BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Mention Jamaican music to someone who isn’t a fan and you can bet that a fairly predictable image pops into the head of your listener. Chances are this image looks something like the cover of Bim Sherman’s Exploitation:

Same old Rastafarian colors… Some guy with dreads… A title that refers broadly to political oppression or positive thinking without much in the way of self-critical awareness or irony.

For many people, this vision  —  of roots reggae and its deified lead singer —  is the only face that Jamaican music has to offer. (To be honest, the Jamaican music industry, in its eagerness to capitalize on the popularity of this face, hasn’t done much to contradict it.)

Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find a dozen genres lurking beneath the tie-died surface of roots reggae. On the album covers belonging to these genres, moreover, you’ll find a dozen different — and sometimes contradictory — visual images of what it has meant to be Jamaican, besides the template of the righteous Rastafarian popularized by Bob Marley. Although the reggae of the 1970s popularized a message of political rebellion, you only have to go back a few years earlier to find album covers that unconsciously reflect the values of neocolonialism — Jamaica as cultural treasure chest waiting to be looted by foreign interests.

Equally complex is the relationship to pop culture: while many covers evidence a conscious Afro-centric opposition to Western society, many others adopt, mimic or are swallowed up by the conventions of American music and movies. You can see every chapter of Jamaica’s modern social history — the burden of colonialism, the optimism surrounding political independence, the social and economic problems that greeted self-rule — reflected in the typographic, illustrative and photographic choices made by its album cover artists over the last fifty years.

In The Beginning

For a country its size, Jamaica has a uniquely prolific music business. In 2000, the industry was estimated to account for 10% of the nation’s GDP (PDF). The footprints of this legacy go as far back as the 1940s, when radios and record players were used to blast American R&B out of storefronts as a means of attracting business. By the 1950s, the phenomenon of the sound system emerged: massive mobile speaker set-ups — run by flamboyant characters with names such as Tom the Great Sebastian — that channeled the music for huge outdoor dances that, in retrospect, look like the distant antecedents of rave culture. With such a uniquely mobilized musical audience in place, it was only a matter of time before the island began to produce its own genres of popular music.

Legendary producer Prince Buster outside his store on Orange Street in the ska days.

Cultural Plunder In the Ska and Rocksteady Years

Ska

The first indigenous Jamaican pop music was ska, a fusion of American R&B, mento (a local genre of folk music resembling calypso) and other influences. In the late 1950s, local musicians and producers such as Coxsone Dodd, Prince Buster and Duke Reid began experimenting with inverting the typical R&B shuffle beat to move the stress to the after-beat. The result was a new concoction that early listeners sometimes referred to as “upside-down R&B.� In the words of session musician Ernie Ranglin: “Instead of the Chinnk-ka… Chinnk-ka… Chinnk-ka style, we ended up with Ka-chinnk… Ka-chinnk… Ka-chinnk.� Often played by large ensembles with full horn arrangements to stress the after-beat, ska music has an infectious upbeat energy that mirrored Jamaicans’ anticipation of political independence from Great Britain, which would officially arrive in 1962.

Listen: Girl, Why Don’t You Answer Your Name, Prince Buster

Who was the first international face of Jamaican music? Before Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff or Desmond Dekker, there was Byron Lee, the country’s original musical export:

This cover actually dates from 1973, but it typifies one way in which Jamaican music had tried to package itself since the beginning of the ska period: music with a light-skinned face (Lee was Chinese-Jamaican), playing for a light-skinned audience. Bright childlike lettering with no sharp edges. A cultural souvenir: exotic dance music with no complicating social narrative.

The attempt to market Jamaican music this way emerged at the beginning of the ska period in the 1950s to meet the surging upmarket tourist industry and the interest among American record labels in tapping the island’s music. It peaked at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, with a contrived and unsuccessful effort by the government to plant ska on the world stage and garner attention for the island as a tourist destination. To the great resentment of the musicians involved, the government selected Byron Lee’s Dragonaires as the backing band for this extravaganza — a decision presumably based on the band’s clean-cut presentation and on Lee’s political connections to future Prime Minister Edward Seaga. The affair failed to incite international interest in ska, and the only relic from the experiment is a forgettable album entitled Jamaican Ska, released by the US label Atlantic Records and timed to coincide with the ’64 World’s Fair:

Although the government would never again throw its hat in the ring with the same vigor, the effort to market Jamaican music to an explicitly foreign market would continue for many years to come. Many album covers would include a map of how to get to the island, instructions on how to dance once you get there, and plenty of goofball novelty typography in between.

Here’s Byron Lee and his Dragonaires again, “The Good Guys� amidst a dark island:

And here’s a rocksteady compilation from the Treasure Island label, complete with copy that seems to have been written by the Jamaica Tourist Board:

(Hat tip: Chris Morrow)

The situation becomes even more dubious when a girl is thrown into the bargain, as offered by several albums from the 1960s:

(Hat tip: Chris Morrow)

Not that there’s anything unusual about putting a woman on an album cover — just about every genre in existence has tried it at some point. But it’s the racial tightrope that these covers walk — airbrushing their models to conform to Anglo-American standards of prettiness — and the associations made with pirate loot that make for a slightly queasy viewing experience today.

In later years, the most absurd culprit in this category was Trojan’s Tighten Up series, a set of compilations aimed at a white British audience, whose covers often evidenced all the subtlety and cultural sensitivity of early James Bond movies:

None of this commentary is meant to reflect negatively on the music within. Regardless of the cover art, the songs of the ska and rocksteady eras burst with self-assurance and innovation. The point is that these genres reflect an industry that had forged its own musical consciousness but whose marketing and visual identities lagged behind. Even the majority of albums from this period that did not parrot colonial values still took their lead from American R&B covers. (See Chris Morrow’s Stir It Up: Reggae Album Cover Art, pages 17 to 19, for more rocksteady cover art drawn overtly from American R&B and soul albums.)

Egalitarianism In The Rocksteady Years

Rocksteady

In the summer of 1966, the tempo of the music being produced in Kingston suddenly slowed, and music historians have been debating the causes ever since. One explanation is a heat wave that left audiences dying for a mellower beat to sway to. Another is a rising tide of violence at dances: suddenly, you didn’t want to be stepping on the toe of the person behind you. The most compelling explanation is the appearance of the first electric bass on the island — imported, in the irony of ironies, by none other than Byron Lee. While Lee’s interest in the instrument was purely practical — an electric bass was easier to tote around than an upright — the dynamics of the instrument helped shift Jamaican music towards a slower, heavier groove, featuring a smaller cast of musicians and more closely resembling the instrumentation of American soul music coming out of Stax and Motown.

