Emergency election typeface pod: 'The Balto conspiracy?'

Inger gathered the team for an emergency pod about Balto the 2013 typeface chosen for the Harris Waltz campaign. 

After one failed attempt – which tested Inger’s patience about kerning — we nailed it (although we may inadvertently start some new political conspiracy theories by talking about the adventures of a plucky Disney dog also named Balto, not to mention the problematic choice of Perpetua for Obama’s first campaign). 

Anitra talks too much about columns and typeface rubbings and Jason tries to take the higher ground, while Inger briskly moves us along. We then revisit past presidential campaign typeface choices, and argue about Optima. Finally we add to Trump’s growing list of indictments by pointing out he has also committed type crimes.

Season two is coming up soon! In the meantime, you can go back and review season one so you get all our jokes about kerning.

Stuff we mentioned
Making Balto
The new Trump Logo and the MAGA cap story
McCain's Optima typeface story

"Back to Font" is out now in English, German, and Spanish! Buy it on Amazon. It's got 5 stars!

Visit our website thetypepod.org to see the show notes.

#wehategoudy

Transcript

Hi, this is Inger Mewburn. I'm the producer of the Type Pod, and I've called the team in for an emergency pod recording because there's been some big news in Type Land.

The Harris Waltz campaign changed their typeface. Now, if you're like me, you may not have noticed this change at all. But apparently it's big, and the Type Team got very excited about it on the group chat. So I convinced them to come in for an emergency recording to tell me all about it. Now, we've already had one go at recording this pod, but as producer, I decided it was super nerdy and intense, and there was a long, long digression about Kearney.

So I took them out to lunch, fed them a burger, and here we are again. I want them to bring more of what they talked about at lunch because it was fascinating. Forget about the Waltz China connection. How about the Harris Disney connection? And in this episode, we're talking about the use of type in election campaigns, you're never, ever going to look at a yard sign the same way.

And depending on what happens, you may even change your default type setting. Let's get started.

. Since it's an emergency, we'll keep this short. Okay. Hi, I'm Anitra Nottingham. 

And I'm Jason Phillips. We're both former book designers who remain committed type nerds. Opinionated committed type nerds. 

Okay, now Tim, apparently the Harris Welds campaign changed their typeface and you seemed very excited.

And honestly, I didn't notice it until you pointed it out. And again, if I'm honest, I still can't tell the difference. So can you tell me what the campaign did and why you're both so excited? Okay, so let's start with what they had to do first, which was create a very quick fire, hey, Harris is going for president now.

So what they used was Joe Biden's old typeface, decimal and mercury. So that sounds like a five minute job where they just deleted Biden and put Harris in. Okay, all professional graphic designers hate you right now.

It's not a five minute job. It's not a five 

minute job. Anyway, let's just, It's an all, it's 

an all nighter.

We'll move on by your blatant disrespect for graphic design work. Yeah. I'll continue on. So what they did was take the two typefaces that had been chosen. So they were using two designed by Jonathan 

Heffler. 

We looked it up, how to pronounce it properly. One called Decimal and one called Mercury, and they were both chosen around the theme of time.

So Decimal was designed for watch faces. So if you look at it, it's got a very interesting four because watch face fours are always designed with a little flat top, but I won't go into that. Last time you said it was too nerdy. Yes. And then the other one, Mercury, is used by the Atlantic.

So it was this idea of time, truthfulness, time, which is quite ironic when you consider what ended Biden's campaign. But they had to do that. But then they needed to rebrand her, um, and say, here's Harris and insert name of vice president here. And it needs to look completely different. So what was the first move?

What was the first like 24 hour emergency move? They just like deleted Biden, backspace, backspace, backspace. Yes. And they put in Harris. Yeah. But president, yeah, with an exciting humanist, italic four, president, you know, a little bit of a twist. Yeah. Yeah. But a lot of people were just cutting the campaign signs in half.

