What’s Your Type? A Reading List on Typefaces with Wild Tales to Tell
March 11, 2025 at 03:30PM
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A dimly lit cave wall; a piece of bark; a stone tablet; a blank sheet of paper; an empty page on a screen. A hand that makes a mark. A mind that exults in the mark it has just made.
Whatever great thoughts may swirl about in the mind, when it comes down to it, the artist must let out the artisan. The spoken word is a mark made in the air, the written word a mark made on a thing. Writers are mark-makers. And sometimes we want more than air.
I found out early that I had a love for letters, scripts, and the art of making them. As a student of architecture involved in literary-type activities in college, I drew posters for years, made design drawings, read a lot, discovered a dubious ability to write in a great number of convincing hands, resisted putting it to criminal use, and stumbled upon a body of knowledge about type. I had caught the bug. I had fallen in love with Aldus Manutius, if not with Johannes Gutenberg. And when I became a programmer, I got to play with type. If it was good enough for Steve Jobs, it wasn’t perhaps all that mad.
This isn’t a list about type design, typesetting, or typography (the use of type) as a field. That unwritten piece might start in China, in AD 1040, with the Song dynasty and Bi Sheng’s movable type, and head into the sci-fi future where letter forms grow and evolve technologically, biologically, emotionally, and do a whole lot more besides. This list is about a handful of interesting typefaces, or fonts (custom subsets) as we’ve come to call them, and their tales. It does get onto the highway from time to time, but more often than not, it goes down picturesque side alleys not quite on the map.
Helvetica (Helvetica Now Design Team, Monotype, November 2019)
In 2007, Gary Hustwit, who “couldn’t believe that a film like this didn’t exist already,” made an indie documentary called Helvetica. It became a phenomenon. MoMA held an exhibition for the typeface’s 50th birthday. Watch it for free on the Internet Archive or pay a small amount for a higher-res copy with bonus material on Vimeo.
Everybody’s seen it. Everybody’s heard of it. Helvetica.
What happens when a typeface that was designed to be invisible spreads like a virus throughout the world? Famous Helvetica had humble yet respectable beginnings in a typeface family called Akzidenz-Grotesk, or “jobbing sans serif.” Far from being the “grotesque accident” this sounds like, in this German context, “akzidenz” means “an event, a regular thing that happens” (a mundane job), and “grotesk” refers, matter-of-factly, to the typefaces that are missing the terminal flourishes called serifs (and so, cruder). This accessible piece from one of the behemoths of the corporate typographic world (sorry) discusses Helvetica’s global cultural impact.
Type as substrate, type as canvas, type that feels like an ordinary day. Is it really possible to dislike something so ubiquitous, so normcore, so easy? It’s kind of like the definite article “the”—we’re not entirely sure why we need it; nothing terrible would happen if we didn’t use it; but it’s always around and makes us feel safe and sorted.
The truth is, there is no “wrong” way to feel about Helvetica. You can love it or hate it, use it for nearly anything or refuse to use it at all. It invites scrutiny and evokes passionate emotional responses, but wears all of its labels with ease. It is a kind of koan: nothing and everything at once.
But however you feel about Helvetica, no one can deny its place in our society. From the nose of the space shuttle to the dripping depths of the New York City subway system, Helvetica is an intractable presence in our lives.
“It’s vanilla,” says Monotype Type Director Charles Nix. “It’s paper. It’s a fundamental container for thought.”
It’s everywhere. And it isn’t going anywhere soon.
Comic Sans Never Meant to Break Your Heart (Luke Winkie and Simon Garfield, Slate, October 2024)
Comic Sans walks into a bar. “Get out of here,” says the bartender, “we don’t serve your type!” Oof.
Here’s a lovely kerning game where you can tweak the spaces between letters until they feel “right.” (I promise I don’t hate you.) If you like that, I’ve got more goodies for you: The Taxonomy of Typography, a quick chart that shows you the elements of type; Typewolf, a flawless type resource site; and Typography Insight, a gorgeous type exploration app.
