Issue 01 Good Design Is the Spice of Life
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issue 01 good design is the spice of life. spring 2017 Voice Magazine 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW Washington, D.C. 20016 issue 01 good design is the spice of life. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF spring 2017 Andrea Lin April 28, 2017 STAFF EDITORS Owen Wilson, Naomi Watts, and Matthew Damon CREATIVE DIRECTOR Andrea Lin CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Angela Reichers, Ralph Caplan, and Steven Heller 2 table of contents P.4 JONATHAN HOEFLER AND TOBIAS FRERE-JONES P.10 REVERTING TO TYPE P.14 WHEN WOOD TRUMPED METAL 3 A Biography by Angela Riechers Type designers extraordinaire Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere- Jones are recognized for their contributions to the typographic landscape through impeccable craftsmanship, skilled historical reference and insightful vernacular considerations. JONATHAN HOEFLER TOBIAS& FRERE- JONES 4 JONATHAN HOEFLER AND TOBIAS FRERE-JONES are responsible for some of the digital era’s most well-designed and beautiful- ly crafted typefaces. The type designers bring to their collaborative work a formidable knowledge of typographic history paired with an impeccable eye for combining, adapting and evolving traditional letterforms into entirely original type systems. As a duo, Hoefler and Frere-Jones have a singular ability to decode contemporary visual culture, translate it and express it in typefaces of considerable technical quality and emotional impact. “There’s a cleanliness to their fonts. They’re always very precise and beautifully spaced,” says Heavy Meta principal Barbara Glauber, who has designed album covers for the rock band They Might Be Giants, among other projects, with Hoefler. “There’s nothing superficial in their work. Everything is very purpose- ful and systematic.” Born just six days apart in New York during the same sweltering week in Au- gust 1970, Hoefler and Frere-Jones each took an interest in letterforms from an early age. As a child, Frere-Jones would puzzle over the Gill Sans lettering on jars of jam brought back from the UK by his English mother, wondering just what about the labels made them look so British. “It took me a while, but eventually I figured out it wasn’t the proportion of the jar or the colors—it was something about the letters,” he explains. “Years later, I figured out that thing had a name.” One day at Saint Ann’s High School in Brooklyn, where he was a student, Frere-Jones received word from the office that the renowned typographer Ed Benguiat had called and left a message for him. At first, he thought it was a prank—until he realized his friends had no idea who Benguiat was, and would more likely have concocted a fake message from the rock band Van Halen instead. (Benguiat had seen the teenager’s submission to a design contest and wanted to invite him to attend his letterform design class at the School of Vi- sual Arts, as Frere-Jones learned when he returned the call.) Frere-Jones went on to study graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design before “I really wanted to joining the Font Bureau in Bos- ton. There, he designed some of the firm’s best-known fonts, be part of that secret including Poynter Oldstyle and Interstate, which have been used for everything from U.S. Census embedded in the forms to Us Weekly magazine. During his childhood, Hoefler design of the letters.” was especially fascinated by codes and ciphers of all sorts—whether ship signal flags, semaphore or Morse code. “Discovering as an adolescent that typography was incredibly coded—that choice of typeface could tell you the genre of a movie before you read the title—was irresistible,” he says. “I really wanted to be part of that secret embedded in the design of the letters.” 5 Hoefler is largely self-taught; by the age of search of unfinished ideas that invite new 19 he’d already worked with magazine art solutions. Frere-Jones calls this an “atom- director Roger Black for about a year, be- ized” approach to history, freely applying fore opening the Hoefler Type Foundry in the strategies of different typographic tradi- 1989. He quickly received acclaim for his tions to the project at hand. “They are both work, including Knockout and Hoefler Text, first-rate designers,” notes fellow typogra- which is part of the operating system for Mac pher and 1995 AIGA Medalist Matthew computers as well as the iPad. I.D. magazine Carter, whose distinguished body of work named him one of the 40 most influential de- has involved type-making technologies from signers in America for his original typefaces punchcutting to RoboFont. “I don’t think designed for magazines such as Harper’s Ba- their typefaces share an absolutely consistent zaar and Rolling Stone, and for institutional aesthetic, but the same good design eyes and clients such as the Guggenheim Museum. the same historical background are present in everything