#2 / Winter 2010

2
3 Welcome
A note from the editor

4 A World of Words
Intro by Aegir Hallmundur

6 Martin Majoor

8 Faces #
14 Ale Paul

22 Stephen Coles

30 Tim Brown

38 Nick Sherman

46 Rich Rutter
This magazine was made possible
54 Veronika Burian & José Scaglione
thanks to the kind and generous
support of our partners. Thank you! 62 Work as if You Live in The
Early Days of a Better Nation
Artwork by Jez Burrows
Platinum
Partner 64 P is for Paper
Competition winner Ayaka Ito

Diamond 66 Fakir
Partner Feature by Samantha Cliffe

70 Windows Phone 7
Diamond Feature by Elliot Jay Stocks
Partner
72 A Brief History of Uncial Type
Feature by Dan Reynolds
Diamond
Partner 76 The Ad Section

PAG E 02 CO N T E N T S
Welcome
I’ve recently returned from
speaking at Brooklyn Beta, at
which I did a presentation on
8 Faces — an overview of how it
went from a half-baked, slightly
silly idea to a real, finished,
printed magazine that sold out of
all 1000 of its copies within just
two hours. At the end of the talk,
I thanked everyone who had
bought a copy and unexpectedly
found myself with a tear in my eye.
It was as if I’d suddenly realised
what had happened, and I felt
genuinely overcome with gratitude
for everyone who bought a copy
of our debut issue.
Many people asked me if I’d known
how successful #1 was going to
be, and I can say with complete
WELCOME
A note from the editor
honesty that I had no idea
whatsoever! Its near-immediate
sell-out was as much of a surprise
to me as it was to the thousands
clamouring to get a copy.
This time around, we’ve tripled
the print run in an effort to satisfy
the demand. We’ve also upped the
page count, added new features,
partnered with a number of great
companies to turn this from a side
project into a proper business, and
enlisted the help of many talented
individuals to contribute to an
issue which may prove to be
even better than the first!
Thanks once again for your
support. We wouldn’t
be here without you!
PA G E 03
A World
We live in a world of words.
Technological development in
recent years has seen an explosion
in the ways we appreciate and
consume the written word. From
artisanal letterpress to digital
billboards and nanotechnological
e-ink book readers; the sheer range
of technology we use to display
type is enormous, and — temporary
phenomenon or long-term trend —
it will all have an impact on how
we design and think about type.
Type has gone beyond being
merely moveable: it is now active.
Our words are no longer passive
things, waiting for the turn of a
page and the glance of an eye.
They are active, they are input:
software constructs possessed of
logical structure and semantics,
and connected to a whole world of
data. When we type our keystrokes
are interpreted: if there’s a ‘va’,
the kerning may be adjusted, if
there’s a double-f, the screen may
show a ligature, if the word is
part of a search, the screen may
start to fill with results before we
even finish typing, and if — quelle
horreur! — our word isn’t in a
system dictionary, it will get
highlighted or even replaced
with a ‘correct’ one.
As typographers and type
designers, we’re very much part
of this process. With contextual
ligatures and glyph substitution,
we can beautify and clarify words
as they’re typed; with hinting and
kerning we can ensure readability
across a range of devices and
resolutions; with unicode we can
cover all the world’s languages;
with universal icons and symbols
we hoped (and, perhaps, still hope)
to bring type to the illiterate.
 of Words
In our design tools we look forward
to greater availability of OpenType
features to automatically add
our ligatures, loops and swashes,
and substitute our glyphs for the
correct ones; adding quote marks,
fractions, arrow symbols and so
on; the list grows. How soon before
everything we use is unobtrusively
cleaning up our mangled words,
teaching us that if we start typing
this word, we can press enter
after three characters and it’ll
do the rest, or that if we want an
apostrophe — don’t worry — it’ll
add one for us.
We’re developing a world
where our words are constantly
interpreted, corrected and now,
often finished for us. We’re
developing this idea of type as a
system, something long discussed
and now possible. In simple but
ever more interesting and complex
ways, the words we type speak
back to us; they respond to our
intentions and even correct us.
Now, with our phones (and soon,
perhaps our laptops and desktops),
we’re getting used to starting
a word and letting it suggest
words we might mean, or even to
finish them for us with barely a
confirmation needed.
Perhaps decades ahead we’ll
be designing type not just
with ligatures but whole new
characters for the parts of words,
abbreviations and even whole
words no-one wants to type in full
anymore. We already have some
candidates: what might the ‘lol’
character look like? What
about ‘wtf’?
Digital type and text composition
are going to be very different in the
future, we just have to make sure
that what we end up reading is
what we intended to write.
Aegir Hallmundur, November 2010
Martin
Majoor
Not many type designers would boast
about only producing one typeface
every six years, but then not every
type designer is Martin Majoor. This is
the man who virtually wrote the rule
book on super-families and influenced
many with his famous type design
philosophy: a principle that says the
serif, sans, and slab serif should all
share the same basic structure. We
talked theory with the father of Scala...
martinmajoor.com
PAG E 06 INTERVIEW
12345678
You developed your type system of creating a sans
and a serif — and later a slab — from the same form,
which you later coined ‘The Nexus Principle’, after your
work on Nexus. Has that evolved even further since
2005 (when you wrote the article on your type design
philosophy), or do the same principles apply to your
more recent type design projects?
The principle hasn’t changed, although I might
have extended it a little bit. After I made ‘The Nexus
Principle’ (nexus meaning ‘connection’), that for me
was the basic thing about this whole project: to make
connections; to base it on one thing, make a sans and a
slab, and have all of them connected.
In the same way, you can connect a fourth font if you
want, and that is something I’ve been experimenting
with, although I’ve never shown or published it. If you
have a serif typeface, cut off the serifs, but not lower
the contrast, does it become a sans-serif or is it simply
a serif without serifs?
And with Nexus, you also have a typewriter font within
the family as well. How does a typewriter font fit in
with the overall principle?
MARTIN MAJOOR
It doesn’t fit in. It’s just for fun! In
Nexus Typewriter, I tried to make
it as readable as possible, but you
always have this problem with a
very narrow ‘m’ and a very wide ‘i’,
and so on. It’s something that’s not
connected to the principle.
What about swashes? You’ve got
swash italics for Nexus. Did you
find that there’s a standard you
have for producing swashes, or is
that again just a little fun?
It’s a lot of fun. Not so long ago,
I told somebody that making
swashes was one of the happiest
times of my type designing life.
I really love calligraphy and
certainly the very old, Italian
masters of calligraphy. What they
did often amazes me, as it’s always
very difficult to make a swash.
If you make one range of swash
capitals, you can’t stop and you
have to make another range, and
maybe a third one. I stopped with
two, but I could have gone on
and done more! But this also has
nothing to do with the principle,
it’s just an extra thing.
Is there ever a scenario — perhaps
in other designers’ projects —  ask yourself: where did they come
where the principle wouldn’t work?
I don’t think so. It’s a very simple
principle. Of course you have to
have the serif typeface. If you have
that, you just cut off the serifs,
change the contrast, and that’s
basically it. You can do this with
Bembo, Bodoni, with everything.
Is there ever a way you can do it in
reverse, if you have a sans first?
[Left] Nexus characteristics designed by
Wim Westerveld and first published in the
FF Nexus FontFont Focus type specimen
INTERVIEW MARTIN MAJOOR
It is possible to do this from a
sans-serif, but to me it’s totally
illegible and doesn’t make sense,
so I wouldn’t recommend it. But
there are always typefaces — sans
typefaces — which later have
a serif equivalent. I remember
Syntax — the metal version — which
is a very beautiful, humanist
sans-serif. Much later, there was
a serif version added to this. It’s
such a horrible thing to say, but it’s
so empty. It doesn’t have anything
of the strength of the original
Syntax. So it’s very difficult to do it
in reverse order. I don’t think it’s a
good idea. It is possible, but what
comes out mostly is not as strong.
What is it about a serif being first
in the process that makes it the
best starting point?
It’s the way history has developed.
Serifs were there first. You have to
from? Who made these? How were
they constructed? And that is what
my principle is about as well: the
historical explanation. As a type
designer, I strongly believe that
these punchcutters from Germany
and England must have had some
sort of example before they could
start a sans. In England they must
have used Bell or something; in
Germany, they must have used
Walbaum or Didot or Bodoni.
In your philosophy, 1 you highlight
an example of Akzidenz-Grotesk
potentially being based on
Walbaum because it’s so similar.
Yes, and that’s what I’m
doing together with Jos
Buivenga 2 — proving it by
just doing it. We're making
a Didot / Bodoni sort of text
typeface — a serif typeface of
course — which is based on
a display face Jos worked on
previously, and from this text face,
we create a sans. If you make the
lowercase ‘a’ exactly on the base of
Just to clarify, the original idea
came from the first version of the
display face that Jos created, and
then you took that and started to
make the text face from that?
In fact it was two different ideas.
One was from Jos and one was Is there going to be a slab variant
mine. It was Jos’ idea to create a as well?
Bodoni / Didot style display face,
and when I saw that, I said, ‘I’m Well, now that you mention it,
trying to prove this sans-serif story, there could be! It’s not what we

Making swashes was one of

what you did with the serif, you’ll
see that it’s really like a sort of

the happiest times of my type

Akzidenz-Grotesk or an early sans-
serif. This is quite interesting. You

designing life.
can really show that this is actually
the process of the punchcutters
when they started making the
first sans-serif.

Last issue, Jos told us a little about

this collaborative project Questa,
which I believe you spoke about
at ATypI and in Arnhem. What else
can you tell us about it?
We’re making progress slowly and
are now at a stage where we've
made a text typeface and a sans-
serif derived from the serif. We're
making the display typeface again,
this time based on the serif.
so maybe we can use the Didot sort
of typeface to make the sans.’
When do you think we’ll see this,
live and in the public?
We don’t have a deadline, but if
all goes well, then hopefully we’ll
release it sometime in the spring
of 2011.
planned, but who knows, maybe
if it’s a success, in the end we'll
make a slab serif.
You're known for your theoretical
approach and wide appreciation
of type history. What do you feel is
the single most important lesson
you've learned from the type
masters of yesteryear?

1. My Type Design Philosophy:

martinmajoor.com/6_my_philosophy.html
2. See our last issue

INTERVIEW MARTIN MAJOOR PA G E 09

 it’s a real, physical thing that
you can hold in your hands.

Helvetica is a clear rip-off of Do you do a lot of book design

Akzidenz-Grotesk. For me, yourself these days?

Max Miedinger is not an I have done, but not anymore. I

stopped because it was a lot of

original type designer. work and I wanted to concentrate

on type design. To me, it was
important to have made a lot
of books, because I know how I
should use typefaces. I always
say you must be a good book
typographer, book designer, or
I’m very much inspired by a lot There’s a lot going on in the world graphic designer to also be a type
of designers from the past; the of typography right now. What in designer. There are of course
people who are original; people particular excites you? type designers who never make
who don’t imitate the things that anything with their types, but I
are already there, and who dare to I am still always excited by feel that one should always make
be original — people like Eric Gill. books — real books, not iPads. The things with his own type.
He’s a very original type designer. iPad is nice, but I like the three-
He did his own thing and didn’t dimensional thing that a book is. Do you feel there’s a problem at
care about what others thought of To me, a book is like a sculpture: the moment with the prevalence of
it or how others did it. There are
lots of examples of designers who
imitate, and for me they’re not
real designers. I always give the
example of Max Miedinger, who
created Helvetica, which is a clear
ripoff of Akzidenz-Grotesk. For me,
he’s not an original type designer,
and I can’t learn anything from
him. However, I can learn from Gill
and people who really created new
things; people who helped the type
world to improve.

PAG E 10
 Why is that?
Well, I don’t like having the
small caps option as a button in
InDesign. For me, it’s not nice to
use this. We’re developing, but in a
way we’re not developing. We just
invent new things that are more
complicated than they used to be,
and that’s not always good.
Do you feel that features such
as swashes, which you might
get as an alternative glyph in a
OpenType font, should be kept to a
completely different font file?
We’re at an interesting point in
time, especially with web fonts
finally taking off.
Everyone is now very excited about
web fonts. And yes, I’m very happy
that Scala is being used on the I
Love Typography website. 3 But in
five years’ time, we’ll probably all
look back and laugh about how
excited we were about it!
I think we’re going see some very
ugly websites coming out of the
poor use of all these typefaces we
now have available to us.

