How a typeface helped launch Apollo | Douglas Thomas

60,048 views ・ 2019-07-20

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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In 1969 in July,
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three Americans launched into space.
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Now, they went to the surface of the moon,
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they famously made the great leap for mankind.
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Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, they walked on the surface,
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they planted this flag.
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It's rightly celebrated as a moment that in America we say is a triumph.
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We think it was this amazing accomplishment.
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They didn't just leave behind this flag, though.
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They also left behind a plaque.
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This plaque is a beautiful object,
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and one that I want to talk to you a little bit about.
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First, you might notice that there's two globes,
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representing all of earth.
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And then there's this beautiful statement:
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"We came in peace for all mankind."
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Now, at first, this is just nice poetic language,
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but it's also set in a typeface that's perfect for this moment.
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It seems industrial, it seems engineered.
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It also is the best possible name
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you could come up with for something on the moon: Futura.
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Now, I want to talk to you about fonts,
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and why this typeface is perfect for this moment.
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But it's actually more than just ceremonial.
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Now, when all of you arrived here today,
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you actually had to think about fonts.
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You might not realize it,
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but you're all unconscious experts on typography.
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Typography is the study of how fonts inhabit our world,
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they're the visual language of the words we use.
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Here's the thing that's funny about this, though.
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I know you're probably not like me, you're not a font nerd,
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maybe some of you are, but if you're not, that's alright,
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because I might spend hours every day
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trying to pick the perfect typeface for the perfect project,
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or I might spend thousands of dollars every year,
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trying to get ones with the right features.
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But all of you actually spend hours every day, evaluating fonts.
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If you don't believe me, think about how you got here.
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Each of you had to judge by the signs
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and maybe even on your phone,
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which signals to trust and which to ignore.
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You were evaluating fonts.
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Or maybe when you're just buying a new product,
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you have to think about whether something is expensive
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or cheap or hard to get or easy to find.
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And the funny thing about it is,
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this may not seem extraordinary to you,
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but the moment you see something out of place,
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you recognize it right away.
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(Laughter)
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The thing I love about typography,
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and why I love fonts and why I love Futura,
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is that, for me, what I study is everywhere.
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Every street that I walk down, every book that I pick up,
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every thing that I read is filled with the thing I love.
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Now, once you understand the history and what happens with typography,
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you actually have a history of everything before you.
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And this is the typeface Futura.
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As previously we've discussed, this is modernism in miniature.
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This is a way in which modernism infiltrated this country
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and became perhaps the most popular, or promiscuous typeface,
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of the twentieth century.
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"Less is more," right, these are the aphorisms of modernism.
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And in the visual arts, the same thing happened.
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Let's focus on the essentials, focus on the basic shapes,
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focus on geometry.
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So Futura actually holds this to its core.
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You might notice that the shapes inherent in Futura
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have circles, squares, triangles.
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Some of the shapes are all based on circles,
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like the O, D and C,
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or others have this pointed apex of the triangle.
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Others just look like they might have been made
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with a ruler or a compass.
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They feel geometric, they feel mathematic, precise.
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In fact, this whole system carries through with the way
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that the typeface was designed.
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To not look like it was made like other typefaces, to be something new.
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Here it is in the lightweight, the medium weight and the bold weight.
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The whole family has different things to commend to it.
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This was a conscious break from the past,
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something that looked like it was made by a machine, and not by hand.
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When I say not made by hand, this is what I mean.
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This is what we think about maybe,
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when you might create something with a calligraphic brush or a pen.
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That there's thicks and thins.
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And even more traditional typefaces, say like a Garamond,
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holds vestiges of this old system
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in which you can see the A where it get little bit thinner at the top
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and thicker down below,
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because it's trying to look like someone had made it by hand.
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But Futura, in contrast,
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is designed to look like no one had touched it at all,
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that this was made by a machine,
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for a machine age, for an industrial age.
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There's actually a sleight of hand here
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that Paul Renner, the designer who made this in 1927, employed.
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If you look at the way in which
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the circular shape joins with the vertical shaft,
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you'll notice that it tapers just every so slightly.
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And this is one of hundreds of ways
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in which this typeface was designed to look geometrically perfect,
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even though it's mathematically not.
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And this is what typeface designers do all the time
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to make typefaces work, every day.
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Now, there were other designers doing this at the same time in Europe and America.
