Socialist features of a typeface

[Nick Shinn]

Any open source font.

As long as it's not too well made.

[J.Montalbano]

Road sign fonts: designed for the public good with tax money.

The first time that was done in the U.S. was back in 1948 when the original Highway Gothic Series fonts were developed. Then again in the early 60s with the addition of EModified. And in the early 2000s when FHWA developed the horrible lowercase additions to Series B, C, and D.

[typodermic]

As long as it's not too well made.

That is true. Some of the best looking open source fonts are merely autotraced capitalist fonts.

[froo]

I believe, that as designers, we are committed to market a good, thoughtful products. Not for the same input, but in order to - hopefully - improve the quality of our common life. The same principle, I think, also relates to any ideologies that we - sometimes unintentionally- redistribute.
I've got used to that, for most people, we - the ones dealing with and interested in typography - are harmless idiots, and the things that we do are worth the garbage.
That's unfair from our perspective. But I can understand, that from "their" point of view, replacing "us" with a crap, is a step in the business side to understand.
Now, let's turn the situation inside-out and see what's wrong with descripting "socialist issue" as something crappy.
If we write that a font is "socialist" as long as it's not too well made, or that it will be clumsy font merely copied from a "capitalist" product, then we spread the unjust and false belief.
Unjust: at first to those people of a good will, tortured and murdered, who insisted to us without knowing us, the rights obvious to us right now.
False: because one can give numerous conterexamples, like fonts included once with the graphics program by a Canadian company, that were also stolen and badly executed - and yet by the capitalist hands. If we say, that "socialist" is something poorly made, then after having a look at the lists of top ten richest, most innovative and most developed countries, we'll find a bunch of countries with very strong social sector there. Let's be objective.
In fact, this is not the ownership of the means of production depends on the quality of products. Spiekermann's work for the German government isn't executed worse than the work for VW, which is a private company. (And Mr Spiekermann once said, that he prefers to see his fonts stolen but well used, than bought and missused. The message is clear, and far above the copyright discussion).

Probably even if we are those, who should "inform" people, "help them to understand", in cases of dealing with such broad and unsharp abstractions like capitalism or socialism or whatever else ideology, we just need a cliche to communicate...

[typodermic]

Are there any contemporary typefaces made today that would be regarded socialist?

I'll try again: Any open source font that's not basically a copy of a well-known classic font. There are a lot of useful opensource fonts to choose from.

I've seen some open font sites where the majority of original fonts are "so-so" quality. When they're seen alongside adaptations of Avant Garde, Helvetica & Franklin Gothic the contrast is stark.

Open Font Library is not like this. Most of the fonts are original and they've obviously picked some of the best ones. The adaptation of older fonts on http://openfontlibrary.org/ seems good to me; they look pro.

I have seen a lot of attractive auto-traced classic open source fonts on other open source font sites. With some open source font sites where there appears to be a low quality bar, the auto-traced classics stand head and shoulders above. That's what I thought Nick meant.

Perhaps a crowd-sourced, open source font would best represent socialism. There's kind of a similar thing going on there.

I'm glad you're not using typical Russian constructivist fonts. If anything it would lead people to believe socialists are incapable of drawing letters without a graph paper and ruler.

[Nick Shinn]

What I meant was that professionalism is more capitalist than socialist.

[russellm]

Says who?

[typodermic]

Awww, Nick. Now I have to re-engineer by all my careful back-pedalling.

I'm out.

[Nick Shinn]

Says who? Not Lenin!

But with regard to type, as I understand it, creative type design ceased during the Soviet regime, because types were considered to be capitalist tools of consumerism.

[rrichrs]

Helvetica. Yeah that'll do.

[Té Rowan]

@Nick - Only in terms of professionalism as expecting money or other remuneration in exchange for your skills. The other type, that of wanting to be "the best whore in the whorehouse" is not restricted to any one country or bloc.

[andrijtype]

it is very simple thing:

in real socialist typeface all letters must be equal. and equally ugly. no that ascenders, descenders. best if they all looks the same: ie. like comrade H.

[Nick Shinn]

These guys are all the same height and width.

[John Hudson]

Nick: But with regard to type, as I understand it, creative type design ceased during the Soviet regime, because types were considered to be capitalist tools of consumerism.