I think so, yes. I really would Yes, but that doesn’t bother me.
like to have the small caps in a Let them be. If they don’t exist,
separate font, so you can use it as you won’t be able to appreciate the
an OpenType feature with all the good designs! 8
buttons, but you can also choose
from the list of typefaces, which
is very simple for swashes as
[Above] ‘Phases of the iPads, and what that means for the well. I once wrote an article about

Sometimes
moon’ designed by Mark
future of books, such as the bad digital typefaces, in which I said
Thomson for the ‘Made
with FontFont’ book typography we currently have in that digital typefaces don’t exist

developments
applications like iBooks? because a typeface exists as a
shape. But the way it’s technically

go too far. For

This is all passing and there are presented is always changing:
always solutions. The first desktop from handwriting, to metal type, to

example, I hate
publishing programs — like photosetting, to digital type. Now
PageMaker — were very poor, but we have this new, hi-res display on

we still did things with it. Now
they’re very rich, and yet I do the
same things with it. Sometimes
developments go too far. For
example, I hate OpenType.
OpenType.
the iPhone 4, so things get better
and better, but who knows how it
will look in 25 years? Maybe Scala
will only be used as a screen type
because there will be no books!

3. ilovetypography.com

INTERVIEW MARTIN MAJOOR PA G E 11

Bembo (hot metal, 11 point)
The best book face ever, both
beautiful and functional. Like
in many faces the digital Bembo
is too thin, too weak and too
perfect. This metal face is
strong and nicely irregular.

Fournier (hot metal, 11 point)

Based on a typeface from 1742
by Pierre-Simon Fournier, this
is quite a ‘modern’ typeface. Its
vertical stress and its straight
serifs were a big inspiration to me.

Deepdene
With Deepdene (1927) Frederic
Goudy made one of the most
beautiful italics. I wish I had
made a lowercase ‘g’ like this.

Romanée (hot metal, 16 point)

Jan van Krimpen is one of my
typographic heroes. His Romanée
from 1928 is his best typeface,
with distinguishing capitals
and an extraordinary italic.
 Gill Sans (hot metal, 9 point)
Eric Gill is still by far the best
British type designer. Again this
metal version of Gill Sans from 1928
is superior to its digital counterpart.
I am very much influenced by its
humanistic touch.

Joanna (hot metal, 11 point)

Another Eric Gill typeface (1930)
Joanna is simple and straight, but
surprisingly elegant. The thickness
of the bracketed serifs are in perfect
balance with the stems.

FF Quadraat
Fred Smeijers was my room-mate
and friend at art school. In 1992 I
witnessed the genesis of this great
typeface from close by, and ever since
it has a special place in my heart.

Prensa
This typeface from 1999 is clearly
influenced by the work of W.A.
Dwiggins, another of my typographic
heroes. Cyrus Highsmith designed
this highly original interpretation;
one I look at with great respect.
Ale
Paul
Ale Paul is one of the most exuberant
characters in the world of type design:
not content with creating beautiful
script faces, he fills his font files with
more alternate glyphs, off-the-wall
ligatures, and lavish ornaments than
you can shake a stick at. We got in
touch to talk about the hot Argentinian
type design scene, in which he’s
playing a huge role...
sudtipos.com
PAG E 14 INTERVIEW
12345678
Argentina has become a hot bed for new typeface
design. Do you feel that Sudtipos has had a major role
to play in that?
Possibly. Maybe it’s because there was nobody doing
stuff with type before, or maybe it’s simply that no-one
knew about it because there was no Internet or social
media. It’s never been promoted in this way before.
There were some exhibitions in Argentina and all
around South America in the last eight years that were
free for everyone from Latin American countries. With
this, social media, and with new schools opening in
Mexico, Chile, and Argentina with Masters programs
in Typography, they’ve all helped to create an image
of something happening in South America. But there
really are things happening here. The Internet is great
for us because we don’t have magazines where we
can show our work; we don’t have enough resources
to pay for an advertisement, and we are very far from
everything. I’m twelve hours from New York!
So it’s a combination of new work and better exposure.
Definitely. But although we have typography in the
universities now, some schools here still don’t have
A L E PA U L
 typography in their graphic design
courses. The schools here are not
focused on the important role that
typography plays in design, and
the problem with that is that many
designers usually don’t respect the
intellectual property. But hopefully
that will change in the near future.
Some people went to study in
I think the focus should be
on how good we are in using
typography and not designing
fonts to make money.
The Hague, and some people are
now studying the Masters here in
Buenos Aires. Everyone working
in the Argentinian type industry
is involved in the Masters course
in some way, so I see that as a very
positive thing. The only potential
problem I see is that a lot of
people think of typography from
a business perspective. I’m not
sure where the business is going. I
think our focus should be on how
good we are in using typography
and not designing fonts just to
make money.
You’ve had great success with
Sudtipos. What has been your
personal experience in setting
up and maintaining a successful
type foundry?
INTERVIEW A L E PA U L
I began doing it because I lost
my job in the 2001 economical
crisis. I was doing packaging
design for eight years before that,
after graduating from university.
I got a cheque from T26, the
foundry that was selling my
first typeface. When I got that,
I thought that if I don’t work in
graphic design, maybe I can do
type design and sell that. You do
it, you polish it, and you see what
happens. So we had some fonts,
and we thought, why not make
a collective and call it Sudtipos?
It was like a breath of fresh air
for typography. Not necessarily
because it was good but because it
was new; people from Argentina
were trying to do a type project.
I never studied typography: all
I knew was packaging design. I
discovered that I was always using
the same fonts because I didn’t
have many for packaging ready to
use on my computer. I met with
Angel Consuper, a 73-year old
lettering guy who was more of a
type-retouch guy who cleans up
logotypes for agencies. He was
without work too, so I asked him
to begin thinking about some fonts
with a focus on packaging. That
was my first approach to hand-
lettering design. (Hand-lettering
is very important in packaging
design because it communicates a
lot to the customer.)
After a few fonts, I approached a
guy that used to work in the beer
industry. He said, ‘Yes we love your
work,’ and, ‘Why don’t you publish
with us’. They gave me a kind of
brand with my name.
Your designs typically get as close
to hand-lettering as possible. Are
actual hand-written signs your
main source of inspiration?
When I built a strong packaging
fonts collection — I call it that
even though it’s not exactly only
for packaging — I found myself
saying that I don’t like just doing
what is straightforward, I like to
experiment with things that are
very difficult for me to do. I don’t
have good handwriting, so I like
to do nice digital handwriting
I’m interested in doing
things that haven’t been
done yet.
fonts. I began to study and buy
more books about how to write
well, or about different systems
for penmanship. I really liked
technology and discovered
OpenType a long time ago. I
thought I should try to move hand
lettering to digital technology.
That was my first experiment. I did
Ministry Script, my first complex
OpenType font. I learned by error
because I did a lot of ligatures that
weren’t useful. I keep some fonts
for packaging, but what I really try
to do is experiment in type. Maybe
it’s a little difficult because there
are a lot of people doing scripts
with flourishes and everything
looks the same. But I’m not
interested in that: I’m interested
in doing things that haven’t been
done yet.
Everybody always asked me why I
always do script fonts and not text
fonts, so I did Brownstone. That is a
sans serif font, but it is a sans serif
with my touch: with ornaments
and ligatures. When I did a fern
font, I imagined a fern growing
up a wall. I imagined the wall like
white paper, and the plant as a
letter, and designed a letter that
looks like a plant. Now I want to do
PA G E 17

a letter where the paper is the skin,
inspired by tattooing. I don’t like
the type used for tattoos, so I’m
doing new fonts for tattoos. The
skin is the new paper. That is the
kind of experimenting — the risk I
like to take.
Technology has allowed you to
create fonts with multiple glyphs,
and OpenType has opened up a
whole new world in terms of what
we can do with type digitally. But
has there ever been a circumstance
where you’ve felt limited by
technology?
The biggest limitation is the user.
Everybody knows about OpenType,
but nobody knows how to use it.
Nobody teaches how to use it,
especially with scripts, because
PAG E 18
script fonts were never taken
seriously. It seems like the user
never has the time to investigate
a little deeper inside the fonts he
is using. It doesn’t have to be a
script, either: when I hosted some
workshops and showed Garamond
Premier’s options, people said, ‘Oh!
Garamond isn’t so boring after all.’
They find that it has a lot of ending
glyphs; a lot of different options
and alternates. They discover
something new, but nobody
actually teaches that. Maybe the
teacher will teach that Garamond
is a great font for a book, but they
don’t teach that they can go one
step ahead. I think that small step
makes a difference with what
makes a good designer.
So the user really is the limitation.
Every day I get emails from people
saying, ‘I bought your font, I love
it, but how can I use the swashes?’
Or they ask me, ‘I want to buy
your font, but will I be able to use
it?’ Another limitation I found
is the compatibility between
applications. It’s not the same
to use the font in Illustrator as it
is in Photoshop, and Illustrator
doesn’t have the same stylistic
sets as there are in InDesign. If I
had more options I would do more
complex things, but actually these
limitations are very good for me,
because I design new fonts with
INTERVIEW A L E PA U L
the limitations people have in
mind. I’m doing a font with more
than 2,000 glyphs and I think,
‘Maybe I shouldn’t do code for
OpenType. Maybe I should say this
font can only be used in Illustrator
and InDesign using the glyph
palette, and you have to choose
the glyph one by one.’ I know I will
limit my market by doing that,
but I’d like to experiment with
what people think about that,
and how they will use it. I used
to be very frustrated when I saw
my first complex OpenType script
user and I found that that they
didn’t use any alternate — or they
used everything — it looked weird.
That’s why I think the difference
between designers is in the details.
What are you looking forward to
in terms of further technological
involvements?
I would be happy with a glyphs
palette in Photoshop! Maybe from
my narrow point of view, I would
like to see some improvements in
FontLab, but this is very focused
on the tools. Another thing I want
to see at some point is the ability
to use my fonts in web type.
Are you excited by woff?
I’m waiting. First I want to see
how all the browsers will support
it, then I want to see how the
browsers will support OpenType
features. After that, I want to see
if the fonts look good on the web.
I still haven’t seen any fonts that
made me say, ‘This is better than
Verdana.’ I really don’t like how
most web fonts look: there are a lot
of discrepancies with the rendering
and the hinting, and nothing is
really uniform. OpenType features
are virtually nonexistent right
now. I think everything will grow
and at some point type will look
on screen like it does on paper.
Personally, I prefer plain black and
white; I want to read what I need
to read and that’s all. I like blogs
because they are image and text,
everything is plain: just the image
and the information. I hate to read
on the screen.
It’s interesting — considering
your style is so elaborate and
exuberant — that you like the plain
and simple.
As I said, I’m a sans serif guy. I
don’t want to see paper on the
screen; I see a screen as a screen
and paper as paper. When I want
to see something beautiful, I like
to touch it. I like to buy books to
read them, to open them. I like to
have some kind of personalised
contact with the thing, which
doesn’t happen for me on screen.
That could be why I like packaging
design and creating typefaces that
are more focused on a different
experience with the customer,
because I like that real, tangible
interaction. I know the web is real.
I am on the computer all day. But
still, it’s not as personal. I don’t
The biggest
like to buy food on the Internet; I
want to go to the supermarket and
limitation is the
take the packaging, look at it and
say, ‘That’s good for me.’ I still like
user. Everybody
to be stimulated by design.
knows about
I don’t know about web fonts. I like
it when when graphic designers
OpenType, but
go beyond my fonts, and do a little
more by adding and amending
nobody knows
things. That’s where the graphic
design work actually come in.
how to use it.
I don’t think graphic design is
taking the font and just typing
it, and the trouble is that all too
often, type on the web is about just
taking the font and typing it. 8
INTERVIEW A L E PA U L PA G E 19
 h g
h g
h g
Affair with Laπy LiΩatures
h g
h g
“…because it let me experiment with ligatures.”

h g
h g
C∑ndy Script dulce de le�e!
h g
h g
“…because it’s funny.”

BurguesScriptt de Louisy h g
h g
h g
“…because it made me very happy.”

h g
Mati ¡El príncipe del tipografía!
h g
“…because I love my son.”

h g
h g
h g
z
h g
PielScript ink & needlen
h g
h g
“…because I want to have a tattoo.”

h g
h g
FanScript aguante!
h g
“…because I love sports.”

h g
h g
Adoi� Script, el amor de mi vida
h g
“…because I love people getting married with it.”

