Not So Font Of You Anymore
Mourning the breakup of Typography’s greatest partnership.
The news broke a few months ago. And it shocked the design world to the core.
Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones were not two separate entities. They were born six days apart in the very lucky month of August 1970. They were competitors and then they were business partners; one in the same. Each time one was interviewed or called for comment, the other butted in. They were the darlings of type design. Their work was prolific; their typefaces seen everywhere. Hoefler & Frere-Jones was so synonymous with its craft that when you Googled typography, their homepage was the first result after Wikipedia.
So it was unfathomable. Yet there it was. Black and white. Set 12 on 24 points in Arial like some sort of ironic punch-line: the terms of the lawsuit Tobias Frere-Jones had taken out against Jonathan Hoefler.
…in the most profound treachery and sustained exploitation of friendship, trust and confidence, Hoefler accepted all of the benefits provided by Frere-Jones while repeatedly promising Frere-Jones that he would give him the agreed equity…
—Lawsuit, January 2013
Jonathan Hoefler began an apprenticeship at the ripe age of eighteen for the Roger Black Studio, where he spent a year building a name for himself while he conducted his studies. He designed the new masthead for Harper’s Bazaar just after he turned nineteen.
When his year with Roger Black ran out, he opened his own business, Hoefler Type Foundry, for which he registered the iconic domain name ‘typography.com’. It was 1994; the dot com race had barely begun.
The business of type design is his language.
Tobias Frere-Jones, on the other hand, took a much more traditional approach to his artistic education. He earned his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where, at the time, there was no formal type design curricula. Frere-Jones pursued independent study classes, seeking out the opinions of master typographers when his own skill set began to exceed that of his professors. It was through several conversations with Matthew Carter over his first commercially available typeface, that Frere-Jones landed his first job. The typeface, drawn for his brother’s band, was sold through Carter’s foundry, FontBureau prior to Frere-Jones’ graduation. Upon the completion of his degree, Frere-Jones was hired at FontBureau.
Since then, he has gone on to be one of the world’s leading and most recognized type designers. He has designed over 800 fonts, useable in 145 different languages. In 1996, he joined the faculty at the Yale School of Art and he frequently lectures on typeface design and typography at other academic institutions and graphic design organizations. His work is included in the permanent collections at the Victoria & Albert and the Museum of Modern Art. He is the first American to receive the prestigious Gerrit Noordzij Prize.
Together in 2013, Frere-Jones and Hoefler received the AIGA medal—the graphic design profession’s highest honor.
When Hoefler and Frere-Jones met, the type design world was smaller, even more niche than it is now, fifteen years later. Both were avid collectors of antique type specimen books. When bookseller catalogs showed up in the mail, Tobias remarks, “I knew that I would have to drop everything right that second, because I knew that at that moment, Jonathan was looking through the same catalog” about to buy up all of the best of the specimens.
After years of being the benchmark by which the other was judged—one would design type for Martha Stewart Living and so Better Homes and Gardens would call on the other—they “recognized in each other the capacity to be both one another’s best advocates and harshest critics” (Hoefler).
And then in 1999, at the Gotham Bar & Grill on 12th Street, Hoefler extended an offer of partnership to Frere-Jones: move to New York and we will start Tobais and Jonathan’s Excellent Adventure LLC. For the subsequent decade and a half, they worked in tandem under the name Hoefler & Frere-Jones, their specimen books displayed proudly on the studio bookshelf, spine to spine, as one collection.
You know, we were always friends, even though we were technically competitors. —Tobias Frere-Jones, April 2013
Shortly after the beginnings of their partnership, Frere-Jones, with the help of Hoefler, began a commission for GQ. The design brief was entirely aesthetic: a masculine and geometric sans-serif, that was new, fresh and versatile. Given the ambiguity, Frere-Jones decided to return to a project he began in the early 1990s, one he still wanted to explore further: working-class lettering. These kinds of letters fascinated Frere-Jones because they were not created by a designer, but an engineer. They were so basic, that a designer would turn up his nose at them.
on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Little West 12th Street.
The letters, though they appeared modernist, were inherently different from their German and Swiss counterparts, most notably the ubiquitous Helvetica. The earliest examples of this lettering date back to the Work Project Administration Posters of post-depression America.
It is possible that these typefaces were inspired by the simplification of typographic standards that came out of Nazi Germany, which frowned upon extraneous decoration. This attitude was present in Germany’s contemporary architecture, the organization of that society itself, and it was definitely present in the popular typefaces, like Univers and Futura, that emerged during this period. New Deal America was trying for the same kind of graphic unification, leading to the development of what Frere-Jones has taken to calling the American sans-serif.
on Eighth Avenue, west of Pennsylvania Station
Historically, lettering like this was created completely outside of the realm of type design. It was geometric and bold, and it looked like draftsman lettering. As a rule, signs that used it were devoid of stylistic embellishments and were based entirely on legibility and the ability to reproduce letters mechanically. The style was long treated for many years as a formula for signage lettering, and so it was popular in the urban landscape. The American sans-serif dominated cities until the late 1950s, when the typeface Helvetica was introduced. Quickly, the hand-rendered American sans was all but obsolete.
