Please welcome Steven Coles.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Nice.
Thanks, Tanya.
It is a real honor to be here for this lecture series,
but just having seen some of the other people who have spoken
and being a real admirer, I always talk about the fact that
I don't really do a lot of great work.
All these other people do great work,
and I usually just kind of talk about great work.
So that's kind of what my role is in life,
but it's a real honor to be speaking with you today.
What is a Boy Scout who is really into bird-watching
have to do with typography?
Yes, that's me on the right there,
wearing a t-shirt that says how tweet it is.
Highly embarrassing. I seem to be jumping out of a plane or something, too.
Before I was into fonts, I was into birds.
Most of you here, I think, are my friends.
You already know all this stuff.
But, yeah, I was a bird watcher,
and I volunteered at the local aviary,
and I attended Audubon meetings,
and I found over the years that birders and font geeks
have a lot of things in common.
They're acute observers of the world, of course,
but they're also obsessed with things like classification and anatomy
and all these little details that distinguish different types of things.
And so it's pretty easy to see how somebody would go from this to this,
which is a page from my book.
And what else are birders obsessed with?
Identification, of course.
And so they have to identify everything that they see,
and, of course, they have to correct people when they get those things wrong.
But birdwatching and type-watching can be a very solitary experience.
Fonts and use is a way in which people can join others in this joy of type
and experience the full diversity of what's out there.
There's more to the world than pigeons, of course,
and there's more to the world than Helvetica.
And at the same time, even though there are pigeons everywhere,
there is much more to them than meets the eye.
A lot of you know this, that pigeons can be very fascinating,
the more you learn about them.
And that's true of Helvetica or any other really ubiquitous typeface
that you might think is dull.
We'll get into that.
But first, how many of you here know about fonts and use already?
Hold your hand up if you've used it for some reason.
You've visited it, you've read it.
And how many of you have contributed to the site?
We're going to improve this today.
That needs to get better.
The question of what fonts and use is really best answered
by understanding the folks behind it.
In late 2010, I just left a job at Font Shop.
A lot of my fellow employees at Font Shop are here in the audience, actually.
And I was ready for a break from selling fonts.
I was interested in education and in editorial stuff about typography.
And so an archive of typography was always in the back of my mind.
Fortunately, Sam Berlow and Nick Sherman,
he was working at Font Bureau with Sam at the time,
they had similar notions.
And so Nick designed the site,
and we teamed up with Rob Meek, who's a brilliant developer.
He's done a lot of work with websites and technical tools around fonts.
And we asked Indra Kupersmith, who's a great writer and educator,
to contribute some writing early on.
And she continued to add a lot of content to the site
until last year when she moved her focus to the awesome Alphabet's site,
which I highly recommend.
And Tanya, who you just saw,
was also a major contributor adding plenty of uses in those first years.
But other than having a good time with our buddies,
what was the aim of this site?
Well, it may be hard to believe for those of you who are particularly into typography,
which is probably most of you.
At the time we started the project,
we found that most design critique was focused on primarily photography
or other graphics.
And if you wanted to know something about the typefaces that were used in the design,
even something as typographic as a magazine,
that info was usually hidden or missing.
This particular example here in New York Times Magazine
is one of those rare exceptions where they actually mentioned the typefaces they used
and the designers of the typefaces.
But that's definitely not the norm.
And if you look at nearly any staff box or call-a-thon,
you'll find the names of everyone and everything that had something to do with the piece.
The art director, the photo editor, the production assistants,
even the printing company.
What about the people that were responsible for the type?
The creative work that is more omnipresent than any other aspect of the magazine?
We also happen to know a lot of type designers in our little group
at the start of the site.
So it's natural that we wanted to give them credit
for contributing what is usually the most basic and essential part of any graphic design.
The absence of type designer credits are particularly glaring in design awards.
Especially those where typography is a key contributor to earning the prize.
I should say that the Type Directors Club is a notable exception to this.
They include in their entry form for the communication competition the typefaces that were used.
And I think that that should be a practice that's more common with these awards.
But the thing that drove us more than anything else was this.
This kind of sentiment is something that we hear a lot.
A typeface doesn't really have a life until you see it in use.
Generally, a typeface's first introduction to the public is through a foundry specimen.
In the days of metal type, this took the form of a heavy bound book
or maybe it was a brochure or a specimen sheet.
