dot-font: Trends in Type

dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.

Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.

In preparation for a panel I’ll be participating in at the upcoming SeyboldSF (“Brass Tacks: Fonts, Color, and Imagery for Today’s Designer,” chaired by Creativepro Editor-in-Chief Pamela Pfiffner), I thought I would take stock of some of the type trends of the past year or two. What’s new in typeface design, and what’s new in how type is being used?

Sans Trends

One trend, of course, that just keeps picking up steam is the one that I devoted my most recent two columns to: the widespread use of humanist sans serif typefaces, and the creation of more and more new fonts to satisfy this demand.

At the same time, the use of naïve industrial typefaces, designed to look “undesigned,” seems to be, if anything, accelerating. The clunky look of highway signage is in style on the page. Font Bureau’s Interstate has been popular for years, and the original German industrial standard DIN Schrift has been augmented by FontShop’s FF DIN. Mark van Bronkhorst’s studiedly untutored ITC Conduit has been expanded recently into a very large type family. Typefaces of this general style are being used all over, not just as an accent but also as regular text and display type in extended use.

Perhaps it’s just a sort of corollary of this trend, but Matthew Carter’s functional screen font Verdana, with its stripped-down but legible serifless design, is popping up in uses far from the computer screen—ads, brochures, book covers, billboards. (I haven’t seen his companion serif face, Georgia, used anywhere near as much off the screen.)

And I’ve seen more and more unusual mixes of typefaces in the same piece—not contrasting styles and not obviously complementary ones, but different faces of the same general kind, mixed up and used together. As a rule of thumb, this is something to avoid, because it can so easily lead to confusion; the differences are enough to be subconsciously noticeable, but not enough to make a real contrast and differentiate between different kinds of information. The usual result is simply irritating. But some of the recent examples do seem to work, against expectations.

Flyers and programs in the last couple of years from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have used as many as three different sans-serif typefaces in the same piece, which is usually an invitation to chaos; most of the time, though, the result has, somehow, worked. The “New Yorker” magazine has been using in its printed pages the old-style serif typeface Sabon for its “fine print,” including for quotations within a column of their normal text face, Adobe Caslon. This is startling to those of us who know something about the history of typefaces (although both are 20th-century typefaces, Sabon’s roots are two decades older than Adobe Caslon’s), and it’s certainly not the choice I would have made if I’d been designing the magazine’s pages, but it works better than you might expect. (Of course, the “New Yorker’s” typography is haphazard enough that this is not one of the most irritating of its typographic nettles.)

Size Matters

Does “USA Today‘s” gross misuse of Gerard Unger’s news typeface Gulliver constitute a trend? Unger is a skillful designer of vast experience and good taste, and Gulliver has been put to elegant, readable use in European newspapers, but in the print edition of “USA Today” it has been scrunched, bloated, jammed together, and turned into a parody of itself. I can only assume that readers must find the current text treatment readable, or there would be a rapid redesign in the works; to me, it’s off-putting rather than inviting. When it began, “USA Today” had a huge influence on newspaper design, because of its emphasis on dramatic, highly effective infographics. Does the paper’s current inflated text have any influence on the designers of other newspapers or magazines? If so, I haven’t seen it yet. (Now that I’ve said that, of course…)

Simultaneously, it seems that a number of new typefaces have been developed for use at very small size, and graphic designers have been using small sizes of text type in many different media. The most recent issue of FontShop’s “font” magazine shows off how well several new FontFonts work in fine print—type so small that it may discourage reading, but reflecting a common real-world problem of how to cram too much text into too little space and keep it as inviting and readable as you can.

A huge proportion of the new typeface designs are display faces, and of those an amazing number these days are handwriting or script designs. There are very carefully worked out script type families, but for the most part these are single faces without variable styles or weights—suitable for use in titles or short heads, to convey a mood. Some of the script typefaces get popular and show up again and again, but others may be perfect for one specific use and then languish in the designer’s virtual drawer ever after.

Optical size is once again popular. Well, “popular” might be too broad a term, for something that most readers and even most graphic designers never notice, but the option is there, increasingly, for the designer who cares. While the infinite malleability of the “optical scale axis” of a multiple master font may be disappearing, several of Adobe’s Pro fonts in the OpenType format have been issued in four different versions, intended for use at different point sizes, and other companies such as the Hoefler Type Foundry have developed typefaces with a wide range of optical sizes. (Of course, the down side of offering different optical sizes is that they can be used in the wrong place. A designer may deliberately take a typeface meant for use in tiny type, such as a telephone-book face, and blow it up to huge display size, but when an optical design intended for display use is shrunk down to text size, it’s unreadable.)

While e-books haven’t taken off at anything like the level predicted, the development of type for text on tiny screens is even more important—and more trouble—because of the increasing “convergence” of cell phones and PDAs. Besides the challenges of designing for the very tiny screen, there’s the influence of all that blocky type on what we expect elsewhere; just as bitmapped screen fonts in the 1980s spawned a style in print that tried to look like a screen, our cell-phone is inspiring a new low-res style that’s showing up in high-res print.

Clarity?

I wish I could say that there has been a dramatic increase in clarity and simplicity of graphic design recently, and a corresponding decrease in muddy, confused, hodge-podge type juxtapositions. But I can’t. The general level of the typographic ocean is about where it usually is: low and stormy, full of wrack and junk, with occasional dramatic peaks and a few hidden tidepools of calm.

No matter what style you choose to work in, good design requires care, discernment, knowledge, and skill. The densely layered style that became popular in print in the 1980s and moved on into motion graphics is very dramatic when it’s done well, but pointless and noisy when it’s done poorly. I wonder, sometimes, which is the easier approach to screw up: a busy, layered style or a spare, squeaky-clean minimalist style. The layered style invites complication, but maybe the spare style makes any faults easier to see. With the long preponderance of a cluttered approach to graphic design, it’s a relief to see some designers cutting away the decoration and letting the content speak for itself. But sometimes the “clean” approach is nothing more than a different style—even a retro allusion to an earlier Modernism. And then it becomes nothing but another style.

Maybe it’s time to say it: Design will get you through times of no style better than style will get you through times of no design.