So they kind of went with what people were doing. Right. Already. Decimal has really short sort of, you've got a lower center of gravity. So the legs on the arm, we should say for the non regular listeners, there's a thing called typeface anatomy. Look it up. It's real. we talk about bits of typefaces and we use body parts as their name, which is sort of where we get the idea for our type platform, but I digress.

Anyway, I said, which I thought was a very good joke in the text chat, those legs, don't give a fuck what you think of them, they're here to work. The legs on the R. The legs on the R of decimal, which is the original typeface. And then they went and changed it. Yes. I tried to use the same joke on threads and it didn't hit quite the same way.

Um, but now they've gone for something different. 

Yes. Very different. Because they've changed the typeface, they've changed the entire look, they've pared it right down to the basics of just two names, which is a very different to take. Very brave Prime Ministers. 

Okay. 

Yeah. For, for presidential, uh, candidates.

campaign logo design. 

Yeah. So what typeface do we have now? So now they're using a typeface called Bolto, which is designed by Tal Lemming of typesupply. com and it's spelled how? B A L T O. Now I know what Jason is thinking. At lunch, what we were arguing about was that Jesse remembered that there was a movie called Bolto.

A Disney film. A Disney film. Released in, uh, what was it? 1997. 97 and Which is when the typeface designer says he started thinking about this typeface. Coincidence? He doesn't think so. Do you read that? I don't 

think so. I'm just joining the dots that are there. 

So he thinks it's a woke Disney kind of, you know, insertion campaign.

It's not. Tal Liming lives in, he lives in Baltimore. The designer is Tal Liming. Yeah, he lives in Baltimore. So Balto, Balto more. Okay. And Baltimore's a famously working class, um, African American city, east coast. We do the work. We keep this country going, you know, like it's charm city. It's working class.

It's on brand. Yeah. It's on brand. Tell us more about Balto. 

So it would, it comes under the classification of a Sans Serif Neo Grotesque, which we use a system called the Vox classification system in our podcast to distinguish between different categories of typeface. So it's a very simple, classic looking Sans Serif, which means it doesn't have any little feet.

What's exciting about this branding is that they're just, it's just the names. 

There's no stars, there's no stripes, there's no arrows, there's no rising sun like no sun. There's no rising sun like no sun. No. We, we looked up what the designer had to say about the typeface. And I'm actually going to read something that somebody else said about the typeface.

So he, he, he writes a very long, and if you're talking about nerdy, okay, respect the craft. He wrote a very long, incredibly nerdy and fascinating and interesting entry on his website about how he designed it and why. But he was designing annual reports and he was using other gothic, so alternate gothic, franklin gothic, news gothic, and all the clients he says were like, we like the typeface, but it's kind of ugly.

So he set out to redesign this sort of quite corporate y typeface to work at all different sizes. So he talks about in the blog post about it being like uncomplicated and approachable. 

Yes. 

Yet businesslike. And it's, it's quite a bold choice. So it's like they're using a condensed version of it.

So it's quite upright, quite tall. It stands very proud. Well, 

for the Harris part anyway. 

For the, well, well the, the waltz part looks pretty good. I mean, it's, yeah, but look, you know, that's always with the VP of Pig. I mean, fans are smaller than Trump. Yeah. Interestingly though, Bush Cheney was pretty much the same size.

What else should we know about Alto? Well, I'm quoting from from someone else who's writing. So Colin M. Form gothics were set out to cull the herd of discontinuous sans sericid filled ATFs catalogue, right?

So there were all these sort of gothic corporate y typefaces made to kind of just be simple, here's three to choose from, sort of typefaces. Hang on a second. Hang on. Thor, your cat, has decided that he doesn't want to be part of the pod recording, so I'm just going to go and let him out. 

He's nerded out.

It's all right, Thor. See you, Thor.

Am I going too nerdy? No. Keep going. Oh. Okay. Okay. So he's saying, Lenning set out to make an American Gothic that emphasises the base ideas of the style rather than the particular visual attributes, quirks or artefacts of bygone type technologies that were added. So he's stripping back this kind of corporate, plain, uh, used for all sorts of purposes typeface.

