I have just finished reading Metro Letters, which presents, in delightfully compact form, thorough documentation of a type design competition for Minneapolis St. Paul, begun in 2002. The book’s contributors raise some provocative questions about the degree to which a typeface can somehow capture the essence of a city (or the Twin Cities, in this case). Indeed, the project’s directors, Janet Abrams and Deborah Littlejohn, as well as many of the participants and jurors, express a certain degree of skepticism in this regard.
Comparable competitions have, in the past, focused on a single event (eg Gerard Unger’s typeface and wayfinding system for Rome 2000; Erik Spiekermann’s typeface for Glasgow’s UK City of Architecture and Design festival in 1999) or a specific institution (Matthew Carter’s 1995 typeface with ‘snap-on’ serifs for the Walker Art Center).
It is perhaps inevitable that the reach of the winning entry, called Twin, appears to have been rather more modest than the organizers might have hoped. (The book relies on a series of doctored images to imagine the winning typeface’s application all over town, above and beyond its adoption as the house font for the event that sparked the competition in the first place.) Twin was conceived by LettError, and comes in all manner of flavors, from a sober, Officina-esque sans serif to, well, Officina on acid. Best of all, the online version actually changes shape according to outside variables such as wind and temperature. Still, every city has its weather.
New typefaces can now be launched internationally, overnight, rather than taking years to percolate from one country to another. One result is that local and regional character, as expressed through lettering and type, is being increasingly eroded. With such rampant eclecticism, the chances of producing a typeface that can be instantly recognized by most people as belonging to a particular city seem remote indeed. Metro Letters, while perhaps doomed to failure in terms of its grandest visions, is nevertheless a vivid, even heroic, attempt to explore some of these issues.
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It is also interesting to note that two of the entries, including the winning one, explored typography “outside” the realm of letterform design. They rely on computer programming to communicate the organic or random element of the urban environment. The winning entry changes with the weather, but more interestingly, Peter Bilak’s second proposal consists of a computer program that “would select a different typeface for each day of the year” from the ones installed in the user’s computer. It seems to me like style is being depreciated as a factor of identity.
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