Dear Martha,
Do you ever get shivers up your spine when you meet someone special? Do your nerve-endings sizzle in response to a passionately knowledgeble speaker? I experienced this yesterday and his name was BT sans.
Theres something gratifyingly geeky about getting excited about typography. I see it as a biological science, as beautiful and functional as the human body. I could compare it to the “Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” - a secretive world that lies behind the fur coats, where letters are born with their kerning pair, speak in accents of serifs and sans; a world where a character’s shape befits their personality, governed by carefully chosen scripts and ruled by the word.
A visit from you answered my second question. You were, as Dre said, ‘a dude’. A new language, I learned, of kerning pairs, and how a well designed font does not need to be kerned post-production. It was interesting to hear how the evil emperor, Microsoft, is a lover of fonts and pays more attention to their type than neo-zen mac. You said opentype was the future and I believe your argument. The functionality and programming behind opentype, or truetype, is much more user friendly and the demonstration of its behaviour within indesign was an eye-opener.
Now to our main subject, BT sans. He was a complete surprise. A custom font, designed for a large commercial company, not somebody i thought I could get excited about. Anne Rynd said, “It is a crime not to think”, therefore BT sans is a saint. A truly thought-out font, tested and tweaked to exist perfectly for its purpose.
Next up was the family for the Land Registry, a font collection based upon the honeycomb structure of their logo designed by North. A family with two members - the father, a strong hexagonal headline and the more subtle and readable mother for body copy. It was amazing how the relationship of these two was obvious when placed together, yet individually they stood to fulfill different roles, expertly.
“Univers is perfection…Clarendon is beautiful…bring back Blackletter in newspapers.” The last I agree with. Poor Blackletter lost its popularity after its association with the Nazi regime. Lovely Black has regained a new identity with the efforts of the t-shirt company, daddy, and personal brands, but it is time to renew its purpose as a font for communication.
When I was very little, my pappa used to play a game with me. He would let me run off into a crowd and time to see how long it was before he had to make chase and rescue me from getting lost. One time, at the Quayside markets, his timing was off and I disappeared. A hunt ensued involving the local coppers, one of whom told my mom this was the season for throwing children into the dark and smelly River Tyne. She was not impressed by his people skills. I was eventually found at an Indian Wedding, happily playing with two new friends.
This story, while extremely worrying for my mom at its time, was received with great attention in its aftermath. Retelling the story, my mom and pappa reconciled the emotions they had felt during the events. I learned very young that a good story is one of the most important things in life. And its typography is the most important.
