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Fonts and You
A few years ago I was reviewing an installation app with some engineers. We were going from screen to screen, with me occasionally commenting on something, and on one screen I told them everything looked fine except for the font in one of the sentences. It needed to match the others.
They looked at me strangely. They're all the same. No they aren't. Just look. Sure they are. No they aren't. Etc. They said they'd check and we moved on.
An hour later one of them came up to me and said, "You were right! I can't believe you noticed that." But I couldn't believe no one else noticed it. They might as well have been in different colors to me. I don't remember the fonts in question, but they were about as similar as, say, Times and Palatino — not wildly different to someone who doesn't care about such things, but still, pretty different.
But even I have a hard time with this from Alice Rawsthorn:
Dirt. Noise. Crowds. Delays. Scary smells. Even scarier fluids swirling on the floor. There are lots of reasons to loathe the New York
City subway, but one very good reason to love it — Helvetica, the typeface that’s used on its signage.
Seeing the clean, crisp shapes of those letters and numbers at station entrances, on the platforms and inside the trains is always a treat, at least it is until I spot the “Do not lean ...” sign on the train doors. Ugh! There’s something not quite right about the “e” and the “a” in the word “lean.” Somehow they seem too small and too cramped. Once I’ve noticed them, the memory of the clean, crisp letters fades, and all I remember are the “off” ones.
A couple of comments here. First, Helvetica is a fine font, but hardly something to swoon over. I mean, come on. Second, the "e" and the "a" in the subway sign look fine to me. Am I just not observant enough? Are there some bad signs and some good ones? Did the offending sign have some crude repairs on it? Or what? I'm a little stumped here.
On the other hand, Rawsthorn also includes some interesting stuff about the misuse of typography on Mad Men, which prides itself on period authenticity. Who knew that all the office signage was done in Gill Sans?
Last summer my wife, a book
Last summer my wife, a book designer, and I took a trip to the UK. About half way from the airport into London on "the Tube" my wife said, "Have you noticed how all the station signs are perfectly kerned?"
If you're interested in this topic
I highly recommend a documentary called Helvetica. They go over the font's genesis, what it meant then, and what it came to mean. One graphic designer (jokingly I hope) blamed Vietnam and all subsequent wars on Helvetica.
As for the 'e' and the 'a'... I don't notice it in the photo, but I have noticed in real life that they look a little off. Like the letters have been pasted over or something.
I think Helvetica is a great design achievement, but I don't know how anyone could swoon over it today. Helvetica is like air -- it's the neutral condition.
The best primer for
The best primer for topography for computer users remains Robin Williams little masterpiece, "The Mac Is Not A Typewriter." It sums up centuries of graphic design principles very neatly. Tells you and about leading and kerning and the best places to use serif or sanserif type. You are right to be sensitive about this stuff, Kevin. The kind of type face determines whether your work is easily readable or not. Its' a BIG deal!
Ditto...
...on The Mac Is Not A Typewriter. Brief, to the point, eminently readable and USEFUL. I love books like that, and wish I knew more of them, One example, originally recommended to me by Josh Marshall of all people, is Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition by Norman Itzkowitz. Just over a 100 pages and hits all the crucial issues in a very readable way.
I really wish I didn't feel
I really wish I didn't feel compelled to write this, but I spent 3 years of my life in a signage shop, and Alice is right, sort of.
In the photo you posted, it looks like if you drew a vertical line down from the rightmost tip of the e, it would nearly overlap the left edge of the a. That's no good. The designer was probably struggling to get the letters as tall as possible without making the entire phrase too long for the sign. He must have done some special kerning between the e and the a, because the other letters don't look that cramped.
Not sure why he didn't just lose a little space at the margins. Sometimes city departments have really onerous regulations about font size and margin minimums when they order their signs, so maybe that's what happened.
Again, I feel a little sad that I actually wrote this. But I feel a little sad about working at a sign company for three years, too.
Helvetica
Looks to me like the entire sign has tight kerning, but the shape of e and a accentuate the narowness.
I always associate Helvetica with '60s urban renewal.
And now, damn you, you've got me looking at the kerning on the comment I'm writing. It's too tight, but when I post, it'll look OK. The posted comments have more leading than the peach background you actually type on.
The sign is kerned just
The sign is kerned just fine. I took Kevin's image and straightened out the perspective using the Gimp. Then I took Microsoft Word and wrote the exact same words using Word's typical kerning. I've superimposed both in an animated gif that I've attached below.
