Interstate is Interesting

1. Interstate alphabet:

2. Interstate was designed by Tobias Frere-Jones whom is still alive and was born on August 28, 1970

3. Interstate was first release in 1994

4. It is a Sans Serif font

5. Interstate fits in with the Sans Serif classification because it is very simple, and is stripped to the bare minimum by losing serif appendages.  Sans Serif fonts have become increasingly popular because of the demand of a contemporary looking typeface.  Sans Serif fonts look new and innovative because of their simple yet futuristic appeal.  Sans Serif type first appeared in 1816, but did not become widely used until the early 20th century, when modernism had a huge influence on typography.  In the late 80's or early 90's, sans serifs shifted towards a post-industrial aesthetic, and from this came the slightly less industrial, quirky Interstate type.  

6. Helvetica, Futura, Akzidenz Grotesk

7. The digital age was just beginning when Interstate was first introduced.  Its very simple design allow more complicated digital touches such as drop shadows and the ease of distorting such as condensing or expanding text.  Interstate is best used for signs, but is also used for text setting in print and on a computer screen, making it very versatile for this new digital age.  

8. FB Griffith Gothic, Gothem, Archer

9. Interstate was designed in 1993-94 for the Font Bureau and is also licensed by this Bureau.  It is a very clean, simple, and legible font.  Tobias Frere-Jones loosely based Interstate on the typeface Highway Gothic, which is the font used by the U.S. Highway Administration for road signage since 1949.  Part of the appeal of Interstate is the familiarity of it, because we see a similar version of it driving on the road everyday.  When developing Interstate, Tobias Frere-Jones found that Highway Gothic had no provisions for optical corrections, as most type faces.  Highway Gothic also has no uniform stroke width.  Frere-Jones made a refined version of this, making optical corrections and fixing kerning mistakes while still referencing Highway Gothic. This typeface developed when Tobias was designing a group of typefaces he called "blue-collar", and is therefore based in the American working-class vernacular; it is rooted in a common American experience of a public space. Interstate was famously used in the 2000 U.S. Census.  It has a 40-font family and styles that include condensed, compressed, and the varying weights of black, ultra black, hairline, and light. (three widths, seven weights). It has a forthright capital R, and its ascenders are clipped at an angle. 

Tobias Frere-Jones had always been interested in typography during his teenage years and was even designing his own typefaces by the time he was twenty years old.  He received a BFA fromt he Rhode Island school of Design in 1992.  After graduating, Frere-Jones moved to Boston and joined the Font Bureau as senior Designer.  As previously stated, he designed Interstate here at the Font Bureau as well as Poynter Old Style & Gothic.  In 1999, Frere-Jones left Font Bureau to meet Jonathan Hoefler in New York, and this duo go on start an epic partnership. Together, this partnership has become a leading typographic designing team.  They have designed fonts for Sports Illustrated, GQ, Martha Stewart Living, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Esquire, as well as ads for New York's 2012 Olympic bid.  The fonts these gentlemen and their company produce are incredibly popular, because their fonts lend a sense of history and place.  Their studio is located in Manhattan's SoHo district.  This duo had never met prior to Tobias's 1990's move to New York, but they had many opportunities in the past for their paths to cross.  They were born only six days apart and are both from New York. Jonathan Hoefler was a self taught designer, but both men had grown up being interested in typography, eventually leading to this dynamic design duo.  

Tobias Frere-Jones began teaching type face design at the Yale School of Art, where he continues to teach at a graduate level.  Frere-Jones has designed over five hundred typefaces for retail publication, custom clients, and experimental research. His work is included in the permanent collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  In 1996, Frere-Jones won the Gerrit Noordzij Prize, and was the very first American to ever win this award.  This award is presented by The Royal Academy of The Hague.  He is also oven a guest lecturer at Universities and Museums.  Tobias Frere-Jones's typographic style is popular because of its timeless quality, and therefore his fonts will remain popular for years to come.  

10. "Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones design fonts. You've seen their work; it's all around you-on billboards and computer screens, on the pages of books and magazines. U.S. Census forms are printed in Interstate; Frere-Jones based the eminently legible design on highway-sign lettering. Hoefler's Knockout, drawn from antique wood-block type often used on Victorian circus posters, recently advertised New York's bid for the 2012 Olympics." Tim Heffernan, Esquire magazine. 

