There must be something about the Cooper Black typeface that encourages typographic nominative determinism. A mere three short years after my first post on this subject, I have recently spotted another commercial concern by the name of Cooper which uses its namesake typeface.
Step forward, as John Junor used to say, Cooper Insulation of Kells, Co Meath. Above is one of their vans, photographed in Sundrive Road, Dublin, a few hundred yards from my house. And here is the company website, featuring a number of lorries and vans decked out in the corporate colours.
Choosing a typeface because of its “accidental association” is disapproved of by most eminent typographic writers, notably Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style (Hartley & Marks, second edition 1997). Here the great man writes:
Choose faces whose individual spirit and character is in keeping with the text.
Accidental associations are rarely a good basis for choosing a typeface. Books of poems by the twentieth-century Jewish American poet Marvin Bell, for example, have sometimes been set in Bell type – which is eighteenth-century, English and Presbyterian – solely because of its name. Puns of this kind are a private amusement for typographers. But a typographic page so well designed that it attains a life of its own must be based on something more than an inside joke. (p.99)
However, it must be said that Cooper Black and its associated italic are fine typefaces, and often used in display advertising and logo design. So who’s to say that it doesn’t fit the bill in this case? (See its original promotional ad from 1922 below, found in an article on Medium.) But you can’t help feeling that the designer who chose it for this client didn’t have have a little chuckle to themselves as they did so.
Plenty of Taste 