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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
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Joe Gebbia has no business designing government services. President Trump’s appointment of AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia as “Chief Design Officer” of the United States is a sickening travesty. It not only proves a fundamental misunderstanding of both design and governance, but an unbound commitment to corruption. Gebbia’s directive to make government services “as satisfying to use as the Apple Store” within three years might serve as an appealing soundbyte, but it quickly collapses under the slightest scrutiny: why? how? with what design army? The creation of the so-called National Design Studio and Gebbia’s appointment as its chief should raise serious questions about credentials, institutional destruction, and continued corruption. Design by Regulatory Arbitrage Gebbia’s reputation in design rests on a shaky foundation. AirBnB’s present dominance isn’t the product of real innovation. He and his friends stumbled upon an idea after listing their apartment on Craigslist for under-the-table sublease during a popular conference. They realized money could be made, and built a website to let other people do the same thing, through them, not Craig. This is important: the very first act of creation was an act of piracy. What AirBnB does today is no different, other than the legitimization that comes with enough capital. The innovation here was collusion: spend enough to ensure that regulatory enforcement costs more; spin enough to make theft look heroic. With Y-Combinator as a launchpad, the company rapidly built its business by systematically ignoring well-established regulations in hospitality and real estate. This sounds like a perfect match for the Trump Administration, and it’s why I cannot take any of Gebbia’s commitments now at face value. His formative business experience taught him to break existing systems rather than designing better ones, and for that he was rewarded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations. True design requires understanding constraints, working within complex systems, and serving users’ actual needs rather than exploiting regulatory gaps. Gebbia’s track record suggests a fundamentally different approach — one that prioritizes disruption over responsibility and profit over genuine public service. I’m not sure he can differentiate between entitlement and expertise, self and service, commerce and civics. Institutional Vandalism The hubris of this appointment becomes clearer when viewed alongside the recent dismantling of 18F, the federal government’s existing design services office. Less than a year ago, Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative completely eviscerated this team, which was modeled after the UK’s Government Digital Service and comprised hundreds of design practitioners with deep expertise in government systems. Many of us likely knew someone at 18F. We knew how much value they offered the country. The people in charge didn’t understand what they did and didn’t care. In other words, we were already doing what Gebbia claims he’ll accomplish in three years. The 18F team had years of experience navigating federal bureaucracy, understanding regulatory constraints, and working within existing governmental structures—precisely the institutional knowledge required for meaningful reform. Now we’re expected to believe that dismantling this expertise and starting over with political appointees represents progress. Will Gebbia simply rehire the 18F professionals who were just laid off? If so, why destroy the institutional knowledge in the first place? If not, how does beginning from scratch improve upon what already existed? It doesn’t and it won’t. This appointment has more in common with Trump’s previous appointment of his son-in-law to “solve the conflict in the Middle East,” which resulted in no such thing unless meetings about hotels and real estate counts. Gebbia knows as much about this job as Kushner did about diplomacy, which is nothing. Despite years in “design,” I suspect Gebbia knows little of anything about it, or user experience, or public service. His expertise is in drawing attention while letting robbers in the back door. Impossible Promises, Probable Corruption The timeline alone reveals the proposal’s fundamental unseriousness. Gebbia promises to reform not just the often-cited 26,000 federal websites, but all government services—physical and digital—within three years. Anyone with experience in government systems or even just run-of-the-mill website design knows this is absurd. The UK’s Government Digital Service, working with a much smaller governmental structure, required over a decade to achieve significant results. But three years is plenty of time for something else entirely: securing contracts, regulatory concessions, and other agreements that benefit private interests. Gebbia may no longer run AirBnB day-to-day, but his wealth remains tied to the company. His conspicuous emergence as a Trump supporter just before the 2024 election suggests motivations beyond public service. Trump has consistently demonstrated his willingness to use government power to benefit his businesses and those of his collaborators. There’s a growing list of “business-minded” men granted unfettered access and authority over sweeping government initiatives under Trump who have achieved nothing other than self-enrichment. AirBnB has already disrupted hospitality; their next expansion will likely require the kind of regulatory flexibility that only comes from having allies in high government positions. Now they’ve got a man on the inside. The Pattern of Capture This appointment fits a broader pattern of regulatory capture, where industries gain control over the agencies meant to oversee them. Gebbia’s role ostensibly focuses on improving government services, but it also positions him to influence regulations that could significantly impact AirBnB’s business model and expansion plans. The company has spent years fighting local zoning laws, housing regulations, and taxation requirements. Having a co-founder in a high-level government design role—with access to federal agencies and regulatory processes—creates obvious conflicts of interest that extend far beyond website optimization. Beyond Personal Grievances Full disclosure: I attended college with Joe Gebbia and quickly formed negative impressions of his character that subsequent events have only reinforced. While personal history colors perspective, the substantive concerns about this appointment stand independently: the mismatch between promised expertise and demonstrated capabilities, the destruction of existing institutional knowledge, the unrealistic timeline claims, and the predictable potential for conflicts of interest. Government design reform is important work that requires deep expertise, institutional knowledge, and genuine commitment to public service. It deserves leaders with proven track records in complex systems design, not entrepreneurs whose primary experience involves circumventing existing regulations for private gain. The American people deserve government services that work better. But interacting with government could not – and should not — be more different from buying something at the Apple Store. One is an interface layer upon society – an ecosystem of its own that is irreducible to a point and inextricable from the physical and philosophical world in which it exists. The other is a store. To model one after the other is the sort of idiocy we should expect from people who either understand little to nothing about how either thing should work or just don’t care. I suspect it’s both.
