New York is a wonderful place to walk around
and see how letters exist in the environment.
I think, as a typeface designer,
you can't help but look at the typography of everything.
One of the really fun things about typeface design
is nothing is out of bounds.
You can love rare manuscripts.
You can love graffiti. You can love logos done by Madison Avenue design agencies.
Everything you've ever read has been shaped by hand.
It's a profound thought that every single letter you consume,
that there is somewhere a person, or a team of people,
who have drawn this thing
and released it into the world.
We reach a point where everybody has a favorite typeface.
The fact that you can choose the font on your phone or your computer
has really sensitized everyone to what typography can do.
We're making raw materials that are open to interpretation.
That's really what it is that moves visual culture forward.
Jonathan was this wunderkind.
You know, he had such an amazing way of thinking about type.
He started young and almost instantly became
one of the most influential designers of our time.
It's rare when you meet someone with such relentless desire for perfection.
He has a complete awareness of time and place.
Jonathan's right up there with the best of the best.
He is the best of the best.
Typography is a dialogue
between typeface designers who create alphabets
and graphic designers who use them.
And it's a two-way street.
The Public Theater behind us has an identity designed by Paula Scher,
who was in season one of Abstract.
I grew up at a time when Paula's work was everywhere.
And I grew up, therefore, with a sense that wood type
was part of the fabric of typography.
In the early '90s, I began
creating a typeface family of my own called Knockout.
It's meant to be inspired by these kinds of wood types.
So, it was really kind of a delight that
Paula, when she designed the identity for the Public Theater,
used Knockout for the design.
So, it's really this sort of wonderful synergy of...
being inspired by graphic designers,
creating typefaces that get used by graphic designers,
and seeing the way they do things that are unexpected.
Typefaces are a raw material.
To be a typeface designer is like
being the designer of a color of paint.
We're not painting houses, we're not decorating houses,
we're supplying the color.
♪ These are letters ♪
Typeface design is sleight of hand.
Even a simple goal, like make all the letters the same size, isn't easy.
To make the letters C and T appear the same height,
the C has to be drawn so that it's actually taller.
Round letters exceed flat ones
by an amount the type designer has called overshoot.
Another goal of typeface design is balance.
To make a letter like B feel as if its top and bottom halves match,
they often need to be drawn differently.
Turn it over, and you'll see that it's actually smaller above than below.
The humble letter T conceals one of the alphabet's great paradoxes.
To make vertical and horizontal strokes look equally thick,
the verticals are drawn much thicker than the horizontals.
This is called anisotropic contrast, and it affects all the letters,
none more so than the diabolical letter S.
An S that's balanced and centered looks bizarre when turned around.
It's thinner at the top and bottom,
thicker in the middle, and it leans slightly backwards.
Typeface design is a slow process. It can take decades, sometimes.
There is no obvious route from beginning to end,
and there's no guarantee of getting to the end, either.
About ten years ago,
I had an idea that I'd buy a wristwatch.
As I began really looking critically at watches,
I noticed that a watch that's 40 years old or older
has a characteristic kind of lettering on it
that's really quite beautiful.
I was thinking that there might be something in this whole milieu
that could inspire a family of typefaces.
This thing is great. This is like a...
heavy metal sans-serif with these sort of hexagonal,
bone-shaped figures that are just fantastic.
But I really love these kinds of things that are so much simpler.
I mean, this is a very boxy, almost octagonal
form of lettering and numbering.
And you see the same kind of thing here,
but a little more sophistication in this one.
Michael Bierut once described what I do.
He compared it to the archaeologist who finds a bone,
and from the bone, like, creates the entire dinosaur.
A lot of what I do is finding those bones
and trying to imagine what kind of creature they came from.
Type design is different now than when I started doing this.
To be a type designer was to be a freak.
I always dreaded the conversation on an airline
with my seat mate saying, "What do you do for a living?"
People would think I designed the magazine itself
or I wrote the magazine, or I, you know, made the ads or something.
And I'd say, "No, I design the alphabet being used for the text you're reading."
And it was the incredulity of like, "What do you mean?
That's like designing oxygen. No... No one designs that."
That gave way to a period of greater understanding,
as digital tools made fonts
something palpable to people.
Grade schoolers choose a font to write a term paper in. You can't not choose.
But now we've entered this third phase where people have favorite fonts.
