20.07.06
Look up, number 2

Part of a series celebrating lost signs. This one was seen on Clapham Southside.

10.07.06
Soft, warm and approachable

They’re everywhere. With their rounded edges and approachable curves. They have no sharp edges, no difficult angles. Soft, warm, approachable typefaces have taken over corporate Britain. Take a slow walk down your high street and from your bank to the post office, blobby fonts are in control. From Barclays Bank, to the Telewest van, to the Royal Mail, they’re everywhere. In the space of a decade, rounded typefaces have turned from being the joke fonts exclusively reserved for children’s party invites to the must-have corporate look of the noughties.

How did this switch come about? Johnson banks might be slightly to blame, having developed a complete font for BT Cellnet in the nineties that tried to rationalise the odd letterforms in the BT logotype into a complete font, and a rounded version of Futura for MORE TH>N at the turn of the century. But, in truth, the history of this now super-prevalent style goes back further than that, to The German Post Office and techno flyers.

By The German Post Office we mean Erik Spiekermann and his eighties experiments with typeforms that were to become Meta, the flag bearer for a new genre of typefaces called ‘humanist’. With their rounded letterforms and willingness to break out of the apparent geometry of the ‘classic’ sans serifs like Helvetica and Univers, faces like Meta became a phenomenon, especially in the dry old world of corporate design. Legend has it that in the nineties the British Design Council, in discussion with consultancies about which font to use, received the same answer from three separate companies who all recommended Spiekermann’s baby. Little wonder that Meta became dubbed the ‘Helvetica of the nineties’.

Meanwhile, in club-world rave flyers and techno sleeves had begun to embrace rounded letterforms as designers like Farrow and 8vo use them to great effect (Helvetica rounded is still Helvetica, after all). So when Wolff Olins revived their own 70s invention VAG (originally drawn for the Volkswagen and Audi Group) for the Tate re-brand, a series of nods of approval had been given to the design community and the high street that ‘human’ and ‘soft’ was within reach again.

Interestingly, many of the users of soft, warm, approachable typefaces (let’s call them SWATs for short) have barely touched their actual identities in the process. Barclays, Royal Mail and internationals such as GEC are all pummelling their SWATs with only minor tweaks to their logos in the process. This asks interesting questions of modern branding, where the cost implications of logo change are so vast, the introduction of a new typeface ticks just enough boxes to produce (at boardroom level at least) a new look, a ‘refresh’, if you like. You can almost hear the brand values being checked off as you look at your bank literature.

The paradox of this is that many of these organisations are trying to mask the weaknesses of their core brands with a font decision. The odd cruciform logo that the Royal Mail clings onto is an interim solution that seems to have stumbled along for a couple of decades. Does anyone truly believe that the wholesale adoption of a SWAT will really change a corporate personality? The bizarre 3d effect eagle that Barclays have stuck onto their fascias throughout the country cannot be rescued by the choice of a headline typeface in some rounded boxes.

Perhaps we should see this positively, that corporates are now starting to see that how their tone of voice appears in their font, their writing and their headlines is just as important as the symbol that appears in the corner. Perhaps.

There’s often an inverse relationship between the companies that choose soft and where they are often perceived to be exactly the reverse. Barclays desperately want to be seen as a ‘human’ bank, the Royal Mail is eager to be seen as more modern and relevant. But where does this all end? Will a corporate finally go as far as Easyjet and also adopt the blobbiest of typefaces, Cooper Black, as their font? Or was the Abbey double re-brand a sign of things to come, the ‘soft’ straw that broke the camel’s back?

We can’t help thinking that deep down this is little more than a trend. A trend driven by lazy advice and herd thinking by designers and design managers world-wide – as more and more organisations adopt SWATs, more and more of them will look the same. The desire for difference simply ends up with the opposite affect. Which is an odd thing to do. We’re pretty sure that ‘the same as everyone else’ wasn’t in their lists of brand values.

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