In celebration of the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, Debbie Millman shares excerpts from interviews with typographers and lettering artists Marian Bantjes, Oded Ezer, Jessica Hische, Tobias Frere-Jones, Matthew Carter, and Kris Holmes, reflecting on legibility and expression, how letters behave, the discipline of refinement, and how type has evolved from hand-crafted processes to the digital tools we use today.
Kris Holmes:
“So you want to get into calligraphy, huh?” I said, “Oh yes, Professor Reynolds, I do.”
Matthew Carter:
Who needs two typographers in the family?
Tobias Frere-Jones:
Change this other thing, make this curve longer, make this curve sharper, or whatever. It’ll have some other effect.
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, we’ll hear from some of the typographers and lettering artists Debbie has interviewed over the years.
Marian Bantjes:
It is perfectly legible. It never interferes with the reading.
Oded Ezer:
I wanted to create a new creature.
Jessica Hische:
I love just coming up with really stupid conceptual projects that I can never do for clients.
Debbie Millman:
There’s not a day that goes by when you don’t encounter a typeface of one sort or another. Most people don’t think about it, but someone designed that typeface. In fact, there are designers at work on new typefaces all the time, and you’re about to meet a few of them. You’re also going to meet a few of the not so distant cousins of typeface designers, lettering artists who draw letters and text for their books or art or design work.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed a number of typeface designers and lettering artists, and I’d like to play you some excerpts from some of those conversations.
Canadian artist Marian Bantjes is celebrated for her intricately patterned images and custom lettering. I spoke with her in 2010 shortly after the publication of her book, I Wonder.
So each piece in the book, each essay in the book is very different, and you’ve said that some are tender and bare, while others lie in jeweled cases, and others still are tarted up like elaborate cakes. What made you decide to create each essay with a very different visual language?
Marian Bantjes:
This was part of the point of the book, and one of the things that I wanted to achieve with the book was to make a point about graphics not being superfluous to text. I’m astonished, actually, by the number of people in graphic, in the graphic industry, visual people who don’t communicate visually. At the very best, usually what we get is we get pages and pages of text and illustrations to accompany that, and the illustrations are in boxes with captions, and they’re separated from the text. At the very worst, we get pages and pages of text and no imagery whatsoever, which just blows my mind when somebody’s talking about something visual. But I wanted to really integrate the two so that when I’m speaking of something visual, I’m not just showing the visual, but I’m actually representing the entire piece in that visual sense. The best example probably in the book is the piece that was about signage from my hometown of Saskatoon.
And that was, again, it was originally written for Speak Up and it was originally written on the web. It was necessarily written as writing and then images. And when I brought it into the book, I wanted it to be so much more than that. I wanted the entire reading of the piece to be the experience of seeing all those signs all over Saskatoon. And so the whole piece is fluorescent orange and yellow and black. I mean, it’s really in your face. And then on top of that, I changed the writing. So instead of writing in an article style, I rewrote the entire piece in the language of signs. So I actually turned the essay into a series of graphic signs. So the whole thing is complete.
Debbie Millman:
Some of your essays are harder to read than others, and you clearly state that the typographic treatments will no doubt cause a certain amount of pain to some of your more rigorously trained colleagues in graphic design. However, you make no apologies for the typographic jungle you’ve painstakingly nurtured. And so two questions, Marian. Why no apologies, and why a typographic jungle?
Marian Bantjes:
I actually think that, except for one section, the book is 100% legible. It’s meant for reading. I don’t want people to get the impression that the book is typographically adventurous because it’s actually not. I’m a really, really conservative typesetter. That’s what I bring from my book typesetting days is this conservatism in terms of text that’s meant to be read. But my typographic choices, my combining of typefaces, my choice of typefaces, is what would quite possibly cause pain to some of the purists in the type world. I think that probably the average person would think nothing of it, but type purists would probably throw their hands up in the air and say, “My God, why did she use such and such a typeface for this and not that?” So I don’t apologize for it because it is perfectly legible. It never interferes with the reading, and yet it’s got personality, and I’m happy with that.
Debbie Millman:
I actually have to say, Marian, in the hundred-plus broadcasts that I have done of Design Matters, I’ve never actually wanted so badly to be able to show something to my listeners as I do now.
