Over at The Guardian, Frida Garza has a pleasant new piece analyzing the graphic design advertising aesthetics of gentrification. Which actually only a fancy manner of claiming: why the fuck does each new luxurious rental advanced use Neutraface as its font of alternative?
Neutraface – a typeface recognized for its clear traces and its legibility from a distance – has been dubbed the unofficial font of gentrification, in response to eagle-eyed Twitter and Instagram customers who’ve noticed the typeface (and others prefer it) on buildings across the nation.
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For a lot of of those professionals and tastemakers, the minimalism of Neutraface – with its skinny, pointy, attention-grabbing traces – provides whimsy and class to a constructing. On the similar time, as Neutraface home numbers have change into too commonplace to disregard, some now affiliate them (together with grey paint jobs) with neighborhoods overtaken by development and renovations.
That affiliation additionally lends itself to different dystopian connections: low-cost fixer-upper jobs carried out on the fly, lease hikes and folks being displaced from their longtime houses. Regardless of the meanings folks 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 seems to be into the historical past of the font’s growth, in addition to the rising pattern of utilizing it for, ya know, these sorts of housing tasks. Personally, Neutraface was one of many two official typefaces utilized in my first job out of school in 2008, which implies the font has already gentrified a sure block in my thoughts anyway. So at the least Garza’s examination of the Neutraface pattern makes me really feel rather less lonely.
The gentrification font: how a smooth typeface turned a neighborhood omen [Frida Garza / The Guardian]