It's a very practical yet approachable. And very digital age typeface. Yes. Very. And the sounds of it. And apparently it's got a bit of a throwback or reference to both Carmela's, Carmela's 2020 campaign and to an earlier campaign.

Can you tell me about that connection back through history? 

This rebranding is a direct reference to her 2020 campaign, Kamala Harris for the People, which used a very similar looking typeface. That, in turn, referenced a 1972 campaign by Shirley Chisholm, who used Franklin Gothic, extra condensed, uh, and she was the first black woman elected to Congress.

And her campaign slogan was unbossed and unbought. Yes. Yes. By

that kind of kick ass, sassy, I'm a woman in charge and I'm going to get things done. 

Okay. And you've got here a striking font that the Harris campaign refers to as fearless medium and fearless bold. Well, that's what she called her campaign.

That's what they called it for her 2020 

campaign. 

So she's bringing it back. So she's like, I'm going to have a new branding. I'm not, she used sort of colors in the original one, like yellows and stuff. So she's gone with a very classic blue Democrat blue. Yes. But it's unadorned, there's no stars, there's no stripes, and we're pretty impressed by that.

Okay, so overall we think good choice, like many other good choices that she's making. I'd like to make one more quote if I could from, from Colin Ford. You may. Balto is a great utilitarian family suited for everyday uses, other sans serifs would turn their noses at. Next time I need a workhorse American Gothic that actually gets down to business, I will certainly reach for Balto.

And I am never going to look at that in the same way, right? And I noticed too, cause I've been watching the rallies and they've just been having signs with say coach on it or so. And they're just changing, they seem to be sort of adapting this. Well, yeah, it's very extensible. Yes. You know? Yeah. It seems, yeah.

So they just change a few colors and they get coach. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you not going to let us talk about the kerning, because it's the great quote about the kerning. All right. Can you tell us a little bit about the kerning? I know this got us in trouble with the first recording. Yes. But the kerning's really hard.

Kerning is moving the letters around so that the spaces between them optically look the same. Yes. So that one letter doesn't look further away from another letter. 

Yes. 

Right? So you don't, it doesn't look gappy. Okay. Um, and then I'm going to get Jason to read out what Jonathan Haefler, who's the designer of the original Biden campaign, but is, he did a great thread about the change in campaign type.

And what did he say about it? 

And he said, and nerds, few letters are harder to corral than W A L Z. So that's a reference to, to her running mate, Waltz. So W A L Z, which are a grand guignol of obstinate geometrics and stubborn kerns. And I like improving my vocabulary as much as the next person. So I actually looked up both the pronunciation and the meaning of guignol, and it means it's a theatrical performance that is both sensational and horrific.

So what he's referring to there is that letters like w a and l and z are very hard to work in combination because as he elegantly puts it they're a bunch of obstinate geometrics you've got angles in the a and the w and you've got straight lines in the l you've got weird negative spaces in combination so between the right hand side of the A which is on an angle and the left hand side of the L which is a straight line.

So you've got a weird triangular space there. Yeah. That you have to try and control. Uh, a W by definition is one of the broader letters of the alphabet. So you have to kind of work in the alphabet. the uh, relationship between that. And still 

make it smaller than the Harris. Exactly. Yeah, well it's smaller, it's set smaller, like Harris is taller.

Yes. But it's set smaller but it's more about balancing it out. Yeah. So it doesn't look weird. And so someone had to like It doesn't look weird. Okay. It's very cool that it doesn't look weird. It doesn't look 

weird. 

Okay. It's very on point. Excellent. 

Exactly. And the other thing too that you have to remember is because there's nothing else to this brand, this branding.

Yes. Any issue like that is going to really stand out. 

So it's your type nerds rant, like it's your type nerds nerdery here. Yeah, basically. I mean, yeah. You were like, whoa, respect the word. Absolutely. 

