Sometimes typefaces seem to have a very distinct ethnic association. You can find these ‘stereotypes’ at restaurants that want to prove how authentically Greek, Chinese, Russian, or German they are.
Sometimes typography is not explicitly ethnic, but has grown to signify certain ethnicities through its historic use. Design writers Rob Gampietro and Paul Shaw have done excellent research on this. Despite their efforts, many designers still have the tendency to use ‘authentic typography’ when it comes to designing a certain ethnicity.
Chinatown Type
After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, a Chinese neighbourhood was built to replace the old destroyed Chinatown. Shaw explains how a typeface called ‘Mandarin’ became synonymous with the neighbourhood. It was designed by a U.S. designer in 1883, intended to look oriental, as it was constructed out of swashing pointy brushstrokes. An early use of the Mandarin typeface can be seen in the 1899 poster by the Beggarstaff brothers for the play ‘A Trip to Chinatown’, which helped to popularise the typeface. A whole range of these ‘oriental’ typefaces, nicknamed ↗‘chop suey’, spread around the world to attract customers for Chinese, Japanese, and other ‘Asian’ restaurants.
In 2002, clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch designed a line of T-shirts with ‘chop suey’ typefaces featuring Asian caricatures with texts like ‘Two Wongs Can Make it White’. One response came from Lela Lee, a Los Angeles cartoonist: ‘the T-shirts depict century-old stereotypes of Asians as “kung-fu fighting, fortune-cookie-speaking, slanty-eyed, bucktooth servants.”’ The storm of complaints forced the company to pull the T-shirts from their stores.
American Spirit
Neuland and Lithos are two typefaces that have been used as a typographic cliché for African American texts and publications. This typography has been used for African American literature, African anthropology, and exotic/adventurous marketing for movies like Jurassic Park, Tarzan, Jumanji, and the Lion King. How did this bold jugendstil typeface become synonymous for ‘exotic’ typography, and African and African-American culture?
Neuland was designed by Rudolf Koch in 1923 as a modern version of the blackletter, at that time used in Germany for bibles and literature. In the U.S., Neuland was marketed for advertising and categorised by designers as a woodblock style type. Gampietro4 explains how this style was used for ‘lower class’ products like ‘tobacco’ and circus advertisements, the latter being full of associations of the exotic and adventurous. By both associations, Neuland became a stereotype in the design of products for the African-American market and representations of African-American culture until well into the 1990s.
The African-American community itself did not follow the stereotyping with ‘ethnic typography’. For example the African-American owned Ebony magazine and Blue Note records in the 1960s used modernist typefaces like Futura, Trade Gothic, and Clarendon.
Totem Poles and Patterns
The Afrika Museum in the Netherlands is a museum that shows both historic and contemporary art from the African continent and the African Diaspora. In 2006 Dutch type designer René Knip was invited to design the new identity for the Museum. He designed an ornamental stencil typeface using African inspired patterns and shapes. The letter- forms were cut out of metal and dispersed around the museum site as signage, like a kind of ‘totem pole’.5
Design critic Max Bruinsma said about the typographic design, ‘The letters radiate with an animist magic’.5 In a lecture in 2014, Knip clarified that his design was not intended to ‘be serious’ because mostly school children visit the museum.6 It is clear that the design is not based on what actual African culture or African typography has to offer, but reflects merely the designer’s imagination of what ‘African’ looks like. This reduces the historic and contemporary art of an entire continent to a colonial stereotype.
Alien Exoticism
Ethnic typography transcends boundaries of time and space. The science fiction movie Avatar from 2011 follows a classic colonial storyline. Papyrus was the typeface chosen for the Avatar poster and merchandise, a typeface designed by U.S. designer Chris Costello in 1983. In an interview from 2007 he said the design was inspired by his image of the ancient Middle East. Papyrus is one of those typefaces which can be found on any design that needs an exotic, spiritual, ancient, or ethnic association.
Ethnic typography can lead to racist designs, but more importantly the use of ethnic stereotypes prevents the public from seeing representations of minorities treated with the same respect as those of the dominant cultures.
Here’s a thought experiment: Close your eyes and imagine the font you’d use to depict the word “Chinese.”
There’s a good chance you pictured letters made from the swingy, wedge-shaped strokes you’ve seen on restaurant signs, menus, take-away boxes and kung-fu movie posters. These “chop suey fonts,” as American historian Paul Shaw calls them, have been a typographical shortcut for “Asianness” for decades.
Shaw traces the fonts’ origins to the Cleveland Type Foundry which obtained a patent for a calligraphy-style printing type, later named Mandarin, in 1883. It is perhaps no surprise that this Eastern-inspired lettering emerged in the late 19th century, an era when Orientalism coursed feverishly through the West.
“Mandarin, originally known as Chinese, is the granddaddy of ‘chop suey’ types,” Shaw wrote in the design magazine, Print. “Neither the food nor the fonts bear any real relation to true Chinese cuisine or calligraphy. But this has not prevented the proliferation of chop suey lettering and its close identification with Chinese culture outside of China.”
Type designers in the West have since cooked up many of their own versions of chop suey. Variations on the font are commercially distributed as Wonton, Peking, Buddha, Ginko, Jing Jing, Kanban, Shanghai, China Doll, Fantan, Martial Arts, Rice Bowl, Sunamy, Karate, Chow Fun, Chu Ching San JNL, Ching Chang and Chang Chang.
It’s hard not to cringe at the Chinese stereotypes bundled up with each font package – especially when seen through the lens of today’s heightened vigilance toward discrimination and systemic racism. Critics believe that using chop suey typefaces is downright racist, particularly when deployed by non-Asian creators.
White politicians, meanwhile, have been using chop suey fonts to stoke xenophobia for over a century. In her book, “This is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History of the Printed Ballot,” Cooper Union professor Alicia Cheng draws attention to the “chopsticks font,” as she calls it, used by San Francisco politician Dr. C. C. O’Donnell on a 1876 ballot, as he vowed to deport all Chinese immigrants if he was elected into office.
More contemporary examples include Pete Hoekstra, the former US ambassador to the Netherlands, who – during his run for Senate in 2012 – was criticized for campaigning with an ad featuring a caricature of a Chinese woman and a website with chop suey lettering. And in 2018, The New Jersey Republican State Committee used a version of the all-too-familiar font in a mailer attacking Korean American Democrat Andy Kim. The incendiary headline read, “There’s something REAL FISHY about Andy Kim.”
Hoekstra’s press team and the New Jersey Republican State Committee did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Companies and advertisers have also looked to exploit stereotypes associated with the typefaces. During World War II, oil giant Texaco produced a series of posters featuring chop suey fonts next to a buck-toothed caricature in order to vilify the “Yellow Peril.”
When asked to comment on the historical posters, a spokesperson for Chevron Corporation, now Texaco’s parent company, told CNN: “Texaco’s World War II posters are regrettable and inconsistent with Chevron’s values.”
Similarly, online grocer Fresh Direct, clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch
and the game developers behind “Cyberpunk 2077,” CD Projekt, are among the many companies criticized for using culturally appropriative fonts in the last two decades.
A spokesperson for FreshDirect told CNN that the company “unequivocally” denounces racism and discrimination and regrets using a controversial typeface on advertising and packaging for its “stir fry kits,” adding that no-one involved in the 2012 decision is still at the organization. A spokesperson for Abercrombie & Fitch, meanwhile, said in an email that T-shirts featuring caricatures and stereotypical fonts from 2002 “were inexcusable 19 years ago when they were released, and they do not reflect A&F Co.’s values today.” The spokesperson added that the company encourages a “culture of belonging” and is “committed to doing better in the future.”