Once upon a time, there was a software program called Microsoft Bob. In it was a yellow cartoon dog called Rover who spoke in comic-book speech bubbles. That’s how Comic Sans was born, says its creator Vincent Connare, because “dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman!” But then it spread throughout the world, infiltrating homes and schools and offices and the unlikeliest of places—harassment notices, suicide helplines, funeral homes, Pope Benedict XVI’s photo album. Its notoriety hit fever pitch when CERN, home of the largest and the most powerful particle accelerator, discovered the Higgs boson (“God particle”)—and chose to make the announcement in Comic Sans.
Maybe we should all chill a little. When a typeface designed for a particular purpose ends up being overused and abused, is it really the typeface’s fault? Some of its applications have even turned out to be unexpectedly excellent, as this Dyslexia Scotland video illustrates. Ugly, disfluent fonts are useful, who knew? The contrary clown has grown on us, after all.
Simon Garfield: Originally, I think, it came from misuse of the font. If you were reading a book called The Guide to Bowel Cancer and it was all printed in Comic Sans, you would say, “Well, that’s not quite right.” When you get a lawyer’s letter in Comic Sans, you think, Who have I employed here? There is also a story that’s been told many times about Dave and Holly Combs, who started a website called bancomicsans.com. [Editor’s note: The site hit the internet in 2002, complete with T-shirts and stickers for sale.] But they knew that it was all in good fun and not a political movement. I have seen it in hospital waiting rooms—not that this was necessarily bad, but it certainly was quite far from its original intended use. There are photos of it appearing on the sides of ambulances, in Spain I think, which I do consider inappropriate. I would personally love to see the font on the gravestone of a famous clown.
The Retiring Type* (Catherine Nixey, The Economist 1843 Magazine, June 2015)
Films have had a long, long love affair with type. Here’s a selection from silent-era title cards to poster art to typographic title sequences to “nerd-dom’s preeminent archaeologist of typefaces” giving you a guided tour of typographic cues strewn throughout sci-fi films. And here are some directors who adore(d) type: Wes Anderson; Ingmar Bergman; Federico Fellini; Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and the French New Wave; Alfred Hitchcock; Stanley Kubrick; and Satyajit Ray.
If Helvetica signposted the world, Johnston went all in for love—of a single city. This is the typeface you’re thinking of when you’re thinking of London; this is what you see on the iconic London Underground roundel and all its reassuring signage (albeit touched up for contemporary stylings). A medical school dropout, Edward Johnston was a calligrapher who took his Victorian hobby of making medieval-style illuminated texts and extended it to learning Roman and Renaissance lettering at the British Museum. When the London Underground Group wanted a clear, coherent visual identity that could help commuters and its own bottom line, Johnston drew inspiration from Trajan’s Column in Rome and responded with a typeface possessing “Readableness, Beauty, and Character.” It continues to persevere, overshadowed by its glossy, worldly, illegitimate offspring Gill Sans, yet untouched by the latter’s taint.
To me, the modest, helpful, 109-year-old Johnston Sans always looks as though actor Oswald Laurence aged, took off his hat, and rolled up his sleeves to tell us with stern kindness—“Mind the Gap.”
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The collections store of the London Transport Museum, known as The Depot, is a vast warehouse in Acton Town, a down-at-heel corner of west London. Inside, the range of exhibits is comprehensive to the point of eccentric: a regulation litter bin stands next to a stationary Tube train, its destination board showing that it has paused here for eternity (an even longer one than usual for the Tube) on its way to King’s Cross. On a wall hang rows of Tube signs; in this deserted space their shouty capitals—BANK, HOLBORN, CHARING CROSS—have a forlorn air, like someone calling a friend who hasn’t noticed them. Below them stands a single wooden filing cabinet: the chest containing Johnston’s lettering, one of only a few ever made.
Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth—Part 1 & Part 2* (Errol Morris, The New York Times, August 2012)
Filmmaker Errol Morris once wrote an article called Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist? with a little quiz at the end. In the first of this two-part essay (expanded into an illustrated book), he tabulates the results from the quiz and reveals his secret agenda. Typefaces change the way you see the world. And the one that calms you and assures you that all is as it should be? Baskerville.
Thomas Phinney is a font detective. Uncovering frauds and forgeries, solving crimes, exposing high-profile political corruption, he’s become the world’s foremost forensic font expert. There’s a big market for this sort of thing, apparently.
Who might have come up with this austere, dignified, elegant typeface? Why, someone “accused of most everything: priggishness, arrogance, immorality, even illiteracy,” of course, a “most profane wretch.” In the second part, Morris takes off on a loving, freewheeling account of John Baskerville, a man who could not have loved letters more: “Having been an early admirer of the beauty of Letters, I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them.”
In this excerpt, Benjamin Franklin tells his friend Baskerville with great relish how he pranked someone on the latter’s behalf.
*If NYT pages aren’t rendering correctly, try turning off your VPN.
To John Baskerville
Dear Sir, Craven-Street, London.
Let me give you a pleasant Instance of the Prejudice some have entertained against your Work. Soon after I returned, discoursing with a Gentleman concerning the Artists of Birmingham, he said you would be a Means of blinding all the Readers in the Nation, for the Strokes of your Letters being too thin and narrow, hurt the Eye, and he could never read a Line of them without Pain. I thought, said I, you were going to complain of the Gloss on the Paper, some object to: No, no, says he, I have heard that mentioned, but it is not that; ’tis in the Form and Cut of the Letters themselves; they have not that natural and easy Proportion between the Height and Thickness of the Stroke, which makes the common Printing so much more comfortable to the Eye. . . . Yesterday he called to visit me, when, mischievously bent to try his Judgment, I stept into my Closet, tore off the Top of Mr. Caslon’s Specimen, and produced it to him as yours brought with me from Birmingham. . . .
Ben Franklin
The Rise and Fall and Return of the Fraktur Font (Ali Fitzgerald, The New Yorker, October 2018)
We’ve read the books. We’ve seen the films. Ever wonder why fascists have such good graphic design? Design legend Steven Heller tells us. He tells us more in Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State, “the first illustrated survey of the propaganda art, graphics, and artefacts created by the totalitarian governments of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the USSR, and Communist China.”
What does it mean for a ruling political party to hijack a typeface? And then to ban it entirely? If that feels like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, it’s because we’ve come to think of typefaces as a visual identity, a branding exercise, or if a government is involved, merely an administrative matter. But they have a fraught political history.
You’ve probably seen blackletter—the dense, almost-illegible type on heavy metal album art that is used to evoke a kind of gothic horror. There was a time when this was a normal style used across Europe. Until Hitler chose Fraktur, an old-style blackletter as the official typeface of Nazi Germany, and prohibited all others—including famous Futura—on pain of imprisonment, exile, or worse. That was until the party became paranoid that it was of Jewish origin, “Judenletter,” and banned Fraktur as well. Type as crime, type as control, type as oppression. All your font are belong to us.
Look around. Look at the shapes of the words you read. How are you seeing the world, being made to see the world? Actors and events keep changing, as these Posters for Gaza demonstrate. Type as resistance, type as revolution, type eventually as harmony.
On Fighting the Typatriarchy (Alison Place and Aasawari Kulkarni, Design Observer, September 2023)
Beautiful calligraphy developed in pockets of medieval Europe and elsewhere in the world, but if you want to see the greatest philosophical and aesthetic expressions of this art form, you must turn to the cultures of East Asia and those of the Islamic world. When you include the rest of Asia, there’s an extravagant, complex plurality of languages, scripts, and expressions. Where are their contemporary typographic counterparts? Walking around town, I might see interesting Malayalam type on posters and shop signs in Kochi, spot cool Ranjana T-shirts in a local market in Kathmandu. Where’s the rest of it?