Some of these are in the display case back there.
Or some other piece of ephemera.
And it's a tradition that continued into the digital era.
Until very recently, most fonts made their first appearance in something like this.
Either as an individual specimen or part of the foundry's larger printed catalog.
And specimens generally give you a sense of the family, a typeface family.
You will see a lot of this.
Waterfalls of words demonstrating how the type appears at different sizes and different styles.
And so a specimen is very utilitarian.
In fact, the best ones are.
It's very much by design that it looks this way.
But sometimes this can get a little monotonous.
And there are plenty of examples of how font suppliers would try to add some interest to their catalogs
through little illustrations like this one.
By the way, this comes from the much maligned period of phototype setting
where typographic standards took a nosedive during the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
But there was still some really nice work produced like this one.
It was from a set of catalogs for copy graphic by the great designer, Jos Toholy.
So there are moments where specimens break out of their regimented weight listings
and they try to give a sense of what type can do or how it feels through pattern
and through illustrative compositions.
And there are also plenty of examples where typefaces are given these fictional in-use treatments.
The German foundry Bauer, where there's some stuff from them in the case back there,
they were quite good at this.
These are all lovely little invented advertisements demonstrating how Bauer typefaces
can lend something unique to a design.
But these are limited to a very specific style and a specific era.
They give us this nice snapshot of what design may have looked like during that period.
But they're limited to that period.
They don't give us a sense of what they might look like in a totally different environment.
And so even though all these fonts were available 30 years later and 60 years later,
most of them are only shown in this kind of context by the foundry.
So it only tells us a little bit of what the typefaces can do.
Another example of a typical typeface treatment is this one.
Of course, you want to see the character set.
It's basically the fonts ingredients list.
So cool, we can see in this one that beyond just the regular alphabet,
there are some alternates and some ligatures in there.
But they don't really reveal their value, all of these alternates and ligatures,
until you see them in a context of a block of text.
This ad shows how these Alts and Ligs add a nice aesthetic and variety to design,
but they also allow the designer the ability to have a nice even justification,
a nice even textbook.
So in this case, it's like the difference between an ingredients list and a recipe.
Still foundry produce specimens like this,
even if they include these in use samples, they're inherently prescriptive.
They kind of push the designer to use the type in a specific way.
And this can be helpful, but it also limits a typeface.
A typeface can be very versatile if it's made well.
And it closes the door to all sorts of various and unimagined ways that a font can be used.
So this is what we were going for.
When we started, it was a blog where people could examine typographic design in detail.
It was not just about specific uses, but broader themes and topics.
And so, for example, here, Indra discusses the typefaces that were used in the Bauhaus,
and it was an ITC Bauhaus.
You can see that alongside on the side, there's a set of metadata.
We'll get into that later.
But the blog gave us a space to write in depth to show real-world uses,
to not only show a specific use, but also specimens alongside it were appropriate,
little snippets of the type, and to recommend alternative typefaces.
And then also to provide a space for commentary from the community,
because we knew early on that the community's kind of dialogue with this would be pretty important to this.
These are some examples of early blog posts,
San Berlo's observation that designers were actually copying that style that I showed you earlier of stacking and justifying the different typefaces,
growing them in size so that they fit in a nice square box.
And so this stacked and justified became a tag that we still use today on the site to categorize that technique.
One thing that I really enjoy is combining interest groups.
So you have maybe type lovers or graphic designers on one side, and then you have basketball fans on another side.
And if you write about some piece of high-profile design that's in their wheelhouse,
you can trick a lot of people into caring about type.
So people who don't normally think about fonts at all are suddenly thinking about the typography.
This great series of NBA ads is a prime opportunity to do that.
I love the way that they use the italic to match the angle of the basketball going through the hoop there.
And if you look closely, you can see that they actually rotated the canvas a little bit so they could match that angle of the basketball.
So in talking about something like this, it also gives the opportunity to say to go dig deeper into trade Gothic and to kind of examine the family.
Why did the digital family get to the place that is today with these two different kinds of bolds and two different kinds of condensed?
And so often these blog posts can help us dig into that.
And to celebrate the 4th of July, Nick wrote about the first typographic edition of the Declaration of Independence,
diving deep into a lot of early American printing history.
And then there's a piece from Sam inspired by a trip to the mall where he observed that there was just a big fat load of Helvetica everywhere.
