to speak of the extremities of the manner in which these kinds of wood types were applied by small-scale jobbing printers. In the context of the pages of the extremely high-circulation magazine Sports Illustrated (America’s third most profitable magazine[453]), the apparent naiveté of the Champion Gothic typeface harks back to a time when sport was not the business of large corporations, but rather the province of local heroes. The face refers to a notion of community within sport, which is one of the business’s central sustaining fictions.

Amongst Hoefler’s most visible work is the Didot typeface family that he designed for Harper’s Bazaar magazine in 1992. Used on the magazine’s pages in combination with a generic Franklin Gothic, the face appeared to be a direct reference to the Didot types that were employed forty years earlier in the same magazine by the art director Alexey Brodovitch. Hoefler’s Didot was commissioned by the magazine’s incoming star art director, Fabien Baron, and received a great deal of exposure as an element within a very well-publicised redesign.

Discussing Harper’s Bazaar in Print magazine under the title 'Baron’s Bazaar Vision', Stephen Heller adopted a decidedly authorial model with which to criticise the new format of the magazine. Tracing Baron’s progression through Italian Vogue in the late 1980s and Interview magazine in the very early 1990s, Heller expressed disappointment that the art director had toned down the aggression of his early work, turning instead to the “classic typographic simplicity of Brodovitch and Wolf.” The “naggingly lacklustre” quality of the new Bazaar was deemed to be the outcome of Baron relying on models from the past rather than pursuing his own artistic course.[454] Adopting an extremely recognisable style throughout his career, Baron has posed himself as a design auteur and so has invited criticism of this kind. Working with the art director, Hoefler was required to create a typeface family that would be able to withstand Baron’s design style. In the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, Baron employed the Didot face in the kinds of exercises in typographic gymnastics for which he had become well known. To accommodate these tactics, the Didot typefaces are endowed with hairlines that remain thin and well-balanced over a range of sizes. Although, according to Heller, Baron’s voice had become muted, it remained dominant and distinctive nonetheless.

Baron himself has denied that his use of the Didot face upon the pages of Harper’s Bazaar was a direct reference to the history of the magazine. Rather, he claimed to have employed the typeface because of its intrinsic femininity and elegance, qualities that were in tune with the mood of early 1990s, pre-grunge, high fashion.[455] Whether Baron’s designs were the outcome of a specific nostalgia amongst those at Harper’s Bazaar for that magazine’s golden age, or whether they were part of a broader cultural nostalgia that dictated the elegant, feminine currents in fashion of which Baron speaks, it is undeniable that the format of Baron’s early issues of Harper’s recalled the magazine design of several decades earlier. Heller concluded that the new style of Harper’s spoke of a time “when fashion and fashion publishing were visually daring, but not as daunting as they have been over the last decade.”[456]

Baron’s redesign of Harper’s Bazaar was part of a whole-scale overhaul of the magazine by the newly appointed British editor Elizabeth Tilberis. Taking on Harper’s in the early 1990s, Tilberis’s task was to turn around what had become an ailing concern and to expand the market for the fashion publication. Baron’s tenure at Harper’s Bazaar was announced upon the magazine’s cover with the phrase the ‘Era of Elegance’. Equating the new format of the magazine with the dawn of a less forbidding era in fashion, Tilberis made it clear that design had become central in that fashion magazine’s quest for redefinition, in its search for new territory. Later, when the sales figures came in, the redesign was directly associated with the upturn in the fortunes of the magazine. The success of the new format could also be read from the quantity of imitative design that it spawned.[457] In the text of his specimen book Jonathan Hoefler took credit for his part in this achievement, crowing: “Within three months [of adopting the Didot family], Harper’s Bazaar overtook Elle to become the second best-selling fashion magazine in America.”[458]

Using that fact within his own promotional material, Hoefler unashamedly equates commercial and aesthetic success. Designing typefaces for mainstream publications, where month by month sales figures are of paramount importance, Hoefler’s types have been exposed to the most rigorous commercial scrutiny. In some cases they have been employed directly as part of aggressively competitive campaigns. A publisher launching Home and Garden, a rival to the successful domestic lifestyle magazine Martha Stewart Living, came to Hoefler to derive a typographic palette to suit that task. The typefaces that emerged from that commission can be read as a straightforward response to those designed by Hoefler’s friend and colleague Tobias Frere-Jones for Martha Stewart Living.[459]

