Whatever did we see in Tekton?
There was a time — back in the early-to-mid ’90s — when we loved that font with a love that was shameless. We were puppies, licking the face of Tekton. Or perhaps Tekton was a puppy. And we let it lick our face for twenty, thirty, forty-minute stretches. And we didn’t even care that she had funky breath.
We put Tekton in our fliers. In our magazines. In our computer books.
Tekton for A-heads and running heads! Tekton for body text!
I remember going to parties where we all dressed up as Tekton letters. Everyone wanted to be the lower-case “t.” There were lower-case “t”s running around all over the place, getting drunk on “gin and tektonics,” taking whippets. It was crazy.
Now you look at ’70s fonts, for example, and no matter how dated they are, you can still understand their appeal — not just the nostalgic, looking-back appeal they have today, but the magic they must have had in the moment. You can picture someone in some 1976 font-mine wiping the ink from their hands, tilting their lantern toward the day’s work, and their buddy says: “that’s fat and freaky.” These were fonts with flair.
With Tekton, I don’t know. I mean, I remember that we felt that way. I was there. I have photographs. But I find myself incapable of recreating a mental space in which our response to Tekton seems plausible.
Did we burn out on Tekton — is that all this is? The way you can kill a favorite tune by overplaying it?
Does our perceptual shift reflect an innocence lost in this post-9/11 world — the ability to dip and swoon before a font that looks kind of like handwriting, but not really?
Or was it just that we were out of our minds?
"…something like the supervisor of an entire team of political agents…"
millenium bug madness, tekton tastes?
(say, this reminiscence could really use an icon. i had my tekton removed years ago, and i can’t remember what it looks like.)
yes, yes, i see the link now…and the whole decade is coming back to me.
people actually liked Tekton?
It’s no Hobo….
Hi Cecil,
Hilarious post. I don’t remember the Tekton craze; it looks like fit font for church bulletins and home pages devoted to kitties.
I remember a friend saying once that the ’70s was the last decade that really believed in the future. Even their cheesiest designs had a certain swagger about being, you know, sort of world of tomorrow. This font–so ’80s in its ethos–seems bent on looking backwards, embarassed about the technology and trying to suggest a kind of crafty, calligraphic-like “hand” personalizing the binary.
A history of modern civ. via typography? Your post makes me think It Could Be Done.
Good ole Hobo. Nothing beats Hobo….
Also, I really like that line about the 70s believing in the future. I’m not sure what the 80s believed in. Maybe “the future is now and it’s sort of unpleasant”?
-Cecil
Tekton-mania was just part of the whole wave of, “We all have Macintoshes now! We have our choice of 22 fonts, and we are going to use them all! On one page!”
This was just a phase that we outgrew, along with omnipresent pastels, Patrick Nagel, and drum machines. Thank goodness.
When everyone could set their own fonts, it was a sad thing. To see editors tying off in the corner while snickering designers slipped them the latest Adobe mix. And Tekton gave us the high of being architects without having to design pointless glass walls outside our houses, or chairs that bit the back of our legs. Still there was a giddiness and sweetness, an innocence to the the font when used socially.
I knew never to touch Hobo. But we all have our font shames. For me, after the gateway font of Souvenir, I sank so far as to use Peignot in public. Thankfully no current friends knew me in my days of being stoned on Boecklin, dancing naked down the street until I dissolved into butterflies.
After I recovered, I wouldn’t even touch Lithos. For a few years it was nothing but Berkeley or Utopia. But now, when I use it properly, I can still go for a little Neuland. I know I can quit anytime.