Now when I'm asked what I do, I say, "I design typefaces,"
and people say, "I love typefaces!
Do you guys know the guy that made Papyrus?"
Or whatever it is.
It's funny going through life as somebody who is attentive to type.
There was this fantastic Saturday Night Live sketch
in which Ryan Gosling is driven crazy by this ubiquitous typeface.
And what's so hilarious about it is
typeface designers who quietly suffered with this all these years,
and to find that actual other people do as well is this...
kind of hilarious and great moment of kinship with the world.
Do you remember the Avatar logo?
I... Yeah. It was tribal yet futuristic.
Papyrus!
Good morning.
Hoefler and Company is a 16-person studio.
We are best known to the world through our website,
typography.com.
That is really the repository for all the things we do here.
We have more than 1,500 styles.
We may have the goal of releasing three typefaces this year,
but we're probably working on nine or ten right now.
Good morning.
One of the hardest things about a typeface is finding a name for it.
We've settled on Decimal.
Decimal watches are watches that the number of seconds
is divided not into 60, but into one-hundredths.
The 12-hour, 60-minute, 60-seconds system,
and the scientific system of base ten.
Something about this is very intriguing to me,
these ideas of two different systems crashing together.
So, I think Decimal's it.
Oh, there's a V.
And this is interesting. It's got the E with a crossbar that's dead center.
Then on the same watch,
it's got an E that is above center.
Pi symbol...
I've never seen on a watch before.
There's a great kind of signature moment in almost every old watch dial
in the design of the number four.
It's got that wonderful flat top to it.
This is a detail not seen in, really, any typeface I can think of.
Here's another watch.
A different manufacturer, different period,
but that same detail.
I started wondering why this one character has been kind of fetishized in this way.
The best I can guess is that in working at small sizes,
a designer does everything to get as much air into a character as possible.
So, maybe this can be the theme of the typeface,
these opened up, squared areas.
I'll probably not find an entire alphabet, but it's far deeper than that.
It is what the punctuation looks like,
what the lowercase might look like, what an italic might look like.
I've never seen italics in watches.
Can you abstract from this a larger theme
about what a whole typeface might look like?
It's a gamble.
This is my first time looking at watchmakers' letters
and it's kind of a scary empty canvas when it begins
without really any assurance that it's going to work.
Humor is such a great way into design.
You know the fold-in, right? In the back cover.
- You've seen how this works? - Yes.
The question is, "What remarkable trick did you learn from this magazine?"
The remarkable trick is...
making 90 cents disappear down the drain.
So stupid.
I loved Mad magazine growing up.
I've always been a lover of satire.
Not just because it was funny, but because it used this whole...
sophisticated visual language to tell the joke.
The cover about video games with the little video game typeface.
The wacky book covers we'd like to see.
That was probably my introduction to the idea
that type has a cultural dimension to it.
This was probably the first issue of Spy I ever saw.
Uh, the Kennedy-bashing issue.
Spy was the first magazine I'd ever seen where I'd become aware of the design.
Alex Isley was doing these extraordinary things,
using unusual scales, making them feel tongue in cheek.
It felt like the perfect marriage of art editorial to me.
I just love things like this.
The story is told with an X-Acto knife cutting through one line
of Alternate Gothic that's letter spaced.
That's incredible to me.
That was the turning point. That was the way out of
type as a part of satire into type as a part of communication.
Oh, I can't believe Donald Trump's gonna be in this episode.
I never went to college.
Typeface design wasn't something you could study back then.
In 1989,
I made a little self-promotion piece as a mailer.
I sent this out with the very non-specific goal
of getting some kind of work involving typography.
But the first call I got
was from the art director of Sports Illustrated, Steve Hoffman,
and he asked...
And for me, it meant the chance to design a typeface for this prestigious magazine.
This was the first thing I did for them. Just these headlines.
This little composition right here.
And we decided we would do a full family of typefaces
that would work in smaller sizes, each with its own width.
That was a typeface called Knockout.
Art directors could match the length of a headline
to the measure of the space and always have a typeface that fit.
And most crucially for a type nerd like me
is you begin to see truly tiny things like this.
What I love about a lot of Jonathan's catalog of type
is that you're always coming from
a really beautiful, brilliantly executed starting place.
In the early '90s, I was at Rolling Stone, worked for Fred Woodward.
