During this walk I noticed something,

so I started taking pictures of it.

Eventually I got my co-workers to join in.

Mac took this picture,

and Agnes took this one.

What we all noticed was this font.

If you've somehow managed to never see it on a storefront,

you've definitely seen it elsewhere.

Because it's everywhere.

Strip away the candy wrappers,

movie posters, album covers,

and corner store signs, and you're left with this typeface.

It's called Cooper Black, and the story

of how it became so popular has everything to do with its versatility,

because these letters have been around for a century's worth of changes in

technology

and pop culture.

To set the stage for the story, I talked to Stephen Heller.

Bear with me while I move to another part of the apartment.

Among other things, he's written like a library's worth of books about design.

Okay, I'm back.

And this is Bethany Heck.

I am a designer who writes about typefaces.

She runs the Font Review Journal where she deconstructs the history and design of notable typefaces

like Cooper Black. If you give me like two minutes I can run and find an actual

like physical piece of wood type and I can talk through some of this.

While she's doing that, let's travel back in time a hundred years to the city of Chicago

where our story begins. It's 1919 right after World War 1.

Advertising was reaching an early zenith at that point because with the end of

the war there was a great resurgence of product and demand. The two dominating

materials for commercial printing were wood and metal. Wood was cut out of the

end pieces hard wood, they were usually large size typefaces that were used for

large-scale advertising and posters. The bold typefaces you see in old wanted

posters? Those were made from wood type. Metal was the process that was created

by Gutenberg when he designed the type for his Bible. Each individual character

was physically formed into words, and those words were cast into tiny lines of

text. Those molds allowed for smaller more precise blocks of type. That's the

kind of type that was used for most commercial purposes, from book publishing

to magazine publishing. By the turn of the 20th century huge Rube Goldberg-like

machines called linotypes drastically sped up this process.

This is the world Oswald Cooper, Chicago's preeminent letterer and

illustrator, lived in. In 1918, after years of making custom hand lettered ads for

car companies and banks, he designed a fully-formed

typeface dubbed Cooper. It took a classic Roman form and softened to the edges.

Seeing promise in Cooper's design and the prior success of his lettering work, the

type foundry Barnhart Brothers and Spindler asked him to make a bold

display typeface based on the font. Around 1920, Oswald Cooper released

Cooper Black, and it was an immediate hit. It was used for newspaper headlines and

large-scale posters. It sold cars, cold medicine, music lessons, turntables,

and ginger ale. With Cooper Black, it was like somebody took an air pump to a tire

and blew up that tire. I mean this ad for Cooper Black credits the font for

getting five thousand customers into their client's new store on opening day.

And in countless reviews, it was considered the most popular typeface

design of the time. So what made it work so well? For one, its curves. Perhaps the

most unconventional aspect of the curves are that willingness to be unafraid to

curve the bottom parts of the letter forms. So if you look at the bottom parts

of the stems of the "A" like there's no flat edges on that, which is very strange.

If you look at most typefaces, they have flat bottom somewhere. Even Cooper Black's

imitations like Goudy Heavy and Pabst Extra Bold failed to fully break tradition.

You want that consistent line for legibility, and so the fact that Cooper

doesn't have that means that it's very forgiving to irregularities. Like the

baseline serif of one character naturally flows right into the curve of

another even when the characters are slightly uneven. Those irregularities

look more like mistakes than quirks in straighter edged designs. The fact that

Cooper doesn't necessarily need to be laid in a straight line to look good is

an advantage. Let's talk about this weird F. It's an identifiable feature of Cooper

Black. Turns out it's pretty genius. Draw a rectangle around that F, and you have

to think like "okay I've got a draw of really bold F

and I only have this rectangle of space to play with." You've got the crossbars,

and then you've got the hook at the top, and the serif at the bottom, you're kind

of like running out of space. The shape of this negative space in the ascender

allowed Cooper to make the F as bold as possible for as much as possible while

still maintaining legibility, which wasn't always the case for heavy

typefaces of the time. This is actually a good example, like this is a very bold

four, and you can see that like the counter space in there is like really

tiny. The tininess is what makes the four look bold and heavy, but that four

could get sort of like filled up with ink and then essentially vanish. These

negative spaces within each character made Cooper Black incredibly light and

friendly while still commanding attention. The fact that it worked both

big and small was a huge selling point. Every character of Cooper Black has its

own little quirks. The G is always the thing that I think about first, it has

like this sort of anthropomorphic quality. I think it looks like a duck. Now

that you say that, the Q kind of looks like a snail. Weird. At any rate, I

think the letter that shows just how fun and functional Cooper Black can be, has

to be the O. A lot of typefaces have a vertical stress, so the oval inside would

just point straight up and down. Cooper's tilts back, and while it looks

off-kilter on its own, when placed in a word or phrase it always seems to

compliment the letters around it. The central conflict that a type designer is

facing is how do I make something that feels cohesive as a whole design system

as opposed to a beautiful collection of letters. Somehow Cooper achieved both.

Oswald Cooper believed Cooper Black was at its best when there was thin spacing

between the words and not much leading between the lines. Basically it worked

best when the letters were all cramped together. But that sometimes posed a

problem. Even when Cooper Black was first designed, like just the act of squishing

type together tight was like in some cases extremely difficult or impossible

to do. In the 1950s, two dramatically new ways of printing made it easier to push

letters closer together, and that thrust Cooper Black into the second half of the

20th century. There was a basic change in the material of which type is made, a

change from lead to paper or film. The first was photo type hot metal

typecasting was replaced by film strips in dark rooms and by the early 1960s

machines like the phototypositor were small enough to fit in local print

shops the other was the invention of dry rub transfers which just required a

ballpoint pen and a piece of paper it was perfect for customizing headlines

letter set the company that made them marketed it as fast simple and

economical these two technologies opened up graphic design to more adventurous

compositions something wood and metal had struggled to do and cooper black

flourished it thrived as always in advertising it's friendly curves fit the

tongue-in-cheek aesthetic of the 1960s and 70s but it also showed up in

magazines movies and hundreds of album covers Pet Sounds was like the

quintessential setting just look at the way the D works with the E and the Y and

boys fits so nicely over the oh it it's fluidity is what makes it special

and it's boldness makes it special I think all type designers would come in

and say like they have an idea of how a typeface is is meant to be used but I

think that a typeface doesn't really reach its full potential

until it's put into somebody else's hands because Cooper black was readily

available in letras at int I posit or catalogs it was no longer just in the

hands of professionals and designers it was in the hands of the DI wires of the

counterculture movement it seamlessly jumped from Burger King to underground

posters and magazines and became a staple the idea of using something

that's basic vernacular but using it with intention to make a statement is

something that you see throughout design or cultural history

these early hip-hop posters are actually the perfect example of Cooper blacks

adaptability and its legacy like take a look at this one it doesn't really

matter that these are two lowercase LS because the S fits so perfectly next to

them and the types ability to be squeezed as tightly as possible and

still be incredibly legible holds up even under extreme circumstances it's

always fun to look at something that's used an assertive lowbrow way and then

to realize that this isn't like some cheap tacky thing this is actually like

very good that's why Cooper black is just as

popular today as it was when it was first made from corner store signs and

fashion brands to food packaging grassroots movements and hip-hop album

covers Cooper's ability to work as like rebel

and letterings and in photo type and as movable type and also now like in

digital that's why it's everywhere and that's something that Oswald Cooper

couldn't have predicted

you