All type is found, in one way or another. Where?
“Everywhere,” answers Matteo Bologna, principal
of Mucca Design. “Anything that man touched and
had to leave some kind of message on is fair game
for us.”
That means casting a wide net. There are the
usual suspects for finding inspiration, of course—
type specimen books and the work of one’s peers.
But a common trait of innovative type designers is
cultivating a certain way of seeing: a form of vision
that finds type riches where others see the ordinary,
prosaic, and forgettable.
It is a faculty that is both learned and intrinsic.
Bologna, who with Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
has crafted some of today’s most fully realized
typographic creations, notes that the French phrase
déformation professionelle (translation: “professional
distortion”) has applicability here. “A painter sees
everything as color and light. For an engineer, life is
one big structure,” he says. “We designers understand
the world as messages and type.”
While that may be true of most graphic designers,
developing the habit of discovering type in the
environment requires a degree of commitment and
discipline … as well as the ability to keep one’s eyes
open with a sense of wonder at the surreal beauty
and mystery of the letterforms that surround us.
Transplanted visions
Individual imaginations develop their own strategies
for finding type, and often the process is activated
by a change of scenery. Michael Hodgson, a partner
of the design office Ph.D, came to the U.S. in 1979
with a background in Europe’s older type traditions.
He remembers it this way: “Having studied photography
and printmaking, I wasn’t a typographer per
se. But I had the equivalent of an apprenticeship
working for the magazine Harpers & Queen, which
was still set in metal type when I started in ’74.”
Arriving in Los Angeles exposed him to a new set
of influences. “I was struck by the neon, by the
Holiday Inn signs, and the music industry changed
my way of seeing, too,” he says, noting that his work
on album covers and music posters began to reflect
the “States vernacular” while retaining its connection
to European styles.
“For a long time Gill Sans tended to be our type
du jour, and people commented on it,” he recalls. “It
was when I went back to England that I noticed that
probably half of the older signage was in Gill Sans.”
His birth records, a keepsake shared by his mother,
contained a further revelation: It, too, was in Gill
Sans. “So I guess right from birth it was predetermined
that I would use a lot of it,” he says.
Yet Hodgson notes that as time went on, the
pull of Southern California style was more evident
in his work. In recent years this has shown itself in
a fascination with letterforms and type treatments
associated with buildings and architecture—and his
firm has become more active in designing signage for
buildings, partially as a result of this interest.
Lure of the open road
Jean-Benoit Lévy is a graphic artist and visual
designer working in both the U.S. and Switzerland
whose typographic interests also reflect a change in
scenery. Like many visual communicators, he finds
typographic inspiration “everywhere—in the streets,
magazines, billboards, a piece of paper on the floor,”
but in his case (and at this point in his life) a big
influence on his work has been the American roadscape.
“To arrive in a new country demands some
mental adaptation. Through my visual profession, I
am used to observing,” he says. “I find it funny that
on the road in the U.S., which is an international
country where you would expect more symbolic
signs, you have all these texts that you have to read
while driving. They’re almost like the subtitles in
a movie. I feel like I am driving in a place where
someone has many things to explain to me in order
to let me travel on their roads. With these texts,
the U.S. road system becomes full of mysterious,
romantic, surreal, and even poetic messages,
depending on how one feels inside while driving.”
From highway to city
The typographic landscape of the city is crammed
with competing messages, and the visual cacaphony
has a tendency to become numbing, closing one’s
eyes to the potential for clarity, uniqueness, and
charm. Reclaiming the sense of wonder—and preserving
the hand-rendered styles fast disappearing in
our age of mass-manufactured signage and corporate
blanding—is the mission of a group of artists and
enthusiasts who find deeper meanings in the letterforms
of urban signage.
Tracy Seneca is a librarian, web developer, and
artist working in a variety of media who has made it
her personal quest to see that city type is fully appreciated.
“I find these signs and images comforting
because they’re not landmarks,” she says. Although
now in California, she lived for years in Chicago,
the signscape of which her site Mildred’s House of
Signage documents.
She describes her motivation in creating the
site as “a combination of being in a new place, getting
to know it, and somehow still seeing things that
are familiar.” Chicago is an ideal environment, she
says. “One of the things I love about Chicago is that
it’s a healthy city. You lose that as things become
more franchised and less distinctive. There are lots
of mom-and-pop businesses in Chicago, and to me
that’s the sign of a healthy community.”
From city to country
“Urban environments have their own vernacular,”
acknowledges Matt Lane Harris, a designer at screen
printer Standard Deluxe, while noting that his
employer’s rural Alabama setting exposes him to an
entirely different but similarly rich and lively set of
influences. “When you come out here to the rural
South, you understand that you have to be affected
by this environment.”
Harris’ surroundings reveal a more traditional
sort of typographic landscape, yet one that exerts
equally powerful influence. “It’s hard not to use
found type here—it’s all around us. When I’m stuck,
all I have to do is walk outside my door.” Harris and
studio owner Scott Peek collect old signs and keep
folders full of samples from old magazines and books.
“One of my biggest inspirations is church
signs,” he says. “The smaller the church, the smaller
the budget, so a lot of what you see is hand lettered.”
Sampling the basic appeal of hand-drawn type helps
him reconnect with his environment, he says, “and it
also gets me out from behind my computer.”
A broader environment
There’s more to the lettered environment than architecture
and signage, of course. Peter Bain is a noted
type designer and educator who often finds inspiration
in antique works that are more purely typographic.
“I tend to look for samples that are readable
but suggestive of historical precedents that interest
me,” he explains. “My background as an educator
helps broaden the range of influences I can draw
on.” Those influences range from Asian calligraphy
to constructed Bauhaus alphabets to 18th- and
19th-century maps. “I think like a typographer,” he
says, even though “sometimes I do things that are
more calligraphic.”
The familiar becomes new
For these designers, finding a new way of seeing
type—despite the presence of a predecessor or influencing
work—contributes to the distinctiveness of
the design solutions they develop. As de Vicq de
Comptich observes, “Every project is different, so by
definition each design should be unique.”
Recommeded resources
Online galleries
Interesting Ideas
—Bill Swislow’s
kaleidoscopic site
encompasses signs,
outsider art, songs
of praise for Don
Knotts, and the Gyros
Project (an ongoing
effort to document
Chicagoland’s ubiquitous
meat-on-a-skewer
iconography).
Ruavista—In
Portuguese, ruavista
means “street sight,”
and Marc Voelckel’s
site is loaded with
colorful street scenes
from around the
world, contributed by
correspondents, in the
form of photos, words,
and sounds. Also
includes links to pertinent
exhibitions.
Books & more
Blackletter: Type
and National
Identity, by Peter
Bain and Paul Shaw,
$19.95, Princeton
Architectural Press
By Jean-Benoit Lévy:
• Live/Love: Lenticular
Postcards, $9.95
• Live/Love: Lenticular
Journal, $12.95
• Note/Quote: Lenticular
Journal, $12.95
—all from Chronicle Books
Pretty Vacant: The
Los Angeles Dingbat
Observed, by Clive
Piercy (book design
by Ph.D), $24.95, also
from Chronicle Books
