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 | | Exclusive Interview |
Page 2 of 2 "A good example is Bell Centennial. It has this very basic problem to solve ie. The telephone book. Tiny titles, huge volume, lousy paper, yet it's a brilliant piece of work and much of the design comes directly from the problems it needed to solve. It wasn't just retrofitted; it grew directly out of those problems." A telephone book has to be fairly perfunctory, but I wondered about the more elaborate textface designs. Since most people perceive them subconsciously, how would that affect the approach to design? Tobias thought about this for a while. "The atmosphere that a typeface evokes is difficult to describe precisely. Largely it's a matter of focus; once you've learnt how to refine these very subtle effects, that's when you get it. With text faces, you work at such a microscopic level and you're so removed from anything you can describe explicitly that it's really down to your instincts as to what feels right. This is what often makes it so difficult to pick up a design, work on it, put it down again and do something else. You have to kind of get that taste back into your mouth again... for the logic of each particular design" Cyrus added. "It's really interesting when you collaborate with another designer and finish the typeface. You're constantly trying to figure out what this person was thinking." Isn't that difficult? Figuring out the common ground between designers regarding what a particular typeface is about? Cyrus agreed. "Most of the collaborations are basically hand-offs where the aesthetic or conceptual decisions have already been made and it's more to do with finishing off or adding to the character set, but in a real collaboration, like the typeface we did for Martha Stewart, Tobias and I really had to discuss the design." Tobias continued. "If you look at Miller in the FB library, there are eight or so in the world now and the drawing was half-Matthew, half me. Another batch was three quarters Cyrus. In both cases, we were trying to impersonate Matthew Carter - not just the mechanical drawing of it, but also the attitude... which is far more difficult." A big problem for any type designer comes from the way type is created in a vacuum. Sooner or later it finds a context, but that context isn't necessarily all of the designer's own making. How did they feel about that? "Whenever I ask other designers what's the most difficult part of designing a typeface, they nearly always say 'coming up with the name', which is reassuring because I find that too.In some esoteric way, a typeface isn't really completed until someone picks it up and uses it. But that's some date in the future and you don't know when that might be, so the thing you're trying to do is, in a sense, incomplete. It's slightly easier in company jobs where the environment you're aiming towards is fully defined. You know exactly who's going to use it and what they're going to do with it, so you have all the variables." Cyrus then quipped. "Sometimes it helps if you name it after the art director!" And Tobias continued. "Sometimes the client has a name in mind and wants to call it after their founder or president or something. I often leave it to them. But what about your own work where you have no client to provide context? "I've seen things that I've done go off into the world and I usually have only a vague idea what will happen to them. Sometimes I'm a little disappointed but other times I'm pleasantly surprised." When were you disappointed? "Actually there was one face I designed that I never saw anywhere until this one occasion in London when I was using a public call box. While waiting on the line, I noticed that the phone booth was completely plastered with all these flyers and cards for phone sex lines, escorts, lap dancing - that sort of stuff. Anyway, one of them was this flyer for a strip club and I suddenly noticed that it was set in my typeface! It was the only time I've ever seen it used. Normally I collect at least one example of what people do with my work, but I passed this one up." Nice work if you can get it. But now it was time to ask the big summary questions like: Where are Font Bureau going? And what do they have in development? Tobias answered first. "We have some new retail releases: Despatch, Grand Central, Vanilla - plus an italic Interstate." An italic Interstate? Surely an oxymoron, if ever I heard one, but Tobias was unphased. "Demand's been there for years and we're already expanding the Interstate range from 12 to 32." |  Tobias also informed me about one of the growing downsides of this particular industry: the constant churn of standards and operating systems that could make the technical side of font design much more difficult. Since these technological choices were out of their hands, planning was becoming more difficult. As Tobias explained: "The technical environment is becoming less and less friendly. We're designers, not software developers. Technically our product is software but we can't be expected to understand all aspects of code." I wondered if perhaps there would soon be a group of what H.G. Wells might call 'Morlock' font operatives whose role was not in design but in the subterranean world of application compliance. "They're already out there." Cyrus claimed. He even hinted that he was a bit of a 'Morlock' himself. "I enjoy that side of it too. I guess I enjoy having a foot in both worlds." My tape had now run out and it was time to let these guys get back to work. However, before I left, Tobias showed me some of his work in progress, including samples of work he was doing for the LA Times. Now that was impressive. It seems to me, if you're gong to make a career out of designing fonts, this was pretty much the kind of thing you should be aspiring to. "It's great." Tobias admitted. "Here's something I really wanted to do and now I'm doing it." It looks like the job will be in good hands. | | |
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