Practical Font Design, Third Edition
It started in the late 1960s when I was hand lettering psychedelic posters for my acid-rock group on the West Bank of Minneapolis. I started getting my fine art degree in printmaking in the Fall of 1969 after flailing about for a few years as a flower child (those people who were later called hippies). When I graduated with my BFA degree in Printmaking & Drawing, I almost immediately became involved with publishing. In the late 1970s, when I was hired (in west Virginia) as a graphic artist under Pik, an art director from the last class at the University of Michigan to still be required to learn hand lettering. Many of the projects I did for him required hand-lettered headlines. If they weren’t hand lettered, they were heavily modified photostats begun as presstype. During the 1980s, my main skill was modified type built off presstype from Letraset. They were the only company selling designs that impressed me. In starting the research for my new booklet series on Type Design I have discovered that a major influence on my design taste is Colin Brignall, who was the Type Director of Letraset—the major supplier of presstype and new font designs in the 1980s. I started putting in alphabets from fonts I love and the first three I thought of were designed by Colin. What really opened things up for me was FreeHand during the 1990s. Being able to tear type apart and play with the paths became my main source of creative fun. The direct control of paths that FreeHand had was amazing. The thing that finally moved me over the edge was the inclusion of Fontographer with the Graphic Studio Suite and FreeHand 7. I was forced into FontLab in the early years of the new millennium. At first I hated it. But I have come to rely on its path editing tools. They are far superior to FreeHand which in turn was far better than Illustrator What led you to pursue designing fonts? It was fun—simply entertainment. I was driven by the need for fonts that had characteristics that were not being sold for text fonts. Caslon had the expert sets and that was it. For example, I wanted true small caps and oldstyle figures in all my fonts and that was not possible or readily available in text fonts limited to 256 characters. I needed display fonts that had caps, lowercase, and small caps. I wanted ligatures. I needed the open ballot box. So I added them to all my fonts. I often had to make several version of each style to simply hold the various characters I used all the time in my designs.