Marian Bantjes:
Well, that’s a great thing.
Debbie Millman:
Because there is really no other way to be able to experience this book other than see it. There really are no words that could possibly describe the adventure that one takes when going through your book. And so this is a moment where I’m going to have to tell our listeners that in order to believe it, you’re really going to have to see it. But I am going to take some umbrage to something that you just said because there is actually one chapter. And I think you did mention this, so I will give you that. There is one chapter that I have spent quite a long time trying to get through, painstakingly trying to get through, and have been unsuccessful. And it’s a chapter aptly called “Secrets.” And so I am now going to put the question to you in person. What is the Secrets’ story saying?
Marian Bantjes:
Oh, that would be a secret now, wouldn’t it?
Debbie Millman:
Now you’re being a minx.
Marian Bantjes:
Well, I mean, just in the way that I want people to experience the chapter on wonder in an environment of wonder and experience the chapter on the signage from Saskatoon in that signage. So two, when I write about secrets, it is secretive. There are two parts to that chapter. One of them is essay-like, it’s talking about secrets and ciphers and the messages that we’re not supposed to read.
Debbie Millman:
What do you mean by messages we’re not supposed to mean like we-
Marian Bantjes:
Well, things like people’s diaries and other people’s letters and things that you’re really not supposed to be digging into. And it’s written in a type that I designed that is difficult to read. You can read it. It’s difficult, but once you get the hang of it, you can read it. The other part of that chapter is actual secret text, in that I wrote it in a cipher, a kind of code. It’s secret. It’s a secret. There’s a secret text in there.
Debbie Millman:
One of the most beautiful, and wonderful, and inspirational chapters in your book is the chapter where you reproduce many of the lists or the pages of lists from your mother’s notebooks. They are magnificent. And I’d actually like to read something that you wrote about those lists from your book. This is from the chapter “Memory 2.” Food, friends, family, pets, directions, TV shows to watch, notes from the radio, problems with her car, book titles, appointments, meetings, bills to pay, oven times, questions, answers, the repetition of chores, and people and food leave a kind of fabric of life. Her life, my life, all our lives are somehow reflected in these pages. These are the things we do every day that make us both unique people we are and members of something bigger and more universal than our own tiny lives. It’s remarkable, really remarkable.
You pop up quite a lot in her lists. Ask Marian to remove the dead mouse. That was a particularly interesting one. And then things about the oven, phone Marian, make carrots, phone Jenny, phone Dennis. Tell me why you included these lists in your book.
Marian Bantjes:
There is actually a lot of my mother in this entire book. The book is dedicated to my mom, who died in 2006. These lists were, they were kind of seemingly ordinary to-do lists that she kept for a good part of her life, and which I inherited when she died. They were a part of her life, as well as part of my memory of her, because ever since I was a kid, I remember her having these notebooks. And the early ones have conversations back and forth between me and my mom and my brothers.
Debbie Millman:
What kind of conversations?
Marian Bantjes:
It was sort of what you did before you had cell phones. I mean, we would come and go from the house and there would be a message from my brother saying that he’s off to his poli science class and a message from my other brother saying that he was out with Laurel or whoever.
But in particular, there’s also these very immediate messages. So my mom, for instance, would be talking on the phone. And I was a kid at the time. I was 10 or something, and I would be bugging her and trying to get her to answer some question or give me permission to do something. And I’d be writing her a message, and she would write me a message back, and I’d write her a message. Meanwhile, she was on the phone. So she’s talking to herself, and she’s talking to her pets. She’s writing notes about the pets. I mean, and they’re hilarious. I mean, it’s incredible. These are to-do lists and they’re funny. And there’s just so much of her in there.
And I wanted to include this because they’re handwritten and they’re graphic. They’re the perfect example of a graphic representation of a human being. And in a way, they’re doing exactly what I’m trying to do in the book, which is represent language and thought in a graphic way. And she already did it. And so it just wraps up the book perfectly.
Debbie Millman:
Marian Bantjes in 2010 talking about her book, I Wonder.
Oded Ezer is a typographer and artist based in Tel Aviv. I spoke with him in 2013.