In a small, self-published booklet titled ‘Every Art Director Needs Her Own Typeface’, Jonathan Hoefler promoted his services to potential publishing clients. He began by pointing out that only a fraction of the wealth of existing type designs were already available in the PostScript format and then went on to suggest that custom design could be quick (“the development of an original PostScript typeface takes about five weeks”) and was not expensive (“the commission of new design is a one-time expense which leads to smaller typesetting bills, in many cases it pays for itself”). Hoefler’s concluding arguments are developed under the heading ‘The Power of Type’:

“There is no better way to create a unique identity than to use a unique typeface. A distinctive identity is as powerful as the message it communicates, remaining forever linked in the imagination with the place it first appeared.”[460]

In selling his own services, Hoefler emphasised the link between identity, a concept that had never seemed more central to commercial success yet at the same time had become increasingly nebulous, and the relatively straightforward act of commissioning a new typeface. He offered a custom font as a lifeline to any art director attempting to negotiate the murky waters of the contemporary publishing business.

As well as offering identity to publications, Hoefler has also contributed to corporate identity programmes. His most important commission of this kind has been for IBM, for whom he designed an extensive family of Bodoni types. The corporate image of IBM has been prominent since the 1950s, when the high profile designer Paul Rand crafted the now well-recognised slab serif logo in 1956. Building a revival of a typeface from the late eighteenth century into what was a formerly strictly modernist identity programme reflected a significant shift in the image that was being pursued by the company. Hoefler’s own approach to the commission was historically grounded, convinced after an extended examination of his work that Bodoni was “intellectually bankrupt”, he faced the challenge of “how to do a typeface that says that.”[461]

In spite of being able to set self-rewarding tasks within his commercial typeface commissions, Hoefler has expressed doubts as to whether the identity design of this kind is justified. According to Hoefler, whereas in the past type design was “driven by technological shift”, this is not longer the case. Hoefler has argued that the “artistic forces” that he believes to be behind most new fonts (though it might be more accurate to view these as commercial forces) do not imbue design activity with purpose. From his among own output, Hoefler has singled out Hoefler Text (1991) as being the only design that was driven by an authentic, technologically-inspired typographic need.[462] The Hoefler Text family was originally conceived as an exploration into historical letterform, a fusion between Janson and Garamond types. A year later, the typeface was adopted by Apple as a project though which to explore their new font technology, GX, a technology which allows for a very large character set and a huge number of kerning pairs. Hoefler’s font suggested itself to Apple because, from the start, it was conceived as a very comprehensive scheme. Hoefler was pleased to develop his already extensive font in line with the requirements of the technology: no longer a self-indulgence, his large character set had become a necessity.

Hoefler’s crises might emerge from his desire to see himself as a craftsmen, an inheritor of the traditions of the type designers of the past. As well as drawing analogies between cleaning bitmaps and filling ink pots,[463] he has also described a design process where “each character is crafted by hand until the final typeface, of anywhere from 49 to 1,016 characters, is complete.”[464] In using the term “by hand”, he is not just referring to the original drawing of the typeface, but also to the editing of the digital version, which he usually completes himself. This kind of language makes a digitised typeface, a product that might seem a little abstract and remote, appear non-threatening and traditional. Within the North American context, the word craft carries the reassurance that, in the face of the soulless forces of industrialisation, traditional (often domestic) values are being upheld.

In tandem with seeing himself as a craftsman in the traditional model, Hoefler has also been keen to explore the theoretically grounded modes of design of the kind practised by his contemporaries, particularly Barry Deck with whom he once shared a studio. To that end, he has tended to keep “at least one experimental iron in the fire”[465] (an incongruously craft-based phrase). Hoefler’s theoretically-driven designs include Gestalt, a typeface based upon the tenet of Gestalt Psychology that no entity is fully comprehensible out of context. An exploration into the contextual nature of legibility, Gestalt is a geometrically reductive face that appears close to many of its early modern predecessors. Hoefler has admitted that Gestalt and other designs of its kind are “are perhaps the least usable” of his entire output.[466] Unlike Tobias Frere-Jones, who productively combined theoretical and formal exploration with typefaces such as Interstate, Jonathan Hoefler has found the two at odds.

