I thought The Devil Wears Prada had a wonderful insight into the culture of design and the mindset of designers. You may be able tell at a glance that I am somewhat a stranger to fashion, but there was much of this movie I could relate to – none more so than the scene above.

I think the reason I could so easily relate is I feel that, fairly late in life, I made the transition from being like the Anne Hathaway character to being like the Meryl Streep character. I can see this scene from both character’s point of view.

Here’s a design / branding version of the Meryl Streep’s cerulean sweater, and it comes from another “devil” of sorts: Martha Stewart.  In just over ten years, a distinctive type family linked with her personal brand went from iconic status to something nearly despised by some as the “next Papyrus.” Here is how this played out.

Archer back in 2000 when it first emerged. It is quintessentially "Martha."

Archer is what’s known as a slab serif, a type of typography that is industrial in a graceless masculine way. It would be at home in 50s and 40s boy scout manuals, US army paperwork, electronics kits, and hardware catalogs. I speak in generalities because there are many exceptions. Hoefler and Frere-Jones rethought the concept of a slab serif, preserving the sturdiness of it but adding an element of grace. From a type nerd point of view, it was like something totally new under the sun, a brilliant reconciling of two opposites: boiling, frozen water. This was in 2000. The font was Archer, the client was Martha Stewart Living magazine.

Archer is a graceful, beautiful slab serif type family

And it suited her to a T. The typeface was a masterpiece – versatile, beautiful, tough as nails, smart, smart, relentlessly smart – just like Martha. And (so far as I could see) possessed by her and her alone. It was used brilliantly, and part of that brilliance was that it was invisible to all but a few. You’ve doubtless heard of Martha, but this is probably the first you’ve heard about her typography – yet it continues to be a powerful presence in her brand.  Archer is her font.

I coveted it and  searched for it for years until I stumbled on an announcement of its release as a “new” font from H&FJ. Later, I figured it out that type families are commissioned for private use and then often later become available to the public. That was in 2007. There were seven years between Martha’s use of this font and it’s public release.

You can surely guess the rest of the story. Now Archer is everywhere and designers of a certain type are starting to roll their collective eyes in horror of it all. I guess they’re right. Archer has become the go to font that buttoned up organizations are using to create a home crafted, earnest, but still sophisticated voice. Once this goes stale, they will move onto the next thing.

Twelve years later

Enough already

I look forward to that cycle – including the inevitable backlash among the designers – finishing soon. This type family can then enter into a cultural equilibrium, joining the pantheon of wonderful, time honored type families that designers use (and use sparingly) for years to come. This will only happen in the distant, distant future when all recent goings on have long faded from memory. Say 2016.

Maxell

Volkswagen. Original text: “Think small.”

Guinness. Original text: “Have a Guinness when you’re tired.”

iPod, Apple.

Bethlehem Steel. Original text:  “New York. Brought to you by Bethlehem Steel.”

Pepto Bismol

Smokey the Bear. Original text: “Only you can prevent forest fires.”

Keep America Beautiful anti-litter campaign

Marlborough. Original text “Marlborough Country”

Nike. Original text: “Just do it.”

Family Planning Association. Original text: “Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?”

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Original text: “This is your brain on drugs.”

Tootsie Pop. Original text: “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? The world may never know.”

Raid.

Ajax

Randomly selected among those that got 100% right was Craig Margaret. Nicely done! We will be sending him a $50 gift certificate go Amazon.com in addition to a set of our hand printed coasters.

Stay tuned for our second contest – titled William Shakespeare, marketing copywriter – to be delivered later this month!

In case you wanted to know the answers, they are 1: The Matrix, 2: The Godfather, 3: Harry Potter, 4: Twilight, 5: The Lord of the Rings, 6: Star Wars, 7: Woody Allen.

Apple used the condensed form in the late eighties, and it became the quintessential typographic solution for business communications in the early nineties.

People who make lists of the most readable fonts tend to pick Garamond first.  It is ideally suited for book design. The Harry Potter books were set in Adobe Garamond, as are The Hunger Games books – even Dr. Seuss. It is also a staple for technical documentation for high end technology firms (like Nvidea).

It’s a remarkable thing that a 500 year old design would be perpetually connected with innovation and fresh, modern storytelling. The reason is at heart very simple: Garamond is a masterpiece of form and function. It works. Seen from distance or up close, it is simply beautiful *and* functional.

