The entire library of the type foundry is used across the book, highlighting the best and worst musical double acts over the years.
If you’re a music enthusiast and a type geek, you’ll know that finding a book to satisfy those two interests would be quite the challenge. Well, look no further! Transatlantic type foundry Commercial Type’s latest launch, Double Acts in Pop, is the answer to your prayers.
Described as a “272-page visual journey meets 1,652-word essay”, the book features Commercial Type’s entire catalogue of typefaces (60+ families). Designed by Chris Wu, edited by writer Caren Litherland, and printed by Conti Tipocolor, Florence, Double Acts in Pop is obviously visually stunning, but it is meant to be read as much as admired.
For the book, Commercial Type co-founders Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz partnered with MTV podcaster and Pitchfork writer Molly Lambert to explore enduring musical duos, fleeting collaborations, and side project partnerships within bands. Think Wham!, Simon & Garfunkel, Lennon and McCartney, and the list goes on.
Lambert reveals the creative peaks, feuds, and hilarious pettiness of some of her favourite and most hated musical duos – all through the typefaces of one of the most prolific type design duos to date.
The double act in type design
Barens and Schwartz have worked together since 2003, when they were paired up to draw a new set of typefaces for The Guardian. “We knew each other a bit before but quickly bonded over shared interests, especially pop music,” Schwartz reveals.
“When we’ve done lecture tours, Paul always comments on how we’re ‘the best as a double act,’ so making a book about double acts in pop music seemed like an obvious idea to us.”
Schwartz reveals that some of his favourite double acts mentioned in the book are Pet Shop Boys, Wham!, and Sparks. He says: “You’ve got the more gregarious member of the pair, with the quieter one amused in the background – I like that dynamic.
“Paul can’t stand Eurythmics and wanted to leave them out; Molly hates Paul Simon but wrote about Simon & Garfunkel anyway, and I really don’t like Steely Dan, but the way Chris used Seance and Blanchard together more than makes up for it.”
Despite the more fun aspect of the project, the type design duo didn’t lose sight of the fact that explaining to music audiences that the book is also a type specimen and explaining to design audiences that it’s also a music book (that you can actually read cover to cover) would be a big part of the challenge. “It’s always been important to us that our type specimens can be read in addition to being looked at,” says Schwartz.
He believes that, while Pangrams have their place, they’re “not very interested in grumpy wizards, brown foxes, and liquor jugs”. Instead, they prefer to judge the character of a typeface when looking at real text.
Finding the right approach
Early on, the idea was to use a line or two from each Billboard #1 song, starting with “West End Girls” by Pet Shop Boys in 1986 and running through the ’90s and ’00s. However, Schwartz says this quickly turned out to be “unwieldy”, especially for text faces that longer chunks of copy would better serve.
Instead, they commissioned one 13,000-word essay, making the book much stronger and easier to follow. Schwartz adds, “I know it was tricky for Chris to figure out the overall rhythm of the book, maintaining the right level of energy across 242 pages without it feeling too choppy and frenetic.
“Perhaps the biggest challenge of all was the anticipation while the books shipped from the printer in Italy to our office in New York when all we could do was wait!”
A dream team
In Barens and Schwartz’s view, Chris Wu at Wkshps was the first and only choice to design the book. “He’s a great designer who does work we love, and we’ve worked together enough to know he would be able to take our vague but ambitious ideas and synthesize them into something wonderful,” Schwartz explains.
In some ways, their relationship with Wu is somewhat unconventional, as they’ve taken turns being on the client side. Commercial Type has previously hired him and his team to design posters, ads, and its previous website. At the same time, he has commissioned custom typefaces and licensed fonts from the foundry for identity, exhibition, and book projects.
Commercial Type also has a history with the book’s editor, Caren Litherland, and has worked with her on commissioning and editing text from various writers for two online type specimens: The Food Issue and ‘Static Screen’. Schwartz says, “Caren and I bounced ideas back and forth about who should write the essay that would form the backbone of the book, and Molly Lambert was at the top of both of our lists.
“We were drawn to her freewheeling style, thinking it could perfectly thread together the wildly varying layouts of the specimen.”
When designing the book, the foundry wanted a compact format that felt comfortable to hold. This format facilitates both sitting back and reading the book and flipping through quickly to browse the typefaces. Commercial Type’s whole library is represented in the book: all its releases, all of the Commercial Classics, and much of its Vault.
Schwartz describes the cover as “deceptively simple, not giving a hint of the chaos to come”. He adds that Wu designed each spread individually, making the book feel like” quite a journey from beginning to end”.
Tactility over tech
“Our last comprehensive printed type specimen was in 2014, so considering how our library has grown over the past decade, we felt like it was time for the next one,” says Schwartz. A huge ambition for the book was to give people the opportunity to browse the whole library through a tactile experience.
Schwartz explains: “Foundry websites have taken on the role that specimen books used to play for graphic designers, letting them get a taste of different typefaces to help choose which one would best fit any given project.
“Websites do this better than a book ever could, but, on the other hand, it’s a little harder to flip through and find a typeface by chance on a foundry site than it is in a book, so we really wanted to lean into that gap.”