We were at sort of the beginning
of doing cool stuff that was getting some acclaim.
And I was invited up to the Hoefler Type Foundry.
So, we go upstairs and...
it's, like, "This is... This is his apartment."
And steps going up to a loft bed with type posters on the wall,
and he had, you know, he had a Mac, and very few of us had a Mac then, and...
And again, I'm like...
"This is the Hoefler Type Foundry?
This is crazy! This is Jonathan's bedroom!"
The first typeface I designed for Rolling Stone was called Ziggurat.
I was working with Gail at a time when Rolling Stone were,
"We need to lose resources in the art department because of the recession."
Gail and I hit upon the idea of taking this typeface and...
essentially retooling it in different styles.
The collection of typefaces, which we called the Proteus Project,
and there are four of them.
So, switching from one typeface to the next, from one cover to the next,
the idea is these are all interchangeable.
You can take one out, substitute the next
and nothing really reflows in your page layout.
They were so cool and so easy to work with.
They represented a whole era of the magazine.
He had this stuff down, as a kid,
that we were just beginning to figure out.
When you think about magazine design in the last 20 years,
such a huge part of the way
American magazines are designed are Jonathan's faces.
He's everywhere.
Come on, he was smart enough to buy typography.com.
So, you know, that's Jonathan.
One of my favorite details in a typeface are these things,
they're called manicules or fists or indices,
hands pointing in different directions.
Manicules are just a way of attracting the eye to a particular detail on a page.
It's been in printing since the first books.
Something like this. That'll work.
- Not bad. - Yeah, it's a start. We'll see.
There's really no substitute for working with primary sources.
These are type specimen books.
Type specimen books are catalogs made by type founders.
These are things produced just to advertise the fonts.
While this book is from the 1870s,
there are typefaces in here that go back 30, 40, 50 years.
Styles that go back hundreds of years, in some cases.
And a lot of these things had been lost to time.
Uh, not one typeface on these pages is something you can buy today.
In many cases, it's specimen books like these
that are the only historical record of some of these typefaces.
In the early '90s, I came across this thing,
which I just fell in love with.
It's a form of Black Letter, which some people call Old English,
that looks like that.
Black Letter typefaces really fell into disuse in the 18th century.
It's alien.
People don't recognize this letter as an E anymore.
But in the early 19th century,
Black Letter comes back into being just because it's eccentric.
We think of this thing as being a fossil,
but it's very much alive in typography today.
And it's been co-opted in so many ways.
Heavy metal uses Black Letters everywhere.
But so does gangster rap. You'll find it in prison tattoos,
Catholic church, satanism.
And there's this sort of marvelous dualism,
this sort of set of binary oppositions where the typeface can be used.
So I began thinking,
“What might we do with this idea, but take it further?”
About 23 years ago, I started working on this typeface,
which we're now calling Parliament.
Embryonic, but, uh, a start.
I started thinking, "Could we do a set of manicules in this style?"
Spent a lot of time trying to figure out how these things
might evolve into calligraphic forms.
This is the final version of these, uh... these manicules.
Thank you.
One thing about typeface design is this constant feeling
of not wanting to repeat yourself,
to try to try something new every time.
Challenges, in many ways, get more demanding as time goes on.
The more interesting, the more specific,
even the more esoteric a typeface you try to create,
the more you have to figure out from scratch each time.
It's a puzzle.
About 20 years ago, I was commissioned by the designer Abbott Miller
to contribute a typeface
to the rebranding of the Guggenheim that he was doing.
We began with openness and roundness, given the rotunda.
The idea of making something feel a little bit more elevated and lofty.
It's always a challenge to try to relate architecture to typography.
An obvious point of inspiration was this lettering on the facade.
The nice thing that seemed to recommend it
for adaptation for a text face
was its stark geometry, which, in some cases, is perfect.
This letter M has a beauty to it that is marvelous.
But letters like E and H have this raised crossbar
that makes them overly stylized.
These are details that are overly distinctive, distracting.
Our hope was to take some of these qualities
and dial them back a little bit.
And push the typeface from being a decorative signage face
into a more conservative face for text and headlines.
Small details helped. Giving the typeface a small lowercase
made the capitals tower over it
and made the whole thing feel a little bit more grand.
Those in different moods
really capture a lot of the qualities of the physical space we're in.