In your book, The Typographer’s Guide to the Galaxy, you ask some rhetorical questions, you put them out at the beginning of some of the chapters, and sometimes you answer them directly, and sometimes you use different examples to articulate an answer, visual examples. And so I want to ask you some of these questions. I think they’re really fascinating questions, whether they have to do with typography or not. My favorite question that you ask in the entire book is, “How can I make type behave in a way that it speaks about time?” And so I’m wondering if you could answer that question.
Oded Ezer:
Well, it would take me some time to answer this question.
Debbie Millman:
Of course, it would.
Oded Ezer:
I think what is really important about this question is the question itself. I mean, we trained as graphic designers and typographers. We trained to ask: How does this type look? And I claim that what we really have to ask is: How does this type behave? And this is a completely different question. When you ask it like that, you understand that you can activate type, just like a person that sits in front of you. And I hope that by doing this, we can achieve a higher level of communication.
Debbie Millman:
I think that one of the most successful ways that you’ve done that is in your tortured letters experiment. Those that are listening that might not have seen them, first of all, I urge you to look, odedezer.com and you can see his tortured letters experimental typography, but I literally felt a visceral sense of fear, a little bit of disgust in seeing these sort of tortured pieces of typography, but not so much because they were just pieces of typography, but mostly because they were bandaged in a way that made it seem as if they were amputated in some way. There’s this sense that something is fundamentally broken and that it has been tortured and not just hurt by accident.
Oded Ezer:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
How do you do something like that? How do you come up with this?
Oded Ezer:
Well, I didn’t really think when I do these things. I mean, I just let myself play. So in this particular project, it was a really short, by the way, really short project. I mean, it took only one day, and because it was a series of improvisations, and I just had my photographer with me. He said, “Oh, don’t move. Just leave it like that. I will shoot it, and then you can continue.” And that’s how we worked. It was really a fluent process, and I try not to think too much.
Debbie Millman:
How old were you when you did the project, Oded?
Oded Ezer:
Well, it was a few years ago.
Debbie Millman:
All right. So late 30s?
Oded Ezer:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Mid-30s?
Oded Ezer:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Okay. So, as Paula Scher would say, “It took you 38 years in one day, not just one day.”
Oded Ezer:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
Because it’s everything that you’ve brought to that day to create that experience.
Oded Ezer:
I agree.
Debbie Millman:
So, a couple of other questions from the book. You asked the question, “How do letters look when they are happy? How do they look when they are shy? How do letters look when they’re shy?”
Oded Ezer:
Well, again, I have to think about it. I mean, well, I assume that if 10 designers will ask this question, the same question, you will get 10 different answers, and that’s how it should be. The importance is to ask this question rather than to answer. Of course, the answer will be very, very interesting, but I just wanted to explain my way of thinking about type.
Debbie Millman:
Sperm DNA and type. You ask a question in your book, or you actually state, “I love to combine typography in other fields in order to find out what else can be done with letters.” And so your sperm DNA and type, typosperma, is that correct?
Oded Ezer:
Typosperma.
Debbie Millman:
Typosperma. How did you actually construct the letters? Because they felt very three-dimensional.
Oded Ezer:
Right. Well, it started with the two-dimensional drawings.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Oded Ezer:
And the first few drawings were not very good because I felt like I’m forcing the letters on the sperm, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to create a new creature. So then I slowly, slowly understood that if I don’t use the whole letter part, like I use only part of the letter and I use only part of the sperm and together form new creature, then it looks convincing. And also, I have this excuse that the sperms are not developed yet. So you can have half-ready letter sperm.
Debbie Millman:
So you have mutated letters and beings.
Oded Ezer:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
One of your more recent projects is a piece that was inspired by Memory Palace, a popular graphic novel by Hari Kunzru. I read that you actually literally hungered for something different. You were hungering for something different. So you shot a video of yourself ravenously devouring bits of edible typography, spelling out key concepts in the novel. It’s not entirely clear in the movie, in the video that you’ve made these letter forms from seaweed. It actually looks like you’re eating something that actually isn’t really edible. I see this as conceptual, as I see Sagmeister’s Cranbrook poster, where he carves the information about his lecture into his body. And here you are engulfing, eating this information, and you eat it in a way wherein it’s not entirely clear to the viewer if your mouth or tongue is bleeding while you’re eating.
And it feels as if this is your attempt, and in some ways, as Sagmeister’s as well, to sort of become one with graphic design, that you are now the canvas in which the design is either happening or containing.