CD Projekt, which used stereotypical Asian fonts in game graphics last year, did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
In 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic ushering a new tide of Sinophobia, Canadian apparel brand Lululemon
fired its art director after he seemingly endorsed a “Bat Fried Rice” T-shirt design bearing the words “No Thank You,” by posting it to his Instagram. The design featured a chop suey font on a take-out box with bat wings, alluding to the purported origins of the coronavirus. While the shirt wasn’t his creation, the art director told various media outlets, “It is something I deeply regret, and my eyes have been opened to the profound ripple effect that this mistake has had.” Lululemon quickly distanced itself from its art director emphasizing that the brand had not produced the “inappropriate and inexcusable” shirt.
Racist undertones
For an older generation of Asian Americans, spotting the faux brushstroke lettering can trigger past traumas.
“I think of words in anti-Asian or anti-Japanese signs,” wrote Japanese American journalist Gil Asakawa, who began his career during a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment or “Nipponophobia” in the 1980s. “I see (the font) Wonton and I see the words ‘Jap,’ ‘nip,’ ‘chink,’ ‘gook,’ ‘slope.’ I can’t help it. In my experience, the font has been associated too often with racism aimed at me.”
But can a font, in itself, truly be racist?
In 19th-century Germany, using a calligraphic blackletter typeface called Fraktur was considered as an expression of nationalism. German books were printed in this gothic-style font, despite being hard to read. The Nazi party then embraced Fraktur – it was even used on the cover of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf” – before suddenly banning
the font in 1941 and categorizing it as Judenlettern (“Jewish letters”).
Yet, there are also examples of fonts harmlessly evoking national or regional pride. Take the distinctive Euskara lettering, used throughout the seven provinces of the Basque County, and deployed on everything from monuments to restaurant menus. The “large-footed, big-eyed, Roman-styled characters,” as a 19th-century chronicler of the region’s monuments once described them, emerged during the pinnacle of Basque nationalism in the late 1800s.
It’s worth noting that, in 1930s America, some Chinese immigrants themselves used chop suey fonts on their restaurant signs, menus, and advertisements, as a way to heighten the exotic appeal of their establishments.
And “Oriental simulation fonts”
(or letterforms designed with aesthetic markers of a particular culture) didn’t just approximate Chinese calligraphy. Decorative fonts like El Dorado or Taco Salad were designed to represent Mexico. The same goes for the Pad Thai font, which borrows strokes from the Thai script. Similarly, there are a host of crude, hand-drawn fonts purporting to capture the aesthetic of the entire African continent.
Shaw said that the persistence of ethnic types, as offensive as they appear to some, lies in their graphic efficiency. They survive “for the simple reason that stereotypes, though crude, serve a commercial purpose,” he wrote. “They are shortcuts, visual mnemonic devices. There is no room for cultural nuance or academic accuracy in a shop’s fascia.”
For Yong Chen, a historian at the University of California, Irvine, it is not the font, per se, that’s the issue – but how it’s used. His 2014 book “Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America,” even features the typeface on its cover. “The font issue never came up during discussions of the cover design,” Yong said in an email. Problems only arise, he said, when the font is deliberately used to “depict Chinese Americans and Chinese food as the Oriental other.”
Chris Wu, a scholar of Chinese typography and co-founder of the New York-based design studio Wkshps, echoed Young’s tempered view. “I am not offended by those typefaces, rather intrigued by them,” he explained in an email. “I am glad to see the discussions and criticism about the ethnic fonts today – it reflects a much well-informed visual culture and the sensibilities to respect minorities. However, I’d be careful about over simplifying the stories and the sentiment of embracing authenticity.”
Beyond chop suey
As diverse and modern as Asia is, its prevailing typographic representations remain stuck in a bygone era. So, can we ever escape chop suey font?
“In light of the tensions in the US around race and racial stereotypes in 2020, (these fonts are) not the kind of thing I would want to be developing today,” said Tom Rickner, creative director at Monotype, a 134-year old digital foundry with several chop suey fonts in its catalog.
Recalling the lone Chinese restaurant in the town he grew up in during the 1970s, Rickner explained that the foreigner-friendly chop suey fonts helped proprietors attract diners, much like the first wave of immigrant Chinese business owners in San Francisco in the 1930s. “Back then, a menu item like Peking duck was considered avant-garde and completely new and different, but we’ve gone so far beyond that,” he said, adding that we now have alternatives to worn-out typographic tropes.
Rickner, who was once Apple’s lead typographer, points to the flourishing of non-English digital typefaces in recent years. For example, there’s Caspar Lam and YuJune Park’s elegant serif Ming Romantic,
commissioned by Vogue China and Google’s open source Korean fonts,
created by a team of Korean type designers, including E Roon Kang, who spoke on the challenges of creating digital fonts in the language.
Korean’s Hangul writing system has a “unique way of combining consonants and vowels for a single letter” that results in a greater volume of letterforms, and therefore larger file sizes for browsers, Kang explained in an email. He said the 2018 project had made fonts – which can be complicated and involve creating various subsets – easier to access by designers and developers, while adding that part of its design includes an interactive function that emphasizes the letters’ “malleable nature” to encourage more participation.
There’s also a growing catalog of high quality Arabic type. Design schools, like KABK (The Royal Academy of Art) in The Hague, Netherlands, and the University of Reading’s department of typography and graphic communication in the UK, are also training students to design fonts in the world’s languages – including Chinese, which is notoriously onerous to recreate digitally.
“We need to democratize the education of type design across different ethnic and economic, socioeconomic backgrounds,” Rickner said. “There’s work to be done there, but it’s happening.
“The right way forward is to have bilingual, trilingual, even multilingual typography,” he added, suggesting that Chinese restaurant menus could perhaps, be presented in both English and (either simplified or traditional) Chinese characters.
“As a type designer, I want to celebrate those languages and those cultures. What we love is building new typefaces that support multiple scripts and languages, and today we’re in such a better place than we were even just five years ago.”
This article has been update to include a response from Abercrombie & Fitch. It was also updated to reflect that Pete Hoekstra is the former US ambassador to the Netherlands.
You might see it every day and never notice, but there it is – on your takeout box of Chinese food, on your morning coffee cup, or on the cover of a favorite book or album: "ethnic type," lettering or type that suggests the culture of a specific ethnic or religious group.
Many designers and critics claim to be embarrassed by ethnic type, damning it for its deficient aesthetics as much as for its racial insensitivity. Eager to point out the type’s derogatory qualities, design writers toss together examples – pseudo-Chinese fonts, fake Greek letters, and type that acts as code for African or African-American topics – as if they are equivalent and interchangeable. But they're not. A quick tour of the history of ethnic typefaces shows that there are many different paths taken by a typeface from its creation to its status as a visual shorthand for an entire group.
The simplest way to shout "ethnic!" is to substitute familiar characters from a foreign alphabet into the Roman one (such as the Greek sigmas that replace the Es on the classic New York City coffee cups). Alternatively, other designers try to mimic the characters in non-Latin writing systems by attempting to create letters with features derived from these scripts.
Many fonts, however, are seen as exotic because of context rather than innate characteristics. Letters written with a pointed brush, a tool associated with more casual scripts, such as those in Auriol by George Auriol (Peignot, 1901), can feel "Japanese" without copying any features of the hiragana or katakana syllabaries. In fact, Auriol was the inspiration for the lettering on Hector Guimard’s Paris Métro stations, which, in that context, seems "French." These types' ethnic flair relies on a viewer’s inchoate expectations of what a given culture’s type should look like.
Such expectations can also be formed simply through repeated use. The most prominent examples of this phenomenon are Rudolf Koch’s Neuland (Klingspor, 1923) and F.H.E. Schneidler’s Legende (Bauer, 1937), which have become identified, respectively, with African (and African-American) and Arabic subjects. Neither typeface has any links with those cultures; instead, Neuland owes its bold form to Koch’s decision to cut the type directly into metal without any preliminary sketches, while Schneidler based Legende on 15th-century Burgundian and Flemish bastarda scripts. These fonts' ethnic connotations have developed gradually through recurrent appearances on book covers and posters by people who connected the typefaces with their own cultural biases and perceptions, slowly reinforcing the fonts’ ethnic associations in viewers' minds.
