The Type Pod
Anitra and Jason are two type nerds, who share the strange and wonderful stories of the typefaces we read every day (and their mutual disdain for Goudy)
The Type Pod
Mrs Eaves
You’ve seen Mrs Eaves everywhere—even if you’ve never known her name. In this episode, we uncover the story behind one of the most familiar typefaces around, and its designer, Suzanna Licko—a woman who gets credit for her work (well, mostly… it’s complicated).
Anitra dives into the research with plenty of side-eye and a healthy distrust of design history, informed in part by having gone to design school with private school boys. Along the way, we detour into the HR relations of early 18th-century print shops, trade magazines, and the so-called legibility wars of the early 1990s.
Stick with us—or better still, visit our website to see Mrs Eaves used in the transcript—and you’ll leave ready to dominate bookstores with your new favourite game: guess that book cover typeface (Spoiler alert: it's probably Mrs Eaves).
"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
Welcome to the Type Pod, a show about typography. Each episode we deep dive into one typeface to find out it's sometimes surprising history behind the design and the designer, then we admire or not its anatomy, ponder its uses and its cultural impact.
Speaker 1:And then we ignore all of that and talk about our feelings. Hi, I'm Jason Phillips, formerly a book designer and typography teacher.
Anitra:And I'm Anitra Nottingham, former book designer, typography teacher, and graphic design school co-chair.
Speaker 1:Anitra and I went to the same design school and we worked together as book designers for Oxford University Press.
Anitra:Where we honed our type skills, became great friends.
Speaker 1:And developed a mutual hatred of the typeface gouty. Which still burns 25 years later. We're type nerds and we always will be.
Anitra:I'm producer Inger Muburn, a better known as Thesis Whisperer on the internet. And I'm here to tell Anitra and Jason to promote themselves more. Although they did get a book deal, so maybe I need to back off on that. Yeah, maybe you do. Most importantly, to get them to stop making jokes about tittles. Okay, it's not okay. The episode, this episode, we're talking about Mrs. Eves. And depending on how this ep goes, you may want to change your default type settings. Let's get started, Jason.
Speaker 1:Okay. In this episode, we're talking about Mrs. Eves. And we're stepping into the 1990s where typefaces are designed by desktop computers and used by designers on desktop computers. And where, according to some designers at least, many type crimes were committed. Oh, we're gonna get into it. A script for this episode, note, not a direct transcript, because it'll have less swear words, is available set in Mrs. E's, which you can download from the show notes. A quick note this episode is something of a companion to our Baskerville episode from last season. You don't have to listen to Baskerville episode to listen to this episode, but it would be a good one to listen to before or after. Also because it's a fun episode. It is fun. Okay, we have done the housekeeping. Get it? Oh dear. So tell us, Anitra, who designed Mrs Eaves
Anitra:I see what you did there. Housekeeping for a typeface named after a housekeeper. It's really nice. Oh, what can I say? Well, I'm excited to talk about Mrs. Eves, Jason. I'm excited to hear about it. Well, this is going to be a good one because I get to talk about Susanna Lico, and that's Susanna with Z's, not S's, by the way. And I said Z's because she's American. I lives there now. It's like Liza with a Z. She designed Mrs. Eves. She's a woman. And importantly, she got credit for her work. And it only took typography, oh, about 400 years to do this or so. But here we are. Yay! Hooray! Disappointingly, I'll note that when I was a student, her husband, Rudy Vanderlands, basically got most of the popular credit for her work. But hey-ho, two steps forward, one step back, right? Where have we heard this story before? And speaking from the perspective of the gays, yes. Yes, very much. Okay, so Mrs. Eaves was released in 1995, two years before we met Jason. And it's not a well-known typeface by name, so it's unlikely you have it on your computer, but you would recognize Mrs. Eaves because it's used a lot, especially on book covers. In fact, it's one of the most popular typefaces of the last 25 years. Liko set out on purpose to design a classic typeface, just like Baskerville did, and she succeeded. Don't at me, Jason. We'll get into it in a minute. I can see you looking at me. Yeah, this is my no-face. Mrs. Eaves is often listed with the other heavyweights Baskerville, Garamond, and Badoni. And if we judge by money, this typeface easily outsold all her other typeface design combined by times two. Wow. On myfonts.com. It's been a bestseller for 20 years. Wow. So argue me, argue with me if you will. Which I will. I will. I will. We'll get into it. We'll get more into it.
Speaker 1:And they're not even undercurrents, frankly. Okay.
Anitra:We'll get more into where you can find Mrs. Eves in the Wild Later in the Air, but it's surprisingly ubiquitous. For instance, the WordPress site logo, which is the logo type to give it its technical name, is set in Mrs. Eve's.
Speaker 1:WordPress is a publishing platform. So in a way, it's a lovely nod to the origins of the typeface. Because you cannot separate the development of this typeface from the history of the famous graphic design magazine Emigray, which we will also talk about in this episode, right, Anitra?
Anitra:Yes, we will. But we can't talk about Mrs. Eves without first talking about our favourite dead typeface designer, William Baskerville, and his wife Sarah, for whom this typeface is named. So if you listen to the Baskerville episode again, you don't have to, but you should plug. Absolutely. You may remember that Sarah Eves was Baskerville's housekeeper. And then finally his wife. So Baskerville would have called Sarah Mrs. Eves, at least in public.
