You got history in my fonts! Well, you got fonts in my history!

October 11, 2008 1:52 PM

Great energy is put into determining if a font used in a TV show or movie is historically appropriate. (Arial, an '80s font used in Mad Men, a show set in the '60s? Gadzooks!) But how does a designer make decisions in the opposite direction? If you've got a product set in the '60s, how do you know what font's to use?

This is actually two questions:

1) The short term - I'm setting something in the US in the late '60. What to use? Sure, Helvetica/Akzidenz-Grotesk/Univers plus hand lettering for the hippy thing were the norms, but what was a designer who was going beyond the norm using?

2) But more importantly, the long term - What references are out there so that I can answer the question for myself? You guys are great, and I'm sure will answer the first question beautifully, but I'd also like to learn to fish.

posted by ericc to media & arts (5 comments total)

I find that turning to ads in old magazines always gives me an amazing window to the typography and graphic design of that time. If anything, typography and graphic design was in some ways more innovative than it is today. Now we can just make an ad full of luscious images and color; back in the day a lot of the same energy was carried by the lines of the piece.

These days a few companies have strong typographic identities, but back in the day you could tell what company was selling the thing based on the font used for their body text. So font loyalty was very big back then, so it's almost more a question of finding out which company you're writing about, and getting samples from those ads. They'll be using the same font for all of their materials, at least for the body and head/tag lines.

Graphic design (of the print variety) was a popular topic of the time. Assuming they weren't all tossed out, you can find oodles of books on typography and design written in the 60s. That should also be a good resource. They probably won't be at most libraries, but for sure at least one used books supplier in your area will have an old book filled with examples.
posted by Deathalicious at 2:10 PM on October 11, 2008

helvetica wasn't really used widely in the early sixties. having been designed only in 1957, it took a while for it to catch on. I think the NYC MTA changed their signage only in 1968 or 69.

there are excellent graphic design and advertising books (an example) that can provide you with a general overview. organizations like AIGA, the TDC and SPD among others have put out many annuals and publications to scour for references. used record- and bookstores are my personal favorite as I'll stumble over a lot of examples and directions I hadn't been looking for when checking out these places. I particularly love finding old magazines few would bother to archive. a middle-of-the-road fashion magazine from the 60s will give you a really good indication for where mainstream typographic culture was at that time. also note that typography and proper use of color go hand in hand - you have to match both to the time or the connection will easily be lost.

I also very highly recommend the forum at typophile.com.
posted by krautland at 3:54 PM on October 11, 2008

I forgot: also read up on paul rand.
posted by krautland at 3:57 PM on October 11, 2008

Besides archives of stuff like magazines, and the like, every year there are about one trillion "annuals" released. I used to have a type annual from 1991 that was a compendium of the most awful "hey we can do digital stuff now!" awfulness you can imagine.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 8:40 PM on October 11, 2008

There are two aspects to this. One is the authenticity angle -- you want the stuff that was actually used and in the ways it was actually used. The other is the reception angle -- you want something that evokes the era for viewers in an effective way. These may send you in different directions, but certainly with an era like the 1960s -- which was positively overflowing with graphic experimentation -- there's very little you can do to go wrong.

Someone else can list actual fonts. I would suggest thinking seriously about the available technology. Office materials produced using typewriters and mimeographs, not word processors (the Dan Rather problem). Signs hand-painted instead of transposed from a digital design. Many things left over from when they were made in the 1930s or 1950s and never changed. Significantly less use of iconography, which was popularized by the 1968 Olympics. (Bathrooms said MEN and WOMEN instead of using little doll-figures.) Street signs also used more English and were full of verbiage and used few images. Many, many more things were printed in just black and white than newspapers.

To cite one thing that bugged me from the Simonson Mad Men critique, it's possible that the lobby would have had the name of the firm in metal type. It's even possible that permanent features like stairways or elevators would have had metal type directing you to them (but it would probably have been much flatter, like 1/8" thick). It's unlikely that most executives would have had their names in metal type -- they would have had simple sliding name plates (white lettering on hard black plastic) in a metal mount.

I think one generic rule of thumb would be simply fewer sans-serif fonts, period. They tended to only be used for display purposes. The title page of a manual for some device might include the logo and the name in a big fat ordinary display sans-serif like Monotype Grotesque, but almost everything else would have been in some readable serif face. (This is not a hard and fast rule and exceptions certainly existed.) Many of the popular display faces of the era, though, were serifs like Bookman.
posted by dhartung at 1:38 AM on October 12, 2008