What FONT is this? An investigation of the investigating of letters by a letter investigator.

>First published to the blog @ ERA Architects (eraarch.ca), 2022< 

We are surrounded by letter forms everywhere in our built environment, whether it’s road signage, advertisements, storefronts, manhole covers, inscriptions on buildings, graffiti, or the branded cup of coffee we’re holding. For most, the letter forms around us are invisible, a part of the fabric of the city and our lives; but when we stop to notice them, there is a universe of styles and forms to discover, inevitably prompting the question, “What font is this?”

Professionally, I get this question a lot as an in-house graphic designer and a researcher of historic lettering. I’ve been designing fonts since 2016 and am an alumnus of the postgraduate program in type design at The Cooper Union, NYC, one of only a few such programs in the world. I also teach ‘experimental typography’ at the School of Design at George Brown College, so we’re going to get pedantic for a moment and unpack the query “What font is this?”—to understand why it’s often the wrong question, and even so, how to find an answer through the resources we have. 

A FONT is strictly speaking a specific size, weight or style of a particular typeface: “12 pt Helvetica Bold,” for instance—the font constitutes every character in the set of that particular size, weight or style: letters, numbers, punctuation, diacritics, maths and other analphabetic glyphs. The TYPEFACE more generally refers to the harmonious set of letter forms that define the character/look of specific fonts—“Helvetica” for example, can be perceived as Helvetica across all weights, sizes or styles. Further down the rabbit-hole, when we talk of TYPE, this refers to the output or physical manifestation of a font on a page or screen or other such ‘printing’ method. 

Here is where we can understand a fundamental divide between what is a font and what is not: a font is a pre-fabricated and reproducible system, consisting of ready-made character forms whether metal sorts or digital glyphs. So anything that is not that is not a font. 

Most simply, anything that’s not a font, we can call LETTERING—and for this conversation, the 3 most common lettering instances we see in the built environment are painted, carved, or sculpted/machined forms. 

There is some understanding of history and precedent experience at play here as well in determining whether we will find a font or a form of lettering in a particular case of signage, and that’s a bit harder to quantify. But generally starting around the 1960s, technology had allowed for photostat reproduction (scaling of a single font to any size) and early digital production on vinyl and other substrates or in the use of machining tools on planar surfaces (wood, stone, etc), such that many cases where we’d only have expected hand painted lettering—a shop awning, for instance—could now be reproduced from technologies using traditional fonts. This revolution was inevitable, and it provided a cost-effective and fast method to create all manner of signage for anyone who needed it. 

Once we know a rough date of origin and the material and scale of a certain sign is assessed, we will have determined whether we are likely looking at a FONT or a certain style and form of LETTERING. 

There are myriad books on the subject of font classifications and an endless supply of individual font specimens available out in the world, but a few basic details will point us in the right direction when asking “what font is this?”—serifs or not; classical proportions or not; high or low contrast of strokes; running strokes or interrupted; high or low x-heights; and finally any era-specific ‘quirks’ in the letterforms (Romanesque styling, art-deco geometric curves, Victorian ornamentation, etc). Again, this is an area requiring a bit of experience, but narrowing down what we’re looking for is a key step to finding the font in question; though the truth of the matter is more often than not, people in every era will tend toward the trends of the day, which means that popular fonts of an era will be used A LOT—when a style works to grab attention or to add clarity, we tend to emulate it. So in actual fact, it’s rare to find very obscure fonts in use en masse, and with a robust catalogue of the most common of them in my memory banks, I can typically identify letterforms at a glance or with the support of one or two resources for confirmation. 

There are several broad kinds of resources I use, including font specimens and some great font classification books in my library, and of course the internet for a massive supply beyond what any one library could have. But when it comes to LETTERING instead of fonts, I rely on 19th and 20th century signpainters’ manuals, signage manufacturing catalogues, and monument engravers’ guides, as well as a personal collection of ephemera and other reference books. 

These sources, especially signpainters’ manuals, are a treasure trove of era-specific styles and tastes, but also because they contain the tried and true “standards” that have been used across the industry since its inception. Signpainters were the de facto advertising and signage industry in every city and town for generations, so the techniques and styles elucidated in these manuals apply to identifying so much historic lettering—so much so that the styles common to signpainting very easily made their way into fonts in the 20th century and into letter carving and manufacturing and vice versa. 

The reproduction or replication of these forms requires its own set of considerations and questions to be answered based on use, material, and context—but it all still begins with the same question, the most important part of the job: “What font is this?”