fonts | WONK

For the copy in WONK5, we went with an old (amazing) standby, Gentium Book Basic which I still can’t recommend enough for it’s simple, readable elegance.

WONK5 headlines, including the colourful title, are done in Heldustry — a slightly squarer Helvetica with a 70s flourish. I liked it because it’s bold (especially in all caps), very direct and serious but, for me, always seems on the verge of coming off the rails.

Heldustry was designed by Phil Martin in 1978 for the recently launched ABC-Westinghouse 24-hour cable news network (source).

I haven’t been able to find out too much about Martin, except that he was a prolific font designer, something of a renaissance man and not a great story teller. Here’ s Martin recounting the development of Heldustry in Typographica:

MS: Do you have stories about any of these? For instance, how did the idea for Heldustry come about?

PM: Eurostyle, also known as Microgramma, had a little popularity. Almost square letters. 75% Helvetica, 25% Eurostyle was the design plan for Heldustry.

(Link to entire interview)

For the headlines and author bios in WONK 3 we went with Puritan 2.0 — a slick san-serif by Ben Weiner. All I can say is that it was a stinking pleasure to work with.

Here’s a bit about the font from Ben along with an awesome quote at the end:

Puritan was my response to these influences; it was also a way (I thought) that I could get hold of an interesting typeface without unofficially borrowing from the Typography department. It might be flawed, but it was mine! Well, I learned a lot from the experience.

I wrote a short essay about Puritan as a project in my final year as an undergraduate. Rather than repeat it all here, I have converted the essay (presented as a booklet) into a PDF file of around 1200K which you can download.

In October 1999, I submitted Puritan to the 3rd International Type Design Contest, where it made absolutely no impact.

— Read the whole thing