A Typeface is Your Visual Voice
How do you go about describing a person you know?
You could start by how that person looks—Physique, wardrobe, etc. You might also think about what the person does—job title, family, or friends in relation to that person. Then, I bet you’d remember that person also by how he or she talks. Does he talk fast like a smart geek? Does she talk like your aunty? The way we talk and our voice quality carries a lot of weight on who we are. I don't know about you, but I usually recall a person by his/her voice.
That’s why choosing an appropriate typeface for your visual identity is so important. If you want to “visually” sound like a leader who values a well-disciplined strategy, you’d not "talk" like this boneheaded-looking font.
It’s like you are watching your favorite actor in a foreign language film. Since you already know how he sounds like, when the character speaks in a dubbed foreign voice that is too low or too high, it sounds totally weird. It’s as if you are listening to a complete stranger. You'd say, “That’s not him! He doesn’t talk like that!” You don’t want that to happen to your online voice. You want to make sure that your online audience can “hear” exactly the voice you have offline. Better yet, it would be even nicer if a viewer could feel your best qualities by the font of your choice.
So which typeface is appropriate for Robbie out of thousands of them out there?
After going through my font selection process, I’ve narrowed them down to several.
Let me present one of them today.
Robbie defines his Performative Speaking “is art and just like other art forms, the goal is to create emotion in the audience.”
I knew we’d need a clean, modern, and versatile sans serif typeface as opposed to a stuffy serif typeface some lawyers use. We need to make his message highly legible and approachable reflecting his ability to speak to a wide range of audiences. Furthermore, it needs to have a distinct character to breathe in his artistic ability just like how he evokes emotion in the listeners’ hearts. Thus, I needed to find a sans serif typeface with a tad of creativity.
Neue Kabel fits the bill.
To see that, let’s go back about a century to see how its original Kabel typeface came to life. During the 1920s in Germany, sans serif typeface with geometric character design was the ethos of the time. All major type foundries there were coming up with “the older brothers” of the Helvetica typeface we use today.
For example, Bauer foundry developed the Futura typeface which has been used by Volkswagen, Royal Dutch Shell, Crayola, and Swissair. Berthold foundry developed the Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface which became synonymous with the Mid-20th century "Swiss International Style" of graphic design.
Among those fashionable older brothers of Helvetica, Kabel typeface stood out. That is due to the type designer Rudolph Koch, “based his character proportions on artistic sensibilities. Character shapes and proportions can be traced to ancient Greek lapidary letters, Venetian old style type designs – and, of course, calligraphy.” You could still hear the historical voice of humanity embedded in the progressive design of the era.
Now with the help of Marc Schütz, “a type design teacher at the University for Art and Design Offenbach — the same school, where Rudolf Koch taught when he designed the Kabel typeface--” Neue Kabel came back to life for both print and digital use in the 21st century. (Link to a video explaining how Schütz went about the design)
Now that I've chose Neue Kabel, I will be exploring how the typeface actually jives with the new design.