Designers categorize Garamond as a humanist typeface, meaning that it comes from a human (i.e. handwriting). Upon inspection, you can see how the forms were created by a brush with a wedge tip by a right handed person. If type is like an illustration, what does the quality of line reveal about the person who made it? To my mind, Garamond reveals a combination of intelligence, warmth, and mastery of control. It reminds me of Bach’s music -  particularly such things as the Brandenburg Concertos or the Goldberg Variations.

Yet, there are ways in which the type departs from its humanist origins. In translating handwriting to movable types, type design began to evolve from being about ink to being about metal. In the example above, Jenson – which predates Garamond by only a few decades – is more closely linked with handwriting. In comparison, Garamond seems sturdier, more in alignment with a horizontal and vertical grid. This is the reason why Garamond (and not Jenson) is fresh and relevant today and will remain so for years to come. It is merely a first step in an evolution of type that would unfold for centuries to come – with successive type designers each attempting to reconcile an organic flowing motion of handwriting within an outlying grid.

It’s simple!  Visit this link and complete the questions. The questions use the theme of typography dovetailing with writing to create tone and feeling. We’ve taken quotes from popular movies and typeset them in the manner of the posters. The goal is to correctly guess which movie poster the typeface was used in.

The reward? Those with the most correct answers will qualify to win a $50 gift certificate to Boundary Bay, or Amazon in addition to a set of our hand printed letterpress coasters. You have until the end of January 2012 to enter. The winner will be announced the first week of February.

Have fun!

the source material

The combination of new location, a daily bike commute, and quick daily walks have made Becca and I much more sensitive to the changing seasons this year. Readers of previous posts will remember that leaves are of particular interest to us this fall.

We were especially struck with the incredible richness and range of colors, and Becca had a great idea to use them in our office entry room signage. The concept was to isolate each leaf against a perfectly white background.

three of the fifty-four leaves we used

Although completely natural, the project had the feeling of a design exercise – with the different size, shape, and patterns of each – creating a sense of both diversity and unity that makes the natural world endlessly fascinating. It reminded me of the evolution of typography, how the interplay of form and function propelled countless designers to reinterpret the same essential forms, over and over again.

a close up

Most striking is that the leaves were all gathered within a few blocks of our office. In an urban setting of concrete and cars, it is easy to think of the natural world as something “out there.” Yet, the diversity of the these leaves tells another story; we have only to open our eyes and see.

the finished result

A call out to the person who wrote down “leaf” with a felt pen on a leaf at Maritime Park. Somehow, among the millions – perhaps billions of leaves – we found your message and included it in our project. What are the odds?

I say that because recently we’ve been involved in a series of conversations about capitalization. Thrilling, right? Sad to say, in my case, it’s a subject that continues to grow ever more interesting. In any case, recent conversations on caps has led me to believe solutions are found in thinking of capitals contextually – not in absolute terms.

So… here is a designer’s exploration of the different ways of thinking about caps.

Title Case
We Rarely Use Title Case Because  It is So Distracting And Hard To Read. The Added Contrast of Contrast Caps Makes it A Good Choice for Trying to Make a Subhead Stand Out Against Other Competing Information. Ok, enough. I think title caps makes stilted, phony language. To my mind’s ear, it has the same strained, self importance of  James Lipton – as per this excellent parody by David Cross.

ALL CAPS
 Used in body copy, all caps reads as SHOUTING… but for subheads and labels ALL CAPS looks more geometric and structural. Where other caps treatments have an uneven top or bottom surface, all caps is inform. The shapes it produces can fit – Tetris like – into structures of content. All caps seems more like a label, and has a more authoritative feel to it. To the eye, all caps has a quality that makes the eye slip, tractionless, over the surface, as per:

lower case
Lower case is easily read. Each letter has a different shape that gives traction to the eye as it alights the different words. Lower case is casual, accommodating to the reader, and natural. Lower case is 98.6 degrees. The different vertical space of each letter occupies has a distinctly musical quality to me, as per:

Sentence  case.
Like lower case,  sentence case is easily read. An initial capital separates each sentence as a separate thought or helps direct the eye to the beginning of a line. For my way of thinking, if you are not writing in complete sentences there is no need to use sentence case.

Wrap up
As designers, of course we use lots of different caps schemes all the time. There is no universal standard… just whichever works best for your application. Think contextually!

When we heard the theme for this year’s Mt. Baker Planned Parenthood fundraiser event was “Tango and Tapas” we knew we wanted to letterpress the invitations, so we went about finding a combination of Argentinian type to use with a dramatic tango dance image.  We chose a color combination of a vibrant orange and a dark purple, which seemed both appropriate for the theme as well as the fall season.