they do—which is not to say Hoefler and Frere-Jones’s independent ca- their work is backwards-looking. It’s firmly reers ran on parallel tracks during the 1990s. grounded in the typograph- In the then-small world of type designers, ical tradition, in the they frequently competed for projects and of- continuum.” ten bid against each other for rare type spec- imens at antiquarian book fairs. They main- tained a friendly relationship at a distance, however, sharing advice and consulting each other by email and fax, but it became increas- ingly hard to ignore the potential advantag- es to be gained by combining their efforts (and their type specimen libraries). In 1999, Frere-Jones joined Hoefler’s studio as a prin- cipal, and the partnership that would become Hoefler & Frere-Jones (H&FJ) was born. Since then, their collaboratively designed original typefaces have been commissioned by clients such as Martha Stewart Living, Nike, Pentagram, the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine. As of early 2013, H&FJ is a 19-person design practice. When the pair is developing a new typeface, they look to the historical re- cord not for models to imitate, but in 6 Intense research plays a part in their pro- be used at extremely small sizes (five point cess, with every aspect of every letter in a and below), Retina incorporates specific font thoughtfully considered. Nothing is features to maximize legibility in the un- randomized; nothing is left to chance. In the forgiving print environment of small type mid-1990s, Hoefler became an early adopter on low-quality newsprint: ink traps pre- of Python, a new programming language that vent pooling where strokes intersect, larger was making inroads in type design. Much of counters within letters provide more white this period was spent developing tools to space and the disambiguation of forms en- automate repetitive tasks such as kerning, sures that a capital letter “B” and a number the practice of managing the space between “8”, for instance, look as dissimilar as possible. awkward pairs of letters. Rather than step The logical, systemic thinking behind Retina through the alphabet from Aa to Zz, one landed it a spot in the Museum of Modern of Hoefler’s tools allowed designers to move Art’s permanent collection—along with the through entire regions of the alphabet at Gotham, HTF Didot and Mercury type once, reviewing at a glance all diagonal or families—in 2011. The designers’ work is round shapes. An equal footing in technol- in the collections of the Victoria and Albert ogy and language ensured that every combi- Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt, National nation was considered visually, even rare ones Design Museum, as well. such as Yq (as in Château d’Yquem). To design Retina, for the Wall Street Jour- nal’s stock listings, Hoefler and Frere-Jones first analyzed more than 120 national and -in ternational newspapers and gathered 3,800 reference examples of ways in which news agate type is used. A typeface meant to Jonathan Hoefler (left) and Tobias Frere- Jones (right) are best known today for their typefaces Gotham, Mercury, and Archer. The duo and their company split ways in 2014 after a dispute about their partnership and legal ownership rights. 7 H&FJ’s Gotham, introduced in 2000, is one of the most successful type- faces designed within the last 20 years. Originally commissioned for use in GQ magazine, it is a marvelously adaptable font now seen everywhere, from the granite cornerstone of the Freedom Tower at the site of the World Trade Center to graphic material for the 2008 Obama campaign. Gotham was directly inspired by New York City building signage. “I’d long had my eye on a particular strain of vernacular lettering that was captured especially well by the sign on the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue,” Hoefler explains. “Type designers guard their secrets closely, but this one had been hard not to share with Tobias: I knew he’d dig it, and instantly see its potential as the foundation for a family of typefaces. It was one of the first things I pointed out when we began collaborating in 1999, and I don’t think the week was out before Tobias began sketching a proto- type for the typeface that would become Gotham Bold.” To investigate this nameless and unrecognized style, Frere-Jones photo- graphed thousands of examples of public lettering in Manhattan, from storefronts and office buildings to faded advertisements and signage on oil trucks. Over the development of the project, Hoefler served as editor, help- ing to articulate some of the emerging themes in the letterforms to define and establish the design’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s a pattern Hoefler and Frere-Jones have followed ever since—one acts as author, the other as editor, each proposing ideas he thinks the other will love, working in tandem to get to the heart of the project and then reviewing every drawing together until the design is complete.