A Fruitful Discomfort: The Face of the 2012 Olympics

The visual identity of the London Games was uncomfortable, like a shattered stained-glass window. But iconoclasm does have its fans; and the more ways we can look at something, and look through something, the better off we are.

The stated intent of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) was to focus on youth; naturally this extended to the visual identity system, the centerpiece being the logo, which has received little love. The logo’s severe angularity does not mesh with the reality that for virtually everybody (except the parents of athletes) the Olympics constitute a pleasant vacation, or a comfy staycation – they’re not about stress or tension. Television “censorship” attests to this clearly, and this clash might be what puts people off.

To me the logo looks like how middle-aged men (coincidentally my own demographic) tend to feel about teenagers: uncomfortable. The logo also makes me think of the 1980s ski boots I once bought via Craigslist. And the Opening Ceremonies also betrayed the reality of who consumes the Olympics, of who the customer is – and it’s not young people. Looking at it that way, the logo just might be perfect. And adherents of the maxim “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” require no justification beyond the fact that the logo is indeed highly memorable.

2012Headline by Gareth Hague, the official typeface of the 2012 Olympic Games.

What is also memorable is Gareth Hague’s typeface for the London Olympics, 2012Headline. Besides being fervently discussed – and ridiculed – in typographic circles, it was also featured in the mainstream media, both at home and abroad. Unlike the logo however 2012Headline is quite difficult to wrap one’s head around. If you look at it as a formal outgrowth of the logo it just might make perfect sense. But if you look deeper, if you consider its genesis, it feels very different: uncomfortable. Fortunately it has one superb redeeming quality, one that’s highly relevant to the enclave of typeface design…

The logo of the London Olympics is based closely on Hague’s Klute typeface of 1997, a unique design that draws ideas from blackletter and graffiti. And in the context of the Olympics it’s possible to imagine the influence of Ancient Greek lettering on 2012Headline. The inherited visual language of the Olympics also seems to be what caused the “O” and “o” to be circular (inspired by the venerable five-ring symbol), a direct formal contradiction with every other glyph in the font. Hague reveals that the circular “o” was supposed to be an alternate; he had provided the expected angular “o” as the primary form.

It’s easy to agree that using the circular “o” was a confused, bad decision. I figured to see if that’s really true, so I decided to make an angular “o” glyph based on how I interpreted the font’s “internal consistency”. The first one I made didn’t have very happy proportions, so I decided to bend the rules and make a different one, which I found less jarring.

This one I subbed into the logo and was pleasantly surprised to conclude that opting for the circular “o” was a good decision after all – it seems to add a nice softness, whereas the angular one might just make the whole too mechanical. Olympic Games logos come and go, but apparently the rings are forever!

The Redeeming Quality

Although 2012Headline was designed after the logo was approved by LOCOG (so was presumably constrained to being a follower and not a leader) according to Hague himself the only thing the two typefaces share is a general angular spikiness; no blackletter, no graffiti, no Greek. But people will see what they see – the designer is never around to tell them what to think. What I myself see most prominently – something shared by Klute and 2012Headline but virtually no other design – is what motivated me to write this article: it might be a better way to make an italic.

Italic has long been a personal sore spot – to me a sort of drive-by shotgun wedding. Roman and italic might be able to tolerate each other after all these years, but pairing them up was still a bad joke. Now, if they can indeed tolerate each other, why worry? It’s a bit like the search for an energy alternative to fossil fuels, with its tinge of desperation. But to some it does seem like an alternative is the only way forward, or at the very least a break from the despotism of cursiveness being at the heart of emphasis in running text. The unduly reviled slanted roman has had its champions and svengalis, but even if I for one believe that can be an answer, it cannot be the only answer. And one answer might just be rotation, which is essentially what makes 2012Headline (and Klute) so special.

Gareth Hague might not have invented the idea. The passing of time has only cemented Frederic Goudy’s “the old fellows stole all our best ideas” and this is probably no exception. One can easily imagine the ATF boys making rotated glyphs a century ago with a quick adjustment of the pantograph – they certainly did everything else with it. Also, neither Klute nor 2012Headline can serve for emphasis since they have no roman. Rotation as a means of emphasis – dubbed “rotalic” – seems to have first been floated by Filip Tydén, but that was a decade after Klute. Also, virtually all rotalic fonts have been created via brute mechanical rotation, and thus deserve the derision they typically engender. This is clearly not the case with 2012Headline – it’s been designed with intent. So Hague deserves credit for applying the idea quite early with Klute, and maturing it before anybody else with 2012Headline.

Jackson Cavanaugh plays with an italic from his Harriet Series.

As with any novelty, rotalic’s potential for ridicule is great; people like to have fun. This is the sort of ridicule reserved for things that can be consciously evaluated by everybody: display fonts. The magic of text face design kicks in when novelties are applied so subtly as to escape general rejection… although there is no escape from rejection by some fellow type designers. We are now seeing a trickle of rotalic fonts including one that elevates the style to a fully respectable level: TypeTogether’s Eskapade.

Perhaps unsure what to do with the unusual orientation of 2012Headline, Olympics designers often resorted to a rotated baseline.