My understanding is a bit different, based on Maxim Zhukov's account and on the contents of the 'big grey book of Soviet typography'. Creative type design flourished: what did not was manufacturing of type and technological innovation. Foreign technology was suspect and importation strictly controlled (ironically, at the same time as export to the Soviet Union was limited and controlled from the outside). Hence, most of the people we would identify as type designers worked as 'lettering artists', and much display 'type' was rendered by hand and photographically reproduced.

[dezcom]

Choosing a typeface to evoke a particular ideology is hardly enough to do the job. Much of the tone is set with how it is used. You also have to ask what aspects of Socialism are you emphasizing? Is this the early revolutionary writing of movement leaders or just a discussion of socialized medicine in long-established governments today?

The proof is in the pudding, not in just one of the ingredients.

[russellm]

How about,

A capitalist font is a collection of beautiful letters.
A socialist font is a beautiful collection of letters.

(to paraphrase)

Fonts can not have any intrinsic philosophical or political meaning on their own without the obvious references to Constructivist, Socialist Realism and the hammer and sickle (☭). Fonts are vehicles for messages. Not messages.

Just my 3 cents.

[Khaled Hosny]

The medium is the message

[froo]

Much of the tone is set with how it is used. You also have to ask what aspects of Socialism are you emphasizing?
That's the point. Paraphrasing Vignelli, you can write it with Helvetica Extra Bold or Extra Light.

[Andrew Osman]

Unemployment by Eric Gill

[John Hudson]

Gill was a distributist, not a socialist. Distributism combines Proudhonian anarchism with Catholic social teaching (especially the principle of subsidiarity), favouring broadly spread, direct ownership of the means of production, contra either centralised state control or concentrated capital control.

[dezcom]

If Massimo were setting "The Diary of Anne Franck", would he have chosen Helvetica Extra Light or Helvetica Extra Bold?

[Maxim Zhukov]

There have been very few new typefaces designed in the USSR between 1917 and late 1980s. Older designs developed mostly by German-Russian type foundries were used for decades. They were endlessly recycled and repurposed, and adapted for the new typesetting technologies: linecasting, photocomposition, digital. I have no exact numbers (I wonder if they exist) but it feels like, say, 75 per cent of Soviet print was set in Romana-like Latinskii, a.k.a. Literaturnaya [garnitura].

Allen Hutt, the renowned British expert in newspaper typography, a communist, and a frequent visitor to Moscow, who probably shared the values and the ideals of “British Typographical Revival”, felt so offended by the ubiquity of Literaturnaya in Soviet print of the 1960s that he wrote:

The survival of this De Vinne-style type, from the worst design period of old Imperial Germany, in the premier Socialist country in the latter part of the twentieth century, is a typographical phenomenon as unique as it is deplorable. (Hutt A. “A revolution in Russian typography”. In.: “The Penrose Survey“. The Penrose Annual, Vol. 61. Herbert Spencer, ed. London: Lund, Humphries & Cº., 1968.)

This is why, to a considerable degree, Latinskii/Literaturnaya may be regarded at the very least as a first runner-up to the crown of “The Soviet Socialist Type of the Century”.

Another likely candidate could easily be the type used in the first line of this broadsheet:

This typeface must have been initially used for the iconic nameplate of Pravda, the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The same typeface was used in the dozens of ‘lesser Pravdas’: Pionerskaya Pravda, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Pravda Vostoka, Vostochno-Sibirskaya Pravda, Minskaya Pravda, Kaliningradskaya Pravda, etc.

Izvestiya, the second-largest daily of the USSR, also had a title piece in the Art Nouveau style…

Come to think of it, in this part of the world, not only in Russia, the Art Nouveau typefaces were often used for the nameplates of newspapers, not necessarily Socialist: e.g., Politika, Helsingin Sanomat, Rudé Právo, Robotnik.

[froo]

As offtopic, while I can't load the picture: I guess, Vignelli would use Garamond or Times and Futura.

[froo]

...so here you have the largest daily newspaper in Poland, an equivalent to Soviet Pravda. Analogous to Pravda, which meant "Truth", but didn't contain too much truth, Trybuna Ludu was the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party inspite it's name meant Tribune of the People.
The newspaper used to spread in millions, because it was made of a scarce commodity(it was usually used as a shim under the boots, wchich was trendy and cool).

[russellm]

@ myself. A capitalist font is a collection of beautiful letters.
A socialist font is a beautiful collection of letters.

I should have said, "...
A socialist font is a beautiful collective of letters.