Obsolete, until Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler stood under the sign over the entrance to the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal, admiring the lettering.
the eighth avenue facade of New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal.
From there, Frere-Jones and Hoefler combed the streets of New York City for the rest of the alphabet. The capitals were easy to build; both because those letterforms embodied the most basic forms of the alphabet and because the engineers who designed these signs worked exclusively in the upper case, as mixture of cases would only serve to clutter the signage. The numbers too, were readily accessible, while the lowercase was created almost completely from scratch.
The subsequent typeface Tobias Frere-Jones designed, is called Gotham. And it’s everywhere.
[Gotham] was born outside of type design, in some other world.
And it has a very distinct flavor from that.
—Tobias Frere Jones, Helvetica, 2007
While the partnership commenced in the last months of 1999, Hoefler Type Foundry didn’t officially change its name to Hoefler & Frere-Jones until 2003, when Frere-Jones fulfilled his end of the partnership bargain by acquiring the rights to the typefaces he designed while at FontBureau.
Rather adorably, Hoefler and Frere-Jones dubbed this group of typefaces the Dowry Fonts, “because this was going to be like a marriage” (Frere-Jones). Included within the Dowry Fonts was Whitney.
clear for signage,
compact for print.
Whitney is a sans-serif face that is unique in its ability to read well at text sizes and also look sharp as headlines and in other display uses.
In exchange for half of Jonathan’s shares in Hoefler Type Foundry and his name on the door, Tobias Frere-Jones signed over Whitney and the rest of Dowry Fonts to the new company for the nominal fee of $10. At the time of the deal, the retail value of these typefaces was just under $3 million.
In 2003, they drafted a press release to announce the name change: “Jonathan Hoefler, Principal of The Hoefler Type Foundry, and Tobias Frere-Jones, Type Director of The Hoefler Type Foundry, announced today that they have entered into an agreement to become equal partners and to rename the business Hoefler & Frere-Jones Typography.”
Tobias and Jonathan’s Excellent Adventure, LLC had officially begun. The pair of typographers agreed that Frere-Jones would operate as the principal designer while Hoefler used his client hustling skills to sell Tobias’ fonts.
“If you go back and look at the old logo, you can see the deal that we made.
There are two names there—the same size, side by side, not one over the other.”
—Tobias Frere-Jones
After Gotham finished its exclusivity contract with GQ, it enjoyed a kind of quiet success until it returned to the national stage.
In 2007, a senator from Illinois was gearing up for his presidential campaign when his design team came across Gotham. It wasn’t tired. It had history, but nothing like the typefaces employed by his competition. Gotham was trustworthy, uniquely American, and bold. It was the Change they had been looking for.
set in Gotham
That senator, of course, was Barack Obama. Many go so far to argue that Gotham, with its comfortable, vaguely familiar and undeniably friendly vibe, won Barack Obama the 2008 presidential election. Change was a message a nation could believe in, if only it was presented in the right typeface.
Not only was his message just right in Gotham, but Obama’s entire campaign was right in Gotham. Because of their determination to keep a cohesive brand across all of their communications, same colors, same graphic style and same typeface, the Obama campaign presented a single-minded visual strategy that allowed them to deliver their campaign’s message with greater impact. Where campaigns in the past picked a logo and then used several different typefaces across their campaign, Obama’s designers were resolute. From the first caucus until the final election, all of their campaign materials were on brand. Obama’s campaign accomplished very easily what corporations sometimes cannot achieve.
Gotham also didn’t carry any of the baggage of a classic face. It was almost too ordinary to be a part of a presidential election. Many postulate, however, that that was exactly the point. Gotham exudes trustworthiness because it has been seen everywhere. In the kind of media driven campaign that candidates lead today, Gotham had a particular usefulness that most classically designed typefaces do not: it’s easy to read on the screen. There is plenty of space between the letters, which makes it much easier to read when viewed on an angle, as supporters on the ground might be seeing it. Gotham excels in such a space, among a crowd, and even more so when these images and signs were shown on television.
“Seeing our work in the Obama campaign, and now on the website for
The White House, is absolutely one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever experienced, and it’s still a little surreal.”
—Jonathan Hoefler, Design Bureau, July 2011
By comparison, the typefaces in use by Obama’s competition, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, were rife with baggage. McCain’s face, Optima, is most prominently known for its use on the Vietnam War Memorial. It was a clever choice to remind McCain supporters that their candidate was a Vietnam Veteran himself. However, by 2007, it was a perplexing choice to make, Jonathan Hoefler commented, because by then, Optima was most visible in the hygiene aisle of the drug store, favored by pharmaceutical companies for its legibility.