Album cover from the late '50s, illustrated by Mike Ludlow, uses a fake Hebrew font for the title. Image from the collection of Leif Peng.
Other fonts are given new names by foundry owners, leading to the typefaces taking on ethnic identities after years of playing other aesthetic roles. Thus, Mikita is considered by type historians to be the oldest ethnic type since it has an "Asian" quality and can be traced back to a design by Bruce’s New York Type Foundry in 1867. But that face, created by Julius Herriet, Sr., underwent a number of name changes based on how it was perceived over the years. Originally called Bruce’s Ornamented no. 1048, it was copied in England the following year by the foundry of J. & R.M. Wood, which christened it Novel. Bruce later renamed it Rustic Shaded, a descriptive name that suggests a cabin’s carpentry. But in the mid-'50s, when Charles Broad, the owner of Type Founders of Phoenix, dubbed it Mikita, the letters must have been equally suggestive of Japanese woodworking.
A decade or so later, the Visual Graphics Corporation, a leading manufacturer of display photo type fonts, offered it as Bruce Mikita (TB-29). The digital version of the face was created in 2000 by Harold Lohner of Harold’s Fonts. Although unaware of the type’s history – on his website, Lohner asks, “Who was Bruce Mikita?” – Lohner recognized the font’s latent qualities, writing, “It seems handcrafted and rustic and suggests East Asian calligraphy.” Lohner based his version on a showing of the face in Dan X. Solo’s Victorian Display Alphabets (1976). Interestingly, Solo, the owner of Solo Typographers, considered the face Victorian rather than Japanese.
Mandarin, originally known as Chinese (Cleveland Type Foundry, 1883), is the granddaddy of “chop suey” types.
The one 19th-century face with an unmistakably Asian name and a suggestive appearance is Chinese (Cleveland Type Foundry, 1883). Known since the mid-'50s as Mandarin, the face is characterized by curved and pointed wedge strokes that superficially resemble two of the eight basic strokes of Chinese calligraphy: the downward left stroke and the upward right stroke. Unfortunately, the strokes, forced onto the armature of Roman letters, are assembled in a manner that completely ignores a calligraphic emphasis on structural balance and harmony.
Mandarin is the granddaddy of what have come to be known as “chop suey” types. It’s a fitting name – just as chop suey is an American invention, so, too, are the letters of Mandarin and its many offspring. Neither the food nor the fonts bear any real relation to true Chinese cuisine or calligraphy. But this has not prevented the proliferation of chop suey lettering and its close identification with Chinese culture outside of China. Mandarin was used by the Beggar staff Brothers (William Nicholson and James Pryde) for their 1899 poster “A Trip to Chinatown.” The poster was included in Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, the enormously influential monthly publication showcasing the most beautiful posters of the fin de siècle. By the end of World War I, chop suey lettering had become synonymous with San Francisco’s Chinatown. This may have been due to the influence of the Beggar staff poster, or it could have been a way to distinguish the rebuilding of Chinatown as a tourist destination following the 1906 earthquake. The new Chinatown was flamboyantly, theatrically “Chinese,” complete with pagoda roofs and other exaggerated and stylized details.
By the ’30s, chop suey letters were being used to promote Chinese restaurants across the country. Chop suey, the dish, invented 40 years earlier, had become a culinary craze. Restaurants responded by including the dish in their name and emphasizing it in their signs and advertising. This can be seen in surviving neon signs – Guey Lon Chop Suey Restaurant in Chicago, Pekin Café Chop Suey in San Diego, and the Joy Young restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama – as well as in postcards and matchbooks from the ’30s through the ’60s. The oldest of these neon signs have sans-serif lettering and are as reminiscent of Morris Fuller Benton’s Hobo (American Type Founders, 1910) as much as other chop suey styles. When chop suey letters do appear, they tend to be rounder and blunter than later iterations of the style and with less overlap among the strokes. The more familiar, and sharper, look is a post–World War II phenomenon. Ironically, it was Chinese-American restaurateurs who were choosing the chop suey lettering (and serving the dish), conferring a bit of authenticity on two American inventions.
The Beggar staff Brothers (William Nicholson and James Pryde) used a variant of Mandarin in their 1899 poster “A Trip to Chinatown.” The poster was included in the influential publication Les Maîtres de l’Affiche.
In recent years, chop suey letters have begun to lose some of their exclusive identity with Chinese food, as Japanese, Thai, and Indian food have become popular in the United States and Europe. The familiar letters can now be found in numerous pan-Asian restaurants, many of which serve other Westernized favorites, including California rolls and chicken tikka masala.
Ethnic type—not just chop suey but all of the varieties—survives for the simple reason that stereotypes, though crude, serve a commercial purpose. They are shortcuts, visual mnemonic devices. There is no room for cultural nuance or academic accuracy in a shop’s fascia. Restaurant owners want passersby (often in cars rather than on foot) to know immediately that they serve Chinese (or Greek, or Jewish) food, and a lettering style that achieves this is welcome.
Ethnic types have been dubbed “garbage fonts” by typophiles, and since the fonts are culturally inauthentic, they are deemed an affront to the political sensitivities of ethnic groups (and to the enlightened morals of graphic designers). But it has often been immigrant entrepreneurs, not professional designers, who have chosen to use these typefaces and keep their popularity alive. As long as there is chop suey, there will be chop suey lettering.
“Ethnic type — not just chop suey but all of the varieties — survives for the simple reason that stereotypes, though crude, serve a commercial purpose. They are shortcuts, visual mnemonic devices” writes Paul Shaw in Print magazine. His commentary on the many stereotypes hidden in plain sight is as relevant as ever.
Ethnic typefaces are decorative typefaces that have been designed to represent characters of the Roman alphabet but at the same time evoke another writing system. This group includes typefaces designed to appear as Arabic, Chinese characters (Wonton fonts), Cyrillic (Faux Cyrillic), Indic scripts, Greek (an example being Lithos), Hebrew, Kana, or Thai. These are used largely for the purpose of novelty to make something appear foreign or to make businesses offering foreign products, such as restaurants, clearly stand out. This typographic mimicry, also known as a faux font (named faux x, where x is usually a language script), pseudoscript, mimicry typeface, simulation typeface or a “foreign look” font is still in use.
“But these fonts are practically free from scrutiny and widely accepted. While much research in visual sociology has been done on gender and racial portrayals of advertising, almost all of it has focused on images, and not the importance of fonts. And fonts really are just as important after all
‘typography is what language looks like’” notes Nichole Fernández quoting Ellen Lupton’s must-read book Thinking With Type.
It is evident that typography evokes emotions, that in a visual over-saturated culture we live and breathe type, we guzzle letterforms and shapes of numerous connotations. Eventually, in times of bigotry, the racialization of type matters as long as we provide room for nuance in the context.
Delving into the matter, Linus Boman, “a type nerd and veteran designer” who makes videos in the intersection of pop culture and graphic design and Raven Mo, a New York-based designer specializing in brand identity and type explore how chop suey fonts, a subcategory of so-called “ethnic” display fonts, and a unique American invention with roots in the 170-year history of Chinese migrants in the United States became the face of Chinese food in America.
“Many Americans have probably seen chop cuey fonts on Asian restaurant signs, takeout boxes and fortune cookies. It has a distinctive style of wedge-like shapes, and is supposed to invoke Chinese calligraphy. But if you grew up in China like me, chances are these fonts would be totally foreign to you” notes Mo who presented her work with Boman in her recent TypeLab presentation.
In the insightful video, the duo analyzes the font, unpacks its history, and deconstructs its design putting things into a long-overdue perspective.
“…After the 1906 earthquake destroyed San Francisco’s Chinatown, it had to be rebuilt from the ground up. For the redesign, an architect and an engineer were hired who had never visited China. They built exaggerated Chinese architecture that referenced temples from the Song Dynasty, a period in Chinese history that occurred during the middle ages. …Where the dragon gates and pagoda roofs went, the chop suey font was sure to follow” they explain.
