BOLD TYPE
MEN'S FOLIO Malaysia|December 2022/January2023
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
BOLD TYPE

 

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.

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