BROWN�ONE �ur� �
h g
h g “…because people can see I’m not just a ‘script whore’.”

h g
h g Find and buy these typefaces at 8faces.com/2/fonts
Stephen
Coles 12345678

For the past six years, Stephen Coles
has been ‘The FontShop Guy’, serving as
Director of Type in their San Francisco
office. Now he’s left to pursue other
projects and revive the excellent
Typographica. We spoke to him about
what’s next...
You’ve recently left your role as Type Director at
FontShop. What’s next for you personally?
It’s mostly been freelance work, consulting with
foundries and websites where typography is a focus.
It was difficult to leave FontShop, but it was good to
make a public announcement and say I’ve moved
on. Nobody would have thought to ask me for my
help with anything because I’ve been known as ‘The
FontShop Guy’ for at least the last six years. So it’s
been fun work on a few side projects.

My main focus now is a database of typefaces in

use. I’ve always been interested in how designers
choose and use type. Foundries have become more
sophisticated in how they promote their stuff.
Complete and useful typeface specimens are much
more common now, so that helps in type selection.
But seeing how a font performs in the real world is an
important part of making that choice, and there has
never been an independent resource dedicated to that.

Is this new site going to be maintained by a centralised

source, or are you going to allow foundries to
stephencoles.org contribute to that database?

PAG E 22 INTERVIEW STEPHEN COLES

That is definitely something we
want to do: we want to make it
very open and independent. At
the moment there are a couple
of partners on it and it’s pretty
closed because we want to build
something that’s presentable first,
but the idea is that everybody
can participate in it; becoming
something like Typedia. 1
Is it going to have any links
to Typedia?
I’d love to work together with
Typedia and it would make a lot
of sense. Typedia has that little
‘in the wild’ section for each font
page, which is currently pulling
from Flickr. Even though we have
machine tags working for Flickr, it’s
still not a very standardised way
of sharing typefaces in use; so this
new site can hopefully plug into
that and share the images with
those kinds of sites, and also bring
in font data from them, sharing
information back and forth and
making it easier for users. In order
1. typedia.com
PAG E 24
to do that we want to make it as
independent as possible; so there
may be some foundry sponsors,
but the goal won’t be to sell
typefaces from any one foundry:
our real goal for the project is for it
to be more of an educational and
inspirational resource.
Who are you developing this with?
Right now I’m working with Nick
Sherman, Petr van Blokland,
Indra Kupferschmidt, and Marc
Oxborrow. The idea is to start
talking bout type in use and build
an archive. We hope to involve
font resellers and foundries soon.
Pulling from their archives of their
own fonts in use and inviting them
to participate in other ways.
Can you give us an insight into
what you did day-to-day
at FontShop?
FontShop is a much smaller
organisation than most people
realise. I think one thing we all
fought against was the idea that
because of all the history behind
it, all the FontShops around the
world, and all of the great type
designers the FontFont library
represented, it is a massive
organisation. But really, in the
San Francisco office — which runs
the website FontShop.com — there
INTERVIEW STEPHEN COLES
are just twelve people. I was
the only guy that was dedicated
just to typography. There were
web developers, tech support,
accounting, administration and all
of that; but I was the only actual
type guy there.
The office in Berlin is in charge of
the FontFont foundry production
and is the headquarters for all of
the other FontShops. There are
more type people there, of course,
but as far as FontShop.com and all
of the content that was created for
that site and all the auxiliary sites
around it such as The FontFeed 2
and FontStruct, 3 all of the type
content was basically just me. We
did get help from people like Yves
Peters who runs The FontFeed,
and designers and developers
who work on other sites. My role
was creating content and creating
the experience for people and
designers so they could learn how
to find what they need as far as
shopping for fonts is concerned.
Is there anything in particular you
miss about that?
Obviously when you have
something where thousands of
people come to look for fonts
everyday — where you have the
ability to shape how that looks and
how it’s organised for them — that
2. fontfeed.com
3. fontstruct.com
was the thing I enjoyed the most
about the role.
The FontFeed has become a great
resource for all things type. Is it a
challenge to remain ‘independent’
while being linked to FontShop?
Well I don’t think it was,
particularly for Yves, whose main
role has been running that site.
Being on his own and able to say
what he wanted on that website
made it easy for him to feel
independent. We set down some
guidelines when we created the
speaks well of the FontShop name,
and it was something fun to build,
so they built it. It all comes from
Erik’s guidance. He isn’t involved
on a day-to-day basis, but he
founded the company because he
loves type, and that’s pervaded
through to each new project that
they fund or work on. As long as
they maintain that kind of passion
for typography, they’ll always be
set apart from other sellers.

One of the great things about

blog; as you know, FontShop is a
sponsor and links to fonts will go

FontShop is that they’re

to FontShop.com, but beyond that,
everything that each author says

willing to put resources into

is their own opinion and their
own voice. They can write about

things that don’t necessarily

whatever they want and with
complete freedom.

It really is a nice independent drive a lot of sales.

venue, and I think one of the great
things about FontShop is that
they’re willing to put resources
into things that don’t drive a lot
of sales. It’s really educational
and it’s the kind of thing that Even though you’ve left FontShop, hopefully they’ll still let me put my
they’ve always been willing to put are you going to continue writing word in from time to time.
money into, which is a rarity in a for The FontFeed?
business of that size. Fontstruct is Typographica... The FontFeed... The
another example of that, too: it’s I hope so. We’re still discussing Mid-Century Modernist... How do
completely free. It’s not a revenue how things will work, but as far you balance your time between
driver, but it’s just something that as I know my name is up there, so all of these projects?

INTERVIEW STEPHEN COLES PA G E 25

 I wish I could say that I’m very
organised about it and I’ve
determined where it makes more
sense to put my time during
the day, but really these all just
represent different interests and
I think that the most exciting
thing [right now] is the general
interest in typography.
passions, and whenever I get
excited about a particular piece of
furniture for example, then The
Midcentury Modernist is where my
time is going to go for that day.
Eventually some things get put by
the wayside — like Typographica
has been lately — because all of my
font love has gone into FontShop
for the last few years. When I say
that will change, it’s because now
I can dedicate my typography
interests to Typographica and
these other things. It really is just
a matter of personal interest in
projects that gets me motivated
for that day.
Part of your ‘next step’ is to revive
the relatively quiet Typographica.
Do you have any major new plans
for the website now that you have
more time to work on it?
No, I don’t have anything that I can
reveal yet. We have lots of plans,
but nothing that has enough shape
to describe it. I will definitely be
doing the ‘Fonts of the Year’ review
that we missed last year. We’re
going to make sure we do one for
2010, and maybe even a review
of the decade of fonts. Now I have
a place for my own views about
the industry — some of which I
probably couldn’t have voiced
before being at FontShop — I’m
going to be a little bit more
opinionated, which is something
I look forward to doing because I
have a lot of opinions!
So we can expect to see quite a few
more posts on Typograhica now
that it’s your main type outlet?
That’s right. I’ll be writing a lot
about the way that fonts are
used on this new site — the ‘fonts
in use’ site — but anything else
typographic is going to go there.
What excites you in the world of
typography right now?
I think that the most exciting
thing is the general interest in
typography. It was such a niche
profession and field for so many
years, and so esoteric, and now
anybody knows what a font is and
that actually is a very new thing.
That’s probably been the case
for maybe ten or fifteen years,
but in the scheme of publishing
that is a very short time and it’s
exciting to see people actually
paying attention to what they
see — not just in terms of what it is
semantically, but the design of the
typography and the design of the
typeface — so I think that will make
everything that we do and write
about more relevant to a broader
audience, and that’s exciting.
Especially on the web, everyone
is probably going to say that web
type is what is the most exciting
to them right now, which makes
sense because that’s the biggest
technological breakthrough of the
last couple of years. But I think
it’s really the extension of that:
it’s that people will now suddenly
notice that, ‘Hey, I’m not looking
at the same three typefaces online
anymore.’ And so the people who
aren’t just font geeks are going
to continue to be more aware of
typography, which is a great
thing for everyone.
I’m really glad you mentioned the
general interest in typography,
because it’s a question I asked
people in the first issue. And I
agree with you: I feel there’s a
resurgence in interest and the
layman is more aware of type
then he was a few years ago.
I think that many of the people you
asked — and I am guilty of this as
well — tend to be sequestered in
our little world of font geeks and
often we don’t notice or we don’t
talk about typography outside
that world; so it’s hard to tell
sometimes that it really is growing
in general interest, but I really do
INTERVIEW STEPHEN COLES
Fighter
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much success with a documentary
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you can
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something many more people are
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8
PA G E 27
 h g
h g
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A magnificent 30 second
Affair with Laπy LiΩatures
KNOCKOUT h g
h g

Amplitude
‘…because it let me experiment with ligatures.’

h g
with all the

h g
C∑ndy Script dulce de le�e!
h g
of the mid-century modernist era! A journey recorded with

h g
‘…because it‘s funny.’

☞
Scala via
BurguesScriptt de Louisy h g
Salt Lake City,
Stockholm,
Berlin,
San Francisco,

h g
and Oakland.

With the enthusiastic help of those variant, stylish heroes, italic, bold, bold italic, and by the grace

h g
of one cat,it the
‘…because madeadventure continued. One last peak to climb. A visit to an original. A face that has
me very happy.’
been evolving steadily since 2002. Behold, the deadly sword-points and flying fox tails of Mount

Pitu .
Mati, el príncipe470
del tipografía!
characterſ
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& 3 superb weights .

‘…because I love my son.’

h g
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Robust, geometric lines from the

PielScript ink & needlen

klavika plain
h g glowed in the slow sunset. A low

h g
‘…because I want to have a tattoo.’ ring shone like an expectant nim-
bus. Serifs flew. Inexorable. It was

h g
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FanScript
Clifford
Kobayashi
aguante!
Georgia
Carter
vs.
h g
‘…because I love sports.’

Freight
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ing
An

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Adoi� Script, el amor de mi vida
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train,
‘…because I love people getting married with it.’

BROWN�ONE �ur� �
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Strokes modulated. Axes swung. Only a scant

h g
few adepts could identify the disctinct forms


in the mælström. Awe redrew all our faces. J
‘…because people can see I’m not just a “script whore”.’

h g
h g Find and buy these typefaces at 8faces.com/2/fonts
Tim
Brown 12345678

What started as a school project
propelled Tim Brown into the spotlight
and his current role as Type Manager
for Typekit. We talked to Tim about Nice
Web Type and his process of designing
from the type outwards...
You’re in the process of redesigning Nice Web Type.
How is that going? You’re documenting it on Tumblr?
Yes, that’s what I wanted to do. More important than
redesigning the site is talking to people about how I
approached designing it. I haven’t met anybody who
designs the way I do, and I want to see what people
think about that. I wanted to open up and share what
I’m doing.

What is your method of design? How do you think that

it differs from other designers?

It’s reflected in the outcome of my final designs. Most

often I start with markup and content. I used to work
at Vassar College, and we wouldn’t always have content
for our site before we designed for it. By reading the
content and talking to the client, you get a feel for
what it’s about, what people need to use the site for,
and what their experience will be as they absorb the
content. From the content, you can then take cues
about the typeface selection.

