What it looked like was not so much an alphabet but a masquerade... [Derived headline]

NEW YORK -- What it looked like was not so much an alphabet but amasquerade ball for 26 capital letters that had arrived early,stayed late and gotten into the good liquor.

There were two versions of B with extended backbones that shot uplike Trojan helmet plumes. A decorative U and V appeared to waltzwith each other. The L had a long, curved base that looked as if itmight reach out and lick the M.

The collection was a sort of back-of-the-envelope doodle by ayoung artist named Andy Clymer who works for Hoefler & Frere-Jones,a foundry that churns out typefaces from an airy office six floorsup, just off the SoHo district of Manhattan.

The firm had just taken on a commission for The NatureConservancy: A decorative typeface it could use for various purposes-- letterhead, fax cover sheets, its quarterly magazine for donors.

It was the beginning of a three-month development process,although years sometimes pass between inspiration for a font and thecompleted work.

What happens in between is a little bit art and a little bitmechanical engineering, a balance between creativity andpracticality. Type designers sometimes say their best work should beinvisible.

They are making letters without making words -- devising a meansof communication, in a way, without saying anything at all.

Beautiful and imaginative as they were, Clymer's sketches werenot a cohesive typeface, not exactly. The left slant of the capitalV formed a giant hook that seemed out of place. The W looked alittle like a V and a lowercase Y taped together.

Still, Jonathan Hoefler, the 37-year-old president of thefoundry, took one look at one version of the capital N and soundedunmistakably like someone who has just fallen in love.

Its diagonal center beam was extended out both ways, to the topleft and bottom right, in an elegant, subtly curved flourish. "WhenI first saw it," Hoefler recalled, "I just thought it was perfect. Ican't think of anything to improve on that."

Explaining his enthusiasm later, Hoefler pulled a copy of avolume called "Masters of the Italic Letter," which examines thework of 16th-century scribes, and pointed out an exuberant capital Nthat bore a resemblance to what Clymer had drawn.

The digression was not unusual: Hoefler and his partner, TobiasFrere-Jones, are given to grabbing books or old maps from the vastbookcase that forms the center of their office. They are surroundedby letters that are centuries old, even as they invent new ones.

"There was sort of a competition between all these calligraphersat the same time, sort of like rap artists having a battle on vinyl,each one trying to outdo the last one," he said. "You find theseincredibly florid things happening as you go through the century."

In the history of typography, this is a time of great visibility -- not in the sense of legibility but what you might think of as typedemocracy. More people are more aware of more fonts than at any timebefore.

Some type analysts say this has to do with the proliferation ofcomputers and the Internet, and perhaps also with our saturatedawareness of brands and thirst for personalization.

You can choose to send your e-mail in any of dozens of fonts.Vanilla Times New Roman or sleek Verdana or classic Palatino orstately Garamond. You can buy your own. You can make your own. Youcan actually have your handwriting fontified.

Right now "Helvetica," a documentary about the so-uncool-it's-cool-again typeface that can be found all over public signage (theNew York City subways) and corporate brands (Nestle, AmericanApparel), is selling out artsy movie houses.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are entire Web sitesdevoted to hatred for Arial and for Comic Sans, a Microsoft facethat looks a little like a child's handwriting and is loathedintensely by some typophiles as lazy and uninspired.

At the moment, the Hoefler & Frere-Jones foundry finds itself atthe apex of typographic relevance. Its typefaces are, to overstateit only slightly, everywhere.

The eponymous Hoefler Text comes with Apple computers. SportsIllustrated uses a versatile Hoefler & Frere-Jones face calledKnockout throughout the magazine. Sotheby's, Barnes & Noble, Nikeand Martha Stewart are all clients.

The 2002 redesign of The Wall Street Journal adopted Frere-Jones' Retina face for its stock listings -- a font that clips outtiny corners where legs of letters meet, like the crook of a K, toprevent ink from pooling up and making the tables unreadable.

And then there's Gotham, arguably the font of the decade,developed by Frere-Jones in 2002 and modeled after New York Citybuilding signage. It is embellished, muscular, with a blue-collarfeel that evokes the Depression and postwar eras.

You can find it now in the "Saturday Night Live" logo, on Netflixenvelopes, in GQ magazine, in tourism ads for the Bahamas, on cansof Coca-Cola, on bottles of Crest Pro-Health mouthwash.

