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I promise you, my love we will be together in another time, in another place.
Typography by Sean Dowling
Photography by Al V Caeiro -
A Lesson in Context: Mistral is that awkward, ugly boy or girl you embarrassingly made out with at school. You pushed the shame of it down and promised yourself you will never do anything like that ever again. But when you bump into them years later to discover that all the same elements were there, but now, inexplicably they are one of the most attractive people you have ever seen… and you realise that YOU made out with them first.
This font is a slice of the 1980’s! That’s not actually true. This is Roger Excoffon’s 1953 creation, Mistral. This is fantastic example of the way type takes on the persona of an era. Just look at it! It screams of the eighties and early 90’s (which strictly speaking might as well be classed as the 80’s). You can just see this lovingly crafted type slapped on gaudy black with white sprinkles background accompanied by brightly coloured geometric shapes in red blue and yellow in some afterschool teen comedy tripe from the ‘radical’ network.
You might be shaking your head thinking ‘I never made out with Mistral in high-school’. But the vast majority of you are intimate with this font. Far more intimate than you realise. It was used for the eye-vomit inducing ‘Hey Hey It’s Saturday’ logo AND for the note-perfect credits in the recent Ryan Gosling film ‘Drive’. Same font. Both with an 1980’s treatment. But utterly different. That’s context. -
I am screening phone calls from Gotham and Helvetica as I am having a love affair with Toronto Subway. The sharpened points of the uppercase A’s, the near perfect circles of the C, the O, and the gloriously minimalist capital Q. Toronto Subway, I love your 1950’s air, the twinges of art deco, your low waist capital R and your small, compact lower case characters.
Toronto Subway, you have quiet elegance and effortless grace. You have charm and poise and you intrigue me. -
I will wait for you till my last breath.
Typography by Sean Dowling
Photography by Sean Dowling -
Released in 1908. has a lovely tail on its upper case Q. notable uses include the branding for the Polaroid corporation and the opening crawl in Star Wars.
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Okay, let’s deal with this right now so it isn’t hanging over us. Comic Sans: You hate it, loath it, deride it, etc. Here is the big shock. You are wrong to hate this font. This font is the perfect example of how typefaces have personality. How each and every one ‘says’ something and imbues text with a tone, flavor and ‘character’. What you hate is the way people use this font. It has been misused on emergency vehicles, tombstones and warning signs.
It isn’t the fonts fault, nor is it the fault of the designer, Vincent Connare, a man who has been spat on in the street because others don’t know how to correctly choose a typeface. He designed a font that was intended to be highly legible whilst making large sections of text appear less daunting. And it does that, magnificently. That was his design vision and he achieved that perfectly.
As soon as I hear someone talk about how crap this font is I instantly know that they’re an ‘armchair designer’ or just an average-Joe-on-the-street with no design knowledge. Hating this font is such a populist, undergraduate opinion to have. Every industry has a whipping boy and this is ours, but it’s just plain wrong and inaccurate. Just like how Helvetica is ‘perfect’ (it’s not, but that’s a story for another time). Spend enough time with typography and you will realise that sometimes Comic Sans is an appropriate choice. Sure, many of those occasions may be limited formatting large sections of text for children with learning difficulties so that the words don’t freak them out, but it’s a legitimate typeface.
So all you ‘armchair designers’ out there. Before you start slagging off someone’s work, why don’t you go make a font (other than just vectoring your handwriting) and see if it’s better than Comic Sans I dare you to try and make something that does its job as well as this typeface. -
I walk these halls and touch all the walls where i know you’ve stood.
Photography by Sean Dowling
Typography be Sean Dowling -
I will carry this love forever.
You will carry this hurt forever.Typography by Sean Dowling
Photography by Al Caeiro -
There is an ocean between us that cannot be crossed.
Typography by Sean Dowling
Photography by Sean Dowling -
After a previous post someone asked me why Bleeding Cowboys as a ‘shit font’? It’s not, it’s a shit type treatment. The original letter forms are quite lovely actually. Look past the artificial weathering and you can see beautifully rounded shapes, the delicate little embellishments and the utterly charming fishhook instrokes on the lower case ‘f’. The problem with this font is the artificial weathering. It looks great for the words ‘Bleeding Cowboys’ but the second you write a word like ‘coffee’ or ‘egg’ and have repeated letters next to each other the illusion is broken and the arbitrary looping embellishments (which are a bit much really) start clashing and shouting at each other. Overall it just screams “I downloaded a font cause I have no idea what’s good”.
But before i go… Dang, check out the body of that capital Q. Lovely roundness and a glorious tail. HOT
