On December 12, 2015 I took the stage with two other audience members to speak at Creative Mornings on the topic of Time. I used my time to try to convince the audience to buy modern typefaces from living designers because the letterforms we are creating now are a better expression of the time we live in.
The talk is from almost 10 years ago but most of what I said is still relevant today. The recording lives up on the Creative Mornings website if you are curious (I start speaking at 8:40).
Letterforms have been evolving since we settled on our Latin alphabet back in the 1400’s. The first typefaces resembled writing. These were soon refined to be more rational and constructed as we moved away from the hand to something more rational, precise, and controlled. Then we decided to remove the serifs altogether and distill letterforms down into their base shapes. The letterforms changed with both cultural ideas and with the introduction of new technology. When digital screens emerged, type was changed again to present in the best possible way for this new medium.
Especially as technology changes, type can be made specifically to solve technical issues—it can be made for a specific context. Bell Centennial is a great example of a typeface that was made specifically for issues in printing phone books. As a yearly publication, phone books were printed on thin, cheap paper and needed to fit a lot of information in as few pages as possible. Bell Centennial was designed to be compact, easily readable at small sizes, and had ink traps built into the letter shapes to deal with ink bleed. This meant that the letterforms in their designed state had huge chunks missing from them and it wasn’t until they were printed in their final context that they actually looked the way they were intended to look.
“There are tons of modern type designers working really hard to meet the needs of today’s readers and graphic designers. There are more foundries than ever and over 150,000 fonts for download… I encourage you to check them out and consider looking at some fresh new typefaces for your work.”
Updated on October 9, 2024 to write down some of the talk ideas in words. I also removed the link section because it exists in various, more updated forms in my more recents posts.