These are words and they mean the same
things, but the letters are different.
And here is why.
When I was a kid, I always wondered why
letters look the way they do.
The letters that I wrote looked in one
way and the letters that I read looked
in a very different way.
And now 15 years after thinking those
thoughts, I have some of the answers
which describe why letters look the way
they do. And so please join me in my
exploration of that field. I will
describe why exactly letters look the
way they do when they're printed and and
in a different way when they're written.
I'll describe how that matters to
everybody who lives in an urban
environment. And I think I'll also
describe finally a reason for you as
someone who uses a computer and probably
types things every now and again to
maintain this information in your mind.
I am very very careful about how I use
the trust that you have given me as a
viewer and as such I will be both brief
and citing all of my sources.
Okay, let's do it.
>> First, a disclaimer.
I speak, read, and write languages that
use the Roman alphabet.
This is what it looks like.
There are a lot of other alphabets
of equal value.
This is the one that I know, so it's the
one that I'm going to be talking about.
However, I will not neglect to mention
fun facts about others.
Our story begins at what may as well be
the start of recorded history and
between now and then.
For a very long time, writing was
something only some people learned how
to do. For writing has always been and
may always be something that is hard to
learn and that takes time to teach.
The people who did learn how to write
did all the writing for everyone else.
There would be monks who who sat in
their monasteries and worked by the
daylight so as not to to burn their
books should an accident happen by
candle light. And so that was the state
of of the creation of books for a long
period of time.
Those monks did all the writing for
everyone else and they got really good
at it. They would write all day.
Old books would rot and take their
knowledge with them. So the monks copied
the books before they disintegrated.
These monks had too much to copy. The
monks also had all the books that
everyone else wanted.
The books were sold for very high
prices.
One day a sneaky conniving swindler
appears in a certain place at a certain
time. And this sneaky conniving swindler
wanted to scam everyone.
He planned to make a machine that would
take away the jobs of of all of the
monks. A machine that would write.
And he did it. It worked.
There was no honor among thieves. So his
friends started running this scam too.
the ones who were
successful in this horrible awful field
which which we now call mechanical
printing. Um well the successful ones
had good text to copy and machines that
made good-looking letters
and some luck.
The monks had been cheated out of their
honest profession of writing the same 30
signs over and over. Woohoo. Uh, the
printers
who ran this scam and continued it for
years and years needed to make their
machines make the best looking
alphabets.
The standard of what a good-looking
alphabet was was set by those monks who
wrote all day every day for years on
end. The printers did that too. They
made letters all day every day for their
machines.
They got very good at what they did.
So with time and energy, they had more
power over what letters looked like than
the monks did.
They made a lot of decisions about what
a letters might look like. They made a
lot of different letters.
The very best printers made letters
which were both good and distinct.
They had what might be called their
famous printing house styles.
And some people loved this making of
letters so much that they decided that
they would focus by and large on making
letters for other printers.
And thus making good letters for
machines became a profession.
This is now called the field of type
face design.
There are a lot of names that I might
drop. Um, and they're generally all
European men because this is a story of
of the Roman alphabets printing and so
it's European men. Uh you know
Gutenberg, Jensen, Garamond, Kaslon,
Keith, Baskerville,
Dedo, Bodonni, Benton, Gaudy, Johnston,
von Crimpen, Rener, Fruger,
Zop, Morrison
over the 500 years of development which
those individuals uals contributed to
the rest of the world changed a lot.
More and more people learned how to
write.
Even people who didn't have to do it a
lot,
they learned how to write in a way that
was perhaps less ornamental than the
monks and more quick and businesslike.
And yet,
it's valid and it is text. And so the
letters that we write generally as
everyday people looks quite different
from the ornamental
idealized letter forms which someone
spent many many hours crafting into a
mechanized system
at a machine of one kind or another.
That's why letters look the way they do.
I mentioned a few minutes ago that I'm I
may only be qualified to discuss at
length about the Roman alphabet.
That is something that I hold true to in
this moment. But I also would like to
mention interesting facts about other
alphabets which are perhaps of more
interest than what I've already said
because they're not often said at all.
the the Koreans
moved from
a
system where every word had its own
symbol
to
an alphabetic system where every sound
had its own symbol
in the early
the early second millennia.
It happens to be that the Koreans were
also the first to combine mechanical
printing with an alphabet.
Here's what that looks like.
More generally, East Asia beat the world
to the punch with printing.
The first alphabet that we still have
memory of was made under mysterious
circumstances in Egypt.
The often read Old Testament describes
the gifting of the alphabet from
divinity.
And that's a pretty story. The one we
have evidence for
is less pretty. involves slaves working
for Egyptians.
