It’s the waning years of the twentieth century, sometime between 1970 and 1985. You find yourself in a position where the responsibility of managing the graphic design identity of a small business has fallen to you, though no one’s calling it “managing the graphic design identity.” Your job, basically, is to pick the Letraset sheets out of a catalog that will be used to create a logotype that will then be used on some external signage and business cards. This logotype will also go on the side of the one truck the business owns.

Your boss, who is also your uncle, has instructed you to find typefaces that are “approachable and unique, with a touch of the eccentric” (his words, not mine). You can tell by the way he says it, though, that he doesn’t want you to get too experimental with it. His idea of “eccentric” does not extend to crazy, fat-bottomed letters dripping psychedelic ooze. Fine, whatever, it’s just a summer job. 

You spend some time with the Letraset catalog, and conclude that you really only have three choices for a type that is equal parts approachable and eccentric in the specific way your employer has mandated: Windsor, Souvenir and Cooper Black.

Today, these three typefaces are typically associated with the 1970s. I think of them as the big three of that era, graphic signifiers of the Watergate years that, even if you don’t know them by name, you recognize the vibe.

They’re much older than the seventies. Each of them dates from the early twentieth century, designed by lone individuals working for major foundries in industrial centers. Windsor was designed in Sheffield in the United Kingdom in 1905, then a hotbed of steel production and labor militancy. Souvenir came from the industrial hinterlands of central New Jersey in 1914, from the drafting table of the head of the design department for America’s largest type foundry. Cooper Black, the bubbly iron-on alphabet immortalized on ten million customized T-shirts, was created in Chicago in 1922. 

They were created at a time when, in those industrial settings, there were individuals referencing a hand-made, more artistic sensibility in a time of rapid mechanization for the printing industry, and for the world generally. Souvenir was influenced by Middle European Art Nouveau, a movement that emphasized careful craftsmanship and organic forms as a means of humanizing industrial production. Windsor and Cooper Black were designed expressly as display fonts, for short, declarative lines of text, meant to draw attention in forms of print media dominated by grim, heavy serif typefaces. All three are bold statements, but none of them bang you over the head.

It’s this humanizing quality that is most likely why designers in the early 1970s resurrected these three typefaces, when the techno-utopia of Star Trek was beginning to curdle into the techno-dystopia of THX 1138. If all of the room-sized IBM and Rand Corporation computers coordinating various mechanized atrocities across the globe had a chilly, efficient Swiss typeface like Helvetica slapped on the side of them, those warmer, more handmade typefaces seem like both a respite and a quiet protest. In any era marked by political and social turmoil, there’s often an effort to call back to the more humane (and certainly, the idealized) aspects of an earlier era. Each of them, in an oblique way, called to mind the fantastical egalitarianism of the Belle Époque, when strains of mysticism, industrialism and socialism intermingled in the pubic imagination. Designing an underground publication or radical flyer in 1970, alluding to that era was a type of resistance against the modernity as it had been practiced: faceless, efficient and brutal. Windsor, Souvenir and Cooper Black, goopy as they may be, are none of those things.

To some extent, all of these typefaces all fell out of favor in the intervening forty years, as far as everyday use was concerned. When these things vanish from the world of high design, they migrate into marginal pockets of the commercial world. Most often when you see Windsor or Souvenir or Cooper Black in the world today, they tend not to be used in a self-consciously tasteful way. They always look a little assertive and individualistic and a little out of place. They tend to be used by independent liquor stores, health food emporiums, formerly fashionable nightclubs and ancient auto body shops, or maybe barbeque restaurants in dying strip malls and house remodelers with a lone Chevy Silverado. Whatever those typefaces may say, they don’t suggest corporate efficiency and facelessness. They always look a little assertive and individualistic and a little out of place, a warm smile and a hand wave across a cluttered urban environment.

