TypeCon 2008: Fonts Of Knowledge
Aficionados involved in the creation, meaning and marketing of typefaces converge for a weeklong conference called TypeCon 2008
For the average computer user, choosing a font from the drop-down menu in Microsoft Word is akin to picking out a brand of windshield wiper. You want it to fit, you want it to function, and if you’re really picky, you might want it to complement the color of your car. Beyond that, who cares?
Lots of people, it turns out. At least 400 typographic aficionados involved in the creation, meaning and marketing of typefaces (or fonts in computer terminology) will converge in Buffalo starting Tuesday for a weeklong conference called TypeCon 2008: Punkt.
For them –along with thousands of designers, artists and fans of visual culture around the world –typography is more than just an offhanded choice between Times New Roman and Arial. It’s an ancient art form that reflects culture and history as well as painting, sculpture or music.
“The number of people who have heard of fonts and use fonts and see them has been multiplied a thousandfold, ten-thousandfold, compared to 50 years ago,” said Charles Bigelow, a professor of typography at Rochester Institute of Technology. He codesigned the family of typefaces called Lucida, which pops up on the font menu of nearly every computer in existence.
“If you’re writing something, the goal is to communicate the idea that you want somebody else to understand and the typeface is kind of an afterthought,” Bigelow said. “But to a book designer or a newspaper designer, a typeface is an exceedingly important choice.”
Take, for instance, the design choices of the 2008 presidential candidates. Sen. Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, among other reasons, on a promise of change and a sense of possibility. To represent this idealism, his campaign chose the typeface Gotham, designed just seven years ago by a New York company and lauded by typophiles for its ability to look simultaneously refined and progressive.
Sen. Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign used the more conservative New Baskerville, which is based on a typeface from the mid-1700s. Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, took the middle road by using a cool-hued, popular typeface called Optima, designed in the late ’50s by the famed type designer Hermann Zapf, Bigelow’s former professor at RIT.
“Types are kind of like Rorschach tests,” Bigelow said. “One of the great things about type is that [it] doesn’t do anything until you make words out of it, and yet the shapes connote ideas.”
For Richard Kegler, a Buffalo resident who founded and runs the typeface production house P22 Type Foundry with his wife Carima El-Behairy, typefaces themselves contain as much history as the books they’re used to write. His own company began by reproducing the handwriting of artists like Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin and has created about 1,000 typefaces that are now used heavily around the world. P22’s work has shown up on dozens of album covers (Brian Wilson’s “Smile,” The Pretenders’ “Viva El Amor”) along with countless magazine articles, advertisements and posters.
“A lot of typefaces have historical baggage,” Kegler said. He pointed to German Blackletter, a form of type used throughout Europe since 1100 A. D. and into the 20th century. “It kind of became associated with Nazism, but then the Nazis embraced Futura, and that totally changed things. Now Blackletter has connotations with gang culture. You see a lot of tattoos and rap albums with Blackletter, which is this Teutonic, European style. The conquistadors brought Blackletter with them [to Latin America].”
The typeface used in this newspaper, Miller, was designed by regular TypeCon attendee Matthew Carter, who is also known for designing the so-called “screen fonts” used on most Web sites and Bell Centennial, a landmark typeface which is used in phone books. (Carter will not be attending TypeCon this year.)
Today’s type designers are forging new directions, often opting for a freer and more expressive approach to typography that contains notions of post-grunge, punk and contemporary artistic culture and often eschews traditional typographical rules in favor of the titillating or even unsettling.
One of those designers, the Austrian artist Stefan Sagmeister, will speak at the Karpeles Manuscript Library (220 North St.) on Wednesday at 8 p. m. The presentation, called “Things I Have Learned in My Life,” will document Sagmeister’s quirky ascendance to the position he now holds as one of the few designers who are accorded rock-star status. He has collaborated with musicians like David Byrne and Lou Reed, for whom he designed iconic album covers, as well as poster and advertising designs that push the boundaries of what design can accomplish.
One, an advertisement for a speech in Detroit, features Sagmeister’s bare torso with the type actually cut into his skin by an intern. “Yes,” his Web site says of the project, “it did hurt real bad.”
And with new Web applications and sites developing every day, the boundaries of type are expanding rapidly.
For Jose Rodriguez, who runs the local Web design firm JRVisuals, treating typography as an art form is a no-brainer. His newly retooled interactive Web project, Type Is Art ( www.typeisart.com ), allows users to create their own abstract artworks from elements of typography and submit those designs to an online database. He pointed to the ubiquity of the Internet for making more people aware of type and the powerful effects it has on modern design. “I think this whole digital renaissance has really pushed type to the forefront,” Rodriguez said. “Everybody can tell an ugly Web page from a good-looking Web page and a lot of times it’s typography that’ll make the difference.”
For Bigelow, type is much like language, clothing or anything else that most of society takes for granted and treats simply as utilitarian. Type, Bigelow said, has always managed to serve a purpose higher than simply spelling out words.
“We try to make things more beautiful, more wonderful than mere function,” Bigelow said. “And that’s the same of typefaces.”
