Interview

Gráfica
2005


•What does typography mean to you? What role does it play in society?

To me typography is one of the fundamental building blocks of graphic design. Without an understanding of typography, how can you communicate effectively? Typography makes thoughts visible. As typographers we have a strong responsibility, we are the visual custodians of our language. For thousands of years scribes, printers and typographers have developed a system of codes and precedents that make text more understandable, for example paragraph indents, use of en or em rules and hyphens, the type size and leading, the use of regular, bold or italics and much more. All these little details guide the reader through the text and make it more accessible and readable, so readable that he does not even notice this visual guidance.

At Ravensbourne we were taught that design also has to have social conscience and that it should help mans understanding of the world. Design must not be used to lie or to make things seem better than they really are! Sadly this is no longer true today – design now is mostly used as a marketing tool. If I see one of my typefaces used well in a social context I feel a certain pride; as when I suddenly came across Foundry Form used throughout the new ecological Eden Project in Cornwall, England. Used for the markings of a cruise missile I would feel very unhappy.

In my book design work I always try to let the text and the illustrations speak for themselves. When I designed the book on the work of Dutch designer Wim Crouwel I tried to leave my personality out as much as possible, and let the personality of Crouwel come to the fore. It is different with a poster, there the typography has to be so much more forceful and eye catching. With my type design I also try not to impose myself on the design, other designers have to use it and they do not want another personality competing with theirs. Designer friends that are close to me say that they can always spot my signature in my typefaces. One thing I always do is overdraw the bottom end stroke of the lowercase ‘s’ it always sticks out too far to the left and always takes a lot of correcting.


•Could you describe your first works in type design? What is your evaluation today of that first stage in your career?

My first type design was in the early stages of my freelance career, I designed a typeface for the English Meat Marketing Board. I took a Stevenson Blake bold slab serif metal typeface as a basis and rounded it all off to made it look really juicy and edible. I did not know a lot at the time of the small intricacies of designing a whole font and using the slab serif as a basis held the design together. Later on I did a lot of typefaces for Letraset; with headline typefaces you can make a lot more mistakes. Looking at some of the work now I cannot believe some of the designs I did – but it was a good learning curve, without them I would never have progressed to be a ‘proper’ text face designer. A few of the designs I am still proud of.

Nowadays, there exists a trend, not only in type design, in which the whole designing process is done on the computer.


•Do you see yourself as belonging to the old school, where the creative process started on the paper? Could you describe your methodology for designing a font?

I used to sketch out the whole alphabet on layout paper then accurately re-draw everything using a 9h pencil on tracing paper, a long tedious but very satisfying method. Now I still do a lot of original sketching but then quickly start working from scratch on screen. You can achieve amazingly good quality with the computer. For me it's important to transfer those hand skills to the computer without losing the human quality that real drawing brings. You can become a computer craftsman but it takes a lot of time and application… it's easy to get an achievable good first result, but to get it beyond that to a near perfect letter with all the correct points in the right places and the handles the right length is harder than drawing by hand. I feel sometimes when I‘m drawing on screen I’m wearing boxing gloves!


•Observing your typographic production as a whole, there are some fonts which seem to be inspired by the geometric styles of the constructivist movement, such as the Teknic, Robotik, Scriptek, among others. Do you consider this movement a strong influence? What other influence and master typographers could you mention.

Those typefaces you’ve mentioned were not really a serious attempt at designing constructivist typefaces. They where more a parody, or a pastiche.

Yes – the constructivist movement is a big influence on me. At Ravensbourne we studied the great masters that created it; Alexander Rodshenko, Piet Zwart, El Lissitzky, Herbert Bayer, Jan Tschichold and the new Swiss designers: Armin Hofmann, Emil Ruder, Karl Gerstner and Josef Müller-Brockmann who was elevated to a god!


•What analysis could you do of the typographic market from the appearance of digital types?

Obviously the market is very fractured and will continue to be so. The big manufacturers such as Linotype and Monotype with their huge type libraries become increasingly more like type supermarkets. Their cumbersome libraries are very mixed, they have some very good designs and some of dubious quality.
The smaller independent foundries market and generally sell their own work –
they care fanatically, and generally their work is of very high quality, and this reflects often in a premium priced product. More often than not I would say the independents employ only a few people, as it is with The Foundry, and in many cases one lone person working fanatically day and night. We are four people. FontShop is more a mail order catalogue, it represents many designers that do not sell their own fonts. It does a good service and cares about the quality of the fonts it sells and the designers they represent, but The Foundry has always remained independent. Although in the beginning we did have a few agreements with other type distributors, but we were never happy with that kind of relationship and ended the agreements quite quickly. One reason being we couldn‘t keep a true record of who our fonts were being sold to. We like to keep track of every font we sell, we can then tell if someone has copied our fonts more easily.


•Do you think it is still possible to make innovations in typography? Do you believe that the tendency of young professionals to display fonts has to do with the fact that it is more simple (at least it seems to be) to make something new or different in this kind of font? Is there anything left to say as far as text fonts are concerned?

Of course it is still possible to innovate, although I think it is getting harder to do so. There is a tendency for young designers to make display fonts. Often a designer has an idea for a special font for a particular graphic design project and this is eventually developed into a full font and released. A few more might follow but then that is it – as in the case of designers like Jonathan Barnbrook and David Carson. The problem with these fonts is that they are very personal to the designer who created them, another designer using them has to cope with another personality appearing strongly in his work; but remember I started off in the same way designing type for certain projects, I then developed some of them for Letraset in the beginning. It was a great learning curve without that experience I wouldn't be designing text typefaces today. Designing typefaces for Letraset is where I met Freda Sack, in all my typeface designs you see her careful eye there.

The differences in the design industry is very interesting, in England and Holland graphic design and advertising are separate professions. In Holland there is a large cultural section supported by various government and private foundations with large sums of money for all manner of design and art projects. Designers here are well insulated from the vagaries of the economy. They are in a luxurious position although designers here do not earn vast sums of money they live a comfortable and relaxed life. The Dutch are more concerned with quality of life than chasing after money. In England those subsidies do not exist therefore designers are much more exposed to the economic situation at the time. Therefore design in England has to work and do its job well, very good design when it happens still has to be accountable. In Holland that is often the opposite, design is more self-indulgent and less stringently controlled by the client, often the design only half works but the Dutch just shrug their shoulders and hope that next time it will work better. In Germany this separation of advertising and design has not happened to the same extent, advertising agencies often have in-house graphic design departments, the agencies seeing design as just another service that they can offer their clients. They do not understand the value of design, design for them is another marketing tool, therefore the design they produce is bland and highly commercial.

If I was caught speeding by the police in Germany they would have to hand me over to the Dutch police as their house style is so fantastic, I'd tell the German police he that they couldn't possibly arrest me as his police car is so badly painted in a vile shade of green and his police logo is so ugly!