My considerations are: reasons, solutions, emotions.

nicewebtype.com Why am I making this site? What are the reasons

PAG E 30 INTERVIEW TIM BROWN

people are going to be here? Why
does it need to exist? That’s the
absorbing content part. Solutions
are the functional parts of the
site that need to exist. I’ve taken
a hard line with the Nice Web
Type redesign: I’m not putting in
anything that doesn’t absolutely
need to be there. That’s partly
because I have questions about
the conventions we stick to as
web designers; those that exist
because we’ve been relying on
them for years. Why does the site
need to show you navigation all
the time? Why does the site need
to show you the search as part of
the ui? Google have been doing
some interesting things with
their homepage with elements
that don’t show up until you start
moving the mouse around.
Once I know exactly what needs
to be present, I can start doing
rough sketches and deciding
where things should be placed.
That’s when I get to the typeface
selection: when I have an idea of
where things should be placed
and an intimate knowledge
of the content. I start to think
about how I want people to feel
about this, which always leads
me to typefaces first rather than
colour, photography, or layout.
Although I certainly appreciate the
power of those elements and of
PAG E 32
composition, type is the genesis of
what I do. From the typeface, you
can get proportions for the layout,
historical references that you
can use for decisions in pairing
fonts, or size-relationships. You
have so much flexibility when you
use type as that atomic element;
that starting point. I think that is
what’s different about how I design
compared to other people: I don’t
start with a layout and then choose
type; I start with type and then
grow out from that.
How long has the Nice Web Type
website been going?
Since 2006 or 2007. The website is
quite young compared to the idea
of the project, which started while
I was in college. That was my bfa
thesis, which came about because
I just fell in love with a number of
things all at once. In typography
class, there was the balance of
classically good typeset pages and
type as a formal thing. There’s a
right and wrong in type. If you
learn certain rules, you’re doing
it right. There are no such rules
in fine art: there’s just something
magic to it. At the same time, I
was learning about web standards
because I was working in the
publications office in my college,
and Jeffrey Zeldman’s Taking Your
Talent to the Web was on the shelf,
INTERVIEW TIM BROWN
so I started doing what I’m doing
with Nice Web Type now, just not
in public. I was building a site,
little by little, and keeping notes
about it. The site was my way of
bringing typography and web
design together when my college
curriculum couldn’t.
From your point of view, has it
changed much in terms of what
you’re seeking to accomplish with
the project and the kind of content
you cover?
It has, but I’m trying to return what
I was trying to do in college. I still
love Robert Bringhurst’s book, 1
but at the time it was my only and
favourite resource. What I wanted
to do was like Richard Rutter did
with webtypography.net: to apply
all the rules to web design and give
people a guide. 2 After school, I
read a lot and followed what others
were doing. I read everything that
Richard posted; he was a huge
influence on me. Jon Tan and
1. The Elements of Typographic Style
(Hartley and Marks, 1992)
2. Rich talks more about his project
from page 46 onwards
Jason Santa Maria were as well;
I’ve been reading their stuff for
years. Saving the things that other
people write was really important,
and that’s how Nice Web Type
started; not only bookmarking
them, but writing a little bit about
them in the bookmark description.
When Ma.gnolia 3 came out, it
was amazing, but then it crashed
early in 2009 and I lost most of
that work. That event made me
think differently about the project,
and I started to write. That’s what
propelled it into the site it is now.

Is it hard to maintain a the site

with up-to-date information in a
constantly changing climate?

Although there’s a lot going

on, I don’t feel that it’s hard to people and looking on websites,
follow, although I do admittedly it’s very impressive. The work

I don’t start with

spend every day thinking about that Peter Biľak is doing with
it! When I was working at Vassar Typotheque 4 is wonderful. It’s

a layout and then

before Typekit hired me, it was a beautiful redesign, and he’s
a challenge to remain aware of a smart guy; I really like what

choose type; I
things, but it’s what I like to do. he’s doing with that service. Tim
Ahrens at Just Another Foundry 5

start with type

Even in the short space of time has also got a great service offering
since we published issue one, a lot really crisp typefaces for the

and then grow

of things have changed. How do screen. What the guys at Webtype 6
you feel about the foundry-specific are doing is also really inspiring.

out from that.

services that are popping up?
I haven’t tried anything besides
Typekit. I’ve looked at them, but
from what I know by talking to
Services as a model is what I like.
I knew I liked Typekit even before
they hired me, because it makes
things so much easier. You don’t

3. The now defunct social bookmarking service 4. typotheque.com

5. justanotherfoundry.com
6. webtype.com

INTERVIEW TIM BROWN PA G E 33


Until we don’t have to support
ie8, it’s going to be hard to go
woff all-in.
have to worry about updating font
files when something changes,
or configuring font matching
between @font-face definitions
and css declarations. The syntax
is changing all the time. The woff
format is coming along, but until
we don’t have to support ie8, it’s
going to be hard to go woff all-in.
Complexity is needed in
@font-face definitions; it’s just
easier to let somebody else handle
that. It’s also nice to have all of
my type selection in one place: a
project-based spot to think about
type and to group and study
things. I think services like that are
the way forward.
Do you think there are any
standards emerging? Or is all
the different competition pulling
everything in different directions?
Well, there are conceptual things
that were very undefined before,
with Typekit in particular. The
guys I work with — Jeff Veen,
Ryan Mason, Ryan Carver, Greg
Veen, Jason Santa Maria, and Matt
Collier — made part of the effort
before I came over there: they’re
helping people think about fonts
as this new asset. It’s not like
you just rig fonts to your css and
use them normally. There’s a lot
more to it: you have to manage
INTERVIEW TIM BROWN
the file size, you have to think
about the subsets, how much you
want to include on your page,
the definitions and connecting
them to css selectors; there are
conventions. So the model of a ‘kit’
that goes with your site or project
is comforting.
What can you tell us about your
day-to-day role on Typekit?
I’m type manager, so I talk with
all our foundry partners, update
all the fonts in the library and
examine them with the partners
to see how they’ll perform on the
web. I’m in the process — along
with Jason and Mandy Brown — of
evaluating our library and
improving not only the quality, but
helping people find and use the
type. So part of my job is caring
for the library, technically, and
liaising with our foundry partners,
who are amazing people. It’s a
dream for me to be working with
the type designers that Typekit
is working with; they’re just
incredibly smart people. Experts.
I can always consult one of them
and learn more. It’s incredible.
They have a reverence for tradition
that you don’t often find on the
web, and that is in line with my
own style of designing: thinking
about the meaning of things, the
math involved in typography,
and the cultural implications of
doing things a certain way. They
are a great group of people to
spend my time with. The other
part of my job is equally fun and
probably what I want to be doing
if I could be doing anything. It was
what I was doing with my spare
time — with Nice Web Type and
when working at Vassar — learning
about web typography and sharing
it with other people. Jeff Veen has
provided some awesome direction
to our team, and one of the things
I look forward to doing more of is
writing posts on the Typekit site. To
be writing for the Typekit blog is an
immense joy for me. It’s everything
that I want to be doing in my job.
What I learn goes into the
Typekit service immediately. The
developers I work with are the
smartest people I’ve ever met, and
they iterate on Typekit every day.
They’re always working on it, and
deploying new stuff to the live
code. What we learn is reflected
in the product right away, and we
can see if people like it, and then
learn even more. We have a ‘tools’
section for our foundry partners,
which tells us what the included
glyphs are, how that matches up
to our default subset, and how it
will match up to our other subsets,
vertical metrics information, and
the relationship to css. If it isn’t
set the right way, type can be
positioned differently in different
browsers and can get clipped. So
the tools at Typekit started as an
exploration into how type behaves
on the web, and later those tools
get built into Typekit so that all
our foundry partners can use this
service to check out their fonts,
change them, and upload new
versions to us. It’s amazing to do
what I want to do and use that
knowledge to make people happy,
and make their designs better.
Are there any juicy ‘coming soon’
INTERVIEW TIM BROWN
What we learn
is reflected in
the product
right away.
features we can expect to see
soon in Typekit?
We’re working on language
support. The thing I’m most
excited about is the way writing
will influence the service. There
are twelve of us now. We have
daily stand-up meetings and
everybody counts. We’re always
fielding ideas and organising
plans. The educational blog posts
that we’re planning will not only
be useful to people, but also to
Typekit the organisation. We’re
going to have a section called
‘Learn’, and the blog — and the font
pages themselves — are all going
to be integrated to help people
decide on particular typefaces for
different reasons and how to use
them. For me, that’s what is most
exciting about my job. 8
PA G E 35
Q
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Shelly sang Róisín Dubh

A
Róisín ná bíodh brón ort fé’r éirigh dhuit:
Caslon Tá na bráithre ’teacht thar sáile ’s iad ag triall ar muir,
Tiocfaidh do phárdún ón bPápa is ón Róimh anoir
’S ní spárálfar fíon Spáinneach ar mo Róisín Dubh.

Is fada an réim a léig mé léi ó inné ’dtí inniu,

Trasna sléibhte go ndeachas léi, fé sheolta ar muir;
An éirne is chaith mé ’léim í, cé gur mór é an sruth;
’S bhí ceol téad ar gach taobh díom is mo Róisín Dubh.

Mhairbh tú mé, a bhrídeach, is nárbh fhearrde dhuit,

Aldus Is go bhfuil m’anam istigh i ngean ort ’s ní inné ná inniu;
D’fhág tú lag anbhfann mé i ngné is i gcruth-
Ná feall orm is mé i ngean ort, a Róisín Dubh.

Shiubhalfainn féin an drúcht leat is fásaigh ghuirt,

Mar shúil go bhfaighinn rún uait nó páirt dem thoil.
A chraoibhín chumhra, gheallais domhsa go raibh grá agat dom
-’S gurab í fíor-scoth na Mumhan í, mo Róisín Dubh.

Dá mbeadh seisreach agam threabhfainn in aghaidh na gcnoc,

Verdana is dhéanfainn soiscéal i lár an aifrinn do mo Róisín Dubh,
bhéarfainn póg don chailín óg a bhéarfadh a hóighe dhom,
is dhéanfainn cleas ar chúl an leasa le mo Róisín Dubh.

Beidh an Éirne ’na tuiltibh tréana is réabfar cnoic,

Beidh an fharraige ’na tonntaibh dearga is doirtfear fuil,
Beidh gach gleann sléibhe ar fud éireann is móinte ar crith,
Lá éigin sul a n-éagfaidh mo Róisín Dubh.

Find and buy these typefaces at 8faces.com/2/fonts

Nick
Sherman
Nick Sherman has his fingers in many
type-related pies: he was almost single-
handedly responsible for the redesign
of MyFonts, he serves on the advisory
board for the Hamilton Wood Type &
Printing Museum, he consults for the
highly-praised Cooper Union Typeface
Design program, and has now joined
the ranks of The Font Bureau. We sat
down to talk about the family that is
the type design community...
nicksherman.com
PAG E 38 INTERVIEW
12345678
Tell us about your love for wood type and what you get
up to at The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum.
How did you get involved with the project?
It’s a pretty unique wood type museum, not only
because it’s one of the few type museums in the
world, but because it’s definitely the only one that is
dedicated exclusively to wood type. It’s located in the
original factory building for Hamilton, which used to
be the largest manufacturer of wood type in the world.
At one point it had more or less a monopoly on wood
type, at least in America.
I got involved with them through a project I did at
school. It was an intercut wood type project where
I designed my own experimental, modular wood
typeface, and produced it as a printable, movable type.
It was through that project that I met someone from
the museum, and they encouraged me to go out and
spend time there. So I took a whole month and did a
sort of residency there, and I’ve been involved with
them ever since. I’m now on their ‘Board of Advisors’.
Last year they had their first annual Wayzgoose as
a means of encouraging more people to come to the
museum and get more wood type activity going on.
NICK SHERMAN
The first time I was there, I was
doing a lot. They had a lot of wood
type that had to be identified,
and I helped them do that. I did
some printing just for fun and
to get acquainted with the wood
type, and I spent a lot of time just
looking around. There’s so much
there; it’s kind of like a playground
for me. They have a pretty
impressive collection of old wood
type specimens that I spent a lot of
time looking at; not necessarily for
anything specific, but just to take
a look at things, to take notes and
photos, and to put everything into
my mental database.
Do you think there’s more interest
in wood type these days?
Yes, for sure. I think not only in
wood type, but letterpress printing
in general. I think wood type plays
a big part in that because it’s much
more forgiving than metal type.
It’s almost like training wheels
for letterpress. If you’re learning
to use wood type, the concepts
are easier to understand because
it’s on a larger scale. I also think
that part of the reason why wood
type is a big part of this letterpress
resurgence is that it tends to
show the texture a lot more, due
to the wear and tear being more
evident on such a large scale. The
imperfections draw people in.
Do you enjoy doing work with
metal type as well?
INTERVIEW NICK SHERMAN
It’s funny: I gave a talk recently
at the Type Directors Club here in
New York, and it was about wood
type. I started the talk by clarifying
that a lot of people think of me as
‘the wood type guy’, but there’s a
lot of other stuff that I’m interested
in. Metal type is just as interesting
to me as wood type.
I’ve been working with The Dale
Guild Type Foundry and we’ve
recently launched their website.
They’re one of the very few
type foundries that can create a
foundry-type font from drawings
of letters all the way through the
process of making patterns and
cutting matrices, finally casting
it as a metal font. The history of
the company is really interesting.
The American Type Founders
Company — which was at one point
the largest producer of metal type
in the world — slowly got smaller
and smaller as the demand for
metal type decreased. The last

person who was trained at atf
was a guy named Theo Rehak, and
when they went out of business
in 1993, he bought a lot of all of
the most important stuff that was
at atf. He got a job there because
he wanted to figure out how to
do type casting for himself. By
working with them, he got a good
feeling of what the most important
stuff was, and he bought all of it
and continued casting type. But I
think that Theo has done enough
type casting for his lifetime, so
he’s just recently sold The Dale
Guild Type Foundry to my friends
Dan Morris and Michael Courier,
both of whom are New York-based
letterpress people.
You do a lot of teaching as well,
including overseeing a lot of stuff
at The Cooper Union — is that right?
Yes, I’m involved. My technical
title at The Cooper Union is
‘advisor’. I’d been helping them
figure out who to come in to talk
and what kind of material to be
teaching. I did the website for
them as well, but I’m also going to
be taking part in the programme
by attending the classes.
What has becoming an educator
done for your own understanding
of type?
You learn that when you have to
teach somebody something that
you’re familiar with, you have to
really know whatever it is you’re
talking about, especially the
history. I would have a general
idea of what was going on — and I
could explain it generally — but in
order to give a good lecture about
it, I basically had to learn it all
INTERVIEW NICK SHERMAN
over again: get the dates down, get
the names down, the places, and
things like that. It was almost as
much of a learning experience for
me as the students, because I had
to re-learn everything in order to
teach it. It had been so long since
I’d thought about type on that
basic a level.
You were virtually single-handedly
responsible for the MyFonts.
com redesign and their lovely
newsletters. Was it hard to leave a
project you had such a big hand in?
Definitely. In some ways I feel like
I still haven’t totally left. As far
as working situations go, I’m not
technically working with MyFonts
anymore, but all the people I
worked with there are the greatest
people ever, and I still talk to
them on a daily basis. I send them
emails on a weekly basis saying,
‘This is broken. Fix it,’ or just giving
them quick ideas about what they
should do to make things better.
So I’m definitely still watching
over it like it was my child. It’s not
something I feel I could just walk
away from, especially because it
was a continuation of work that I
had been doing in school. A lot of
my motivation — even working for
MyFonts — was selfishly motivated.
It was stuff that I wanted to see. I
wanted a website that did this, so
PA G E 41

