We use two fonts in our materials and on the site, Graphik and American Typewriter. We did – for a nanosecond – wonder if we should shun fonts with such obviously appropriate names but decided this would be perverse. Why look a typographic gift horse in the mouth?

From the outset we were keen to use a sans serif for our name and looked for a font that is archetypal – but not predictable. Graphik, designed by Christian Schwartz and sold through his and type designer Paul Barnes’ foundry Commercial Type, was inspired by less well-known twentieth-century European sans serifs and, apart from one notable and all important character, seemed perfect.

GraphicDesign& is all about connectivity. We wanted to foreground this by using an ampersand in our logo that was based on the Et (‘and’ in Latin) ligature – but Graphik didn’t include this form of ampersand. We were grateful to Christian who, sensitive to what we were trying to achieve, drew a GraphicDesign& ampersand just for us.

So, Graphik it is for GraphicDesign& alongside American Typewriter. The latter in honour of Henry Bliss, the American librarian who during the 1930s and ‘40s used his typewriter to devise the typographically eccentric Bliss Bibliographic system that guides all GraphicDesign& outputs.