Listen: Ba Ba Boom, The Jamaicans

Rocksteady is the genre that took its cue most explicitly from the US soul music of Stax and Motown, and the resemblance led to some distinction in the cover art. Instead of the larger ensembles that played ska music, rocksteady tended to involve a smaller number of musicians, which allowed more room for vocal harmonizing. This in turn created an interesting democratization of the band dynamic: rather than a clearly-defined lead singer with subordinates handling backup, the rocksteady structure often featured a trio on equal footing, each sharing lead duties — and consequently, all enjoying an equal chance at stardom. Covers from this period frequently show three vocalists standing shoulder to shoulder, with no apparent hierarchy:

The rocksteady years, while producing some sublime original music, also yielded innumerable remakes of American songs, and many of the covers of the time show expressive ways of communicating this:

The heavy-handed “ROCK� lettering here serves as kind of “buyer beware� label to a Jamaican audience more partial to smooth soul sounds (represented here in script).

Social Consciousness And Self-Indulgence In The Reggae Era

Reggae and Rastafari

In 1968, the first reggae rhythms began to appear as musicians sped the tempo back up again, and increasingly sophisticated organ parts created more room for rhythmic syncopation from the bass and guitars. But the reggae era diverged sharply from rocksteady not just in music but by ushering a new era of political consciousness into Jamaican music. Whereas ska and rocksteady were essentially dance genres created in Kingston, reggae signaled a shift to a rural consciousness, which had always been the stronghold of political dissent in Jamaica and within the Rastafari movement in particular.

The term “Rastafariâ€� signals a belief in the messianic status of Haile Selassie (born Ras Tafari), the Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. Shut out of mainstream Jamaican middle-class society until the 1970s — and thus shut out of ska and rocksteady — Rastafari finally bubbled up into the mainstream musical and social consciousness when the political and economic woes of Jamaica grew too great to ignore. Frequently derided as a kind of screwball mysticism, Rastafari is best understood as Jamaica’s native vehicle for black social consciousness, a political movement every bit as much as a religious one.

Listen: Police and Thieves, Junior Murvin

As reggae was coalescing as a style in Jamaica, Motown artists Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye were locked in a public struggle with label boss Berry Gordy to buck the company’s rigid hit-factory structure and to make records with greater artistic freedom and social commentary. Although there was no such open insurrection in Jamaica, the shift to reggae signalled an analogous move towards an industry dominated by artists rather than producers. The results mirrored those up in Motown: the songs became longer, the structures more experimental, the lyrics heavier in theme. At its best, reggae was a radicalized version of pop music, with a heavy-hitting political and social relevance unlike anything seen before. At its worst, it showed bouts of self-indulgence that make you yearn for the disciplining hand of the ousted producers who ran the show during the rocksteady years.

The best photographic covers from this period serve as photo-journalism, taking you right into the rural realities of the third world:

(Hat tip: Chris Morrow)

(Hat tip: Chris Morrow)

Meanwhile, the best illustrated covers from this period — especially those associated with Lee Perry’s seminal Black Ark studio — take on themes of suffering and political oppression in a style as creative and incisive as the music itself:

The status of reggae singer as righteous judge passing verdict on society’s injustices inevitably led to a drift to self-indulgence, as well as a monotonous and humorless repetition of certain themes:

(Hat tip: Chris Morrow)

Reggae’s drift from relevance to self-indulgence is especially evident in the album covers of its greatest star, Bob Marley. First, consider Burnin’ (1973), Marley’s last album with the Wailers.

The band is still an ensemble here, with Marley surrounded by his bandmates. While your reaction to this cover might depend on how you feel about wood grain, there’s no denying its immediacy. This feels not like a band of self-satisfied superstars, but rather like a band hungry for insurrection.

Marley’s next album, Catch A Fire, was picked up by Island Records, which made a conscious attempt to promote the artist as a rock star might be promoted, right down to the ostentatious album cover that would have been at home in a gatefold double album by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The first 2,000 copies of Catch A Fire had a design featuring a giant zippo lighter that is flipped open to reveal the record inside:

In This Is Reggae Music (page 413), Lloyd Bradley writes approvingly of this development: “Up until Catch A Fire, if reggae album artwork didn’t look like publicity material put out by the Jamaican Tourist Board, then it featured somebody’s girlfriend looking nervous, near naked and not very sexy at all.� In retrospect, though, the conscious bloat of Catch A Fire seems more a part of the problem than the solution.

When biographers discuss how Marley was able to achieve superstardom where his peers failed, they often credit the ease with which he learned to play the part of rock god. By the time of Uprising — the last album released in his lifetime — the transformation was complete. The cover helped to cement his messianic status and set the template for the Bim Shermans of the world:

Dub And The Super Ape

Dub

In an industry where sales were built around promoting a hit song on a 7-inch single, producers grappled for decades with the question of what to do with the leftover b-side. In Jamaica, where every penny counted, producers would sometimes save money by creating an instrumental version of the a-side. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, a sound engineer and former radio repairman named Osbourne Ruddock began to experiment with deconstructing and rebuilding these instrumental tracks. Dropping certain elements in and out of the mix, bringing a snatch of vocal track back for ghostly effect, applying echo and reverb from effects boxes of his own devising — anything was fair game. A bystander describes the crowd’s reaction when Osbourne — better known as King Tubby — played his concoction at a dance one of the first times: “The crowd did a quick double take and then went wild, pushing down the fence until it was flattened, and then rushed in, knocking the speaker boxes flyingâ€� (from Reggae: The Rough Guide, page 197).

King Tubby and fellow innovators — most notably, Lee “Scratchâ€� Perry — continued pushing the envelope during the decade, creating their own musical idiom in the process and pioneering the role of producer-as-artist that would later find expression in disco, house and other forms of remix-oriented music.

Listen: Roots of Dub, King Tubby

Dub is consciously spooky music, full of cavernous spaces, unexpected collisions and ghostly half-suggested vocal lines. Lloyd Bradley (in This Is Reggae, pages 309–310) describes the “disconcerting� listening experience as “a reach back to Africa�: “The crushing bass ’n’ drum remixes keep us on our toes with such seemingly arbitrary SFX as explosions, crashes, windows breaking and big dogs barking, while through the judiciously employed echo some frighteningly large spaces open up quite suddenly. Such offerings, vividly evoking the smokey intensity of Rasta drumming, were almost allegoric, designed to inspire a notion of simmering, meditative righteousness and to strike dread, both literally and figuratively, into the heart of Babylon. Just as obeah used to scare the crap out of white folks down on the plantation…�

For all its technological forwardness, there is a deliberate African primitivism to dub, a talismanic spookiness. And yet this primitivism is also a bit of a put-on, like a Halloween costume or a fish that blows out its cheeks to appear more gruesome. Many dub album covers from the mid-’70s — especially those belonging to Lee “Scratchâ€� Perry — capture this quality perfectly with their aesthetic of tongue-in-cheek savagery:

Distended Marvel Comics-style lettering… A savage ape, emblematic of Africa… And yet the arrows and diagrammatic comic-book text tell us there’s an ironic self-awareness behind the whole thing.