We use photopolymer plates on our Vandercook SP15 cylinder press to print all of our work. Below is the orange ink and plate set up and ready to print. While a motor drives the ink rollers, each printed impression requires a full hand crank of the cylinder.

I still love following a project through all stages of the production process when I can. I’m lucky enough to have access to a large guillotine cutter [below] at a local copy/print shop – my old stomping grounds. There is nothing more satisfying than a sharp blade making a crisp cut into a stack of paper.

Delivering the boxed and wrapped invitations is a bit playing Santa Claus.

The invitations will arrive in the mail as such….

…but built into the design is a little puzzle, rewarding those who might be paying extra attention.

The Commission works with a variety of community partners to detect, prevent, and help people recover from domestic violence issues. Their identity needed to reflect the organization’s role of understanding domestic violence in an abstract way (i.e. through statistics) while still being emotionally present in the human impact this issue has on our community.

The balancing act between rational and emotional is inherently tricky, and adding to that challenge was the powerful, extreme nature of domestic violence – a thing which by its nature is usually hidden from view.  In our explorations of the material, suggestions of violence usually came off as maudlin, corny, or voyeuristic where outright depictions were  blisteringly negative – probably the worst thing to show for an organization devoted to stopping violence. Can you draw a picture depicting the absence of domestic violence? Neither can I.

My comfortable little life of art books, typography, cats, and chamber music seemed utterly inadequate for the task at hand. Even my language seemed lacking, even darkly, comically, perverse. This was not a subject you could “take a stab at” or build a “killer app” for.

Divide and conquer, indeed. Our first major step forward was thinking about creating a solid, believable foundation for the brand. Fontfont’s Sanuk seemed a perfect choice. The handwriting based, endoskeleton of Sanuk seemed smart, precise, and slightly feminine to me, and its streamlined look made it look perfectly suited for a government agency.  Used in everything from reports to posters, Sanuk would help create a controlled presence for the organization that would stay fresh and relevant for years to come.

Sanuk, an elegant, versatile type family integrates all of Commission's materials

By itself, Sanuk would be coldly rational… too much so. A collage system would act as ballast to the type, contrasting the fluid precision of the letterforms with a rougher, imperfect, more colorful illustration style. Effects applied consistently to each would impose a coherent look among drastically different photos, helping them read more as symbols instead of actual things.

collage component: intervention

Our content selections were guided by four emotional touch points we identified: control, loss, intervention, and community – with the last concept envisioned as the culminating, positive  step of a sequence.

collage component: community

As a system, these pieces could be combined and recombined in a variety of ways to make covers for reports or other assets, website graphics, or other applications, creating a stable, but adaptable platform the Commission could use in its materials for years to come.

collage application - report cover

As always, the process begins with focusing on your message, ideally your one message.  Deciding on a core message is often the biggest challenge, especially if multiple decision makers are involved. However, once you have it, the rest is, in a sense, “just details.”

In the ad above, profitability is the key message; the function of the ad is to help the audience trust the company and the product it sells. Conveying trust is a task well suited to structural thinking, as is evidenced by the language of trust  (e.g. “a solid partnership,” “an upright citizen,” “a stand-up guy,” a “shaky deal”).

I think it’s easier to trust something that’s perfectly centered and perfectly straight, than a crooked something that leans one way or another. That was the reason behind conceiving the middle as a backbone for this ad. It connects the perfect vertical of the man’s weight bearing leg with the copywriting and the frame holding the various logos. I think of these organizational elements as power lines (like power chords), combining the function of support beams, taut string, and a live wire.  Not using them at all creates visual oatmeal, using too many is like a pile of glass shards.  A handful is just right.

Color provides another critical point of connectivity, in this case linking the message with the logo – a relationship reinforced by both elements using the same type set at the same size. Visually, we are prompting the audience to associate profitability with the Fireline brand. Conveying this message verbally and visually makes it more interesting and believable.

A final structural component is the consistent use of spacing between the various elements – depicted above through the lines and squares of equal length.  Building consistency into a design in this fashion subtly communicates a methodical, professional reliability into the message, but I think the real purpose is to be invisible. We don’t want waste the audience’s attention on these details. Their function is always to support – never compete with-  the primary message.

I’ve found that thinking structurally about design has helped us convey messages relating to corporate success, trust, reliability, and strength. However, there are times when a too structured approach ruins a concept by slowly draining the life out of it. The middle ground between too much chaos or order is different for every project or person. As always, the best strategy is to understand how the choices you are making figure into the final product.