I was building it around that idea.
Obviously I thought about helping
other people, and we had to do
testing and things like that, but
it was something that I felt really
strongly about, and that I still feel
really strongly about. That’s why
it was such a good job for me. I
PAG E 42
still have a lot of ideas for things
I wanted to do, and I left a to-do
list a mile long, but I’m definitely
happy with the way it turned out.
Have you been heavily involved
with the Webtype project that Font
Bureau are a part of?
INTERVIEW NICK SHERMAN
That’s been the main thing that
I’ve worked on with Font Bureau
so far. It’s interesting going from
working at MyFonts, which is the
largest collection of fonts in the
world. There is obviously a huge
variation in how fonts are made,
how they’re packaged, and how
they’re sold; different foundries do
different things in different ways.
Working with Font Bureau, it’s so
much more focused and I can have
more control over how the fonts
are shown. All the people involved
at Font Bureau have this long
history of working with type and
understanding how it’s used. A lot
of the people at Ascender worked
on Verdana and Georgia, and all
the screen fonts that people have
been relying on for so long. I had
to know about web fonts when I
was at MyFonts because it was the
upcoming thing, but now — even
though it’s less than a year later — 
so much has changed with how
people are using fonts online, and
the general reality of web fonts. It’s
crazy how quickly it’s moving.
It must be difficult at times!
I feel like part of my job is to try
to stay on top of things. I dedicate
time every day to making sure
I know what’s going on: how
technology has evolved, and
how the standards and processes
are going. It’s much more time
sensitive now than a lot of the
other stuff that I had worked on,
but I like it. The more I work on
it, the more I’m interested in it;
especially working with people
like David Berlow. It’s amazing
working with him because he
understands things in a way that
is unlike anybody that I know.
He’s kind of like this mad scientist
in a way. I’ll think I have a good
understanding of how it works and
what the ideal situation should be,
and then I’ll talk to him about it for
twenty minutes and my mind will
be totally changed.
You’re involved with type in many
different ways. How have those
extremes from the type world fed
into each other and your work?
One of the things I’m most
interested in is not just type, but
the way in which it’s presented.
When you have a typeface that
has been worked on for years and
years, and you’re ready to release
it to the world, it’s important to
do it right. There are only a small
number of people who really
think about it in depth. When I’m
presenting digital fonts — and even
fonts that are purely digital in the
sense of web fonts — there are still
a lot of the same principles that
apply in terms of how you should
When you have a typeface that
has been worked on for years
and years, and you’re ready
to release it to the world, it’s
important to do it right.
present things. In terms of how of a better word — competition;
the extremes of the type world but he would put me up when I
come into play, it’s great that the was visiting San Francisco. The
type world is so small; there are type community feels a lot more
always so many crossovers as far like a family.
8
as projects that I’m working on.
Someone that I would have worked
with at MyFonts might come into
The Cooper Union to teach a class.
It’s such a small community, and
everyone is so interconnected that
it’s hard not to have crossovers.
It’s nice. A lot of times the
‘competition’ is just a good friend
of yours who happens to be doing
something similar. Stephen Coles
is a perfect example of that with
me when I was working at MyFonts
and he was working at FontShop.
We had very similar jobs at
companies that were — for lack
INTERVIEW NICK SHERMAN
 Auto•Auto•Auto
Feijoa & Aivy
“This sans-serif family from Underware is a stylish but highly usable face,
equipped with a good range of weights and typographic fixings like small caps and oldstyle figures.
Es la verdad.
However, the fact that it has three different sets of italics — varying from tame to lively and swashtastic — is what
makes it really interesting to me, and versatile enough for any variety of uses.

Liza Pro, c’est magnifique!

“ This script from Underware is a masterwork of OpenType functionality and a highly
considered take on how to emulate hand-painted lettering with a systematic set of typographic
rules. A lot of thinking and problem solving went in to the font in order to provide great results
without requiring lots of work by the typesetter. Its exuberant style is also hard to ignore.”

Benton Sans & Miller

“I realize they aren’t the most exciting typefaces in the world They just work really, really,
from a visual standpoint, but it would be hard for me to make well. Plain and simple, they get
any kind of personal top 8 list without including them. the job done without any fuss.”

••• Bell C entenni al •••

“A specialized typeface by Matthew
Carter, Bell Centennial was developed
specifically for use in phone books.
The letterforms have an odd appearance
at large sizes due to their ‘ink traps’,
but these notches improve readability
by counteracting the ink spread which
plagues small text printed at high
speeds on low-quality paper.”
Bass, S Phase IV, Why Man Creates St, Jetstream, BKLYN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 535–1927
CARTER & CONE
3rd Planet “Gæa”, Sol Star System, Orion Arm, The Milky Way Galaxy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353-9712
Sherman, N Woodtyper Pl, Pizza Rules! Prefecture, Speciminism, USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 617–5223
Stocks, E Curly HQ, 108c Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 832–2337
Tan, J Set in 6-point at Mild Bunch HQ, 108c Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 832–2337
“ Unnamed font Wood type
This font of wood type was hand-cut, circa 1826, by Darius
Wells — one of the more significant figures in wood type history. The
font has narrowly survived two fires and is among the oldest existing
fonts of American wood type. While the typeface design is interesting
on its own, these particular blocks fascinates me the most as physical
and historical objects. The font is now housed at the Hamilton Wood
Type & Printing Museum.

Italian Wood type

This wonky slab serif, first shown by Caslon & Catherwood in 1821, has
been referred to as a ‘typographic monstrosity’, among other things.
Indeed, the reversal of thick and thin strokes does result in some
unusual forms. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but something about
the ridiculousness and originality of this face has earned a soft
spot in my heart.

Georgia and/or Verdana

“ Until relatively recent technological advances, these two have been among the only typefaces that could
be reliably used on websites. As such, they have become some of the most ubiquitous typefaces in the
world. Both designed by Matthew Carter, they were decades ahead of their time as far as being designed
and engineered from the ground up specifically for readability on the computer screen. They will act as a
model for other such fonts which will become more and more prevalent in the years to come.”

Find and buy these typefaces at 8faces.com/2/fonts

Rich
Rutter
When most of us were being weened
off table-based website layouts, he was
busy applying Bringhurst’s seminal
work ‘The Elements of Typographic
Style’ to the world of web design, and
he’s still at it. As one of the founders of
accessibility-focused agency Clearleft,
and more recently the co-founder of
font delivery service Fontdeck, Rich
Rutter is one of the most respected
authorities on web type...
clagnut.com
PAG E 46 INTERVIEW
12345678
You’ve been working on applying Robert Bringhurst’s
work to web typography for some time now with your
website ‘The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to
the Web’. How is the project going?
It’s been dormant for a couple of years and not much
has happened to it, due to time constraints and having
so many other things to do. I’m trying to get more
people to try and help out with some of it, and I’ve
got a new sense of vigour about it because there are
so many good things happening with css: things are
moving on so quickly and right now we’re on the crest
of a wave. I really want to start going back through the
whole guide and updating it, because in some places
it refers to some modules which have since been
merged or re-named in the spec. In the fonts module
in particular, there’s a lot of new stuff appearing which
needs to be talked about. So it will soon be redesigned
slightly and tweaked.
What developments would you like to see happen in
the near future?
The main thing for me is simply for proper OpenType
features, which is massively important for non-Latin
RICH RUTTER
fonts. But even just thinking about
Latin ones — just having an ‘ff’ or
an ‘ffi’ ligature when it’s required
in the headline hasn’t been so
much of a problem in the past
because Georgia and its ilk have
been designed in such a way that
they don’t need ligatures. But
when you start using font linking,
a lot of the fonts need ligatures to
stop the clashes happening, and so
ligatures need to be enabled.

The latest version of Firefox has

kerning, which is quite important
for type set at bigger sizes.
Kerning and common ligatures
are turned on by default on Macs,
and they are turned on by default
on Windows when the type is
over 20 pixels. In Safari they’re
turned off by default, but you
can turn both those on with the
optimize:legibility property.
What can you tell us about
Fontdeck’s noble support for rare
languages? Jon Tan mentioned this
last issue and it sounds great.
That’s still the goal: to be able to
provide support for languages
that don’t have many typefaces.
It also depends on the foundry:
if they give it away for free, we
host it for free. With some scripts,
ligatures are essential: if the
ligatures aren’t working then you
can’t read it; it doesn’t make any
sense. We’ve got some support
for Greek and Cyrillic. Greek, in
some ways, is a rare language:
it’s only written in one country,
and among academics, but of
course there are quite a number of
designs out there. We are hosting
one of the Cyrillic ones for pt Sans,
which is one of my chosen ‘eight
faces’ because I think it’s such an
astonishing achievement. When
you consider Japanese and Chinese
languages, OpenType features are
needed in order to swap things in
and out. As a long-term goal, we’re
committed to looking to do other
scripts, too.
Have you contacted foundries and
people like yourselves to try and
form a library of typefaces, so that
you can support some of the lesser-
known languages?
Yes, but we haven’t been hugely
proactive recently because we’re
building up our library of Latin
fonts, but we have managed to
host pt Sans. I met a designer in
Armenia who has a foundry called
Pomegranate, which just does
Armenian stuff, and we should
have some of those soon. However,
some stuff that we want to do in
the future with connected scripts is
very difficult to do; until browsers

PAG E 48 INTERVIEW RICH RUTTER

offer more support for this, it’s
almost not worth touching. In
particular, Japanese and Chinese
languages have huge character
sets — 6000 glyphs as opposed to
300 for a fairly basic Latin script —  it’s the same for most people. If
so these are also problematic.
What have you learned since
launching Fontdeck?
need to protect your ip; but how
much of your text consumption
is done on screen, and how
much is done in print? It’s got to
be a significant proportion and
you’re designing text, surely you
want people to read it! If you’re
eliminating, say, 40% of their
control over that. Web services
are becoming more and more
prevalent for lots of different
things. You’d never think of
hosting your own maps, for
example, and I think the same
analogy applies to fonts, and
may apply to more things in the
future. It applies to jQuery as a lot

There have been hard lessons

for sure. This applies to anyone

You’d never think of hosting

staring up a dot com, but it’s
especially true if it has been set up

your own maps, for example,

as a side project, as was the case
with Fontdeck. You have to get

and I think the same analogy

the legal and financial side sorted
out as soon as you can, while you

applies to fonts, and may apply

are building the app. The whole
thing has been a really interesting

to more things in the future.

experience, as has getting
involved in the type industry. It’s
a close-knit community, similar
to the web design industry. The
majority of the foundries are either
actively or already selling web
fonts in one way or another, either
by themselves, through a third reading time, then that doesn’t
party, or both; or they’re seriously quite make sense to me.
considering it. Unfortunately, there
are still a group who are holding Do you see a growing interest
out and believe that the likes of in font delivery services or do
Fontdeck are the type agents of designers still want to host the
piracy. They are in the minority fonts themselves?
but sadly they are very vocal. That
attitude has got to change. In some Some people like to host their
ways, I can understand how you own stuff and they like having