Here, Coxsone Dodd — who had already been on the scene for about 20 years as a respected producer — wants you to believe that he was recently transformed into a woodcut monster.

The interest in Africa is also made plain on many Black Ark covers from this period, such as Lee Perry’s Chapter 1:

(Hat tip: Chris Morrow)

See also the exquisite Heart of the Congos (not a dub album, but a classic Perry production from the mid-’70s nevertheless):

Pop Culture, Movies and Dancehall

For all of the cultural defiance in some of the reggae album covers of the 1970s, Jamaican music has always been clearly influenced by American popular culture. Part of this stems from the Jamaicans’ love of a good joke, a willingness to subvert almost anything to playful effect. Secondly, Jamaicans love their movies. Thirdly, on an island where so many records are made, parody is in constant supply:

The Harder They Come caused a sensation when the major motion picture opened in Kingston. Thousands of people without tickets tried to storm the gates of the cinema. The exquisite illustration and typography owe a debt to both Hollywood Westerns and blaxploitation.

Other times, Jamaicans’ obsession with movies comes across in ways that are overtly silly and farcical:

(Hat tip: Chris Morrow)

The island’s musicians have shown a willingness to cover just about anything (including Christmas), a tendency that is often perceived as showing a lack of integrity. It would be more apt to view it as part of the famed Jamaican resourcefulness, the habit of mining every last bit of available source material:

These covers keep a safe satirical distance from the 500-pound gorilla that is US and UK pop culture. But during the dancehall phase of the 1980s, Jamaican sensibilities seem to get swallowed up by the aesthetic of materialism and arrogance in US hip-hop culture:

(Hat tip: Lars Hasvoll Bakke)

Credit Yellowman for at least maintaining a grotesque sense of humor in his postures (and, in some cases, a weirdly meticulous sense of photographic composition: check out how his belt aligns perfectly with the receding edge of the sidewalk in the cover above). As the ’70s rolled along, the appropriation of rap culture became depressingly void of self-awareness:

(Hat tip: Lars Hasvoll Bakke)

The ’80s: Things Unravel

With its lack of lyrical themes, dub music freed up cover artists to illustrate topical subjects and get the albums out onto the street in two to three weeks. London-based designer Tony McDermott, in particular, popularized a fun, irreverent approach to dub cover art in his work for musicians such as Scientist and Mad Professor:

By the mid-’80s, however, the comic-book style degenerated into an excuse to put out bad artwork quickly. These covers often accompanied albums that were themselves hastily assembled or poorly mastered reissue material. After King Tubby was mysteriously murdered outside his recording studio in 1989, for example, his backlog was looted and rushed out the door. This one in particular treats Tubby with all the dignity normally reserved for Burger King’s mascot:

The ’80s in general were a difficult time for the industry. Reeling from the death of Bob Marley and destabilized by the collapse of punk, reggae staggered into the new decade, struggling to find a new identity. The album covers reflect the hard times, as the genre contributed some of the worst covers you’ll ever see from this period. See Crestock’s “42 Reggae Album Cover Designs� for some particularly gruesome examples.

(Hat tip: Chris Morrow)

Enter Blood And Fire

Just when it looked like every idea had been exhausted, every theme mined and every cliche deployed, we’re reminded that the genre can always be visually reinvented with a little fresh thinking. The English label Blood and Fire formed in 1993 with the intention of reissuing Jamaican music to the same standards as jazz and blues, thereby “saving it from the world’s bargain bins and half-price tags,� in the words of founder Steve Barrow. Blood and Fire specializes in dub reissues, and its innovative covers have created a new visual vocabulary for the genre:

Gone are the attempts to personify Tubby as a cartoon character. Also gone, for that matter, are beaches, coconuts, women in bikinis, giant spliffs and every other tired staple of the genre.

In their place are tightly rendered scenes of scrap metal, raw surfaces and found objects: a commentary on the resourcefulness and grit of the producers who made dub music and the interior nocturnal spaces where they worked. Tubby and Lee Perry literally built their own studios, after all, as well as many of the devices and effects boxes therein. One of the great qualities of the Jamaican industry has always been its DIY ethic, which enables the music to stream from its makers to its audience with a minimum of calculation or interference from outside interests. Here is singer Max Romeo talking about the way things were done at Lee Perry’s Black Ark Studio in the 1970s:

We were just messin’ around with lyrics and the melody. Scratch say: “Sounds good.â€� He come out and decide to record it right away. It was out on the street in a couple of days. That’s the vibe we had at Black Ark — you didn’t have to say tomorrow or next week. You sound good, you go right now. It was fun days.

– From the liner notes to the Arkology box set (emphasis added).

Max Romeo’s memory of a spontaneous musical culture, an environment devoid of record label executives and MTV influence, is what informs Blood and Fire’s album covers. Although Blood and Fire is unfortunately now effectively defunct, the torch has been passed to other labels, such as Pressure Sounds, which has continued to explore ways to creatively package Jamaican reissues:

Conclusion

The modern history of Jamaica is a story that resonates in any number of former European colonies. But of all these countries, Jamaica is the only one whose music industry is so prolific that we can see the whole trajectory written on its album covers. Efforts to keep reggae popular on the world stage have led to a narrow conformist definition of the genre’s visual brand — an ironic fate for a music that is supposed to be about diversity and rebellion. The impressions left behind on Jamaica’s album covers, however, point to a wider and more fragmented social history, one that lacks the conformity of a marketing campaign and that contains the multitude of contradictions in the postcolonial experience.

One for the Road

Quick quiz for design nerds. Why does this posthumous compilation of The Skatalites’ deceased saxophonist include lettering from the Arts and Crafts period?

(Image: R~P~M)

Answer: Tommy McCook … Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Hey, whatever works.

