Public Typography: The Toy Store Ashley Kieffer
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{Chapter 1} The Toy Store: An Introduction {Chapter 2} The Playful & Unique (Handwritten Typography) {Chapter 3} The Geometric & Practical (Toy Store Labels and Way-finding Typography) {Chapter 4} The Script & Curls (Girls Toys Typography) {Chapter 5} The Blocky & Heavy (Boys Toys Typography) {Chapter 6} The Clean Set (Genderless or Ageless Toys Typography) {Chapter 7} The Credits & Conclusion (Reflection on Toy Store Typography)
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The Toy Store: An Introduction
“Although specialty toy stores existed in major cities like New York and Chicago as early as the 1860s, in the towns and suburbs there was no store that primarily sold toys to kids.”
—History of Toy Shopping in America
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n such a progressive world, it is difficult for local toy stores to stay afloat. Their competitors have expanded and are emerging through the internet like online toy venders, large chain toy retail centers like Toys R Us, and toy sections in super centers like Walmart and Target. Smaller scale or local toy stores have to offer more than just merchandise to attract customers. More frequently than not, local toy stores sell more specialized toys, feature different products for all age groups, and have a more interesting environment or “charm� to offset their slightly higher prices and more limited selection. They cater to those wanting something unique for the children in their lives.
Venues such as The Toy Store on Massachusetts Street in Lawrence, Kansas feature these elments that are common to local toy stores.
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The Toy Store represents a successful entrepreneurship venture and a favorite place to shop or just visit for tourists and townies alike.
A Letter from the Owner
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y name is Margaret Warner, and I have had the pleasure of being involved with The Toy Store since its
birth in 1976. Our business has grown, and today we sport two of the largest independently owned specialty toy stores in the world! Our flagship store in Topeka is over 20,000 square feet of fun, and has been awarded the prestigious Playthings Award numerous times by the Toy International Association. Our Lawrence, Kansas store is located in a beautiful historic downtown, and attracts shoppers from all over the world. The Toy Store inspires creativity, individual thinking and community awareness through play and reading. Our Toyologists are here to help you choose the perfect toys. We offer a selection of quality playthings and expert advice that only a local, family-owned business can provide. We stock today’s finest toys and books, while embracing the classic toys you remember from your childhood. Our online catalog is a small sample of what we stock in our store. We look forward to helping you choose toys that will spark your imagination! Warmly, Margaret Warner and The Toy Store family
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History of Local Toy Stores Toy retailing has undergone three signiďŹ cant changes in its social organization over the past century. First, the size, economic power, and location of stores have changed. Retail stores have become bigger, more powerful than manufacturers, and more spread out over suburban and quasirural areas. Second, the labor force inside retail stores has undergone profound rearrangement. Retail work that was previously considered appropriate for white family men has become feminized, racially mixed, part time, and temporary. And third, the toys offered for sale inside stores have changed. In contrast to a generation ago, virtually every toy brought to market today has television and movie tie-ins. These tie-ins determine the packaging design and the typography used.
Located along the historic street of downtown Lawrence, Kansas, The Toy Store has been locally owned and managed since 1976.
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The Playful & Unique
“To a child, often the box a toy came in is more appealing than the toy itself.” —Allen Klein
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alking along the bustling Mass Street sidewalk, the first thing you might notice about the Toy Store, beyond their set-type store name and black and white striped awning, is the large display window case that covers almost the entire front exterior of the store. Inside the case is usually a featured theme that changes by the month. When I visited the store, they were in the process of changing out the display to their Halloween “Monster Mash� party. A store employee uses glass paint to decorate the window surface with words and images, and then toys are arranged in the background to create a scene. This window typography is therefore uniquely handwritten and draws the attention of passing customers through its creative letter forms.
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The Toy Store employees decorate the front window for each upcoming event. During my visit they were just starting the lettering.
Handwritten signs hang from the ceiling or are displayed in clear frames for easy viewing
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andwritten signs are effective for the Toy Store because they appear more friendly and playful. They can be made uniquely and changed often. Handwritten typography is featured in several other places in the toy store.