The oldest alphabet that we have
evidence of is Rotoenitic,
an ancestor to a lot of different
alphabets, including Hebrew.
And so understanding that that those
were the people that would eventually
become those who wrote the Old
Testament. Maybe there's a little kernel
of truth in the story of the Old
Testament and the gifting of the word on
on Mount Sai. maybe a little. Um,
however, the full truth may simply be
that in the beginning there were slaves
and slaveholders.
That would make Nze chuckle.
Okay,
here are pretty pictures of old
alphabets on old things.
It looks nice.
just a little bit more about other
alphabets and languages.
Printing in some languages is a really,
really hard problem. And in a lot of
languages, this problem wasn't solved
until the 20th century.
It took a long time to develop a
typewriter that would work with
an an a language that doesn't do
that doesn't do alphabetic scripts like
um Chinese. Every word has its own
symbol. And so uh it took a long time to
make a typewriter for that. And um well
even today that's kind of solved but
through like a phonetic
like abstraction above the alphabet
developed for
European keyboards.
Um now that may be very difficult and uh
it's a complicated problem with
imperfect solutions but um what may be
lost in ease
is gained for certain in poetry.
And one more. Printing in languages
using the Arabic script is complicated
and was like with Chinese best solved by
digital computing.
Typewriters were made and quick
mechanical printing was possible.
However, these iterations lost a lot of
what made Arabic writing artful.
Digital technology brought art back into
affordable Arabic type setting.
Anyway, so that's a short history on why
letters look the way they do.
Having described how letters got to be
so distinguished, it stands to reason to
wonder about what happened next. We
started printing things other than
books.
We started putting these printed things
everywhere.
The industrial revolution happened and
printing enabled it. Printing enabled
modern advertising.
Brand identities became woven into the
structure of the city.
Propaganda became essential to the
spirit of the nation.
When a sign is placed in the world, its
meaning moves from abstract to concrete.
It gains a role in the story of a place,
like casting an actor to play a
character.
In 1850s London, that story featured big
letters with intense qualities.
In the London Underground, a more
softspoken actor was chosen to represent
the character of the place.
One author says that the tight face
chosen became diffused into the visual
fabric of London.
In the Toronto subway, a more quirky
actor was selected.
This type face
was made by someone at some time. And
though the source of its identity is
mysterious,
it is in all certainty a part of what
makes Toronto Toronto. It is a part of
the identity of the place.
This lucky tight face went to the moon.
Enough said.
This type face Futura has been such a
strong
storytelling device that there's a book
dedicated to it.
It's not the only type face with a book.
This is another one. Palutino.
There is such a thing as casting the
wrong actor.
A set of scientists made a very
important discovery and presented their
findings
with an actor which might be better used
inside of a kindergarten classroom.
People
notice these kinds of things
much as if an actor known for his gritty
performances shows up in a children's TV
show or vice versa.
Now, I would not want to tell a tubby
telling me about very important things.
As such,
I care about how I receive the
information that is given to me.
That said, miscasting can be
intentional.
The type faces used for highway signage
are sometimes used outside of highway
signage.
It might be found on the side of a can
of beer or
on the signage of a theater
perhaps for
a
shocking effect.
People take these actors seriously.
Certain type faces have wellprotected
reputations.
The type faces used for mathematical
writing themselves carry a certain
authority that is respected widely and
that within the mathematical type
setting communities is discussed as a
real authority to be protected.
Okay, here's another example. The
company that
maintains the identity of the London
Underground, Transport for London,
is very particular about who gets to
share that identity.
Another example, Google maintains the
very same terms. It's true they run
services that share many fonts.
Some fonts are very intentionally
excluded from that, including
Google Sands, the font used for the
Google homepage.
Another example,
Apple allows anybody to download their
type faces.
However,
nobody except Apple is allowed to
publish anything using them.
Okay, enough of those examples.
Maybe they all have a point.
Yes, it'd be great if we lived in a
world where we could share everything.
However,
that is also true that sometimes
sometimes it can be tiring to see the
same actor playing a lot of stories.
This type face has been used across many
different cities.
There was someone who was doing a
research project and asked for good
documentation of of many different uses
of this type face. There were enough
uses of this type face to make a book.
Okay, this is an unconventional example
that I had given and the one I will give
now is perhaps a bit better known.
Helvetica.
This type face was so often used in the
20th century that it earned a feature
film not entirely in a positive vein.
And yet there are counter examples.
Maybe a shared identity is a good thing,
too.
Cooper Black is on Tootsie Rolls and on
airplanes.
It came from Germany. It made it big in
the US. Nobody can say for certain where
it will fly to next, but it is sure to
remain an important player on the world
stage.
