There seems to be a lot distressed wood type being used in the design of print ads these days. And when I say “seems to be” I mean that if you don’t look too closely you might mistake it for distressed wood type.
Let us look a little closer though. A case of type (not a drawer of type) contains many separate pieces. The nature of movable type is that copy is set from a case and used for the printing of a job and then, when the work is wrought off, the type is laid back into the case from whence it came. Some of the pieces of type are used more often that others. Some pieces are treated more roughly than others while some are treated more gently. Some type gets dropped, some type gets nicked.
Because of this, individual pieces of type have all lived very different lives.
When I look at mock-distressed type I am always a little irked by the similarity of the degradation of the letters. It is as though each piece has been abused in exactly the same manner and to exactly the same degree. Each one dropped, each one nicked, each one carefully roughed up.
In the end, what should be an interesting crowd of faces, with disparate scars and wrinkles reflective of their varied life experiences is, instead, a clownish homogenization of a rustic ideal.
Yesterday I placed a form of wooden type in the bed of a press and, as I printed the run, each face kissed the sheets of paper with its own intensely personal passion. The lingering impression of each kiss a poetic indication of a life well lived.
And I am always left wanting just one more kiss.