Type is one of the most import­ant aspects of any brand­ing solu­tion. Type can eas­ily dif­fer­en­ti­ate an entity. It can unify diverse doc­u­ments and products. It can also build power­ful brand recog­ni­tion. These are the issues that faced the cre­at­ive team respons­ible for the brand­ing of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. The team was, how­ever, aware of the three gen­eral guidelines for choos­ing a typeface to help cre­ate a brand identity.

1. If you can afford it, have a cus­tom font cre­ated that is expli­citly for your brand. If you can’t afford a cus­tom design, choose a typeface that is both dis­tinct­ive and ver­sat­ile. The key is to pick some­thing that walks the fine line between a bland design that is ver­sat­ile and a dis­tinct­ive design that will not be appro­pri­ate for a mul­ti­tude of uses.
2. Chose a type fam­ily with sev­eral styles. Roman, italic and bold ver­sions of a fam­ily are almost never enough for a large brand­ing sys­tem. Per­haps not imme­di­ately, but sooner or later the cli­ent is going to run into instances where con­densed, very bold, or even other styles may be required.
3. Use typefaces that have legs. There are more than 200,000 fonts in the world to choose from. Many have a short life – and then become about as fash­ion­able as tie-dyed t-shirts. Brands are sup­posed to last a long time. Pick a typeface that will not look out of date in a short time.

The Van­couver Organ­iz­ing Com­mit­tee took all three of the guidelines to heart when they chose the Neo® Sans typeface design as part of the brand­ing for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Ali Gardiner, vice pres­id­ent of brand and cre­at­ive ser­vices for the Van­couver Organ­iz­ing Com­mit­tee, sums it up per­fectly. “We selec­ted Neo Sans,” she recalls, “because it felt con­tem­por­ary and would rep­res­ent Canada as a mod­ern, pro­gress­ive coun­try, but it also feels like it will ‘age well’…which is import­ant for Olympic design because it’s seen for dec­ades and even cen­tur­ies after the Games them­selves. Neo Sans also has many weights, which made it prac­tical across the tens of thou­sands of uses for which it would be required.”

To add a little more dis­tinc­tion to the use of the design, the Van­couver team reques­ted that a spe­cial cus­tom font be developed by Mono­type Ima­ging. Accord­ing to Gardiner, “We thought that a uni­case font (one that had sev­eral lower­case char­ac­ters designed to the height and pro­por­tions of the cap­it­als) could be used for dis­play text in a way that felt both warm and friendly as well as con­tem­por­ary and cool, which was how we wanted to rep­res­ent Canada to the world. It also had the poten­tial to become a unique, recog­niz­able typeface for Van­couver 2010, which was import­ant as we estab­lished our own look and feel and brand iden­tity lead­ing up to the Games.”

Sebastian Lester, the designer of Neo Sans and the cus­tom uni­case font, is delighted that his design was chosen for the Winter Games. “I’ve always sought to design appeal­ing, use­ful and ver­sat­ile typefaces,” he says. “The face that the design was chosen for the Winter Games con­firms that I met my goal with Neo Sans.”

From retro show­card dis­play designs, to mod­ern rework­ings of clas­sic typefaces, to vir­tual clones of antique fonts, there are more typeface reviv­als avail­able to graphic design­ers today than ever before. Maybe Fred Goudy was right, “The old guys stole all our good ideas.”

Although Goudy had noth­ing to do with this pro­ject, ITC just released an upgraded and enlarged ver­sion of the ITC Stone® Sans typeface fam­ily. The ori­ginal plan was to add some con­densed designs to the exist­ing fam­ily, and call it a day. Once Sum­ner Stone, the designer of the ori­ginal ITC Stone Sans and the new revival, got into the pro­ject, how­ever, he real­ized that more extens­ive design improve­ment were called for. The end res­ult is a com­pletely new addi­tion to the ITC Stone super fam­ily, con­sist­ing of 24 typefaces in the Open­Type™ font format.

