…with the lights ON! (A Design Odyssey)

I’ve definitely had a thing for Eye for awhile now, but the most helpful it’s ever been was when designing my sister’s business card. This sounds boring as shit so far, but hear me out. In Eye #58, Abbot Miller describes the typeface Didot, which is used in the logos for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, as coming to define a certain kind of femininity by the way it has been used historically. The contrast of thick and thin bars and serifs “just feels right for women” is one line from the article, to paraphrase. Where was the client to hear that rationale?

Chanel’s butch sans-serif typeface is the counterpoint to Didot. It’s “the little black dress” amidst all the ostentation. This might at first sound pretentious in its own way, but really the Chanel typeface is great because just looking at it reminds you of Jean Seaborg with Jean-Paul Belmondo in bed, smoking a post-coital cigarette in Breathless. Generally speaking, that whole logo says “fuck me” and this makes it a good logo indeed.

I wanted to use both typefaces in my sister’s business card. Anyone who has met my sister would understand the classical beauty implied by Didot, but “Chanel” also gets at the part of her that’s flipped off one cop, refused to apologize in court for almost hitting another with her car, and slammed a door or two in the occasional face. Authority unto itself.

Unfortunately, I discovered the “Chanel” in the Chanel logo is commissioned design, a proprietary part of the brand that’s not available to anyone. So where to find some kind of replacement? That’s right, Barack Obama.

Ok, this seems like an unfair compromise at first. Yes, Obama is the Sexiest Black American President Alive, but the success of Obama’s campaign has made Gotham very trendy right now (see the latest ads for Pepsi), and this threatens to overshadow the beauty of the type. On the other hand, Obama has made this type the ultimate choice for “open, comfortable, approachable, confident”. And these are all fine qualities for anyone to have.

Ultimately, typefaces are defenseless against the myriad ways people might abuse them, infuse them with perverse meanings. But although each is comprised of tiny symbols we normally call ‘letters’, as a whole typefaces do seem to be able to resist the ignominy wreaked on them by history better than symbols alone. The Nazis had their way with German Blackletter after all (Nazi branding was very consistent), but you can still use it in the signage for some bar in downtown Philly and reasonably expect people to think you’re referring to traditional German heritage. The swastika could not do this even if it had been used to symbolize Germany prior to the Nazis, just as in this country the Confederate flag is no longer first seen as a symbol of Southern pride and so now can never be a symbol of Southern pride, and the logos for Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns no longer refer to banks (the words don’t either, for that matter) but financial crisis.

The logos for Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are actually interesting because they show how type can be co-opted as symbol, can become the “golden chalice” for content that Beatrice Ward cautioned against, but is really okay in this case because in a logo typeface is content. It’s like drinking the wine, and eating the glass after! (Ok, so I’m terrible at analogies, and even elaborating on good ones.)

In the end we would like to control the meaning of images, but it just doesn’t work that way. Whereas with type we have the mixed blessing of not being able to attach any meanings, only history. Didot and “Chanel” have the potential to remind you of different images of women, feminine or butch, as determined appropriate by others over time.

Which means type speaks only for itself, and that’s really all you can ask it to do.