Confessions of a font junkie: an interview with Randy Stuart

When Jill left a comment on my earlier typography post about how her husband, Randy is a font junkie, I knew I'd have to interview him. Since this month's theme is all about text + photo, it might pay to get some input from a font pro. Randy Stuart has a background in illustration and has worked as an in-house designer for more than fourteen years and is currently a senior designer at Further Creative. I'm happy to say that he designed the logo for my photography business (it makes an appearance on the take-out box in my banner).

I spoke with Randy last night about some of his favorite—and least favorite—fonts.

What are some of your favorite fonts?

Myriad, of course. It's Apple's proprietary font that Steve Jobs had commissioned. It has a good variety of weights and styles. It is almost impossible to make look bad.

(above) A sample of Myriad from Veer.com. If you're lucky, you may already have it.

A good workhorse font is Futura.
Futura comes in a lot of different weights and styles. I like it because it has a more round shape to the lower case open forms (the a, o, d, b).

(above) One of many styles of Futura, from Veer.com.

Trade Gothic is another font that's hard to make look bad, no matter what you do to it. In fact, Trade Gothic Extended is used extensively on the Food Network.

(above) Trade Gothic Extended at Veer.

Avenir: It's nice, light, open, friendly, and feminine without being girly. It's the font that was used in Cingular wireless advertising.

(above) Avenir std 2 from Veer. Note from Marc: This is the font I used in my Paris ABC project.

Frutiger is good because it's really well weighted, which means it's easy on the eyes. For example, if you look closely at, say, Times, it's kind of an ugly font because it has super thin serifs, but it's designed that way because on a newspaper there is dot bleed, so the thinness is made to compensate for the spreading of the ink on newsprint. But it looks too pointy on good quality printing. Frutiger was designed for all the signage at Charles de Gaulle airport. They wanted a font that would be world-wide friendly.

(above) A sample of Frutiger on Wikipedia.

Gotham is great. It's a square font, meaning most of the letterforms are as wide (or close to as wide) as they are high. It's a really good font to use if you want to customize text. I'm kind of opposed, as a rule to stretching fonts. You're better off finding a font at the beginning that looks stretched. However, if you want to start monkeying with the points, the vectors, etc., it works well because a lot of the strokes have a uniform thickness. Gotham can lend weight and beefiness, without being clunky. Gotham is Obama's font, but also Coke in all sans serif applications, and Saturday Night Live in the opening credits.

(above) Gotham font example from the always-superb Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

I notice you didn't mention any script font. Is there a script font you would recommend that doesn't look tacky?

Bickham I'm not really a script font guy, but it's OK. There are a couple of Shelley fonts that are OK. Those would be my recommendations.

(above) Bickham via Veer.
(above) Shelley standard via Veer.

But you can also use other fonts instead of script, such as Bodoni (because it has nice thin flat serifs) or Didot. Those can be light and airy and sophisticated. People seem to equate script with "fancy" and that's not necessarily the case.

(above) A sample of Didot from the drool-worthy collection at Hoefler Frere-Jones.

(above) A sample of Bodoni. An elegant alternative to script.

Are there any fonts that make you cringe?

Lots of them.

For example?

Well, the King Daddy of them all is Comic Sans. People overuse it, or use it inappropriately because they think it's cute and fun.

(above) Screen capture of Comic Sans from "Comic Sans Sucks" post on Exhibit 5A.

Brush Script. There's a standard one that you see on every bad "On Sale Now!" sign on State Street. Going out of business! Everything must go!

(above) Brush Script.

Papyrus. It is like the go-to font that everyone uses who wants to do something antique-y or for people who say "I want it to feel like a Day spa!"

(above) Papyrus as seen in "5 Terrible Fonts You Shouldn't Use in Print Design"

Eccentric. It kind of seems like it's trying to be a Frank Lloyd Wright-looking font, but it's just done poorly. The open areas (say on a capital R) are super squished and yet it has very long legs.

(above) A sample of eccentric from (sorry) the excellent font source Lynotype.

Zapf Chancery. It's the script used on every crappy low-budget wedding invitation.

(above) A classy with a capital "K" example of Zapf Chancery from Lynotype.

You know, another category that we haven't talked about is fonts that I generally don't like, but that can look good when used in the right ways.