When an institution like the Guggenheim adopt a typeface,
the typeface gets used everywhere,
not just in print publications and on the website,
but in places like store windows,
exhibition calendars,
facilities signage,
way-finding graphics,
floor plans, interactive applications...
and even the guest pass.
The test of that one for me
is looking overhead and seeing the lettering of the name of the museum,
but then seeing the actual lettering on the window.
If those things present the same kind of feeling,
then the typeface is a success.
When you design a new typeface,
the first two characters you draw are the capital H and the capital O.
The principal is that the H is a straight character
with vertical stems and straight sides.
The O is a round character with round sides.
And in theory, once you've drawn these two characters,
you've got a basic sense of the flavor of the typeface you're designing.
Unfortunately, it never seems to turn out that the H and the O
are the characters that designers first draw, because they're boring.
The drawings I've done up to this point
are essentially an inventory of things that are interesting ideas.
Here's that flat-top four, and some ideas about watches
that have the same flat-top detail in letters like A and V and W.
And by extension, what letters like K might do.
It's essential at this point to begin working digitally,
where you're working with the same kinds of outlines, character to character.
I came to design through computers.
I was a computer kid growing up.
I was into video games when they were much simpler things
and you could make one.
As part of the graphics for it, I'd do letters.
Every character had to be eight by eight pixels.
And the question is, how do you give your Dungeons and Dragons-style game
and your space game different typography?
That's tough to figure out.
I'm at the point with Decimal where I've drawn a couple of key characters
that I feel are very watch-like in a nice way,
a few more that are a little bit more neutral
to help me figure out what the tenor of the design is going to be,
and then some really challenging ones.
There's a form of S that you see in watchmaking.
It has these gestures
that point very aggressively outward.
But I've also found this J
where the stroke at the bottom points up into the character.
A lot of what you're doing in typeface design is
finding these eccentric things and trying to figure out
what center you can pull them toward.
Does the S want to become more J-like, or the J more S-like?
Or is it okay as it is?
Even this S and A that I've drawn,
the worst part of this for me right now is I don't like either one of them.
I feel like as a designer I wouldn't use either of these typefaces.
So, where in this continuum...
is the idea of Decimal?
What feels like a watch?
All typefaces are full of these inconsistencies
that are impossible to justify through anything except optics.
And that really is a lot of where the art comes into play.
Type design is not about drawing letters. It's about drawing systems of things.
There are the letters in the alphabet, other cases,
caps, lowercase, small caps, swashes.
There's an italic, there's a bold, there's a bold italic.
All of these have to be created.
Our design team begins with Sara Soskolne, who is our senior designer.
Jordan Bell is a designer with a strong interest in lettering.
Troy Leinster comes from graphic design,
and Colin Ford is a typeface designer and Python programmer.
These are just different things from different watches.
That's a concordance of all the letters and numbers I found.
- I like all the little... little serifs. - Awesome.
Well, that's gonna be kind of a question,
which is, Is this a serif or a sans-serif?
And I've got my... my heart on it being a sans-serif.
- Yeah. - Check that out.
- Yeah. - I think those are fantastic.
- Jonathan, there's our lowercase. - Yeah. Let's just do that.
There you go.
When I begin working with the designers,
they begin asking questions about where the design is going,
what motivates certain decisions.
And that makes me realize that a lot of the things I've been thinking about
really haven't been articulated in the right way yet.
I think one of the key questions right now is what the curves look like.
I was about to ask what you're thinking about the relationship between those two.
- I think we need to pick a direction. - Yeah.
I guess it's also a question of...
There is a lot of chaos in the early days of a typeface
in figuring out what's the signal and what's the noise.
But I do find that working with a team is the best way to resolve that.
Any last words before we jump off the cliff?
It's difficult to find examples, historically, of italics on watch faces.
Whenever I initially skew the Roman form,
it creates this distortion
and pulls a lot of weight into this bottom left-hand quadrant
and, uh, pinches up here.
These terminals, they're very uneven.
It can be tedious, but it's a nice puzzle.
Ultra is heavier than bold. It's as black as you can get.
The urge is to add a lot of weight everywhere,
but you need to pick and choose where that weight goes.
I'll be trying to articulate what the thin version will look like,
because there's not much weight there to hide detail.
I'm trying to keep the same proportion between
the bold and the thin.
It's a bit of, uh, trial and error.
Working with Jonathan is awesome. He's very, very collaborative.
