David Rudnick on "borderline impossible" process of designing Arsenal typeface | Hacker News Reader

David Rudnick on "borderline impossible" process of designing Arsenal typeface

itsnicethat.com

61 pointsdroidjj43 comments

I don't know that I got anything out of this other than that it took a long time. I think there is an interesting article to be written on this. Like, what were the concrete requirements? Why were those the requirements? Maybe show how one letter evolved over time as the project went on, and explain why.

But instead the article is effectively the Gravitational Pull of Pepsi[0].

[0] https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

Hmm. I would have appreciated more depth and details, but it did cover requirements to look good and maintain identity across print, screen, merchandise, etc.

Which makes sense but that alone sent me spinning. Not easy.

That seems pretty standard to me. Consider the counterfactual: How many design briefs do you think contain one or more of the following:

1. Totally ok if it doesn’t look good.

2. Identity is not important. It’s fine if it looks totally generic

3. I don’t care about print/screen/merchandise so it can look terrible in that medium

In general, people want things that look distinctive and work for digital and physical media.

I guess? Design briefs do tend to be ambitious.

But how many brands are really, honestly, displayed at that variety of sizes, in that variety of media, across language barriers and purposes. Some, sure. Not many.

All of them? I mean literally any global brand.

some people will spend a lot of money on bullshit

and oddly if you instead told them "I was very diligent and spent a lot of time thinking about this" they won't give a flying fuck

Is it me or are typeface designers some of the most pretentious people in tech? And that's a really high bar.

Most typeface designers are pretty normal (excepting their choice of one of the most simultaneously precarious and work-intensive creative careers). David Rudnick is (in my and many others opinion) infamously pretentious. He is a prolific designer though, and even many people who dislike his work acknowledge that he's quite good at what he does.

yeah pretentious bunch. but can't lie though that typeface reflects the history of the club. I say that even if I don't support the gunners.

That is indeed a really high bar I don’t think they meet. I don’t see them pitching some nonsense as a multibillion dollar investment opportunity.

I think they’re just doing what is smart, talking about what they contribute and what their craft is, because underlying it all, the truth is they design for legal reasons, because you can only trademark your brand that is a word, which you want to license for merchandising to sell to the mindless sports masses, if you also own the typeface. You can’t really trademark or copyright Arsenal the word written in Times New Roman.

I remember watching a whole documentary about Helvetica.

Font people, logo designers and sushi makers.

That’s not “a whole documentary”, it’s a spectacular documentary.

Documentary films are like nonfiction books: any subject can be fascinating when done well, any subject can be awful and banal when done poorly. I’m not even a huge non-fiction / documentary fan but I’ll die on the hill that telling true stories with depth and passion is much harder than doing great fiction.

My point was not aimed at the documentary itself, but rather the over glorification of things, in this case typefaces as the OP was referring to.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi was a beautiful documentary as well, but clearly sushi was being put on some divine pedestal. That is the 'over-the-top' part I am referring to.

Respectfully, I think you're missing the point of these documentaries.

Both Helvetica and Jiro Dreams of Sushi are trying to communicate, to you, the passion that these other people feel for the work they do.

They're not telling you that you should care that much about fonts or sushi. There is no claim if divinity. They're honestly trying to give you a 90 minute glimpse of the interior life of other people.

There are other documentaries that are much more neutral or even dismissive of their subjects, if that's more your taste. Hospital and City Hall are great examples with no editorial cast. Riligulous and Roger & Me are great examples of a documentarian trying hard to have no empathy.

To be fair, the same guy also made a really great documentary about urbanism as part of that trilogy

Yep, reading the article just revealed the designer’s self centred view of the project.

Surely the design aims, the evolution of the typeface and how it meets those aims are more important.

I do have good vision but for me (sample size 1) it’s really hard to read (especially the riband variant). How does it look for people in different environments ?. Is the aim to look iconic rather than communicate information.

I wish Arsenal well as my father was huge fan and would always look for the results.

Dug out these discussions for your amusement; might shed additional light on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36719987

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19756123

I’d argue they’re not really in tech.