Can you talk a little bit about what made you decide to eat the typography and what made it seem as if it might actually be painful?
Oded Ezer:
The idea behind those eight different videos that I created for the V&A exhibition was to try to find other ways of reading type and content. So one of the ways was eating the types. Imagine to yourself that you are introduced to typography, but you don’t know what is it actually. So if you are really a curious person, you will try different things. And one of the things that I thought I can try to read is by trying to taste it and to eat it and to try to have it in my body, and maybe in this way I can read the text. Of course, you can’t, but it was an honest attempt. I dealt with other techniques of reading texts, just like burning text, burning the actual letters, not the book, but the letters, tearing it apart, and other very naive attempts to understand what’s going on there.
Debbie Millman:
It’s one of your most powerful pieces.
Oded Ezer:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Oded Ezer from 2013.
Jessica Hische is an author and a lettering artist. I’ve interviewed Jessica several times over the years, and I want to go back to the 2011 interview I did with her. At the time, Jessica was in her late 20s, and the internet was a whole other place.
In addition to your extraordinary talent, one of the things that really put you on the map in the design community was a project that you started when you first went freelance, a project called Daily Drop Cap. So talk about what Daily Drop Cap is/was.
Jessica Hische:
Well, when I left working for Louise, I knew that my schedule was going to be kind of all over the map and that I am not incredibly disciplined at showering before noon and stuff like that. So I wanted to do a project that kind of kept me on a schedule when my schedule was going from like very regimented to just all over the map. So I set up Daily Drop Cap. I originally wanted to do an alphabet a week and realized really quickly that was far too ambitious. So I settled on a letter a day, and it ended up being just kind of like the best thing I could have ever done for myself.
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Jessica Hische:
It just took off as a project. It inspired so many. Young designers would write me and tell me, “Oh my God, your project made me want to do a daily project. And because I did this daily project, I started getting work.” And a lot of people ended up kind of knowing who I was because of Daily Drop Cap.
Debbie Millman:
How did you get publicity for it initially? I mean, you put up one letter a day. After a couple of weeks, what do you have? 30 letters? So how did it catch on like that? How did it become this really cultural phenomena?
Jessica Hische:
I think a lot of people started paying attention once I got past the one or two-month mark because they saw that I was being really regular about posting. And I think at the time there weren’t a lot of lettering websites like that. A website called Letter Cult existed, but a few friends of mine, friends of type, started up a site around the same time. And theirs is this very similar thing, except it’s four people collaborating instead of just one. And I think that the biggest thing that kind of put it around was the internet. And that’s one of the reasons why I have just kind of a love, love relationship with the internet. Tina from SwissMiss wrote about it, and that was a huge push. Jason Santa Maria wrote about it, which, of course, I mean, that guy has more Twitter followers than the president. Not really, but almost-
Debbie Millman:
Close enough. And so you then went from Daily Drop Cap, and I think you had 12 or 13 alphabets?
Jessica Hische:
12 alphabets that I completed, and then there was a 13th guest alphabet.
Debbie Millman:
And then you’ve been doing regular internet projects ever since. So in addition to all of the freelance work that you do, designing stamps, designing book covers, et cetera, you also have a number of other sites that you’ve created, the “Should I Work for Free?” site, which I want to talk about. momthisishowtwitterworks.com. You also have your own blog where you have posts like “The Dark Art of Pricing” and so forth. So you seem to have quite a following of people that are interested in your point of view as well as your actual output of design work.
Jessica Hische:
Which has been really wonderful. I mean, the main reason why I’ve started all these projects is that a lot of the lettering work that I do isn’t exactly the most intellectual work. I do a lot of work for advertising, which is really wonderful, but at the same time, someone hires you and says, “Draw the word Christmas and ribbon.” And that’s kind of all that you do. It’s not really a giant exercise in brainwaves. So I’ve used a lot of these side projects as a way to kind of exercise my other creative muscles and copywriting. I love copywriting and writing for things. And I love just coming up with really stupid conceptual projects that I can never do for clients.