“If typography is a voice, what is this type but a fake foreign accent?…. Sadly, it also has an equally long history of being used to mock and otherize people of Asian descent….While Chinese migrants spread the use of Chop suey fonts, this font was never created by them. It was part of an outsider-created makeover that helped their economic survival during a time when they were the targets of suspicion and discrimination. The typographic caricature was one minor insult among many for first-wave migrants. When fighting for basic human rights, authentic cultural expression is a luxury” comments Mo.
Following is an excerpt from the CNN article written by Anne Quito on the many typographic stereotypes we must abolish:
“In 19th-century Germany, using a calligraphic blackletter typeface called Fraktur was considered as an expression of nationalism. German books were printed in this gothic-style font, despite being hard to read. The Nazi party then embraced Fraktur -- it was even used on the cover of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto, ‘Mein Kampf’ -- before suddenly banning the font in 1941 and categorizing it as Judenlettern (‘Jewish letters’).
Yet, there are also examples of fonts harmlessly evoking national or regional pride. Take the distinctive Euskara lettering, used throughout the seven provinces of the Basque County, and deployed on everything from monuments to restaurant menus. The ‘large-footed, big-eyed, Roman-styled characters,’ as a 19th-century chronicler of the region's monuments once described them, emerged during the pinnacle of Basque nationalism in the late 1800s.
It’s worth noting that, in 1930s America, some Chinese immigrants themselves used chop suey fonts on their restaurant signs, menus, and advertisements, as a way to heighten the exotic appeal of their establishments.
And ‘Oriental simulation fonts’ (or letterforms designed with aesthetic markers of a particular culture) didn't just approximate Chinese calligraphy. Decorative fonts like El Dorado or Taco Salad were designed to represent Mexico. The same goes for the Pad Thai font, which borrows strokes from the Thai script. Similarly, there are a host of crude, hand-drawn fonts purporting to capture the aesthetic of the entire African continent.
Shaw said that the persistence of ethnic types, as offensive as they appear to some, lies in their graphic efficiency. They survive ‘for the simple reason that stereotypes, though crude, serve a commercial purpose,’ he wrote. ‘They are shortcuts, visual mnemonic devices. There is no room for cultural nuance or academic accuracy in a shop’s fascia.’
A Nazi font banned by Nazis? Fraktur and its legacy in the must-listen design podcast of this week
‘We need to democratize the education of type design across different ethnic and economic, socioeconomic backgrounds,’ said Tom Rickner, creative director at Monotype. ‘There’s work to be done there, but it’s happening. The right way forward is to have bilingual, trilingual, even multilingual typography,’ he added, suggesting that Chinese restaurant menus could perhaps, be presented in both English and (either simplified or traditional) Chinese characters” reads CNN’s report.
“For many designers ethnic fonts are seen as simply ‘garbage fonts’ used by ‘amateur designers’…. But amateur or not, we go about our day exposed to way more than the rare professional high-end sleek design with a social consciousness. We see these stereo‘types’ everywhere. Maybe it is time we hold designers accountable for these stereotypes. Maybe we should also hold accountable the institutions that teach design without teaching the social implications of design. The job of a designer is not to be uninventive, simply repurposing stereotypes for easy visual communication. We need to call on the design industry to be innovative, creative, and to generate useful visual solutions, because ultimately, that is their job” concludes Fernández.
Type designers should, by default, celebrate languages and cultures via design means. But, can a font truly be racist? As this long-running debate keeps going strong, let’s pause for a second, and address the importance of education in type design in full frame whilst not blaming the fonts for racism. The real racists that we should stand up against are the ones that walk and talk bringing humanity to the verge of hate.
Lately I have found myself walking around town, going about my everyday activities, and getting increasingly frustrated. I’m not frustrated with the average worries of modern life such as a busy daily commute, and eternally long bank lines. These things don’t bother me as they are relatively mundane and inoffensive.
What I am most frustrated by is something that is both rampant and widespread, showing itself all across western world. I’m speaking of course about bad fonts. Yes fonts! And I’m not frustrated in the pretentious way type designers look down on Comic Sans for being too cutesy and inappropriately used. No, I am getting mad at offensive fonts like “this one:”
And this one:
Alright lets just put them all together all together:
I am fed up with fonts that perpetuate negative stereotypes. This sort of design is seen all over public spaces. It is seen in the gendering of fonts used on the signs of lingerie stores and in greeting cards. It is visible in the appropriation of “Asian” themed fonts on takeout menus. It is inescapable and I take personal offense to it. I really don’t feel that I need to be reminded of my gender stereotypes while purchasing deodorant or a box of tampons.
But these fonts are practically free from scrutiny and widely accepted. While much research in visual sociology has been done on gender and racial portrayals of advertising, almost all of it has focused on images, and not the importance of fonts. And fonts really are just as important after all "typography is what language looks like”[1].
Fonts have personality and use socially recognized symbols to create an alternative visual communication, what Judith Williamson calls a “currency of signs”[2]. For example “feminine” fonts (fonts that are crudely categorized as more appealing for women) tend to be softer, curvy, script based, and sans serif. Whereas masculine is portrayed as its counterpart: bold, square, strong serifs. Now I feel like you can probably see where I am going with this. The use of these fonts not only relies on outdated negative stereotypes about gender, but also reinforces the concept of a strict gender binary. “Stereotypes are a poor choice for describing letters. At best they’re vague and careless, and at worst they’re perpetuating harmful, false ideas about how different genders have innately different capabilities.”[3]. Designers do not subconsciously perpetuate these stereotypes; they are actively used and studied by marketing communicators in order to increase product sales [4].
Take the photo below: we have the same brand of razor, one targeted towards men and the other to women, and the font of the razor name, Quattro, is actually changed to appear more “feminine”.
Fonts intended to portray ethnic, national, and racial symbolic recognition are much more varied than gendered fonts. There are fonts that attempt to be Middle Eastern, Mexican, Russian, old English, Catholic, French, African, Thai, and practically every nation, religion, ethnicity, or race you can think of. Sweden even recently released an official national font [5].
However, more commonly seen are ethnic fonts like Wonton shown here. It is an example of one of the many “Asian” fonts available that are “characterized by curved and pointed wedge strokes that superficially resemble two of the eight basic strokes of Chinese calligraphy […]. Unfortunately, the strokes, forced onto the armature of Roman letters, are assembled in a manner that completely ignores a calligraphic emphasis on structural balance and harmony.”[6] However, as Shaw points out, not all ethnic fonts are based in any real representation of culture. Some fonts just become ethnic by association, and that label becomes inescapable.
But almost all “ethnic” fonts tend to share the same characteristics of being “foreign” or non-western. Ethnic fonts are generally less structured, often handwritten, have purposeful flaws, look old, and can often be based on traditional writing.
Now at this point you may be thinking that I am reading way too much into the meaning of fonts. Ethnic fonts may not seem like such a big deal, and they may not bother you because they are so ingrained in our visual communication. But I feel like this complacency and acceptance of ethnic fonts is one of the reasons why this conversation matters. It matters because it adds to the “currency of signs” that valorizes western aesthetics. It places modern, progressive, industrial, and democratic values to standard typefaces like Helvetica and Times New Roman, while ethnic typefaces allude to the exotic, backwards, wild, and maybe even slightly savage. It is reinforcing a western-centric worldview, and perpetuating socio-economic power dynamics.
Marketing and design students are often taught to consider using things like gender and ethnic stereotypes to their advantage (like in this article here that could really benefit from some feminist help). In this context, they argue stereotypes are not always bad, but rather useful tools to communicate non-verbal ideas, attract the appropriate demographic, and ultimately get people to buy things. In fact, it can be argued that this is an example of how a large amount of what a graphic designer does is simply using these visual stereotypes to their advantage.
