Hoefler & Frere-Jones

Hoefler & Frere-Jones has received the great honor of being selected as an honoree in this year's National Design Awards, and is especially proud to be the first typeface designers ever recognized by this prestigious award. An official White House project created to increase national awareness of the role of design, the National Design Awards are given annually by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in recognition of excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement in design. A highlight of the award has traditionally been a reception for honorees at the White House, hosted by the first lady.

Now in its tenth year, the National Design Awards are given in ten categories from architecture to fashion, and past winners include iMac designer Jonathan Ive, fashion designer Isabel Toledo, and industrial designer Bill Stumpf, co-inventor of the Aeron chair. Congratulations to all of this year's honorees, especially our colleagues in Communication Design: finalist Project Projects, and the category winner, the Graphics Department of The New York Times. —H&FJ

Hoefler & Frere-Jones: National Design Awards Finalist

Typeface: Gotham

Type designers are accustomed to approaching the line between homage and parody with great care. It's especially daunting when its subject is a living colleague, as was the case last Friday when Tobias presented an award of his own design to Wim Crouwel, winner of the 2009 Gerrit Noordzij Prize. (In keeping with the tradition, the current holder of the prize designs the award given to its next recipient.) To design an award for Crouwel, a Dutch icon who is indelibly associated with a strong and recognizable personal style, takes great sensitivity: imagine having to design a business card for Piet Mondrian, or select a ringtone for Igor Stravinsky.

If there is anyone able to see past the obvious, it is Wim Crouwel. In the 1960s, Crouwel's fresh yet doctrinaire approach to graphic design earned him the pejorative nickname "gridnik," which Crouwel, with typical flare, adopted as a moniker, and later chose as the name for his best known typeface. In his acceptance speech on Friday, Crouwel described his decades-long disagreements with his friend Gerrit Noordzij — in whose name the award is given — and both men reflected gleefully on their continuing philosophical differences. This fruitful synthesis has colored both the study and the practice of graphic design, and it's satisfying to see it recognized. This is what awards should be for.

In keeping with the custom, Tobias designed an award that uses his own work but includes a nod to Crouwel's. In celebration of the pre-history of the Gotham typeface, Tobias arranged for the fabrication of a traditional enamel sign, featuring an abundant grid of Gotham's many styles (64 out of 66, to be precise.) Hearing Crouwel speak with such good humor at the presentation ceremony, I was almost tempted to reveal Tobias's original idea, which was to find a way to bridge the Dutch tradition of chocolate letter-making with Crouwel's arresting new alphabet of 1967. ("I probably could have done it with Kit-Kat bars," Tobias mused.) I am certain Crouwel would approve. —JH

One charming aspect of the Gerrit Noordzij Prize is the design of the award itself. By tradition, it's something created by the current prize holder, and presented to the incoming awardee. Past winners have used the occasion to create something that not only encapsulates their own work in some personal way, but postulates some connection to the interests of the next designer in succession. Erik Spiekermann, winner of the 2003 award, presented the above to Tobias in 2006: it's a witty rendering of his twentieth-century Meta typeface, produced in the distinctly nineteenth-century technology of wood type. As a gift to a type designer whose work regularly engages with historical form, I thought it was especially poignant.

The set was made by Scott Polzen, who began exploring the resurrection of wood typemaking while still a student. His latter-day wood types are lovely artifacts, cut from cherry and finished with sandpaper and file, as Polzen explained in an essay in Letterspace, a journal of The Type Directors' Club. As intriguing as the how of this project is the why: "I’ve come to understand," Polzen writes, "that my real motivation for this project was to gain a greater sense of participation in the culture of reading and writing: making wood type forced me to think quite literally about how the written word works." I thought this sentiment nicely echoed Noordzij's own philosophy about the primacy of written, not printed, words; it makes Polzen's connection to the award even more apt.

Wim Crouwel will receive the 2009 Gerrit Noordzij Prize on Friday, when we'll have the first photographs of the award that Tobias designed for him. I will miss seeing it around our office. —JH