INTERVIEW RICH RUTTER

 of people link off to Google’s code
distribution for this, and for jQuery
there are a lot of advantages to
that. There’s a model there that
isn’t just about fonts, and spans
across a number of things.
There’s a line of communica-
tion that needs to be open, and
it extends to wider projects.
But it doesn’t necessarily
mean that at the end of the day
you’re going to get nice curly
quotes out of a cms.
Clearleft’s focus is on usability.
What role does typography play
in making a website usable? Have
there been core principles that
have come up time and time again?
It’s an intrinsic part of good design.
Information Architects recently said
that 95% of design is typography.
PAG E 50
For the kind of work that Clearleft
does, that’s probably true.
Information design or application
design primarily revolves around
words, so the layout and the size
is really important to hierarchy
on a page. Many organisations
have visual designers in house
and front-end developers, so
there’s a communication point
there where the designers specify
type sizes, measure, line heights,
and margins; that all needs to be
communicated to the person who
is actually writing the css. It’s
INTERVIEW RICH RUTTER
no coincidence that our front-
end developers at Clearleft are
typographic enthusiasts as well.
There’s a line of communication
that needs to be open, and it
extends to wider projects. But it
doesn’t necessarily mean that at
the end of the day you’re going to
get nice curly quotes out of a cms,
unless you happen to have the
luxury of typesetting an individual
page, which — let’s face it —very
rarely happens. What about
orphans and widows? Somehow
you need a non-breaking space
inserted. Someone somewhere
has got to specify that, and
someone somewhere else has
got to make sure that it always
happens and that it can happen
programmatically. There are a lot
of different ways of approaching
it, but it’s a challenge. It’s one of
those things that’s just down to
attention to detail, which is what
typography is all about: all of these
tiny details that build up to form a
bigger picture.

Besides these things, what would
you say are the main obstacles
the web design community has
to overcome to understand and
implement the key typographic
principles espoused by Bringhurst?
I think it’s probably not unfair
to say that there are a relatively
small fraction of professional web
designers out there who have
actually been taught design. I
wasn’t taught design by anyone
other than those people who had
written the books and the blogs
that I read. I taught myself about
typography just out of a rampant
interest in it. The Bringhurst
project was more a case of showing
people that what he’s saying can
be achieved on the web, especially
when you consider it was started
in 2004 when css support was a
lot worse than it is now. It’s still the
case of these guidelines that he’s
setting down; if you were to follow
them, you can achieve it. There are
a lot of steps in this. Let’s say you
have been taught these guidelines
and maybe spent a few years in
print design and are branching out
into doing web design; you may
be a good print designer but not
necessarily willing to carry some of
those things you learnt over to web
design because you think it’s too
hard, or you think it’s not worth
it because it’s only a screen. I get
the impression that some of that
attitude actually does exist and is
probably quite prevalent.
It seems that one of the challenges
is really just getting to grips with
I believe that browser
defaults are the enemy
of considered typography.
INTERVIEW RICH RUTTER
the very basics of typography;
something we’ve felt challenged
by, because of the fairly limited
technology we’ve been using up
until recently.
I believe that browser defaults
are the enemy of considered
typography, by which I mean
browsers set margins and they
set line heights themselves,
which isn’t wrong, but they’re not
considered; they don’t necessarily
work as well as they could do. This
is why I think css resets are a very
good idea: if you get rid of all those
margins and line heights and all
line heights are set solid, then
you’ve got to go back and change
those; if you go back and change
them, that means you have to think
about what you’re changing them
to as opposed to using what comes
out of the box. That’s extremely
important. 8
PA G E 51
Feijoa & Aivy Es la verdad.
“Feijoa is simply lovely. Kris Sowersby designed the face so
that ‘a straight line is a dead line’ and that’s what must give
its femine, handwritten feel. I could look at it all day, but then
what about the gorgeous italic and the fabulous ampersands?”

Adelle loved Xen tiene siete años!

№7
“I love slab serifs. This is one of the best of the modern
crop, and surprisingly versatile. The heavy weight is
big, fat and chunky, great for display work requiring an
impact. The lighter weights are more subtle, particularly at
smaller sizes, and can happily be used for continuous text.”

“Bodoni

f
can be something of a cliche, but I really enjoy it at display sizes.
It can say romantic, classy, European, Italian. I particularly love

”
it in a black weight – Robert Hunter Middleton’s Bodoni Black
is particularly extravagant (love that ‘f’!).
PT Sans ПараТайп
“I was introduced to this at Typecon 2010. Commissioned by the Russian Federation to cater for its
78 written languages, it’s a magnificent achievement and comes in eight styles. Essentially it’s a fully
hinted, humanist sans screen font which I hope will replace the usual candidates – it is free after all.”

Baskerville 1757
“Baskerville is such a classic face, it would be hard to leave out.
My brother, a super-talented graphic designer, chose this version
when designing the stationery for our wedding. There’s an
authenticity to it which is both charming and solid.”

momentus &
BLISS
“When choosing 8 typefaces, a sans-
serif family is surely required. Bliss
is a very British sans with humanist
forms of Gill Sans, but without the
awkward idiosyncrasies. It’s neutral
enough to fit most purposes, but with a
lively character twinkling through.”

Plantin*1913 “ I’ve liked Plantin for a long time. It’s classy, but actually quite utilitarian
with its large x-height and relatively low contrast; consequently it works
rather well on screen. Famously used in Monocle, I’ve also seen it used
creatively on Underworld’s 12” vinyl artwork.”

Oh, and Georgia

(We love you!)

Find and buy these typefaces at 8faces.com/2/fonts

Veronika Burian
& José Scaglione
In our debut issue, we combined
our seventh and eighth ‘faces’ and
interviewed type design duo Post
Typography. This time around we
continue the tradition and speak
to former University of Reading
classmates Veronika Burian and
José Scaglione, collectively
known as TypeTogether...
type-together.com
PAG E 54 INTERVIEW
12345678
You work as a duo yet you’re thousands of miles
apart — how does that work on a day to day basis?
[Veronika] We talk every day on Skype and through
email. Without the Internet our relationship wouldn’t
be possible. It doesn’t really matter where either
of us are, as long as we can be online and the time
difference isn’t too different, then it’s fine. We can
talk about things that need to be dealt with. It’s nice
to meet each other once or twice a year, and that’s
basically the maximum time we get to see each other.
When we started, for the first year or two, we didn’t see
each other at all.
So you didn’t start TypeTogether while you were both
studying at Reading University?
[Veronika] No, we started it in 2006. José was in
Reading one year after me. Right after graduation I
started with Dalton Maag in London.
[José] It was an idea we had been playing around
with and discussing whenever we actually saw each
other. I think we always knew we would end up doing
something together.
VERONIKA BURIAN
& JOSÉ SCAGLIONE
[Right] Adelle in South
African newspaper ‘City
Press’, redesigned
by Peter Ong
How does it work? How do you
decide who does what?
[Veronika] It changes all the time.
If we decide to do a new typeface,
we discuss it in great detail and
decide on the general direction;
on what kind of typeface it’s going
to be; what type of application
we aim for. In our case it’s mostly
editorial design.
[José] We like starting with just a
few characters, sending them back
and forth to discuss details. The
one rule that we have is that if I
design a basic shape, it’s then up
to Veronica to fix it or edit it, and
vice versa.
[Veronika] It’s really handy doing
PAG E 56
things that way. Neither one of
us gets too stuck or focused on
something, because often when
you look at things for a long time
you don’t notice mistakes, so it is
helpful to get feedback right away.
[José] In the first stages, we have
‘letter a’, ‘letter a.alt’, ‘letter a.alt2’,
and then we look at it, test it, and
discuss it over and over. Another
interesting thing about the way
we work together is that most of
our designs spend at least six to
eight months in a drawer. At many
points in time we have designs
that we have started. Right now we
have four or five typefaces that are
in the early stages of development.
We like to let them rest and then
revisit them a few months later to
INTERVIEW VERONIKA BURIAN
& JOSÉ SCAGLIONE
discuss them again in case we’re
ready to start production on them.
[Veronika] That tends to
happen quite often because we
get sidetracked on other custom
projects, or admin. But designing
typefaces is a lot of hard work.
On top of that you also have to
promote yourself.
[José] Veronica and I also like to
do academic speeches at colleges
or visit classrooms and discuss
design. We give workshops and
lectures, sometimes on our own
and sometimes together. These
things are time-consuming.
Do you feel that your collective
style is a coming together of
Eastern European and South
American styles?
[José] That’s a tough one. Let me
be honest: I don’t really like talking
in terms of styles. I like to think
that we’re focused on a particular
kind of typography, specifically
for editorial use. I’m not sure that
we have a fixed style in the sense
of the way our stuff looks. I don’t
think someone will see one of our
typefaces and say, ‘Oh, that’s a
Scaglione and Burian.’
[Veronika] I think that’s
something for other people to
decide. Of course we have our
preferences; we have shapes we
like that are really attractive to
us that we use elsewhere. But I
agree: I don’t think that we have
templates of shapes of letters that
we always use. We try to find new
solutions and try not to repeat
ourselves.
These days you publish typefaces
from other designers as well as
your own. How do you decide
if a typeface is suitable for the
TypeTogether brand?
[Veronika] At the beginning it
was very much our friends from
Reading. We only had a couple
of fonts in our repertoire, and
you can’t necessarily run a type
The one rule that we have is
that if I design a basic shape,
it’s then up to Veronica to fix
it or edit it, and vice versa.
foundry with two fonts. Since it What are lessons have you learned
takes a long time to develop a new from running TypeTogether?
typeface, we began asking a few
people if they would like to publish
with us. In some cases it was very
fast, and in others, we still haven’t
released them! It’s not that they
send us their files and that’s it, we
actually work very closely with
them. We give the designers a lot
of feedback and suggestions and
do post-production. In some cases
it took quite a few years to develop
and fine-tune the typeface because
most of the designers don’t
dedicate every minute of the day
to it. They have other projects and
clients to attend to. But in terms of
how we choose, we have a library
that has a certain focus, and we
try to stay within that and always
consider high quality as a factor,
be that aesthetically or technically.
[Above] Athelas in ‘Tradiciones Argentinas’,
a letterpress book by The Society of
Argentinian Bibliophiles
INTERVIEW VERONIKA BURIAN PA G E 57
& JOSÉ SCAGLIONE

