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 The Metropolis Observed October 2001
The original Bell font--created in 1937 by Chauncey Griffith for Bell Telephone Company--was designed to maximize the amount of information that could fit onto one phone-book page and be legible under the poorest conditions. "I had always admired the Bell Gothic design because it solves its problem really well," says Tobias Frere-Jones, a graphic-design critic at Yale University school of art and creator of Griffith Gothic. "But it reproduced constraints that were no longer relevant," he says, citing the width restrictions imposed by the old linotype machines. Of Griffith Gothic--which he created for Font Bureau--he explains, "Much of what I was doing was to take Chauncey Griffith's ideas and play them out in an environment that didn't have too many technical restrictions." Both Bell and Griffith are most easily identified by the thin crossbars on the letter I. However, Griffith's characters are freer than Bell's, which look like they're pressed inside a rectangle. "We needed a typeface that was authoritative, that had boldness and strength," New York magazine's Michael Picón says of why he redesigned its pages with Griffith last year. "But we also wanted to soften it up and put social trend pieces in [the magazine]. This font embraces all of those things." Frere-Jones, of the Hoefler Type Foundry, suggests computer pervasiveness as the reason for the fonts' appeal. "People are beginning to tire of anything overly clinical and cold." |
