Typography Tour

I've finally settled into New York, where I will be interning for a small graphic design firm on the Upper West Side. While I’ve visited New York countless times, this is the first time that I’ll actually be living here for an extended period. For the next few months, I have the opportunity to soak in all the amazing art and design at my fingertips. New York typography is especially interesting because there are so many pockets of New York with different cultures, past and present. After all, New York is considered “the world’s second home.”

Focusing on my particular interest in typography, I came across a website for the Type Directors Club (TDC), an international organization for “all people who are devoted to excellence in typography” through a variety of disciplines (advertising, communications, education, marketing, and publishing). In recent years (TDC has existed since 1946), TDC has led four original lettering tours of New York, led by typography specialists and covering areas like the Financial District, Civic Center, Tribeca, Midtown, Morningside Heights, Washington Heights, Inwood, Brooklyn Heights, and Park Slope. It’s quite fitting that with all the recent hype over Gotham (the typeface popularized by Obama’s campaign) that I was able to find a Google Earth itinerary (god bless technology) for the tour that Tobias Frere-Jones, the typeface’s creator, gave in conjunction with AIGA/NY this past fall.

I started by the Municipal Building, U.S. Court House and other government buildings and then proceeded through Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Lower East Side. Given that I had to serve as my own tour guide and just went by a map with no clue where or at what I was really supposed to be looking, it was a frustrating at times… but totally worth it. I could see how some of the letterforms inspired Gotham’s creation. It amazed me how the signs I was led to weren’t designed by graphic designers, as they would be today. Rather, they were architectural letterforms, designed by engineers or draftsmen, and legibility and durability were probably the most important aspects to consider in their design.

Here are some pictures that I took during my tour (didn't want to post all 60):

Here is some really interesting information courtesy of the Hoefler Type Foundry (Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones’ foundry) on the history of these letterforms and the inspiration of Gotham:

Like most American cities, New York is host to a number of mundane buildings whose facades exhibit a distinctively American form of sans serif. This kind of lettering occurs in many media: the same office buildings whose numbers are rendered in this style, in steel or cast bronze, often use this form of lettering for their engraved cornerstones as well. Cast iron plaques regularly feature this kind of lettering, as do countless painted signs and lithographed posters, many dating back as far as the Work Projects Administration of the 1930s. And judging by how often it appears in signs for car parks and liquor stores, this might well be the natural form once followed by neon-lit aluminum channel letters. Although there is nothing to suggest that the makers of these different kinds of signs ever consciously followed the same models, the consistency with which this style of letter appears in the American urban landscape suggests that these forms were once considered in some way elemental. But with the arrival of mechanical signmaking in the 1960s, these letters died out, completely vanishing from production.

Although designers have lived with this lettering for half a century, it has remarkably gone unrevived until now. In 2000, Tobias Frere-Jones undertook a study of building lettering in New York, starting with a charming but rarely examined sign for the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Though Frere-Jones wanted Gotham to exhibit the "mathematical reasoning of a draftsman" rather than the instincts of a type designer, he allowed Gotham to escape the grid wherever necessary, giving the design an affability usually missing from 'geometric' faces. Unlike the signage upon which it was based, Gotham includes a lowercase, an italic, a full range of weights, and a related condensed design.

In just the few months that have passed since the tour was given, some of the lettering from the original tour was already gone. For example, Gertel’s Bakery at 53 Hester Street was an empty lot. I witnessed firsthand these letterforms’ “inevitable race with the wrecking ball,” as the Hoefler Type Foundry referred to it, and my tour inspired me to go explore in these next few weeks, camera in hand, the other inspiring (yet expiring) lettering that New York City has to offer.

About the tour: http://www.typography.com/ask/showBlog.php?blogID=10
The origin of Gotham: http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_history.php?historyItemID=1&productLineID=100008
A NYT article on a previous letterforms tour led by Paul Shaw: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/23/arts/design/23type.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
The Type Directors Club website: http://www.tdc.org/index.html