In the Winter of 1998, I fell in love with a letter. I spotted it in one of the only things I held dear from my short stint in Dutch design school: my typography book. Despite its smallish size, the book felt heavy in my hand. I was squarish and fat. On each page was a specimen sheet of a different typeface, showcasing the range of fonts available: upper and lowercase, roman, italic, the different weights available like bold, semi-bold, black. They type families were printed large to show the shape and subtle differences between them.
I wasn’t anywhere near ready to choose what I wanted to do after high school, and did what most boy-obsessed teenage girls do when they’re forced to think of their future: choose the path of least resistance. I joined my best friend at the college she started the year before. We grew up in a small Dutch village, and had been friends since elementary school. Since we’d been sent to separate high schools, the opportunity to be in the same school again made this an easy choice.
I assumed that like my best friend, I would enjoy design school. Everyone else was going to college, and this seemed as good a choice as any. But I found the basic design classes to be excruciating. In color theory class, we were asked to weigh (on an actual scale!) the correct amount of gouache paint of each required color to reproduce exactly the color in our book. Over and over (and over) again until the color was to the professor’s satisfaction. My love of color was seriously challenged. I just didn’t see the point. The decision to study design had been thoughtless, and now that I found myself having to do the work, I felt completely hemmed in. I don’t remember what other assignments we were given, only that I wasn’t any more focused on school than I had been in high school. I spent that summer running around with an American backpacker named Will who’d been stranded in my town and was now determined to make my way to California to be with him. Will bought me a standby ticket to LAX so I could spend Christmas with him. And so, when I wasn’t obsessing over him, I was ditching class and smoking pot at my classmate Cindy’s apartment near our school.
The letter I fell in love with was the lowercase italic “z,” in Times. Times, of course, is the most basic font imaginable. It’s the default font in Microsoft Word. The font is already installed onto the hardware of any computer you buy. It’s the font you don’t ever think about. Designed in 1930, Times was born out of pure pragmatism. Readers of the Times newspaper in London had been complaining that the publication was difficult to read, and Times was designed to improve legibility. Just a year after it was launched, the font was made widely available.
It’s true that Times is milk toast. And yet, look past the blandness of the type family and check out the italic lower case z. Pragmatic as the Times typeface may be, the swoosh of the tail at the end of that z doesn’t serve any practical purpose. Yet, it’s there.
Italics came into being for a similarly practical reason: they were designed in the 1500s to fit more letters onto the page. There was nothing pragmatic about my love for that italic lowercase z. I found something magical in the shape. I studied it. I loved looking at it, admiring the contrast between the fat ascenders and descenders and the skinny cross bar. The swoosh of the tail ending with that satisfying swash. Maybe the z reminded me of myself, standing out from the rest of my bland (or so I thought at the time) family.
Serif fonts, like Times, originate from the Roman Empire when text was painted onto stone by a sign writer, then chiseled out by a stonemason. This resulted in serifs—the short cross stroke at the beginning and end of each letter —formed from the use of those chisels. All serif typefaces we use today are derived from this style of text.
Wanting to study the shapes more closely, I put the z onto the overhead projector Will had picked up at a garage sale, aimed it at a big piece of craft paper I had taped to the wall, and traced it. I then cut the shape out with scissors, and left the negative, the piece of paper with the z cut out, on the wall like the piece of art that it was.
Will and I were both artists and taping things to our walls was nothing out of the ordinary. He liked making collages with Xerox copies of photos he had taken. We were living in Holland renting a cheap house in a neighborhood that was scheduled to be demolished later that year. The house didn’t come with a proper floor. Since we couldn’t afford to buy one, we bought armfuls of cheap grass mats at a discount Asian store, carried them home on the backs of our bikes and stapled them to the floor, filling the living room with the scent of hay. We got married later that year.
Christmas break finally arrived and the anticipated trip to California was here. The standby ticket Will bought me had a layover at JFK. It was out of Frankfurt, a five-hour drive from home. My parents drove me. I had never been on an airplane before, let alone fly to America by myself. I was undeterred. Like that little italic z, I stood my ground. I told myself I had my purpose, even though I wasn’t quite sure what it was yet. When I landed in New York, I made my way to the terminal, plopped myself down and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I was about to light up when an older lady with a strong New York accent stopped me, “You’re not allowed to smoke in here, honey.” Genuinely surprised and probably defiant, I shoved the cigarette back into the pack.