It is a common view that fonts are used in this way “for the simple reason that stereotypes, though crude, serve a commercial purpose. They are shortcuts, visual mnemonic devices. There is no room for cultural nuance or academic accuracy in a shop’s fascia. Restaurant owners want passersby (often in cars rather than on foot) to know immediately that they serve Chinese (or Greek, or Jewish) food, and a lettering style that achieves this is welcome.”[7]. It is true that for a designer, it is attractive to use stereotypes as a quick and easy way to get your message across. If your target audience is female, then why not use a curly hand-written font with light pastel colors? Or if you are designing an ad for Jewish matzo ball soup mix, why not use one of the many Hebrew themed fonts? Like the font Faux Hebrew or Hebrewish, maybe even Talmud or Jerusalem, or if you are not yet spoilt for choice there is also a font entitled Circumcision (no joke, you can find it here if you don’t believe me)[8].
While using these visual stereotypes may be an appealing way to design, it is also lazy, bad design. As I write this post I am trying to acknowledge that there is a difference between necessary critiques of the visual social world we live, and just being a mean, pretentious, and overly critical designer. I think it is all too easy for designers to criticize their contemporaries and I try as much as possible to break that trend. But when it comes to font stereotypes I can’t help sharing the same judgmental sentiments as this author: “It is hard to comprehend the brain pattern of the people who choose this font, but it must go something like: ‘How on earth is my audience meant to know that my sign that reads 'Chinese Restaurant' refers to a Chinese restaurant if I don't write it in wacky calligraphy-y, bamboo-y letters?"[9] These sorts of fonts are offensive to the group stereotyped, but also to the viewer. We are intelligent beings with the capacity to read the intent of a sign without designers resorting to negative stereotypes.
For many designers ethnic fonts are seen as simply “garbage fonts”[10] used by “amateur designers”[11]. Using gender stereotypes is also, though much less so, considered an amateur decision. But amateur or not, we go about our day exposed to way more than the rare professional high-end sleek design with a social consciousness. We see these stereo‘types’ everywhere. Maybe it is time we hold designers accountable for these stereotypes. Maybe we should also hold accountable the institutions that teach design without teaching the social implications of design[12]. The job of a designer is not to be uninventive, simply repurposing stereotypes for easy visual communication. We need to call on the design industry to be innovative, creative, and to generate useful visual solutions, because ultimately, that is their job.
“The Neuland Question comes up regularly, and alas without much resolution….”
–Jonathan Hoefler
The “Neuland Question” to which Jonathan Hoefler refers involves not just Neuland, a “display” typeface hand-carved in 1923 by Rudolf Koch, but also Lithos, another “display” typeface digitally created in 1989 by Carol Twombly. The Question can be put simply: How did these two typefaces come to signify Africans and African-Americans, regardless of how a designer uses them, and regardless of the purpose for which their creators originally intended them? The investigation of this question has four parts: first, an examination of the environments in which Koch and Twombly created the original typefaces; second, an examination of the graphic culture that surrounded African-Americans prior to the creation of Neuland through a close viewing of tobacco ephemera; third, an examination of the Art Deco (French Modern) style, the graphic culture most prevalent in the United States at the time of Neuland’s release; and finally, an examination of the ways designers use Neuland and Lithos today.
Rudolf Koch was born in 1876 and had a career that was both uninteresting and undistinguished until he enlisted in the German Army in 1907 to fight in World War I. Upon returning from the war, he commented to his close friend Siegfried Guggenheim that he was “profoundly stirred” by his experiences (10). The horrors of war inspired Koch to seek religion for himself and then preach the benefits of a religious life to his countrymen. Having experimented with the art of calligraphy shortly before enlisting, Koch returned to the art after WWI with the intention of making bold, noticeable typefaces that would shout to other Germans that following God’s path would help them find comfort from the trauma of war. Guggenheim notes, “Koch’s fonts after the war were designed for broadsides, postcards, etc. – not books [… they were designed] to demonstrate his religious fervency” (11–13). Neuland was such a face. Yale University Printer John Gambell suggests that Koch designed the face with the intent of making a modern version of the German black letter (or black face) style. Black letter fonts were used at the time for the setting of important texts, especially Bibles and church-related documents. Koch’s “new black face” attempted to preserve the flared, interlocking forms of the traditional black letter style, while at the same time adopting the sans-serif style around which modernists, like Paul Renner, were building their typefaces. Renner’s Futura, the quintessential example of modernist typography, was designed in 1927, only four years after the Klingspor Type Foundry released Koch’s Neuland (Rock).
Koch’s settings of Neuland in the original German specimen book published by the Klingspor Type Foundry support Gambell’s suggestion. He sets the type with minimal leading and kerning as black letter was typically set. He inserts woodcuts and Greek cross-shaped (+) ampersands as well, a common practice with black letter texts. However, Koch broke with black letter typesetting standards by stripping Neuland of the delicately interlocking serifs commonly used in black letter typography. The result, a font composed of heavy black forms, was visible from great distances and easily distinguishable from lighter-weight typefaces on a page. These qualities made Neuland suitable to advertising. Koch even attempted to set a classified ad in Neuland at the end of the German specimen book.
By the time Neuland reached the United States, its distributor, the Continental Typefounder’s Association, had little interest in Neuland’s uses as a modern black letter, and the specimen book that they prepared promoted Neuland as exclusively an advertising typeface, a “type that attracts attention” (Koch, Loose File, “Klingspor Type Foundry”). The American specimen book showed Neuland used in advertising settings from bank bonds to drywall contracting. Because of the absence of a black letter tradition in the United States and because of the way the Continental Typefounder’s Association promoted Neuland, Koch’s intentions for the font were entirely lost immediately after its introduction in America.
Just as Koch was trying to modernize an ancient form of writing with Neuland in 1923, so too was Carol Twombly with Lithos in 1989. Jonathan Hoefler suggests that “Lithos [is] an interpretation of ancient lapidary writing.” Twombly herself corroborates this:
Inscriptions honoring public figures or dedications for temples were intended for public viewing in ancient Greece. Geometric letterforms, free of adornment were chiseled into the stone. These basic shapes are the inspiration for Lithos.
Letterforms like those that inspired Lithos can be seen not only on ancient Greek temples, but also on many modern buildings built in the Classical or Gothic styles, such as on the front entrance to Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. In his famous book The Elements of Typographic Style, critic Robert Bringhurst notes that many modern typefaces take their inspiration from architectural sources, and, indeed, many of Twombly’s typefaces, like Lithos, come from ancient architecture: Trajan, a serifed face, evolved from carvings on columns in ancient Rome; and Charlemagne, another serifed face, evolved from carvings found in Byzantine temples.
Although Twombly left Trajan and Charlemagne relatively unaltered from their original forms, she made a substantial alteration in Lithos. Twombly decided to create a bold weight for Lithos in addition to its book weight, even though bold-weighted letterforms were nonexistent in ancient Greece. John Gambell suggests that Twombly “may have felt the font was not marketable today without a bold weight.” Regardless of her reasons, Lithos’ bold-weighted anachronism is now Neuland’s bastard child. Lithos’ flared edges, heavy lines, square characters, and pen-like strokes are analogous to Neuland’s trademark elements, and the fonts are virtually identical to the untrained eye. Indeed, Lithos’ close formal approximation to Neuland makes it virtually interchangeable with Neuland for designers working on African and African-American projects.
Because Lithos follows Neuland historically and formally, and because printers and designers used Neuland in African and African-American projects before Twombly even conceived Lithos, the resolution of the Neuland Question rests in reconstructing Neuland’s history.
Primarily because of both constant anti-African-American sentiment and the socioeconomic status of African-Americans during and after the Civil War, African-American graphic culture in the United States prior to Neuland’s release in 1923 and before the Harlem Renaissance in general was unimportant at best and nonexistent at worst. In short, African-Americans did not have the buying power or the social acceptance required to cultivate a significant graphic culture. What graphic culture they did have centered around their depiction in advertisements for products associated with slavery: tobacco and cotton.
