EXPLORING DIVERSITY - What difference does a FONT make?

We are always looking for simple fonts that are good to use for the large blocks of text often found in our exhibit panels. These four fonts are now our “go to” fonts when making labels and basic graphic posters, and include Latinx and Black designers.

Joshua Darden

Joshua Darden has been a typeface designer for over 30 years, co-founding The Scanjam Design Company, The Hoefler Type Foundry, and Darden Studio. Creating his first typeface at 15 he is considered by Fonts in Use to be the first known African-American typeface designer. In 2005 he created the font superfamily Freight which was chosen as the official font of the National Museum of African American History & Culture. 

Font: Freight Sans (paragraph text and smaller title font in above image)
Exhibit: James Van Der Zee and Michael Francis Blake: Picturing Blackness in the 1920s (2021 Duke University Libraries)

Font: Freight Sans and Freight Big Pro (all title, text and labels in exhibition)
Exhibit: Dante and his Afterlives: To See the Stars Again...(2021 Duke University Libraries)

Font: Freight Sans (all title, text and labels in exhibition)
Exhibit: The Pretend Villages: Photographs by Christopher Sims (202-2022 Duke University Libraries)
Exhibit: Celebrating Thirty Years of East Asian Collections (202-2022 Duke University Libraries)

Font: Halyard Text (body font and labels in exhibition)
Exhibit: “To Stand by the Side of Freedom”: Abraham Lincoln and Nineteenth-Century America (2021-2022 Duke University Libraries)

In 2017 he designed Halyard font of collaboratively with Eben Sorkin and Lucas Sharp, which is a great alternative to Helvetica.

Lewis McGuffie and David Williams

David Williams received his MA in Typeface Design at the University of Reading, UK in 2019, is a typeface designer, graphic designer, and the founder of Manchester Type foundry and typographic consultancy providing multi-lingual typeface design services. Lewis McGuffie also received his MA in Typeface Design at the University of Reading, UK in 2019, and is a designer of commercial and custom-made Latin, Greek & Cyrillic typefaces from Tallinn, Estonia.

Font: Salford Sans (display font in signage as seen in above image)
Exhibit: “To Stand by the Side of Freedom”: Abraham Lincoln and Nineteenth-Century America (2021-2022 Duke University Libraries)

Alfonso García and the Latinotype Team

The Our History/Nuestra Historia exhibition created new challenges as we were specifically highlighting Latinx voices and all elements in the exhibition were in both English and Spanish. The student curators from Dr. Cecilia Márquez’s Latinx Social Movements course were invited to choose the fonts (following our diversity guidelines), and they chose Eva for the heading font and InterSans for the body text.

Alfonso García is the founder of Tipos Del Oeste, a foundry in Argentina. The Latinotype foundry was introduced in 2007 and considered the first digital foundry in Chile:  “Our goal is to design new typefaces remixing diverse influences related to our South American identity (most often know as “Latino”)...” Together in 2021 they crafted Inter a font inspired by removing the serifs from the famous font Rockwell.

Font: Inter (paragraph text as seen in image above and all labels in exhibition) Exhibit: Our History, Our Voice: Latinx at Duke/Nuestra Historia, Nuestra Voz: Latinas/os/es/x en (2022 Duke University Libraries)