At the time in 2011, we did some research and found that 15 of the top 20 retailers of the Fortune 500 used Helvetica as one of their main typefaces in their identity.
And so that blog post led to this discussion about that homogeneity and its effects.
And with some saying that, you know, maybe the goal of a major consumer brand isn't to grab the public's attention.
It isn't to distinguish oneself, but it's actually just to make shoppers feel comfortable.
So after about a year, we realized that the blog was great, but it was limiting.
The articles are getting more and more labor intensive and we weren't covering as much of the design landscape as we wanted to.
And so that's when the collection was born, a place for adding shorter snippets of individual uses.
It helped us build a tool that lets anybody add a use to the collection.
And for those who haven't done it, which is most of you, I was going to do a little demo, but I don't want to test the Wi-Fi or the demo God.
So I made a little video instead.
Is it going to go? Good.
Okay.
So all you really need to do is have an image and add a title.
Everything else that you do can be added by us.
We don't know what the typeface is. We're going to do the type at Cooper website here.
Even if you don't know what the typeface is, you can submit it as is and we'll add it.
But say you do know, you start typing some names and you'll get a automatic suggestion for something that matches that name.
If it's not in our database, which is becoming more and more rare, then you can add a custom typeface to the site.
We'll have custom samples being generated by renderings from my fonts and font shop and then our own custom samples.
So most of the typefaces you put in there will have a sample.
Put in the format, the web, put in the industry.
So here we're going to do education and graphic design.
Add your designer.
Add your Nick.
And then tags. I'll get into this, but this can have to do with maybe the client.
It could have to do with the technique of type setting that's being used.
And we also offer suggestions for that so they can easily make connections with other stuff in the collection that uses some more technique or comes from the same place.
Location. There's also date.
And then you can write something about the use and we love it when people have their own opinion, they add some own in their own insight into what's going on.
And if it's your own work, we really like to know why it is you chose the typeface that you chose.
Then you can preview it and you see what it will look like on the live site and then you submit it to be published.
And it will go into a moderation queue when one of us usually Florian these days, but also myself will proof it.
We may add relevant connections to it and then we publish it on the site.
So it's that easy.
So adding guest contributions took fonts and use from being a blog that was just about this small group of people and expanded into a much larger community oriented project.
Our contributions now are just a segment of a diverse collection.
So yeah, so now we're part of this larger community and it allows us to learn something from a group of people that has totally different perspectives from ours.
So what kinds of things did we learn?
Before I get into this next section, I need you to know that Florian Hardvig contributed a lot to this talk and especially the following data.
And so I know he'll be watching this video from Berlin and many of you know Florian and he's probably benefited you at some point in the past to help you write something or help you find a typeface.
So please join me in giving him his due.
Let's give Florian a round of applause.
Hello.
Thank you very much.
That makes me happy.
So this is where fonts and use stands now.
We just top 7000 uses and of those roughly one in seven is what we call a staff pick.
These are uses that highlight outstanding contributions.
There's no strict definition.
It's just stuff that the staff thought was interesting either by the use of the typeface or the typeface itself or it's a use that was documented really well.
So it offers a way for people to browse the site if they're overwhelmed by the collection.
They could just go and filter it by staff picks to get the cream of the crop right in the way.
There are now 35000 fonts in the database.
These come from different sources.
They could be current digital sources or they can be historical sources depending on what kinds of uses are added to the site.
And 3200 of those are associated with the use.
We have to add that in these slides we use the word font and what we really mean in that case is a typeface family.
In most cases we organize things by typeface family because it makes it a lot easier to browse.
But there are certain cases in which will give a individual font style its own entry.
So Gil Kayo for example an ultra bold Gil Sands is so different than the rest of the family that it has its own entry or universal to condense as another example.
So we're nearing 10,000 user accounts and a surprising portion of these have published a use and these uses can be their own work or it can be work that they admire that they found they've taken a photograph of it or they found it on the web.
Later we introduce sets so that visitors can group uses together into personal categories that make sense to them and save that for inspiration for a specific project.
And this gives us a sense of how much commentary is going on in the site.
That's how much is actually published and then that same amount every week gets spammed.
On average we publish about four new uses every day and I think there are very few design platforms with individual commentary that really have this kind of update rate.
So it's a good pace for following along because they're often for most monitors there are four squares on the top of your grid view and so you end up getting like a new row of new content each day.