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ust outside the main door is a chalk board easel decorated with a colorful chalked rocket ship and a message explaining that the store in under construction. An employee used chalk to write out the words manually, so each character is slightly varied and this makes the message seem more personal—almost like a handwritten letter a friend would send to you.
Updates about the Toy Store are handwritten in colorful chalk on a board that sits just outside the front door.
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llustrated typography is also featured on some of the container labels, like the sectioned boxes for marbles for example. Each label is characteristic of the marble’s name, which is based off the swirls of color and flakes inside the glass. These pieces of loose and lively type are contrasted with the more rigidly composed set type. Handwritten notices about upcoming contests are also hanging in a frame just outside the front door
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“Type that isn’t perfect reflects the imperfect language of the imperfect world inhabited by imperfect beings.” —Barry Deck
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The Geometric & Practical
“When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.”
—Patrick Rothfuss
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he Toy Store has a clean, set typeface for their logo and features a black and white color palette with a simple striped pattern. Their store name is most predominately shown on the exterior of the store stretched across the striped awning, as mentioned briefly before. The black and white set type makes an appearance in other places within the brand as well, though. Because The Toy Store is a retail outlet for other companies’ products, The Toy Store’s colorless, basic elements of their brand help offset the complex and saturated assortment of products that populates the interior of their store. The neutral color scheme is also gender-neutral. Their logo also features a friendly, line drawing of a bear which serves as a mascot of the store.
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he Toy Store also employs set type throughout the layout of the store. This style of type is typically found on price tags, shelf labels, and way-finding signage. The main purpose of these tags, labels, and signs is clarity and readability. They function most efficiently when the text color is heavily contrasted from the background (black on white) and the typography is clean. The price tags are typically small and unobtrusive as to not take away from the product packaging. The price tag stickers are also all consistent so the consumer can easily identify the cost of the item. The prices of free standing, unpackaged toys, like the marbles, candy, or other small toys, are identified through other set type labels. These labels are usually placed on the front side of the shelf and also contain the name of the product.
Simple typed identification papers provide easy-to-read labels for small novelties
Designing for Readability Readability should be one of the top concerns when it comes to any design project. If text can’t be read, then why are you designing in the first place? Good design delivers content in a way that is understandable; readability is a big part of comprehension. Today we’ll be discussing how you can plan a design around the words, so that your projects are easy to read. What is Readability? We talk about readability a lot when it comes to design. But readability, and readable or legible text, is not quite the same thing. If someone can make out letters, text is considered readable. That does not mean, though, that words are necessarily easy to read or comprehend; they are just decipherable. Readability is the ease with which text can be read. Comprehension is a key factor in terms of readability, as is being able to quickly look at—and understand—lettering. Readable text, on posters or packaging, can be scanned quickly from a distance.
Stand-alone toys often have small stickers that describe the item because there is no other packaging to do so
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“Geometry can produce legible letter but art alone makes them beautiful. Art begins where geometry ends, and imparts to letters a character trascending mere measurement.” —Paul Standard
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The Script & Curls
“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite toy.” —Marcel Proust
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he Toy Store caries a variety of products for each gender, or both, and for all age ranges. The first category of toys they sell that I wanted to focus on are the products for young girls. Girl toys, while commonly having a pastel color palette, also tend to have packaging with script or curly typefaces. Characteristically more feminine, these typefaces have varied stroke weights with more dramatic thick and thin sections. The packaging associated with the delicate, but still uniform, typeface is typically lightly colored in shades of pink, purple, and yellow. The toy brands also feature “girly� items like flowers and hearts.
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Larger brand names, such as Hello Kitty, have their own section in the store
Originally aimed at the pre-adolescent female market, the Hello Kitty product range has expanded and includes various items like dolls, stickers, greeting cards, clothes, accessories, school supplies and stationery to purses, toasters, televisions, other home appliances, massagers, and computer equipment. These products range from mass market items to high-end consumer products or rare collectibles.