Such as?

Copperplate. It's used way too much in many inappropriate ways, but when used correctly—such as in signage for, say, a really old building that's been updated for loft space—it's really quite good. It's a display font, not a text font.

(above) A screen capture from a blogger who is sick of seeing Copperplate. Maybe he has just seen it misused too often.

Thanks for your time, Randy.

The Psychology of Typeface

If you're new to take-out photo, you may not know that every month we focus on a theme (a "Monthly Special"). The "September Monthly Special" is all about text and photography, so today I want to look at text, not its content but its form.

Look at your handwriting. How has it evolved (or in my case, devolved) over time? Did you once dot your "i"s with circles or hearts or flowers? Unless you are a 10-year-old girl, let's hope those days are over. As a professor, I see a lot of handwriting. Occasionally, a guy will have the big loopy handwriting one might associate with a young girl, or a girl will have the condensed, sloppy handwriting more typical of a guy. The disconnect we might sense between the writer and the handwriting reveals that you don't have to be a graphologist to assign meaning to how someone crosses their "t"s or loops their "y"s.

Fonts are not much different, because whether we are conscious or not of their psychological impact, we choose them and we are judged by those choices. If a student hands in a research paper written in Comic Sans (yes, it's happened) or a CK scrapbooking font (true story, I swear), I have a much harder time taking their research seriously.

Check out the use of typeface in the four examples in my photo at the top of this post:

• The Strapontin café signage looks friendly, quirky, and inviting.
• The oval sign announcing that a boulangerie is closed Sundays and Mondays is full of nostalgia and suggests that the owners are probably off in Provence on those days, going to mass, picking bunches of lavender, and carding wool before winter hits.
• On the bottom left, the little flourishes on the letters of the "Hôtel de l'Avenir"—literally "Hotel of the Future"—tell us that this is yesterday's quaint future, not some distant space age where everyone will be forced to wear unflattering unitards.
• Finally, the bottom right, from the Concord Metro station, suggests power, sophistication, and obedient conformity.

A study published in 2006 by the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL—Star Trek-inspired logo, anyone?) at Wichita State University tested the "personality" of 20 fonts by asking people to rate them according to lists of adjectives. Courier New, for example, was the top font for the words "conformist," "unimaginative," "dull," and "plain." What a winner. Participants described a swirly little font called "Gigi" as "creative," "exciting," and "feminine," but also "unstable," "rebel," and "impractical." Gigi sounds fun, but trust me, that girl is trouble.

A study set to appear in the October issue of Psychological Science suggests that diners are willing to pay more for food if the menu is hard to read and difficult to understand. Try the medley of berry conserves and puréed pindas on pain de mie (aka PB&J on white) It's pricey, but oh so worth it.

And if you think messing with fonts on a menu is a high-stakes game, think about the Presidential race. In March, the L.A. Times did a story on the typefaces of Obama and McCain. Obama is all about Gotham—the "it" font of 2008. Gotham is only 7 years old (Incidentally, Hillary used New Baskerville—a font with roots in the 18th century—and we see where that got her.) McCain uses Optima, the same font used in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Coincidence? The New York Times did a great piece getting reactions to that font from various experts.

Since we're on the topic of politics, what about political t-shirts? Is it appropriate to wear a pink ringer tee with a fat and happy little pink font used to spell out "Darfur"? The New England art blog "Our Daily RED" doesn't think so. They call it a "typographically irresponsible" act.

The moral of this story, or Does this font make my butt look big?
Have I made you self-conscious of your fonts? Are you afraid that your font choices will make you look immature, naive, or even typographically irresponsible? Never fear. The studies that dissect the meanings of fonts get their information from the reactions of people like you. In other words, trust your own opinions and intuition. Catastrophically wrong font choices come from a lack of forethought. If, as the saying in typographic circles goes, fonts are the clothing that words wear, then you need to make sure your words don't get dressed in the dark. Don't let your words wear flip-flops and a t-shirt to the opera. Not unless that's the look you're going for.


Postscript
Still feeling unsure? Wish there were a What Not to Wear for font choices? Well, check back for a future post that will give you, if not Stacy and Clinton, well then, maybe their equivalents in the world of typography.