And early on we got this quote from Eric I didn't think about adding stuff so quickly until I saw this and then I thought okay now we really have to pick up the pace and we ended up doing that.
I think it's safe to say you can visit every day and see interesting new stuff now.
And this looks like a made up chart.
It looks like just a triangle but it's not.
This is the actual growth of the collection so it's been a very surprisingly steady growth.
Some quick examples of these some standout uses on the site as I said before anytime you write about something that's nearly on the present so that everybody has seen it.
You can you can help interest people that aren't interested in type otherwise so one example is the Microsoft logo when it was redesigned in 2012.
It uses a frutiger style face that isn't so different from what Apple and Adobe and other tech companies were using at the time.
And so we talked about you know is it too similar and do they feel like they're a different company is this distinctive enough.
But now Apple seems to be moving away from myriad and going to San Francisco takes over so maybe Microsoft was prescient.
The most liked or appreciated contribution so far as Florian's piece about the brilliant campaign from a Berlin theater.
These minimal posters filled with black letter appear all over the city and they're very striking instantly recognizable.
You don't even need to see the logo or any kind of image to know what this represents.
So this whole style has become immediately associated with the folks.
And it also gave Florian who's a black letter aficionado this chance to dig into some of the origins of these typefaces.
The most discussed entry so far involves the very controversial rebrand of Yahoo back in 2013.
Designed that the CEO proudly hailed was finished in a weekend using a sans serif quote a sans serif with scallops.
Well that sans serif is Optima and we talked about the choice and the spacing thereof.
And another interesting aspect to the Yahoo identity is the supporting typeface used for the section logos throughout their site.
It's what I call MN Latin but it's not really called that it's not a single typeface.
It's actually the Latin portion of several Indic fonts that come with every Mac and they've been bundled with every Mac for several years.
And it vaguely resembles a kind of serif list version of Times New Roman and some of the characters are very strange.
But its appearance here brings to mind that moment that many people have when they're scrolling through their font menu.
I mean these are in your font menu even though they're meant to be used for Indic languages.
And you know you maybe you're scrolling through and you land on something that looks very different than the other stuff that you have installed.
And I suppose they wanted to reflect the contrast of Optima but I'd argue that there were better faces that they could use.
So far the item in the collection with the most typefaces in one piece is this sampler of 1980s German dance music.
Not only is it a delightful cornucopia of rad band names but it also represents some of the typical styles of the day.
1982 this is the kind of stuff you'd see all over the place.
And I think one of our tags on this one is word pile but if not then it should be.
Who contributes to the site.
Since we started there's been the steady growth but over time more and more of that has been coming from guests.
And so now pretty soon they will have contributed over half of the existing uses.
And so for another look at this this represents the number of new entries every month.
You can see the opposing trends and this includes the blog where we published a lot of interesting writing from guest contributors like
Andreas Kofler on the Stedlick Museum Identity or Ivar Sack on the Estonian version of Helvetica or a Futura.
And just recently Blisswood who that's what they want to be called.
They're very active on Wikipedia and now they're active on fonts and use.
They did a really nice article on one of the earliest sand serifs that was designed specifically for the blind.
This is just an idea of what kinds of people are contributing to the site.
The bulk are from type foundries and aficionados type of files.
People who are just fans of typography.
But they're also graphic designers submitting their own work.
And then that under the other interested parties is our groups kind of such as the Stiftung Buchkunst which is an organizer of a book publishing award.
And so it offers them a way to engage with the community by publishing the stuff that is winning in their awards.
But for foundries it's a tool that is quite useful.
It increases visibility especially if you're a small indie foundry who doesn't have a lot of notoriety.
So the poster child of this would be Gareth Hague of the alias foundry.
He's contributed 166 uses that cover 33 of his different typeface designs.
And he also engages with his audience and says hey find new stuff that is using my fonts and I'll give you a free font.
So it's a way to engage with his potential users.
The other way that type designers use the site is through our API.
We have an API where people where foundries can take images that are associated with the typefaces they've designed and show them on their own site.
So DJR who just recently launched his foundry David Jonathan Ross he shows in use examples on his site that are pulled directly from fonts and use.
So he doesn't have to host them himself.
He doesn't have to annotate them himself unless he wants to.
One thing I need to make clear about this is that we're really very focused on making sure that attribution is always attached to these images.