Hoefler has described himself as an “armchair historian”[467], a phrase which belies the body of well-digested historical information upon which he has based his work. The large part of Hoefler’s typefaces have made explicit historical references, but rather than being akin to the attempts at faithful formal reproduction of the designers of the early twentieth-century typographic revival, according to the designer they have been based upon historical enquiry of some kind. Hoefler’s self-appointed task has been to explore historical spirit and circumstance through type designs. In some cases, this has involved directly confronting history, for example with the face Hoefler Text, where he has added characters and facilities to a historically grounded design in order to serve “today’s readers in ways that traditional typefaces couldn’t.”[468] In others, it has led the designer to play games with history, for example by bestowing numbers upon versions of his typeface Fetish, such as Fetish 126 or Fetish 338, that are actually arbitrary, “but feel like they might have been found in the old ATF book.”[469]

In their attempts to go beyond formal resolution, Jonathan Hoefler’s revivals have been decidedly in line with contemporary inclinations. But it is the circumstances surrounding their commission and use that have been more pertinent in determining the nature of these typefaces than Hoefler’s personal design task. Through Hoefler’s designs, typographic history has been effectively employed in the late twentieth-century struggle for commercial identity.

Matthew Carter

A different generation from either Tobias Frere-Jones or Jonathan Hoefler, the type designer Matthew Carter (born 1937) is now engaged in a similar form of practice. It has been said of Carter that “his experience encompasses the entire history of typefounding”.[470] Unlike Frere-Jones and Hoefler, who immediately became acquainted with the screen and keyboard, Matthew Carter began his career in type in 1955 by learning, amongst other things, hand punchcutting at the Enschedé printing firm in The Netherlands. Even at that time this practice was extremely rare. Recalling his mentor at Enschedé, Carter has said, “I was fascinated, realising that this man was not long from retirement and the skills he had were quickly going to pass out of currency.”[471] After spending two years at Enschedé, Carter went to work for a couple of years as a freelance designer and letterer in London, a period in which he remembers having to “scuffle” for work.[472] In 1963 he was appointed as typographical adviser to Crosfield Electronics, supervising the manufacture of fonts for a photo-typesetting machine that was known alternately as the Lumitype or the Photon. This job involved supervising the fabrication of the disks that were used to set type upon this machine. In the early 1960s photo-typesetting technology was still “unevolved” and a large part of Carter’s task was “compensating for the defects of the technology.”[473]

Throughout the early 1960s, Carter was frustrated at the lack of opportunities to design original typefaces. As a freelance he was mainly occupied with small-scale commissions such as sign-writing, and at Crosfield his time was spent adapting existing designs to an unwieldy technology. He has compared this situation with that of young people setting out on a career in type design in the period since the late 1980s:

“There are guys who are able to make a living out of type even before they have left school. If you want to go that way, you can make a living out of type. For the future I think it is a very significant thing, because the way you learn is by experience. Jonathan Hoefler or Matthew Butterick have been able to do a lot of learning at a stage when I was not able. I think for the future that is a very good thing, because an increasing number of people will be getting increasingly knowledgeable, experienced and skilful at an earlier age. It bodes well for the future of type design that people are able – if they have the dedication – to be working at it almost immediately.”[474]

In 1960, Carter had visited Mergenthaler Linotype in New York and had been impressed by the energetic programme of original design that was being undertaken at the company. In 1965 he leapt at the chance of a job at that company that was offered to him by the newly appointed director of type, Mike Parker. In a profile of Matthew Carter published in the magazine Communication Arts, the designer argued that coming to America in the 1960s offered him the chance to escape the stultified and extremely “conservative” culture around typesetting that remained in Britain in the early 1960s.[475] At Linotype, already ten years into his career in type, Carter was offered his first opportunities to design complete, original typefaces. During the six years he spent with the company, Carter expanded their typeface library, which had been developed in the era of hot metal setting, to take into account the opportunities that had been created by photosetting technology.

Amongst the first of these typefaces was Snell Roundhand, a script face released by Linotype in a Linofilm format. Snell Roundhand, based upon the principles of the early eighteenth-century English writing master Charles Snell, fully exploited the ability of Linotype’s Linofilm setter to set joining and heavily kerned scripts. Since the face was rereleased in the PostScript format it has remained extremely popular. To the skilled user, PostScript technology facilitates an even greater flexibility in kerning than photosetting ever did. Partly because of these new technological possibilities and partly because of their implied informality, script faces have been very popular amongst the new generation of designer/typesetters. Snell Roundhand has fitted well with a certain strand of contemporary taste because, while not appearing bound to the formal traditions of type and typesetting, it nonetheless speaks of an elegant traditionalism. It creates a mood, but allows for a circumnavigation of the rules.

In 1971 Carter returned to Britain and spent the next decade working freelance, designing typefaces for Linotype and for other companies. Significant experiences acquired during these years included designing typefaces for newly emerging digital typesetting systems, designing a number of non-Roman typefaces and working on identity programmes, both for corporations and publications. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Carter became extremely familiar with a selection of the many digital typesetting technologies that were launched over those years. Amongst other projects, he designed the digitally set Bell Centennial typeface for the AT&T telephone company, a task which involved working within very tight technical limits, and also became consultant to IBM, advising on the adaptation of type to laser printers.

