I was recently introduced in one of those short-format introductions we are so good at these days as, “This is Janet, she’s a mother of two grown kids, works in communications and is a type nut” – quite a succinct summary of my life.
The person to whom I was being introduced looked at me curiously and asked: “Does being a type nut mean that you know about fonts?“ This made me consider my condition a little more deeply.
And it is a condition. Being a type nut is a combination of addiction and obsession, of preoccupation and love, of frustration and admiration. The problem of my condition is that I can never turn it off, so that while other people can enjoy the benefits of looking at type purely as something to be read to gain information, I see it as shapes and forms, spaces and meaning, appropriateness and crafting.
This adds a lot of weight to the reading of a menu, the enjoyment of a magazine article or even the casual sighting of street-pole ads. Many is the time that I have nearly had an accident in traffic because I have just been flabbergasted at the inappropriate use of a font on a billboard for an insurance company (really – they expect me to take them seriously when they have used a font called Brainless Thoughts to attract attention?).
I really battle to even address the issue of what I feel like eating when a Moroccan restaurant sets its entire menu in upper-case Algerian (which in appearance is vaguely appropriate, but gives major eye fatigue after two lines).
The worst symptom of the condition is my response to movie titles. I recently started watching a movie called Centurion, which promised to be an interesting historical movie about the Roman Empire. The opening typographic sequence made use of an uncial font – this font was used in handcrafted manuscripts mainly by monks from around the 4th to 8th centuries AD.
Not only would Romans never have used this font (having developed their very own, very beautiful Roman alphabet), but it also only emerged into being about a hundred years after the time the story of the film was set. This inappropriate use of type not only makes me discredit the historical relevance of the rest of the film, but also resulted in a tirade from me which (apparently – according to my family) can be quite tiresome.
Equally, though, being a type nut can lead to moments of deep pleasure that non-type nuts cannot identify with. Every year, my fellow condition sufferers and I (including Tiffany and Kevin at Flow) get to satiate our appetite for beautiful and interesting type design through our involvement with the International Society of Typographic Designers Student Assessment scheme. Students are given wonderful, creative briefs that they are expected to interpret typographically. The work is generally amazing, and fresh and creative – really pushing the possibilities of what type design could and should be.
I was recently asked to brief a group of honours-year design students on the project, to whip up a bit of enthusiasm and to explain why type in the context of contemporary communication design is important. My condition being what it is meant that I had to take quite a few deep breaths to calm down before facing the students for fear that my obsession may come across as little scary, as opposed to being something inspiring, a condition they may want to catch. Judging from their responses to the great examples of type that I showed, I suspect they were all pretty much infected already, which I think, for design students, is a good thing.
The problem, when you are so tuned in to type, is that it’s almost impossible to tune out. My son recently came home with a new hoody emblazoned with some arbitrary brand and asked me what I thought. I think he wanted to know if the colour suited him, but all I could say was that “there’s too much word spacing between the words”. It isn’t really the kind of response that one expects to have to an item of clothing and whenever he wears it, all I see is that appalling bit of typesetting.
In my line of work, I am often sent documents to read – possibly a script for some exhibition content or draft copy for a website. Before I even start reading, I have to go through the entire document, reformatting the fonts, sizes and spacing so that I can read with more ease. I have to make headings underlined or bold, choose my favourite typestyles and check that the margins and inter-paragraph spacing is clear and comfortable. Only after that process can I engage with the content properly, with the type nut in me appeased.
Obsessive-compulsive? Perhaps. Overly critical? Maybe. Willing to change? Not a chance.
I think an ability to craft type beautifully is one of the most underrated skills in the world. People who continue to innovate, surprise and entertain with those 26 letters are amazing. In a world flooded with the bland and indifferent, a bit of typographic genius can brighten my day and give me faith in human ingenuity again.
So, back to the question of whether being a type nut means I know about fonts; that’s a bit like asking a chef if he knows about flour – to a certain extent yes, but it is so, so much more!