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These are a few other excellent examples from Europe,
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trying to create something new for the new age, a new moment in time.
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These are some other ones in Germany
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that in some ways look very similar to Futura,
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maybe with higher waist or lower waist or different proportions.
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Then why did Futura take over the world?
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In this case, if you can read the titles there,
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some of these names don't quite roll off the tongue:
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Erbar, Kabel Light, Berthold-Grotesk, Elegant-Grotesk.
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These aren't exactly household names, are they?
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And so when you compare that to Futura,
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you realize that this was a really good choice by the marketing team.
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What's amazing about this name --
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you know, what's in this name is that this is a name
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that actually invokes hope and an idea about the future.
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And this isn't actually the word for future in German,
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it wasn't a German name,
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they actually picked something
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that would speak to a wider, larger audience, a universal audience.
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And when you compare it to what was being done in America --
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these are the typefaces from the same period
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in the United States in the 1920s,
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bold, brash, braggadocios.
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You almost think of this as exactly like what the stock market looked like
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when they were all going nuts in the 1920s.
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And you realize that Futura is doing something revolutionary.
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I want to step back and talk about an example of the typeface in use.
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So this is a magazine that we all probably know today, "Vanity Fair."
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This is what it looked like in 1929, in the summer.
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And in many ways, there's nothing wrong with this design.
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This is absolutely typical of the 1920s.
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There's a photograph of an important person,
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in this case Franklin Roosevelt, then-governor of New York.
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Everything seems centered, everything seems symmetrical.
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There's still a little bit of ornamentation,
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so this is still maybe having some vestiges of the painted lady
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and not fully modernistic.
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But everything seems kid of solid.
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There's even drop caps to help you get into the text.
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But this all changed very quickly and in October of 1929,
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a Berlin-based designer came and redesigned "Vanity Fair."
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And this is what it looks like with Futura.
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Instead of the governor
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now we have a photograph of an abstract, beautiful setting,
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in this case, the ocean.
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Instead of drop caps, there's nothing at all.
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And replaced with a centered layout is now asymmetry.
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And it gets even more radical the further you enter the magazine.
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In this case, even more dramatic asymmetry.
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In this case, illustrations by Pablo Picasso, moving across the page
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and breaking the gutter of the two pages.
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And there's something even more radical.
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If you look closely at the Futura, you might notice something.
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You might not pick it up at first,
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but there are no capital letters in the title or the captions on this page.
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You might not think that's very radical,
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but pick up any magazine, any book or go to any website,
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and I guarantee, you are not going to find it very easily.
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This is still a radical idea.
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And why is that radical?
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When we think about what capital letters denote,
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they denote something important,
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whether it's our names, or our titles.
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Or maybe even just the name of our corporations,
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or maybe our trademarks.
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Actually, in some ways, America's the home of capitalization.
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We love putting capitals in everything.
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(Laughter)
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But think about how radical this would be
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to introduce a magazine where you're taking away all the capital letters.
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This has maybe had the same political force
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that we now argue over things like pronouns in our society today.
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In the 1920s,
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this is just shortly after Soviet Russia had a communist revolution.
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And for them, this actually represented a socialist infiltration into America.
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All lowercase letters meant that this was an egalitarian,
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complete lowering of everything into one equal playing field.
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Now this is still kind of a radical idea.
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Think about how often you do capitalize something
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to have more power or prestige to it.
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So for them to do this was a way in which Futura was using this idea.
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Now, other designers were doing other things with Futura.
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Others brought other ideas of modernism with it,
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whether it was interesting new illustration styles,
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or interesting new collage types of illustration.
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Or even just new book covers,
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whether they were from Europe.
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But here's the funny thing.
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In the 1920s, if you wanted to use a new typeface,
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you couldn't just go download it onto your computer.
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You actually had to have pieces of lead.
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So for Americans who wanted to adopt this
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and make it part of their own system,
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something they could use in everyday typography,
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whether in ads or anything else,
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they actually had to have metal type.
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So being good American capitalists, what did we do?
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We made all sorts of copies.
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Ones that had nothing to do with the name Futura,
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but looked identical to it,
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whether it was Spartan or Tempo.
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And in fact, by the time that World War II started,
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American corporations were actually trying to boycott Nazi goods.
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But they said, "Go ahead and use our copies.
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Use 20th Century, use Spartan, use Vogue, use Tempo.
