Off Book | Typography | PBS

[music playing] JONATHAN HOEFLER: Type faces aren't merely about forms, they're about design systems.

They have to do with the way things relate to one another.

PAULA SCHER: It's the joy of what happens with color and form and information.

DEROY PERAZA: Fonts are clothes in a sense.

They help visually externalize your identity to the world.

EDDIE OPARA: It's about tension, it's about special arrangement, it's about the texture, and it's about the dynamics.

[music playing] JONATHAN HOEFLER: Type faces are not toys, they're tools.

They designed to solve problems.

Some people say that there are two kinds of type designers.

There are those whose voice is always detectable in the work they do and those whose voices is never detectable in the work they do.

Tobias and I try to conceal our handiwork in type faces.

And I would love people to recognize our work, to respond to it in some emotional way but, again, for it to play second fiddle to the message.

TOBIAS FRERE-JONES: A lot of the conversations that we have would sound kind of bizarre.

We're trying to figure out what is the gray flannel suit version of this form?

JONATHAN HOEFLER: It's like this is too Tom and Jerry.

It needs to be more Don Draper.

TOBIAS FRERE-JONES: And you can see exactly what we're talking about.

JONATHAN HOEFLER: Yeah, it makes sense.

TOBIAS FRERE-JONES: Oh, yeah.

I think you're right.

JONATHAN HOEFLER: Letters are everywhere, and that's one of the things that makes typography so interesting to people these days.

TOBIAS FRERE-JONES: It's such a pervasive part of our day.

You need type again and again and again to get through the day, to live your life.

PAULA SCHER: I landed in the music industry in '70s.

It was completely lucky.

I loved record covers.

I thought there was no object more wonderful than a record cover.

The albums that people would know were things like Bruce Springsteen, "Darkness on the Edge of Town" or the "Boston" album.

But I was more interested in typography.

So I used to experiment with typography on jazz albums.

I determine how I design something based on the audience and what the audience will bear.

Evoke the response you want while pushing the audience to see something perhaps in a new way.

My goal when I started designing for the public theater was to create a visual language as opposed to a logo for the theater.

And "Bring in the Noise, Bring in the Funk" was the best use of that visual language, because it used this wood type in a very provocative way.

It was type that talked to you.

Is was type that rapped.

It was type that tapped.

It's the only Broadway show that didn't have a logo.

Everything is about identity.

Everything is about expressing individuality of places, businesses, organizations, people.

I think the ultimate goal is to have as much uniqueness and understanding in every communication that you can have.

EDDIE OPARA: Quite weirdly, I always think typography is a little bit like carpet.

I kind of look at it from the point of view of texture.

and how readable that texture actually is.

One of our clients is Studio Museum in Harlem.

I had thought about Invisible Man.

He talks about the sense of identity as an African-American and being black.

The idea of being noticed and unnoticed.

What we did was create a form similar to a stealth bomber.

I took some text, and I applied it to a paper format, utilizing optical illusion.

And that's how stuff became whole.

It's not a normal poster, which is flat.

It's very sculptural.

UCLA came to me and asked us to look at their poster series.

We utilized a standard form.

We used Fedra and manipulated them through code into irregular dynamic structures, which were still fonts.

You need attractors.

Too much text and not enough textual form and tension and dynamics.

And so when you see a poster that is entirely different to other posters that you see around you, then you're going to be attracted it, whether you hate it or you like it.

And it's basically doing its job.

DEROY PERAZA: If you look back 200 years, infographics were being used to map cholera cases in London.

Fast forward, and you have magazines like "Wired" putting an emphasis on infographics.

"Wired" influences publications like "Good" who take this online.

So the Opportunity Gap is a piece that we did for "Good" magazine.

It's really ultimately about education.

It's about how poverty rates and access to health care creates a discrepancy in the opportunities available to students of different races.

The most challenging part of working on an infographic is taking all of the available data and deciding what is the most important bit of information that we need to communicate.

Infographics are just about typography getting out of the way of the message.

JULIA VAKSER: Our process is to be able to distill information to a very key point.

We try to be as expressive as you can possibly be with the limitations you have.

DEROY PERAZA: Infographics are like pop science.

It's fun.

JULIA VAKSER: It's fun and friendly.

DEROY PERAZA: It's Interesting and it's absorbing.

PAULA SCHER: Because of the computer, people are really aware of typography like they've never been before.

DEROY PERAZA: Typography is kind of finally free on the web.

JONATHAN HOEFLER: It amazing that everybody can do this.

The tools are there.

They're on your phone, which is extraordinary.

EDDIE OPARA: This is just something that should be enjoyed.

PAULA SCHER: Words have meaning, and type has spirit, and the combination is spectacular.

[music playing]

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