By 1981, having acquired a full understanding of the nature of the business that was becoming established around digital typesetting, Carter was encouraged to join his former Linotype colleague Mike Parker in the launching of Bitstream Inc. in Boston. Through Bitstream, Carter and Parker proposed to license digital typeface designs to typesetting equipment manufacturers, a revolutionary step in detaching the activity of designing digital fonts from that of building the machines upon which to set those fonts. Bitstream Inc. was a controversial venture from the outset. Having been refused the license to many well-established type designs by traditional type firms such as Linotype and Monotype, those at the company set about creating their own versions of these faces. Parker has justified this activity at Bitstream on the grounds that a core type library was required to provide foundations for the development of original typefaces. He argued that the design of original type, considered to be a broadly beneficial activity, was becoming suppressed at traditional companies, where resources were becoming increasingly bound up in the pursuit of the definitive digital typesetting system.[476]

Matthew Carter remained at Bitstream Inc. in the position of Senior Vice President and Director for over ten years, before leaving in 1992 to establish the small-scale type venture Carter and Cone Inc. with partner Cherie Cone. Leaving a significant post within a fairly large company to work from a studio attached to his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Carter was responding to a trend in working patterns that was undoubtedly prompted by the possibilities being offered by new technologies. His choice to set up a small digital foundry can be seen as parallel to that of Sumner Stone, who left Adobe to strike out alone in Palo Alto, California, at around the same time. Both Stone and Carter viewed the possibility to concentrate upon the activity of designing and making typefaces within a minimal corporate structure as being the most important opportunity that was presented to the designer in the age of device-independent digital typesetting. Like Sumner Stone, Matthew Carter has characterised this state of affairs as a kind of return to earlier model of typeface manufacture in which art and craft were united. Matthew Carter has celebrated the fact that once more “individual designers can create and revive type designs, make fonts, without having to go through an industrial manufacturing process.”[477]

Carter’s position in the contemporary type industry is unique in that, having seen many generations of type technology come and go, he has consistently remained employed at the technological cutting edge of the profession. By the mid-1990s, Carter was spending a significant amount of time developing fonts for software manufacturers, largely Microsoft, for the purposes of on-screen text and display, an area which appeared to be at the forefront of font development in technological terms at that time.[478] As well as a dizzying series of technological shifts, Carter has also witnessed dramatic changes in the profession of type design over the first forty years of his career. Carter has been sufficiently flexible to alter his own working patterns in line with these changes. A few years after the introduction of device-independent type, Carter had adopted a mode of working that was comparable to that of many designers who had begun their careers assuming the existence of those technologies.

Like his colleagues Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler, Matthew Carter has divided his time between designing type to commission and the speculative design of type for retail. Also similar to those two, Carter has found custom work to be central to the fortunes of his foundry. Discussing that side of his business, he has said “I didn’t know this would happen when I started, but it’s lucky it has since it is cash on the nail and it’s sometimes relatively well paid.”[479] Not only a vital source of income for the designer , Carter believes that type commissions are significant in that they sponsor the development of new type in general: “Selling large libraries of type will not pay for the development of new faces, [but] I think doing commissions possibly might.”[480] Carter has viewed his self-directed programme of speculative type design, typefaces that he believes he has been “arrogant enough to think that someone might buy”,[481] as being sponsored by his more immediately profitable custom work.

The first typefaces included within Carter and Cone’s retail library were Mantinia and Sophia. Both released in 1993, the first of these, Mantinia, is a family of capital letter fonts that was intended to complement Carter’s 1978 text face Galliard (which was distributed first by Linotype and later licensed to ITC). While Galliard was based upon the types of the sixteenth-century French punchcutter Robert Granjeon, Mantinia is an exploration of the Roman capitals that were found engraved upon ancient monuments. Designing Mantinia, Carter allowed his meticulous examination of historic typographic form to be influenced by the similar explorations of the Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna. Pairing Galliard with Mantinia, Carter mined the layers of meaning that have accrued to certain letterforms. Together these faces refer to the typographic inscriptions of ancient Rome, to the fifteenth-century revival of these inscriptions within Italy and to the promotion of such letterforms in sixteenth-century France. Alongside this host of references, any examination of canonic typeform inevitably brings to mind similar ventures undertaken in the early decades of this century. Suggestive of the revivalism of the early twentieth-century international typographic reformation, unlike the type designers of that time, Carter demonstrates an acute awareness of the ambiguities involved historical exploration. Selling Mantinia in TrueType and PostScript formats, Carter exploited the potential of these programmes by offering alternatives, superiors and ligatures. Effectively, the face proposes a scheme by which ancient typographic customs might be embodied within new typesetting programmes.