For many people however letters that seem to be falling over are… uncomfortable. So much so that many applications of 2012Headline – including high-profile ones – have resorted to rotating lines of type counter-clockwise, effectively eliminating the slant, even though the result is an often awkward “uphill” line of type. Then there’s Hubert Jocham’s Keks: older than 2012Headline but more recent than Klute, it seems to vie for the same sort of angularity, but critically without the “discomfort” of rotation. In a way Keks is to 2012Headline what Excoffon’s Chambord is to Peignot: they share a style, but the former avoids the latter’s iconoclasm (Cassandre’s design was nothing less than an effort at alphabet reform), resulting in something easier to sell. In fact it’s nice to imagine a retrofit of 2012Headline that would serve as an italic for Keks (similar to the genesis of Triplex Italic), which might become a first in terms of having a roman and an italic that are equally slanted!

It’s not possible to see 2012Headline as a text face, or even as an italic for a text face. But anybody who can see in it something that will enrich typeface design, that will perhaps propel a new generation of italics, is better off. To quote from a poster made by Hague promoting Klute: “It’s not what this is that’s important, it’s what it could or might be”. This is nicely parallel to a founding principle of the Olympics: “The most important thing is not to win but to take part.” Let’s not worry merely about making sellable fonts – let’s see where 2012Headline can take us.

Roboto is a Four-headed Frankenfont

Just in time for Halloween, from the depths of the Android 4.0 laboratory emerges a frightening cross-breed creature called Roboto.

It was built from scratch and made specifically for high density displays. Google describes it has having a “dual nature. It has a mechanical skeleton and the forms are largely geometric. At the same time the font’s sweeping semi-circular curves give it a cheerful demeanor.” — GottaBeMobile

This is pure PR BS. I know it when I see it because I’ve had to write a few glowing descriptions about typefaces that don’t really glow.

Roboto Font for Android
Click to embiggen image.

I’m all for the strategy of developing a unique identity typeface, and I commend Google for employing type designers in house, but this is an unwieldy mishmash. Roboto indeed has a mixed heritage, but that mix doesn’t have anything to do with the gibberish from the press release. Its parents are a Grotesk sans (like a slightly condensed Helvetica) and a Humanist sans (like Frutiger or Myriad). There’s nothing wrong with combining elements of these two styles to create something new. The crime is in the way they were combined: grabbing ideas from the Grotesk model, along with a Univers-inspired ‘a’ and ‘G’, welding them to letters from the Humanist model, and then bolting on three straight-sided caps à la DIN.

When an alphabet has such unrelated glyphs it can taste completely different depending on the word. “Fudge” is casual and contemporary. “Marshmallow” is rigid and classical. This is not a typeface. It’s a tossed salad. Or a four-headed Frankenstein. You never know which personality you’ll get.

For now, I can only speculate on how this beast came to be. The font files credit the design to Christian Robertson, whom I know to be a very bright professional with some decent work under his belt, including the convincing handwriter Dear Sarah and the adorable Ubuntu Titling font. Either Google tied him down and made unreasonable demands or there’s something nasty in the water down in Mountain View. To be fair, I haven’t seen the fonts on a phone, in person, and Google promises that they are built specifically for that medium. But I can’t imagine that would erase the inherent problem with the design. There are some good shapes in Roboto, they just belong in multiple typefaces.

In any event, Roboto probably won’t terrorize mobile screens for very long. Helvetica and Frutiger are immortal. Hodgepodge brutes like these usually have a short lifespan.

Download the Roboto fonts
See Roboto in action
For a multi-class combo done right, see Fakt or Breuer Text.

Update: Robertson has replied with his rationale for the design:

Here’s the thinking with the open terminals on the ‘e’ and ‘g’. It has been the hard and fast rule for sans serif types that the a, c, e, g and s must agree as to their angle of exit. Interestingly, this is not the case for serif types, and certainly isn’t true for any kind of handwriting. It is common for the lower case ‘e’ to be more open than the ‘a’ for example. If there is a single story ‘g’ it will often remain open, or even curve back the other way (up until it forms a two story g).

As I experimented with this thinking I realized a couple of things:

1 / I have always hated the way Helvetica and all of her acolytes close the terminal on the ‘g’. It is just so awkward. You can’t do it with a pen; the terminal always wants to end somewhere other than straight up (note that this is not true of s or a). It’s like a ‘t’ or ‘f’ that hooks all the way around. It’s just gross. It’s even worse with the geometric bowl on top. You get such an awkward double curve. I equally hate any calligraphic ‘g’ that closes with a ball terminal.

2 / I discovered that the type with a closed ‘a’ and ‘s’ and an open ‘e’ and ‘g’ has a really beautiful texture across longer blocks of text. The rhythm has this kind of a swirl that is actually really nice to read. You are correct that Fudge and Marshmallow may initially disrupt some expectations, but over the course of actually using the font, you forget that ‘e’ is decreed to be closed like ‘a’ (it doesn’t want to be anyway and ‘g’ needs a friend). Despite the PR speak, the variation in exit vectors does make for a more cheerful type.

As for the other two monster heads, I’m ignoring the part about the straight sided caps, since I don’t find it a problem that the lower case aren’t equally straight sided. Also, I find your disagreement with the K hardly worthy of justifying another head; possibly a finger or toe.

Note that there are still some bugs in the font that has been extracted from the SDK. Many of these have been corrected already, and you can expect to see some fixes to minor kerning issues and some diacritical misalignments. Also, since Android doesn’t use much of the nastiness that is TrueType hinting, Roboto is not hinted to support older Windows browsers, for example.

Update: Jan. 12, 2012 — Google offers the full 16-font Roboto family and specimen book on their new Android Design site. (Thanks, Reed Reibstein.)