Hey, this is me home stroll a few days ago.
During this walk I noticed something,
so I started taking pictures of it.
Eventually I got my co-workers to join in.
Mac took this picture,
and Agnes took this one.
What we all noticed was this font.
If you've somehow managed to never see it on a storefront,
you've definitely seen it elsewhere.
Because it's everywhere.
Strip away the candy wrappers,
movie posters, album covers,
and corner store signs, and you're left with this typeface.
It's called Cooper Black, and the story
of how it became so popular has everything to do with its versatility,
because these letters have been around for a century's worth of changes in
technology
and pop culture.
To set the stage for the story, I talked to Stephen Heller.
Bear with me while I move to another part of the apartment.
Among other things, he's written like a library's worth of books about design.
Okay, I'm back.
And this is Bethany Heck.
I am a designer who writes about typefaces.
She runs the Font Review Journal where she deconstructs the history and design of notable typefaces
like Cooper Black. If you give me like two minutes I can run and find an actual
like physical piece of wood type and I can talk through some of this.
While she's doing that, let's travel back in time a hundred years to the city of Chicago
where our story begins. It's 1919 right after World War 1.
Advertising was reaching an early zenith at that point because with the end of
the war there was a great resurgence of product and demand. The two dominating
materials for commercial printing were wood and metal. Wood was cut out of the
end pieces hard wood, they were usually large size typefaces that were used for
large-scale advertising and posters. The bold typefaces you see in old wanted
posters? Those were made from wood type. Metal was the process that was created
by Gutenberg when he designed the type for his Bible. Each individual character
was physically formed into words, and those words were cast into tiny lines of
text. Those molds allowed for smaller more precise blocks of type. That's the
kind of type that was used for most commercial purposes, from book publishing
to magazine publishing. By the turn of the 20th century huge Rube Goldberg-like
machines called linotypes drastically sped up this process.
This is the world Oswald Cooper, Chicago's preeminent letterer and
illustrator, lived in. In 1918, after years of making custom hand lettered ads for
car companies and banks, he designed a fully-formed
typeface dubbed Cooper. It took a classic Roman form and softened to the edges.
Seeing promise in Cooper's design and the prior success of his lettering work, the
type foundry Barnhart Brothers and Spindler asked him to make a bold
display typeface based on the font. Around 1920, Oswald Cooper released
Cooper Black, and it was an immediate hit. It was used for newspaper headlines and
large-scale posters. It sold cars, cold medicine, music lessons, turntables,
and ginger ale. With Cooper Black, it was like somebody took an air pump to a tire
and blew up that tire. I mean this ad for Cooper Black credits the font for
getting five thousand customers into their client's new store on opening day.
And in countless reviews, it was considered the most popular typeface
design of the time. So what made it work so well? For one, its curves. Perhaps the
most unconventional aspect of the curves are that willingness to be unafraid to
curve the bottom parts of the letter forms. So if you look at the bottom parts
of the stems of the "A" like there's no flat edges on that, which is very strange.
If you look at most typefaces, they have flat bottom somewhere. Even Cooper Black's
imitations like Goudy Heavy and Pabst Extra Bold failed to fully break tradition.
You want that consistent line for legibility, and so the fact that Cooper
doesn't have that means that it's very forgiving to irregularities. Like the
baseline serif of one character naturally flows right into the curve of
another even when the characters are slightly uneven. Those irregularities
look more like mistakes than quirks in straighter edged designs. The fact that
Cooper doesn't necessarily need to be laid in a straight line to look good is
an advantage. Let's talk about this weird F. It's an identifiable feature of Cooper
Black. Turns out it's pretty genius. Draw a rectangle around that F, and you have
to think like "okay I've got a draw of really bold F
and I only have this rectangle of space to play with." You've got the crossbars,
and then you've got the hook at the top, and the serif at the bottom, you're kind
of like running out of space. The shape of this negative space in the ascender
allowed Cooper to make the F as bold as possible for as much as possible while
still maintaining legibility, which wasn't always the case for heavy
typefaces of the time. This is actually a good example, like this is a very bold
four, and you can see that like the counter space in there is like really
tiny. The tininess is what makes the four look bold and heavy, but that four
could get sort of like filled up with ink and then essentially vanish. These
negative spaces within each character made Cooper Black incredibly light and
friendly while still commanding attention. The fact that it worked both
big and small was a huge selling point. Every character of Cooper Black has its
own little quirks. The G is always the thing that I think about first, it has
like this sort of anthropomorphic quality. I think it looks like a duck. Now
that you say that, the Q kind of looks like a snail. Weird. At any rate, I
think the letter that shows just how fun and functional Cooper Black can be, has
to be the O. A lot of typefaces have a vertical stress, so the oval inside would
just point straight up and down. Cooper's tilts back, and while it looks
off-kilter on its own, when placed in a word or phrase it always seems to
compliment the letters around it. The central conflict that a type designer is
facing is how do I make something that feels cohesive as a whole design system
as opposed to a beautiful collection of letters. Somehow Cooper achieved both.
Oswald Cooper believed Cooper Black was at its best when there was thin spacing
between the words and not much leading between the lines. Basically it worked
best when the letters were all cramped together. But that sometimes posed a
problem. Even when Cooper Black was first designed, like just the act of squishing
type together tight was like in some cases extremely difficult or impossible
to do. In the 1950s, two dramatically new ways of printing made it easier to push
letters closer together, and that thrust Cooper Black into the second half of the
20th century. There was a basic change in the material of which type is made, a
change from lead to paper or film. The first was photo type hot metal
typecasting was replaced by film strips in dark rooms and by the early 1960s
machines like the phototypositor were small enough to fit in local print
shops the other was the invention of dry rub transfers which just required a
ballpoint pen and a piece of paper it was perfect for customizing headlines
letter set the company that made them marketed it as fast simple and
economical these two technologies opened up graphic design to more adventurous
compositions something wood and metal had struggled to do and cooper black
flourished it thrived as always in advertising it's friendly curves fit the
tongue-in-cheek aesthetic of the 1960s and 70s but it also showed up in
magazines movies and hundreds of album covers Pet Sounds was like the
quintessential setting just look at the way the D works with the E and the Y and
boys fits so nicely over the oh it it's fluidity is what makes it special
and it's boldness makes it special I think all type designers would come in
and say like they have an idea of how a typeface is is meant to be used but I
think that a typeface doesn't really reach its full potential
until it's put into somebody else's hands because Cooper black was readily
available in letras at int I posit or catalogs it was no longer just in the
hands of professionals and designers it was in the hands of the DI wires of the
counterculture movement it seamlessly jumped from Burger King to underground
posters and magazines and became a staple the idea of using something
that's basic vernacular but using it with intention to make a statement is
something that you see throughout design or cultural history
these early hip-hop posters are actually the perfect example of Cooper blacks
adaptability and its legacy like take a look at this one it doesn't really
matter that these are two lowercase LS because the S fits so perfectly next to
them and the types ability to be squeezed as tightly as possible and
still be incredibly legible holds up even under extreme circumstances it's
always fun to look at something that's used an assertive lowbrow way and then
to realize that this isn't like some cheap tacky thing this is actually like
very good that's why Cooper black is just as
popular today as it was when it was first made from corner store signs and
fashion brands to food packaging grassroots movements and hip-hop album
covers Cooper's ability to work as like rebel
and letterings and in photo type and as movable type and also now like in
digital that's why it's everywhere and that's something that Oswald Cooper
couldn't have predicted
you