Sophia is also an uppercase font. Inspired by the hybrid alphabets of sixth-century Constantinople, the letterforms of Sophia refer to capitals, uncials and Greek letterforms. The design of non-Roman letterforms has precedents within Carter’s work. Employed by Linotype, he created not only a number of Greek faces, but also a Korean face, a Hebrew face and a Devanagari type for India.[482] Much less familiar to an Anglo-American or Western European audience than Mantinia, Sophia incorporates several striking visual quirks (a roundbacked ‘e’; an ‘f’, a ‘p’ and a ‘g’ that descend below the baseline, an ‘x’ that is vertically and horizontally symmetrical etc.). Several of the characters in the face offer alternatives and/or have the property to fuse with their neighbours to form a series of unusual ligatures, which, rather than alphabetic, appear almost symbolic. Although it would seen to have little in common with its library companion Mantinia, Sophia does share a mission with that face: to undertake a sophisticated exploration of historic letterforms in the context of new technological opportunity.

Remaining primarily an exploratory venture rather than a commercial one, the retail library of Carter and Cone has grown very slowly; by 1995 it contained just four typefaces. During the early 1990s, Matthew Carter’s energies were taken up largely with custom work. Included amongst this work was a commission to design a GX font for Apple Computer. The outcome, the Skia typeface launched in October 1995, was the first family of GX fonts to include Variations, a method of generating an infinite range of weights and widths of consistent design. A very different software commission was that from Microsoft for the Verdana screen face, a family of fonts intended to “bridge the legibility gap between screen and paper.”[483] While Skia is concerned with fully exploiting the subtle range of possibilities offered by GX fonts when they appear in print, Verdana addresses the extreme limitations of current screen technology. Both projects led Carter to work with emerging technologies, yet the tasks were undertaken with very different typographic ends in mind.

Carter has been concerned professionally with the creation of typographic identity since the late 1970s. Well known amongst these projects is his 1978 commission to design a typeface for the AT&T telephone company’s Bell telephone directories. Newly adopted typesetting technologies and a desire to achieve a consistency with the company’s overall identity programme (itself the creation of Bass/Yager) prompted AT&T to turn to Linotype, who set Carter on the project. The resultant face, Bell Centennial, a sans serif that is legible even when condensed and survives very poor print quality, is a triumph in its achievement of distinctive form within very tight limits. Other identity projects of Carter’s have been less technically circumscribed. For example designing a caption face for the magazine National Geographic in 1979 offered the designer relatively large amounts of room for aesthetic manoeuvre. However, given that the face was required to slot into a predetermined, fairly rigid typographic format and that the emphasis of the magazine was upon the straightforward delivery of a quantity of factual information, the National Geographic commission, like the Bell project, became largely a matter of determining a singular, effective solution.

Carter more recently worked on an identity project of a different kind. In 1993, he was invited by Laurie Haycock Makela, Design Director of Minneapolis-based Walker Art Center, to develop a proprietary font for the institution. Rather than hoping to use this font to present a clear-cut and resolved public identity, Haycock Makela intended that Carter’s design reflect the institution’s slightly whimsical motto: “Open to interpretation. Closed Mondays.” This ambition is particularly significant in the context of the history of the institution. Until 1990 design at the Walker was in the hands of the design curator Mildred Friedman, who established a programme for the design of printed material and signage within the Institution that has been described as being of “an unswerving international style.”[484] After Friedman’s departure, Haycock Makela sought to loosen up the stringently modernist design of the Walker and to bring it in line with the contemporary mood. The design critic Andrea Codrington has argued that, under the direction of Haycock Makela, “every project that leaves the studio is emblematic of the Walker’s new identity as a multidisciplinary, global institution.”[485]

While Friedman was in charge, a limited palette of typefaces were used throughout the Center’s design. Favouring faces such as Franklin Gothic and News Gothic, the Walker’s typographic policy was commended for its clarity by Margot Rouard Snowman in her book Museum Graphics:

“A standard typeface is used for all contexts, following an excellent hierarchical system which enables the information of the Center’s permanent and temporary exhibitions to be easily read. The signs harmonize with the size of the building and have a strong contemporary feel.”[486]

