If Michael Doret only ever designed the New York Knicks logo, his exalted place in the land of bespoke letterers would be forever enshrined. (I urge the team to place a plaque commemorating his historic emblem somewhere in Madison Square Garden—or, better yet, announce a Doret Day.) Hence, I was disappointed that he did not talk more about the making of these letters at his recent Cooper Union lecture titled “1970s Old-School Lettering Skills: Back to the Drawing Board” to celebrate his long-awaited monograph, Growing Up in Alphabet City: The Unexpected Letterform Art of Michael Doret (Letterform Archive).
If the talk and the book title seem like mouthfuls of words, that’s because Doret’s life and art have been devoted to making words of all kinds jump off the page with precision—bespoke letterforms he’s been flawlessly drawing for over five decades.
The “NYK” letters and Knicks basketball logo may be his most iconic, but Doret has, remarkably for the amount of work involved, created many more custom logos, monograms, trademarks, as well as headlines and titles for magazines, movies, records, packaging and posters, which defined a genre of ’70s-’80s-’90s hybrid sign painting. And this does not even take into account his original typefaces and typo-illustrations.
For those of you who have never seen the critical mass of Doret’s output, the new (and surprisingly heavy) monograph is filled with almost everything he’s ever done with pre-digital pencil, rapidograph and drafting tools. The book is not just a trip down memory lane, it is memoir and process replete with sketches and roughs galore.
For the type and lettering student, there is a lot of history to be had, but Doret’s brilliantly obsessive methodology has much to teach the digital fontographer and typographer in today’s world. Alphabet City comes out at a propitious time, when the specter of generative AI is on our desktop and the manner that Doret practiced is going the way of flip phones and cable boxes.
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