"Jones says he likes to think of this font as the estranged cousin of some of the early American Gothic typeface families"

Heffernan, Tim. Esquire Magazine. 12/1/05. http://www.esquire.com/features/best-n-brightest-2005/ESQ1205FREJONE_204_3

Vicars, Graham. Highway Man. Creative Review. Wilson OmniFile. May 1998

http://www.lexisnexis.com.www2.lib.ku.edu:2048/us/lnacademic/api/version1/sr?csi=153108&sr=headline%28Highway+man%29+and+date+is+May+01%2C+1998&secondRedirectIndicator=true

Eastman, Mark. Post Industrial Sans Types. Photography Annual 1997.

https://owa.ku.edu/exchange/sfine/Inbox/interstate.EML/1_multipart_xF8FF_2_multipart_xF8FF_4_post.pdf/C58EA28C-18C0-4a97-9AF2-036E93DDAFB3/post.pdf?attach=1

Interstate

portfolio_type_spec_booklet.pdf(175KB)

Tobias Frere-Jones and Hoefler website

http://www.typography.com/about/index.php

Font Classification

Font Classification: Was developed over the course of the twentieth century in order to have an organized system of growing collection of typefaces.  Fonts are classified by their variation in stress, variation in thick and thin strokes, and variation in the serif.  

Old Style: This font originated in Renaissance Humanism.  Characteristics of Old Style include low contrast with diagonal stress, and cove or "bracketed" serifs.  Also, it is based on handwriting.  Examples include Bembo, Calson, and Palatino.  

Transitional: This is a refinement of Old Style forms and represents the transitional time period from Renaissance style to a more modern style.  Characteristics include a stronger contrast between thick and thin strocks, a slight diagonal stress, bracketed serifs, and a tall x-height. Examples of Transitional font are Baskerville, Caslon, and Perpetua.

Modern: This classification is not influenced by handwriting, and is technically exact.  It is also known as Didone after the designer Giambattista Bodoni.  Characteristics include no horizontal stress and extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes. Bodoni, Bauer Bodoni, and Walbaum are examples of this classification.

Slab Serif: This classification is typically classified within serifs.  What sets Slab Serif apart, however is the thick, square ended serif.  Slab Serif became increasingly popular with the need for advertising.  Examples include Serifa, Rockwell, and Memphis Clarendon.

Sans Serif: Sans Serifs are stripped to the bare minimum and are very malleable.  There are many different classifications of San Serif including humanist, geometric, and grotesque.  Examples include Futura, Gill Sans, and Frutiger.

Script: Script letterforms is just like handwriting, and have been around since humans could write, making it hard to classify this type.  Examples include Sinclair, Bickham Script, and Mistral.

Blackletter: Black Letter has been around for over 600 years and is used often in newspapers, labels, and tattoos.  It was also used often in religious scripture and is believed to have Judaic origins.  Examples include Lucida Blackletter, Linotype, and San Marco. 

Grunge: This classification came about in the 1980's during the postmodernism era.  Characteristics include scratchy, amalgamated, and quirky typefaces.  These came about and are named after the Grunge musical movement.  Examples include Template Gothic, Fallen Thyme, and Escalido Streak. 

Monospaced: This classification is inspired by type from typewriters, and all letters conform to a specific physical width.  Letters look best expanded or condensed.  Examples include Orator, Courier, and OCR B.

Undeclared: This classification, as the title alludes to, are for those that do not fit into any category.  Examples of this are  Optima and Copperplate Gothic, because of their flared serifs attached to san serif structures.  

Representatives of Letter Forms

Here, I will be discussing three of some of the most important "representatives of letter forms".  

Zuzana Licko

Zuzana Licko is a female Czechoslovakian designer, born in 1961. Despite having  practically no formal training in typography, Zuzana Licko went on to invent some very important typefaces today.  She became famous through Emigre magazine, which she founded with her husband.  Emigre was originally intended as cultural journal to showcase artists, photographers, poets, and architects. The first issue was put together in 1984 by VanderLans and two other Dutch immigrants.  She designed the typefaces for this magazine using a bitmap format.  Licko would reference old fonts and produce her new interpretation of them.  She invented the text Mrs Eaves which is based on Baskerville and Filosofia which is based on Bodoni.  Other fonts invented by her to name a few include Solex from 2000, Matrix from 2007, Fairplex from 2002, and Dogma from 1994.  She had her big break around the same time as the introduction of the Macintosh computer in 1984, when her husband released Emigre magazine.  She used the new technology of the Macintosh to digitally design her fonts.  Eye Magazine describes her success by stating, "As one of the first type designers to exploit the potential of the Apple Macintosh in its pre-designer days, Zuzana Licko transformed the pixel from low-resolution imitation to high-style-original". She designed the typefaces of the magazine, and went on to develop a diverse family of different fonts as technology improved.  

http://www.emigre.com/Bios.php?d=10

House Industries

• Neutraface Slab
• Neutraface
• Neutraface No. 2
• Studio Lettering
• Girard
• Showcard Stunt
• Blaktur
• Burbank
• United
• Luxury
• Ed Benguiat
• Paperback
• Chalet
• Las Vegas
• Holiday
• Movements
• Simian
• House Gothic 23
• Shag
• Bad Hood
• House-a-rama
• Sign Painter
• Tiki Type
• Rat Fink
• Coop