He'll make a prototype and give it to other people to run with,
and be totally unprecious about other people's role in that design.
He quickly handed me the medium weight to help with the prototype.
I find that you cannot look at the shapes that you're making
without also being very careful about how you space them.
It's a huge thing.
♪ These are letters ♪
Most of the shapes that type designers draw
are the ones that never get seen.
These complex forms are carefully crafted
in order to establish the fit of a typeface.
These aren't the shapes of letter forms themselves.
They're the invisible spaces between them.
A well-fitted design has a consistent rhythm
and strikes a perfect balance between the letters we see
and the void that contains them.
Even the most well-fitted letters need some extra helping hands.
After the alphabet is drawn,
a typeface designer will bring additional techniques to bear
to ensure that letters can lock together
into words and paragraphs with an even texture.
The loose spacing of this H and O can be fixed through kerning,
the individual adjustment of space between a specific pair of letters.
But kerning is just the beginning.
To improve the rhythm of this F and L,
rather than kern the letters together, a type designer can provide a ligature,
a specially drawn combination of two or more letters
that's automatically substituted whenever it improves readability.
It's often the case in a typeface
that you find yourself
forced to follow tributaries in places you wouldn't expect.
A reason to be in a graveyard like this one
is to see how the mannerisms of Black Letter typefaces changed over time.
One of the challenges with Parliament is...
how do you modernize this truly ancient thing
in a way that's actually useful, but also feels old?
With typefaces that are rooted in history,
I always want to go beyond what's been done.
The idea of finding some attractive fossil
and just reproducing it doesn't feel very interesting.
Doesn't feel very original, either.
This is great.
It's the same Black Letter style on every surface of this thing.
Incredibly hard to read there, a little bit easier here.
But when the light catches it at the end,
ah, this is just spectacular.
The legibility of a lot of these characters comes from the way
the sunlight strikes these letter forms.
A lot of the typefaces we've been looking at for the Parliament project
are Black Letter typefaces with these raised highlights.
It's very fun to have an actual three-dimensional model to work with
and see how you can change the overall construction of the character.
And I'm curious to see, when we get to working on this digitally,
how we can, uh... how we can achieve the same kind of effect.
The effort involved in drawing contours within contours within contours
is impossibly complicated.
So, something we've been doing is developing a tool to help us do this
which, for the first time, allows designers to control
more than one contour at the same time.
Working with this tool in this way, that'll enable us
to not just make one or two varieties of an element,
but up to five.
Programming has always been an important part of what we do.
In 1991, I got a commission from Apple.
They were developing new technology to imbue a font with intelligence,
to know how to insert special characters in certain circumstances.
I had been designing a typeface myself called Hoefler Text.
And I had been giving this typeface a lot of automated features
like lots of ligatures and swashes and things.
And Apple licensed it for inclusion on the Macintosh.
And subsequently on every iPhone and iPad ever made.
Today, the typefaces that we create need to be designed
in often distinctively different ways to succeed in different places.
A typeface designed for screens
needs to be imagined differently with applications in mind,
imagining how it would work on a smartphone,
how it would work on a watch.
There can be the typeface originally designed for print
that is revisited with screens in mind.
They'll do things like change proportions of letter forms,
take gestures that are prone to congestion at small sizes and open them up.
They'll change the spacing of a typeface.
I think, as with all technologies, it's given rise to new solutions,
but also opportunities to do more sophisticated things.
We've been working on Decimal for a while now,
and I think we're at a fork in the road.
- How's it going? Oh, good. - Pretty good.
There are two different ideas going on
in the lettering on watches we're looking at.
That's something we've been working on in the last couple of months.
None of these feel right.
I mean, including what I gave you to begin with, so...
It's a real question.
This is where I always get fearful that this is actually a bum idea.
We should abandon ship.
In a lot of the watch lettering we'd seen,
there are some curved letters that are very round.
An O is almost a perfect oval.
Some that are very square. Like the U, occasionally at the bottom.
There's a tension there between these things that's not desirable.
It's much more disruptive than I would like.
Here's what it looks like in text.
The thought that a typeface might not work out,
there's definitely a cost of failure attached to that.
Would either that or this work? I'm not sure.
As somebody who has a team of type designers working for him,
it's a monetary cost as well.
When you hit a snag, you've got a couple of options.
One is to just push through with brute strength
and hope that it all comes out in the wash.
