Just My Type
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Simon Garfield
If you run your own business then the question of how your company brand looks and especially the font used for your logo has probably come up at some point.
Even if you have never thought too deeply about the letters you read on a page or a computer, you will probably have a favourite font you use on your computer.
It’s the psychology behind why we like certain fonts and detest others that Simon Garfield tries to get to the bottom of in Just My Type.
The book is part history, part analysis of specific fonts and why they do or don’t work. Garfield threads all this together with stories about the designers behind well-known fonts such as Gill Sans, a bespoke variant of which is used in the John Lewis logo, the hated Comic Sans, Times New Roman and the widely used Verdana.
He also has some interesting and sometimes horrifying examples of where individuals or firms don’t just use the wrong words, but present them in the wrong fashion.
The best one is the case of Vicki Walker who in 2007 lost her job as an accountant in a New Zealand health agency as a result of an email she sent to staff.
Walker sent a group email to employees at Procare in Auckland, New Zealand, with the simple message - “TO ENSURE YOUR STAFF CLAIM IS PROCESSED AND PAID, PLEASE DO FOLLOW THE BELOW CHECKLIST”.
Her crime was the fact that her email was in capital letters. In a world where most of us are sending hundreds of emails, tweets and texts every week, we know that upper case is reserved for when you want to shout or show you’re angry.
Still, most of us would just fail to respond or delete the email. Instead the company she worked for accused her of creating disharmony in the workplace and sacked her.
Some 20 months later she successfully appealed for unfair dismissal and was awarded $17,000.
Obviously it’s an extreme case and hopefully most companies take a less aggressive approach to lapses in email etiquette.
But it’s a good example of how personally people can take type.
Presumably this wouldn’t be the attitude taken at IKEA as its whole name is in capitals.
Garfield describes how the global leader in modern Swedish design kicked a typographical nerd’s nest in August 2009 when it changed the font of its logo from Futura to Verdana.
In part IKEA made the change because Verdana was at the time one of the web-safe fonts on the market, which was hardly surprising as it was designed for Microsoft.
And it was precisely this that got some people’s goat. As Garfield explains, because Verdana is now so widely used it’s practically a non-font that most people fail to register. It just looks like how most people expect a font to look.
The genius of Garfield’s book is to open your eyes to the wide range of different fonts available and why Times New Roman, Verdana and Gill Sans are so popular.
Plus it’s all written in a simple and enjoyable way, largely free of any typographical jargon.
So if you are interested in marketing or feel your logo or branding could do with a revamp, the book is definitely worth a look.
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