Speaker 1:After he married her, he would have called her Mrs. Baskerville, because that's basically how they rolled back then. Yes, never Sarah. Too too informal.
Anitra:No. Indeed, well, Leeko named Mrs. Eves after Sarah Eves to highlight the forgotten women of type history, in her own words. And in the Baskerville episode, we talked about how Sarah is mainly remembered as helping to run the printing press, which is frustrating. Helping to run in helping to run air quotes. Yes, because she definitely made books too. And I looked again for this episode, Jason, I found another site with a picture of one of her books. Her name's on the title page, Sarah Baskerville, in quite large letters, actually. And yet in the description, she's literally relegated to a footnote as Baskerville's widow and has sold as a Baskerville book. Why am I not surprised? And I just a little shout out, Inga, thank you, for going and picking up my copy of a Sarah Baskerville book. Oh yeah. I did. I went to London. I know. I went to a shop. I remember where they're drinking red wine and patting their cat, it was very London. And then they climbed over stacks of old books and they handed me this tiny little piece.
Speaker 1:I remember how excited.
Anitra:And my friend said, How much was this again?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But she was so excited when she said to me, I found it.
Anitra:And you can just buy it. You can just buy it. You can just buy a piece of history like that. Amazing. Exactly. Anyway. Anyway, she's even in the description, she's still forgotten. And the forgotten women of topography continue to be forgotten. Except in Etro, we're going to do our little bit to change all that. Thank you, Allah. Leaving aside Sarah's design work helping to run the press was actually a big contribution to topography history because HR-wise, this would have been a nightmare. And this is because of the printer's devils. Uh well, hang on, this episode's taking a bit of a turn. Don't you don't have to worry, I've not peered off into my new cult podcast script, Printer's Devil, is actually the term for print shop apprentices. They did a lot of dirty work in the shop. I'm going to quote from myself here from an essay I wrote about 10 years ago to give you a flavor of what managing these workers must have been like. It was commonly believed that a demon lurked in the corners of print shops who was responsible for any mistakes.
Speaker 1:The demon did it.
Anitra:The demon did it exactly. Perhaps the use of the term devil signals that apprentices were viewed as a source of mess and inaccuracy and perhaps even mischief. There was concern for the morality and personal habits over still or aptitude. Articles of indenture from as late as the 1900s show their attempts to control the conduct of the printer's devils. So here's an example. They shall not commit fornication, capital letters, or conduct matrimony. I mean just take all options off the table. Anyway, I'll continue. With the said term, hurt is said to the masters he shall not do, or cause or procure to be done by others. He shall not play at cards, dice tables, or any other unlawful games whereby his said masters may have loss with their own goods during the said term. Without license of his said masters, he shall not buy horse sell. He shall not haunt or use taverns, alehouses, or playhouses. I don't know what those are, but I really want to know. Or absent himself from his said master's service day or night unlawfully, but in all things, as an honest and faithful apprentice, he shall behave himself towards his said masters and all theirs during the said term. Wow. Wow. Harsh. Yeah. Bit of a sign that the apprentices were not easy to manage if they had to write, hey, don't be a dick, staff writing to the contract like that. Kids these days, Jason.
Speaker 1:They don't want to work. No, they don't. They don't want to work. Look, yeah, Sarah seems to have had a bit more of a business brain. We talked about in the Baskerville episode how the press made beautiful books but never made any money. Unlike her husband, Sarah seems to have been a bit more pragmatic about it.
Anitra:Yeah. So after John Baskerville died, she made a go of it. That, you know, making books with her name on them and then sold the equipment and the matrices for Baskerville to a Paris literary society connected to the French Revolutionary Beaumarchais. Thank you.
Speaker 1:And maybe that was a final stuff you to the English, who never liked her husband very much anymore. I really hope it was.
Anitra:I think too. So getting back to Mrs. Eve's the typeface, designed as a revival of Baskerville the typeface. Lico did what other type designers have done. She went back to look at the actual original Baskerville print samples that were in the Bancroft library in Berkeley in California. And by doing so, she noticed that as the LED hit the paper, it made the ink spread and the characters look softer and looser on the page. So Baskerville on screen, especially, looks very precise and contrasty. And Lico did the same for the font digitally. So she shortened the X height, thickened the contrastiness of Baskerville, but kept its openness, which is what makes it a very readable typeface. Certainly got an eye for detail. Well, thank you. You're giving it something. I'm really pleased. Revivals like this are a pretty common way to make a new typeface. So that's what we learned last season. So Times New Roman revival of Plankton, probably. Yep. Although, as Wikipedia puts it, Mrs. Eaves is unorthodox and not a pure revival because it is rounder, thicker, and quite altogether different from the contrastiness of Baskerville. So I would call Mrs. Eaves an homage to Baskerville because that's more postmodern. And the early to mid 90s when it came out was the apex of graphic design's postmodern phase.
Speaker 1:Dare I say it? Graphic design's Gen X phase.