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Ty specializes in making adorable plush toys— deemed “Beanie Babies” due to their stuffing being small plastic beans. Ty Beanie Babies feature a slightly more feminine logo typeface that is rounded and friendly. Ty produces a range of characters in small plushie form, including Pooh Bear and My Little Pony. The Toy Store has Beanie Babies in several sections of the store including the plush area and downstairs in the book area.
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“I do not think of type as something that should be readable. It should be beautiful.”
—Ed Benguiat
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The Most Popular Dress-Up Doll: Barbie Barbie’s real name is Barbara Millicent Roberts. In 1959, the first Barbie doll sold for $3.00, that is equivalent of $23.97 today. The first Barbie doll was available as either a blonde or a brunette. The first Barbie dolls were manufactured in Japan and their clothes were hand-stitched by Japanese workers. Barbie’s were manufactured in Japan until 1972. Barbie isn’t from Malibu, she is actually from (fictional) Willows, Wisconsin. Barbie was originally a 17-yearold “Teen Age Fashion Model.” She has had more than 130 careers; they have included being an elementary school teacher, a business executive, a McDonald’s cashier, a doctor, an astronaut, and yes, even a rapper. Ken is two years and two days younger than Barbie (he was introduced in 1961). Also, his full name is Ken Carson. Ken has never put a ring on it—he and Barbie have never officially been married.
The Toy Store features several Barbie toys including a Barbie Glam Convertable
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The Blocky & Heavy
“A child’s appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.”
—Christopher Lasch
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nother category of toys that takes up a large section of the store is “boy toys,� or those products targeted primarily at young boys. These toys tend to feature blocky, heavy typefaces that are accentuated by exciting effects like lightning or explosions. The bold letters tend to be more traditional, uniform typefaces that are even less varied than the girl toys typefaces. The packaging is also dominated by darker, more masculine colors such as blue, red, and green. The type on these packages tends to have more monoweight strokes, or little variation in the thick and thin sections of the letters.
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Type in these products are bold and all capital letters to create a feeling of stability 足足 like building blocks
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“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.”
—Robert Bringhurst
Greatest Building Block Toy: Legos The LEGO Group’s story begins in 1932, when Ole Kirk Christiansen began making wooden toys for children. However, the LEGO brick—as we know it today—wasn’t launched until 1958. Simple, durable, and colorful, the LEGO brick design created that year was ideal for a child’s toy. The plastic bricks are part of an interlocking system that has just the right amount of grip: The bricks hold together well but can be taken apart easily by a child. And consistency has been key. The bricks produced today can interlock with those produced back in 1958. The rise in popularity of LEGO bricks can be attributed to the amount of imagination a child can use to build something with the bricks. The bricks are so versatile that the LEGO Group has calculated that just six eight-stud bricks can be arranged in 915,103,765 different ways.
Lego has created a huge variety of building sets, including this technologically advanced Mindstorm robot device
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The Clean & Legible
“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.”
—Albert Einstein
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he final assortment of toys in the store can be classified into the genderless toys typography. A few examples of gender-neutral toys include card games, board games, and most of the plushy animals. Toys made for infants also tend to be for either gender.
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One of the largest sections in the Toy Store is the area for card games and boardgames
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oardgames, card games, and stuffed animals to a certain extent tend to have a large target age range. Many of the boardgames and card games can be played by those who are 4+, 12+, etc. years of age and therefore the typeface must be reflective of this broad—virtually ageless and genderless—audience.
Here is an example for a newer board game. The Game of Things uses modified geometric type that is set untraditionally.
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Card games are packaged in brightly colored boxes to draw the customer’s attention.
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hile some of the newer games feature more expressive and creative typefaces to reflect the playful spirit of the game, many of the classics, like Checkers or Chess, feature very geometric or traditional sans serif typefaces. The color palette for these items vary based on the specific game and market. Games for a younger age range tend to be more brightly colored with busier packaging while games targeting older people tend to be cleaner with a limited color palette and simplified design.
