Bad Type for Posterity

While waiting for the Klingon Christmas Carol to start on Saturday night, I spent some time in the lobby of the new Paul and Sheila Wellstone Center for Community Building that is home to Neighborhood House on St. Paul's West Side. (Commedia Beauregard is an itinerant theater, so they were renting the Wellstone Center's auditorium.)

The lobby is circular, and when it was built, a work of art was commissioned that includes bas relief wall sculptures representing the many cultures found at Neighborhood House, as well as three large quotes from Paul and Sheila Wellstone. The quotes are done in copper, with the background in accelerated patina. Altogether, it looks like a lot of effort went into to it.

Unfortunately, the artist, Evelyn Rosenberg, specializes in images and knows nothing about type, so she has immortalized the Wellstones' words in three separate, clashing fonts that came bundled with Microsoft Office -- combined with straight quotes and a funky blackletter "We" at the beginning of each quote that is supposed to evoke the preamble to the U.S. constitution.

I don't want to sound like a type snob, but basically, it's a painful-to-look-at, naive mess that will be in the lobby forever.


This is a font called Impact. You probably have this on your computer.


This is Harlow, a late '70s Art Deco face. Note how the "We" has been slanted in an attempt to make it fit better with Harlow's slant.


And this is Trebuchet, designed by Vincent Connare (creator of that perpetual font favorite, Comic Sans). Also available on your computer, I imagine.

I know it sounds like I'm implying that Rosenberg shouldn't have used fonts that we all have on our computers. That's not really what I mean... but this is an installation that is meant to last for decades, a special thing -- and fonts like Impact and Trebuchet are almost generic. It's like going to a fancy restaurant and being served SpaghettiOs.

But even the use of a common font could have worked if the type was just set better -- without so many fonts, the use of straight quotes, and the awkward blackletter lead-in. And Harlow is both hard to read and artistically inappropriate -- what does Art Deco have to do with the Wellstones or anything else in the installation? My guess is the artist used it because she thought it looked like handwriting.

It's not my habit to flame well-intended people, such as this artist or the staff at Neighborhood House, but this piece obviously touched a nerve about the amount of money that is spent creating permanent signage for buildings without any thought devoted to setting the type. It's visual pollution, and the folks on St. Paul's West Side are stuck with it forever.