Anitra:Well, Susanna Liko is Gen X too, as it happens. She was born in Slovakia in 1961 and she emigrated to the USA in 1968. Liko went to design school at Berkeley, where she met Rudy Vanderleens, and he'd emigrated to California from the Netherlands. So they're both um immigrants or emigres. That's a more posh term for immigrants. That's it. So they started Emigray Graphics in 1984 when they left school. And as it says on their website, this is a year that coincides with the birth of the Macintosh computer. Early on, their design studio became one of the first digital type foundries. It was set up to sell Lico's typefaces. So let's talk about Emigray magazine. Okay. No accents on the E. It's a designer thing. It was a self-published magazine started by Rudy Vanderland's Mark Susan Menno Mayers. Mayers. Let's go with that. In 1984. Sorry, Menno. And it was somewhat erratically released until 2005. So no judgment. We know how hard it is to do a creative not-for-profit out the door, guys. Susan and Menno left after issue four, and Rudy carried on. He collaborated with Lico and with others, most famously with illustrator Ed Feller. Which, if you're a graphic designer, you know who that is. But Inga's just looking at me like who. Anyway, we don't have time for that digression. Carry on. Fella Bonar. In 1985, in 1985, Rudy Vanderland started incorporating Susanna Lico's typefaces into the layouts for Emigray magazine. Now in graphic design, typography is the one thing we always have to deal with. It's the defining thing that sets graphic design apart from other kinds of design. So the typefaces gave the design a very distinctive look. Such a new and interesting look that it created demand for the typefaces, which is what started their digital foundry. Again, one of the first. Originally, you could buy typefaces on floppy disks, or you acquired them through your mouse. Just shout out to my old work buddies Shep and Hunter for their support. Nowadays, Emigray typefaces are licensed through Adobe Fonts. Yeah, license being the operative idea. Every edition of Emigray was different. It was experimental. It took Derrida's ideas of deconstruction into the visual realm. And Inga's shaking her head because it was way after the architects did it. It did to type and lay out what Frank Geary's buildings did to buildings. It was the epitome, the vanguard of postmodernism in graphic design. Side note, yes. I worked Friday nights in a very fancy art book shops around the corner from the paperback. And it used to sell emigre. And it was so popular, we had to keep it behind the desk. Yes, because people would steal it. Because it was expensive. It was $38. Really expensive. It was $38, didn't it? And every copy would have like be already have someone's name on it. And it was the whole thing you had to learn when you looked after that particular part of the bookstore was where was the Emma Gray? Because people would get upstairs. Oh my God, I'm going to get into that a little bit more in a minute. But thank you for validating that it was really, it was the it was the design magazine before the internet was really a thing. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And isn't it wonderful, listeners, to enjoy the shared history of architecture and graphic design?
Anitra:We had we had conversations about deconstruction and graphic design. Anyway, we'll go on. Computer technology. I know. Computer technology enabled Vanderlands and Leeko to distort and overlay and more easily create new typeforms and layouts, which Stephen Heller describes as leaning into the primitive bitmap default typefaces endemic to the map. Sounds judgy?
Speaker 2:Yes, it is.
Anitra:Liko made typefaces which took inspiration from and embraced the limits of the bitmappy technology of the time. So the most famous of those. Yeah, sorry. Producer note, bitmappy. When things are bitmap, you know, when you have an image and you enlarge it too much and it looks stepped on the outside, it looks like it's little boxes instead of a straight line. Pushing the pixels. Basically. So you see the pixels. They couldn't render the typefaces as smoothly as they can today. So you could see the edges. So she just blew that up and made it a feature. Yeah, so the most famous typeface was called Low Res. And it looked like it was bitmapped, but big bitmapped, right? Like so it's like I'm bitmapped, I'm here. Yep. The other is Matrix, and yes, it was designed before the movie, The Matrix. Stephen Heller. We're probably going to get in a bit of trouble here. It's an influential. And I'm just going to say it, sometimes problematic. Oh, okay. Design historian and create a chance.
Speaker 1:I just had a gauntlet hit the table.
Anitra:Yeah, gauntlet hit the table. In Mertz to Emigray, Avant Garde magazine design of the 20th century, coached by Stephen Heller. He traces Emigray's origins to the countercultural magazines of the 1960s and 70s, which were contraband and considered offensive. By the late 1980s, Heller says that the public's increasing tolerance of voyeurism and salaciousness, what was once considered offensive, is now vernacular. What was once odious is now common, popular fair. Right. It doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Which is quite the way to introduce a chapter about emigray and gives you a clue about his feelings about it. Has lots of feelings. Feelings. Haller says that alternative periodicals. Oh, alternative periods. Like emigray. And I quote here, may not have threatened the social or political disruption, but few of them upset the fundamental rules that govern graphic design and advertising and destabilized post-war design either in rightness of form that was built into the foundation of rationalism and modernism. As a counterpoint, young designers rejected regimentation in favor of the relaxation of grids, provocative clutter, and visual anarchy, using layouts that busted pages into illegible abstract fragments. So he's not going in a really super bitchy way. Rightness of form against destabilized provocative anarchy busted, which he briefly alludes to in this book. And it doesn't, what he doesn't delve into is that right around then he was very much a critic.
Speaker 1:That's going to have to be a power player, sorry. Yeah.
Anitra:It will. We'll talk to Liz about it. Very much a critic and a participant in the legibility wars. Ah, legibility wars. The legibility wars. Writing in a 1993 article about Emigray and postmodern design called Cult of the Ugly. Shots fire. Yeah. More of that in a second. See, problematic, I'm sorry, but it is. Emigray started out covering art and communication design in Northern California, but around 1995, it basically became a trade magazine, which is when I was focusing on design criticism and typography and a vehicle to promote the Emigray Digital Foundry.
