Interesting you should name-drop Klimax and Arco. What has your reaction been to this recent surge in popularity of “obese” typefaces whereby form has been simplified (often to the point of extreme)? In fact, there was an interesting debate about it here:
designassembly.org/?p=1008
What are your thoughts on this and on projects such as Pentagram’s Museum of Arts Identity that employ similar graphic treatments?
First of all, we weren’t the only ones producing “obese” or, as we tend to call them, “superbold” typefaces. Others included Michael C Place (Build) and Stefan Gandl (Neubau) who were producing blocky letterforms long before we began experimenting with them ourselves. The main difference between the superbold typefaces of Build and Neubau and the ones we were creating, is that theirs took the form to its furthest extreme – they were amazing studies of form that stemmed from the fundamentals of typography but they were usually almost entirely illegible. Our goal was to bridge the gap between these extreme forms and the more conventional bold (or black) weights of typefaces.
One of the first of our experiments to be used commercially was the typeface Isambard which appeared in 2006 on the cover of Adrian Shaughnessy’s book Look At This. It wasn’t, as someone suggested on the Design Assembly blog, simply a stroke-expanded Giza 77 – it wasn’t even based on Giza 77 at all but was based on a similar typeface albeit with many hours of modifications and adjustments made to ensure that anyone trying to simply copy our methods would find that they couldn’t so easily achieve the same results. Unfortunately many typefaces appeared here and there that attempted to replicate the technique but any lack of finesse simply betrayed their origins as ‘stroked’ fonts. We were certainly amused to find replicas cropping up here and there, and chose to regard it as an indication that maybe we were on to something interesting. But the strongest message it gave us was that we simply had to move on with our type experiments and try to achieve results that couldn’t be so easily replicated by a simple technique alone. This led to a thorough and still ongoing exploration of typefaces constructed using geometric and, later on, more organic shapes.
We’re not at all displeased to glance across and find other designers ploughing a similar path to ours, so long as they have their own agenda and it’s apparent that they’ve sweated for hours trying to create their own typographic language. What’s galling is to see someone’s work being used wholesale by another designer, with no acknowledgement of its origin, particularly when it’s being applied to a mainstream project. The Museum of Arts and Design is a tricky one to judge. Pentagram could certainly argue that they have taken a typographic form that was being tested by designers such as Milton Glaser many decades ago, and then appled it to their branding for MAD, but it’s fairly obvious to anyone with a knowledge of contemporary design that this style of typography has undergone a more recent revival, which brings into question the motivation for its use on the MAD identity.
It could be argued that it’s very hard work to create something genuinely new for a client that demands only the most cutting edge work. But it’s perhaps just as hard to sell in an aesthetic that’s only a couple of years old to a mainstream institution that’s more reliant on focus groups for aesthetic guidance than the opinion of a design firm who knows a bit about what’s going on in the world of typography. The MAD identity is obviously going to look a bit dated to anyone who’s business is trying to discover new avenues for typography, but it’s a pity it has to look so similar to the work of so many other designers. Especially as it’s for a museum devoted to art and design.
This post is tagged Art Direction, Non-Format, Packaging, Sessions
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