That never really seems to work out.
The second is to abandon ship,
to just decide this idea is not working out and to put it down.
The third option is to just kind of...
squeeze the brief a little bit harder and see if you can add more things to it
that might make it more flexible, more interesting.
I wanted to look at some other examples of lettering from very small sizes.
Uh, watches, obviously, are painted in small sizes,
but here at the New York Public Library,
the map room has a collection of engraved lettering in small sizes
from centuries' worth of maps.
The question in a typeface is, "Will it be square or will it be round?
How do you resolve these different systems?"
- Thank you. - The height of...
19th-century map production right there.
This really is insane.
That is great.
I think this is gonna be our answer in Decimal.
Some really nice examples of rounded and then not so rounded lettering.
This is an interesting atlas
because you begin to see a different shape of curves working into this.
There's a great moment over here on the left side
where it says, "Great Barrington."
And the O has a squareness to it.
That's exciting to see here, but then equally fun
in subsequent pages,
there are a pair of streets in this one map,
Hubbard Street and Charles Street.
And Hubbard, the bottom of the U has this very shallow curve,
but then Charles Street below it has a very rounded C.
So, I feel like this designer is struggling
with a lot of these same ideas that can be resolved.
This is great. This is really... It's interesting.
So many of its letters seem to be drawn to be compact.
They try to fill their space as much as possible,
like inflating a balloon inside a box.
We can create forms that are curved but squarish.
Now, we can redefine the brief for Decimal
in terms of compactness.
We've finally reached the point that there is a theme to this typeface.
♪ These are letters ♪
Our attempts to truly see two-dimensional forms
are bedeviled by optical illusions from our three-dimensional world.
Typeface designers compensate for these illusions
by focusing not on the letter's construction, but on its appearance.
And the simplest letters can be the trickiest.
The letter X appears to be made from two continuous lines that cross.
But to have the appearance of continuity, the lighter stroke needs to be broken
in a phenomenon known as...
Disassembled, type doesn't even look like type.
Complex shapes like these can be rife with subtle adjustments
needed to provide the illusion of continuity.
A small curve next to a larger one is something you see a lot on a typeface.
But setting aside what we think we see and measuring what's actually there,
we find that these small and large curves are identical.
This is a crafty effect known as...
And it's hard at work in typography
anywhere you find a pair of closely related nested shapes.
Context means everything in a typeface.
Whether to give a letter form thick strokes and blunt corners
or delicate strokes and a sharp point isn't only about style, it's about size.
These two letter forms are designed
to feel like expressions of the same underlying idea,
but one is designed for small sizes and the other for large ones,
a phenomenon type designers call...
About 20 years ago, Tiffany and Company commissioned me to draw their logo
and then to do a family of typefaces.
Both of these things were designed
to, in some way, come from the tradition of engraving.
Obviously, an engraved piece of jewelry is, a, uh...
mm, iconic Tiffany product.
The logo was an interesting challenge, though,
in that it's meant to seem consistent everywhere,
but behind the scenes, we design logos in a variety of different forms.
The logo will be appearing on a flexible hanging flag
or on a flat awning
or in three-dimensional relief in metal.
It means making compensations in the letter forms,
so that each thing presents the same way.
This project began in 1999,
and in 2000, I got engaged.
And there was this strange moment
where I had just finished invoicing my client for lettering
and went to pick up our wedding bands,
and, uh, there was an item on the receipt for lettering.
And, of course, it's the inscription inside our rings,
which includes the Tiffany and Company logo in small sizes.
Carleen and I began dating in 1999.
She joined the company a few years after that and is now our CEO.
She spent years directing marketing here, and now really directs the business.
Dude!
What's the benefits of being married and working together?
I think... You know what's nice?
Neither one of us can ever
get annoyed with the other person because they have so much work to do,
because you totally know how much work they have to do.
I've driven Carleen nuts for almost 20 years with...
a typeface that's launching in January,
then suddenly it's March, and it's like, "It's almost done,"
and then it's June and it's like, "Okay, now it's done, but I've got a new idea."
Um, you know I know I make you nuts with that and that's...
- You do. - will always be that way.
Um...
But I think, I mean, we're definitely both able to commit to doing the things
that we want to do the right way.
Carleen handles the business, and I handle the creative.
We both find those two things to be inseparable.
