Shortly after the beginnings of their partnership, Frere-Jones, with the help of Hoefler, began a commission for GQ. The design brief was entirely aesthetic: a masculine and geometric sans-serif, that was new, fresh and versatile. Given the ambiguity, Frere-Jones decided to return to a project he began in the early 1990s, one he still wanted to explore further: working-class lettering. These kinds of letters fascinated Frere-Jones because they were not created by a designer, but an engineer. They were so basic, that a designer would turn up his nose at them.

Steel signage,

on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Little West 12th Street.

The letters, though they appeared modernist, were inherently different from their German and Swiss counterparts, most notably the ubiquitous Helvetica. The earliest examples of this lettering date back to the Work Project Administration Posters of post-depression America.

It is possible that these typefaces were inspired by the simplification of typographic standards that came out of Nazi Germany, which frowned upon extraneous decoration. This attitude was present in Germany’s contemporary architecture, the organization of that society itself, and it was definitely present in the popular typefaces, like Univers and Futura, that emerged during this period. New Deal America was trying for the same kind of graphic unification, leading to the development of what Frere-Jones has taken to calling the American sans-serif.

Neon channel letters,

on Eighth Avenue, west of Pennsylvania Station

Historically, lettering like this was created completely outside of the realm of type design. It was geometric and bold, and it looked like draftsman lettering. As a rule, signs that used it were devoid of stylistic embellishments and were based entirely on legibility and the ability to reproduce letters mechanically. The style was long treated for many years as a formula for signage lettering, and so it was popular in the urban landscape. The American sans-serif dominated cities until the late 1950s, when the typeface Helvetica was introduced. Quickly, the hand-rendered American sans was all but obsolete.

Obsolete, until Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler stood under the sign over the entrance to the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal, admiring the lettering.

Aluminum signage,

the eighth avenue facade of New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal.

From there, Frere-Jones and Hoefler combed the streets of New York City for the rest of the alphabet. The capitals were easy to build; both because those letterforms embodied the most basic forms of the alphabet and because the engineers who designed these signs worked exclusively in the upper case, as mixture of cases would only serve to clutter the signage. The numbers too, were readily accessible, while the lowercase was created almost completely from scratch.

The subsequent typeface Tobias Frere-Jones designed, is called Gotham. And it’s everywhere.