Type with meaning: The invisible designers behind the world’s great fonts
By Liam Trickey
Everyone loves a good font. You might have heard words such as Serif, Sans Serif before. Maybe you have messed around with the fonts on your word processer of choice, laughing at Wingdings or committing a font crime with Comic Sans on a high school PowerPoint.
You may even have a favourite font, one that makes your work feel professional, more than just words on paper. But how much do you know about fonts? But where did they come from, these things at the intersection of art, design and practicality? Could you even name one designer for these things you use every day?
Behind every great piece of written word is typography. It’s the invisible but deeply important part of creating great writing. Without even reading the content, the curves and lines of the words provide the first impression to the reader, priming you to feel something.
As font designer Laura Worthington says, “display type is a visual voice. Without reading, it imparts its message.” Typography has developed beyond a mere practical necessity into an artform in and of itself. It is the medium by which a writer can prepare their audience for how they should react to a piece of content. Beyond all this, fonts are beautiful pieces of design.
In the early days of digital typography, fonts were created out of a desire for practicality and standardisation. One of the earliest, most popular fonts can be traced back to 1955. Howard George “Bud” Kettler was a designer at IBM in the 1950’s. He was tasked with creating a font that resembled the lettering of a traditional strike-on typewriter for the newer, electric typewriters IBM had developed.
IBM chose not to keep the font exclusive to their machines, and Kettler’s new slab serif font, Courier, became the industry standard. This continued in the 80’s and 90’s with the introduction of computers, and even became the standard for U.S State Department documents up until 2004.
It can be easy to overlook a font like Courier as a mere means to an end. It was designed to be used in professional documentation, and in forms where content needed to be aligned into columns consistently. But its cultural ubiquity stands as a testament to its form.
While in the modern age we have moved onto fonts that are better for digital documents, the psychological effect of Courier is still as powerful today. Because of it’s practical, “telegram-like” text, we still associate it with a certain office vibe, and it is used in advertisements and movies props to signify a certain level of seriousness. Nothing says “Top Secret” like Courier on a manila folder.
The design of typography has developed into big business, and no designers exemplify this more than “dynamic duo” Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow. The pair have been working together for over 40 years, and in that time, their designs have been licensed literally a billion times.
They found their love of lettering in a class at Reed College in Oregon, where they studied Calligraphy under famed calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds. The pair continued to study and develop their craft in New York, at the School of Visual Arts. One of their greatest successes came in the form of ITC Isadora, which was invented in the 1980’s for early digital typesetters. Despite this, the stylish and flowing font has remained popular to this day. It’s dynamic curves and stylisationmade it an instant classic. After that, they cemented their standing as legends of the font business with the Lucida family of fonts.
This “super-family” is one of the most dynamic and versatile fonts, and has been used by Apple, Microsoft and Oracle, and distributed with these operating systems to over a billion computers. Apple continued their partnership with the pair into the 90s, and Holmes & Bigelow created the “city” fonts: Chicago, Geneva, New York and Monaco. These typefaces became some of the most used fonts on Apples systems.
If there’s one set that stands above the rest, however, it has to be Times New Roman. Undoubtedly, this serif typeface has been the most prolific modern typeset, used countless times on assignments, reports and books. For a decade this was the default typeset for Microsoft office, being replaced in 2007 by Calibri.
Despite this, though, it remains one of the most popular fonts on the planet, which is impressive for a font from 1932. British newspaper The Times wanted a redesign for their lettering, and commissioned their artistic adviser Stanley Morison and lettering artist Victor Lardent. The pair came up with the idea to make the new font more robust, stockier, and make it look like printed works from the eighteenth century. They also chose to take elements from Roman print from the fifteenth and sixteenth century, hence, Times New Roman.
There are over 2 billion computers on the planet, and most of them carry Times New Roman. Could Morison and Lardent have ever imagined that almost a hundred years later, billions of people would still be using their work, some of them on a daily basis? In this way, fonts can be seen as timeless pieces of art and design. Next time you’re choosing a font, take a second to admire the design that went into it. You might just discover something beautiful.
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