Published in How Magazine, February 2003

As graphic designers, we are the letter form professionals. But while we may have the education and experience to draw a lowercase "g", set a Caslon swash Q in metal, or kern a headline in Quark, do we really have the corner on the market? Letters are the building blocks of written communication, drawn and appropriated by people from all walks of life. How might their everyday experiences with letter forms, outside of the traditions of Typography and Graphic Design, affect our practice as a whole?

Tobias Frere-Jones may have the latest answer. He has spent the past three years wrestling with two competing approaches to letter forms. A graduate of RISD, a former type designer at the Font Bureau, and, currently, a type designer at The Hoefler Type Foundry in New York, his digital type faces are among the most refined and best known of the present day, and include Interstate and Nobel. But, in his own city, Frere-Jones is surrounded by examples of hand-engineered letter forms. Among the dozens of periods and styles displayed on New York's building signs is "post-war geometric," a tradition dominated by draftsmen and engineers of the middle of the twentieth century. Gotham, Frere-Jones' latest type face, investigates this clash of approaches. Inspired by the engineered forms on the sign for the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal, Gotham is a translation that goes far beyond thirteen bold uppercase letters.

A client provided the context for the project, initially. In the year 2000, GQ Magazine hired The Hoefler Type Foundry to "create a geometric sans serif face." The freedom of the assignment allowed Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler to explore their long-time common interest in the Port Authority sign.

Frere-Jones set out to make a complete Roman face that was, in some senses, "engineered rather than designed." His first step was a search for other signs from the era that could add to the type face that was forming in his head. While he collected many examples, including a plethora of liquor store signs, in the end, his library was far from comprehensive.

And that's where the wrestling comes in. As Frere-Jones says, " Having absorbed all we could from the isolated forms of the Port Authority sign, we had to dig deep into the strategy of the sign's engineer and pull out ideas. We began to look 'under' or 'behind' those forms, to find what had driven them in the first place." He compares the process to method acting; he made visual decisions based on the persona of an engineer, rather than a designer. Beginning with the bold caps, the game was to balance geometry and quirkiness, which were applied unevenly to the individual characters, but appear smooth across the set. Call it "situational ethics."

For Tobias Frere-Jones, Gotham's design marks the end of a moment that is distinctly American. The computer is now the tool of choice, and many hand-generated signs have been replaced. As mid-century buildings in New York and across the country are torn down, original artifacts are disappearing. Ironically, Gotham celebrates their history outside of Typography by bringing it to the desktops of graphic designers.

This project is a beginning. After years of collecting type specimen books, Tobias Frere-Jones now plans to visit every block in Manhattan to photograph "anything that is not a typeface." So far, he has completed approximately 15Ð20% of the island.