We're here 

to educate the masses.

So tell me a little bit more about type electoral campaigns more generally. Like, what are the design considerations? I mean, we based the Type Pod on the idea that typefaces are like people. We didn't, we weren't smart enough to do a series of TikTok videos, which are very funny, that people always send to me because they are very funny.

But that's the idea that typefaces are people, right? So we're always thinking about Where were they born? Where were they came, where did they come from? Where do you find them in the wild? Are they used and abused? 

Yes. 

And so when it comes to designing for a political campaign, any political campaign is a cult of personality on some level.

So the typeface has to represent that person or has to bring the vibe of that person or convince you otherwise about that person perhaps. Um, and you can see that in some of the choices that are made. So you've got a great quote here from Jonathan Hoefler. Yeah. 

Heffler. 

Heffler. Okay. Tell me, tell me that quote and why that, that really.

Well, he said in this thread, which was really great, campaign typography is completely unlike graphic design. It's a strange and fascinating agility sport marked by limited information, a ticking clock, unimaginable pressures and serious consequences. It's Iron Chef, but in Adobe Illustrator. I love that.

Which is brilliant. But it is that thing, too, that you have to showcase your candidate through typography, but only the best elements of the candidate as well. So you want to choose a typeface that is distinctive, but it can't be too controversial. 

It 

needs to be, you know, individual to stand out from the other candidates, but it can't be eccentric because you don't want to pick people off.

It needs to 

project everything about the person, but it can't say anything too specific. 

So you're actually subconsciously influencing us all the time you designers aren't you? Absolutely. Like we think we're making our own decisions. We are masterminds in the words of Taylor Swift. Okay, so tell me about some previous, election campaign.

How far back would you like us to go? You, I'll be guided by you. Well, I mean, why don't we start back in 2001 with Bush Cheney. Yes, they used, what did you, what did you say it was, folio? 

Ah, so, well initially they used something else I think. It's a very bold, smooth serif. But they used folio, extra bold, italic.

Yeah. Initially it was Roman, and then they switched it up to italic, which made 

it look a little bit more hip. We've done more wars, so we made it italic. Okay. for their second campaign. So it's a very bold sans serif, like really chunky. And interestingly, the names are almost the same size in that one.

Right. And Cheney was famously a very active VP, so I think that's kind of interesting. 

Okay. 

Obama comes along and Obama originally used Perpetua and not to start anything with the QAnon crowd here. Yes. But that was designed by Eric Gill, famous historical pedophile. And if you want to know about Eric Gill, you can go back to season one.

And listen to our episode about Eric Gill, which there is a content warning at the start. Trigger warning. Yeah. Absolutely needed. And then, so when the Hope poster got made, that Shepard Fairley made with the picture and the word Hope underneath, that was in Gotham. The Obama campaign switched out Perpetua for Gotham.

Now Perpetua was much more classic. Gotham was much more of a bold, sort of modern kind of choice. So they initially started with something not scary. That's right. Because it's a black man running for president. Exactly. And then they were like, hey, we're going to lean in. Yeah, 

yes. 

We've got a vibes election here.

They followed the vibes. Yeah. And now we see those pictures of Harris. It's in the similar style to the Obama one, but we have freedom of thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And is the freedom in the same perpetua, like, sorry, which one is it? He changed from, from perpetua to Gotham. Is it in Gotham? Gotham. The freedom one is in Gotham?

I know I shouldn't ask you. I'm thinking about the new one. This is how we end up down. Okay. I'll start talking about Perning again. Interestingly okay, so it's got a really kind of, um, quintessentially American roots. Like the designer who designed it walked all around New York City taking pictures of type on buildings and sort of distilled that down into what Gotham is.

So it's sort of, it's built into the vernacular of the American landscape. So there's something very quintessentially American about Gothie. So kind of reassuring as well. Kind of reassuring. And from a time of prosperity. 

But also, but also new. It was still a relatively new. Yeah, it was. It only came out in 

2001.

