Typographical Snobbery

This is a guest post from Chris Hughes.

At one time, I was probably the biggest typographical snob (and bore) you were ever likely to meet. I grew up in a house littered with books about typography, and beautiful books. My grandfather typeset private press books, using hot metal, well into his eighties. My father had helped develop page layout software and hyphenation programs in the sixties, and sold typesetting equipment. The virtues of Baskerville over Bodoni was a topic to be discussed at family gatherings.

My grandfather loved typefaces, and he collected as many as he could. This is not a trivial matter for Monotype casters: each size of a typeface had its own set of keyboard layouts, matrices and wedges. Screwdrivers, spanners and other tools were required to change a font. I used to lunch with him every day in his workshop, and we used to pore over old type specimen books, discussing the pros and cons of different designs, and the best ways to use them: leading (the space between the lines) often being the most important consideration, in his view.

My relationship with type got even deeper when I started typesetting myself. I used to spend evenings in my flat leafing though type samples, reading everything I could about them. At one time if I was shown a few characters from 4000 typefaces, I could instantly state the name of the face, the year of its introduction, and the name of the designer. I actually used to get people to test me. I began to develop very strong views on the suitability of different typefaces for different jobs.

Looking at a menu in a restaurant would not be about the food listed, it would be about how appalling it was to letterspace Stempel Garamond italic. When anyone’s relationship with something gets this intense, strange things start to happen. I developed a sort of typeface synesthesia: assessing a body of text would provoke a ‘whole-body’ reaction. In my mind, many typefaces had a smell, texture and flavour.

Gill Sans smelled of soap, and tasted like bakelite. Palatino sounded like a Eighties-era synthesiser handclap. Times New Roman smelled of engine oil. Bembo felt like velvet.

Which brings me to Helvetica.

I have noticed online, (no doubt provoked by the film about it) that Helvetica is enjoying something of a revival. I keep reading about how people love its minimalist beauty.

I always hated Helvetica. It was the font of last resort, the default font that no-one would mind something being in (perhaps Times New Roman if a serif face was required). My foreman always used to want things put into Helvetica. I might ignore the instruction, and do the job in, say, ‘Kabel’ by that forgotten genius, Rudolf Koch. Fret over the leading, wallow in the idiosyncratic beauty of the letterforms. Back the proof would come, marked, ‘reset in Helvetica’.

And then I would get my revenge. I would reset in Univers. My foreman could never tell the difference between Univers and Helvetica, but I could. To me, Helvetica was day old white bread; Univers was the Beatles, with the lyrics rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Univers had the intense flavour of dehydrated oranges – the kind they used to give to astronauts. And – bizarre though it is to remember and relate – in my mind, it hummed. Hummed like a black and white television set.

To this day, Univers casts a spell. The designer, Adrian Frutiger, designed it before Helvetica, but they were released almost simultaneously, in 1957. Other Frutiger designs, notably the self-named Frutiger itself, and Avenir, are astonishingly beautiful, almost essays in the subtle craft of typography. After all, these designers have always got to produce something that looks so much like the letter in question, that the reader never even notices the typeface. How do they produce work of such variety and brilliance?

I know there is nothing really wrong with Helvetica. Tastes differ, and many people who know a lot more about typography than I do, praise it highly. But I suspect that many use a little typographical knowledge to suggest the possession of enormous cultural discernment. Rather like some fake wine buffs: lots of theatrical sniffing and smacking of lips. But people who live and breathe the stuff, day in and day out feel quite differently about it. It’s not an opportunity for a bit of after dinner one-upmanship; it’s their daily bread.

An artisan wine maker, with Pinot Noir grape pips stuck in his toenails, will no doubt chuckle at British tourists snuffling and snorting over his wine, as if they had any concept of the labour involved in its production. And I am a tourist myself now: I have lost my synesthesia. It’s as if a vast range of colour, present in my life for a few years, has been turned off, and can only be recalled with effort. Badly designed street signs no longer provoke physical pain. Menus suggest food first, and typography second. I still grumble when people kern numbers, but I can cope with that.

And my typographical snobbery was never really snobbery, because snobbery is an affectation. I really did care very deeply about the shapes of letters of the alphabet, in the way that only earnest, intense young men care about anything. With age comes a bit more breadth of vision, and I prefer it that way. Outside of your family, these things matter less. The sacrifice is that everything starts to look like Helvetica.