Tremendous amounts of ephemera surrounded the tobacco industry from the 1850s until the 1930s, much of which involved racist uses of African-Americans as mascots. Much of this ephemera took the form of trading cards given out in general stores, on street corners, or wherever tobacco was sold. These trading cards were common media for advertising from the 1850s to the 1930s, and generally involved a caricatured picture of a “Negro” and a slogan in dialect (“Sho’ fly, git away from dar”) on the front and information about the product on the back. As tobacco companies had to make these cards cheaply and copiously, the text on the back of these cards was often poorly set with cheap woodblock type rather than with more expensive metal type.
While today woodblock type has a certain nostalgic appeal, designers and typophiles (typographic historians and typography enthusiasts) into the 1950s saw woodblock letters as nothing but lower-class. Immediately upon its release, designers and typophiles linked Neuland’s forms with woodblock type and responded accordingly. In his book Typographic Milestones, typophile Allan Haley charges “Neuland is not considered a particularly practical, useful, or attractive typeface” (70). He later reiterates his point, saying, “[Neuland is] not especially attractive, nor even very useful […] its realistic applications are quite limited” (73). Typophiles like Haley frequently omitted Neuland from typographic histories altogether, and Neuland soon became a member of the family of fonts that designers call “garbage type”: esoteric, inelegant, difficult to set, and destined, like tobacco ephemera, for the garbage. Neuland’s figurative status as “garbage type” became a literal truth when, as popular design legend has it, printers threw the face away after becoming frustrated with the extraordinary weight of the thick lead letters and the large amount of space the alphabet consumed in their often small print shops.
Apart from being perceived as cheap “garbage,” woodblock type carried with it a legacy of cultural stereotype. Woodblock type was also known as “circus type” because of its frequent use in promoting circuses. An entire culture of “stereotypography” developed around these playful woodblock typefaces as certain “circus types” came to stand for stereotypical visual associations that Americans held about the cultures that the “circus types” were designed to represent. For example, circus promoters used the woodblock type Tokyo when promoting performers from the Orient. Hometown, another “circus type,” is a near match for Neuland, as is Othello, a heavy (black) sign-lettering typeface whose name alludes to the black hero of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Beyond the circus’ stereotyping of non-Western cultures via woodblock type, cigarette packages, in addition to their advertising, often employed stereotyped and racist themes on their packaging. Two cultures often stereotyped were Egypt (on the packages of Oasis, Café-Noir, Zima, Egyptian Heroes, and Crocodile cigarettes) and Turkey (on the packages of Fatima, Omar, and Turkey Red cigarettes). The dominance of these cultures in antiquity ties them to Lithos’ Greek forms. Their use on cigarette packaging ties them to Neuland. Finally, their status as cultural “Others” to the West, in the same way that Africa was seen as a cultural “Other,” figures prominently into determining the cultural implications of the Neuland Question. Jonathan Hoefler explains,
I suspect that designers who use Neuland or Lithos as an approximation of the Africanesque are being unimaginative at best, and jingoistic at worst. [This use of] Neuland…still survives on that appalling cigarette package.1
Before Neuland’s release, the graphic culture of African-Americans exemplified by trading cards, “circus type,” and cigarette packaging typified the racial and socioeconomic stereotype of the “Po’ Negro.” However, the extent to which that attitude continued, and whether the predominant graphic culture in America at the time of Neuland’s release, Art Deco, altered that attitude, remains to be discussed.
Art Deco, a school of art that “responded to the changing taste of society during the ‘Jazz Age’” (Janson 856), started in France shortly after 1900, but its development was postponed until after WWI, when, in 1925, the French dubbed it Le Style Moderne. This is why Art Deco was also known as the French Modern style. This name existed for a short time, but as the style became more international it came to be known as “Art Deco,” getting “Deco” from “decorative,” since the style applied mainly to the decorative (rather than high) arts. Thus, Art Deco, like the woodblock and “circus” typography that came before it, was considered lower-class. Art Historian Anthony F. Janson echoes this point, “[Art Deco’s] everyday objects catered to the lowest common denominator” (856). Having grown up in France around the turn of the century, Art Deco adopted much of the fantasy of Art Nouveau. Oftentimes this fantasy included “a taste for the exotic [… including] ancient Egypt” (Janson 856). Like cigarette packaging that drew much from ancient Egypt, Art Deco’s Egyptian elements drew heavily on stereotyping the “Other,” a category that included Africa. Finally, Art Deco’s references to “primitive” cultures like Africa created a romanticized ideal that echoed references to “primitive” cultures made by the Primitivists in France a generation before.
Primitivist and Art Deco elements show up in Koch’s own work. In terms of Primitivism, two histories of Koch, Friedrich Matthaus’ Rudolf Koch, ein Werkmann Gottes, and Oskar Beyer’s Rudolf Koch, ein schopferisches Leben include drawings and photographs of Koch’s sculpture, which is nothing if not Primitivistic. Like much of African sculpture, Koch’s sculpture is carved out of dark wood and supported by small animal figurines. Koch savagely scratched out Christian messages into the sculptures in a typeface remarkably similar to Neuland. Koch created Neuland in a similar fashion, creating the letterforms by carving them directly on the metal punches (type blocks), rather than making drawings from which to work (Haley 73). In its original metal version, each character set of Neuland was subtly different from all the others; this wonderful quality has been lost since the type’s adaptation into phototype and then digital forms.
Apart from Neuland, typophiles commonly group another of Koch’s typefaces, Kabel, with Art Deco fonts. Kabel’s quirky lower-case “e” and upper-case “G,” and the entire face’s low x-height position it squarely in the Art Deco typographic aesthetic. Kabel’s German specimen book includes a number of interesting suggestions for its use, most notably for a page of cigar advertisements. The following page continues the tobacco merchandisen theme as it predominantly displays a Turkish star-and-crescent symbol.
Though Neuland is not technically an Art Deco typeface, many typophiles group it with Art Deco typefaces anyway. In his Advertising Typographers of America Type Comparison Book, typophile Frank Merriman groups Neuland under the heading “Informal Sans” with true Art Deco faces such as Banco, Studio, Cartoon, Ad Lib, and Samson 2 as well as the sign-lettering face Othello discussed earlier. On the page facing the “Informal Sans,” he shows some Greek pottery fragments found in Corinth from the second half of the 8th century BC. Although Koch was fascinated by Greek lettering – Matthaus’ book displays lettering Koch drew in the manner of Greek tablets and a book about Koch bears some of his hand-drawn Greek letterforms – Merriman’s comparison is not based on this fact. He explains the juxtaposition of the “Informal Sans” and the Greek pottery fragments in this way:
These [fragments] are nearly as old as any Greek inscription or writing found to date. Their informal nature, whether through ineptitude or choice, is remarkably like that of our informal sans-serifs nearly three milleniums later (71, emphasis mine).
Merriman’s juxtaposition clearly links Neuland and Lithos to one another and to the formal aesthetics of Art Deco, which were positioned in the lower-class and tied to antiquity and stereotypical views of the “Other.” Merriman’s use of the word “informal” to describe the faces marks the cultural snobbery typophiles displayed toward Neuland and faces like it.3 Merriman explicitly suggests this quality by calling the “Informal Sans” “inept.” Implicitly, he suggests it by his name for the group, “Informal Sans.” “Informal” here means “not according to prescribed, official, or customary forms; irregular; unofficial; suitable to or characteristic of casual or familiar speech or writing” (Urdang 683). “Informal” is inartistic, lower-class, and outside the establishment. “Informal” is Merriman’s judgment of American society’s perception of African-American art and, indeed, of African American people themselves.