Other Resources

You may be interested in the following articles and related resources:

• “42 Reggae Album Cover Designs: The Art and Culture of Jamaica,â€� Crestock
  If you enjoyed this article, run — don’t walk — to this selection of weird and wonderful album covers, including oddities such as Uglyman’s Ugly Lover.
• This Is Reggae Music, Lloyd Bradley
  This excellent volume on Jamaican music provides much of the historical context for this article.
• Stir It Up: Reggae Cover Art, Chris Morrow
  A collection of Jamaican album cover art. Another excellent resource.
• Muzikfan, Alastair Johnston
  Reviews of Jamaican and world music.
• Reggae: The Rough Guide, Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton

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© Dan Mayer for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

Where do good ideas come from? It’s a question that matters a great deal to designers, yet seems to be curiously discounted in the common perception of graphic design. Any time I talk with, say, an uncle at Thanksgiving about my work, I’m reminded that, in most people’s minds, the job of being a designer is mainly a matter of learning a set of computer applications — programs which, when properly operated, presumably do the work of generating ideas on their own.

If pressed further, most people will offer up some version of the Genius Theory: the idea that certain individuals are simply blessed with a force called ‘creativity’ that (as the theory goes) allows them to summon remarkable visual solutions to problems where the rest of us see only a blank canvas.

In this article, we will look at four examples of successful visual solutions created by well-known designers, and examine the process by which each designer arrived at his final concept. In each case, we will see that the solution did not arrive as a sudden flash of inspiration from out of the blue; rather, a good idea emerged methodically out of a sensible analysis of readily-available ideas and impressions.

In particular, we will zero in on the dual role played by clichés in this process: while clichés can derail the creative process, for seasoned designers they can act as the building blocks for effective solutions by telling them what not to do. In the final balance, we will see that good ideas are not created by magic, nor are they generated by computers — the process of developing them is a skill that can be learned, taught and practiced, and, like a muscle, gets stronger the more it is used.

Exhibit A: Imaginary ‘Drive Safe’ Campaign for Teens

Suppose we are working together at a studio and we receive a job to design a poster for a public service campaign aimed at educating teenagers about the dangers posed by drinking and driving. We meet for our first internal review to critique our initial ideas, and I present the following proposal:

In this case, the problem with my work is painfully easy to diagnose: the image simply has no connection to the message. It may or may not be nicely illustrated… but this is somewhat beside the point: unless it’s trying to speak to eight-year-old girls, this poster is not going to make a meaningful impression on its audience. If we imagine a spectrum of all possible design solutions to this job ranging from ‘totally clear’ to ‘totally unclear’, this would rank pretty far in the latter direction:

‘Fine,’ I reply, tearfully storming back to my desk. A week later, I present a revised concept, confident that it speaks to the audience more directly:

This time, the problem is a little harder to put one’s finger on. The image communicates clearly… but it does so at the cost of boring us half to death, with no humor, inflection or engagement. Also disturbing is the fact that I’m using a pre-existing visual symbol from the urban environment — the stop sign — to do my communicating for me.

If we had never before seen a red eight-sided shape with the word ‘STOP’ inside, it might be a powerful and abstract creation; as things stand, however, the symbol has become so deadeningly familiar that it has lost all capability to impact us in a meaningful way. In my eagerness to communicate clearly, I’ve run headlong into the arms of a cliché — which, in the context of graphic design, can be defined as  ‘an image that may or may not have been memorable at one point, but has since been so overused that it has lost all ability to surprise.’

The Problem of Clichés

This imaginary case study demonstrates why clichés are such a stubborn problem for designers. In the example above, I didn’t arrive at a cliché because I’m a terrible or uncreative person; I arrived at it because I took the most readily-available solution from the environment around me, and stopped there.

Clichés are hard to banish from our thoughts because their sheer familiarity makes them appealing: they are always at hand, ready to be put into service; and — especially if we are working under pressure — their familiarity offers a certain amount of reassurance, a guarantee that we won’t be misunderstood. Design solutions that employ clichés are the hardest for me to critique in the feedback sessions that I run as a teacher: often, there is the frustrating sense that the student has done nothing wrong exactly, yet the overall design leaves us wanting more.

Most depressing of all is the fact that clients often prefer clichéd solutions to original ones. This is the syndrome of the Chinese restaurant owner who wants us to use the same tired chopstick lettering for her sign because ‘that way, people will know it’s a Chinese restaurant’. Wanting only to be correctly identified, the client is drawn to the universality of clichés: they have, after all, the same meaning for everybody within a particular culture, which — if only they weren’t so hackneyed — would make them an ideal communication tool for designers.

In the haste to fit in, the need to stand out has been forgotten. It is our responsibility as designers to make the case that design can serve both ends at once: it can speak plainly while still leaving a mark on its audience.

Every area of graphic design has its built-in clichés. But none more so than images that seek to convey a sense of ethnicity, where the same predictable type choices pop up again and again (shown left to right: Sunamy, Papyrus, Neuland). See Rob Giampierto’s indispensable article New Black Face for more on this topic.

Clichés, in short, are the empty calories of the design world: like junk food, they are available everywhere and easy to consume, but pass through us without leaving nutrition behind. Their prevalence arises from the shared nervousness with which designers often view their clients and their clients view design: satisfied merely to get to the point across in an obvious manner, both sides neglect to create a message that will live in a viewer’s memory and foster long-term recognition and loyalty.

If the above hypothetical campaign has given us examples of two flawed extremes — one too obvious and the first not obvious enough — what does it look like when a designer hits the sweet spot in between? And, more importantly, how did he or she get there?

Exhibit B: Craig Frazier

In 1987, the designer Craig Frazier did a poster for this very purpose, a public service campaign aimed at persuading kids to not drive home drunk from their senior high school prom. His poster:

Like Goldilocks’ bowl of porridge, this solution is just right: it communicates its message with appropriate urgency, but the weapon of surprise is also part of the attack. “It has an art quality that removes it from the realm of ordinary public service campaigns,” Frazier noted in a 1996 interview with Critique magazine, in which he also identified it as a personal best. “It presents a visual riddle that’s almost attractive at first glance, but gets more gruesome the more you study it.â€�

The unconventional presentation of the subject matter requires us to spend a split second visually decoding the image, discerning its story… and, in that moment of cognitive engagement, a connection is formed between viewer and image. The abstract and original treatment of the topic allows the poster to sneak past our defenses — in Frazier’s words, “it proves that you don’t have to be condescending to convey a deadly serious message.â€� Whereas the Stop Sign approach droned authoritatively at its viewer, this execution lures the onlooker into a perceptual dialogue, and refrains from talking down to its touchy teenage audience (note the quiet treatment of the tagline in the lower left corner).

In sum, by avoiding an overly obvious delivery, the designer cleared the way for a work that leaves a lasting impression: “I still get tingles when I think about the poor guy on the road,” Frazier commented nearly ten years later. “I have a visceral, emotional reaction.â€� Impactful? Check. Emotional? Check. Clear in meaning? Check. “What makes the poster work is the same thing that makes any good ad or brochure work,” Frazier concludes: “It’s engaging and memorable to its intended audience.”

