Public lettering is a term that is increasingly used to describe the totality of visible letterforms that surround us: on street signs, storefronts, monuments, drain covers, bus tickets, etc. Public lettering predates the development of graphic design and of typography before that.
Type designers have long drawn on an eclectic range of sources, creating typefaces that mimic the typewriter, the computer screen, graffiti, handwriting, license plates – and public lettering. Hoefler & Frere-Jones, for example, an excellent digital type foundry based in New York City, recently released a new design called Gotham, derived from some of the public lettering traditions of that city (background and examples here).
And so to Nature Valley’s Crunchy Granola Bars, manufactured by General Mills. Here, the designer of the packaging chose to use Gotham prominently, in a context that couldn’t be more removed from the original. To my mind this example demonstrates the miriad ways in which even the most mundane piece of design is overdetermined; that is, the result of a wildly complex set of influences.
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