They used to be given names that sounded sensible: Univers, Times, Spartan, Courier. Like well-behaved children, they were praised for being clean, standing straight, and expressing themselves with clarity.
But for the past three or four years, typefaces have gone bonkers. Entropy, Amplifier, Mr. Frisky, Uncle Stinky, Fury, Prozac, Burnout, Blind Date, Dishonor, Stinky Movement Shifto Groovilator, Blink, Blast-O-Rama, Riot, Fragment, Fatboy, Freakshow, Scratch, Carnival, Spike, Sputnik and dozens of other computer-generated fonts are adding a jolt of anarchy to the world of graphic design.
Deliberately ragged, blurred, fractured and truncated, the new breed of fonts brings an unruly energy to the page. There’s only one problem with many of these typefaces. They’re practically illegible.
Does it matter? Not necessarily, according to Carlos Segura, a Chicago designer whose company T-26 is nationally recognized for its catalog of quirky fonts. Sitting in his River North office, Segura points to one of his ads, a densely textured collage, and says: “I see this as abstract art, like a painting. Fonts in layouts like this aren’t limited to speaking to what words they represent, because to me, personally, typography isn’t just about what words are saying; typography can also about a feeling it contains, the interplay between the typography and the visuals. This happens to be a poem, which I admit is not completely readable, but that’s not the important thing; it’s the feeling it gives you.”
Further, Segura argues, fractured type faces are appropriate to a fractured society. “What people refuse to understand is that not everybody sees the same thing the same way,” he says. “People don’t read from the beginning to the end anymore, especially the youth of today.”
Segura, 38, points out that different cultures learn to see letters differently from one another. “Go back to the lettering the monks did in the 16th Century and you’d think it was written by some crazy designer who didn’t know how to read,” he says. “But that’s just how people were used to reading back then. You’re used to reading what you’re used to seeing. But the more important part for us is, it isn’t always important whether a font is legible or not because that’s open to interpretation and it depends who the target audience is.”
Segura, who went directly from drumming in a Miami band into graphic design, proudly numbers bartenders and rock guitarists among the free-lancers who create fonts for his company. “Anyone can design type today, and I think that’s what its about: having a diversity of people contributing their ideas.”
Is it type or art?
Stephen Heller begs to differ. He’s the editor of the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ Journal of Graphic Design who coined the phrase “Cult of the Ugly” to describe the type-for-art’s-sake mentality.
“Type has always been a fashion statement, and headline type has always been eccentric,” Heller says. “But there are a lot of abuses under the guise of youth culture and newness. The bottom line for most cases is, type needs to be readable. Otherwise, you may as well just be putting marks on a page and call it abstract art.”
The current spate of mangled typefaces is just the latest in a long line of idiosyncratic type styles, says Heller. There were the lavishly decorative Victorian fonts, radically asymmetric layouts from the Futurists and Dadaists in the ’20s, sinuous Art Moderne designs, and psychedelic lettering from the late ’60s.
The move toward deconstructed typefaces began in the mid-’70s, when young designers rebelled against the eminently readable but bland “international” typefaces that had ruled corporate design since the ’50s. The trend toward non-standard fonts accelerated in 1986 when Fontographic, a software program, was introduced. Anyone with a Mac and about $400 to buy the program could now design his own face.
In 1992, Raygun, an alternative rock magazine, was launched. Art director David Carson and his staff began exploiting computer software, especially a program called Fontographer, to subvert conventional notions of readability. Using headlines made of blurred, cropped or otherwise mutated letters, and text composed of overlapping lines of tiny type set against densely layered collages, Raygun hit big with young music fans, more than doubling its circulation to a healthy 120,000 in about 2 1/2 years.
In a generally weak magazine market, Raygun’s success was noticed by advertisers eager to catch the attention of consumers in their 20s. Now, grungy typefaces are filtering into more mainstream venues, and, though the medium appears radical, the message is the same old same old: “Buy this and be hip.” A credit card brochure uses truncated fonts to lure applicants; a local radio station uses a blown-apart typeface to spell out its message–“This Is Not for You”–on billboards around the city; and Raygun’s Carson has begun designing ads for Levis and Nike.
Designers dislike trend
If eye-straining typefaces become more popular in the coming years, it won’t be with the blessings of classically trained designers, according to Mary Davis, executive director for the American Center for Design, an association for professional designers based in Chicago.
“There’s a huge split in the graphics community, which tends to fall along age lines,” she says. “One school of thought says type equals communication, and communication means you can read every word. The second camp says communication is not about being literal.”
In Davis’ view, the ground rules are changing “because the marketplace has become so segmented, so a plain vanilla presentation isn’t always going to work. I wouldn’t want Rick Valicenti designing the instructions to my VCR, but he’d be great to promote a conference to students.”
The man Davis refers to runs the Barrington-based design firm Thirst. Trained in a conventional manner–he has two advanced degrees in photography–Valicenti became a convert to Macintosh-generated graphics in the late ’80s, when he began working with a cadre of computer whiz kids. The 43-year-old designer, whose original fonts are named Ooga Booga and Bronzoid, is devising a campaign for MTV’s upcoming line of books, and he concocted the surreal poster insert in the May issue of Wired magazine.
Valicenti says desktop technology is liberating the new generation of do-it-yourself type designers in much the same way that punk rock inspired amateur musicians in the mid-’70s.
“No longer is the star system in place, where there’s this slate of elite designers. What you’re seeing is the whole empowerment of the desk top, which has essentially said to everyone, `You always had your own handwriting; now you can all have your own typeface.’ “
For Valicenti, the strength of the new typography lies in the passion of its creators. “What I think has happened in our profession is, the traditional designers had the ability to say something, but didn’t have anything to say. So along comes a group of people who are making an effort to spawn something new.
“Type has become much more about personal expression. It may not be well-crafted, but at least these designers have something to say. They’ll develop the craft skills in time.”
What’s ultimately important, Valicenti says, is designing graphics that hold the reader’s attention.
“Television has conditioned everyone at being very good at discerning what an image is and `getting’ it within a few frames,” he says. “If you don’t like it, you hit the remote control. So print, quite often, does the same thing: It freezes a moment where a lot of things are happening to provide an impression. People can either stay there and engage the interesting aspects, or turn the page.”
