Monument of a splendour that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach

I went to New York City. It's pretty great, you get cheese and maple syrup with almost all food and everyone's really friendly until you get in their way. This blog post's not about that, though - it's about the surprising differences in visual culture that lurk semi-obfuscated in the city, specifically relating to typography. Maybe breakfast would have been a better subject. Too late now. Here are three typographic observations on the city that never sleeps:

It's literally Gotham City

H+FJ Gotham is everywhere in New York. Actually, it's everywhere pretty much everywhere, but it's even *more* everywhere in New York. Despite being a relatively new invention, Gotham seems to have become NYC's Johnston - you see it all over the place, from tourist trap store signs to banks to subway ads for Jonathan Zizmor MD, Dermatologist.

It's probably to do with Gotham's genesis - it's the product of Hoefler's (or was it Frere-Jones's?) love affair with the city's myriad hand-made signs. To an outsider, though, the similarity's not that obvious - Garage Gothic seems much more obviously linked to the street - so it's a testament to the typeface's versatility and all-round greatness that it's been so rapidly and thoroughly reabsorbed into the visual heart of the city.

History's important

I sort of got the feeling that if Ayn Rand (who wrote the title of this post) came back to life, the state of her beloved NYC would probably make her die again. In the 30s the city was the centre of the modern world - the Chrysler Building and then the Empire State were the tallest buildings ever built, monuments to the power of money, determination and rational self-interest, and the city was rapidly filling with records of mankind's conspicuous achievement. It's not like that now though - lots of it's falling down and there's people dressed up as Mickey Mouse posing for tourists all over the place.

That sense of a past richer in opportunities than the present probably explains why there are so many typographic tombstones to lost potential. I really like the aesthetics of the 30s - Art Deco and Art Nouveau design had a unique elegance and class - but I never reference them because they always seem to look a bit tacky in modern settings. But in New York condensed, slightly flowery typefaces are all over the place, not just in the places you'd expect them, and they look totally at home. Despite the ostentatious, bland modernity of so much of the city, it struck me that it's still defined to a great extent by the aesthetics of 80 years ago.

It's Swisser than the average

I've been brought up with the idea that Helvetica is the perfect blank-canvas typeface. When I use it, I do so because it comes without any baggage - it's just readable and sort of nice, the lazy / time-poor man's fallback when he's not quite sure what he's trying to say.

Having been on the New York City subway, though, I'll never look at it the same way again. They use Helvetica for everything, and it totally defines the MTA (buses, ferries and trains) - the obvious parallel is to Johnston and Transport for London, but (probably because of its ubiquity elsewhere, and Gotham's aforementioned dominance) Helvetica hasn't become shorthand for the city in the same way as Johnston has in London. That kind of gives it more focus though - it's much easier for a typeface to sum up one part of a diverse city than the whole thing - and it makes Helvetica, for me, much more strongly linked to the subway than Johnston is to the underground. It made me wonder what a New Yorker thinks when they see Superdry, or Orange, or Kawasaki, or any of the other billions of brands that are built around Helvetica.

What have we learnt?

So, yeah, in conclusion, there's a lot of depth there if you look for it. I wasn't walking round thinking about fonts the whole time or anything, but the way a relatively small number of typefaces so comprehensively sum up such a diverse city, in a way that the average / normal visitor might not even notice, is fascinating. I think so anyway.