Old English Today

Typefaces never really meant much to me, at work or at school. For projects it was usually a matter of scrolling down the typeface choices until I came across something that worked or at least didn’t make my eyes melt out of my face a lá Raiders of the Lost Ark. At work we only have about 40 typefaces for the customer to choose from, so a lot of typefaces that they want become merged into one. Helvetica = Block 2. Bodoni, Garamond, Century = Times New Roman. There are not a whole lot of choices, and it has trained my brain to immediately figure out:
1) What font could be substituted
Or, failing that:
2) How hard would to be for me to forge it

There are some things I have noticed over the years I’ve worked there, such as that the younger customers tend to prefer fonts like Cooper, Impact, Ireland, Old English, and (shudder) Curlz. Cooper and Impact I can understand; as they are very popular fonts for shirts due to their easy-to-read designs. However, Ireland and Old English are very difficult to read sometimes, especially on a shirt thirty feet away. I believe those particular fonts are chosen because they “look cool” and not because of their readability.

I believe the reason why Old English is such a popular font is a result of brand name companies using it on their merchandise and advertisements, such as the shirt above.

The extremely popular video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas utilized Old English font to give the logo a more West Coast/Los Angeles feel.

The point I am trying laboriously to get to is that the typeface Old English is still alive and well today among today’s youth. From hats to shirts to wristbands, it seems like every teenager these days wants the words in Old English.

(FYI: Old English is a pain in the butt to embroider on hats)

Old English evolved from the font Blackletter, which came about during the Middle Ages when books were still expensive handwritten commodities. Letters became tall and very ornate, which subsequently made them harder to read. Since the vast majority of the population was illiterate anyway, this didn’t affect much.

Blackletter was a very confined typeface, and a lot of the letters tend to look the same, requiring the viewer to read very carefully.

Over the centuries the engraved, elegant style of Blackletter and the Middle Ages evolved into what is commonly referred to as Old English.

- Colin