Perhaps most famously, it showed up on the inscription to thecornerstone laid at the future Freedom Tower, at ground zero, onJuly 4, 2004. "To honor and remember those who lost their lives onSeptember 11, 2001," it proclaimed, in capital Gotham letters.

"It's gotten around very nicely," Frere-Jones said.

Several years ago, The Nature Conservancy was using a sort ofknockoff version of Requiem, an elegant, imperial-looking Hoefler &Frere-Jones face with serifs, or small feet that adorn some letters.Another design firm had adapted it, ginned it up a bit, to make itmore decorative.

The Conservancy called Hoefler to fix some technical problems thedecorative tinkering had caused. For Hoefler, irresistibly drawn tothe history of type, it was not so simple. It never is.

"He started faxing me snapshots or scans of 14th-, 15th-centurystuff," says Christopher Johnson, a senior creative manager at theConservancy. "He saw it as an opportunity to reassess the wholetypeface."

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People who work with type will sometimes tell you that criticismof fonts comes in two types.

There are the people who, technically speaking, know what they'retalking about. They observe an x-height that's too low, or a boldnot bold enough, or a descender on a capital J -- the downward swoop-- not sufficiently expressive to distinguish it from an I.

And then there is the vast majority of consumers of type, thepeople who do not speak the vernacular but nonetheless have closelyheld opinions on how a letter makes them feel.

"This feels too -- too dusty Grandma's attic," Frere-Jones saidby way of example. Someone at Esquire magazine once told Hoeflerthat a typeface felt "too celebrated German."

The Nature Conservancy fell into the latter category. "We werelooking for an independent look, something different from what's outthere," Johnson said. "A sense of formality. A sense of grace, thatsort of thing."

The snapshots and scans that Hoefler faxed to Johnson weresamples of the work of Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi, a papalscribe and calligrapher during the Italian Renaissance.

Hoefler, Frere-Jones and Clymer, the young designer, went back toArrighi's letterforms -- they have been known to literally putsamples of type under a microscope -- for inspiration on theirproject for the Conservancy.

They decided to give The Nature Conservancy an ornate version ofRequiem outfitted with swashes -- decorative swooshes andornamentations that evoke Arrighi.

Clymer's sketches were converted into digital images using acomputer program called FontLab that allows designers to make almostimperceptible adjustments to, say, the corner of a capital H'sserifs.

One morning this February, Hoefler and Clymer had an online chatabout where they were. Hoefler had been tinkering. He pasted up apicture of two capital A's whose right-hand bars dipped way down ina flourish. He wasn't pleased.

"I also tried some different A's," Hoefler wrote to Clymer, "but,well, didn't go so well."

He pasted in a capital S. To the untrained eye it lookedperfectly normal. To Hoefler, it was flawed. "Those sharp cornerswhere the ball terminals meet the letter aren't intentional," hewrote apologetically, referring to the teardrop shapes at thebeginning and end of the character.

In modern-day type design, self-expression is carried out inincredible, even maddening, detail.

Matthew Carter is perhaps the single most revered living typedesigner. He came up with Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana, three staplesof Microsoft computers, and he redesigned the slate of headlinetypefaces used by The New York Times for a 2003 revamp.

All forms of industrial design, he said in a telephone interviewfrom his office in Cambridge, Mass., are boxed in by functionality:You can make the most attractive vacuum cleaner of all time, inother words, but it's no good if it can't trap dust.

Type designers are particularly constrained in this way.

"You can't wake up one morning and say, 'I don't really like theletter B. I'm going to invent a new B,"' Carter said. "You have yourown desire to find some part of yourself in what you do. Otherwiseyou wouldn't bother."

"So there is this tension," he went on. "Jonathan and Tobias arevery conscious of that. You have to be aware of the constraints."

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Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones were born six days apart,in August 1970, and their lives traced similar paths before theywound up first as competitors and then as partners.

Both were born to English mothers, and both grew up in New York.They were both drawn early to the shapes of letters: Hoefler recallsnoticing at a young age that the type in opening and closing creditsof a TV show were different, and learning years later that one hadbeen hand-lettered and the other typeset. For Frere-Jones, it wasflipping through issues of National Geographic magazine and noticingthat the letters that spelled out, say, "MEDITERRANEAN SEA" was"something that only appeared there, and nowhere else."