Speaker 1:When you think trade magazine, you might think about being stuck in your accountant's waiting room with copies of paperclip, the magazine for office managers or something similar to that. Trade mags go deep on their subject and are on the whole, how shall I put this uh boring? Except to those in the trade, one hopes. I don't know.
Anitra:Paperclip sounds fun with an exclamation mark.
Speaker 1:Oh, as long as it's a Microsoft paperclip. I really hope.
Anitra:In pre-internet times, trade magazines were crucial for spreading new ideas in all design fields. So that's why you sold a lot of them ingo. Graphic design magazines allowed students at Monash Design School, for example, in Melbourne, to see what design students are. Fucking an example from thin air. Just we both went there anyway. To see what design students at Cranbrook, which is a famously progressive arty design school, graphic design school in Michigan were doing. So it's very easy today on Dribble or whatever, but it really wasn't easy back then. It also meant that publishing your own design magazine would give you influence in the profession. So graphic design still has a few trade magazines, and they're probably boring to non-designers. Oh, which I find very hard to blame. Zero comments. Graphic Design USA, I, Creative Review, Communication Arts and Print, or Capital Letters, magazine, have transitioned to digital and they do podcasts too now. Oh wow. Yeah, I looked at it. But they are, and they are in their digital form too, still pretty traditional layout-wise. So they might have O tray design in there, but it's all the grid, right? Emma Gray was a design artifact as well as a magazine about design.
Speaker 1:Artifact.
Anitra:Yes, it was the only one that consistently called for change or was, as Hella puts it, a touchstone for progress in graphic design. It's hard to over-emphasize how influential this was on many design students like myself, at least at the time. And I'll confess I'd never read the articles. I first saw the design magazine in 1991 and it was so cool. I didn't copy it. Many of my fellow design students did. I was inspired by it though, and I broke the rules that I was learning about. But the only name that got talked about in my design school was Rudy Vanderlands.
Speaker 1:I can attest to that too.
Anitra:Like I knew Susanna Lico was in the mix, I think. I didn't even realise she was the type designer until I first heard she designed Mrs. Eves in 1997. So I'm sorry to say, until I researched this article, I thought Van der Lans had designed at least some of the typefaces, but he didn't. No.
Speaker 1:Look, well, I have to say I have very mixed emotions about Emma Gray. Somewhat similar to my mixed emotions about David Carson.
Anitra:Yeah. Well, producers, no. David Carson's famously deconstructed designer, like grunge design, which was a good one. Which we talked, we talked about. He had a magazine called Ray Gun, which was We talked a bit about him in the Times New Roman, I think. Yeah. We'll put it in the show. Yeah. We'll carry on. Show notes. Look, I maybe would have been better informed informed had I bought the magazine myself and was able to properly read the articles, but I couldn't afford to buy emigre. I only got to see it in the flesh because Jeremy, the obnoxious private school git, who sat opposite me in the design studio, bought it on mail order from the States. No offense to private school boys, Jason. It's fine.
Speaker 1:Anyway, you probably went to Scotch College, right? Everyone hates Scotch. You know what? I think you did. As it happened. And I'm not going to apologise for standby.
Anitra:Sorry, not sorry for calling you a git, Jeremy. I hope you improved after uni. In Australia, Emigray magazine was rare and it did have a circulation of 38,000 around the world, which is really good for a self-pub, but it was very expensive. I was still eating beans, I was still gaffetating my shoes together at the time. So water wouldn't seep into the holes. So let's just say Jeremy didn't seem to have any of those problems and always had the latest copy. And I could only shame him into letting me look at it because he sat opposite me and couldn't avoid me. Jeremy and I had a very interesting relationship. But anyway. This episode has taken another turn. Dark turn. It's a dark turn. I say this next thing, not just throw shade at Jeremy much, but just show how history works. Because if people like Jeremy and his mates, mostly equally obnoxious private school boys, sorry, not sorry, only talk about the men, which they did, then the women's contribution is easily lost. Even though I had to listen to the very tedious conversations and I saw the magazine, I didn't realise at the time that Lico designed the typefaces and Randy Vanderlands didn't. Lico has an impressive body of work before and after Mrs. Eve's, but in earlier ages, this might have easily been credited to Randy Vanderleins because facts are not recorded. What's talked about is and what gets written down and what gets written down becomes history.
Speaker 1:Luckily, Susannah Lico, despite not getting her due from people like you at the time, has won many awards, including in 1997, American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal Award, which is a big deal. Think of it as the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for graphic design. She has an honorary PhD too. The best kind, Inga.
Anitra:That's triggering, Jason. Stop. Well-deserved accolades, especially the doctor.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Anitra:Type design is hard, especially hard with the digital tools that she used in the 80s and 90s. Despite designing some beautiful and quite traditional typefaces like Philosophia, she's still described by Simon Garfield in just my type as a radical Californian type designer. Radical California designers are my fave. Hello, April Griman, who's very fun to drink rose with. I think not just because of her typefaces or her role in Emigray, but because she didn't shy away from defending herself. Lico and Vanderlands both got a lot of hate for their work being illegible. In 1991, Lico, in the words of Adobe Fonce, caused a lot of consternation in the graphic design world when she said that black letter typeface were once considered more readable than Roman and were no longer. She inspired again. I don't really understand, but I'm getting the bar.
