Cooper Black has survived the phototype and digital revolutions, and since the s has been a standard transfer type — but who knows the man behind the face?
Oswald Cooper — Oz or Ozzie to his friends — was born in , a native of Coffeeville, Kansas, who in his teens settled in Chicago, originally to study illustration, but eventually to become one of the leading practitioners of the Chicago Style.
Lettering, typography and illustration were the defining media; advertising the primary outlet. The Boston Style was attributable to W. Goudy both of whom spent time in Chicago , while the Chicago or Midwestern Style was driven by Cooper, who combined calligraphic skill with typographic expertise to create press advertisements that were modern in character and classic in form.
A Vocation by Accident During the first two decades of the s, most advertisements were illustrated and lettered by hand to achieve individuality within the bounds of convention. A successful commercial artist had to be either a smart salesperson or a skilled general practitioner, adept at the rather tedious art of lettering.
The more versatile and imaginative the artist — and Cooper was both — the happier, and more forthcoming, the clients. Cooper stumbled into his lifelong vocation by accident. Goudy befriended Oz and helped him to earn his tuition fees by assigning him jobs setting type for correspondence course booklets: a happy career move, since Cooper soon realised that he had little talent for drawing pictures, but a real knack for the art of lettering.
Soon he was appointed as a lettering teacher, and though the pay was poor, if he was paid at all, he enjoyed his work and the friends he made — maestro W. Dwiggins, cartoonist Harry Hirschfield, and, of course, Goudy. While teaching at Holme, Cooper met Fred Bertsch, who ran an art service agency next door to the school. Lessons in Structural Form Eventually, their financial success allowed them to open the full service shop they had dreamed of, giving Cooper the opportunity to test his other talents.
Although he honoured the past, Cooper was not its prisoner. One of the things that has always struck me about Cooper Black is how soft it is despite the gaudiness of its weight and the scale of its serifs. Competitors like Goudy Heavy [7] were drawn to try to coast on the Cooper Black trend but never reached the same level of success.
Cooper Black has made the transition from metal type, to wood type [4] , and even Letraset , such was its ubiquity. I find these tactile production methods to be a particularly good medium for the inherent softness of the font, and they ground the odd characters in a physical way that adds even more warmth to the design.
The metal and plastic feels too slick and cold, though there is something pleasant about seeing the beefy characters brought into the third dimension. The best part of writing these reviews is that it forces me to look deeper at typefaces I might have taken for granted. Many of the details in the uppercase set draw your eye towards the lowercase characters that will follow and I think the cap-height, x-height and width of the typeface are all perfectly in sync.
I think this spread from the New York Magazine shows off how handsome a design Cooper Black is when you divorce it from your preconceptions [14].
It makes them sensuous and just a little dirty. Cooper Black works brilliantly with saturated colors. Its stout forms can stay legible when reversed out of a hot color without being overwhelmed, and can drink up colorful ink by the buckets. The number of designs that leverage this talent of the font are too many to review here, but I have pulled some of my favorites.
The puffy letters resemble clouds and stand in contrast to the sleekness of an airliner. The bright salmon color suits the playful nature of the typeface, and the word-mark has the letters squished together so they form one inter-connected, cloudy mass. The word-mark is paired with a clean geometric sans, which plays a perfect straight man against the quirk of its counterpart. Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.
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