[Above] Ronnia in [José] For us, I think it was a
‘Women of Design’ by process of learning the business,
Bryony Gomez-Palacio
and Armin Vit which has some very nice bits
and some not so nice. Legal
[Right] Bree in
‘I love her’ poster by stuff is never fun, and neither is
Marina Chaccur admin, but it gives us a sense of
PAG E 58
independence. A small foundry
has a very clear focus; a very clear
aesthetic. This is very good for
designers looking for typefaces
to use. Of course we hope in the
future that we’ll be much better
known. We have a lot of potential
clients who need typefaces.
[Veronika] For me personally,
the independence factor is very
valuable. I love to be independent.
Working for someone else in the
creative field is very difficult. It
isn’t as gratifying as when you
build or create something for
yourself. You have much more
freedom. Of course, you have many
more risks to take, but I wouldn’t
change anything.
Do you guys still do non-type
design work for clients?
[José] I do a bit of editorial
design. I work on bits and pieces
for newspapers and magazines,
although not as much lately. The
type design part is taking over.
[Veronika] No, I don’t. I’m not
a graphic designer, so I don’t
come from that area. I’m a type
designer. Type design and running
TypeTogether is more than enough!
We’ve spoken a lot about Reading
and it’s certainly one of the most
INTERVIEW VERONIKA BURIAN
& JOSÉ SCAGLIONE
well-known type design courses in
the world. Did you guys enrol after
working in the design industry
for several years?
[José] For me it was very hard.
I had to attend Reading while
working part-time, and also it was
a big investment. I didn’t know if I
would get any return from it.
[Veronika] That’s very true.
In my case, I needed the break
from being in Milan as a product
designer. Taking that year
off was absolutely fantastic.
Groundbreaking. Life-changing,
if you will. It was a very good
investment for me.
Do you think it has influenced
where you are now?
[Both] Definitely. Absolutely.
And they also run a one-week,
condensed course, too — one that
gives you a taste of the Masters?
[Veronika] From our experience
with week-long workshops, it’s
great. They pack a lot into that
week. If someone really has some
passion for type design, it’s a great
thing to do.
[José] I think it’s a very good crash
course. It’s a lot of information
in a very small amount of time,
and then you get to go home and
process it for as long as you want.
[Veronika] Even if one doesn’t
start to do full-on typefaces, I still
think these workshops play a good
part in a designer’s development,
because it’s an enrichment of your
knowledge. I’ve noticed a lot of
veteran designers in editorial and
book design have never drawn
a letter; and once they start to
draw a letter, they realise, ‘This is
actually really tough work!’ They
discover another level of design
that can be appreciated, and that
then can enrich their own work.
They will then be better able to
choose typefaces and how to
look at them.
What can you tell us about the
letter.2 competition? 1
[José] In 2001 there was the first
type design competition run by
ATypI. Veronika and I both feel it’s
important for type designers to get
1. See page 85
together every year to discuss the
field and to continue supporting
A lot of veteran
one another. The problem with
these meetings is that you can
designers in
quite often get involved in
ventures like this that distract you,
editorial and
but it’s fine: I think what we are
building here is really positive. The
book design have
letter.2 competition is the second
type design competition, held
never drawn a
exactly ten years after the first. The
idea is to have a snapshot of the
letter; and once
current state of excellence in type
design, and it will be the biggest
they start to draw
competition out there because it
covers a ten year span. The idea is
a letter, they
not to have a winner, but to select
100 works that represent the state
realise, ‘This is
of that excellence. We expect to
have a lot of submissions with a
actually really
lot of great designs and we have a
great jury as well.
tough work!’
[Veronika] It would be nice if we
could do a book like we did last
time, but at the very least we’re
going to have this conference.
[José] I’m sure we’ll have some
opportunities to get this out
there. The idea is to show how
things have developed, which
will eventually give us a timeline
of type. Ten years from now we’ll
have another competition with to
see how things are moving. I think
letter.2 will be incredibly important
to the type design industry. 8
[Above] Bree and Karmina in ‘DN Divadelní
Noviny’, redesigned by Studio Designiq
INTERVIEW VERONIKA BURIAN PA G E 59
& JOSÉ SCAGLIONE
Breetogether
“Bree has its origins in our logotype.

serifs of the 19th century. However, early in

the design process, we decided to move away
from the mechanical feel and adapt Adelle
to a more humanist model. It was conceived
specifically for intensive editorial use, mainly
in newspapers and magazines, but its person-
ality and flexibility make it a real multiple-
purpose typeface. As it becomes larger in
print, Adelle shows its personality through a
series of measured particularities that make
it easy to remember and identify.”

Abrildisplay&text
¶
It is a sleek sans serif that delivers a polished and modern look and feel for branding or
headline usage. Bree is quite unusual in being a spirited and rhythmic upright italic. It
successfully merges elements from handwriting with contemporary typography.”

ADELLE
“Adelle is a slab serif, inspired by classic slab

“Abril is our latest project and is still a work-in-progress.

KARMINA
“Karmina is our first collaborative project, which
resulted in a fresh and contemporary work-horse
typeface. It was built to withstand the worst
printing conditions: low quality papers, high
printing speed with web presses and variations
in the ink level of the printing press. Karmina’s
features, such as the rather large serifs, intended
to work perfectly in small reproduction sizes,
the sharpness of the shapes, including some
calligraphic reminiscences, the large and yet
graceful and narrow proportions, grant Karmina
outstanding legibility and economy.”

It is a font family engineered mainly for newspapers and magazines

that features friendly and elegant styles for headlines and robust and economic
styles for text. Abril Text is inspired by Scotch Romans, sturdy work-horses from the
19th century, while Abril Display has more influences from French Didot-styled typefaces.”
¶ National
$₨€₪₢₤
“

FenwayDelight
“Trade Gothic was one of first
typefaces I worked with and I
still like it. It is clean, simple
and somewhat independent, but
at the same time it feels a bit
quirky and very warm, friendly.”

Fedra
•
Serif
• ••
B & A
“We paid close attention to National when looking for an accompanying sans
serif for our Adelle. Definitely an impressive piece of design by Kris Sowersby.”

TRADE GOTHIC
“Matthew Carter’s
Fenway is simply beautiful.”

by Jackson Burke from 1948–1960

“Peter Biľak’s Fedra Serif is a beautifully crafted typeface. A very nice

contemporary example of technical quality and careful design.”

Find and buy these typefaces at 8faces.com/2/fonts

Artwork
by Jez Burrows

Every issue we’re asking one of our favourite

artists and fellow type fans to create a piece
of type-inspired art. This issue we called on
Jez Burrows and he produced the wonderful
illustration you see on your right, as well as
our cover art.

Jez says of the quote: ‘I can’t help but feel

enormously buoyed by that quote every time I read
it. It suggests this unstoppable, almost romantic air
of productivity, and my artwork is just an attempt to
show it visually.’

Jez has kindly made the artwork available as

desktop backgrounds for your computer, iPhone,
and iPad. Visit 8faces.com / 2 / wallpapers for
the downloads.

If you’d like to contribute artwork to a future issue

of 8 Faces, please email editor@8faces.com.

PAG E 62 ARTWORK
JEZ BURROWS
P is for
Paper
Last issue, we ran a
competition to win a
limited edition print
by Jessica Hische.

The challenge? To design a drop

cap. The winner? The very talented
Ayaka Ito, who hand-made this
wonderful ‘P’ from paper. Thanks
to everyone who entered and
congratulations to Ayaka!

PAG E 64 CO M P E T I T I O N W I N N E R
AYA K A OTO
 =
Feature
What’s the best way to Feature it in a book
present the versatile written on the subject of
and edgy Fakir, a voluntary suffering and
typeface that took five printed in the blood of
years to arrive at the the author, of course!
finished product from When European design collective
the first sketches? Underware created the blackletter
Fakir, they may not have
anticipated that the process of
AFGGGGGGGG
bringing this typeface to fruition
To have something powerful,
simple, and readable was more...
PAG E 66 F E AT U R E FA K I R
would have been so arduous a
journey. Given the enormous
amount of time, effort, patience
and perseverance taken to create
the typeface, it seemed only fitting
to feature this design in more
than simply a display catalogue.
What was required was something
that would be worthy of all the
hard work and suffering taken
to create Fakir. Arriving at an
appropriate solution took more
time: another year, in fact. But a
 solution was finally concluded
and the decision was made to
create a publication focusing on
the subject of voluntary suffering,
which seemed entirely appropriate
for all the time and effort that
went into its creation. For a Gothic
typeface such as Fakir, the theme
was certainly fitting: harking back
to medieval times when the Gothic
style of type first originated in the
days suffering was a daily theme.
GGGGGGGGGHD
In order to find suitable material
...important than following the
style of historical blackletters.
for this subject, Underware’s
attention soon came to Ruud
Linssen; the Catholic Dutch author,
poet and journalist. ‘If there’s
anyone who really knows what
suffering truly means, it’s him.’ says
Sami Kortemäki of Underware.
Ruud immediately took to the
idea, and the decision was soon
agreed for him to write a short
story on voluntary suffering,
and a deadline of completion in
F E AT U R E FA K I R
approximately two to three months
was agreed. However, six months
later, no story had materialised.
Ruud had in fact become heavily
involved in writing an extensive
book on the subject, and instead
of two months, The Book of war,
mortification, and love took two
years to complete. The author
ascertained that he had rewritten
every sentence of the book at least
PA G E 67
 five times, and that the book had
‘changed his life’, giving him an
entirely new perspective on the
subject owing to his extensive
thought and research on the
matter. ‘Suffering,’ he described,
‘has already been a major theme
in my life for many years. But not
voluntary suffering.’ The creation
of the book therefore became an
example of voluntary suffering in
itself. One could say that it is the
essence of Linssen’s voluntary
suffering. In light of this, and in
true Gothic style, the decision was
made to print the book with the
blood of the author.
The simple (and somewhat
macabre) idea soon turned into
a complicated issue of how
printing an entire book in human
blood could turn into a practical
solution. This was no easy feat,
and a number of trial and error
situations ensued before a solution
AFGGGGGGGG
PAG E 68
was found, but the team saw the
positive side of it, ‘Let’s see it
this way; production failures are
appropriate for a project about
voluntary suffering.’ said Sami.
After tapping Ruud’s blood, the
next stage of the process at first
appeared to be nearly impossible:
to turn blood, which is water-
based, into offset ink, which is
oil based. After talking to dozens
of ink experts, chemists and
physicians, the best solution
Our Fakir fonts are very graphical;
they form strong word images...
F E AT U R E FA K I R
seemed to be to freeze-dry the
blood; this was found to be the
best way to remove all water from
the human blood. The substance
left after the lyophilising process is
a powder of pure blood. Once the
powder was created, it was then
relatively easy to turn the powder
into an oil-based offset ink.
Fakir is the namesake of the
Hindu religious mendicant: one
who performs feats of endurance.
The vision behind the creation of
this blackletter was to design one
more suited to modern times: for
readers not used to the traditional,
elaborately decorative blackletters.
‘We didn’t go to the library to study
old blackletters; instead we started
with a clean slate.’ described Sami,
‘To have something powerful,
simple, and readable was more
important than following the
style or construction of historical
blackletters.’ Prior to any initial
sketches, the decision was made
to design the typeface to be strong
and black with nail-sharp forms
 without a strict grid. It was
vaguely constructed on broad
nib textura, with broken, edgy,
interrupted strokes. ‘Try to sit
on a nail bed and you’ll know why
fakirs like to read just these kind
of fonts!’ explains Sami.
A fundamental concept for
Underware was to have a number
of blackletter fonts that work very
well together and could be used to
GGGGGGGGGHD
set all levels of type in a magazine,
...but they also have an ability to
stay readable and legible.
proving that a blackletter family
can be practical and versatile.
Fakir’s family of eleven text and
display fonts is just that, covering
a range of identities from the
fragile and poetic Fakir Italic, to
the aggressive graffiti style of Fakir
Display Black Small Caps. Sami
explains: ‘Our Fakir fonts are very
graphical; they form very compact
and strong word images, but they
also have an ability to stay readable
and legible. We think that’s a rare
F E AT U R E FA K I R
ability for a blackletter face.’
The journey from Fakir’s initial
conception, to printing an entire
book in blood to showcase the
typeface, tested the patience and
tenacity of the team, and was by
no means an easy feat; but therein
lies a poetic beauty that ties in
completely with the subject of the
book: voluntary suffering.8
PA G E 69
Feature

Microsoft is not a name The new mobile os has a ui that
is distinctively type-heavy. In
that many associate a dramatic departure from the
with groundbreaking icon-heavy visual style of iOS and
Android, wp7 is very clearly an
design, but the stigma attempt to get back to basics; to
is undeserved: they’ve employ solid design principles
instead of elaborate graphics to
done much for the deliver a fulfilling but ultimately
world of type, from very simple user experience.
commissioning modern We spoke to Jeff Fong (Design
classics such as Matthew Lead for wp7) and Simon Daniels
(Lead Program Manager for Fonts,
Carter’s Georgia, to Windows Core Experience) about
paving a new path for the phone and how importantly
type played a role in its realisation.
type rendering with the Jeff had previously worked on the
DirectWrite engine. Their Zune ui and done a lot of work on
bringing content to the forefront.
latest achievement is He says that the phone was about
Windows Phone 7. formalising these principles:
‘A lot of ui you see these days is
about making things pretty by
adding decoration. I wanted it to
look beautiful once you stripped out
the decoration; something pure.’
The ui’s design and interaction
guide — which Microsoft kindly
let us have a peak at — references
way-finding as a key inspiration
and it’s clear that this simple,
no-nonsense approach permeates
the entire experience. ‘It’s about
having something glanceable,’
says Jeff. ‘Iconography is of course