Carleen had this idea that we needed a sort of store window
where we can promote our typefaces.
So, we created this thing called Discover Typography
where we can create themes that are interactive.
- We did... - Well, there are 12.
- Yeah. There should be more. - The...
They're hard to do.
Wanderlust was based on vintage luggage tickets.
Barrel Proof was based on
- whiskey ephemera. - Yes!
Redline is based on things with numbers.
Menus.
Take a Number was numbers you just run into.
- That was a fun one. - Matchbooks.
Trail Mix, we thought about the connection between camping and designing.
This is...
really a new way for us in marketing typefaces.
Parliament is done.
Now, we're executing the eleventh-hour stuff.
I'll sit down with Brian Hennings, our creative director,
and try to find ways to present the typefaces
in ways that are compelling,
that show off the best things of what the fonts can do,
but also to help create the kind of culture
that people will understand about what a typeface is meant to connote.
Parliament is so eccentric.
What I'm looking forward to is seeing where it gets used.
I've been working on Parliament for 25 years.
And the final act of the typeface will be seeing it used in the world
and seeing what other people think of it.
The dream has never died, it lives on.
One of the treats of being a typeface designer
is you don't know where the work's going to wind up
and you can suddenly find yourself confronting it in the public sphere.
Gotham is a great example of this. It's something we designed
when Tobias Frere-Jones and I were working together.
It's certainly one of our best-known typefaces.
In the late '90s, I came upon the Port Authority Bus Terminal,
which has these marvelous letters on the Eighth Avenue facade.
They looked like somebody's elemental idea of just letters.
I wanted to do a typeface based on this because it felt so iconic and so familiar.
I was the design director of the 2007-2008 Obama presidential campaign.
Gotham really did speak of American values.
Having that boldness and having that candor and that honesty
that you just see when you lay out the letters C-H-A-N-G-E.
It always starts with when you look at a letter form,
or you look at a word,
does it actually communicate something deeper than the word itself?
Does it actually drive some other meaning to you?
And, subconsciously, I think all letter forms do.
It comes down to
what is the emotional quality that we're trying to say with this word?
And I think that that's the opportunity that we have with typography.
It's impossible for me to say that... that...
uh, there is something about the typeface that it was instrumental to the campaign.
But in the last House race,
69 different candidates used Gotham on both sides of the aisle.
We're starting to see Gotham become the typeface that politicians use
because it has a track record of success.
It's a thrill to realize the thing you put all this effort into,
at least one other person in the world also likes enough
to use them in something.
The cornerstone for the new World Trade Center
was designed by Michael Gericke at Pentagram,
set in Gotham.
Michael chose Gotham because it's of the city.
It's a typeface that was
designed based upon lettering here in New York.
This was an amazing moment in my career.
It was very...
very moving, emotionally.
I mean, you can't be a New Yorker and not have your own September 11th story.
To have this particular connection to the rebuilding
was really quite something.
I think of all the places I've seen Gotham used,
that's the most profound.
It's one of the things I think of first.
It's a strange feeling to complete a typeface.
Decimal's been evolving.
This is the G I had originally and...
So, we've been very slowly making it squarer.
This is how the S began originally.
And it's gradually become squarer as well.
This the four where we began,
and this is the final version.
We finally reached a point that
the balance of the square and the round doesn't take two different approaches,
but takes a single one through the execution of its letter forms.
It's lookin' good!
It is.
- It's great to see the range of weights. - Yeah.
I'm excited about Decimal. It's come a long way from watch lettering.
You'd be hard-pressed to look at an actual wristwatch
and see that Decimal came from this.
I like that...
I can't even describe it. It's almost like these are engraved letters.
Like, the copperplate tradition or something. And yet it's not stuffy.
You'll be able to use the typeface
in a way that is completely divorced from its origins,
which hopefully makes it versatile.
But I'm curious to see how it gets used.
Whether people sense in this that it has a heritage behind it,
or whether it feels entirely new.
I just... I gotta say, I love the way these little spurs worked out in the thin.
So nice, Troy.
It's obviously very rewarding
to see that the very small and mysterious thing that we do
become such a part of the fabric of communication and of the world.
One of the most rewarding things to me is seeing the ways
that people use the work that I do in ways I never expected.
The way they find new voices of typography
that's pushing things forward.
It's changing how people speak to each other.
It's an exciting thing to watch.