Haycock Makela deliberately overturned this orderly regime, employing a multitude of what Codrington has described as “next wave fonts” including OCRB, DIN and Carmela.[487] Loosening the rules, Haycock Makela’s pursuit of typographic variation brought with it problems of its own. The quandary that she presented to Carter was to display a typographic identity that was recognisable, but nonetheless spoke of diversity. This dilemma is similar to that faced by the art directors of the commercial publications that were discussed earlier, but voiced in the context of a non-profit making cultural institution it presented an opportunity for experiment. The Director of the Walker, Kathy Halbreich, has described the typographic identity project as a form of “research and development.”[488]

Matthew Carter’s response, a typeface that became known as Walker, was developed over a couple of years. The face emerged from a dialogue between Carter and the institution’s in-house designers. Carter would send the Walker design team trial fonts and they would respond with suggestions of how those letterforms might be used. The resulting face is a set of strong capitals that can be enhanced by a variety of highly distinctive snap on serifs (each a character in its own right) or horizontal rules. In an article written in Eye magazine soon after the launch of the face in 1995, the design writer Moira Cullen interpreted Walker as offering a successful analogy to the mission of the Walker Center in the 1990s. Elements of the face were imbued with ideological content: “In Walker the serifs are the ultimate connectors, the antithesis in type of a Modernist apartheid.”[489] Ultimately Cullen celebrated the face as offering a “radically new approach to type” which “allowed for the kind of idiosyncratic representation of multiple voices that is so important in a community-based institution such as the Walker.”[490]

Putting the Walker face into use requires a sophisticated understanding of the properties of the software. Equally, it could be argued that reading the intended meaning of Walker demands a familiarity with visual codes that have become established within American graphic design of an overtly experimental nature (of the kind that has been emerging from design schools such as Cranbrook Academy or the California Institute of the Arts since the late 1980s). It is arguable whether the typeface actually mounts an effective blow for the project of diversity, or simply represents that state to a select audience. The issue of whether Walker overturns the assumptions of dogmatic modernism aside, the face is undeniably part of an extremely strong and highly unconventional outing into typographic identity.

In the mid-1990s, like his younger, East Coast-based colleagues, Carter divided his working time between designing type for OEMs, retail, publications and other identity projects, but unlike them his approach was informed by a career that had already spanned four decades. Carter’s position has led him to draw links between contemporary and historical practice. He has viewed many of the new developments in type technology as being the last links within a full circle of development, bringing about a return of the craftsmen and reviving traditional typographic practices. Discussing the evolution of typography in the journal Design Quarterly, Carter concluded: “It will take the newest technology to reunite type with some of its oldest traditions. Evolutionary paradox or not, that bodes well for the future.”[491]

Carter’s approach to the new breed of type designers, who “hack” their fonts “with Type 1 PostScript only” has been decidedly indulgent. He has described theirs as “a sort of blissful state where you don’t worry about anything.” But, while he has appreciated the contributions of these hackers, Carter has distinguished between this kind of activity and that of his peers, who share fully the concerns of type designers in the pre-digital age: how to make their typefaces function in the contexts for which they were intended.[492] However, in allying contemporary and historic typographic practice, Matthew Carter has not ignored the shifts that have occurred in typographic meaning over the last few decades. His sophisticated understanding of contemporary typographic issues has been aptly demonstrated through projects such as the Walker scheme, a venture into identity design which mounted an overt challenge to much of the received wisdom upon the subject.

Conclusion

All the designers discussed in this chapter have been professionally engaged with examining the meaning of the letterform, and particularly with negotiating the concept of typographic identity in the 1990s. For the designer David Berlow, in collaboration with art directors such as Roger Black, this has meant accurately casting alphabets to fulfil very finely defined commercial roles. The series of publications that have been through Berlow’s hands display a range of considered, carefully-crafted typographic approaches. Working with Berlow, Tobias Frere-Jones has reconciled the commercially driven pursuit of identity with his own quest for experiment. In line with many of his contemporaries, he has managed to place his commercial design practice within the framework of theoretical enquiry. Similarly, Hoefler has pursued the answers to self-posed questions within the context of highly lucrative design commissions. Hoefler’s work stands out for its attempt to determine an approach to the activity of historical revival that is appropriate in a time when type’s established historical canon has been called into question. Like all of these designers, Matthew Carter has exploited the potential of device-independent typesetting technology to determine a conducive working mode. Since 1992, as a principal of Carter and Cone, he has been able to explore the typographic enquiries that had accumulated over forty years or so of his career until that point. Combining an historical awareness with a decidedly contemporary sensibility, this has led to a work which delves into questions that are at the heart of type design and typography.

