Tiny Type On Yellow Pages

If you enjoyed a computer interface in your day, you likely have enjoyed or at least tolerated the work of Matthew Carter. He is a typographic legend, whose work has directly appeared in many places throughout modern life. In a world where we only had 10 or so “web-safe fonts,” he was responsible for three of them—Georgia, Verdana, and Tahoma.

But years before he became known for developing key parts of your default computing experience, he took on one of the most important tasks ever presented to a font-forger: He redesigned the font for the phone book.

AT&T had been using its own custom fonts for decades by the time that Carter got to it. In 1938, the company had commissioned typographer Chauncey H. Griffith to develop a new standardized typeface for its phone books, which it called Bell Gothic. Griffith, earlier in his career, had created a font called Excelsior, well-suited to run at very small sizes in newspapers, a class of typography known as “agate.” Bell Gothic was the phone-book version of that font, and it helped set the vibe for the Bell brand in general.

The problem was, by the 1970s, AT&T had moved to cathode ray typesetting (CRT), a process that allowed more flexibility in layout. Previously, a bold character in a hot-metal Linotype machine had to be the same width as a regular-width character, limiting flexibility. But CRT just did not do any favors to Bell Gothic, which was built to work around the quirks of the metal-type process.

As writer and typographer Nick Sherman noted on his website, CRT did not work particularly well with the agate-sized typography of Bell Gothic:

Bell Gothic worked fine when the directories were still being composed in hot metal on a Linotype machine and printed on a letterpress, but because it was designed for those production methods, it didn’t hold up under the set of limitations presented by newer technologies. Typographic composition was being done photographically with Cathode Ray Typesetting (CRT), and the printing done on high-speed offset lithography presses. These production methods greatly affected the typeface; letterforms (especially in the Light face) broke apart: its strokes became lighter, sometimes eroding completely at the intersections of straight and curved strokes.

For a time, printers tried to compensate for this erosion by over-inking the printing plates; while this helped to thicken the strokes, it brought up a whole new set of problems. Legibility suffered as the already condensed letterforms closed in on themselves. The strokes of different characters ran into each other, making c and l become d; r and n became m; 3 looked like 8; 5 looked like 6. Another problem with over-inking was that the presses had to be stopped frequently for additional cleaning which cost printing time and production money.

This is where Carter was brought in. Around AT&T’s 100-year anniversary, he was asked to give a second glance to Bell Gothic that updated the style for the era and technical needs. What he came up with was Bell Centennial, which is noted for its narrow creases. These features, called ink traps, essentially work with the printing process to ensure that, as small smudges happen in tiny typography, the letter fills out. The result is that, in practice, the “traps” are not visible—and that ink is less likely to smudge the letterform into something unreadable.

Carter’s work with Bell Centennial is considered iconic, and was introduced into the Museum of Modern Art, where it sits, next to Verdana and five other fonts. But he did not invent the “ink trap” technique, nor was it its first use case in phone books; as CBA Italy notes, a similar technique had been patented a decade prior by typographer Francesco Simoncini, which he then applied to Italy’s SEAT Yellow Pages in the late 1960s.

CBA’s Davide Milinari notes that ink traps have somewhat lost their purpose in our era of 4K screens and high-resolution printing, but they maintain their distinctiveness:

The charm of ink traps remains intact even today, although printing is now almost always in high definition and screens have excellent visual quality, making them technically unnecessary. But the personality they give to the letters is undeniable: many designers choose to design fonts with highly visible and uniquely shaped ink traps. They are even used more often for display cuts, thus for use at large sizes, where they would be technically even more unnecessary, but where they can be more evident and visible.

The CBA piece goes on to note that this was not just an issue with print—CBS notably modified its News Gothic font to have some small traps targeted at the other kind of CRTs, cathode ray tubes.

As for Bell Centennial, one can argue that you see Carter’s imprint on this font—his later fonts, especially Verdana and Tahoma, feel cut from the same cloth as what he did with Bell Centennial. Despite being a nearly 50-year-old font, it still feels highly modern, which is something you can’t say for Bell Gothic, which maintaines its retro vibes regardless.

Anyway, if you see a cool font with some distinct creases in the lettering, you can give credit to the phone book for giving it its vibe.