The only reason I can see to
The only reason I can see to think that the "e" and the "a" look odd is that they aren't "o"s like every other vowel in the sign.
Better than this fiasco!
Better than this fiasco! http://gothamist.com/2009/02/10/do_not_lean_font_questions.php
Never understood how serifs got dirty
> Seeing the clean, crisp shapes of those letters
> and numbers
For 10 years I have heard over and over how sans serif typefaces are "clean" - and certainly "cleaner" than dowdy old serif faces.
I confess I have never understood how serifs got "dirty". And I certainly have never understood how sans serif faces came to dominate when in the vast majority of uses serif faces are vastly easier to read. But apparently someone in the Brooklyn coffeshop where all the hip magazine designers hang out decided sans serif was "crisp" and "clean", so here we are.
Cranky
There is indeed a problem
There is indeed a problem with the "ea" -- and, to my eye, also with the "t" and "l" before it. The whole sign looks wrong -- looks like it was originally created with Helvetica bold, probably misspelled, then someone edited it with Helvetica normal weight:
But it probably looks right to anyone who has had a few beers -- which is probably the intended audience anyway.
Also the "n" in the word
Also the "n" in the word "not" seems to be bold, whereas the other two "n" characters are not.
Straight on
From this perspective, it's clear that the 'e' is riding above the other letters. Also the lowercase 'd' doesn't quite look like Helvetica, though staring at this stuff after awhile makes me question everything.
Here is what Do not lean on door looks like in helvetica fonts:
http://www.linotype.com/526/helvetica-family.html?PHPSESSID=c50fbe438484...
It seems that this sign was
It seems that this sign was created manually, by picking individual letters from different adhesive sheets (which were from different fonts, really) and sticking them one by one on some surface. Not only is there more than one font represented here, but the "o" characters are on their sides (witness the horizontal elliptical holes, and the fact that the vertical portions are thinner than the horizontal ones -- precisely the opposite of what they are supposed to be). And I see the "a" as being too low -- rather than the "e" being too high.
Different Setup
This is obviously a different setup from the one Kevin posted at the top. The "a" in "lean" is just one of a whole host of issues - the o's are too heavy and poorly kerned, the lowercase L is too thin, the capital D is too thin and looks smooshed on the right side. The version at the top of the post has none of these problems.
Helvetica, when used correctly, has a certain classic elegance that you don't get with anything else. On the other hand much of the time it's used poorly, with poor kerning and insensitive application within its surrounding context. Also, some cuts of the font are better than others. (Years ago I used to deal with Compugraphic's version of Helvetica, called Helios, which was an abomination.)
Because the font is so spare, it suffers more obviously if used poorly, and probably looks worse in a tasteless application than a fancier font would.
But did you read his whole
But did you read his whole post? He quoted from an article in the NY Times, in which the writer complained about the "e" and "a" in this sign as being "not quite right".
That article did not have a picture of the sign. Looks like Kevin found a picture in Google images and included it in his post. It's true -- that picture doesn't show the problem -- although it's harder to tell because it's taken at an angle. But Google images also had the one I included -- and that's obviously the one the NY Times article was writing about.
I understand that fine, JS;
I understand that fine, JS; the NYT is referring to the crappy version you posted a picture of, not to the one Kevin posted. I'm just noting the "ea" problem is only part of what makes it craptacular.
My misunderstanding.
My misunderstanding.
Are you sure?
That the picture is the same sign as reviewed in the NYT? In a link posted above, it says that the wonky picture was a sign put in by the car's manufacturer instead of the city and that's why the typeface is so scattered. The diagonal picture doesn't seem to have the same problems. I think based on probability, it's a lot more likely that the author was riding an approved NYC train car and not one of the "new" ones with the seriously disfigured signs.
Bottom line, I think the author really was nitpicking about a nearly perfect sign and that was the crux of the whole piece. You don't really have to be a font nerd to be able to see that the lesser sign is not correct.
I love typefaces. I've been
I love typefaces. I've been Googling today about Starbucks because I love the font the company uses on its store signage. Conflicting results. Some say it's a font called Freight and others say it preceded the creation of Freight and is a custom, unique font. At least it introduced me to Freight which is also very nice.
It's a custom font based on
It's a custom font based on Freight, but known as "burnt coffee".
