SOUTH LOOP — Most people only notice typefaces when they're failing to do their job, according to Meg Duguid, director of Columbia's A+D Gallery, which will launch an exhibition this week that celebrates fonts.
Typeface is an important part of the messages people absorb every day, Duguid said, either because they succeed in "allowing us to immediately grasp something and understand our place in the world" — or they don't.
"It's important on the actual, practical level of like, capital I's not looking like L's, a true practical, readable level," she said. "Type designers do a really great service to the world by making things clear, and also on some level, establishing mood and aesthetic."
Lizzie Schiffman Tufano says the exhibit is for anyone who may have ever been irked, or amazed, by typography:
Sometimes the stakes are high. Duguid points to several new signs Downtown that have recently left Chicagoans frenzied over fonts, like the giant, shiny serif "TRUMP" on Trump Tower, or the recent Esurance billboard that may have placed the "c" and "l" too close together in the word "click."
"People are implicitly aware of how much type impacts their lives, and they become kind of explicitly aware when and where a type doesn't do its job," she said. "It doesn't either match the moment, or the thing that it's trying to express, or it's in some cases unreadable. And I think that's when people kind of get jerked out of their lack of awareness of how ubiquitous type is."
Duguid says it's not just graphic designers and visual artists who are put off by imperfect typefaces. Hatred of comic sans, for example, extends far outside the type design community.
"When things don't match up right — that's an angst that people can relate to," she said. "If you're looking at representing the future, you wouldn't use an old English type. You would use maybe something sans serif with hard edges."
TYPES by Display, running at the South Loop gallery from Wednesday to Dec. 13, was curated by Jamilee Polson Lacy. The touring exhibition is site-specific, and is re-created at each gallery using a rubric designed by artist Katherine Walker.
The A+D Gallery exhibition works with materials from Chicago writer Claire Keys' stories that revolve around untranslatable foreign words.
"The words being utilized are words that can't be translated into English, so type becomes almost the bearer of that information in this case," Duguid said.
"I think people will leave the exhibit with a certain kind of hyperawareness," she said.
The A+D Gallery is at 619 S. Wabash Ave. and open from noon-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays and until 7 p.m. on Thursdays.
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