The book publishing world of the 1920s, 30s, and early 40s, well-versed in Art Deco, did nothing if not underscore the culturally stereotypical qualities that Neuland had already assumed. Book publishers often mockingly coupled the font’s use with titles like “Illiterate Digest,” “Cannibal Cousins,” and, in a visual pun, with the pulp fiction mystery “The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde”.
By the mid-1940s, long after Art Deco had left, Neuland’s use in African-American texts remained. Famous African-American books such as Richard Wright’s Native Son and Wulf Sachs’ Black Anger use Neuland on their covers. Critic Ellen Lupton notes, “Neuland has appeared […] on the covers of numerous books…about the literature and anthropology of Africa and African-Americans” (37). Even today, books that fit into the category that Lupton outlines bear Neuland or Lithos on their covers. While the stereotypes associated with the fonts have remained, their applications have, in fact, increased in the present day beyond just book publishing. Neuland has found its way into Hollywood, used in such films as Jurassic Park, Tarzan, and Jumanji. Subaru used Lithos prominently in the logo for their new car, the Outback. Both fonts appear frequently on all sorts of extreme sports paraphernalia. These uses seem to indicate that in addition to Neuland and Lithos’ prior associations with informality, ineptitude, ugliness, cheapness, and unusability, they have since acquired qualities that suggest “jungle,” “safari,” and “adventure” – in short, Africa. Moreover, “stereotypography” – the stereotyping of cultures through typefaces associated with them – has been increasing as graphic design becomes a greater cultural force: just this year, House Industries, a type foundry in New Jersey, released a family of typefaces called “Tiki Type,” which is meant to signify Polynesia; at the same time, Abercrombie & Fitch, a clothing store catering to twentysomethings, created shirts with meaningless Chinese ideograms on them, meant to look as if they came directly from New York’s predominantly Chinese garment district.
But away from the white-controlled industries of book publishing, movie making, car dealing, adventure seeking, font designing, and designer clothing, in small African-American-controlled sectors of business and culture, no sign of Neuland or Lithos appears. The first issue of Ebony magazine takes more from the classic 1950s typography of Life magazine than from African-American books published at the same time, and other African-American magazine published before Ebony like Common Ground and Lamplighter do the same. Jazz album covers from labels like Blue Note and Verve are steeped in the playful modernism of designer Saul Bass and employ modern typefaces revamped, like Futura, Trade Gothic, and Clarendon, in ways that melt their Modernist frigidity and heat them with the hot beat of Jazz. From Motown in the 1970s to the Fugees today, African-American musicians do not simply ignore Lithos and Neuland on their album covers-they have excised them completely from their visual vocabulary.
As Michael Rock points out, an intrinsic difficulty confronts all designers as they set out to design new cultural texts with the tools of old Modernist typography. “Inevitably,” he observes, “you end up having to refer to other aesthetic systems, and those systems are subject to stereotype.” However, African-Americans from Common Ground to the Fugees seem comfortable reinventing old Modernist typography in new ways rather than developing new, separate systems. Indeed, typography today is still a separate-but-equal world, and prominent African American authors like Terrance McNally still have their work branded as “different” simply as a result of the typeface used on the cover. If, as John Gambell suggests, the typefaces we as a society choose in which to set our messages are meant to stand in for the speaker of the words themselves, than how should we see a speaker with Koch’s “new black face”? If we want to know why the words of African-Americans continue to be lost, we must come to recognize that the “new black face” that voices in Neuland adopt is not a new face at all: it is simply a mask for the old black stereotypes that still persist today.
On August 16, 2016, Zarah Sultana tweeted an image of a tote bag she saw in the Berlin subway that went immediately viral. The bag had Arabic type on it which said, ‘This text has no other purpose than to terrify those who are afraid of the Arabic language”. The image was retweeted 78.000 times and the design was featured on news sites around the world. The tote bag is made by Rock Paper Scissors, a graphic design studio in Haifa run by Sana Jammalieh and Haytham Charles Haddad. When interviewed by the Australian news site SBS, the two designers said about their design, “While fuddling what to write we came to a conclusion that the existence of the font and language—and not necessarily the writing—is what’s important.” The designers live in the Israeli city of Haifa, where typography is easily connected to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The designers continued, “We notice here that the Arabic language is starting to disappear from signs and public places.” The bag’s popularity coincides with growing xenophobia in Europe and populist politicians who brand Middle East culture as religious or Islamic extremist. The bags are currently sold out but keep an eye on their webshop, if you one.
For a while now, I’ve seen a lot of designers using deliberately mismatched font combinations. I know there has been a trend to use, what would have previously been seen as very unfashionable/unsuitable, fonts within work that is more artistic/fashion led (especially in zines). While at the same time, a lot of digital work has been utilising the “new ugly” or “brutalist” approach as well. However, the examples that got me thinking the most about cultural appropriation in typography were a couple of zines I had seen that specifically used the font Mandarin (I took a screengrab of it and now can’t find it annoyingly). Seeing these zines reminded me of the section in The Politics of Design titled “Ethnic typography”. If you’re not aware of the book I would strongly recommend that you buy it. It looks at how no graphic design is objective. Everything is coloured by its environment and “explores the cultural and political context of the typography, colours, photography, symbols, and information graphics that we use everyday”. Within this section the author Ruben Pater looks at typefaces that have been designed and used to convey a sense of ethnicity, nationality, or geographic territory. The short essay that follows has been inspired by this section and also relies heavily on two essays quoted within this chapter: Stereo Types, written by Paul Shaw and New Black Face: Neuland and Lithos as Stereotypography, by Rob Giampietro. As well as my own thoughts on the subject of typography, cancel culture and who has permission to use culturally insensitive material, if any at all. I don’t want to regurgitate Pater’s chapter, because it is worth the price of the book alone, so I’ll be using the following criteria to look into the idea of cultural appropriation in typography:
1. Who created the font? Why did they create the font? What was its intended purpose?
2. Is a font innocent by itself? Is it only how it is used?
3. Questions over power and control: who has it? Can it change?
4. What is the role of typography in general?
Who created the font?
The typefaces primarily used in these three essays (I’ll use the word essay to collectively describe all three source materials within this essay, despite Pater’s being a chapter in a book) are Mandarin, Neuland and Lithos. I won’t go into too much depth here about the origins of each typeface — you get all that from the original materials — but I will touch on it briefly to help understand the context and purpose of each typeface and question whether this influenced its later use. Paul Shaw is keen to point out that we shouldn’t group all these ethnic fonts together and assume that they all share the same history but rather understand that there are “many different paths taken by a typeface from its creation to its status as a visual shorthand for an entire group.”
Firstly, when were these typefaces created and who created them? Neuland was created in 1923 by Rudolf Koch, Lithos was created by Carol Twombly in 1989 and Mandarin (originally named Chinese) was created by the Cleveland Type Foundry in 1883. While looking for any commonality in their creation, it is difficult to see any shared characteristics or attributes between these typefaces. Neuland was inspired by Blackletter/Blackface typefaces that had historically preceded it and designed with religious fervour in mind by Koch. When it went on to be marketed in America, it was pitched as an advertising font and its religious function was soon lost.
Lithos was architecturally inspired by Greek temple inscriptions but, like Neuland, this was not enough to make it sellable to market. To make it sellable another weight was added, much bolder, which drastically moved it away from its original intentions and into something, albeit historically unrelated, visually very close to Neuland. Or as Giampietro bluntly describes it, “Lithos’ bold-weighted anachronism is now Neuland’s bastard child”.