So how did he get there? Not, as my uncle might assume, by virtue of being a creative genius who effortlessly vaults over commonplace ideas (nor simply by owning a computer). Rather, to judge from his own comments, Frazier arrived at his solution by taking accurate stock of the commonplace and determining in what direction the fresh territory lay:  “These kids had already been hit with plenty of preaching and scare tactics about drunk driving and drug abuse, not only from their parents, but also the media,” the designer recalled, explaining his thought process.

“I knew what I didn’t want to do — a poster that presented the consequences in such a grizzly fashion that the student could dismiss it as another image from a Highway Patrol film. Even though I knew these images could be effective — like the ads of that time by Fallon McElliot — I wanted this poster to be gripping, not scolding.” Put in the simplest possible terms, Frazier came up with his idea by identifying the resident cliché and then setting out in the opposite direction.

Simple as this approach might sound, the tangible benefits are worth taking note of:  “All reports indicated that the students received the poster well,” Frazier recalled, “and many students requested copies for their bedroom walls. The effectiveness of any poster is hard to measure, but the fact that they looked at it, and are still looking at it, makes it a success.â€� What the reaction to Frazier’s poster, and the process behind its making, point to is the surprisingly transparent nature of graphic design — the extent to which the creator’s subjective experience in making a piece bleeds over into the observer’s reaction to it.

Creative solutions that take no searching on the part of the designer rarely make a mark on the audience either. If the designer is willing to set out in a direction whose end point is not immediately apparent, on the other hand, the journey taken is relayed back to the viewer in the split second of perception, and this experience of distance — of having a message relayed to us in terms that are clear and yet outside the ordinary — can make the experience of seeing memorable. In the next section, we will look at another work whose dramatic impact derives from the fact that its author moved beyond his immediate first impressions in order to create it.

Exhibit C: Art Spiegelman

Best known as the creator of the acclaimed graphic novel Maus, Art Spiegelman was working as a staff artist for the New Yorker magazine on September 11th,  2001. A resident of downtown Manhattan, he lived a short distance from Ground Zero and was grappling with the day’s events when a call came through from the New Yorker office explaining that, incredibly, the magazine would be putting out a special issue at the end of the week and needed a cover from him as soon as possible.

Settling down to a daunting task, Spiegelman started out by painting his most immediate visceral impressions of the day: the vivid blue sky that hung over New York on that day and its incongruity with the smoke, ruin and destruction that had transpired. After a while, he had created an illustration that looked something like this:

We know what this image looked like because Spiegelman later used it for the cover for an anthology of writing about the September 11th attacks called 110 Stories. But, for his magazine cover, Spiegelman rejected this direction. Why? “I was barking up the wrong tree,â€� he later told The Progressive magazine: “It had a blue sky and orange building; it was channeling [René] Magritte, with the thought bubble, ‘It’s such a nice day, what a bummer.’ It was a reasonable cover for a book that came out a year later, but it just wasn’t sufficient, because anything with a nice blue sky and pretty orange building was just too pretty. And pretty outweighed whatever meanings those shrouds had.â€�

Spiegelman’s use of blue sky here isn’t a cliché in the conventional sense… but in the context of his design process, it was functioning in much the same way that a cliché does: a too-readily-available impression that speaks too literally to its audience and thereby dulls the piece’s potential emotional charge.

Rather than trashing his canvas and starting from scratch, however, Spiegelman simply responded to what he didn’t like: “I kept trying to gray down and dim down the image, so, OK, a less blue sky, less orange buildings. [...] Then I finally said to Francoise that it should just be a black-on-black cover because every time I was walking to my studio from my house I kept finding myself turning around to make sure the towers were not there, as though they were a kind of phantom limb”:

What binds both Frazier and Spiegelman’s accounts together is the evidence that neither artist could have visualized his final solution from the outset of the process. Both used (perhaps it’s even fair to say needed) the intermediary steps of (a) identifying cliché and (b) reacting to cliché to set them in the right direction.

Exhibit D: Ivan Chermayeff

Our fourth example involves a case where simple associations were not so much rejected as stitched together in an imaginative manner to create a complex and engaging message.

For decades, the office of Chermayeff & Geismar has managed to produce memorable images with a narrative capability, pieces that quickly tell a story in an engaging manner. One such work is Ivan Chermayeff’s poster for a television series called Between the Wars that covers the diplomatic efforts that transpired between 1914 and 1940. Even more overtly than Craig Frazier’s poster, this work deliberately presents a puzzle to the viewer, whose enjoyment of the piece lies in the process of assembling its visual clues:

The designer did not, however, set out with the intention of being clever. When I emailed Chermayeff to ask about the challenge of Between The Wars, he replied as follows: “A title which raises many questions. The process of illustrating such a title was the search for images that will immediately answer those questions. Together those images must connect as a coordinated and related whole image.”

“What are possible symbols of World War I and World War II that existed and that are immediately recognized in our time?” Note that, again, the process again begins with the gathering of simple, readily-apparent associations:  ”Maps, armaments, tanks, nationalities and their physical characteristics, trends, battlefields — there are many, many things. Most of them too complex to be a simple, resonating image.” In response to the problem — complexity — the designer sets out looking for its opposite, simplicity: “One thinks and searches, one looks at the available visual records of two world wars, and what comes up —Helmets!”

“Helmets evolved and they changed over the years. But they are always there in the photographs. Once seen, they are seized. One can hold them in one’s hand, and everyone recognizes them. So what remains to fill the gap between 1918 and 1940? What is the image of the 22 years between to match the simplicity of the two helmets at either side? Talk and discourse and ambition all surround the nations engaged in these two conflicts. The common thread is diplomacy. What is like a helmet but not a part of war? A hat! A diplomatic hat of a statesman in the twenties and thirties is the homburg, and it fits between the wars on the head just like a helmet.”

In this case, the final design does not so much refute the clichés of the field as cleverly assemble them. But the thought process behind it works in the same way: it starts with the readily-available information and works methodically, step by step, to react to what is lacking in the first sweep of associations.

Exhibit E: Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain

It seems to be easier to talk about idea generation in the context of print than web. A designer’s success, or lack thereof, in coming up with a good idea shows itself more plainly when the medium is something like a poster (as in the Frazier and Chermayeff examples above) or a magazine cover (Spiegelman), which are only called upon to communicate a single visual message to the onlooker. A typical web interface, in contrast, must balance a host of competing priorities — navigational, functional, hierarchical — the sum of which can frequently obscure our understanding of how successful the designer was in one particular area.