Yeah typeface design is a deep craft that predates anything we'd call "tech" by centuries.

You can make a credible argument that typefaces are the original information technology: the first technology that encoded and distributed information and whose coding limitations changed the shape of the information itself.

(Not least on the basis that they changed the requirements of paper, which before typefaces was a rather more ad-hoc, per-project process)

you have to be because otherwise no one gives a shit

Never thought I'd see my team on HN but I really love the changes Arsenal has done. I remember only 10 years ago, we were super corporate and quite trend chasing (with our captain Aubameyang et al. doing reaction videos and sweg sweg) and you could really tell the messaging was supposed to be sanitised and generic. I noticed esp. when Arteta got in, we started to actually have an identity of our own with the typefaces and a brand new song and all the focus on our history etc.

Completely unrelated thought - are Arsenal the only club in England to not have a placename in their name?

I know they were originally Woolwich Arsenal, but they dropped the Woolwich when they moved from there.

And, of course, the big problem is, they always try to walk it in.

Yes, the club name bears the shame of having moved across town for money. The MK Dons of the 20th century.

Port Vale is the only other one without a place name but they never moved, I don't know where the name comes from.

Crystal Palace is also a bit weird - named after a building that was moved, then burnt down, which also gave its name to an ill defined area of London that straddles three boroughs, which is not where the club plays any more…

Most areas of London are ill-defined, I think it's fair to say.

Crystal Palace is a made up place but the club is authentic to that place, if that makes sense?

It’s more that both the club and the area are independently named after the site of the stadium where the club used to play. The club would still be called Crystal Palace even if the name had died out for the area of town.

ahhhh... i never thought that Port Vale wouldn't be an actual place - the internet seems to think there was a Port Vale Wharf though: https://www.thepotteries.org/walks/longport/15.htm https://portvalenostalgia.co.uk/history/

Not as readable as the old typeface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_F.C.#/media/File:Arsen...)

edit: Wikipedia has a whole section on the crests and typefaces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_F.C.#Crest

It works as the basis of a logo, but as a typeface it's very hard to read and clashes with almost every other font it could be paired with.

Forget the typeface you can't even get the website with this monstrosity of cookie selection panel.

By "borderline impossible" they mean at the end they needed to be able to describe it using a bunch of opposing adjectives and I guess thats kindof difficult but I think its generally accepted that in the world of PR you can now get away with whatever adjectives you want so I guess contradictory ones aren't that hard anymore.

"At the top of this system we needed something completely unique and borderline impossible, typographically. Somehow it had to be this contradiction, that was forever dynamic and new and somehow felt eternal and had always been there; that it somehow felt English, but also transcended that and became universal."

MyFonts (I'm not affiliated to it) has a visual search for fonts, and searching for this design yields 94 results that are not identical but collectively share the same patterns. Now, fonts are horrible when it comes to licensing. Like, in this case, a font I picked has a 2M page view limit per month and you pay $660/year for that highest tier, so I get why a company would find a custom font a reasonable decision, visually and/or financially. But 4.5 years is absurd.

Whatever typeface they're using on this website is kind of awful. It's got totally random weights on different parts of the letters. Look at the bottom of the e for example.

That's how you know they're serious about typography.

If it just straightforwardly looked good and was easy to read then you wouldn't be sure they'd put any effort into the choice.

It's nice that he got work for four years, I guess

White on red, with a stripe of red through the white.

Obviously a Spurs supporter.

Speaking of ludicrous displays, it kinda looks like Fraktur.

What does “designed in terrain” mean?

COYG!

"The ask was this: How do you make a typeface for when Arsenal shows up in culture? For those moments when football leaves the frenetic energy of the match, when it then collides and harmonises with the worlds of fashion, art, music and more."

Arsenal fans are insufferable.

You know Arsenal does collaborations with different fashion designers and labels right? And every online fanbase is insufferable. It won’t get you traction to bitch about it like it does on /r/soccer

I think it's maybe because Arsenal seems to be the default team for middle class people that work in London that I meet so many of them in real-life.

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