As adults in type design, they were competitors, sometimes to thepoint of absurdity. One would barely beat the other, sometimes by amatter of hours, in snapping up an arcane volume of lettering.

Frere-Jones joined Hoefler's firm, then called the Hoefler TypeFoundry, in 1999. They share a similar manner: They dress sharply.They speak in complete, precise, sometimes halting sentences.

Hoefler is color blind, and Frere-Jones says he has "no sense ofperspective." Both readily admit the oddity of noticing typeeverywhere.

"I'm baffled by people who can glance at a car driving down thestreet and immediately identify not only its maker but its year ofmanufacture," Frere-Jones said. "It's a car. It's a red car. That'sall I can tell you."

"You start seeing type everywhere," Hoefler added. "You see afont and start thinking about it historically. It makes seeingmovies difficult."

As the project for The Nature Conservancy moved forward, Hoeflerand Frere-Jones needed to lay down some rules.

They examined a word: "CHALLENGE."

The capital H seemed especially wild, with a "ball terminal," orsmall bead, attached to the left side of the crossbar, and curlyoutbursts on the top and bottom of the right-hand pole.

"This H," Hoefler said, clearly bothered, "I'm getting a very1970s feeling from it. That kind of 'Hill Street Blues' swash periodthat typography went through." Sure enough, the H was almost areplica of the H from the cop drama's title card.

The trick with designing a swash typeface is that the additionsto the letters can explode quickly from a few decorative touches toa thicket of colliding arches and curlicues that makes entire wordsseem illegible.

It wouldn't work, for example, if a word started with a capital Mand the decorative swash flew out backward from the top left like aparachute behind a drag-race car.

All the "drama," as Hoefler thought of it, needed to happeninside the word.

Their solution was to decide that the swashes were great for someletters, but not for all. Moderation was the answer. Letters like Nand K with sharp lines could naturally be extended for decorativetouches. Others, like O, would stay the same.

They tried a word: "KONINKLIJKE." (Clymer studied at the RoyalAcademy of Art in The Hague, and "Koninklijke" is the Dutch word for"royal.")

Hoefler typed out: "RENOVATE MAINE NUTCRACKERS NEVERMORE."

The swashes seemed to fit, the extensions to the letters allabout the same length, bowing in similar arcs. It made the wordsseem to undulate, all together. It was working.

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It has been written that sports constitute the kingdom of ends --joyful endeavors for their own sake, the opposite of work. And youmight say type designers make up the kingdom of means.

Designing elegant letters does not, at least not outside thesmall fraternity of people who do it, constitute an end. No onevisits a gallery to look at an italic, lowercase R.

Put another way, letters are designed explicitly to facilitatethe reading of words. And the kind of display type that Hoefler &Frere-Jones was creating for The Nature Conservancy can be more eye-catching, but only up to a point.

"If somebody notices something about a text typeface, it'sprobably not a compliment to the face. It's probably something thematter with it," Carter said.

To the type designer, of course, there is almost always somethingthe matter with it. And even after they had solved their majorproblems, Hoefler and Frere-Jones were making subtle adjustments,nipping and tucking.

The changes are incredibly minute -- a curve is too open ortight, the upright stem on a capital M needs to be more oblique. Andmost important, all the letters need to look at home when they'replaced in one big group.

"The final step is to make sure it's all square," Hoefler said."Make sure all the family relationships are consistent."

It's no accident type designers speak of "families" of fonts.They treat the letters as children being raised, in need of nudging,correcting, encouraging, occasionally reining in.

The swash capital letters that the foundry created for The NatureConservancy will probably one day -- after the Conservancy'sexclusive license is up -- be for sale to designers everywhere.

For now, it's part of a set of fonts used exclusively by theConservancy. It was christened Oakleaf.

Johnson, the Conservancy's senior creative manager, was one ofthose who lacked the vernacular to describe the typeface. But heknew what he loved about it.

"It has a more organic feel," he said. "The stems" -- he wastalking here about the decorative swashes -- "a lot of the way thetypeface flows, a lot of them felt like maybe branches for a tree."

"It feels," he said, "like nature."