So when you upload an image you have the place to put in the source of the image.
And then when an image is used on another site it always links back to the person who contributed that to fonts and use it always leaks back to the source of the image.
And then there are distributors who use the API as well.
So Web type is using it.
They sell fonts from a variety of different foundries.
And they use it in their gallery.
And then type designers are using or type users are using it as well.
Now I don't expect you to read all of this but I wanted you to get a sense of what I think is most interesting about whether a type if a type user graphic designer is using the site.
If they're giving some sense of how they made the choice that they made maybe they chose one version of plant in over another and why they did that.
And then there are the font spotters like I mentioned before who are have maybe a collection.
So Kirsten Salve Schneider she has a collection that she of this type of graphic journal from Germany from the 20s.
She uploads images to Flickr adds a machine tag on Flickr and those are automatically imported into the site.
Or there's the other example which is Chris Purcell.
He's a designer from Hallmark he's retired and he just contributes stuff from around his house that are interesting.
So maybe it's a book jacket or maybe it's this interesting everyday object like this loose site ruler.
Pretty evenly distributed between different industries.
You can see the main one that gets a lot of attention here though is music and there's a good reason for that.
The square format of a record cover or a CD cover is ideal for our little grid layout.
And it's also often presenting the kinds of display typefaces that are indicative of specific areas or genres.
We recently switched added a new category specifically for album art so that that can be separated out from other kind of music work.
And then all different kinds of formats are represented.
So although most of it comes from books and branding and identity there's also web designs want to make sure that people are aware that this isn't just about print typography.
This is an interesting slide to me because it shows that we're of course about current typography and that's where a lot of the most available imagery is.
But there's also this little bump in the 60s and 70s and that might reflect what the personal taste is of the of the staff.
It might be that that's just where a lot of interesting type was used.
But there's a dent in the 90s and I don't know if that means that design was terrible in the 90s.
Maybe the there wasn't a lot of good digital imagery available.
I welcome you guys to help me answer that question but we need more stuff from the 90s.
There's also a lot of stuff here before the 50s even though these bars don't seem very large.
There's hundreds of items to explore before 1960 50.
And so as an example of that you can see some stuff from the 30s here.
These are accessible you can search by decade or you can just search by tag.
So we tag things that are really specifically indicative of that period.
And so it helps to give you a feeling of that era in order to do period correct and emulation or to see classic typefaces in early use.
It helps you to discover unrevised typefaces that aren't available now or differences between an original metal typeface and how it differs between a revival.
The location of the artwork that's actually published is obviously biased to the Western world.
It has a lot to do with the staff that started the site but also has a lot to do with the Latin script of course.
So we're trying to encourage more contributions from regions of the world that would use Arabic or Cyrillic or Indic scripts.
And so as an example of somebody who is helping us with that Pascal Zogby from Beirut has contributed a lot of stuff using his Arabic typefaces.
This should not be a surprise for anybody.
The best seller lists on most foundry websites on most reseller websites looks very much like this.
And so it's not a very interesting slide to me but what is interesting about it is how you can find something totally different in this list that's connected to those typefaces.
And I'll talk to you about that in a moment.
So what do we get out of this project and more importantly what does the community the educators students designers type designers what do they get out of it.
This is the most obvious thing and I hesitate to use the word inspiration because it's a word that's overused but graphic designers do learn by looking.
It's a fallacy to say that we should not look at other work and we shouldn't examine it for what works and what doesn't.
And so this is why dribble the hands Pinterest they all are such popular sites.
But what we try to do that's different from those when we can is to bring some context to it some opinion some analysis to it.
And to make connections between different uses and different typefaces so that it's not just a big pile of imagery but there's you can actually get something else out of it.
Thank you James this is a very nice tweet from you today.
This is really what it's all about it may be strange but there's often a division between the people who make type and the people who use it.
There's an intention and intentional difference but they can come at it from very different perspectives.
Graphic design and type design are different skills and it can be nice to have venues where these two different animals can come together and understand each other.
So another way that you can use the site is by is to track trends and typography.
And that I mean specific type typography techniques you may have heard of trend list which documents certain tropes in today's design.
These can be considered fads but they can also be a genuine indicator of current style so they track things like this trope of using setting all the type on in the borders of the frame left right up and down.
Staircase like way or Wiggles.
And so we try to track some of the same kinds of techniques and along with many many others.
