2013 AIGA Medalist: Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones

Intense research plays a part in their process, with every aspect of every letter in a font thoughtfully considered. Nothing is randomized; nothing is left to chance. In the mid-1990s, Hoefler became an early adopter of Python, a new programming language that was making inroads in type design. Much of this period was spent developing tools to automate repetitive tasks such as kerning, the practice of managing the space between awkward pairs of letters. Rather than step through the alphabet from Aa to Zz, one of Hoefler’s tools allowed designers to move through entire regions of the alphabet at once, reviewing at a glance all diagonal or round shapes. An equal footing in technology and language ensured that every combination was considered visually, even rare ones such as Yq (as in Château d’Yquem).

To design Retina, for the Wall Street Journal’s stock listings, Hoefler and Frere-Jones first analyzed more than 120 national and international newspapers and gathered 3,800 reference examples of ways in which news agate type is used. A typeface meant to be used at extremely small sizes (five point and below), Retina incorporates specific features to maximize legibility in the unforgiving print environment of small type on low-quality newsprint: ink traps prevent pooling where strokes intersect, larger counters within letters provide more white space and the disambiguation of forms ensures that a capital letter “B” and a number “8”, for instance, look as dissimilar as possible. The logical, systemic thinking behind Retina landed it a spot in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection—along with the Gotham, HTF Didot and Mercury type families—in 2011. The designers’ work is in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, as well.

H&FJ’s Gotham, introduced in 2000, is one of the most successful typefaces designed within the last 20 years. Originally commissioned for use in GQ magazine, it is a marvelously adaptable font now seen everywhere, from the granite cornerstone of the Freedom Tower at the site of the World Trade Center to graphic material for the 2008 Obama campaign. Gotham was directly inspired by New York City building signage. “I’d long had my eye on a particular strain of vernacular lettering that was captured especially well by the sign on the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue,” Hoefler explains. “Type designers guard their secrets closely, but this one had been hard not to share with Tobias: I knew he’d dig it, and instantly see its potential as the foundation for a family of typefaces. It was one of the first things I pointed out when we began collaborating in 1999, and I don’t think the week was out before Tobias began sketching a prototype for the typeface that would become Gotham Bold.”

To investigate this nameless and unrecognized style, Frere-Jones photographed thousands of examples of public lettering in Manhattan, from storefronts and office buildings to faded advertisements and signage on oil trucks. Over the development of the project, Hoefler served as editor, helping to articulate some of the emerging themes in the letterforms to define and establish the design’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s a pattern Hoefler and Frere-Jones have followed ever since—one acts as author, the other as editor, each proposing ideas he thinks the other will love, working in tandem to get to the heart of the project and then reviewing every drawing together until the design is complete. Gotham has earned a high degree of visibility within pop culture; H&FJ regularly receives emails from designers that show its use in the frosted lettering on tea cakes, or rendered in materials ranging from burnt toast to embroidery.

Hoefler and Frere-Jones lecture widely, and both are respected teachers. In the words of Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, they are known for being “great explainers,” able to communicate minutely detailed information with grace and efficiency to students, clients and colleagues alike. Hoefler has been a visiting critic at Yale University, Cooper Union and the School of Visual Arts. Frere-Jones has taught type design at the Yale School of Art’s graduate program since 1996, and in 2006 became the first American awarded the prestigious Gerrit Noordzij Prize, presented by the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, for his contributions to type design and type education. The Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) awarded Hoefler its most prestigious prize, the Prix Charles Peignot, in 2002 for outstanding contributions to type design.

Of all the creative disciplines, type design is perhaps most heavily dependent on evolving technology, not only in terms of the development of the letterforms themselves, but in the very environments in which they will be put to use. “We try to keep ourselves flexible enough to take the lessons of a 16th-century punchcutter and apply them to what will happen on Internet Explorer running on Windows 8,” says Frere-Jones. This is evident in a project that has consumed a great deal of their time over the last three years: the adaptation of their entire library of more than 700 fonts to suit the screen, and the creation of more than 200 new fonts specifically designed for digital environments, from smartphones to computer screens to stadium-sized Jumbotrons. It’s a daunting feat both in scope and ambition, but these are designers who clearly relish a challenge.

As Hoefler sees it, “We are at a point in history where we can ask: what kinds of semantic distinctions do online readers need, what kind of distinctions do authors benefit from and how can typography address this? That opportunity hasn’t come up in two or three centuries.”

Frere-Jones adds, “Here, the intersection of technology and culture and emotion and commerce are all on the table at once.”