Tara Books, founded by Gita Wolf, is an Indian publisher of exquisite works. In their children’s book called I Want to Be, type play “guides the child through a fluid visual space, so that she deciphers words like puzzles.” Creators Anushka Ravishankar and Rathna Ramanathan discuss the book.
Exciting work is happening, such as multi-script fonts for two billion people, a project that translates the work of Indian street sign painters to type, a typeface that bridges Arabic calligraphy and typography, a project that decolonizes Chinese typefaces, a Southeast Asian type design zine, and world-class type foundries. But most of it doesn’t get Western-level coverage or global cultural attention. In this conversation, Kulkarni talks about the context for Nari, the feminist variable typeface she designed. Does it hold more-than-symbolic value? We won’t know until we try it. Until then, symbols are pretty powerful things.
Aasawari Kulkarni: I tried to write a definition of feminism for myself—the fight against patriarchal systems that deny choice, expression, and opportunity to a person on the basis of their gender—then I made an analogy of that to design. There are only a selected few fonts that have always sat on the pedestal of “good” design (i.e., patriarchal systems). Expressionist typefaces are always on the edges (i.e., denied choice/opportunity). They never get mainstream attention like grotesque typefaces. The patriarchal system in this case is the constant use of these typefaces, not the typefaces themselves, so I coined the term typatriarchy. Initially, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that when I am designing this typeface, I’m also bringing in my identity and my experiences as a designer, as a woman. I know that the identity of the people who make things matters and that representation matters, but [they’re] also not the only thing[s] that matter. Feminist design is not just about the identity of who makes things—it’s a constant struggle of integrating feminist ways of designing and thinking.
About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition (Jonathan Safran Foer, The Guardian, December, 2002)
Sometimes book covers explore wild typographic terrains and return with more than mere information. Take a look at the award-winning typographic covers for the Penguin Great Ideas series created by David Pearson and his design team. There’s more.
Lest we take our type too seriously, here’s a short story. You may have noticed how some books carry a colophon at the end—a device of rich and varied history—that conveys the details of their production. Since we’re no longer so medievally lavish with our curses (“If anybody takes this book from Gall’s estate, Gall and Paulus together shall inflict the plague upon him”), it’s often just a logo or a note that describes the chosen typeface, its history, and the circumstances of its choosing within the overall design. Typophilic publishers tend to pay minute attention to a typeface’s nuances, things that the average reader couldn’t care less about. And admittedly, some take it too far. Foer pokes satiric fun at such tendencies in this story of spiraling absurdity.
Nothing wrong with satire; some of the greatest novels are satires. But here’s the thing—satire works best when there is genuine affection for the subject matter. Try reading this both ways: once to be amused by pretension, as perhaps the author intended; and again with sincerity, that most old-fashioned of unironic virtues, as I suspect the story secretly hopes you might.
ELENA, 10 POINT: This typeface—conceived of by independent typographer Leopold Shunt, as the moon set on the final night of his wife’s life—disintegrates over time. The more a word is used, the more it crumbles and fades—the harder it becomes to see. By the end of this book, utilitarian words like the, a and was would have been lost on the white page. Henry’s recurrent joys and tortures—bathwater, collarbone, vulnerability, pillowcase, bridge—would have been ruins, unintentional monuments to bathwater, collarbone, vulnerability, pillowcase and bridge. And when the life of the book dwindled to a single page, as it now does, when you held your palm against the inside of the back cover, as if it were her damp forehead, as if you could will it to persevere past its end, God would have been nearly illegible, and I completely invisible. Had Elena been used, Henry’s last words would have read:
Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/11/whats-your-type-a-reading-list-on-typefaces-with-wild-tales-to-tell/
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