Contributed by Nick Sherman Fonts In Use. License: CC BY-SA. The Fonts In Use staff was never especially enthusiastic about maintaining our account on Instagram. The platform is antithetical to so much of the what we love on the web: hyperlinks, web feeds (e.g., RSS), advanced search, chronological timelines, archival functionality, cross-references, citations and proper credits, web standards, semantic formatting, and direct community connections, with freedom from corporate intermediaries and their agendas – the Open Web at its best. We sincerely appreciate the 28,000+ people who’ve followed our account on Instagram, but the benefit of “being where the eyes are” has involved compromises that are increasingly incompatible with our staff’s values. It’s been almost a year since our last post on Instagram, and we wanted to explain why here, publicly. Rejecting passive complicity There are legitimate questions about whether Instagram is even an effective platform for sharing design anymore, but – more significantly – there are deeper moral considerations about the platform that can’t be ignored. Instagram and its parent company, Meta, have been involved in countless issues related to the invasion of privacy, psychological manipulation, unauthorized surveillance, corporate fraud, employee exploitation, security breaches, censorship, negative environmental impacts, copyright infringement, moderation negligence, and conscious facilitation of everything from housing discrimination to literal genocide. It can be easy to forget or disregard all these issues while scrolling through a timeline of enjoyable posts from people you like. Surely, casually browsing photos of your friends or sharing some small design item doesn’t have anything to do with genocide, right? Meta has carefully engineered its experience to manipulate its users, and depends on this kind of passive complicity from otherwise critically-minded people to maintain its stronghold via the network effect. Their power is dependent on a massive user base continuing to use their platform without thinking too hard about the consequences on a larger scale. It’s too much for us. Fonts In Use can’t justify supporting such a morally corrupt company with more content, energy, or attention. Doing what feels right Discontinuing our activity on Instagram matches a broader ethos at Fonts In Use where we try our best to operate the project in a way we feel good about, even if doing so risks the possibility of a bit more work, a smaller operating budget, or a reduced audience. We’re proud to exist as proof that you can operate a successful, sustainable organization without relying on so many of the dystopian companies and technologies many people accept as necessary evils these days. We don’t claim to be perfect but – if you’ll pardon the cliché – we’re trying to be the proverbial change we want to see in the world. That mindset has led to other significant changes for Fonts In Use over the years: We stopped using Twitter, despite having tens of thousands of followers there, and embraced decentralized, non-corporate social media with Mastodon. We cut the use of third-party cookies and scripts from our website. We moved our website analytics away from Google and onto a privacy-friendly, self-hosted system. We rejected sponsorship from companies we find problematic. While some of these decisions make our work trickier, there are also notable practical benefits: Our content and relationships with our community aren’t beholden to the whims of egomaniacal billionaires. Visiting our website doesn’t require annoying consent pop-ups. Our website loads faster. Our readers’ privacy is secure. We sleep better at night. Best of all: despite abandoning all those practices accepted by many as inevitable compromises, Fonts In Use still has a stronger audience now than it ever has, by almost all metrics. More people visit the site more frequently, looking at more pages, and clicking more external links to sponsors, designers, and independent font companies than ever. Who knew removing unsavory variables from your online presence may actually be good for business? Push the status quo As with Twitter and Google, we don’t expect our discontinued activity on Instagram will have any immediate effect on that company’s behavior or bottom line. But maybe other designers reading this will reconsider how they manage their own content and relationships online, or be more proactive in removing toxic dependencies from their occupation. Maybe it will reduce the influence of predatory corporations on the world of typography just a little bit. One thing is certain: unless more people push against the status quo, the grip of horrible corporations will only become tighter and tighter. If you’re considering a similar move away from questionable social media platforms, there's no better time than the present. Even if you don’t completely leave those platforms, you can always start building up an independent presence in tandem – on a decentralized social network, your own website, and/or an email