“Life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems”—Elon Musk
How can fonts help us design a more joyful built environment?
Modern designs tend to be sleek, streamlined, and utilitarian. Consider for instance the featureless glass skyscrapers of our cities, simplified company logos, and even novel products such as the low-poly Cybertruck. I believe the reader will agree with me that while modern designs can be fascinating, they typically lack a sense of character or warmth or joy. I am aware this is perhaps impossible to prove, though I suspect all the same that we sense this to be true. Most people would probably agree for instance that old houses usually have more character than the newer ones built today, even if it is difficult to precisely pinpoint why we feel this way.
Churchill said that “We shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us”. Would it not be reasonable then to suggest that by creating more joyful designs, our lives will in turn become more joyful? If so, how can warmth and life and character be added into our designs once again? I believe the unlikely world of typography can offer a guiding principle for doing so.
There are three general classes of fonts, which we may describe as Simple, Serif, and Dingbat. The first type tends to be sleek and reductionistic, keeping only what is essential to communicate a text. The letter I for instance is often represented in this style as a simple vertical rectangle. On the opposite end of the spectrum are Dingbat fonts, which replace letters with random symbols. The letter I in this style may be represented by something like an icon of a raven—something that has nothing to do with the letter it represents. Whereas Simple fonts tend to be utilitarian, Dingbat fonts are completely useless to the general reader. Finally, situated in the middle of these two styles are Serif fonts. In typography, a serif is a decorative stroke added to a letter. This is the technical name for those tiny lines that jut off the top and bottom of the letter I, for instance, in some fonts. Serif fonts combine both function and form, the useful and the useless, utility and beauty.
Similarly to fonts, we may define Simple designs as designs that have no unnecessary ornament and Serif designs as those that are composed of both useful and decorative elements. These terms can be used to describe the design of anything—whether cars or buildings or cities or websites or household products or robots or rocket ships.
Simple designs are the rule in the modern era, and Serif designs are the exception. I believe, however, that the world will be much happier if Serif designs become the norm and Simple designs the outlier. Serifs are an easy way to bring a design to life and infuse it with joy. While functionality can make a thing useful, a few serifs can make it worth using. Good engineering can make a house able to be lived in, and architectural serifs can make a house enjoyable to live in. Further, by including functionless serifs in our designs, this reminds us that so many things in life are good in-and-of-themselves and not merely because they serve some use or can be exploited. They communicate that the purpose of life is not to solve problems, but to live.
This could be something to consider as we enter an era of robots and possibly seasteads and space stations. All of these are currently on a Simple design trajectory (consider the Optimus robot from Tesla or the SeaPod from Ocean Builders). Could it be possible, even desirable, for these to be made instead in a Serif style?
Something to ponder!