A Mystery Font That Took Over New York
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Brushes may be used in painting letters onto a sign, but only as a tool to fill an area, whereby brush marks are regarded as artifacts to be avoided.
The font doesn't look quirky to someone whose native writing system's canonical form is rooted brush strokes.
Basically this remark in the article nails it:
> This could have to do with what Choc evokes. For some it bears a resemblance to the calligraphic forms of Asian writing systems.
But then:
> However, it’s disputed as to whether Choc was a direct homage to these styles. According to Ms. Chamaret, José Mendoza, Excoffon’s assistant at the time of Choc’s production, said that the letterforms were drawn in outlines. “Never with a brush!” she said.
That hardly counts as an effective dispute. Obviously, the font painstakingly captures the appearance of brush strokes in exactly the same manner that Asian fontographers do in certain fonts. They also don't use brushes, but rather vector graphics: precisely specified outlines or strokes.
Choc is undeniably Asian influenced. Look at the C in Choc; it starts with a little right tick and then reverses. The roman letter C doesn't have anything like that; this is reminiscent of the top stroke in the Japanese こ (ko).
An initial swash [or horizontal serif] isn't unheard of for capital C in cursive Roman typefaces/scripts.
Other than that, I think you're spot on.
But this seems over-the-top. Who are these "ridiculous" people in New York, whose grasp of the situation around why this particular font ever came to be used in NY signage is so laughably feeble and inferior to the commenter's own?
There may be no mystery worth solving, but neither is there a clearly identifiable moment when a shopkeeper selected the font for the first time. In high-profile design, in contrast, historical moments like that are often traceable—they do have an author.
It's that people can apparently read a lavish, deeply-researched article, yet are incapable of discussing it in terms other than its headline.
So they are somewhat right, obviously. And the article comes to the same conclusion[0].
But those that consider this narrow answer as in any way central to the article suffer from some fundamental misunderstanding of the genre. I can just imagine them complaining about Infinite Jest: First, because they are unlikely to consider it very jesty. And secondly because it isn't actually infinite.
[0]: while even finding a candidate for "a clearly identifiable moment when a shopkeeper selected the font for the first time"–25 years after the fact.
This approach frustrates me in other media - it's especially common in podcasts. Sometimes the author finds something that interests them, but ultimately feels they have to sell the story with a different hook.
I wish authors would instead take it as a challenge to get other people invested in what captivated them. For example, the story could have pretty easily owned the obvious Asian restaurant association up front, but deliberately explored the font origins anyway (and maybe more specifically in that context).
Thanks to whom we're duly informed that these Choc signs are not really advertising at all, but mere graffiti.
Both this passage and Exofon's fonts remind me of Henry van der Horst, a Dutch graphic designer who basically has a monopoly on Dutch market signs. His work has become so ubiquitous that a market stall without it feels less "authentic", so there is a lot of demand for his work.
It's crazy: everyone here knows his handwriting, without knowing it was one man doing all of those signs for decades, and when I say "all those signs" I mean that at a national level (altough the Netherlands is small of course). He's like a weird kind of anonymous household name ("anonyfamous?"). Well, until a newspaper wrote an article about him down a few years ago, that is.
[0] http://www.willemverweijen.nl/henry-van-de-horst/
[1] https://www.volkskrant.nl/mensen/-op-de-markt-doet-niemand-a...
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/01/8-of-honest-eds-...
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2016/10/19/iconic-honest-eds-sig...
Or maybe it just gets lumped under “folk art”.
Some of those signs are probably from back then, but they retained the style right up until they closed in 2016.
The place was a godsend when I was younger—you could get hygiene products and some food items for dirt cheap.
And the sight from the street was even more wild than those hand-painted signs:
This type of analysis bugs me. Yes, with hindsight you can say it has "energy". Give this font in a controlled experiment with many "energetic" fonts to choose from and you'd not say the same thing. There is probably a word for this type of bias - perhaps confirmation bias?
There is nothing more to read into this. When a font gets popular in local design circles, restaurants end up tangled in the whatever font trend it happens to be because the designers that they hire are from the same circle of influence.
I usually find most complaints of cultural appropriation frivolous; go ahead and dress up as ninjas or wear kimonos all you like, we don't care! But this in particular keeps bugging me somewhat, as hardly anyone - even the writer of this article - seems to care about that angle much. Even in the logo for Disney's Big Hero 6[2], which I assume was supposed to be Disney's love letter to JP pop culture, wonton font influences die hard. (At least they de-wontonned the logo for the Japanese release, retitled as "Baymax."[3])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonton_font
[2] https://vgboxart.com/resources/logo/8390_big-hero-6-prev.png
[3] http://www.lightweight.tokyo/3ds/baymax_hero/images/catch/lo...