Speaker 1:Well, remember that black letter are those gothic old-timey letters that were beloved of the Nazis and confusingly rappers and bikers.
Anitra:Oh, maybe that's not confusing. There's a, you know, bikers, not necessarily and some rappers, Kanye, Nazi. This connection. Lego famously said in an interview, we read best what we read most. A quote that's often been misattributed to your favourite type designer, David Carson, Jason. In fact, I think we might have done that in season one. Sorry, Susanna. Also, she said, preferences for typefaces such as Times New Roman exist by habit because these typefaces have been around the longest. She saw through the whole Times New Roman hegemony and called it out, Jason. Death to Times New Roman. This was a battle. As a student, we were raging with our design teachers at the time. Our work wasn't bad, Jason. They just didn't understand it. No, they didn't. I mean, as Vanderland said, deconstructed design was punk rock.
Speaker 1:So maybe we should consider ourselves fortunate. We studied at a time when you could claim your work was a blow against the system and not just a bit shit.
Anitra:I wonder if messy and ugly design was upsetting to the old guard because they think they'd spent so much of their career trying to make their work perfect with no computer to help. And you can't help thinking they're a bit annoyed. They finally had the tools to achieve inhuman perfection. And these young people just went and made things look messy.
Speaker 1:The old guard felt a bit threatened by computers in general, too, for good reason. They did end up taking lots of people's jobs, even as they created new ones. Many of those designers never adapted and got left behind.
Anitra:Yeah, that's true. And things came to a head around 1991 with that interview. The US West Coast designers started to fight with the established mainly modernist East Coast designers in the legibility wars. It's a real thing that raged until the mid-90s. I think can we have these back instead of the culture wars? I know, right? I would prefer it.
Speaker 1:Well, in some ways, it's kind of like a prototype culture war.
Anitra:It is. These wars were fought in person through cutting exchanges at AIGA meetings and at design conferences and through interviews and articles like Hella's 1993 effort called of the ugly in iMagazine. I probably sold that magazine. You probably did. Had social media been around, there would have been quite the Twitter frenzy. Oh, yeah. Here's an excerpt from a 2009 Wide magazine interview to give you a flavor. A woman took to the stage of a Seattle design conference in 1995 and smashed a computer to smithereens with a sledgehammer. Passions all raging, full boiled during the so-called legibility walls, as tradition-based graphic designers in love with clean, simple advertising and magazine layouts looked with horror at the new generation of font designers and illustrators who used computer programs as a tool for shredding, shattering, melting, and otherwise rethinking the way words and pictures came together to sell a message. End quote. In 1991, famous New York graphic designer Massimo Vignelli called Emma Gray garbage and an aberration of culture. Culture wars.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Anitra:As we mentioned last season, he also had a go at April Griman in 1986 for her digitally designed post off for Design Quarterly. So I think I'm on solid ground calling this criticism a bit sexist too. Well, of course, you would say that.
Speaker 1:I mean, he only ever used six typefaces. Yeah, famously.
Anitra:Fun fact, he came to talk at our design school in 1992 and told us all off for compressing typefaces and being too influenced by Emigray. And we all thought he was a boring old fart, and we got told he's really famous, and we're like, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's just an old guy with an axe to grind.
Anitra:Can't even speak properly. Anyway.
Speaker 1:I worked on a publication of his work in design philosophy in the late 2000s, and he was an even older boring fart then. Just so you know. But he was right about compressing typefaces. We did a lot of that in the 1990s, and it was bad.
Anitra:Yeah, all right, Jason. It was a type crime, but we were being postmodern. I feel like we were being not just a bit shit.
Speaker 1:No, but it's also that thing of like uh when they talk about young men being like the ground up in the in the um engine of war and stuff like that. I feel like we're we're the front line. We grew up in this time.
Anitra:Yeah, we did. I know, but you didn't realize like how fraught it was, right? Exactly. By the way, Hella credits women with driving postmodern design. Oh credits or display, wait for it. Saying in a 2016 sort of Mia Kolpa essay for print magazine this time, lost and found in translation, revisiting the so-called legibility wars of the 80s and 90s. Wow. I'm quoting from Hella here. The real revolution was technology, which also had the effect of starkly increasing the power of women in design. And the number of women experimenting with legibility and readability was considerable. So the women Wow, this is a Me Too moment. I don't even know.
Speaker 1:On the one hand, he gives women credit and then he takes it away by saying, Oh, it's actually the technology, not the women.
Anitra:I don't know why he thinks more women were allowed into the profession by computers. I can't do a hard firm line with a tech pen. But plenty of women I know can and do it really well. And I'm sure back in those times too, I think it's more likely that the 80s and 90s were a time when a lot of women finally infiltrated male-dominated professions and changed things and made a certain kind of man uncomfortable. You know the kind I mean. I'll note the graphic design now is majority female, but it's still very, very white. So there is much work to be done.
Speaker 1:Let's make sure that goes on the agenda for our next tofu eating wokarati branch meeting.
