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The Mystery Font That Took Over New York (nytimes.com)
How did Choc, a quirky calligraphic typeface drawn by a French graphic designer in the 1950s, end up on storefronts everywhere? From a report: Stand just about anywhere on Broadway, or on Canal Street with its sprightly neon and overstuffed souvenir shops, or the long stretch of restaurants, hardware stores, pharmacies, bars, realtors, barber shops, groceries and auto shops that extends through Fifth Avenue in South Brooklyn, and you'll find a surplus of vibrant and overstated signage -- a cacophony of typography. Steven Heller, a co-chairman at the School of Visual Arts' M.F.A. program, sees it somewhat differently. "You say 'cacophony,'" he said. "I call it chaos." But amid all of this chaos there is the occasional beacon. Choc, for instance.
It's a typeface that draws the eye with its inherent contradictions. It seems to have been drawn improvisationally with a brush, and yet it's so hefty it looks like it could slip off a wall. It's both delicate and emphatic, a casual paradox, like a Nerf weapon. Choc is far from the most popular typeface on the storefronts of New York, but it can still be found everywhere and in every borough. It's strewn on fabric awnings and etched in frosted glass. It gleams in bright magenta or platinum lighting. It's used for beauty salons, Mexican restaurants, laundromats, bagel shops, numerous sushi bars. It may be distorted, stacked vertically, or shoehorned into a cluster of other typefaces. But even here Choc remains clear and articulate, its voice deep and friendly, its accent foreign, perhaps, yet endearing. You've already seen it, probably repeatedly, like a stranger you recognize from your morning commute.
It's a typeface that draws the eye with its inherent contradictions. It seems to have been drawn improvisationally with a brush, and yet it's so hefty it looks like it could slip off a wall. It's both delicate and emphatic, a casual paradox, like a Nerf weapon. Choc is far from the most popular typeface on the storefronts of New York, but it can still be found everywhere and in every borough. It's strewn on fabric awnings and etched in frosted glass. It gleams in bright magenta or platinum lighting. It's used for beauty salons, Mexican restaurants, laundromats, bagel shops, numerous sushi bars. It may be distorted, stacked vertically, or shoehorned into a cluster of other typefaces. But even here Choc remains clear and articulate, its voice deep and friendly, its accent foreign, perhaps, yet endearing. You've already seen it, probably repeatedly, like a stranger you recognize from your morning commute.
I'm not fond of it.
New York City is a place where people are obsessed by status. Someone noticed that trendy new places were using something to signal the fact that they were trendy to everyone. This time it was a font. Everyone suddenly wanted that same status, so they all followed the leader, like so many chimpanzees piling into the fruit cart. Presto, you now resemble others with status.
What they forgot was to set barriers to entry. High costs, restricted invitation-only events, social media full of virtue signaling posts, required letters of recommendation from high status individuals, . Fonts are too easy to copy. Now that all the deplorables have the font too, it's going to go out of fashion fast. Look for it to resurface 20 years from now as a "retro" font.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
That, and it doesn't seem that common judging by the pictures the author chose...
Newspapers wonder why nobody seems to want to pay for them anymore. Curious.
Also, do you think the author was wearing pants while writing that description of a font?
God, I hate fluff pieces like this.
TL:DR; Some crappy looking font becomes popular because "it bears a resemblance to the calligraphic forms of Asian writing systems." No Shit, Sherlock. News at 11.
Here is a texture atlas (picture) of all the glyphs in this shitty font since the author was too fucking lazy.
1. You have crap like this:
Uh. how about SHOWING us the glyphs instead of textually describing them and making us look them up so we can understand what the fuck you are going on about???
2. The popularity of Comic Sans and Choc "proves" that the general populace doesn't give a fuck about well designed fonts. Why is this news?
3. So it is "everywhere" in New York. No one gives a fuck about this font except some pretentious stuck-up typographer.
Talk about a slow-news day at the NY Times.
Font nerds are almost as bad as cosplay enthusiasts.
As far as I'm concerned there are two kinds of fonts: ones that are easy to read and ones that aren't.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Where's the exposé on the use Papyrus at Middle Eastern restaurants?
Have gnu, will travel.
On the surface the article is about a font that is more-or-less widely used in New York City signage, but that's not its true purpose. Its true purpose is to identify stuck-up asshole font nerds on /.
So far I'd say that it's doing a pretty good job at it.
That, and it doesn't seem that common judging by the pictures the author chose...
Indeed. In every picture the majority of the signs are in a different font. Most of the examples in Choc were Asian restaurants. In East Asia, calligraphy is often done with a brush rather than a pen, so the appeal of a font that looks "brushed" makes sense.
Can we get a rule which auto-bans anyone who submits an article behind a paywall?
I've got some arty blood in my veins and like typography and layout and all things designy and I think this font isn't half bad. It's way better than using comic sans for everything, that's for sure. Choc is bold, heavy, unusual but still compareatively easy to read. And it's improvised notion makes it usable for just about everything. You really *can* just slap this one on the wall and it will work, because it isn't pretentious and really just does look like brushstrokes.
Bottom line: This is really an improvement over comic sans and normals can't really go wrong with it when typesetting with Choc. I've seen worse insults to the design-gods.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
As soon as I read the headline I was seeing the font in my head without even knowing what it had been called or even that is was associated with Asian businesses. I just knew.
Every single example shown in the photos was for businesses with a foreign flare - the vast majority of them were Asian, with a couple Mexican businesses in there too. It's pretty obvious to me that the font is expressing the brush type strokes used in Chinese and Japanese (Shodo) calligraphy, but in English letters. The font is being used to convey a very specific meaning, and the reason you see it so often is there are simply that many foreign themed businesses in New York.
Better known as 318230.
Only some things have that font. Very specific things. Almost all of those signs are for Asian things. There was one Mexican place I saw. All the rest looked Asian. Traditional Asian script is painted with a brush. It looks brushed, therefore it looks Asian. Mystery solved.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
nice one
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