Mandarin, as portrayed by Shaw, is a different story and can be described as a “chop suey” font. Meaning, “just as chop suey is an American invention, so, too, are the letters of Mandarin and its many offspring. Neither the food nor the fonts bear any real relation to true Chinese cuisine or calligraphy.” This is not the same as Neuland and Lithos. From the outset Mandarin was an unashamedly stereotypical rendering of another nationality and culture’s visual language. It anglicised minor aspects of the original and made it what it wanted, in effect caricaturing the original. And like a caricature it ignored what it didn’t want to see and exaggerated what it wanted to highlight. As highlighted by the example (Pater and Shaw both use) the 1899 poster “Trip to Chinatown”. Shaw goes on to detail how by the 1930s, chop suey fonts were synonymous with Chinese culture (and today as almost anything Asian) and Pater mentions how this still continues with the 2002 Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt with lazy, stereotypical “racist caricatures”. Therefore, Mandarin was deliberately stereotypical from the beginning and was not something that happened over time.
Can the font itself be innocent?
Now that we have seen the origins of these three fonts, are they innocent? Or is it only their later application that has made them fall into cultural appropriation and stereotyping within the design world? As stated, Neuland began with religious fervour, it was later (and without the originator) that it became heavily used within “advertisements for products associated with slavery: tobacco and cotton.” Giampietro demonstrates how even the woodblock nature of the font itself even gave it the reputation as “lower class”. Reducing it to a “garbage type”, i.e. “esoteric, inelegant, difficult to set, and destined, like tobacco ephemera, for the garbage.” Neuland and other typefaces of this nature would be heavily used amongst circus advertising, only emphasising their “other” (i.e. non-western) status and grouped with the Middle East (Giampietro also emphasises this furthering the link with Lithos). Therefore, because of their use as signifying Africa and the Middle East, the fonts become lazy, unimaginative symbols, often combined with racist imagery, of not just these geographical locations but harmful stereotypes of people, histories and work practices. Giampietro argues that Lithos has also been used extensively to convey a feeling or rather, “suggest ‘jungle,’ ‘safari,’ and ‘adventure’ — in short, Africa”, citing the example of the Subaru Outback badge as well as books on the Harlem Renaissance.
In other words, as far as we know Neuland was created without any “African” concept in mind but rather as an updated German blackletter typography. (Although, Giampietro does reveal evidence of Koch’s sculpture work which is strongly “Primitivist” and also combines some of the religious fervour that went into creating Neuland itself.) Regarding Lithos, to say it ‘borrows’ from Greek influence would be kind. To say it presents as a corrupted caricature of a highly anglicised version of Greek typography might be going too far. Either way, it is certainly a cheapened version of a “Greek” style without too much care for the original. That is to say, neither Neuland or Lithos are anywhere near as bad as Mandarin. We know from it’s conception that the creator of Mandarin was producing it as purely a “chop suey” font with no love for the geographical, historic or visual origin and purely a commodification or colonial stereotype.
For these reasons I think we can safely say that Mandarin is not an innocent typeface. It was exploitative from the start. I am undecided whether Lithos is innocent or not. Neuland, with Koch as the creator, cannot be held accountable for the way the typeface got used beyond their control. Once the work of a typographer has been created and is released into the world, how can the creator possibly be held accountable for the way that it is used? With the evidence that Giampietro presents, it is without ill intent that the typeface was created. The same simply cannot be said for Mandarin. Whereas Lithos, according to Giampietro, has subsequently been used to convey “Africa” I am unsure whether there was any original implication of cultural appropriation. Despite its Greek influence and arguably anglicised nature it is certainly ambiguous whether we could go as far as to say it is guilty of cultural appropriation. Rather, as stated, it is a bit of a cheapened version of an original...
Power and control:
who has it and can it change?
For me this is the essential part of the argument regarding cultural appropriation within typography, power and control. Of course, as much as anything else (the power and meaning of language, political power, cultural capital etc.) power has the potential to change hands. However, let’s also be realistic. Giampietro describes succinctly how, pre Neuland’s creation in 1923, African American graphic design history was “non-existent” as African American’s had “no buying power or social acceptance”. This only contributed to the proliferation of the racist stereotypes on products like tobacco. Maybe, it could be argued that this was almost a hundred years ago and things have changed? However, Giampietro describes the practice of ““stereotypography” — the stereotyping of cultures through typefaces associated with them — has been increasing as graphic design becomes a greater cultural force”.
My thoughts on this aspect (prior to reading on the subject) were based on whether it was possible to demonstrate a ‘reclamation’ of typefaces by those who had historically had power removed from them through this “stereotypography”. But from these three primary sources this has not been the case. There has not been a reclamation of Neuland or Lithos by African or African diasporan designers. Shaw states that, “Ethnic types have been dubbed “garbage fonts” by typophiles, and since the fonts are culturally inauthentic, they are deemed an affront to the political sensitivities of ethnic groups (and to the enlightened morals of graphic designers). But it has often been immigrant entrepreneurs, not professional designers, who have chosen to use these typefaces and keep their popularity alive.” Does this count as a reclamation? Does this address the historic power imbalance and go towards righting the wrongs previous graphic designers have inflicted on these “other” groups? I’d argue no.
Shaw himself provides some of the reasons why this does not qualify as reclamation in the paragraph preceding the quote above, “[Ethnic type] survives for the simple reason that stereotypes, though crude, serve a commercial purpose. They are shortcuts, visual mnemonic devices. There is no room for cultural nuance or academic accuracy in a shop’s fascia.” Could it be that shop owners, restaurateurs, small business owners etc. are not thinking in the same way, or for as long, as critics, writers and graphic designers on this subject? They certainly cannot be blamed for employing the use of these “lower class”, “ethnic”, “garbage fonts” because, as Shaw points out, they provide a quick, easy, visual device that tells the potential customer what they sell so was good for business. However, given the history that we have seen associated with these typeface, we as designers, must think in a way that does not resort to “stereotypography”. For one, it is lazy, but more importantly do we want to perpetuate these stereotypes and be a part of their historical usage? Regarding whether African American designers used fonts like Neuland and Lithos, Giampietro writes, “away from the white-controlled industries of book publishing, movie making, car dealing, adventure seeking, font designing, and designer clothing, in small African-American-controlled sectors of business and culture, no sign of Neuland or Lithos appears”. Rather, by looking at Ebony magazine and Blue Note records, he instead sees “playful modernism” with “modern typefaces revamped”. No need to use these “garbage fonts” when you’re designing for some of the best records ever made.
What is the role of typography in general?
After having looked at each font’s origins, asked can the font itself be innocent, and considered ideas of power and control within typography, we can now ask (briefly): what is the role of typography? Have we been overly sensitive? Have we read too much into some ugly fonts? Is this political correctness gone mad? Is it alright for typography to just be expressive and capture a mood or a feeling, even if it’s not accurate and only in the typographer’s mind and avoid cultural appropriation altogether?
Of course, typography can be expressive! I do not subscribe to the masochistic zealousness that faux-modernists hold dear by quoting Massimo Vignelli. I admire his work, of course, but I think there are more than 3 good typefaces in the world. I enjoy a lot about the so-called “brutalist” or “new ugly” designs that are a reaction, or distortion, to the parochial passion that many feel towards the Bauhaus and the Swiss/International style. Again, I am definitely not against these styles and admire a lot about them and what they have provided graphic design. Stylistically and theoretically. However, as I have read these three essays I have realised that the question regarding typography’s role is not as relevant. Of course, as mentioned at the beginning, zines and art projects are perfect for expressive, subversive, challenging typography and I love seeing previously frowned-upon typefaces reinvented with great design combining text and image. In some ways I have wondered, might it be appropriate to use fonts like Neuland and Lithos, if they were not tainted by the history that has come to be associated with them? To use a “garbage font” could be non-conformist and make a powerful visual and political statement. We have seen how even typefaces like Helvetica, the most ubiquitous typeface, can be distorted, altered and bent into something powerful and interesting. However, hopefully what we have read here is to avoid, at all costs, “stereotypography” through lazy stereotyping using typography. Is it ever alright to use “chop suey” fonts? That might need a part 2 to explain further but it should be obvious not to perpetuate harmful imagery with bigoted attitudes. Or as Pater concludes, “the use of ethnic stereotypes prevents the public from seeing representations of minorities treated with the same respect as those of the dominant culture”.
