Why this font is everywhere

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 [Music] 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 ok 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 well 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 promising Cooper's design and the prior success of his lettering work the type foundry Barnhardt 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 tire and blew up that tire I mean this ad for Cooper Black credits the font for getting five thousand customers into their clients 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 blacks imitations like gaudi heavy and papst extra bold fail 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 and straighter edge 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 and there is like really tiny the tiny Ness is what makes the floor 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 like the cute 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 Oh 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 letting 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 to dramatically new ways of printing made it easier to push letters closer together in 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 photo type oz etre 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 [Music] you

Channel: Vox

Views: 1,285,499

Rating: 4.9600606 out of 5

Keywords: Cooper Black, graphic design, font, by design, vox, explainer, beach boys, pet sounds, 1960s, 1970s, protest, protest art, branding, letterpress, woodtype, andy warhol, advertising, typeface, odd future, Tyler the creator, thundercat, the black keys, Vox.com, explain, design, vox by design, vox design, cooper black, design history, black keys art, black keys

Id: Zu91meda2I8

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DickNickel]

I enjoyed the shit out of that. Thx for posting.

[u/vanderZwan]

Someone here once mentioned that one of their teachers (professors?) wore a T-shirt saying "I'm bringing Cooper Black" and it's my favorite typography pun ever

[u/snakesonausername]

My final in my Typography class was titled "Stop abusing Cooper Black".

Took a bunch of photos of Cooper in use with crazy stretching, gradients, bad letter spacing etc.

Then did a new "style guide" for it.

Proud to say I changed my professor's mind about Cooper. Was one of my finest college achievements.

[u/patnubay]

Wished VOX would create more of these History of Type sort of videos - I'd devour them in an instant!

[u/NtheLegend]

Saw it a few days ago. I had no idea. Great video.

[u/robbinthehood75]

Cooper Black Helvetica and Futura. The holy trinity of fonts.

[u/Caddiemollet]

Just designed a web campaign around Cooper! Used vintage, BW photographs of 1950’s housewives with cheeky edits for imagery (to give a little context). It’s always had such a nostalgic, almost ‘American’ feeling to me? Idk, I love it. It’s like everything comic sans wishes it was lol

[u/PoorDaguerreotype]

It’s in my home! It’s everywhere I look now. It’s like the number 23.

[u/vanderZwan]

I wonder if there's a nice mono coding font out there inspired by it