This is also why you don't see fake-cyrillic writing in any country using cyrillic because it is just odd and meaningless to readers to these scripts.
main.js:14 0000000 000 0000000 111111111 11111111100 000 111111111 00000 111111111111111111 00000 000000 000 1111111111111111111111111100000 000 000 1111 1111111111111111100 000 000 11 0 1111111100 000 000 1 00 1 000 000 00 00 1 000 000 000 00000 1 000 00000 0000 00000000 1 00000 11111 000 00 000000 000 11111 00000 0000 000000 00000 00000 000 10000 000000 000 0000 000 00000 000000 1 000 000 000000 10000 1 0 000 000 1000000 00 1 00 000 000 1111111 1 0000 000 000 1111111100 000000 000 0000 111111111111111110000000 0000 111111111 111111111111100000 111111111 0000000 00000000 0000000
NYTimes.com: All the code that's fit to printf() We're hiring: developers.nytimes.com/careers
update: Those 0s and 1s formed an ascii-art style nytimes logo. The format is messed up.
It was ripped off by Bitstream and included in the Bitstream TrueType Font Pack for Microsoft Windows 3.1
For some information about these fonts see https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.fonts/y3BOdTKSg...
It’s mentioned in the article that it was packaged as part of CorelDraw under this name.
It's used a lot in Vietnamese restaurants but also appears in random businesses (garages, hairdressers). I also saw it a lot when I visited Vietnam - I'd guess it's from there.
“I learned how to hand letter signs and trucks,” Mr. Boegemann said. “We started with a simple pencil and paper. We designed what we wanted and used the styles we wanted and knew how to apply...”
Asked if he’s ever made a sign in Choc, Mr. Boegemann said: “This style is a ‘Bastard’ letter style.”
I like this guy :-D
I can see why it might remind an untrained eye of Comic Sans, but I strongly disagree. Then again, I have an arts degree, so let's chalk that up to déformation professionnelle.
The funny thing about Comic Sans is that you can see that it is from the nineties computer era. Although I don't know if it was first created on paper and then transferred, or created directly on a computer, its curves feel both too mathematically "perfect", and at the same time ruined by human intervention. This is probably best highlighted by fonts that attempt to "fix" Comic Sans, like Comic Neue[0]. It's a bit like how tweening in computer animation can feel off when it uses naive linear interpolation, because it breaks our intuitions of normal physics (or is maybe that's just me).
Choc on the other hand is very clearly (to me) a font that was created before the digital era. The brushstrokes feel natural in a way that we could not create from within a computer medium until recently (thinking in the order of decades). And yet, its feels more consistent with itself than the comic sans letters do. Furthermore, if you view it in the context of designs from the fifties it just "fits", you can see that it was a products of its time (same with Comic Sans and Microsoft Bob being visibly a nineties product, actually - and that is not me throwing shade on either of them).
Sure other people here do know more on the subject though, let's hope they'll see your question and give some suggestions.
It's original reporting, so the usual copout of calling it worthless as soon as it appears in more than one publication doesn't work.
It's a metered paywall, so their insistence that they only read a single article from the NYT, like, once per year is provably wrong.
The topic is rather whimsical, and unlikely to be of much consequence for anybody's life. That makes any sort of appeal to a "right to be informed" or sumsuch rather flimsy.
FTFY
* A domain name like ipfs://nytimesmirror.com that mirrors nytimes articles (at the same relative URLs) * Some kind of crowdsourced process for content curation.
I'm aware that it's not legal, but I wouldn't be against it. Content piracy has been a catalyst for change. I simultaneously would be willing to pay nytimes for access to their content but I'm not willing to sign up to a $15 / month subscription. So if their content was widely pirated using delivery method like IPFS they might be incentivized to problem solve that for me.
Yet paying for content has been a catalyst for...content.
> they might be incentivized to problem solve that for me.
What is that even supposed to mean?
"This could have to do with what Choc evokes. For some it bears a resemblance to the calligraphic forms of Asian writing systems.
However, it’s disputed as to whether Choc was a direct homage to these styles...There’s no denying that Choc has become a typographical shorthand for Asian-themed restaurants."