Debbie Millman:
All right. So let’s talk about some of them because I think they’re really intriguing. Let’s talk about “Steal My Idea.” Let’s talk about that. You have a bunch of ideas on this site. You have an idea that’s called the Zipcar-like gym service. You have “The Internet is Now Diamonds.” Forwarded emails-
Jessica Hische:
That was very topical, that one.
Debbie Millman:
Forwarded emails from mom. So what about Steal My Idea? Let’s talk about that one.
Jessica Hische:
Well, I always have these… The thing is, if anyone pays attention to the stuff that I do, I’m churning outside projects like crazy. I think I have 11 of them at this point. And it’s kind of like a little overwhelming to maintain all of them, but at the same time, I feel like I’m constantly … I have this walk that I do every day from the Bedford Avenue stop to my studio in Greenpoint, which is about 25 minutes, 30 minutes. And I’m always coming up with some random, weird idea on that walk that I wish that I had time to do myself, but I don’t. So instead I’d tell the internet, “Hey, do you feel like making a website called ifeelawful.com in which all that you do is scout out bodegas that deliver Advil and Gatorade to hungover people?”
Debbie Millman:
And then what about your cake site? Did you get a lot … You posted a query about asking people to send you cake.
Jessica Hische:
It started out as a joke at the studio because when I was sharing a space with Tina from SwissMiss and a bunch of other web designers down there, and Tina, of course, gets a ton of requests constantly for people to kind of pimp their stuff on her website. And people do that a little bit to me, but not quite that much, but they do it a lot with like, “Hey, will you send my portfolio to other art directors that are looking?” And I decided to make a joke of it and say, “I won’t judge you at all based on your work, but I will judge you based on your baking ability. So if you can send me a cake that’s creative and good, I will do a massive write-up about how awesome you are at baking and how that probably translates into your design portfolio.” So it’s kind of a-
Debbie Millman:
How many baked goods did you get?
Jessica Hische:
For a while, it was like once a week or something. So everybody at the studio was like, “Man, this is awesome.” And then by maybe the third or fourth week, they were like, “All right, I think I’m about four pounds in. I think we should maybe quell this a little bit.” Okay. Okay.
Debbie Millman:
Jessica Hische from 2011. I interviewed her again in 2020, so there’s a whole lot of Jessica Hische you can listen to.
Tobias Frere-Jones is a designer who has created some very popular typefaces, including Gotham, Retina, and Interstate. I spoke with him in 2015.
Over the seven years you worked at Font Bureau, you created a number of the typefaces that are their best known, among them Interstate and Poynter Old Style and Gothic. Let’s talk about Interstate. The font was released in 1994, just two years after you arrived at Font Bureau. And from what I’ve read, Interstate was loosely based on the Font Family Highway Gothic used by the United States Federal Highway Administration for road signs. Is this true?
Tobias Frere-Jones:
Yep.
Debbie Millman:
And so what inspired you to do that?
Tobias Frere-Jones:
I grew up in a number of different places in Brooklyn, but for a long time I lived at the very top of Brooklyn Heights, just by the Brooklyn Bridge there, up the hill at the beginning of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, looks out over the water over to Manhattan. If you stand at the very northern end of the promenade and look down at the BQE that’ll appear below you for a moment, you’ll see a highway sign right there for, I believe, it’s Exit 28. It’s this unusual circumstance where you get to see a highway sign at eye level and a pretty short range. So I spent a lot of time standing there at the railing looking at these letters, thinking that these shapes that are so distinctive and so recognizable don’t exist outside of this one particular environment, and they work pretty well at this environment. They’re durable and legible at high speeds, and those qualities ought to be useful for running text.
So it was with this premise that the strength of these forms can be remapped to a new situation that I had this idea that I would make a text face based on highway signs. And I just kind of liked the fact that it was from this completely sort of off-the-wall source. So with the help of my friend, also from RISD, Scott Stowell, I tracked down the Federal Highway Administration’s specification for what highway signs ought to look like and what the letters on highway signs ought to look like. It’s a pretty bizarre-looking spec, and how closely it’s followed varies a lot from state to state, I found out later. But the idea behind Interstate was basically to take these forms and try to keep their personality, what I came to think of as their clunk, and remove the parts that don’t help, like the weight that clumps up in places and the widths that look kind of weird and the curves that break in weird places, basically to make all of that look deliberate and balanced. That turned out to be a much more difficult job than I realized.