newsletter – where you control your own content and aren’t trapped by any one gatekeeper to maintain connections with your community. In the meantime there are several ways to keep up with what’s new at Fonts In Use: Subscribe to any of our many RSS feeds: for all posts, staff picks, comments, just the blog, or any tag, designer, contributor, format, user-curated set, category, etc. (most listing pages on the site have corresponding RSS feeds). Follow us on Mastodon. Sign up for our upcoming email newsletter. This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Contributed by Florian Hardwig Source: movieposters.ha.com Image: Heritage Auctions. License: All Rights Reserved. Csillagok háborúja (Star Wars), 1979. The custom acute accents are simple squares. The secondary typeface is ITC Avant Garde Gothic. More info on StarWarsMoviePoster.com. Tibor Helényi (1946–2014) was a Hungarian painter, graphic designer, and poster artist. Among his most famous works are the posters he created for the original Star Wars trilogy, commissioned by MOKÉP, Hungary’s state-owned film distributor. Today, the posters are sought-after collector’s items. The typeface Helényi used for the titles is Langdon Biform. Characterized by triangular notches, the boxy design is by John Langdon (b. 1946). To most people, the graphic designer and retired typography professor is best known for his ambigrams, and especially those he made for Dan Brown’s 2000 novel, Angels & Demons. Langdon Biform is an early work of his, drawn in 1971 when he was in his mid-twenties, years before embarking on a career as freelance logo designer, type specialist, and lettering artist. Langdon submitted the design to a competition organized by Californian phototype company Lettergraphics, who added it to their library of typefaces. It didn’t take long before it was copied by other type providers. I’m aware of at least six digitizations, under various names including Lampoon, Harpoon ART, and Dominion, none of which were authorized by its original designer. In a 2014 interview, Helényi was asked about a debate among fans who wondered whether he’d even watched Star Wars before designing the poster. After all, his art includes creatures that don’t appear in the film. Helényi laughingly replied that he indeed had seen the film, and that he had a lot of fun with designing the poster. In addition to his impressions from the advance screening, he also worked from lobby cards. You can learn more about Helényi and see more of his work at his official website (maintained by his daughter Flora) and also at Budapest Poster Gallery. Source: movieposters.ha.com Image: Heritage Auctions. License: All Rights Reserved. A Birodalom visszavág (The Empire Strikes Back), 1982. Subtitle and credits are added in Univers Bold. More info on StarWarsMoviePoster.com. Source: movieposters.ha.com Image: Heritage Auctions. License: All Rights Reserved. A Jedi visszatér (Return of the Jedi), 1984. The secondary typeface for this poster is Univers Extended. More info on StarWarsMoviePoster.com. Source: www.liveauctioneers.com Image: Budapest Poster Gallery. License: All Rights Reserved. The original painted art created for the posters was sold in Budapest Poster Gallery’s Tibor Helenyi Estate Auction in 2015, alongside many other items by the artist. Stephen Coles. License: CC BY-NC-SA. Glyph set for Langdon Biform with its fifteen alternates, as shown in the “Do a Comp” fan by Lettergraphics International Inc., 1968–1975 This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Contributed by Stephen Coles Source: www.flickr.com Kit Karzen/Harris for President. License: All Rights Reserved. The Kamala Harris 2024 campaign identity, designed by Wide Eye Creative, is built around Sans Plomb, a condensed gothic not unlike the Bureau Grot used by Wide Eye for Harris’s 2020 primary bid – in turn inspired by Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 campaign. This time, though, the typeface is from a French foundry, rather than from Anglo-American origins (Stephenson Blake via Font Bureau). Source: fontsinuse.com License: All Rights Reserved. The logo for Kamala Harris’ 2020 campaign used Bureau Grot and an atypical asymmetrical layout. It’s not clear to me why they made the switch. From a design point of view, the caps aren’t significantly different from Bureau Grot. Perhaps they liked the more constructed, “modern” feel? Personally, I would have gone back to Chisholm’s pick, the all-American Franklin Gothic, which has no shortage of contemporary versions for any use case. (At the risk of friendship bias, I recommend the interpretation from Fonts In Use cofounder Nick Sherman.) The symmetrical layout for “Harris/Walz” is a much more conventional approach compared to Harris’s 2020 logo, which took a different road than most US presidential campaigns. The new look reflects her move to the center (no pun intended) for a broader audience. Source: www.flickr.com Eric Elofson/Harris for President. License: All Rights Reserved. Not the best kerning on this rally sign (AY). The