Gotham Gets A New Face

Unfortunately, Katia Bachko's entire piece on Clearview, New York City's new typeface for all road signage, is behind The New Yorker's paywall. If you've got a subscription you can read the whole delightful thing, and come to a new appreciation of how difficult it can be to render a legible fraction on a road sign. According to James Montalbano, one of Clearview's designers, fractions are "a uniquely American thing. Elsewhere, it's metric--they're all decimal."

The New York Times is a little more generous and will let you read this piece in its entirety, and will show you pictures of the old and new signage.

But maybe the best evidence that typeface selection really matters is from the Clearview website itself:

What designers call 'reduced halation.'

Fun with Type

If you read GallyCat, you may have already seen their blurb about an interesting new blurb about the book Just My Type. In it, there's a Periodic Table of Type. (Yes, type nerds, you heard me right. I'm squealing with delight right along side you.) Reminds me a little bit of Jeffrey Skinner's Periodic Table of Poetic Elements.

Helvetica

Helvetica film still

So far on this blog the subject has been poetry, but Architrave is also about the art of type. Recently I re-watched Gary Hustwit's film Helvetica and I was reminded of some of the many commonalities between the two art forms.