Barnaby’s Futura Fantasy
March 31, 2025 at 05:30PMI love the notion that typefaces have personalities—which Nicole Rudick discusses in this Broadcast essay—and that some fonts might actually persuade us. A few recent reads on typography warmed me up for this piece: Marcin Wichary’s essay on the use of Gorton across Manhattan and Kanya Kanchana’s reading list on typefaces. Rudick’s essay examines the use of Futura Medium Oblique in Crockett Johnson’s comic strip, Barnaby. Johnson was interested in geometry, and the interplay of form and content. In Barnaby, type and image work together in each panel to create meaning, and we’re invited to see words as pictures and pictures as a kind of type. “But at a slight rightward tilt,” writes Rudick of Futura, “the words are not only set off from the panels’ line work but, together with Barnaby’s progression down the stairs, aid in propelling the action forward, from one panel to the next.” A fresh read on comics, visual language, and creativity.
Geometric exploration is at play two decades earlier in his Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955). Harold is about the vast representative power of mark-making. A single line can suggest the horizon; two converging lines set at an angle to it can suggest a road cutting into the distance. From there, as Harold’s journey demonstrates, the possibilities are limitless. When Harold’s hand shakes from fear, his crayon creates a triangle wave, which becomes an ocean into which he plunges. In an effort to locate the window of his own room, Harold draws a city full of skyscrapers—a legion of rectangles filling the pages. As he tumbles through empty air, he begins drawing a balloon to slow his descent; the semicircle of the unfinished balloon echoes the curve of the crescent moon aloft in the night sky. Harold and the Purple Crayon may be celebratory of creative imagination, but it is also a paean to the wonders of geometry.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/31/barnabys-futura-fantasy/
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