A little over two years ago, ITC also released an enlarged and improved ver­sion of the ITC Frank­lin Gothic™ typeface fam­ily. Called simply ITC Frank­lin™, the new design, cre­ated by David Ber­low, has 48 designs and is also avail­able as Open­Type fonts. The new designs range from the very wil­lowy Thin to the robust Ultra – with Light, Medium Bold and Black weights in between. Each weight is also avail­able in Nar­row, Con­densed and Com­pressed vari­ants, and each design has a com­ple­ment­ary Italic.

Prior to these two designs, ITC had not released upgraded or improved ver­sions of typefaces in its lib­rary. It has, from time to time, added new weights and pro­por­tions to exist­ing fam­il­ies but never reworked the basic designs from scratch.

My ques­tion to you is: would you like to see more ITC typeface re-released to higher stand­ards of design excel­lence – and would you like to seen exist­ing ITC typeface fam­il­ies enlarged to con­tain a broader range of weights and proportions?

E-books are the hot new elec­tronic device. For those unfa­mil­iar with the frenzy of these new elec­tronic mar­vels, an E-book, as defined by the Oxford Dic­tion­ary, is “an elec­tronic ver­sion of a prin­ted book which can be read on a per­sonal com­puter or hand-held device designed spe­cific­ally for this pur­pose.” An E-reader is a light­weight device spe­cific­ally developed for down­load­ing and dis­play­ing these mater­i­als page by page. Amazon’s Kindle™ E-reader was the first on the mar­ket, Barnes and Noble fol­lowed with the Nook™, and there are now over thirty more in one stage or another of development.

These devices, how­ever, are not books. They are read­ers. Books have pages that turn, they have a heft and a smell, you can dog-ear their pages, you can press flowers in them – and they are put on a shelf when you are done with them for the time being. E-readers will not replace books – at least not all books.

First, because E-readers, at about $200, are rel­at­ively expens­ive – and you still have to pur­chase books for them. Even­tu­ally, the price will come down, but there will still be many people that can­not afford the devices and would like to con­tinue pur­chase their books from a book­store or bor­row them from a library.

Next, there are some books that can­not be replaced – at least with cur­rent E-reader tech­no­logy. Children’s books that you read to your nieces and neph­ews, sons and daugh­ters, and grand­chil­dren when they snuggle up next to you on a sofa, come to mind. Art books will con­tinue to be pub­lished in tra­di­tional form. E-readers will prob­ably not replace books on graphic design – and cer­tainly not books on typo­graphy. (He wrote with tongue firmly planted in cheek.)

E-readers, how­ever can be a strong com­pet­i­tion to books for enter­tain­ment. You may eagerly anti­cip­ate Dan Brown’s next novel. You may thor­oughly enjoy read­ing it. But, when you are done, what do you do with it? Put it on a shelf where it will sit until you decide to throw it out. Unless it’s a signed first edi­tion, Dan Brown’s new novel will have little value once it is read. That’s where e-readers come in. When you are done with an E-book, you can simply delete it from the E-reader and it will be stored in the cloud for you for future use.

You can also put over 1,000 E-books – or many very big E-books – on a single E-reader. Required read­ing for schol­ars, edu­cat­ors, stu­dents and pro­fes­sion­als in the tech­nical trades is today sat­is­fied by many – heavy – books. E-readers can be a god­send to these folks. One E-reader has to be bet­ter than car­ry­ing 30-pounds of tra­di­tional books in a backpack.

To become more main­stream, how­ever, E-readers will also need to improve their typo­graphic present­a­tion. One or two fonts are simply not enough. Kern­ing, line spa­cing, para­graph­ing, column align­ment, and all those other typo­graphic details we sweat over as design­ers, and appre­ci­ate as read­ers, will have to be addressed in a much bet­ter fash­ion. Tech­no­logy has done a pretty good job of put­ting words and let­ters on digital sub­strata. It will, how­ever, take the know­ledge, skill and, yes, the pas­sion that we put into tra­di­tional graphic com­mu­nic­a­tion, for E-readers to make much of a dent in real book sales.