Avant Garde Gothic (shown above) was a typeface designed by Herb Lubalin in the 60’s for a magazine called Avant Garde. All the other designers wanted to use it because it was so “graphic”. After the magazine folded, it was finally released for general use. According to Herb, only one other designer has used Avant Garde Gothic the way it was intended to be used. I guess that makes sense.

Here’s something that happens all the time. A new typeface appears. First, some big ad agencies start using it. Then more and more people become aware of it, and because of the demand more and more type-setting places start carrying it. Before you know it, it’s the most popular typeface in the country. Then, little by little, people get tired of looking at it and the popularity levels off. Around this time, it is “discovered” by mediocre-to-poor designers who proceed to drive it into the ground through over-use. Take the typeface above. It’s called Souvenir, a French word meaning “to remember”. It’s only a few years old, but many designers are already trying to forget it.

Here’s a strange thing: substituting big lowercase letters for uppercase letters. It was real popular in the 60’s. Designers thought it made words look more “friendly.” Nowadays, when somebody does this they are immediately sent away for treatment.

A simple formula for the lazy designer who wants to be successful: Set everything in Helvetica (above); “flush left, ragged right”; don’t center anything; make sure everything lines up with something else and leave plenty of creative “white space.”

Some lettering artists just don’t know when to stop. Give them a word and they’ll give you a drop-shadowed, outlined, comstocked, shadowboxed, airbrushed, over-embellished, interlocking, pretentious mess that’s so slick you need a pair of vice-grips to keep it from sliding out your hands. This kind of thing is usually used on the covers of boring books trying to become best-sellers.

One of the things that always seems to impress people is the swash. But unless it is done well, it often looks terrible. Beginners usually come up with something like the example above.

One of the things that’s like really weird y’know is like y’know the lettering stuff they do in like underground comic books and stuff like that where they kinda relate like to the reader’s consciousness y’know with like typefaces like Windsor and Cooper y’know like really funky sort of ones like that y’know?

There is a cult that’s been flourishing since the 60’s that is hooked on decorative art of the past, such as Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Art Moderne and so on. The goal is to match, as nearly as possible, the style of a given era. If this is done perfectly, the designer goes into Nostalgic Rapture and becomes a Perfect Then Master.

There are a whole bunch of typefaces, like the one above, that are made up of only circles and straight lines. Nobody knows quite what to use them for, but the type designers keep cranking them out, anyway.

The two words above (“far out”) have been set in two of the thousands of relatively useless typefaces available. Designers design them to please themselves or impress other designers or clients. About the only place they are ever used is in ads for type companies.

One of the most selfish and self-indulgent things a type designer or lettering artist can do is to make words illegible. If you suspect that something you are trying to read has been made unreadable for no apparent reason, don’t read it. It’ll serve them right.

Almost every designer in this country is an ampersand freak. They can’t resist a beautiful ampersand. An ampersand is that strange-looking symbol that comes from the joining of the two letters in the word “et”, the Latin word for “and”. Designers are obsessed with the many variations that are possible. Don’t criticize them for this, though. They would probably come after you with an X-acto knife.

Mark Simonson is this newspaper’s production manager and typologist.