Nevertheless, web design needs fresh thinking just as much as print design, and the role played by clichés can be every bit as detrimental. Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain’s account of redesigning the website for Steinway and Sons explains how a formulaic approach to one issue (in this case, layout) can deprive the design of strength in another key area (aesthetic/emotional impact). Bennett-Chamberlain has a nice write-up of this project in the Notebook section of his site, 31three.com — the following discussion is drawn from his account and from follow-up questions I posed to him by email.

Having never worked with the client before, Bennett-Chamberlain recounts that he “played it safe” in his initial process and “started off with a design that closely followed a wireframe that they provided”:

This wireframe suggests a classic template for usability — “a layout that was very typical,” Bennett-Chamberlain recalls, “and reminded me mostly of Apple”. (In fact, you can see that this layout is almost exactly that of Apple’s homepage). While there is nothing necessarily wrong with following the lead of an acclaimed site like Apple’s, in this case, the boxy, conventional guidelines proposed by the client’s wireframe led to an initial design that failed to do justice to the subject matter:

Not a bad design, by any means… and yet if you removed Lang Lang from his piano bench and placed him inside a luxury car, this could quickly become a site for Audi or Lexus. “I thought the initial design was okay,” Bennett-Chamberlain explains, “but it still didn’t feel ‘Steinway’ to me. It seemed a bit underdeveloped, too easy of a solution for such an elegant brand.”

Much of the problem lay with the cookie-cutter wireframe: “Although the image of Lang Lang was dynamic and had some energy, the layout of the site felt pretty linear, boxy, and well… boring.” Lost in the conventional presentation were the aspects of the grand piano that make it truly remarkable: its shape, its contours, and, of course, its sound. “I wanted the piano to be in the spotlight,” he recalls, “and not share the stage with anything else.” Bennett-Chamberlain presented a variant design that strayed a bit from the recommended wireframe by “placing the piano front and centre, and then building the site around it”:

In the final iteration, Lang Lang has been reluctantly whisked off the stage, and the instrument itself is the star of the show. The piano’s distinctive contours are emphasized by the graceful arc placed behind it, and by the decision to have its lid peek up above the designated promo area into the top nav. The background motif of piano strings has been ramped up to create a semi-abstract, radial representation of sound (indeed, you can almost hear the piano in the final design).

In the nav bar area, the usual ‘logo left’ convention has been discarded here for centered treatment that makes you feel like you’re sitting on the bench itself and gazing at the Steinway and Sons trademark sitting over middle C. Yet nothing has been lost in terms of ease-of-use compared with Bennett-Chamberlain’s original design — it simply took an effort of self-critique and problem-solving to do justice to both the functional and aesthetic possibilities of the project: “I figured that if these guys can spend a year making a single piano, I could probably spend an extra couple hours here and there on refining these details.”

Putting It Into Practice

These works by Frazier, Spiegelman, Chermayeff and Bennett-Chamberlain are classic examples of what designers like to call ‘process work’ or ‘methodology’, terms that refer to a method of drawing ideas, direction and inspiration from the process of working on the design itself, rather than simply having a fixed destination from the outset. No one can write step-by-step instructions on how to do this — the entire point, after all, is to react, rather than obeying fixed directives — but there are certain steps we can take at the outset of a project that help clear the way to let this process happen:

• Start with a sketchbook, not a computer. There was a time when I once suspected that the teachers who tried to impress this point on me were just cranky technophobes… but over time, I came to appreciate the wisdom of this suggestion. The computer is a bad companion to start with because its particular toolset pushes us in certain directions (towards clearly defined shapes and hard edges) and because it tempts us to focus overly on execution (by offering up sexy drop shadows and whatnot) before our concept has really come together.
• Using your sketchbook, start by drawing every association you come up with for the subject matter. Draw it quickly, and don’t be critical. At this stage, it’s not about making pretty pictures, and it’s not about evaluating your ideas (in fact, the ability to turn the critical part of your brain on and off is one of the most helpful tricks you can develop).
• Don’t try to avoid clichés — let them happen. Trying not to think of clichés is like the old joke where someone says ‘Don’t think of a pink elephant.’ It’s best to get them down on paper and get them out of your system.
• Once you’ve jotted down every association you can think of, take a break, come back and jot down a few more. Then, take a longer break…
• Come back with fresh eyes and look at what you have in front of you. Now is the time to be critical, but also to be fair. Seeing our own work clearly for its merits, without bias and defensiveness, is one of the hardest things for graphic designers to do. George Orwell wasn’t thinking about graphic designers when he wrote, “To see clearly what is in front of one’s face requires constant struggle,” but he might as well have been.

Conclusion

There is no single answer to the question of where good ideas come from. Some designs actually do seem to come out of thin air, like the Citibank logo that Paula Scher infamously drew on a napkin during an early meeting with the client. But a great many more good ideas come about through the incremental process described in this article, of gathering and making decisions about readily-available information.

The viability of this approach suggests that coming up with good ideas is not a matter of genius, but rather simply a challenge of seeing clearly and thinking sensibly. The good news that this implies is, idea generation is a learnable skill that can be cultivated in many of us, not just in a chosen few. The only disappointing part is that you don’t get to feel like a genius while you’re doing it.

If idea generation is a process that is accessible to everyone, then what accounts for the fact that it can be so hard to pull off? Part of the answer lies in our inability to get out of our own way, a condition which stems largely from our ideas about what it means to be a ‘professional’. The term ‘professional’ is generally used to connote a person who is in control of their work process at all times… and, yet, as we’ve seen in this article, the condition of absolute control is rarely a place where exciting design comes from.

“What is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression,” Milton Glaser writes in his wonderful essay Ten Things I Have Learned. “Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success.” Graphic design is one of the few fields where it works to our advantage if we can let go of the reins from time to time, a feature that makes it to be an exhilarating place to work if we can manage not to find it unnerving.

Credits

I would like to thank Craig Frazier for his assistance in locating a copy of the Critique ‘My Best / My Worst’ interview used in this article, and also Ivan Chermayeff and Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain for taking the time to answer my questions.

