5 Trick Pony Brand Guidelines v3

Choose faces whose individual spirit and
character is in keeping with the text.
4.4
Types
& Faces
Accidental associations are rarely a good basis for choosing a typeface.
Books of poems by the twentieth-century Jewish Ameri- can poet Marvin Bell, for example, have sometimes
been set in Bell type -which is eighteenth-century, English and Presbyterian - solely because of the name.
Such puns are a private amusement for typographers; they also sometimes work. But a typographic page
so well designed that it attains a life of its own will be based on real affinities, not on an inside joke.
Letterforms have character, spirit and personality. Typog- raphers learn to discern these features
through years of working first-hand with the forms, and through studying and comparing the work of
other designers, present and past. On close inspec- tion, typefaces reveal many hints of their designers’
times and temperaments, and even their nationalities and religious faiths. Faces chosen on these grounds
are likely to give more interesting results than faces chosen through mere convenience of availability or
coincidence of name.
If, for example, you are setting a text by a woman, you might prefer a face, or several faces, designed by
a woman. Such faces were rare or nonexistent in earlier centuries, but there are now a number to choose
from. They include Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse’s admirable Alcuin, Carmina, Diotima and Nofret families;
Eliza- beth Friedlander’s Elizabeth; Kris Holmes’s Sierra and Lucida; Kris Holmes’s and Janice Prescott
Fishman’s Shannon; Carol Twombly’s handsome text face Chaparral and her titling faces Charlemagne,
Lithos, Nueva and Trajan; Zuzana Licko’s Journal and Mrs Eaves, and Ilse Schiile’s Rhapsodie. For some
purposes, one might also go back to the work of Elizabeth Colwell, whose ColwellHandletter,issuedbyATF
in1916,wasthefirstAmerican typeface designed by a woman.
“Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of
learning, and a means of expression. Almost all
of the characteristics we associate with mature
discourse were amplified by typography, which
has the strongest possible bias toward exposition:
a sophisticated ability to think conceptually,
deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of
reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a
large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a
tolerance for delayed response.”
- NEIL POSTMAN