We're tagging not only color combinations and font formats and materials of the actual piece but also specific type setting effects.
So these can be alignment they can be the case that's used it could be an unusual variation the font style or the text orientation.
And individually some of these are fairly common techniques of course you know all caps you see that all the time but when you start combining them together in a search or associating them with other aspects of design interesting patterns start to emerge.
For instance these trends can be current but they can also be tied to a specific time in a place.
For example you could once you start tagging type setting styles it becomes apparent that designers of the 40s and 50s loved to alternate letter colors within the same line.
So here are a lot of examples of that many more on the site the Paul Rand campaign there's another example of that in the case back there from from Kaiser this is actually different brochure but there's another nice one back there from there from archive.
This can also include font formats as well and for a while we tagged websites that used web fonts rather than images for text.
But now that has become so common which is a good thing people using web fonts instead of images that that that tag is virtually irrelevant.
But what's interesting is that it had significance at the at the time there was a period of four to five years where it made a difference and so you can start seeing that how that thing has changed over time.
And of course we can also see trends in the typefaces themselves.
So anyone following the design scene today is probably aware that geometric sans serifs are all the rage.
But which ones are they and what are some of the less ubiquitous and over and less overused designs pinpointing popularity can be a starting point for digging deeper and discovering something less common.
So yes we can use the site to discover new type but also type that may be new to you.
If you take a look at some of the most popular designs in our collection the most popular graphic designs then you can start to pick out typefaces which are interesting but underappreciated that come from different genres that are not so commonly seen.
And many of these pieces that you see on the left are very well publicized pieces of graphic design but the typefaces on the right are many that fly under the radar.
Along with that you can learn new things about typefaces that you thought you knew.
Discover the stylistic range of a typeface.
So if you remember what I said about pigeons in Helvetica there are the things that everyone knows and assumes about a typeface.
Common uses like Helvetica in the mall for example but they're also unusual uses and even versions of a typeface that can surprise you.
Brush Script is a prime example of that.
It's a typeface that's been used and abused for years.
For many it's associated with a kind of anonymous design like this genre of so-called boring postcards.
These are dingy banal photography of a building or an interior.
The last options on the rack when someone visits a hotel.
Here's another great example of it.
By the way before you correct me that's not Brush Script on the last card.
It's a mandate but if you look closer there is some Brush Script in the small type and that's a beautiful type pairing right there.
Mandate and Brush Script highly recommended.
But boring typefaces can surprise you if they're put to work in a different environment or a different material.
Or if they are as in the case of this optician sign in Berlin if the face is slightly modified.
So the A here is custom.
It's not from Brush Script but the rest is and that neon inline gives Brush Script an entirely different flavor than you're used to seeing.
And when you're speccing type it's this last one that's a challenge for so many.
I get more questions about type pairing or type mixing than any other.
And that's another reason to go to Tanya's class which you can talk about that in a district.
So sign up for that workshop.
We're really pleased when we see that people are using the collection to discover combinations that have already been put into practice and learning from them.
So browsing the Cooper Black collection you can see a range of pairing techniques.
You could choose something that has a similar heavy weight but contrasts with a narrow straight stance.
It's hard for me.
I'm trying to pay attention to type on that one.
Not the actual cover but it's a pretty great cover.
Or you could play off of Cooper Black's roundness and its playfulness.
Or you could emphasize its warmth and charm.
Or you could choose another very different style and use that contrast in a very direct way as George Lois did in this celebrated cold medicine ad.
Here all that's needed to have a dialogue between two different people, two different characters is contrasting typefaces.
Nothing else.
Because industry is a core category of the collection it can be easy to get a lay of the land in any particular industry or market.
You can get a sense of what other designers are doing in your industry that you're designing for.
What are they choosing? How are they using the typefaces they choose?
And maybe how can you set your work apart and do something totally different.
And here's where it can all come together in a way that is most interesting and exciting to me.
This is one of the things that I love about the internet too.
As a very recent example of this, this is a show that caught fire this summer.
Probably most of you know about it.
It's a drama that is set in the 80s in 1983.
It's about the supernatural.
And this poster captures that genre and that period immediately.
But it's not just about that image even though that helps.
It's really about the type and it's about the opening titles.
They aren't very complicated.
It's just avant-garde credits within the letters of the logo.
And you slowly zoom out and those letters come together.