Anitra:Yes, let's. Getting back to Mrs. Eve's. Right. It came out in 1995, near the end of hostilities. And I can't help thinking Susanna was like, You want legible? I'll give you legible. Because Mrs. Eves could never be accused of being radical and legible. No, no. Hella put both sides of her work quite nicely in that Mia Culpa essay, I have to say, and give him a little bit of credit. Quoting again, digital typeface design was a significant postmodern outlier, and no one captured the essence and evolution of the 90s, 80s, and 90s better than Susannah Lico, the creator of such early digital fonts as pixel, low res and dot matrix. Dozens of her faces, both precise and grungy, classical and novel, help to typographically define graphic design and can, in some instances, uh pinpoint the postmodernism's moment of conception. And in others, like Mr. and Mrs. Eve's, have a timeless look that defies the stereotypes and cliches of either ism. Hang on, there's a Mr. Eaves? Yes, yes, there is a Mr. Eve. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. I don't know if I'm gonna get to that, but yeah, there is. There's lots of versions of it. The legibility wars just kind of petered out rather than being one. Although I'm just gonna say that Susanna and Rudy definitely won. In 2016, 11 emigre typefaces, including Mrs. Eaves, were purchased by the New York MOMA for their permanent collection.
Speaker 2:There you go.
Anitra:It's true to say that once the war was over, the idea that there were right ways to design was pretty much gone. Thank goodness. And we're veterans in that war, Jason. We are right. We opened the doors. You're welcome, design students. Yeah, you're so welcome. Anyway, Leeko and Vanderland's still working, although these days Leeko focuses on her ceramic work, which she describes as a good distraction from the tedious aspects of typeface work. Of which we think there are many. Yeah, many, many. The Emigray Digital Foundry now licenses 600 typefaces through the Adobe Font and sites like MyFont. So you can buy merch at their website, emigray.com, Susanna's Vases, Rugs, Font Specimen books. You can also buy design is a good idea t-shirt, and it only comes in black JSON. Oh of course.
Speaker 1:Should I be taking notes for our own merch? I don't know, maybe.
Anitra:They look nice. Yes. Right. Promotion. It's all about promotion. In 2022, Emigray released an app where you can see the font specimens and the entire back catalogue of Emigray. So no one has to steal it anymore, Ingar. No one has to beg for a copy, which is very nice. So I'm going to end this history of Mrs. Ease with an example of how much Emigray and Lico's typefaces influenced my design student days. Design schools have an end-of-year show. They're kind of like job fairs for graduate designers. The Monash Design School's 1992 end-of-year show invitation was a large format poster which was hand-delivered to the best studios around Melbourne. That poster, designed by my old studio mate Jeremy. It's coming back to it again. Looked like it was straight out of the pages of Emigrate. He won a prize for being most influenced by Emigray Design Award in Emigrate. Was that a diss? This is could have been a diss. I don't know.
Speaker 1:It feels like it was a very meta experience.
Anitra:Like I said, Jeremy and I had an interesting relationship. He was actually my friend Steph's roommate for a long time. Wow. Anyway. So he couldn't really avoid me, even though he wanted to, and I couldn't avoid him either. So, okay, as usual, here's what was happening in 1995 when the typeface was released. And it's a significant year for me personally. So I've weaved a little personal history into this one, if you don't mind.
Speaker 1:Take it away, Nature.
Anitra:I met my husband Mark in Portland, Maine in July 1995, and he doesn't listen to the pod, but hello baby, anyway. The WTO. Husby. Hello, Husby. The WTO was established and spawned many conspiracy theories about the New World Order and stuff about lizard overlords. Denver Airport, which is deeply weird, look it up, opened in 1995, which, according to some, is now the site of the alternative lizard government. Oh wow. Yeah. The US government officially stopped funding NSFNet, making the internet a fully privatized system.
Speaker 1:And hasn't that worked out well for that? That's worked out great for everyone.
Anitra:I got my first email address in an internet cafe in Boston and used it to tell my parents that I'd met a nice boy who helped me get my first email address in Boston Cafe. Bering's bank collapse because a white mediocre white guy banker made some stupid bets, which was unusual at the time, but pales into significance after the GFC just a little over 10 years later. The Oklahoma City bombing happened while I was browsing a thrift store in New Orleans. And in Tokyo, the um Sharinko cult killed 14 people in the subway with saring gas. Big year. Lots of records were set in space. First Americans in the Soyuz capsule wouldn't really get that anymore. Atlantis docked with the space station for the first time. And help me here.
Speaker 1:Valerie. Valerie Poly Poly Polyakov.
Anitra:Oh look, you're letting us down.
Speaker 1:I am, yeah.
Anitra:Set a record for 300 and sorry, for 438 days in space. 125 civilians were killed in the Sri Lankan Civil War, which was really terrible. Bombay was officially restored by the Indian government to being called Mumbai. That's quite recently. I think that's longer. The Sony PlayStation was released, and the Unit Bomber's Manifesto is published. Safe to say he wouldn't have been a fan of video games, or maybe he would. O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of murder, and I watched that live on TV while living in Baltimore with the nice boy who helped me get my first email address. The first Protease Inhibitor was released, and AIDS desk dropped from 50,000 to 18,000 in one year. Wow. Amazing, isn't it? And finally, Toy Story, the first CGI full-length movie was released. And my husband, Mark, and I went to see that when we moved to Melbourne that November, and 1995 was a lot. And I I went there to that movie with you. Yes. With the nice boy from Boston who got me my first e-cal account.
Speaker 1:Wow. Not from Boston, from Baltimore. But anyway.
Anitra:A big year for and fun fact, that nice boy was the reason that I met my husband. Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1:Well, I I I have nothing to contribute.