font, Sans Plomb Super, doesn’t deliver that big of a gap out of the box, so something went awry in the typesetting. Source: kamalaharris.com License: All Rights Reserved. Source: kamalaharris.com License: All Rights Reserved. Source: store.kamalaharris.com License: All Rights Reserved. The supporting face for “WALZ”, running text, and other small bits like “YES SHE CAN” merch is Balto, Tal Leming’s contemporary take on the American gothic genre, such as Franklin Gothic and News Gothic. The Harris web store adds Sara Solskone and Jonathan Hoefler’s Decimal, a continuation of the Biden/Harris 2020 campaign. Seeing Solskone’s name makes me wonder if maybe there was a missed opportunity to also choose a typeface by an American woman for the main mark. For example, Program by Zuzana Licko, or Utile Narrow by Sibylle Hagmann. Source: store.kamalaharris.com License: All Rights Reserved. Source: kamalaharris.com License: All Rights Reserved. The logo used in this web pop-up is the early version before it was redrawn (see below). Source: www.instagram.com Jonathan Hoefler. License: All Rights Reserved. A refined version of the Harris/Walz logo (white outline) launched around August 11. The biggest changes were relieving the pinched curve at the top of the S and enlarging “WALZ” just slightly to the left for optical centering. Hoefler, whose typefaces (or those of Hoefler & Co.) have been part of the logo for “every Democratic president in the twenty-first century”, recently revealed that the mark was refined on August 10–11, a few weeks after its initial launch. The work – which involved some redrawing and better “WALZ” centering – was done by Leming and Scott Dadich under the direction of Wide Eye’s Alayna Citrin. Hoefler also commented that, “Trump has used Gotham for years, and NEVER bought a license. Color me surprised! We talked to a white shoe lawfirm in NYC about taking action, and was told, with a laugh, ‘take a number.’” Ironically, it was Barack Obama’s 2008 run that made Gotham (and its lookalikes) a default for US political campaigns, regardless of party. At least Harris is diverting a bit from that same old choice. This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Contributed by Florian Hardwig Source: www.abebooks.com Between the Covers (edited). License: All Rights Reserved. One advantage that lettering has over typeset text is that the artist can always alter letterforms ad hoc, depending on the context. This allows her to make the most of the available space, to dissolve awkward pairs into pleasing combinations, or simply to enliven a design by means of variegation. Ursula Suess was a graphic artist who designed numerous book jackets in her career. For the majority of them, she’d come up with her own letterforms. I’ll later add a selection of designs that hints at her stylistic range in the comments to this article. Source: www.abebooks.com Between the Covers. License: All Rights Reserved. An early jacket with italic lettering, designed by Suess for Sean O’Casey’s Sunset and Evening Star, Macmillan, 1955 Source: www.abebooks.com Between the Covers. License: All Rights Reserved. Suess designed the jacket for The Confrontation by Lenore Marshall (W.W. Norton) in 1972, the year her Book Jacket was released. The lettering could pass as an extrabold variation. Source: www.klingspor-museum.de Photographer unknown. License: All Rights Reserved. An undated portrait of Ursula Suess In the early 1970s, Suess set about designing a typeface. According to a 2014 article by Ellen Sussman, she was in part motivated by the fact that “most type styles at the time were too wide and didn’t fit on a jacket.” Her typeface indeed is compact, both horizontally and vertically, with condensed, tight-setting letterforms and a large x-height with short extenders. Suess didn’t want to forgo all the flexibility she was familiar with from lettering, so she drew a large set of alternates. A TGC specimen sums it up: “She used lettering similar to this in her book cover designs, where space limitations called for lettering with many swash characters that was strong and condensed, yet rich and sensuous.” The calligraphic design was released by VGC as a stand-alone italic in 1972, named Book Jacket. Whether you find the name boring or brilliant, it did clarify the intended application area. And Book Jacket indeed was used for designing book jackets. One example by Suess herself is shown here. (See Robert Halsband’s biography of Lord Hervey for a second one.) As We Are Now is a novel by Belgian-American writer May Sarton (1912–1995), published by W.W. Norton & Company in 1973. Suess used her typeface in two sizes, with the alternate swash caps for the big initials, a wider terminal form in “We”, and hardly any space between the last two words of the title. For the subline, she opted for more restrained forms overall, but inserted a descending h, a sweeping f that embraces the preceding o, and a single swash cap L in “LOVE”. The a in “author” is the double-story alternate. May Sarton’s name is set in Richard Isbell’s wide