Font Story: Bell Centennial
Today I learned what an “ink trap” is: a feature in some typefaces where the corners are excessively notched, to compensate for ink spreading when the type is printed. It has more importance than you might think.
In the mid-1970’s, AT&T had just switched from printing their phonebooks on expensive letterpresses to the much newer and faster method of Cathode Ray Typesetting (CRT), with the printing done on lithography presses. But the pages, full of rows of small print and detailed numbers, were getting less and less legible: under the new methods, the ink bled on the newsprint, causing 5 to look like 6, rn to become m, and 3 to seem like 8, among infinite other misinterpretations—disastrous for something that was supposed to be a reference for information. Something needed to change.
In stepped designer Matthew Carter, who undertook the challenge of designing a font that would look essentially the same as AT&T’s classic, Bell Gothic, when printed on the new machines—but without the illegibility problems. In a display of incredibly creative problem-solving, he painstakingly designed complete sets of letters in four weights by filling in squares on graph paper to exactly the pixels it would be printed in the phone book. He enlarged the bowls of letters like g, b, d, and p, allowed for more white space in all of them, and, of, course, added the distinctive deep ink traps.
The font worked perfectly and has been used ever since, both in the phonebooks and also to hugely exaggerated size in some interesting cases, like Mazda UK’s mid-nineties ad campaign.
Bell Centennial is an interesting case of design in direct response to a problem. It had to satisfy almost unmeetable expectations—aesthetics, tradition, space efficiency, readability under strange conditions, durability, universality, and approval of marketing directors all at once. Creativity flourishes most under the most restrictions.
(images and most of the story sourced from http://nicksherman.com/articles/bellCentennial.html and Graphic Design Referenced)
