I’m curious: How do y’all feel about “fun type?” You know—typography that feels ‘bouncy’ or ‘playful,’or like what it really wants to say is  Party Time!!? Well. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

The thing is, I’ve been kicking around an idea for a personal project, and the last time I paid a visit to Momma’s house I hit upon a fitting title: Carter’s. (Not ready to tell you yet what the project is exactly, but that’s beside the larger point; you’ll just have to bear with me.) Title inspiration struck when I unearthed this old photo of my grandmother, Mary, with a couple other gals in Milan, Tennessee, in 1962, next to grandpa’s pickup, emblazoned with the name of the gas station he used to run: Carter’s DX. See—that was their last name. Carter.

[side note: DX was a midwestern brand of the Tulsa-based of Sunray DX Oil Co., which merged with Sun Oil in 1968. In the late ’80s, Sun began rebranding the DX stations under the Sunoco name.]

Anyway, I thought Carter’s would be a fitting name for my project. So I set about thinking up a logo. I was originally going to lift the type treatment right off the hand-lettering on the side of the truck, but as you can see, whoever scrawled that on there wasn’t exactly a wiz in the aesthetics department.

As I played with the letters of the name, it seemed it wanted to be a bit off kilter. The letterforms just didn’t fit snugly enough when they were all in alignment. A page from my sketchbook below:

Which brings us back to my original quandry: It looks so damn playful!

I think what it is is that type that doesn’t share the same baseline with the adjacent letters automatically looks like it’s having a good ’ol time. Why is this? Is it some residual effect of epic 20th century branding efforts (on the part of kids’ products, toys, cereal, etc.), now ingrained in our visual-cultural mental library? I mean, why does it automatically scream out, “I’m having fun!,” and not “I’m drunk!”?

To get to the bottom of this, I investigated other venerable brands that use a similar treatment. There’s Playskool [Won’t be getting into all the questions the spelling raises, in this post]—

—Obviously, they’re just doin’ it for the kids.

But then there’s the inexplicable PriceWaterhouseCoopers logotype:

Um, please explain? Is this solution just to horizontally compress such an incredibly long name? ’Cause it looks pretty fun to me, and I don’t see how that could be what they’re going for.

The last witness I’ll call to the stand is the title treatment for the play/film Alfie, which kept the “playfulness” intact from the Michael Cane version all the way through to Jude Law’s interpretation of the role.

And here’s Jude, for good measure:

(Alfie was [is], like, a playboy, I think. Which must explain all the playfulness going on.)

All of this to say that perhaps I’m okay with Carter’s sans consistent baseline? Or maybe I’m venturing into treacherous waters, and should just stick with the truck type? (The more I investigate this question, the more I think the latter might be the way to go.)

Watch for it…