Americana. Source: canadatype.com Canada Type. License: All Rights Reserved. Partial glyph set of Book Jacket Pro, the digitization drawn by Patrick Griffin and released by Canada Type in 2010 Ursula Suess was born August 13, 1924 – which means it’s her 100th birthday today. Canada Type, who released a digital version of Book Jacket in 2010, provided a biographical outline: Ursula Suess was born in 1924 to German parents in Camden, NJ, and grew up in Munich, Germany, where she attended two semesters of design school at the Academy of Fine Art before it burned down during the war [in July 1944]. She then studied calligraphy with Anna Simons for two years. She returned to America in 1946 and established herself as a graphic designer working for Oxford University Press, Macmillan Co., Harper, and other publishers. She also taught calligraphy for 20 years at the Westchester Art Workshop, and at the Cooper Union in New York City. In her 50s she learned to cut gems and eventually became an accomplished gem carver. She moved to Green Valley, AZ, in 1998, and has been applying her artistic versatility with clay, water-color and acrylics. In Arizona, Suess became a long-time supporter of the Tubac Center of the Arts. Ellen Sussman additionally mentions paper sculpture, pottery, and collage as techniques she engaged in. Apart from Book Jacket, she is credited with at least one more typeface: Rotalic is a low-contrast italic sans featuring swash caps with ball terminals. It was also released with VGC. One of its four styles recently was digitized as BN Rascal. Suess passed away in 2020. She left us a large number of beautiful works, including many pieces of lettering and two unique typefaces that have stood the test of time. Source: tubacarts.org DeDe Isaacson, Tubac Center of the Arts. License: All Rights Reserved. Ursula Suess at the Tubac Center of the Arts Source: www.abebooks.com Rare Book Cellar. License: All Rights Reserved. This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Contributed by Stephen Coles Source: lithub.com License: All Rights Reserved. Martyr! is a novel by Iranian-American writer Kaveh Akbar that combines modern situations with traditional imagery. For the jacket, prolific cover designer Linda Huang did what she does so well: pick a striking and relevant typeface and let it do a lot of the work. License: All Rights Reserved. Left: Salem, as advertised in the Inland Printer, Vol. 28, No. 2 (November, 1901). Right: Daria Cohen’s reinterpretation, Zangezi (2018), with additional weights, italics, and condensed (2021). Her choice was Zangezi Condensed, a fresh, fashion-forward take on Salem, in which Daria Cohen took a turn-of-the-century dazzler, narrowed it, and increased its stroke contrast, giving it even more spike and sparkle than it already had. The idiosyncratic type is the perfect companion to the contemporary use of antique illustration. Huang also deftly delivers the commercial necessities – a blurb and “a novel” – in an inconspicuous way. Huang on the design: Despite its heavy themes, I found Akbar’s novel to be insanely funny,” Huang told Literary Hub. “I cackled many times while reading the manuscript. More than anything, I wanted to evoke this unique tragi-comedic tone on the cover. One of the central, recurring images is this Iranian ‘Angel of Death’ warrior. I experimented with scale and ultimately found the warrior in miniature to be most striking, with ‘a novel’ set in a deadpan speech bubble. I was also lucky to stumble upon the perfect decorative typeface to activate all that negative space. To me, humor is one of the most alluring qualities in a book (and really, in life) so it was an absolute treat to work on Akbar’s novel. Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com License: All Rights Reserved. The version of the cover seen in bookstores today. Martyr! quickly became a New York Times best seller – soon enough for the cover to get an extra speech balloon celebrating that fact. You can also see an improvement on the letterspacing in “Akbar”. A Digression and Suggestion Photo: Stephen Coles. License: All Rights Reserved. Once you get to the end of a book, “a note on the type” is a great way to learn about the creation of the letterforms you’ve been staring at for hours. Photo: Stephen Coles. License: All Rights Reserved. Back jacket flaps usually include an author bio and designer credit. This is good. Could they include a bit more? The interior of this book, designed by Betty Lew, includes “A Note on the Type”, a lovely hundred-year-old publishing tradition which not only credits the text face (in this case, Dante), but tells a bit of its story. Why not have a typeface credit on the jacket flap, too? Sure, you’re reading a lot more Dante than Zangezi when you read this book, but it’s the cover that often sells the book. Also, the type used on book covers is more likely to be something newer that the interior text, and thus more likely to be made by living designers. Isn’t it time we give them a nod? This post was originally published at Fonts In Use