Anitra:Anyway, on to our next section.
Speaker 1:Now for our next section, Anatomy, where we check out our typeface for this episode. The body of a typeface is the various parts that make up the letter forms, many of which are named after body parts. For example, the top horizontal stroke of a capital T or F is known as an arm.
Anitra:We're doing our first video podcasts.
Speaker 1:We're doing a podcast and she's auditioning for The Price Is Right or something.
Anitra:That was lovely. Don't listen to him, Inga. You're doing great producing. Mrs. Eves is a display serif typeface, so it has little brackets at the ends of the letter forms. It's designed for headlines and small blurbs of text, not really for long slabs of body copy. It's a revival of Baskerville, like we've mentioned. So it's classified the same way as transitional in the Vox classification system, which, as we pointed out last time, is a bit of a diss to John Baskerville. Go read it, go listen to it. It comes in lots of things: italic, Roman, bold, bold italic, petite small caps, basic small caps, all small caps, like we mentioned. There's a Mr. Eve's. It also comes in lining caps. Think of them as a shaping underwear of typography. No unsightly lumps on the top or bottom.
Speaker 1:I literally never thought of them in that way. Well, I have to point out that point out here that curiously, and by contrast, Mrs. Eve's features old style or non-lining numerals, which, spoiler alert, is one of the few aspects I like about it.
Anitra:Ooh, non-lining numerals? Okay, so the the old style nine, you know, where the nine sort of sits and it looks like a G because it dips below the baseline. Like that's really old style y kind of numbers.
Speaker 1:It's it's they're really it's the kind of equivalent of giving numerals descenders and ascenders the same as the upper and lowercase letters.
Anitra:So non-lining doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:So it's more a traditional way.
Anitra:We'll put a link in the show notes. Carry on. It has a wonderful case. Yeah. We tried to explain. It has a wonderful set of ligatures. A ligature comes from the word to bind and is a combination of two letters into one form that would otherwise crash into each other if they were set together. So I think two F's in a row or an F and an L, an S and a T, the letters are literally joined together so they're spaced perfectly. So ligatures are both functional and decorative. And Mrs. Eve's ligatures look fancy as benefits a typeface design for display. And most famously, it has the best set and ranges small caps of any typeface. I said what I said. Don't add me, Jason. Small caps have a capital, which is a bigger cap, but all small caps set so you don't have to set the type all in caps. So it'll look less shouty because they're small. So hence all small caps. Very cool. Or as my kids would say, no cap.
Speaker 1:Okay. Overall impression and best worst features of this typeface.
Anitra:Mrs. Eaves is a thicker, softer looking, more vertically compressed version of Baskerville, as we said. So the drawing from memory blog says that we can consider Baskerville and Mrs. Eves the equivalent of Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man of typography. And we can all agree that Mrs. Pac-Man did it better. Great quote. It's loose though. So British design critic Robin Kinross kind of neged the typeface, saying that the loose spacing limits its use. And I'll turn out he said this while he was handing a design award to Xanaliko for it in 1999. No wonder she's into ceramics now. Can't blame the woman. The X height on Mrs. E's is relatively low. It's designed for display rather than body copy. So there's an XL version that was released later, which has a higher X height, which makes it more readable. Fonce.com says there is something unique about Mrs. E's and it's difficult to define. Its individual characters are at times awkward looking, the W being narrow, the L uncommonly wide, the flare of the strokes leading into the serifs unusually pronounced. Yeah, awkward looking now. Oh, here we go.
Speaker 1:Some of those serifs are a joke, especially on the C and the S. And at the risk of sounding like I'm body shaming Sarah, the reduction in stroke contrast makes most characters in Mrs. Eve's look chunky and unrefined. Disagree. Lico once said an aspect of Baskerville's type that I intended to retain is that of overall openness and lightness. To achieve this while reducing contrast, I've given the lowercase characters a wider proportion. In order to avoid increasing the set width, I reduced the X height relative to the cap height. Consequently, Mrs. Eaves has the appearance of setting about one point size smaller than the average typeface in a lowercase text size. Which, conveniently for me, gathers many of the aspects I dislike about this typeface in one paragraph.
Anitra:There's so many little typography terms in there that I'm betting it doesn't even know what that means. I don't know. See? See? Wow. Yeah. That's this is like more, more, more, more, more for me.
Speaker 1:Well, it's I'm quoting her.
Anitra:But also, what's not to like? Anyway, it's described by Emma Gray. So they are describing themselves even as rambling on as body text. So maybe they admit maybe not so great for that. It's a good way to put it. The lower X height means it needs to be set larger to read well. It really needs the right kind of tracking. You can set it as body text, but it's hard to do it well. And really, why would you? I think the small caps, especially like Emma Thompson, intelligent, beautiful, classic, and versatile. I never get sick of watching her act even after all these years.
Speaker 1:Okay, we're just gonna have to agree to disagree. Next to an important section. Why you should or shouldn't get into a relationship with this typeface. Each typeface is made for or is good for a purpose or purposes. So what is Mrs. Eves good for or not good for? I'm just gonna jump in here and say, I'm pleased that you have so much love for this typeface in Nietzsche because it balances out the fact that I don't know. How are we friends? I'm all for rescuing Sarah Eves from historical obscurity and from being Robin to John Baskaville's Batman. And I can appreciate what Lico wanted to achieve with her design homage. But it still kind of feels like she had a checklist of air quote improvements to tick off. And for me, it creates a whole typeface that is somehow less than the sum of its parts. But I yield the floor to you, Anitra.
