Gotham and Trade Gothic—typefaces that celebrate sturdy, blue-collar sans serif character shapes and proportions—are still go-to designs for Carin Goldberg and Gail Anderson. Here Goldberg employs Gotham for an article in the Gallup Management Journal (left) and Gail Anderson layers Trade Gothic in a chromatic book cover design for Allworth Press (right).
So is there a game-changer on the horizon now? We invited several prominent typeface designers and foundries to weigh in on trends they see in the marketplace and discuss some of their newest offerings. Then, since the success of a typeface is ultimately determined by the people who buy and use it, we reached out to communication designers known for their masterful use of type and asked them to reveal their favorite type styles and what they look for in a font. The common threads among their answers give us some clues to characteristics that might define the next revolutionary typeface.
THE GREAT AND ONGOING SERIF VS. SANS DEBATE
The topic on which there is the least agreement between producers and consumers of new typefaces might actually be the best indicator of the next big sea change in typography. Virtually every designer we spoke to leans toward sans serif fonts, but among the type creators, a focus on serifs was nearly unanimous. Patrick Griffin, co-founder of Canada Type, dismisses sans serifs as “the flavor of the day” and says, “We see high-contrast Didot and Bodoni designs being used more and more.” He points out that neoclassical designs like these are virtually ubiquitous in fashion industry magazines—and have been for years—and they are now showing up on blogs and a variety of digital environments, often having been specially developed for digital imaging. Sumner Stone of Stone Type Foundry also notes the growing popularity of Didone typefaces and their kin and says that for text typefaces, the classic serif type styles will be major influencers for new designs. “The trends in typography are probably best divided into the multifaceted markets for typefaces,” he says. “Text typography is the most conservative of these, and although the sans serif has made some inroads in this area, I think it is likely that Aldus/Griffo, Garamond, and their many revivals and imitations, will continue to dominate the field for a long time to come.” And though Griffin says that the slab serif trend of the past five years or so is on its way out, Steve Matteson, type director at Monotype, counters by paraphrasing Mark Twain. “The reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated,” he says. “We have a number of slab serifs in the works—all based on customer requests.”
Many of the most promising new designs take a cue from classic san serifs, from Monotype’s yet-to-be-announced sans serif companion to Eric Gill’s original Joanna, to the versatile Brandon Grotesque family from Hannes von Döhren, to several fresh faces by Kris Sowersby of Klim Type Foundry in New Zealand.
TAKING THE LONG VIEW
Given that every designer we interviewed preferred sans serifs, are the type foundries simply out of touch with their customers? The likely answer is no. It seems that they are looking further into the future and seeing the result of another common trend among designers: they shared a dissatisfaction with newer sans faces and voiced a preference for sans serifs with roots in classic designs—or simply stuck with the classics themselves. “It’s hard to beat a face like Gotham,” says Carin Goldberg, principal of Carin Goldberg Design. “It tends to be overused, but it’s so perfect, it’s hard to resist.” Pentagram partner DJ Stout says he rarely purchases new typefaces, though when he does, he is a fan of Kris Sowersby’s Klim Type Foundry, particularly the Galaxie Copernicus, National, Karbon and Tiempos designs because they are “a great melding of classic and fresh features.” AdamsMorioka designer Sean Adams prefers older sans serifs because he finds many of the new families too uniform. “They don’t have the soul of the grotesques,” he says. “Sure, grotesques are a little wonky, even the new cuts, but they have a handmade, human quality. Classic grotesques like Trade Gothic and the Monotype grotesques of the 1970s intrigue me. A lot of the old ITC typefaces, like ITC Caslon No. 224 and Fenice, also have a special charm.” AIGA award-winning designer Gail Anderson shares his sentiment, choosing sans serifs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because “there is an honesty to the designs.” The Trade Gothic family is her go-to sans, but she also likes Hannes von Döhren’s newer Brandon family. “Although it’s obvious Brandon was influenced by the geometric sans of the 1920s and 1930s,” she says, “it has more of a human quality.”
