Mrs. Eaves is dead. Long Live Mrs. Eaves!
by , (6 comments)
In the spirit of Halloween, I feel compelled to make my first foray into the Be A Design Group blog with this dire warning. Everyone must stop using the typeface Mrs. Eaves.
To support my case, you must indulge me as we take a trip back in time: The year is 1996; after more than a decade of crafting an extensive set of extremely progressive (if marginally useful) typefaces, Zuzana Licko, co-founder of Emigre, labors long and hard to birth Mrs. Eaves. Her newborn child is strikingly beautiful; as proof, listen to how Zuzana describes her new daughter: “In translating this classic to today’s digital font technology, I focused on capturing the warmth and softness of letterpress printing that often occurs due to the ‘gain’ of impression and ink spread.” (Okay, so it’s a description of one’s child that only us typophiles could appreciate — but you can imagine how it would make for a lovely typeface.)
Zuzana set out to craft an historical revival based on the design of John Baskerville’s eponymous 1920’s typeface. To her credit, she did a remarkable job. Mrs. Eaves is a gorgeous typeface, widely usable yet undeniably distinct. She captured, and arguably even improved upon, Baskerville’s original transition between the Caslons of his day to the Bodonis of his future. It looks old, but feels new; it’s traditional yet fresh. (Incidentally, Zuzana named the typeface after John’s wife, Sarah Eaves. For a deeper history of Mrs. Eaves than I will cover here, visit the source: Emigre.)
It didn’t take long for perceptive designers to recognize the beauty and distinction of Mrs. Eaves. Bored silly with Adobe’s rendition of Garamond, progressive designers started using Mrs. Eaves on everything from annual reports to baby food packaging; from corporate identities to invitations for the local pancake feed. By the turn of the century, pieces using the typeface started creeping into the design annuals. By 2003, open to a random page of the Communication Arts Design Annual, and you had a pretty good chance of catching a glimpse of Mrs. Eaves. (There’s urban legend circulating that Delaware actually briefly considered legally requiring all annual reports published in the state to employ Mrs. Eaves.) You already know the rest of this story: less-progressive designers started seeing Mrs. Eaves all over in the annuals, and, knowing cool when they see it, began using it everywhere. In a very short span of time, Mrs. Eaves made her way into the Top 10 “[over]used because uberfamous designers used it” Typefaces.
I remember asking a group of colleagues a year or two ago if “Mrs. Eaves was played.” Some of them didn’t really even know the typeface. Make no mistake, by now they probably do. I recently watched Kevin McConkey of gripdesign speaking to a large group: when he made a joke about “putting it in Mrs. Eaves so it’ll win an award,” everyone seemed to get it. I haven’t seen anyone else talking about it recently, but with any luck, as you’re reading this, you’re thinking “what is it with everyone coming down on Mrs. Eaves?” Finally, to underscore my point, by the end of judging this year’s CA design annual, I had seen so much Mrs. Eaves that I never wanted to see the typeface again.
So, to come full circle, I must emplore everyone to immediately stop using Mrs. Eaves. Archive the font files off onto a CD somewhere, and put it up on a shelf. I ask this of the community at large because I believe that Zuzana Licko has given us a wonderful gift in Mrs. Eaves, but we are dangerously near to causing it irreparable harm. We are at a crossroads: either put the font away for several years to let it cool off, or lock it so intrinsically with this era in time that it becomes cruelly enslaved as a caricature, used in the future by designers to denote the first years of the 2000’s, the way we currently use Bauhaus to evoke the 70’s.
Comments (6)
Nathan Voss said:
Isn’t that the Oxide Design Co. stationery materials typeface? I’m not sure of your motives here, man. Trying to get everyone to stop using it so you once again become uniqueﾖ
I would like everyone to stop using Futura for the next 10 years. Then, in a fit of retro-constuctivist design inspiration, I’ll bring it back. Wait for me on this one, folks.
Posted on October 31, 2004
Paul said:
Nice shooting, Nate - if you’re claiming Futura for keeps on your part, I’m going to nab Neutraface and run a competitive platform of 50’s-inflected futurism to lure the eyes of trendwatchers away from your purer motives…Hope I make the big bucks off this little hornswaggle and House Industries doesn’t have too much money left to prosecute with!
