Over at The Guardian, Frida Garza has a pleasant new piece inspecting the graphic design advertising and marketing aesthetics of gentrification. Which actually only a fancy manner of claiming: why the fuck does each new luxurious condominium advanced use Neutraface as its font of alternative?
Neutraface – a typeface identified for its clear strains and its legibility from a distance – has been dubbed the unofficial font of gentrification, based on eagle-eyed Twitter and Instagram customers who’ve noticed the typeface (and others prefer it) on buildings across the nation.
[…]
For a lot of of those professionals and tastemakers, the minimalism of Neutraface – with its skinny, pointy, attention-grabbing strains – provides whimsy and magnificence to a constructing. On the identical time, as Neutraface home numbers have turn out to be too commonplace to disregard, some now affiliate them (together with grey paint jobs) with neighborhoods overtaken by building and renovations.
That affiliation additionally lends itself to different dystopian connections: low-cost fixer-upper jobs completed on the fly, hire hikes and folks being displaced from their longtime houses. Regardless of the meanings individuals make of those home numbers, Neutraface now appears each indivisible from – and an indicator of – the fixed adjustments of our nation’s screwed-up housing market.
Garza appears to be like into the historical past of the font’s growth, in addition to the rising development of utilizing it for, ya know, these sorts of housing tasks. In my opinion, Neutraface was one of many two official typefaces utilized in my first job out of faculty in 2008, which implies the font has already gentrified a sure block in my thoughts anyway. So at the very least Garza’s examination of the Neutraface development makes me really feel rather less lonely.
The gentrification font: how a smooth typeface grew to become a neighborhood omen [Frida Garza / The Guardian]