Sources

• Neumeier, Marty and Frazier, Craig (1996) ‘My Best / My Worst’, Critique, Summer 1996
• Siegal, Nina (2005), ‘Art Spiegelman Interview’, The Progressive, January 2005
• Unicorn illustration by Xploitme, used under Creative Commons license

Other Resources

You may be interested in the following articles and related resources:

• Craig Frazier Studio
  Web site for this noted designer, illustrator and writer
• Chermayeff & Geismar
  Founded in 1958, Chermayeff & Geismar is one of the world’s most acclaimed brand design firms, and have also produced their fair share of remarkable and engaging poster work
• Art Spiegelman Interview in The Progressive
  Complete transcript of interview quoted from in this article
• 31three.com
  Portfolio of Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain
• Ten Things I Have Learned
  Invaluable essay from Milton Glaser, another long-time practitioner of idea-driven design
• New Black Face
  Must-read article by Rob Giampierto on the complicity of typography in ethnic clichés
• Brainstorm #9 Logo Process
  Nice writeup from Fabio Sasso tracing the creative process behind a specific logo project

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© Dan Mayer for Smashing Magazine, 2011. | Permalink | Post a comment | Smashing Shop | Smashing Network | About Us
Post tags: business, cliche, Design, generation, idea, ideation, process

For many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. There seem to be endless choices — from normal, conventional-looking fonts to novelty candy cane fonts and bunny fonts — with no way of understanding the options, only never-ending lists of categories and recommendations. Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose intuition, and takes years of experience to develop a feeling for. Here are five guidelines for picking and using fonts that I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography.

1. Dress For The Occasion

Many of my beginning students go about picking a font as though they were searching for new music to listen to: they assess the personality of each face and look for something unique and distinctive that expresses their particular aesthetic taste, perspective and personal history. This approach is problematic, because it places too much importance on individuality.

The most appropriate analogy for picking type. (Photo credit: Samuuraijohnny. Used under Creative Commons license.)

For better or for worse, picking a typeface is more like getting dressed in the morning. Just as with clothing, there’s a distinction between typefaces that are expressive and stylish versus those that are useful and appropriate to many situations, and our job is to try to find the right balance for the occasion. While appropriateness isn’t a sexy concept, it’s the acid test that should guide our choice of font.

My “favorite” piece of clothing is probably an outlandish pair of 70s flare bellbottoms that I bought at a thrift store, but the reality is that these don’t make it out of my closet very often outside of Halloween. Every designer has a few favorite fonts like this — expressive personal favorites that we hold onto and wait for the perfect festive occasion to use. More often, I find myself putting on the same old pair of Levis morning after morning. It’s not that I like these better than my cherished flares, exactly… I just seem to wind up wearing them most of the time.

Every designer has a few workhorse typefaces that are like comfortable jeans: they go with everything, they seem to adapt to their surroundings and become more relaxed or more formal as the occasion calls for, and they just seem to come out of the closet day after day. Usually, these are faces that have a number of weights (Light, Regular, Bold, etc) and/or cuts (Italic, Condensed, etc). My particular safety blankets are: Myriad, Gotham, DIN,Akzidenz Grotesk and Interstate among the sans; Mercury, Electra and Perpetua among the serif faces.

A large type family like Helvetica Neue can be used to express a range of voices and emotions. Versatile and comfortable to work with, these faces are like a favorite pair of jeans for designers.

2. Know Your Families: Grouping Fonts

The clothing analogy gives us a good idea of what kind of closet we need to put together. The next challenge is to develop some kind of structure by which we can mentally categorize the different typefaces we run across.

Typefaces can be divided and subdivided into dozens of categories (Scotch Modern, anybody?), but we only really need to keep track of five groups to establish a working understanding of the majority of type being used in the present-day landscape.

The following list is not meant as a comprehensive classification of each and every category of type (there are plenty of great sites on the web that already tackle this, such as Typedia’s type classifications) but rather as a manageable shorthand overview of key groups. Let’s look at two major groups without serifs (serifs being the little feet at the ends of the letterforms), two with serifs, and one outlier (with big, boxey feet).

1. Geometric Sans

I’m actually combining three different groups here (Geometric, Realist and Grotesk), but there is enough in common between these groups that we can think of them as one entity for now. Geometric Sans-Serifs are those faces that are based on strict geometric forms. The individual letter forms of a Geometric Sans often have strokes that are all the same width and frequently evidence a kind of “less is more” minimalism in their design.

At their best, Geometric Sans are clear, objective, modern, universal; at their worst, cold, impersonal, boring. A classic Geometric Sans is like a beautifully designed airport: it’s impressive, modern and useful, but we have to think twice about whether or not we’d like to live there.

Examples of Geometric/Realist/Grotesk Sans: Helvetica, Univers, Futura, Avant Garde, Akzidenz Grotesk, Franklin Gothic, Gotham.

2. Humanist Sans

These are Sans faces that are derived from handwriting — as clean and modern as some of them may look, they still retain something inescapably human at their root. Compare the ‘t’ in the image above to the ‘t’ in ‘Geometric’ and note how much more detail and idiosyncrasy the Humanist ‘t’ has.

This is the essence of the Humanist Sans: whereas Geometric Sans are typically designed to be as simple as possible, the letter forms of a Humanist font generally have more detail, less consistency, and frequently involve thinner and thicker stoke weights — after all they come from our handwriting, which is something individuated. At their best, Humanist Sans manage to have it both ways: modern yet human, clear yet empathetic. At their worst, they seem wishy-washy and fake, the hand servants of corporate insincerity.

Examples of Humanist Sans: Gill Sans, Frutiger, Myriad, Optima, Verdana.

3. Old Style

Also referred to as ‘Venetian’, these are our oldest typefaces, the result of centuries of incremental development of our calligraphic forms. Old Style faces are marked by little contrast between thick and thin (as the technical restrictions of the time didn’t allow for it), and the curved letter forms tend to tilt to the left (just as calligraphy tilts). Old Style faces at their best are classic, traditional, readable and at their worst are… well, classic and traditional.

Examples of Old Style: Jenson, Bembo, Palatino, and — especially — Garamond, which was considered so perfect at the time of its creation that no one really tried much to improve on it for a century and a half.

4. Transitional and Modern

An outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking, Transitional (mid 18th Century) and Modern (late 18th century, not to be confused with mid 20th century modernism) typefaces emerged as type designers experimented with making their letterforms more geometric, sharp and virtuosic than the unassuming faces of the Old Style period. Transitional faces marked a modest advancement in this direction — although Baskerville, a quintessential Transitional typeface, appeared so sharp to onlookers that people believed it could hurt one’s vision to look at it.

In carving Modernist punches, type designers indulged in a kind of virtuosic demonstration of contrasting thick and thin strokes — much of the development was spurred by a competition between two rival designers who cut similar faces, Bodoni and Didot. At their best, transitional and modern faces seem strong, stylish, dynamic. At their worst, they seem neither here nor there — too conspicuous and baroque to be classic, too stodgy to be truly modern.

Examples of transitional typefaces: Times New Roman, Baskerville.
Examples of Modern serifs: Bodoni, Didot.

5. Slab Serifs

Also known as ‘Egyptian’ (don’t ask), the Slab Serif is a wild card that has come strongly back into vogue in recent years. Slab Serifs usually have strokes like those of sans faces (that is, simple forms with relatively little contrast between thick and thin) but with solid, rectangular shoes stuck on the end. Slab Serifs are an outlier in the sense that they convey very specific — and yet often quite contradictory — associations: sometimes the thinker, sometimes the tough guy; sometimes the bully, sometimes the nerd; sometimes the urban sophisticate, sometimes the cowboy.