Anitra:Wow, that like sounds even worse than it's like read in the script. Wow, wow. I think Leeko describes- I'm committed to my dislike. Yeah. What can I say? Wait till we get to Nova Ration. Leeko describes why you should get into a relationship perfectly, in my opinion. Quoting here, I think Mrs. Eve's was a mix of just enough tradition with an updated twist. It's familiar enough to be friendly, yet different enough to be interesting due to its relatively wide proportions as compared with the original Baskerville. It's useful for giving presents to small amounts of text such as poetry or for elegant headlines to using print ads. It makes the reader slow down a bit and contemplate the message. She's a really good communicator when you're. She really is. She really knows how to talk about it.
Speaker 1:I can't say anything to that without sounding like a sexist pig.
Anitra:Okay, so moving on. I think sit down, Jason. It's a very versatile typeface. You'll find it in lots of places. The small caps are the best in the business, so you'll find those whenever someone wants to give something a stately and classy but approachable and classic look. And the italic is beautiful, the regular is very readable and classic. Emma Gray says about Mrs. Eve's, trips to the bookstores are always a treat for us, as we find our Mrs. Eve staring out at us from dozens of book covers in the most elegant compositions, each time surprising us with her many talents. Take that, Jason.
Speaker 1:And just remind us who was behind Emma Gray and wrote these reviews.
Anitra:Again, husband. Been learning a lot about comms in my new job. And let me tell you, the way you talk about your work is more important than you work.
Speaker 1:I was gonna say clearly, this episode is at least an education in how we can promote our own shit. And promote the shit out of our own shit.
Anitra:But not our shit student design work. Just saying. Moving on, it's a great wedding invitation typeface. So you'll see it being used there a lot. Also for fiction books, especially women's fiction of a certain worthy type with maybe historical setting. Penguin uses it for their pocket classic series, and they pair it with Futura. Very spaced out. Mrs. Eve's small caps is a visual cliche on poetry book covers. True dad. It's useful for bringing elegance and presence to simpler lines of text, so it's great for wine labels. Yeah, it definitely drives me to drink. Wow. Wow. Blurbs on wine labels and books and signage. It's used for the Toronto General Hospital signage system, which gives the hospital a reassuring classic look while maintaining our modern medical practice happens here, kind of a feel. As we've mentioned, Mrs. Eves was the logo type for WordPress, but they close up the spacing a lot. So I don't think that's a great example. Radiohead used it on their album artwork for Hail to the Thief.
Speaker 1:All right, now for our final section: Kiss, Date, Kill or Marry. When we talk about why we would want to be with Mrs. Eves or not. Is this typeface a one-time thing? Or do you just want to go out with it occasionally? Do you never use it? Hello. Or do you use it so much, Anitra, that you are worried about yourself or your friends are worried on your behalf?
Anitra:Let's get real. Mark Bolton, who I once met, really nice guy, wrote in 2005 that unfortunately Mrs. Eve suffered the same fate in the 1990s as Template Gothic did in the early 1990s. Chronic and often inappropriate overuse. And that's a shame, really. I never stopped using it though. I did use it for my wedding invitations in 1910. I think he called it overused too early, though, honestly. It's definitely been overused and inappropriately, like for body copy, but I contend that it's moved through that par se phase and has become a classic. One of my favorite typefaces. I've used it on other wedding invitations, party invitations, book covers, presentations. So me and Mrs. Eve's in a long, extremely happy marriage. I laugh at its jokes. I still find it sexy 27 years after years after I first saw it, much like my actual husband. Husby. Husband. Husby. I just wish other people didn't feel the same way because I want to keep it to myself.
Speaker 1:I've always enjoyed Mark's company. Mrs. Eve's not so much. I can count the times I've used it on one hand that has lost most of the fingers to a printer's mangle.
unknown:Nice.
Speaker 1:I'd rather use OG Baskerville. That looseness and the problem of tracking you mentioned earlier. To paraphrase one of Emma Thompson's characters, the Baroness in the movie Cruella. When there's a gap in the conversation, I'm going to fire you. There's a gap, you're fired.
Anitra:We can't end on that, no. Yes, we can. Jeremy, though, is definitely fired. Don't train. I really hope he improved Arthur uni. I might feel a bit bad. Anyway. Shout out to Jeremy. Wherever you are. Jeremy, wherever you are, I'm sure. I'm probably going to friend you on Facebook next week. Luckily, you're never on Facebook. Yeah, luckily I'm never on Facebook. Thanks for listening, especially to my stories of design school. Um, shared history. Shared history. Uh uh, and uh, these are our feelings and opinions. Obviously, we have feelings um and opinions. We're interested in yours. You can email us on the address in the show notes, leave a review in Apple Podcasts, please, where you can rate us to make the pod easier to find. We'd love to hear from you. Where can people find you, Jason?
Speaker 1:I'm so old school, you can email me at designsleuth at yahoo.com.
Anitra:I'm an eachonaut on all the things except Twitter. And you'll find me producing things as a thesis whisperer on all the things except X. That's true, we should stop calling it Twitter. Thanks for listening so much.
Speaker 1:Thanks for your company.