And so online there's been a lot of love for this title sequence and people were seeing how perfectly it captures part of their childhood.
How it captures the 80s and thrillers and science fiction.
And it's one of those works that are purely typographic.
So it's the perfect moment for Fontzen used to jump into the conversation and ask,
what is it about this type that makes it work so well for this purpose?
Well, first is the typeface, of course.
Born in the late 70s, ITC Bengat is an art nouveau-influenced design.
It has these sharp ornamental details and letter shapes that for some reason imply mystery and intrigue.
And it may be because of the way they had been used over time that it gives us that association.
Bengat was often used in the 80s for editorial work.
It was used for logos and advertising.
It was everywhere for a period of a few years.
But it was also used for book covers like this one that were extremely popular when I grew up.
Choose your own adventure.
This is a very large series.
There must have been hundreds of these.
But it's also not just about the typeface.
As we often find in the work that we cover on Fontzen use, it's about the way the type is set.
And this is an ideal example of that.
The show's creators were heavily influenced by Stephen King novels.
And this kind of end cap stacked and interlocked style of titles.
It became a calling card for Stephen King book jackets.
Starting with The Stand, The Dead Zone, and Firestarter in 78, 79, and 80.
And it moved then to his name as kind of his logo on these books.
And so this is one of those moments where we can use the site to engage in a typographic dialogue
and make connections and document these connections in an entry or a blog post.
You can also use the site to explore time.
You could combine two different search terms such as advertising and a specific period
and get a sense of what ads from the Mad Men era might be like.
And then you can just take the interesting ones of those and make your own set.
That's just specifically the things that you like the most.
One thing that Donald Knuth brought up in his talk was he mentioned that
Gerard Unger said to him that type styles are always ten years behind
fashions in architecture and in industrial design.
And I thought that was a really interesting question that I've never considered before.
And I'd like to spend some more time answering that.
I think that's something that we can do with the collection.
We're really honored to hear that educators are using fonts and use in their reading material.
I think it's useful because it goes beyond the usual course material
that may be a graphic design history that's showing the most famous,
the most notable examples of design.
It can sometimes be very useful to see everyday design, ephemeral design,
that elucidates a certain topic or a genre or an era.
So looking at all the different ways that Brave New World has been presented
to different audiences and to different time periods can be pretty informative.
It can also help us to tell our students what not to do.
Cautionary tales such as don't use optical spacing in Adobe products.
If you're using a script like this one, this is the kind of stuff that might happen.
Who knows what's wrong on the right?
Besides teachers.
Oh, good.
Yes, one of the type of Cooper students knows what he's talking about.
Yeah, that's an S set for the ampersand.
It is not an ampersand.
This was actually more common than you might think.
People mistaking characters like this,
even though that seems like a very strange ampersand.
A lot of these designs were done with Letraset,
and when you have something that's not entered with a keyboard
and you don't have a lot of familiarity with outside the English language,
you might choose something that doesn't make sense.
There are also other cautionary tales.
This is a common trend that we're seeing a lot of in web design
where because there's so much space on a page,
you can just add as much line spacing as possible.
But then it becomes difficult to see the difference between a list and a paragraph.
And there are more obvious cautionary tales.
This is a war memorial in the Netherlands using comic sans with dumb quotes.
One of the things that's most interesting to me being a traveler
is exploring place with typography.
As an example of this, Matthias Sleuter from The Hague,
he went on a trip to Prague and he discovered local fonts in use.
All of these signs for local boutique shops and what have you
are using typefaces that may not be common anywhere else,
but in the Czech Republic.
So alcoholics from Francis X Storm, Joe 182 is by Jan Horczyk.
These are people that are connected to the local Academy of Arts.
This is another interesting example in Berlin.
Each of the subway lines and a lot of the different stations
use different styles of lettering that come from different periods.
They use different materials.
And on the U8 line, there's this one on the right,
where we have engineered geometric sans serif.
And so Anton Kuvick of FUTYPE, he revived that lettering,
which was never a typeface, it was just a lettering template,
and made a typeface out of that, which is what you now see.
Actually, the one on the left is the original.
This is now the restored, the renovated station using the typeface.
So this is an example of lettering that became a typeface
that went back to lettering again from its original source,
a full circle.
Foundries know best who uses their creations.
So being active and finding who's using your work
and being interested in it is a nice hat tip to your customers,
if you're a foundry.