They can convey a sense of authority, in the case of heavy versions like Rockwell, but they can also be quite friendly, as in the recent favorite Archer. Many slab serifs seem to express an urban character (such as Rockwell, Courier and Lubalin), but when applied in a different context (especially Clarendon) they strongly recall the American Frontier and the kind of rural, vernacular signage that appears in photos from this period. Slab Serifs are hard to generalize about as a group, but their distinctive blocky serifs function something like a pair of horn-rimmed glasses: they add a distinctive wrinkle to anything, but can easily become overly conspicuous in the wrong surroundings.

Examples of Slab Serifs: Clarendon, Rockwell, Courier, Lubalin Graph, Archer.

3. Don’t Be a Wimp: The Principle of Decisive Contrast

So, now that we know our families and some classic examples of each, we need to decide how to mix and match and — most importantly — whether to mix and match at all. Most of the time, one typeface will do, especially if it’s one of our workhorses with many different weights that work together. If we reach a point where we want to add a second face to the mix, it’s always good to observe this simple rule: keep it exactly the same, or change it a lot — avoid wimpy, incremental variations.

This is a general principle of design, and its official name is correspondence and contrast. The best way to view this rule in action is to take all the random coins you collected in your last trip through Europe and dump them out on a table together. If you put two identical coins next to each other, they look good together because they match (correspondence). On the other hand, if we put a dime next to one of those big copper coins we picked up somewhere in Central Europe, this also looks interesting because of the contrast between the two — they look sufficiently different.

What doesn’t work so well is when put our dime next to a coin from another country that’s almost the same size and color but slightly different. This creates an uneasy visual relationship because it poses a question, even if we barely register it in on a conscious level — our mind asks the question of whether these two are the same or not, and that process of asking and wondering distracts us from simply viewing.

When we combine multiple typefaces on a design, we want them to coexist comfortably — we don’t want to distract the viewer with the question, are these the same or not? We can start by avoiding two different faces from within one of the five categories that we listed above all together — two geometric sans, say Franklin and Helvetica. While not exactly alike, these two are also not sufficiently different and therefore put our layout in that dreaded neither-here-nor-there place.

If we are going to throw another font into the pot along with Helvetica, much better if we use something like Bembo, a classic Old Style face. Centuries apart in age and light years apart in terms of inspiration, Helvetica and Bembo have enough contrast to comfortably share a page:

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just picking fonts that are very, very different — placing our candy cane font next to, say, Garamond or Caslon does not guarantee us typographic harmony. Often, as in the above example of Helvetica and Bembo, there’s no real explanation for why two faces complement each other — they just do.

But if we want some principle to guide our selection, it should be this: often, two typefaces work well together if they have one thing in common but are otherwise greatly different. This shared common aspect can be visual (similar x-height or stroke weight) or it can be chronological. Typefaces from the same period of time have a greater likelihood of working well together… and if they are by the same designer, all the better.

4. A Little Can Go a Long Way

‘Enough with all these conventional-looking fonts and rules!’ you say. ‘I need something for my rave flyer! And my Thai restaurant menu! And my Christmas cards!’ What you’re pointing out here is that all the faces I’ve discussed so far are ‘body typefaces’, meaning you could conceivably set a whole menu or newspaper with any of them; in the clothing analogy presented in part one, these are our everyday Levis. What of our Halloween flares?

Periodically, there’s a need for a font that oozes with personality, whether that personality is warehouse party, Pad Thai or Santa Claus. And this need brings us into the vast wilderness of Display typefaces, which includes everything from Comic Sans to our candy-cane and bunny fonts. ‘Display’ is just another way of saying ‘do not exceed recommended dosage‘: applied sparingly to headlines, a display font can add a well-needed dash of flavor to a design, but it can quickly wear out its welcome if used too widely.

Time for another clothing analogy:

(Photo credit: Betsssssy. Used under Creative Commons license.)

Betsey’s outfit works because the pink belts acts as an accent and is offset by the down-to-earthiness of blue jeans. But if we get carried away and slather Betsey entirely in pink, she might wind up looking something like this:

(Photo credit: Phillip Leroyer). Used under Creative Commons license.)

Let’s call this the Pink Belt Principle of Type: display faces with lots of personality are best used in small doses. If we apply our cool display type to every bit of text in our design, the aesthetic appeal of the type is quickly spent and — worse yet — our design becomes very hard to read. Let’s say we’re designing a menu for our favorite corner Thai place. Our client might want us to use a ‘typically’ Asian display face, like Sho:

So far, so good. But look what happens when we apply our prized font choice to the entire menu:

Enough already. Let’s try replacing some of the rank-and-file text copy with something more neutral:

That’s better. Now that we’ve reined in the usage of our star typeface, we’ve allowed it to shine again.

5. Rule Number Five Is ‘There Are No Rules’

Really. Look hard enough and you will find a dazzling-looking menu set entirely in a hard-to-read display font. Or of two different Geometric Sans faces living happily together on a page (in fact, just this week I wound up trying this on a project and was surprised to find that it hit the spot). There are only conventions, no ironclad rules about how to use type, just as there are no rules about how we should dress in the morning. It’s worth trying everything just to see what happens — even wearing your Halloween flares to your court date.

In Conclusion

Hopefully, these five principles will have given you some guidelines for how to select, apply and mix type — and, indeed, whether to mix it at all. In the end, picking typefaces requires a combination of understanding and intuition, and — as with any skill — demands practice. With all the different fonts we have access to nowadays, it’s easy to forget that there’s nothing like a classic typeface used well by somebody who knows how to use it.

Some of the best type advice I ever received came early on from my first typography teacher: pick one typeface you like and use it over and over for months to the exclusion of all others. While this kind of exercise can feel constraining at times, it can also serve as a useful reminder that the quantity of available choices in the internet age is no substitute for quality.

Other Resources

You may be interested in the following articles and related resources:

• Typedia Type Classifications
  A more extensive list of different categories and sub-categories of typefaces than the simplified version presented in this article.
• So You Need A Typeface?
  Useful — and humorous — flowchart for selecting type, brought to you by Julian Hansen via Inspiration Lab.
• The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
  Link to the Amazon.com order page for this 1992 classic.
• What Type Are You?
  Pentagram’s patented personality test.
• Best Practices of Combining Typefaces
  This articles takes a close look at some of the best practices for combining typefaces — as well as some blunders to avoid.

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© Dan Mayer for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: Fonts, typography