BOLD TYPE

Watch firms come in for withering criticism from typographers. We examine the issue at length, while making amends for our own lackadaisical attitude over the years.

- Josh Sims

 

Philippe Apeloig doesn't hold back. "The watch industry is just a little backward when it comes to typography," he says. "It just isn't a priority for its companies when they consider their dials. Design for them is so much more related to shape, materials and so on, that an opportunity is missed to give a watch personality through type. Perhaps the problem is that when typography is well-done it's invisible. It's rarely meant to be spectacular. But that doesn't mean it's not completely changing the aspect of a watch."

Apeloig knows of what he speaks: he is the French typographer who, a decade ago this year, was hired by Hermès Horloger to give his attention to the Slim d'Hermès. The result is a curiously bisected, light and, perhaps most importantly of all, distinctive stencil-like number form, and arguably the most celebrated instance of watch dial typography in recent years. Apeloig also worked on the H08 seen here.

Indeed, it is a counter, in a way, to the criticism levelled by typographers at so many dials on so many watches from many of the most esteemed makers: why, for example, is there a strange gap in the kerning between the 'a' and 'i' on the dial of a 2019 reissue Rado Captain Cook, seemingly just repeating the error found on the 1960s model; why does the Grand Seiko SBGR077 use not one but a jumble of four typefaces on the same dial; or why the flurry of city names in the fancy Chancery font was thought to sit well alongside the hours in plain Arial on the Patek Philippe 5131 world time watch.