Serba is a typeface that's designed specifically for dictionaries,
and they found one of their customers using it for this purpose.
Miola has been praised for its outstanding diacritics,
and so here's an example of it in Czech language.
Or you can use that, and foundries use that to show the origin of a revival.
So here AlphaPipe by Briefcase was originally made for Czech book covers in the 1980s.
And I think that this way of promoting type is a more low-key
and informative and entertaining way than just shouting out new releases on Twitter.
It's a triple win.
It's good for type makers, it's good for type users, and it's good for readers,
as long as you're adding some kind of interesting or educational value to it.
But it's not just about work.
If you're like us, and I know some of you are,
font spotting can be a hobby and an addiction.
So I mentioned the birding before.
These were the books on my desk when I was younger,
and those have moved to a stack that's more like this.
This is kind of an overview of the ones that I use most often
when I'm researching type that is not current, that's not digital.
The one on the bottom is probably the best reference for metal type bases
that come from U.S.
The one above that is a pretty good reference for more of a global overview,
although some of the dates in those are incorrect,
so it's always good to check multiple sources.
The brown one above that is a nice way of comparing metal type,
the ATA comparison book.
I hope these are big enough that you can see.
VGC and the photo lettering book are two of the best ways to see a photo type
because they were two of the largest suppliers of photo type
in the 70s, 80s, 60s, 70s, 80s.
And then Phil's photo on the top is a later book.
It's from the early 90s, but it has really nice big character sets,
and that's a good way to find a photo type that was produced by other suppliers.
The font book is all digital type.
This one in this edition is from 2005,
but it contains digital fonts, many of which are no longer available,
so as things change hands and licensing roadblocks come up,
there are fonts even in digital catalogs that are no longer available,
so these books can be useful resources.
Like a bird watcher, I at the time was very obsessed with going on a field trip
and checking off all the boxes, or as many as I could.
For example, in this visit to somewhere in Utah in 1989,
I may have been very disappointed that I didn't see all the finches,
and that works the same way for stamp collecting, too.
Florian had an obsession at age six with collecting stamps,
and there's something about this page that reminds me so much of fonts and use,
this grid of colored squares with lettering all over it.
This stamp collecting sparked his interest in graphic design very early on,
and the same thing here, if you didn't have a whole series, he was really bummed out about it.
Later, he was collecting Panini stickers.
This is the European Championship in 1988 in Germany,
and again, it's a similar kind of collecting.
It's these squares that has metadata attached to it.
It was just as addictive to them,
and so we have this same need to hunt for things that we don't have examples of on fonts and use.
I'm still looking for FF Avants, for example, so if you guys have a sample, please submit it.
And by the way, this comparison isn't new.
It's a book from the 60s comparing type-watching to bird-watching and stamp collecting,
so someone already knew that Florian and myself would be born back in 1967.
And note that it also describes the serious player as a sophisticated type man,
so you can be one of those as well.
So development on the site is an ongoing project.
We're always trying to improve things.
This is our long list of features in the queue or bug fixes.
One of those things that really needs to improve is access to some of the trends and the themes that I showed today.
There's a goldmine of material in this collection, and it continues to grow,
but making some of the connections still requires some manual digging.
So we're working on better ways to surface relevant to an interesting information.
For instance, if you search for a typeface, you should immediately see data for what formats
or what industries or what styles of graphic design are most commonly associated with that typeface.
And we'd also like to hear from you guys about what kinds of things you'd like to see on the site,
where you'd like to see the project to go.
But our next major effort is a sister site of sorts.
It's an atlas. If Fonsen uses a guide to the way that type is used,
this new project is a guide to the type itself.
Fonsen use can be a great way to discover type, but it's really focused on the typography, on the graphic design.
But behind all of these images that you see in Fonsen use, there's a database of typefaces.
And we're making the same sort of connections between these typefaces that we make here on Fonsen use between uses.
So if you can imagine a site in which the font families themselves are the entries rather than the uses,
you can start to tag, search, filter, and group typefaces to get a lay of the land.
Type production is increasing at a faster rate than ever before,
and the choices for people using fonts is overwhelming.
And so it's easy to get lost, and we're building a roadmap for that.
We want to help get a handle on what's available so that people can make smart choices.
So our next thing is something like this.
If we build fonts in use now, we're building fonts to use.
That's not the real name, but you get the idea.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