John McCain’s 2008 Presidential Campaign,
set in Optima.
Clinton’s New Baskerville was also a snooze of a serif, something that could have been seen on the back of a box of cereal or across a mildly embarrassing medical ointment.
Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Presidential Campaign,
set in New Baskerville.
This is why Obama’s use of Gotham was such a success, because the only thing that Gotham is working hard at is being Gotham. Frere-Jones designed it to capture the idea of comfortable authority, the perfect typeface to be employed by the Commander in Chief.
J: We start with a capital H and a capital O. H being a typical square character and O being a typical round character. And once your H and your O are locked down, you can design a capital D which is half square and half round.
T: …Once those are drawn, they become the foundation for what follows.
—Font Men, 2013
After Frere-Jones signed the Sale and Assignment of Type Fonts, fully transferring over the rights to the Dowry Fonts, as well as an employment agreement with Hoefler Type Foundry, he believed that there would be an additional agreement between himself and Hoefler. This agreement would deal with the business of transferring half of the company from Hoefler to Frere-Jones. However, there were multiple delays. As they were friends and now business partners (in everything but the paperwork) Frere-Jones respected Hoefler’s delays, which cited a variety of reasons including work and personal pressures. Frere-Jones believed, somewhat naively, that the situation would work itself out.
During the interim, Hoefler presented himself and Frere-Jones as equal partners, in a series of e-mail communications with clients, always allowing his respect for Frere-Jones show through these mundane conversations:
“…my new (and as-yet-unannounced) partnership with Tobias Frere-Jones has opened the floodgates for new work;” “…setting up my new partnership with Tobias Frere-Jones (you know his Interstate family, among others);” “…that Tobias Frere-Jones, my partner at the studio, has been noodling with for some time.”
If Hoefler received an interview request, he would usually schedule the meeting to include Frere-Jones: “my partner Tobias Frere-Jones has been kind enough to let me shanghai him into joining us, since we’re far more fun as a tag team effort.” And they were so much fun as a pair, most definitely.
From the looks of it, in it’s heyday, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, must have been the most excellent of adventures.
“This was a process that produced better work. I think the other part
of it is that there aren’t many other people that I’ve met who’s opinions
I value as much as Tobais’.”
—Jonathan Hoefler, Font Men, 2013
In 2012, Mitt Romney’s design team borrowed from Obama’s arsenal, and selected their own H&FJ typeface to brand their campaign, the effortlessly masculine Mercury.
Mitt Romney’s 2012 Presidential Campaign,
set in Mercury.
It was commissioned by Esquire, another men’s lifestyle magazine, from Hoefler prior to the commencement of his partnership with Frere-Jones in 1999. It was designed for headlines, but quickly became a part of the magazine’s editorial openers. Mercury is very tightly wound, and creates an excited calm on the page. It is, like all typefaces with the Hoefler & Frere-Jones name, a gorgeous workhorse, and although it didn’t win Romney the election, it remains one of H&FJ’s more seminal accomplishments.
For his own campaign in 2013, Barack Obama’s presidential office requested an updated version of Gotham. Frere-Jones designed Gotham with Serifs, which is not yet available to the public.
exclusively for Obama’s 2012 Presidential Campaign
The effect of the serifed Gotham to Obama’s campaign materials was not to make it stuffy or conservative. Rather, it was as if H&FJ had introduced Gotham: All Grown Up. Gotham with Serifs had been through four years in the Oval Office and it knew better than anyone else how to run the United States of America.
“The decade that we’ve worked together has been everything I’d ever hoped,
and more.”
—Jonathan Hoefler, Design Bureau, July 2011
In the Spring to 2012, Hoefler said that he would complete the transfer of equity after the launch of the Cloud, a new service designed to deliver Hoefler & Frere-Jones typefaces to the web, a product that was a longtime coming as far as the graphic design world was concerned.
After the Cloud finally launched in 2013, Hoefler revealed to Frere-Jones, for the first time, in October, that he did not intend to transfer fifty percent of the company to Frere-Jones.
On January 17, 2014, the day after Frere-Jones filed his complaint with the court, Hoefler released a statement explaining that with Tobias’ departure, the company founded by Jonathan Hoefler in 1989 (Hoefler & Frere-Jones née Hoefler Type Foundry) would subsequently be known as Hoefler & Co.
J: We do have a longstanding disagreement on the height of the lowercase t.
T: Oh, okay, alright. Yeah. Alright, there’s a thing with the lowercase t. Okay.
J: That is—that is the only point of contention.
—Font Men, 2013
In 2008, Gotham crushed Optima in the national polls. If the 2012 Gotham vs. Mercury fight for the Oval Office taught us anything new about about graphic design, it taught us this:
An H&FJ typeface always wins.
