By: Neil Macmillan

Interstate from Font Bureau is one of Sainsburys' weapons in the extremely competitive battle for supermarket customers. This huge seller for The Font Bureau, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones and based on the American highways signage typeface, is used on ads and in-store. Gone from Sainsburys is their bastardised, romanised Perpetua Italic which typos either loved or loathed. Tesco, on the other hand, seem to have ditched the somewhat laid-back and subtle FF Providence Sans for a powerful 'in your face' use of Bernhard Gothic. Getting back to Sainsburys and an interesting association, Nick Cooke, whose 'GTypes' collection Fontworks has just launched, 'cut' the very light Century display face featuring in Sainsburys Magazine.

There's an extremely competitive battle going on, too, between airlines Go and EasyJet, and there couldn't be more of a contrast between the types used in their corporate identities. The Go sans-serif, developed by Jeremy Tankard whilst at Wolff Olins, is an exclusive design loosely based on Berthold's Akzidenz Grotesk. Elegant and cool, it successfully supports the Go philosophy. Slight bias here as the writer, who regularly travels between Edinburgh and London with Go, has always found it living up to the hype. EasyJet utilises the cheap and cheerful associations of Oz Cooper's Cooper Black. As EasyJet's telephone number, the numerals of this wonderful typeface, from one of my favourite type designers, look sensational stretching the height and width of a Boeing 737 fuselage. But I think EasyJet misses out on the full potential of Cooper Black by resorting too easily in their press ads and posters to weak use of the supporting sans-serif, Futura.

The Guardian, the current doyen of UK newspaper style, has replaced its text font Nimrod, designed by Robin Nicholas, with Matthew Carter's Miller. This distinctive design, with a hint of Richard Austin's Bell and inspired by Scotch Roman from Edinburgh typefounders Miller & Richard , was introduced as a complementary display font to Helvetica. A special text version was commissioned, called News Miller, and the very pleasing result of its introduction can be witnessed for a mere 45p (50p in the Republic of Ireland).

Magazines seem to have replaced press ads as the most exciting source of innovative type use. 'GQ' magazine has introduced Adobe Myriad as its dominant display face. Myriad has worked well on 'Graphics International' magazine since its introduction through a redesign by MetaDesign London. The typeface, designed in 1992 by Carol Twombly and Robert Slimbach, is one of Adobe's Multiple Master fonts, a factor which is responsible for its limited success to date. Fontworks have some copies of the Adobe Myriad specimen books for sale. These award-winning booklets explain Multiple Master technology and show excellent samples of the typeface at work. Check the books section of our web site.

The Shire Types by Jeremy Tankard, part of Fontworks' Special Collections, are currently being used to great effect by 'Front' magazine. According to Jeremy,"There are no ascenders or descenders in The Shire Types, accented characters shrink to fit the general character height and capital letters mix happily with their less stately comrades; it's a classless and caseless system". Yes, it's a very interesting and novel typeface development and it's good to see it used so well by 'Front'.

Toronto type designer Nick Shinn's sans-serif Shinn family works well in Emap's 'New Woman' magazine. Styled by freelance editorial designer Andy Cowles, 'New Woman' utilises the subtle sans-serif nuances to great advantage. Shinn is available through Fontworks from the ITF CD. Nick Shinn is currently working with Fontworks on a Special Collection and an interesting addition to the FontBox will be mailing soon.

Several weeks ago, the Weekend FT launched a new magazine, 'the business'. Art director Gary Cook and design consultant Vince Frost made an interesting choice of display face. Tasse, from The Font Bureau, is a multi-weight version of Topic or Steile Futura designed by Futura man, Paul Renner for the German Bauer typefoundry between 1953 and 1955. Its use in text alongside ITC Garamond Condensed proves a successful combination. It's worth a Saturday morning trip to the newsagent to check it out. Type fiends might be interested to know that Julius Bauer, founder of the typefoundry of that name, trained in Edinburgh with the Miller & Richard company.

Continuing within the newspaper magazine vein, Wayne Ford, art director of The Observer's 'Life' magazine is making powerful use of Berthold's Evo. Evo, designed by Marco Ganz for Berthold in 1994, is a serious contender in the alternative sans-serif stakes. Within 'Life' magazine Evo successfully complements its text partner, FF Scala. Meanwhile, down at Canary Wharf, The Independent's Saturday magazine combines the beautiful Arepo by Sumner Stone, with a black extended Helvetica and the text face Charter. Styled by John Belknap, the display types work well but there must be some reservations about the stiffness of text face Charter.

Concluding this review are some comments on type use by PC retailers, Gateway and PC World. A shrewd type mind has styled the Gateway press campaign with one of the earliest FontFonts, FF Advert by Just van Rossum. This strong sans-serif family, in four weights with interesting alternative lowercase 'a's, brands the Gateway campaign successfully. Unfortunately there are no italics available with FF Advert. Signata, designed for Berthold by Bernd Möllenstädt, is the choice for PC World's press campaign. Yet another sans-serif family, but this time with contrasting thicks and thins, Signata succeeds in giving the PC World ads a dynamic edge.

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