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Every great design has one organizing detail that unlocks everything else, and the best design leaders never stop looking for it. Every good piece of design has at least one detail that is the “key” to unlocking an understanding of how it works. Good designers will notice that detail right away, while most people will respond to it subconsciously, sometimes never recognizing it for what it is or what it does. These key details are the organizing principles that make everything else possible. They’re rarely the most obvious elements — not the largest headline or the brightest color — but rather the subtle choices that create hierarchy, guide attention, and establish the invisible structure that holds a design together. Sometimes those key details fall into place right away; they may be essential components of how an idea takes its form, or how function shapes a thing. But just as often, these keys are discovered as a designer works through iterations with extremely subtle differences. Sometimes moving elements around in a layout, perhaps even by a matter of pixels, enables a key to do its work, if not reveal itself entirely. Without these organizing details, even technically proficient design falls flat. Elements feel arbitrary rather than purposeful. Visual hierarchy becomes muddy. The viewer’s eye wanders without direction. What separates good design from mediocre design is often nothing more than recognizing which detail needs to be the key — and having the skill to execute it properly and the discipline to clear its path. Seeing the Key in Action Recently, a designer on my team and I reviewed layouts for a series of advertisements in a digital campaign. We’ve enjoyed working with this particular client — an industrial design firm specializing in audio equipment — because their design team is sophisticated and their high standards not only challenge us, but inspire us. (It may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s easier to produce good design for good designers. When your client understands what you do, they may push you harder, but they’ll also know what you need in order to deliver what they want.) The designer had produced a set of ads that visually articulated the idea of choice — an essential psychological element for the customer profile of high-end audio technology — in a simple and elegant way. Two arrows ran in parallel until they diverged, curving in different directions. They bisected the ad space asymmetrically, with one arrow rendered in color veering off toward the left and the other, rendered in white, passing it before turning toward the right. This white arrow was the key. It overpowered the bold, colored arrow by pushing further into the ad space, while creating a clear arc that drew the eye down toward the ad’s copy and call to action. It’s a perfect example of old-school graphic design; it will do its work without being understood by most viewers, but its function is unmistakable once you see it. In reviewing this piece, I saw the key right away. I saw how it worked — what it unlocked. And I also recognized that the designer who made it saw it, too. I could tell based upon his choices of color, the way he positioned the arrows — the only shapes, other than text, in the entire ad — and even the way he had used the curve radius to subtly reference the distinct, skewed and rotated “o” in the brand’s logotype. This kind of sophisticated thinking, where every element serves multiple purposes and connects to larger brand systems, separates competent design from exceptional design. The white arrow wasn’t just directing attention; it was reinforcing brand identity and creating a sense of forward momentum that aligned with the client’s messaging about innovation and choice. The Maturity Trap I’ve often heard it said that as a designer’s career matures, the distance between their responsibility and functional details grows — that design leadership is wielded in service of the “big picture,” unencumbered by the travails of implementation so that it can maintain a purity of service to ideas and strategy. I couldn’t disagree with this more. While it’s true that senior designers must think strategically and guide teams rather than execute every detail personally, this doesn’t mean they should lose touch with the craft itself. The ability to recognize and create key details doesn’t become less important as careers advance — it becomes more crucial for developing teams and ensuring quality across projects. A design director who can’t spot the organizing principle in a layout, or who dismisses pixel-level adjustments as beneath their concern, has lost touch with the foundation of what makes design work. They may be able to talk about brand strategy and user experience in broad strokes, but they can’t guide their teams toward the specific choices that will make those strategies successful. No Big Picture Without Details My perspective is that no idea can be meaningful without being synchronized with reality — as informed by it as it is influential upon it. There is no “big picture” without detail. The grandest strategic vision fails when it’s not supported by countless small decisions made with precision and purpose. No matter how one’s career matures, a designer must at least retain access to the details, if not a regular, direct experience of them. This doesn’t mean micromanaging or doing work that others should be doing. It means maintaining the ability to see how abstract concepts become concrete solutions, to recognize when something is working and when it isn’t, and to guide others toward the key details that will make their work succeed. Without that connection to craft, we become blind to the keys at work — we lock ourselves out of an understanding of the work that could help us develop our teams or ourselves. We lose the ability to distinguish between design that looks impressive and design that actually functions. We can no longer teach what we once knew. The best design leaders I’ve known maintain a hand in the craft throughout their careers. They may delegate execution, but they never lose their eye for the detail that makes everything else work. They understand that leadership in design isn’t about rising above the details — it’s about seeing them more clearly and helping others see them too. Great design has always been about the details. The only thing that changes as we advance in our careers is our responsibility for ensuring those details exist in the work of others. That’s a responsibility we can only fulfill if we never stop looking for the keys ourselves.
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