So it's got, it's got that kind of fresh new vibe that mixes in with the whole Obama, new star, rising sun. You can't underplay the contrast between even the look of those two logos for Obama, where the one that uses Perpetua looks kind of slightly wishy washy in comparison , it still uses the same basic branding, the O of the rising sun for Obama, fresh start, new dawn, all that sort of thing. With the addition of Gotham, it just gives it so much more impact. It has such, such presence. 

So there was a real era there of electoral campaign signs having a bit more kind of iconography on it. So we had the rising sun for Obama and you were telling me in our earlier Dearly Departed pod that Hillary had some waves, like a wavy flag across her.

Oh, we were talking. What's that middle part of the H called? What's the middle part of the H called? that. Don't you have a name for that? Yeah, we do have a name for that. Like, you know, usually we do extensive research and we'd have the answer to, okay, this is an emergency, we don't need to know. It does have a name.

Yeah, 

so the, the, her 2016 branding for her campaign was quite controversial because it was just a simple H, a blue H with a red arrow pointing to the right, which. Caused all sorts of questions about where she was headed to. Yeah. But the, the point that we were making in the previous, uh, iteration was that that was a development of a previous version from her 2008 campaign where, uh, She had this sort of, the, the more true, what you usually see in these, these campaign brands references to either the flag to stars, to stripes to, to that sort of stuff too.

Biden 

had those three horizontal stars, which was like the stripes and the flashing. But it, 

but it, That Obama campaign, the Clinton campaign, and the first Biden campaign, seem to signal a shift to a, perhaps a more corporate y sort of looking design, where it's very simple and graphic.

Largely dispensers with the mo, more overt illustrative elements like flags and things like that. 

Right, right. Can we talk about Optima now? We can talk about Optima. . Who used Optima? John McCain. Tell me about Optima and Sarah Palin. 

Which Sarah Palin. Which curiously is another example where the names are almost the same size, and in fact, I think Oh, interesting.

Technically. Palin's name ended up being slightly bigger, which of course Did it optically 

look bigger because of the kerning and the tracking? Not because of the kerning. I think 

it might have been a bit of a, you know Might have been a 

little too subconscious, like he's a bit for it. Tell me about Optima.

So Optima is the typeface used on the Vietnam War Memorial, which if you've ever been there it's really type focused. Yeah. Memorial. Yeah. And I felt very validated when I looked up. There's a lot of graphic designers that agree with me that optimum is terrible. Right? It's neither serif nor sand serif.

It sort of bulges at the end. It's a nonbinary binary. No, it's not non-binary. It's centrist and boring. . Okay. And yes, I know necessarily with it, he doesn't. My point is it's used on gravestones for a reason. , okay, and And how about Mitt Romney? He's Trajan now. That's interesting. Trajan's designed by a woman called it.

Carol Twombly. Twombly, yep. And it's based on a rubbing.

I don't know why our filthy minds make us laugh every time we get to this. 

A rubbing of an ancient Roman, uh, column in Rome. Yeah. So, yeah, oh, it just gets worse. No, it's worse. 

Okay. I can't 

dig myself out of this one. Um, anyway, the important thing is, It was a 

very serious rubbing of a Trajan column. Right.

Good, good. 

Carry on. Despite its origins, it's actually a very elegant typeface and we devote an entire episode to it in season two of our podcast. Yeah, it's beautiful. So, join us for that. But, uh, it is also famously one of the more, shall we say, hated typefaces, because it's overused and abused.

And it has different connotations and associations, one of which is with religious ideas. It's very bible coded. 

Very bible coded. Yeah, lots of churches use it. Because it's from the time of Christ. Well, it was released with this free package. So it was Charlemagne, Lythos and Trajan were released as a package together.

Yes. Package. Anyway. Yes. I've got to stop. Rubbing the column, yes, 

forget it. I wish it was a dead horse you were flogging. 

