Daniel Will-Harris' Favorite Display Faces

So I was annoyed when I first saw this face, especially the lowercase and "casual" versions which are completely inauthentic and unlikable--now the designer--the same person who did Tekton, will probably write to me and complain--good, I welcome it--write me, complain!

Erich Wilkinson. President, Large Wooden Badger Graphicworks emailed me to say "The original FLW lettering upon which this font is based was designed for Olive Hill, another Wright spectacular. Apparently the contemporary designers of the font felt "Olive Hill" didn't have that classic font name ambiance, but Arch Oboler Eaglefeather design in Malibu (of which only the gatekeeper's house was ever built) seemed to fit the bill."

So while I still am not wild about the casual and lowercase, I do love the small cap version of the face--it's the typeface I originally used for Will-Harris House and all the blue-print initials--so maybe that makes up for it. If you want an even rougher and more hand-made craftsman-style script, use Judith Sutcliff's Greene & Greene. If you want something that has the clean sans serif grace of the type you see on some of his buildings, try Bernhard Gothic, from the DsgnHaus.

It's like "modern" architecture. The original modernist architects, like Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, may have said that "less is more," but they also said that "God is in the details." Their original buildings, while spare, where beautifully detailed (and required expensive hand-made craftsmanship to look so simple and machine-made). These designs were copied, endlessly and badly, to create the many ugly boxes that clog skylines around the world. The point of this talk about architecture is that there's good modern architecture and bad copies. Univers is like good modern architecture, it's clean and spare, but it's details are careful and elegant. Univers is easy to read in smaller sizes, and exceptionally legible in larger sizes. Sometimes, try as I might to use something exotic, Univers (particularly the extended or wide variations) is so distinct (if not distinctive), so transparent (and clear), so simple--that I end up using it.

I worry a bit that people who don't know anything about type will think I've used Helvetica, and I know people who copy my designs poorly will probably use Helvetica--but that's not the point. The point is that Univers is a beautiful modernist face that works, and that's the point of type, to work. {Seagram's Building}