Here is another famous example of a
shared typographic identity.
So this one airport in France had their
own set of letters commissioned for
their signs.
The guy who was commissioned to do it
was really good at making letters. And
those letters worked out really really
well.
They worked out so well that that other
airports wanted to use these letters
too. And so many airports have adopted
these letters. The letters are now tied
to the in between spaces that airports
are nowhere in particular a strange
hodgepodge of places and cultures and
culturlessness.
The letters are very easy to read and
reminiscent of many places and no place.
They have been adopted by multinational
corporations.
Microsoft uses these letters. Sony uses
these letters.
For a time, Apple used these letters
and many universities do too.
Now, going from a huge identity down to
a maximally local one,
there's a shipyard that had a particular
style of lettering.
That shipyard has been made into a
museum.
And so, the style was made into a type
face. It was made mechanical.
Sometimes a type face is used on the
side of a paper bag and perhaps publicly
used seldom ever again.
And there are a lot of type faces that
have well-known names and yet are used
only on the right occasion.
There was a type face named Winder,
which which might be found on the side
of a quirky can of beer or on the cover
of a book by Tom Hanks.
It has a certain feel to it that that
has a real value in the world and yet
must be applied with care.
A lot of these stories are supremely
local
and a lot of these stories are a little
bit more than local.
A certain city might get a certain type
face made for its wayfinding system. A
certain
animated TV show might modify a well
available type face for the purposes of
the show.
Anyway, here's a Hungarian Star Wars
poster while
all the food for thought processes.
All of these stories I've told are about
distinct places. The London Underground.
um Sheffield
airports.
Some of these places are just one and
some of these places are varied and
spread across the world
everywhere.
It describes the the language of a place
that is as of current
a field of study of interest to some
scholars.
The words to search for on the study of
interest would be semiodics or
linguistic landscapes.
Every time a type face is seen on a
building, card
or anything tangibly connected to life,
it's acrewing a place in the story of
your life.
Those letters are a part of the society.
They're a part of the language of the
city. They form the linguistic
landscape.
Viewer, I implore you. Here's why you
need to remember what I've said.
If type faces are actors, then writers
are well, writers, but also casters.
Graphic design as viewed by the general
public is influenced by the decisions of
everyday people.
A wholesome understanding of the
tacit implications of image is relevant
to everybody.
Yes, you may choose to use Times New
Roman because it's what you've been told
to use. However, the work is your own.
and a type face made for a newspaper in
the 1920s that even that very newspaper
has abandoned probably won't fit 95% of
the time, maybe 99% of the time. I mean,
there are so many choices and some of
them have something interesting to say.
Like, yeah, you could cast that actor
that everyone's seen before in a role
that fits that role very generically.
However, you could spend a little bit of
time, a little energy, and cast an actor
that fits perfectly.
The font menu has some good stuff. The
internet has some good stuff, too.
Yeah, I could give you a long list of
type faces. There's probably more value
in me telling you where to look for
yourself.
Who am I to kill the joy of seeking and
searching?
In that vein, websites that may act as
search engines for these subjects
include Type Cache, Type Atlas,
Alphabets, Fonts in Use, Type Drawers,
and Typographica.
Any of these websites that's been up for
years and will be active for years to
come.
Closing remarks.
There is no special magic to be found in
the letter R of a good type face.
There is value in the relationships
between that letter R and the letters S,
T, U, and V. I've also made it clear
that there's a lot of value between all
those letters and the societies they
show up in. It's not just me.
Sociologists and linguists are teaming
up to form the budding study of
semiodics and linguistic landscapes.
Signs and symbols establish so much of a
place's identity that's become a
scholastic cause for concern.
It's true that Cooper Blackot F is some
amalgam of vector graphics data and
copyright information less than 100
kilobytes of digital information.
But again, its connotation has ma made
its value much more than the sum of its
parts.
Nothing is objective. The reality we
care about comes from togetherness. Now,
please enjoy the rapper on a Tootsie
Roll with a profound sense of revery.
On a personal note, thinking back on my
running interests through life, I've had
a profound interest in digital identity
that's never quite left me. I grew up
with computers as an integral part of
society. As a kid, I joined internet
societies via video games, Animal Jam,
Club Penguin, Monkey Quest, Pixel Gun
3D, Call of Duty, Minecraft, and hear me
out, Pony Town.
As an adult, I interact with internet
societies via my website on the
Neocities Network. There's a lot to be
said about extending the expression of
personality to the digital world.
Something that the generation after me
is first experiencing through, let's
say, Fortnite.
That's a thought for another time.
Goodbye.