Brought to You by the Letter...

Brought to you by the letter: C
Broadway, Regular, uppercase C

Broadway is another one of those highly recognizable typefaces, using it instantly invokes the eras of the 20s and 30s. I'm partial to the C because it has a sort of half-empty/half-full vibe happening. Standing alone, the Broadway uppercase C looks like much more than a C, it becomes quite abstract.

I like that the terminals are rounded instead of completely flat, which I think help counteract the very thick and rigid lines that make up the heavy black part of the letters. The black line in the uppercase C also helps make the bowl more interesting and distinguished, by creating a flat sided white space, which is uncommon for any bowl.


Courtesy of wikipedia.com, identifont.com

Design Foundry: American Type Founders; Linotype (now)
Designer: Morris Fuller Benton
Date: 1925
Classification: Decorative, Art Deco

Broadway is a very popular Art Deco typeface. Originally, it was designed as a capitals only typeface, but in the 1970s during a resurgence of Broadway came several new variants that included lowercase letters.

Art Deco was a big art movement between 1925 and the 1940s that included a lot of geometric shapes and was always very ornamental. Art Deco was truly design for design's sake. While once it was called elegant, glamorous and modern, people began to associate it with a false-opulence. I think society has turned around on Art Deco once more, and it's returned to being a sign of elegance and glamor, but now with a hint of vintage.

Brought to you by the letter

Today's letter is brought to you by the letter: C.
Tungsten, Medium, lowercase c.

I recently did some promotional materials at work, and convinced my boss to buy the Tungsten and Vitesse type families, both from Hoefler & Frere Jones. I thought Tungsten had the right look to fit with our sport, MVP concept. Tungsten is strong, it's tough, and compact. It's a man's man's type. It's not the in-your-face, million dollar, football quarterback type, it's the hold-on-to-your-roots, English rugby player type. You know, rugby guys that knock each other around without helmets and pads. That's some tough shit.

What I appreciate about Tungsten's medium, lowercase 'c', is that it is completely indicative of the entire typeface. It's compact--no unnecessary curves here, and means business. It is essentially a visual chain link, the building blocks of industry. This style of sans-serif was common in industrial, constructionist propaganda. This wasn't a type family that was designed it was built. But rather than being too tough, like an impact or some slab type, Tungsten gets the message across without being intimidating. It's too confident to demand anything. Tungsten knows you'll come along via your own free will.

Courtesy of typography.com:

Design Foundry: Hoefler & Frere Jones
Designer: Hoefler & Frere Jones
Date: 2009
Classification: Geometric (?) Flat-sided (?) Sans-Serif

"A few years ago, we started wondering if there was a way to make a typeface in this genre that was disarming instead of brutish, one that employed confidence and subtlety instead of just raw testosterone. Many such designs quit the fight when the going gets rough, abandoning their own internal rules when unruly letters like S or Y won’t conform to the grid — a frailty that’s especially unwelcome in this kind of typeface, whose square-jawed ruggedness would otherwise recommend it for action movies and airport paperbacks. ...The result is Tungsten, a tight family of high-impact fonts that doesn’t sacrifice wit, versatility, or style."

[They have a really nice write up of their font at their site, I recommend you read it.]