PAG E 70 F E AT U R E WINDOWS PHONE 7


[Above] The panorama part of that, as well, but when we
view that lies at the designed our icons, our goal was to
heart of wp7’s core
visual experience extend the work already being done
by the type.’
One of the things that immediately
struck the 8 Faces team was the
panorama view, where large
headings often disappear off the
screen to the right, and further
content is hinted at, rather
than resorting to the regular
forward / back arrow metaphor. It’s
fresh and daring approach. ‘A lot of
people were uncomfortable with it
at first,’ says Jeff. ‘We wanted things
on screen to have a different sense
of scale. It’s a fun, unique design
element to play with, and all part of
simplifying the process to make it
feel like one large expansive space
instead of tiny windows.’
With type playing such an
important role in the new os, we
asked Simon which typefaces were
used. ‘There are six weights of the
Segoe wp family, which is based on
Zegoe, used on the Zune interface,’
he explains. ‘However, Segoe
wp was developed specifically
for the phone and there’s a new
set of numerals.’ Interestingly,
there are no italics used in
the ui at all. Simon cites the
difficulty working with multiple
languages: ‘Arabic or Asian italics
were particularly problematic!’
One of the weights — originally
developed for the Zune hd but used
much more extensively on wp7
is the interestingly-named Segoe
Semilight: ‘We had a Light and a
Regular,’ explains Simon, ‘and we
liked the elegance of the Light, but it
was a little too light when rendered
on digital displays, so we needed
something in between.’
When asked what he feels wp7
brings to the world of mobile-
focused design, Simon points out
the simplicity, ‘which is so hard
to get right.’ We agree: having
such a type-focused ui means
the design has to be extremely
well considered. Jeff says that his
hope is that, ‘it will have a positive
impact on how people think about
interfaces at Microsoft... and in
the world at large.’ 8
F E AT U R E WINDOWS PHONE 7
 A Brief
History of
Feature
Type
Uncials and half-uncials Today, graphic designers often
use the term ‘uncial’ to describe
were developed in Irish letter styles, although this is
the Roman Empire. not particularly accurate. In early
medieval Europe, many books
Originally used for Latin produced in Ireland, Britain, or
or Greek texts, these Irish monasteries on the continent,
used insular scripts influenced by
scripts were also used earlier forms of Roman writing.
by scribes writing in After the reign of Charlemagne in
Europe, the Carolingian minuscule
Germanic and Gaelic became the predominate style of
languages. Since uncials letter in most countries where the
Roman alphabet was used. Insular
have never really scripts made the transition to
disappeared from the typography when books printed
in the Irish language began
western vocabulary of appearing in the sixteenth century.
letters, they’ve been used Although the printing of books
in Gaelic typefaces fell out of
for multiple modern common practice in Ireland during
languages, too. the twentieth century, these forms
PAG E 72 F E AT U R E A B R I E F H I S TO R Y
OF UNCIAL TYPE
continue to be used for a variety
of cultural applications, display
purposes, logos, and signage;
especially in Ireland.
If uncial typefaces from the
primary vendors of digital fonts
are searched for, it’s difficult to
classify the results as being clearly
uncial, half-uncial, insular, or any
other specific style.
Libra and Simplex are a pair of
related display typefaces from
the Lettergieterij “Amsterdam”,
also known as The Amsterdam
Typefoundry, or simply Tetterode.
Sjoerd H. De Roos designed Libra,
a unicase alphabet made up of
broad nib pen-based forms, in
1937. Simplex is its sans serif
counterpart, developed by De Roos
[Above] Libra
together with Dick Dooijes in 1940.
Both men were giants of 20th
century Dutch type design, and
these uncial typefaces function as
footnotes in their bodies of work.
Still, Libra and Simplex offer an
interesting vantage point into how
uncial typefaces were viewed in
the mid-twentieth century.
Although De Roos hoped that Libra
would be used as a book face,
Tetterode marketed it and Simplex
as display faces. Both designs are
unicameral, rather than including
the standard upper and lowercase.
This feature ties Libra and Simplex
into the many lowercase writing
experiments going on in European
design at the time.
The typefaces’ use of the uncial
character is stylistic, rather
than historic or linguistic. Libra
and Simplex are not literal
revivals of any specific book
hands. Dutch printers were the
primary market for the types,
although the typefaces were
also distributed abroad. New
display typefaces should appear
unique — presumably, this helps
their sales — as printers would be
more likely to consider them if
they appear different from other
designs of the same foundry, or
Tetterode’s competitors. Very few
uncial typefaces were available
in 1937. Printers who purchased
these types could rest assured that
the design would create a unique
text image on the page.
The Austrian-born artist and
F E AT U R E A B R I E F H I S TO R Y
OF UNCIAL TYPE
[Above] Rieven
designer Victor Hammer seems
to have had different motivations
from De Roos and Dooijes.
Hammer worked with uncial
letterforms throughout his long
career. Before emigrating from
Vienna to the United States in
1939, he had travelled widely,
spending almost a decade in
Florence. His work — which
included many books — was in
several languages. Hammer felt
that texts written in Latin had
a different appearance than in
modern English, French, German,
or Italian. Latin words have a
lower frequency of ascenders or
descenders, for instance. Inspired
by Irish scribal writing, like the
style of letters seen in the Book of
Kells (which is written in Latin),
Hammer developed his own
PA G E 73

uncial style handwriting, which he
translated into several typefaces
from the 1920s to the 1950s.
In 1943, the Dearborn Type
Foundry cast the first version of
his American Uncial typeface. The
design did not enter distribution
until 1954, when the Gebr.
Klingspor foundry in Germany
published it. Klingspor changed
the name to Neue Hammer Unziale.
Today, the design is available in
several digital versions, under
both names.
Unlike Libra and Simplex — as well
as some of Victor Hammer’s earlier
typefaces — American Uncial / Neue
Hammer Uncial is a bicameral
design. Since handwriting
styles in the early Middle Ages
PAG E 74
had no uppercase / lowercase
differentiation, Hammer’s concept
for uppercase letters featured
serifless roman capitals, rather
than the enlarged ‘lowercase’
seen in some other uncial or
Gaelic typefaces. The design of the
uppercase letters from American
Uncial / Neue Hammer Unziale is
similar in appearance to those of
Hermann Zapf’s Optima (1958).
Klingspor distributed Neue
Hammer Unziale with a set of large
initials. These stylised versions
of the lowercase were really
ornaments, rather than proper
letters. Unfortunately, most digital
versions of American Uncial today
are made up of just these initials,
rather than the true upper and
lowercase letters from design.
F E AT U R E A B R I E F H I S TO R Y
OF UNCIAL TYPE
[Left] Simplex
Despite the ubiquity of poor
American Uncial digitisation, a
version of Neue Hammer Unziale is
available from Adobe and Linotype.
Using this lends a more graceful
appearance to text, and is even
more faithful to Hammer’s
design intentions.
Monotype’s Colmcille type family
may be a better choice for Irish
text rather than Libra, Simplex,
or American Uncial. Designed
explicitly for book printing in
Ireland, its fonts include authentic
Gaelic letterforms, as well as the
diacritics required by the Irish
language. Colm O’Lochlainn, a
printer and typographer from
Dublin, designed Colmcille’s
regular and italic during the
1930s; Stanley Morison, Monotype
Corporation’s typographical
consultant, played a key role in
ushering the face’s development
along. In 1988, O’Lochlainn’s son
Dara added a design for a bold
weight. Today, Comcille is available
as an OpenType family, with
regular, italic, bold, and bold
italic variants.
Each of the OpenType fonts
include a number of extras. Beside
the standard character set, users
may switch on Irish versions of
A, G, d, f, g, r, s, and t. Alternate
designs for A, E, G, T, g, and t are
also included. 40 ornaments are
also inside the fonts. These glyphs
are mostly of the traditional Irish
knot pattern variety, and may be
used together to construct borders.
The development of uncial
typefaces continues into the 21st
century: digital font-making tools
make designs easier than ever to
bring to fruition. The most recent
uncial to receive critical acclaim is
Rieven Uncial, designed by Steven
Skaggs for Delve Fonts, which
received a Certificate of Excellence
in Type Design from the Type
Directors Club in their tdc² 2010
competition. Skaggs, influenced
by Hammer’s example, set out to
create an uncial face appropriate
for book text. Unlike American
Uncial, however, which pairs an
[Left] Walhalla
F E AT U R E A B R I E F H I S TO R Y
OF UNCIAL TYPE
uncial lowercase with capitals that
are rather roman, Rieven Uncial’s
upper and lowercase letters are
more harmonised.
Designed in 2008 by German
designer Ludwig Übele, Walhalla
is a revival of Oldřich Menhart’s
Česka Unciala, released by Státní
Tiskárna in 1948. Walhalla Sans
is a sans serif version, conceived
of by Übele himself. This ‘serif’
and sans serif pairing is more
continental than Irish, but Übele
includes the acute and dot accents
necessary to set Irish-language text
(although, the typefaces may need
Gaelic alternates of some letters
before traditional typesetters could
deem it appropriate).
As was the case with Hammer and
Skaggs, Menhart spent many years
developing his Česka Unciala. All
three designers hoped to create
new uncial faces that would be
worthy interpretations of old
book hands, in contemporary
typographic form. Walhalla
Sans reminds us of Simplex, but
also somewhat of Colmcille’s
italic. Where Colm O’Lochlainn
expanded on his upright face to
create the first-ever finished Irish
italic, Übele’s Walhalla Sans shows
a thorough investigation and
understanding of the
uncial letterform. 8
You can find Dan’s complete bibliography for
this article at 8faces.com / 2 / uncial
PA G E 75
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Credits
Editorial
Written & edited
by Elliot Jay Stocks
elliotjaystocks.com
Copy edited by Samantha Cliffe
samanthacliffe.com
Pages 4 & 5 written
by Aegir Hallmundur
ministryoftype.co.uk
Pages 72 – 75 written
by Dan Reynolds
typeoff.de
Pages 64 – 67 written
by Samantha Cliffe
samanthacliffe.com
Audio interviews transcribed
by Brian Beavers, John Griffiths,
Karen Kuhn, Michael Oullette,
Allen Tan, Heather Van De Mark,
and Mai-Chi Vu
PAG E 86
Artwork & Design Photography
Designed by Elliot Jay Stocks Elliot portrait by Chris Casciano.
elliotjaystocks.com Ale portrait by Daniel Bericua.
Stephen portrait by Michael
Typeface choices spreads Kressner. Tim portrait by Ryan
designed by Jon Tan Carver. Rich portrait by Jack
jontangerine.com Barnes. Jez portrait by Lizzy
Stewart. Fakir photographs by
Cover artwork & illustration Underware. ‘P is for Paper’
on page 63 by Jez Burrows photos by Ayaka Ito. Windows
jezburrows.com Phone imagery used courtesy
of Microsoft Corporation.
Illustration on pages 4 & 5
by Annica Lydenberg
dirtybandits.com
Uncial type examples typeset
by Dan Reynolds
typeoff.de
Website designed & built
by Kyle Meyer
kylemeyer.com
& Dan Millar at Decode.uk
decode.uk.com
Printed in England
by Prime Group
primegroup.co.uk
Set in FF Unit Slab
(and FF Unit for page footers)
CREDITS
Thank you
Our contributors:
Samantha, Aegir, Dan Reynolds,
Jon, Jez, Annica, Kyle, Dan Millar,
and the photographers
Our interviewees:
Martin, Ale, Stephen, Tim, Nick,
Rich, Veronika, and José
Our partners:
Ascender, Chank, Fontdeck,
FontFont, FontSmith, Jeremy
Tankard Typography, La
Fabrica, letter.2, Mark Simonson,
Parachute, Process, Typolar,
Typotheque, Underware,
and Webtype
The small print This issue is dedicated
8 Faces, volume 1, number 2.
to those who believed
issn 2043-7692. Published in in us and rushed to get
November 2010 by Elliot Jay
Stocks Design Ltd. © 2010 Elliot
a copy of issue one in
Jay Stocks Design Ltd. & the the first two hours of its
contributors. All rights reserved.
Contact: editor@8faces.com
release. Thank you for
your support!
For errata, please see
8faces.com / 2 / errata ~ Elliot Jay Stocks, Editor

Special thanks to
our extremely generous
‘Platinum’ and ‘Diamond’
partners: Linotype, MailChimp,
(mt) Media Temple, and Microsoft

Extra special thanks to Erik

Spiekermann, for guidance

CREDITS PA G E 87
 This issue:
If you could use just eight
typefaces for the rest of your
life, which would you choose?

Martin Majoor,
8 Faces is a new magazine
for devotees of typography

Ale Paul,
that asks this question — and
many more — to eight leading

Stephen Coles,
designers from the fields of web
design,

Tim Brown,
print design, illustration, and
of course type design itself. Plus:

→ An introduction by Ministry of Nick Sherman,

Rich Rutter,
Type’s Aegir Hallmundur

Veronika Burian,
→ The story of Underware’s
contemporary blackletter Fakir

→ A look at the type-focused and José Scaglione

interface of Windows Phone 7

→ Dan Reynolds on uncial type

→ Exclusive artwork by Jez Burrows

issn 2043-7692 02

9 772043769008

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