Joshua Darden

Case Study: W Magazine

Considered by many to be the crown jewel of Fairchild Publications' empire, W Magazine's oversized pages feature the biggest and best of everything — lush photography, trend-setting fashion and opulent accessories, all presented in a rarefied system of layouts. When group design director Edward Leida noticed that numerous competitors were knocking off W's signature style, he began a soft redesign of the magazine, bringing the familiar aesthetic to a new (and less easily imitated) level of refinement. Realizing that the magazine was pushing the popular and traditional retail typeface Serifa beyond its capacity, he turned to typeface designer Joshua Darden for ideas.

Leida was drawn to Darden's fresh retail slab-serif family, Freight Micro. These fonts were designed for use at small sizes, which led to a very peculiar collection of forms to counteract the adverse conditions of newsprint and other low-resolution settings. Setting the fonts at display sizes, Leida found that these quirks gave headlines a unique personality.

While attempts were made to adapt Freight Micro to display settings, Darden found that he kept returning to his sketchbook with new ideas. "It turned into a new family of fonts," he explains. "When minor cosmetic alterations proved insufficient, we agreed upon a more drastic solution — building W Macro on a completely different infrastructure of shapes." The result: a new design, comprised of four weights in roman and italic.

Drawing W Macro from scratch gave Darden an opportunity to address the magazine's specific needs. Where Freight Micro's recommended use range tops out at 9 point (due to Freight's larger system of optical sizes), the new W Macro is built to dazzle from text sizes (for sidebars and bylines) to dense all-caps headlines at 200 point. The weight range is specific to Edward Leida's requests, and a number of alternate letters and non-alphabetic symbols allow the fonts to integrate smoothly into W's existing editorial format.

Ultimately, the new fonts' greatest accomplishment is to give W an exclusive brand asset: for as long as the fonts remain proprietary, no other publication can come close to their new look.