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These are identical to Futura."
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And in fact, for most people, they didn't even learn the new names,
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they just still called it all Futura.
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So America took this typeface in,
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conquered it and made it its own.
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So by the time World War II finishes,
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Americans are using this on everything,
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whether it be catalogs, or atlases,
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or encyclopedias or charts and graphs,
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or calendars, or even political material.
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And even the logo for a new expansion football team.
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And in fact, it was used even on some of the most important advertising
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of the 20th century.
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So it's in this context
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that when the US government was picking a typeface
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to use after World War II for new maps and new projects,
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they picked Futura.
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It wasn't an astounding choice, it wasn't a radical choice,
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it didn't have anything to do with communism.
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But in this case, it was used on some of the most important maps,
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so this one, an air force map in 1962,
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or used for the maps in Vietnam in '66.
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And so it wasn't a surprise
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that when astronauts first started the Mercury program,
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such as John Glenn orbiting the earth,
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that charts and maps that he was using were in Futura.
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And in fact, by the time Mercury morphed into Apollo,
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it started getting used more and more for more things.
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So in this case for a safety plan,
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or even starting to get used on instrument panels,
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or navigational aids.
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Or even on diagrams to show how the whole system worked.
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But here's the amazing thing,
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it didn't just get used for papers that they handed out to people.
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It started to get used for an interface,
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for an entire system that helped the astronauts
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know how to use the machine.
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NASA wasn't just one big corporation making everything.
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There was hundreds of contractors --
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Boeing, IBM, McDonnell Douglas --
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all making different machines.
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Now imagine if astronauts had to use different typefaces and different systems
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for each component they had in the space shuttles.
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This would have been impossible to navigate
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and there would have been a cognitive overload
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every time they had to open up a new system.
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So in this case, Futura being used on the interface
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helped them navigate complexity and make it more clear.
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And it wasn't just used on buttons, it was used on labels,
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and it was used on their food rations,
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and it was used on their tool kits.
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It was used on knobs and levers to tell them what to do.
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In fact, maybe even some of the places
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where they needed to have things that were complex be more simple to them,
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instructions were printed entirely in Futura,
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so that they could know what to do with that one moment.
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They didn't have to remember everything in their head,
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they could have it out there in the world to see and refer to.
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In this case, Futura helped make that system,
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which was already a very difficult and complex system,
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a little less complex.
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In fact, the very first or last thing an astronaut might have seen
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when they were entering or exiting the spacecraft
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would have been in Futura.
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One of my favorite examples of how Futura worked in this way
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is actually this camera.
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This is a Hasselblad that was made by the Swedish company.
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It's a perfectly good camera, some of you might have used one,
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it's prized by photographers as a really great camera.
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And you might notice, if you know anything about cameras,
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that there's some modifications made to it.
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In this case, there are stickers placed all over the film canisters,
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or other parts of the camera here.
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What this enabled NASA to do,
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was make something really great out of the astronauts.
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They're not photographers, they're not experts in art.
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But they could ensure that they would know how to use this camera
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because of the labels placed there in Futura.
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So in this case,
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Futura acquired and made sure that they had legitimacy
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with the things they were using.
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In this case to not take off the film before it would expose.
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Which, in this case, we would have never had
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some of the amazing photos we had without this label.
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When we see something as decorative as this, a ceremonial patch,
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or something like this plaque on the moon,
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we realize that Futura was more than just something ceremonial,
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something more than something that had just been picked for its design.
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In fact, Futura had authority,
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had legitimacy and had power because of this choice.
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There's one other thing I want to talk about in closing.
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And that is that Futura tells a story.
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And this is what I love about typefaces, is that all of them tell stories.
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And in this case, this typeface tells a very powerful story
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about assimilation, about something being taken into America
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and being made part of its culture.
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And that's one of the best and worst things America does,
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is we take things into our culture and we spit them out back again
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and claim them our own.
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And in this case, Futura mirrors exactly what happened with the technology
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undergirding the whole system.
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Futura was a German typeface, taken in, made into an American commodity.
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And so were the technologies:
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the rockets, the scientists all came from Germany as well.
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So in some ways, this German typeface on an American plaque
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perfectly mirrors what happened with the technology.
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And in this case,
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when you think about this story, you realize that typography on the moon
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represents legitimacy, represents authority,
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and this gave them, the astronauts, the power to get to the moon.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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