I personally rather like the
I personally rather like the Art Nouveau font style in the Paris metro. There is a sort of insouciant grace to the serif font, which you do not capture in the NY subway.
True, but they only use that
True, but they only use that font for the station names at the entrances. Inside the Metro, and in the trains, all signage is in modern sans serif, similar to the one used in New York. Here is an example.
That's Univers
The font in the link is Univers (or one of its clones), a close relative of Helvetica. Univers has a bit more variation in weight than Helvetica, and a slightly more old-fashioned feel. Helvetica's proportions are a bit more neutral, at least to my eye.
One wishes that if they are
One wishes that if they are going to use sans serif for signage, that they use something a bit more elegant, like the humanist sans serif fonts, like Trebuchet, Optima, Segoe, or Calibri. Possibly the geometric ones, like Century Gothic or Futura. The ones currently in use have an unappealing resemblance to the ambiance of bland, massed-concrete urbanity circa 1962.
Serif type
One of my big regrets with this blog is that Kevin gave up his eminently readable serif typeface when he moved from Washington Monthly for the godless sans serif we see here.
Not nearly as readable.
A friend of mine who was an
A friend of mine who was an art director at publishing house told me a story about an MS that had come back from the copy editor. On one of the pages, the ce'd circled a comma and written 'wrong font' in the margin....
CEs need to be anal
but you can go too far. Back then I was one, another ce at the same magazine insisted that a period was italicized (unlike the word preceding it) and needed to be corrected.
Ah, damn, left out the word
Ah, damn, left out the word 'typeset' before MS in the preceding.
Back when I worked at Bitstream we had a saying
"Even nice folks get Helvetica."
"There are lots of reasons
"There are lots of reasons to loathe the New York City subway ..."
Cripes. If Alice wants to talk about typography, fine. But stay out of New York, honey, if you don't like the subways. No need to take unnecessary swipes at the biggest mass transit system in the world -- just try to imagine New York without it. Unpossible.
fonts schmonts
Fonts schmonts! For 15 years, I walked past restrooms at work labeled "Men" and "Woman's". And I work at a university. Finally, this fall, they fixed it, but now the new "Women" sign is a different color and font. It's a wonder I can ever get anything done with this kind of a distraction at work!!!
Ummm...font follows
Ummm...font follows function?
I guess I'm glad there are people who worry about all the stuff talked about here; I am certainly glad I am not one of them.
Thank you anonymous Anonymous
"One wishes that if they are going to use sans serif for signage..."
My day on the intertubes is now complete
Peach? Does everyone see this as peach?
Peach? Does everyone see this as peach? It looks white to me.
This morning I found this,
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap091101.html
It's the average color of the universe as identified by NASA, said to be beige. Looks white to me, while the white of the page background has a distinct blue cast.
Is it me or my monitor?
I see the text entry
I see the text entry background as yellow (not peach) -- and I confirmed that it is yellow with a program that reads the screen color and displays the RGB components.
And I see the cosmic beige as, indeed, beige.
Hard to know if it's you or your monitor, of course. Try another computer. And take one of the online color sensitivity tests -- like this one.
signs
I'm a retired sign painter. Strictly brush work. I don't know from "fonts" — that's printers' talk.
It's about negative space. The "a" and "e" take up too much of it; plus, they're competing with round "o"s; they're too skinny. almost kissing each other and the back bar of the "a" almost blends into the front bar of the "n." They eat up all the negative space and the "o"s, in contrast seem to give too much of it. Also, the eye sees curved letters that do not slightly exceed their upper and lower parallel lines as being smaller then they are. It's a crappy sign.
A Note on the Type
Just finished a funny book called Gone Postal. At the "end" of the story there's a "Note on the Type" that runs 15 pages.
JS Sign
That sign is truly cobbled together: the "o"s are Futura (extra bold, I think) the "d" is Antique Olive* and the rest appear to be Helvetica bold. Cut vinyl lettering applied badly. Oog.
Worst type atrocity I committed was 20 years ago when a real estate agent came into the Kwik Kopy where I was the typesetter with a long page of copy for a postcard she wanted set. In Hobo. It would up fitting, at 7/8 I believe, and I was sure she would realize it looked horrible when she saw the proof. But she loved it, and had 1000 or so of them prinited on red cardstock. Truly unreadable.
*Cf. Hamlet, "I am more an Antique Olive . . ."