Okay, so they're all from that time period, actually the time of Christ, right? So that, that's, you know, it's got some sort of resonance and it's used, yeah, for a lot of churches, a lot of.

book covers. Oh yeah. Um, so. And coincidentally. Famous Mormon. Horror films. Lots of horror films. Lots of horror films. So of all these, which, which of the presidential campaigns really got it right, do you think, if you had to say? Well, um, well, I, I, I think that Obama. Obama. It's the best. Better still than that.

It's the best. Uh huh. 

Well, we'll have to wait and see. History will tell us. Yeah. History will tell us. 

Speaking of presidential campaigns, um, how about the Trump campaign? 

How about it? 

Well, our listeners will probably not surprised, be surprised that we accused Trump of a type crime. Correct. In fact, of a couple of type crimes.

All right. Tell me. So his original Trump, he used extra bold extended. Accidents grotesque with too much kerning, too much, sorry, too much letter spacing. Oh dear. Tell me the difference between letter space and kerning really quickly. Letter spacing is the space between all the letters, so he's tracked it out, so he's got it wider than it should be, so there's space between the letters, starts to make the letters separate into individual letters, but he's trying to make himself as big as possible.

Sure. Okay. Right. Okay. Um, and then. I mean, he's got a few stars in there. 

Yeah, but they're very small stars, which is odd for someone who's very concerned about the size of his hand. Sure. 

It's also got a box around it, which is a sort of well known in publishing. We were always told to put images and things in boxes because then we're more comfortable with things that are in boundary.

Men were more comfortable with things in boundaries. So it's a male coded typographic logo for President. It said something about the Elong and the penetration of the T in his name. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a T. It got a bit weird. Yeah. Well, let's, maybe let's not go there. Let's talk about the typecrime. So the Make America Great Again is also the San Serif, but it's a slightly different one called Meta.

So he's using two slightly different Sans Seraph typefaces together, which is wrong, because 

What's the point? It doesn't contribute anything. There's no contrast. 

It's the same thing, but slightly different, so it just looks wrong. And then to make it even worse, then he used a Seraph typeface for the Make America Great caps again, presumably whatever the the Chinese factory had lying around that they could embroider onto the hats is the typeface that they used for that.

But then he also used, what was it? 

Well he's, he's come a long way because he's, apparently he started out using Arial, which is just like the default typeface that you get with words. So someone along the way has gone, oh we actually need to kind of make this outfit look a bit more, you know, real and professional.

But he has, in 2024, he has famously stolen gothic from gotham gotham has famously stolen gotham from the obama campaign 

yeah 

so very yes very very controversial there however only in typical trump fashion his branding is very inconsistent and pretty much depends on what he's using at any given time on any given surface so for example His 2024 MAGA release uses Gotham.

However, the never surrender merchandise, which came out of his, uh, famous, you know, arrest and court case uses, uh, reverts back to accident accidents. Grotesque. Yeah. But with Gotham as the. Never surrender. Again, type prime. So. So, I feel 

like we're all caught up. Yep. I 

feel 

like I'm not as excited as you, but I'm paying attention.

Well, that's good. Yes. Absolutely. You'll 

never be as excited as us. Let's face it, Inga. 

And uh, and if you want to learn more about accidents, go to TASC. It's the first episode of season two, which is coming up, oh, about a month. I reckon that puts me under some time pressure. And in the meantime, you can go back and listen to our other episodes, Gil Sands, Famous British Helvetica, Times New Rome, which we also recorded multiple times, in fact, four times.

We're still a bit traumatized. It's 

our record. 

Yes. And then you can learn about Futura and why the Nazis hated it before they didn't hate it. So many things to see and you've also got a book coming out. We do. Next August we're writing a book. We got a book deal based off the podcast to write a book about the stories.

So very exciting times here at the Tite Pod. Thank you. Thank you team for coming and doing an emergency pod. Thank you for doing it better after carbohydrates. for giving us the carbohydrates. All right. Well, we'll see you for season two soon. Thanks for your company. Bye.