Andy Cruz and Rich Roat start house Industries in 1993 in Wilmington Delaware.  Allen Mercer also helped jumpstart the career of this company.  They started the company by producing a mailer announcing the release of ten typefaces. They delivered these typefaces via floppy disks.  These fonts were very quirky and appeared scribbly, squiggle, jagged, and blobby. These typefaces were constructed for a specific culture that is revitalized through their work.  House Industries was inspired by the past decades of sub-culture and the music scenes from these decades. They used their inspiration from Ed Roth, Chris Cooper, J.J. Abrams, Sven Kirsten, and Ed Benguiat to name just a few.  The company grew and added new designers such as Ken Barber, Tal Leming, and Christian Schwartz. The company has designed many important fonts including Neutraface, Blaktur, Chalet, Girard, Movements, Simian, and Paperback, to name just a few out of the many typefaces they have produced. The company today provides illustration and design services, as well as selling a series of idiosyncratic display typefaces collections, packaging, clip-art, clothing, pillows, and accessories. House Industries has grown into an incredibly large institution and its marks are left anywhere from billboards to greeting cards, and reaches out to a broad audience with its wide variety of style.

http://www.houseind.com/  

Oded Ezer

Oded Ezer is a typographic artist, and a logo and type designer born in 1972 from Israel.  He does a lot of experimental art with typography.  He graduated from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem with a bachelors degree in visual communication.  Most of his work is in Hebrew, although he also experiments with Latin-based projects.  He has designed about twenty typeface families.  I had a difficult time finding the the names of his typefaces, and only managed to find one called Beit Hillel.  He is most proud of the art he produces, rather than the types.  I stumbled upon a new project in which he incorporates multiple typeface.  He uses Zapfino, Goudy Old Style, Shoken, Caslon, and his own typeface Beit Hillel.  The work is called Ketubah, which is a predominant form of Jewish art.  HE uses different typefaces for each language and the languages used include Yiddish, Hebrew, English, French, and Spanish.  

He also uses experimental typography in a "Biotypography" series in which he refers to any typographical application that uses biological systems to creat  a typographic image.  

Oded Ezer has won a number of awards including the Gold Prize at the international design ceompetition of the Nagoya Design Center in Japan, Certificate of Excellence the the New York Type Directors Club and the Israeli Exucation Ministry Prize for Design. He founded Ha'Gilda, which is the first cooperative type foundry of Israeli designers.  

www.ezerdesign.com/

Baskerville and Frutiger Blog

John Baskerville is the inventor of the very famous baskerville type.  He is one of the most famous typographers, as he started the usage of leading and adding wide margins.  Leading is the space between lines of text in a text block and is very important because it can increase legibility in a block of text.  John Baskerville was English, worked with the University of Cambridge, and well respected for his type style.  His first published book was an addition of Virgil.  His most famous font, emphasized the contrast of light and heavy lines.  This makes the serifs look sharper.  This font is more consistent in its form than previous fonts because curved letters are rounded, keeping more of a regularity.  Baskerville font has a simple and refined feeling.  Ironically, Baskerville was only popular for a very short time when John Baskerville came up with it in the mid 18th century.  It was not popular again until the 20th century when others such as Bruce Rogers took interest in the font.  Since then, Baskerville has been refined and taken on new forms.  The new forms of Baskerville as well as the original continue to be very popular today.   

Adrian Frutiger was an incredibly influential Swiss-born typographer who is most famous for inventing the typefaces Univers and Frutiger.  Frutiger grew up in Switzerland, interested in calligraphy and sculpture.  He has practiced woodcuts his whole life and focused solely on woodcuts most recently.  He is most widely known, however, for his typeface Univers, and the grid that makes up the typeface family of Univers.  Univers is a sans serif typeface and is unique by the large family within the typeface.  Universe actually represents the original modular in the type family.  The family consists of varying weights and widths.  The four original widths include condensed, ultra condensed, regular, and extended.  Univers is often used as an alternative to Helvetica, as it has a wide range of uses because of its large family.  Adrian Frutiger developed a numbering system known as Frutiger's grid in order to clarify and differentiate the different typefaces within Univers.  Numbers are used to identify the different cuts.  For example, 55 stands for Roman, and 75 stands for bold.  This numbering system became so useful that it has been adopted and used with Frutiger's other fonts (Serifa, Avenir, Glyphic, and Frutiger), as well as with Helvetica. Frutiger's grid organizes in a simple way the many typefaces within a font, and is incredibly useful today.