When a page is properly typeset, it should draw no attention to itself. Typography lives to serve the written word. That’s not to say we can’t appreciate letterforms for their individual beauty.
Even though typography has been around for hundreds of years, it hasn’t changed much. Not the way my life did back then. After the holiday visit in southern California, Will and I lived in northern California together for a year. When we couldn’t make our life work there, we moved back to Holland for the next year. That’s where I fell in love with the z. After our lease ran out, we decided to move back to America. Arbitrarily, we decided on Seattle.
Sans serif typefaces—the ones without the cross strokes at the end of the letter—didn’t emerge until pre-war 1930s. The Bauhaus typeface was created in the Art School of the same name (active from 1919 to 1933). Based on Herbert Bayer’s 1925 Universal typeface, Bauhaus typeface followed the modernism ethos of “form follows function.” Today’s most well-known sans serif font is Helvetica, most famously used on the directional signs at the New York City subway system. Sans serif fonts work great for headlines and directionals, but the reason almost every single book you’ll ever read are set in a serif font, is because those little serifs make it easier for the eye to follow along. Like tiny pointing fingers, they lead the eye from one letter to the next, from one word to the one following, always moving us forward, without ever being noticed.
Despite my infatuation with that letter z, typography wasn’t exactly on the forefront of my mind at this time. Will and I mostly got married so I could apply for a green card. The green card definitely made things easier once we got back to the States. The prospect of getting a legal job was fine, but what I was really excited about was to go back to college. There is no such thing as community college in Holland and loved the idea of being able to take classes in any subject I fancied. I enrolled into psychology, mythology and life drawing. It didn’t take long for my old love typography to pop up again. When I inquired about a typography class, I was told I couldn’t take the class on its own. The class was part of their two-year Graphic Design program so the only way to take the class was to apply for the program. I figured: why not? Community College or not, the program was highly regarded. It took two attempts to be accepted.
The Netherlands is famous for design, but the design education didn’t suit me. Now that I found myself in design school again (albeit a scrappy graphic design program at Seattle Central Community College) and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The student body was diverse, in every way. At twenty-three, I was neither the oldest nor the youngest in the group. In Holland we had all started pretty much right after high school, but this was a completely different story. In fact, there were so many stories. My new group of friends comprised of a twenty-something Samoan guy I had a crush on, a devoutly Christian Korean-American of thirty, a forty-something divorcé and mother of two teenagers, and a twenty-year-old Thai interior designer with whom she started a design shop while in college. They are still in business after all these years. And then there was our Ethiopian friend, who now designs actual African flags. Unlike that little lone z not fitting into that bland Times family, I didn’t stand out in any way. Maybe because we were all z’s.
Our classes ranged from design history to advertising, and then of course, there was typography. The teacher’s name was Margaret. In her understated way, she was passionate about typography. Her personality was much like typography itself: unassuming but with great depth. She taught us the many rules of typography: rules for type choice and size, line length, space between lines (leading), space between letters (kerning) and hyphenation.
All of typography’s rules are there to serve the readability of the text. It should do so invisibly, never calling attention to itself. As Bauhaus professor, László Moholy-Nagy, said in 1929, “The emphasis [of typography] must be on absolute clarity.” If your type is anything but absolutely clear, you have failed as a designer.
You’d think the rules felt restrictive, but I enjoyed the exactness, the science of it. I also enjoyed how they served the written word.
Perhaps because of its fundamental function, typography has changed very little in the years it’s been around. German typographer and designer Jan Tschichold created the font Sabon in 1967. It was inspired by a much older typeface named Garamond which he discovered on a specimen sheet from 1592. Tschichold graciously named his updated version after the original typographer Jakob Sabon. These typefaces are constantly modernized and redesigned, but never so much that anyone but a designer would notice.
Hermann, the typeface this essay was originally set in, was launched in 2018 and inspired in turn by Garamond and Sabon. After years of writing in Times, I decided my writing deserved its own typeface. Cute italic z aside, I was ready to part ways with the default. Scouring the font websites I found the one that serves my writing best, the way a good typeface should. The type foundry’s description of the typeface sold me on Hermann as much as the typeface itself:
“Hermann was designed not only to be accurate in terms of legibility but also to be wild and bold. That is why we took a big leap and designed a font that is inspired by the world of 20th-century novels, using the name of one of its greatest exponents, Hermann Hesse.”
—W Type Foundry
My current letter crush is Hermann’s capital Q, in italic of course. Google it and, and take a look at this beauty. You might almost call it a little wild and bold.