The karaoke bar I go to in Southeast Portland runs its lyrics through a monitor that has been bolted to that wall since roughly 2004. Same typeface every night. A heavy italic sans with a hard drop shadow, white on blue, kerned by nobody. Last Tuesday I sang a Patsy Cline song in it and every word looked like an ad for a boat rental. The host, who calls everyone baby, said it was beautiful. The font disagreed with him the entire time.
Every word on that screen was correct. The typeface still argued with all of them.
I have thought about it all week, which tells you something about how I am spending December.
Type is the part of your brand that reaches a person before the copy does and gets read even when the copy does not, which makes it the only voice work that happens whether you invest in it or not.
This got harder in 2018, not easier. Google has Product Sans. Airbnb has Cereal. Spotify has Circular. Uber redrew its whole system around Move. Every one of those decisions is defensible on its own terms: screens are everywhere, legibility at small sizes is real, licensing at scale is a genuine budget line, and geometric sans faces behave themselves in a design system. The trouble is the aggregate. Line up eight tech wordmarks, cover the names, and try to say which is which. You cannot. Neither can your customer, who is not studying them.
The brands that still sound like themselves on a shelf made a harder choice somewhere. Oatly's cartons look like a person typed them in a hurry and meant it, and that mess is doing more positioning work than the copy is. Patagonia's slab has not flinched in decades and reads as durable because it has been durable. Stumptown's bag says small, exact, a little serious before you have read the origin. Powell's hand-painted signage is not efficient and has never needed to be, because nobody confuses it with anything else in the country.
Here is what I ask clients now, usually in the first hour. Not which font do you like. Instead: if we set your name and your competitor's name in this face, side by side, does anything happen? If the answer is no, we have chosen wallpaper. Variable fonts are landing in browsers, custom drawing is cheaper than it was five years ago, and the excuse that distinctive type is a luxury is getting thin.
If the answer is no, we have chosen wallpaper.
The bar will never change its screen and I would riot if it did. That ugly italic is the most recognizable thing in the room. Truffles, for her part, sleeps directly on top of my type specimen books, which I have decided is a review.