This desire for the human touch that the designers seek in the classically rooted sans families is, in fact, exactly why Stone is looking toward serifs. “I think that the popularity of the remade nineteenth-century sans serifs may soon reach its peak, if it has not already,” he says. “Helvetica and its many look-alikes are expressions of an industrial, corporate culture that now seems dominant, but when it comes to aesthetic pleasure, they have little to offer.”
Revivals, reimaged typefaces and fresh new designs—serifs have not fallen out of favor with type designers. Patrick Griffin of Canada Type is betting on serifs with his recent revival of Mauritius (middle) and a number of redrawn and remastered originals from the late Jim Rimmer (bottom left). Monotype also looks to the past to create this new glyphic family with a large suite of alternate characters, tentatively named Masqueliran (top). Graphic designer Sean Adams favors ITC New Esprit (right), a recent overhaul of Jovica Veljovic’s calligraphy-inspired charmer from 1985.
REVIVALS, REINVENTIONS AND REINTERPRETATIONS
The preference for classic type designs accounts for another trend that came up often among both type designers and their customers: revivals. Griffin recently completed a revival of the Mauritius typeface family that was based on an old specimen designed by Georg Trump for the C.E. Weber foundry in 1965. Griffin took Trump’s original three designs and enlarged the family with additional weights and condensed versions. “The result is a family with strong calligraphic and old-style overtones that should perform equally well in text and display applications,” he says. Griffin has also resurrected a suite of typefaces based on the work of Canadian type designer Jim Rimmer that Canada Type acquired from the P22 foundry, which he has seen used in everything from mainstream books and magazines to posters, packaging and wedding invitations. “The rights to Jim’s fonts didn’t come cheaply,” Griffin says, “but in less than two years, we made back about 40 percent of their purchase price—and we’ve only rereleased about half of them.”
Matteson says Monotype is looking back in time as well, researching Bruce Rogers’s original pen-and-ink drawings for Centaur in order to create a new adaptation that reads well on digital screens. His design team has also gone back to Eric Gill’s original Joanna typeface and is in the process of developing a sans serif companion.
On the designers’ side, Adams casts a vote in favor of revivals as well. A recent favorite of his is the ITC New Esprit family, a complete updating and reworking of Jovica Veljovic’s original 1985 blend of classic proportions with the charm of calligraphic lettering.
Type creators noted the continued popularity of high-contrast Didone typefaces and their kin in the fashion industry (bottom left) and a trend toward layered, polychromatic typefaces, such as Core Circus by S-Core (top) and Pizza Press (bottom right), a custom font developed by CP+B and Monotype for a major pizza chain. Adobe Originals’ Rosewood and Zebrawood introduced the first polychromatic digital fonts in 1994, but Canada Type’s Patrick Griffin observes that “layered, stackable type seems to be making its way out the door.”A FRESH LOOK AT FONT FAMILIES
Anderson is particularly taken by the work of Laura Worthington, which, while not reviving old typefaces, does hearken back to an older, more handmade aesthetic. “Laura seems to be redefining the idea of a type family,” Anderson explains. “Many of her typeface families are not a variety of weights—italics, etc.—in a single style, but rather a wide-ranging assortment of styles designed to complement each other. The Charcuterie typeface is a great example. It’s like a French bistro menu, with its quirky Victorian mix-and-match style. The fonts are all drawn in by a single hand, which gives them an additional level of coherence.”
Stone believes that the next era of type design may involve a journey even deeper into the past. “Sophistication and refinement has brought us a certain distance down the typographic road since the introduction of the personal computer in the ’80s,” he says. “I think that process is also carrying us back to the eighteenth century.” Not all the designers and typographers might agree with him, but it does appear as though the next game-changing font might have one foot—with serif or without—in the past. ca
Allan Haley is a storyteller and a consultant with expertise in fonts, font technology, type and typographic communication. He held the position of director of words and letters at Monotype for fifteen years and has six books and hundreds of articles to his credit. He is a past president of the Type Directors Club and was executive vice president of International Typeface Corporation.