The quest for typographic identity which has concerned the designers that have been discussed in this section has emerged from their connections with the East Coast’s well-established publishing industry. For the older designers, such as Carter and Berlow, these connections are no accident. Formerly working for Linotype, a typesetting business founded late last century, both of these designers moved on to become part of Bitstream, a firm that at the outset hoped to occupy Linotype’s territory by offering traditional typefaces in digital form. Bitstream’s Boston location was in part determined by the technological facilities of MIT, but it was also prompted by the desire to place the firm within the heart of the traditional print and publishing community. Leaving Bitstream, both Carter and Berlow carried on working from Boston, maintaining many of the connections with the publishing industry that they had established from within Bitstream. In the cases of Hoefler and Frere-Jones the scenario is somewhat different. Born and trained in the area, to some extent these designers have adopted a manner of typographic practice that has been determined by their location.

That the East Coast continued to house a large part of a specific mode of typographic activity is a reflection of the manner in which established industries are able to weather change. In theory the desktop publishing industry should have detracted from the mainstream industry, promoting the independent launch of marginal publications. In practice the mass publishing industry has been able to mobilise the tools of the desktop for its own ends. By diversifying their own activities, and becoming ever more sensitive to consumer (demographic) trends, the established businesses have ensured that the boom in magazine publishing since the late 1980s has remained largely in their own hands.

Notes

[382] . Sumner Stone, 23/9/96

[383] . Matthew Carter, 1/6/96

[384] . Tebbel, John & Zuckerman, Mary Ellen, 1991, The Magazine in America 1741-1990, Oxford University Press, Oxford

[385] . see Kevin Robins ‘What in the World’s Going On?’, pp.11-66, Du Gay ed., 1997

[386] . p.243, Tebbel & Zuckerman, 1991

[387] . p.246, Tebbel & Zuckerman, 1991

[388] . p.247, Tebbel & Zuckerman, 1991

[389] . p.363, Tebbel & Zuckerman, 1991

[390] . p.361, Tebbel & Zuckerman, 1991

[391] . p.56, Owen, William, 1991, Magazine Design, Laurence King Publishing, London

[392] . In recommending the Spanish publication Big designed by Vince Frost, the critic Steven Heller was moved to suggest that it could “be compared in certain respects to a legendary magazine masterpiece, Alexey Brodovitch’s Portfolio.” p.172 Print v.50 Jan/Feb ’96

[393] . p.46, Owen, 1991

[394] . p.234, Tebbel & Zuckerman, 1991

[395] . p.79, Owen, 1991

[396] . p.235, Tebbel & Zuckerman, 1991

[397] . p.63, Snyder, Gertrude & Peckolick, Alan, 1985, Herb Lubalin: Art Director, Graphic Designer and Typographer, American Showcase Inc., New York

[398] . p.127, Friedman, Mildred ed., 1989, Graphic Design in America, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

[399] . p.108, Owen, 1991

[400] . p.108, Owen, 1991

[401] . p.103, Friedman, Mildred ed., 1989

[402] . p.189, Glaser, Milton, 1973, Milton Glaser: Graphic Design, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth

[403] . p.102, Owen, 1991

[404] . p.371, Tebbel & Zuckerman, 1991

[405] . p.115, Lupton, 1996

[406] . p.134, Lupton, 1996

[407] . p.99, Moran, 1971

[408] . p.127, Friedman, Mildred ed., 1989

[409] . p.122, Olins, Wally, 1989, Corporate Identity, Thames and Hudson, London

[410] . p.7, Olins, 1989

[411] . see Robin Kinross, Conversation with Richard Hollis, Journal of Design History, Vol.5, No.1, 1992

[412] . p.86, Olins, 1989

[413] . Kent Carroll ‘The Facts of Fiction and the Fiction of Facts’, in Washburn, Katherine & Thornton, John eds., 1996, Dumbing Down, Norton, New York

[414] . James Twitchell, ‘But First a Word from our Sponsor’, Washburn & Thornton eds., 1996

[415] . Rock, Michael, ‘Time Magazine’, I.D., September/October 1992

[416] . see the description of the adoption of PostScript software ealier in this thesis.

