TDC Judges Panel & the Basics of Typesetting
Two Thursdays ago, Maxim Zhukov moderated a panel with Paul Shaw, Erik Spiekermann, Roger Black and Matthew Carter that touched on a range of topics from Open Type to how they judge non-Roman fonts to everyone’s favorite fonts. With such a range of personalities as well, Spiekermann’s German extrovert to Carter’s stoic Brit with charm, it felt like hanging out backstage in the VIP lounge of a festival with only headliners. Throughout the panel discussion, you got a sense that despite the frequent claims that a typeface emerges from a given client’s demands, typefaces emerge through each designers background and personality. Georgia could only come from Carter, FF Meta from Spiekermann.
While there will always be a sense of the designer behind a typeface, the part of the discussion I found most interesting centered around Roger Black’s recollection of print shops. (I’m probably really biased here since my family still runs a print company in California.) Black remembered a time when you could pick up a book or anything printed and know exactly who printed it by the tracking, leading, and word spacing alone. Each print shop had such exacting standards, a typographic dogma so to speak, that you instantly knew who it was. It was true typographic branding, more than just the idea of one typeface or type family representing a brand–and it made me wonder if there was an equivalent online. A site that by the way the copy is set you know instantly where it’s coming from. I’d wager that the New York Times comes close to this with their digital experience but I don’t know if it’s all the way down to the bones, to the line-height and letter-spacing. And with Carter’s ubiquitous Georgia everywhere I’m not sure if I could safely be able to blindly distinguish an article from the nytimes.com from a bostonglobe.com article or any other major publication if the other branding were hidden.
Black reminded me of this lack in the digital space and I wonder if anyone’s going to tackle that this year. Or if we’re so wrapped up in mobile first and responsive design that we’ve forgotten the basics of typesetting.
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