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nfant toys typically also have traditionally set typefaces that are sans serif and more humanistic. They are often set in a single case and the packaging tends to use fewer colors to contrast with the colorful patterned toy or product. The Toy Store sells several products that are made by forward thinking designers. These items often have very simplified, clean packaging that operate on the premise of “less is more.�
HABA is an infant toy brand that uses clean, rounded capital letters for their brand.
“It becomes impossible to tell if the most popular typefaces are easy to read because they are commonly used, or if they are commonly used because they are easy to read.”
—Zuzana Licko
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The Toy Store also features a diverse selection of colorful puppets. The Puppet Company has a simple logo to contrast with the assortment of products they sell.
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The Credits & Conclusion
In Conclusion There are many features that are unique to local toy stores that give them an extra boost of charm to attract buyers. Such elements include handwritten typography, more specialized toys, and different products for all age groups. All of these pieces come together to form a more engaging experience for the customer to compensate for their slightly higher prices and more limited selection. The Toy Store, on Massachusetts Street in Lawrence, Kansas, thrives in its historic location. The various typographic components of The Toy Store help distinguish specific toy categories—categories that help companies target a specific consumer age group or gender. Deciphering the layers of typography, image, and color in the store allows the visitor to fully enjoy in the toy buying experience.
Patrick Dooley Designer as Author University of Kansas Fall 2013
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SPECIAL THANKS to the Toy Store and the friendly workers there, to the Design Department for letting me check out the camera, and to my dear friend Charlie McCool for helping with my two hour photoshoot COPY set in Archer and Trade Gothic PHOTOS by Ashley Kieffer, using a Canon EOS 40D
IN REFLECTION, I really enjoy the exploration and new perspective that came along with this project. I had made several trips to the toy store prior to this project and it was amazing to me how much more alive the store became once I started looking closer at how the type worked. There are so many elements that make up retail stores. I felt enlightened as I walked along Massachusetts Street, looking at all the typography in the stores and restaurants downtown. It was a wonderful experience to make a photobook and write the body copy for it. I enjoy book layouts and setting images with typography. I think the colorful images tell a narrative of the realm in which toys and typography meet. It took several editions to finally hit my groove for this project, but I am satisfied with the result. There were so many pictures and interesting product typography I still could have added, but I think the selection I chose summarizes the Toy Store well. —Ashley Kieffer
BIBLIOGRAPHY Cousins, Carrie. “The Importance of Designing for Readability.” Design Shack. Compact Creative, 22 July 2013. Web. 1 Nov. 2013. <http://designshack.net/ articles/typography/the-importance-of-designing-for-readability/>. Galindo, Brian. “18 Surprising Things You Don’t Know About Barbie.” BuzzFeed Rewind. BuzzFeed, Inc., 20 May 2013. Web. 1 Nov. 2013. <http://www. buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/18-surprising-things-you-dont-know-aboutbarbie>. Gerianne M. Alexander, Teresa Wilcox, & Rebecca Woods. (2009). Sex differences in infants’ visual interest in toys. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 38, 427–433. “Hello Kitty.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 11 Sept. 2013. Web. 1 Nov. 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Kitty>. “History of Toy Shopping in America.” UC Press. Ed. Alison Mudditt. University of California Press, n.d. Web. 05 Oct. 2013. <http://www.ucpress.edu/>. Pisani, Joseph. “The Making Of... a Lego.” Bloomberg Business Week. Bloomberg LP, 29 Nov. 2006. Web. 1 Nov. 2013. <http://www.businessweek.com/ stories/2006-11-29/the-making-of-a-legobusinessweek-business-newsstock-market-and-financial-advice>. “Toy Advertising.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 09 Jan. 2013. Web. 07 Oct. 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_advertising>. Warner, Margaret. “About Us.” The Toy Store. Specialty Toys Network, 2013. Web. 19 Oct. 2013. <http://www.thetoystoreonline.com/read/19/about-us>.
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