[417] . Mike Parker, 1/6/96

[418] . Mike Parker, 1/6/96

[419] . Mike Parker, 1/6/96

[420] . Matthew Carter, 1/6/96

[421] . Jill Pichotta, 1/6/96

[422] . Mike Parker, 1/6/96

[423] . Tobias Frere-Jones, 1/6/96

[424] . Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum, ATypI Conference, 1997, The Hague

[425] . Font Bureau specimen book, 1995

[426] . Font Bureau specimen book, 1995

[427] . Font Bureau specimen book, 1995

[428] . Font Bureau specimen book, 1995

[429] . for example, see Form + Zweck, No. 910, 9/10/1994

[430] . Font Bureau specimen book, 1995

[431] . ‘Roger Black’, I.D., November/December, 1996

[432] . p.108, Owen, 1991

[433] . Rock, Michael, ‘Time Magazine’, I.D., September/October 1992

[434] . Berlow, David, ‘Time Magazine’, I.D., September/October 1992

[435] . Tobias Frere-Jones, 1/6/96

[436] . Matthew Carter, 1/6/96

[437] . Tobias Frere-Jones, 1/6/96

[438] . Font Bureau specimen book, 1995

[439] . see Mixing Messages, Lupton, 1996

[440] . Font Bureau specimen book, 1995

[441] . Font Bureau specimen book, 1995

[442] . Tobias Frere-Jones, 1/6/96

[443] . For a discussion of easy-to-apply postmodern style see ‘The (Layered) Vision Thing’, Mike Mills, Eye, 8/1992.

[444] . see the discussion in Chapter Three of this thesis.

[445] . Barry Deck, 10/6/94

[446] . Tobias Frere-Jones, Fuse Conference, London, 25/11/95

[447] . see the editorial of Fuse 3 ‘(Dis)information’, Winter 1992

[448] . Matthew Carter, 1/6/96

[449] . ‘Barry Deck and Jonathan Hoefler’, Wired, March 1995

[450] . Jonathan Hoefler, 3/1/96

[451] . Jonathan Hoefler, 3/1/96

[452] . Jonathan Hoefler, 3/1/96

[453] . Forbes Publishing, April 1997

[454] . Heller, Steven, ‘Baron’s Bazaar Vision’, Print, v.47, Jan/Feb 1993

[455] . Miller, J. Abbott, ‘Fabien Baron’, Eye, 18/1995

[456] . Heller, Steven, Print, v.47, Jan/Feb 1993

[457] . Miller, J. Abbott, ‘Fabien Baron’, Eye, 18/1995

[458] . Hoefler Type Foundry specimen book, 1995

[459] . Tobias Frere-Jones, 1/6/96

[460] . ‘Every Art Director Needs Her Own Typeface’, 1991

[461] . ‘Barry Deck and Jonathan Hoefler’, Wired, March 1995

[462] . Jonathan Hoefler, 3/1/96

[463] . Wired, March 1995

[464] . ‘Every Art Director Needs Her Own Typeface’, 1991

[465] . Hoefler Type Foundry Specimen Book, 1995

[466] . Jonathan Hoefler, 3/1/96

[467] . Hoefler Type Foundry Specimen Book, 1995

[468] . Hoefler Type Foundry Specimen Book, 1995

[469] . Jonathan Hoefler, 3/1/96

[470] . Coyne, Dick, ‘Matthew Carter’, Communication Arts, Jan/Feb, 1989

[471] . Coyne, Dick, Communication Arts, Jan/Feb, 1989

[472] . Matthew Carter, 1/6/96

[473] . Coyne, Dick, Communication Arts, Jan/Feb, 1989

[474] . Matthew Carter, 1/6/96

[475] . Coyne, Dick, Communication Arts, Jan/Feb, 1989

[476] . Coyne, Dick, Communication Arts, Jan/Feb, 1989

[477] . Carter, Matthew, The Evolution of American Typography, pp.56-64, Design Quarterly, No.148, 1990

[478] . Matthew Carter, 1/6/96

[479] . Spiekermann, Erik, ‘Matthew Carter’, pp.10-16, Eye, 11/1993

[480] . Spiekermann, Erik, pp.10-16, Eye, 11/1993

[481] . Matthew Carter, 1/6/96

[482] . Coyne, Dick, Communication Arts, Jan/Feb, 1989

[483] . Verdana specimen, 1996

[484] . Codrington, Andrea, ‘Changing Identities (Laurie Haycock Makela)’, pp.64-68, I.D., September/October, 1993

[485] . Codrington, Andrea, I.D., September/October, 1993

[486] . p.23, Rouard Snowman, Margot, 1992, Museum Graphics, Thames and Hudson, London

[487] . Codrington, Andrea, I.D., September/October, 1993

[488] . Cullen, Moira, Eye, 19/1995

[489] . Cullen, Moira, Eye, 19/1995

[490] . Cullen, Moira, Eye, 19/1995

[491] . Carter, Matthew, ‘The Evolution of American Typography’, pp.56-64, Design Quarterly, No.148, 1990

[492] . Matthew Carter, 1/6/96

Previously unpublished