Drew, in as much as Zuzana’s revivalist Mrs. Eaves is such a robust, elegant, and effective bit of type design, I’m afraid we’re simply going to have to weather the storm of its proliferation at the moment and watch to see whether it successfully enters the realms of Garamond and Baskerville in terms of typographic ubiquity (though perhaps a little redundant when paired with / against Baskerville, it’s such a marvelous specimen of it that we’d all be served by it becoming a standard issue along the lines of Hoefler Text or Bookman).
Rarity and elite usage are only two marks of a specific sort of success and excellence, particularly when it comes to typefaces, and if Mrs. Eaves stands a chance of becoming the face of this period I think it’s petty to stand in the way of it realizing that role. I personally suspect that its classicism, variety, and sturdiness are going to keep it from souring in the manner of a Bauhaus or an Avant Garde, but only the visual record is going to confirm or disconfirm that. It’s designed with a true understanding and embracing of the beauty of good stroke form and weight, with an eye for the human mark and for the printed one, and finally with eyes tempered by far more caricatured faces in Zuzana’s past. This is her mature work and continues to prove that case again and again…
As a teacher and a designer, I’m actually perversely thrilled by the fact that it’s grown such enormous wings and entered so many designs - I suspect it’s both word-of-mouth recommendation, and seeing it work so well on other pieces that has put it towards the top of many designers’ lists. I’m excited to see a font that is so delectable and yet so functional make that kind of a wave - having watched things like blackletter faces, grunge faces, and sans serifs tossed on and off like so many fashion accessories, the litmus test of their merit has always come in looking at the font a few years out of its heyday and seeing what its facets and aspects look like out of the fire and out of the limelight. Blackletter faces are mellowing back into their historical roots and remain gorgeous for all the reasons they’ve always been (with a few additional tattoos, punk and rap concerts under their belts now), Grunge looks dated and ridiculous even before it previews in Suitcase, and several sans serif faces continue to straddle the uneasy identity of eternal contemporarity and stilted historicity.
At least the students seem to be responding to a font that has some wickedly strong inherent merits to it - am I simply too naive in seeing this as a sign that the level of taste and typographic sensitivity has become much more rarified even for those still in training?
Mrs. Eaves will give gradually over to the next body of fonts that CMYK or EYE magazine see fit to patronize, and will then return to the ranks of exceptional readibility and reverent revival, with or without any of our efforts to promote that move or prevent it.
I appreciate your efforts at preservation, Drew, but I suspect neither Mrs. Eaves or Ms. Licko need our particular help in that pursuit…
A random typographic urban legend: Thanks for directing us all to the actual history of the name of this font - I’d heard from a source I felt fairly reliable that the font was actually a veiled reference to the name of a housekeeper originally - the housekeeper of the family in the “Hound of the Baskervilles”. This urban legend also served to more or less accuse Licko of having only covertly indicated where she got the basic forms for this face to begin with - a notion her own account completely eradicates.
Posted on October 31, 2004
Paul said:
Almost forgot one other perverse Mrs. Eaves-related thrill from the last year: I was flipping through the New York Times (I believe) midway through last year (I’ll post it once I pull it out of storage and have a chance to scan it) and saw a public service announcement that used Eaves as the typographic voice for text that spoke of the “voice of truth” in journalism and publishing - this may in fact have been an answering to the many questions circulating after the various editorial maelstroms that the NY Times had to grapple with.
I couldn’t contain my sick little glee at the fact that Mrs. Eaves had been publicly declared a form of the “voice of truth” by its complicit participation in announcing this message. One of those times where the inner geek simply got the better of me…
Posted on October 31, 2004
鋭k said:
Amen. I have a campaign (Posters, website and pamphlets) all using Mrs Eaves from 1997 that I simply couldn’t carry around in my book after 1999 and too many snickers from creative directors while looking at my work. Not that the ideas we’re bad, but the look was suddenly so insanly dated. Now I think I might revive them actually. ;)
Posted on November 10, 2004
Font Boy said:
Oneleigh: the new Mrs. Eaves.
Posted on March 18, 2005
Tom said:
Mrs. Eaves is a very good and clever typeface. It’s completely absurd to tell everyone to stop using it. It is a VERY difficult typeface to use, I’ll give ya that and I will agree that people should stop OVERusing it…but it is still very nice and provided you use it tastefully (and often sparingly) it has it’s place in design and perhaps always will. Don’t fault a good typeface because of poor typesetters…
I do find it humorous someone joked about winning an award just for using the face…that just goes to show how superficial competitions and designers are these days… it’s like the same as saying “let’s make sure we listen to an iPod, then we’re REAL graphic designers.”
Posted on January 22, 2007