Debbie Millman:
How do you do something like that? How do you make something look deliberately balanced?
Tobias Frere-Jones:
A lot of trial and error, and most of all, observation.
Debbie Millman:
You have to then be able to trust your own observational abilities.
Tobias Frere-Jones:
Yeah. And that doesn’t appear on day one. That comes through finding out what happens if you change the width of the lowercase N and the lowercase H and the U and the M, its relatives, and then seeing what kind of effect that has when you set a whole block of text in it and then trying something with the lowercase B, D, P, Q, and G, that’ll have some kind of effect. I came to notice really quickly that to be able to understand the cause and effect, I would have to do one kind of change at a time, and then see what that effect was and try to understand that if I do this, it will have this effect. If I change this other thing, make this curve longer, make this curve sharper, or whatever, it’ll have some other effect. It was really the first time that I took this very foggy notion of a personality and tried to break that down into the parts that would project that. It was this kind of curve, this kind of intersection.
Debbie Millman:
Interstate has now been used all throughout culture, including the 2000 US census. You’ve called the font “working class lettering.” What do you mean by that?
Tobias Frere-Jones:
I called this a working class or blue collar typography to acknowledge its source as being different than, I don’t know, Bembo or Garamond or any of these other sort of fine printing typefaces, which are great. And they’re beautiful, and they’re lovely, and they’re really important. But I think there’s also a value in this other source that has a much different kind of attitude, but also comes from outside typography. Type design has a tendency to point back to itself.
Debbie Millman:
In what way? What do you mean?
Tobias Frere-Jones:
So much of type history was an incremental process from one designer slowly shifting a style from the designer that had come before, whether it was Fleischmann and Caslon and Baskerville and the rest. That certainly changed after William Morris. So we don’t think it’s so unusual to find Futura and Garamond on the same page, even though those were designed hundreds of years apart. We couldn’t really do that in fashion or in many other fields. I mean, you might be able to pull that off in architecture in some way, but-
Debbie Millman:
Maybe with some furniture, but it would have to be inventive.
Tobias Frere-Jones:
Yes. Yes. But there’s a kind of fluidity now to history that I’m pretty sure does not exist in most other fields.
Debbie Millman:
Tobias Frere-Jones in 2015.
Matthew Carter is one of the world’s most celebrated typeface designers. His many typefaces include Georgia, Yale and Roster. I spoke with him in 2018 in front of a live audience for the Type Directors Club in New York City.
Can you explain to the audience what a smoke proof is and how you make one?
Matthew Carter:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
This was one of the most fascinating things that I learned in doing my research.
Matthew Carter:
When you’re cutting a bunch, you obviously want to see what the letter looks like. The only way to do that is to hold it in the soot of a candle flame. So you get a little deposit of black soot on the face of the punch and then dab it on a piece of coated paper normally to leave a little impression. So that is what you do. You look at it, and you see the letter printed at actual size and so on. Inevitably, when you first look at it, it’s wrong, so you work on it more. It’s very difficult to persuade students that whoever it was, I don’t suppose it was me, but the first time somebody digitized two letters on a computer and sent them to a laser printer, and they came out at real size and real time, was the first time in the history of typemaking that any type designer saw their work in that way.
I mean, smoke proofs, you can imagine it’s immensely laborious. When I was at liner type, if you wanted trial matrices cut, you had to wait because it interfered with production and so on. Same thing in the photo-composing days. I mean, the factory was very good to me, but there were often… With matrices, it would be weeks of waiting. With a trial font, it would probably be several days at least before you could see what you were doing. So, smoke proofs were the punch cutters’ only way of getting some sort of idea of what this letter might look like before you struck the matrix and went.
Debbie Millman:
So you heated up the metal type, you then were able to get some soot to be able to then press it down on some sort of coated paper to see what it would look like.
Matthew Carter:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Matthew Carter:
You don’t believe me?
Debbie Millman:
No, I do. I do. I do.
Matthew Carter:
It’s true.
Debbie Millman:
It’s just hard to believe how far we’ve come.
Matthew Carter:
Yes. It is. It is.
Debbie Millman:
And also, I can’t imagine that looking at the type that way would really be that accurate.
Matthew Carter:
It’s accurate in this sense that the image you get is very precise, provided you do it right. But of course, you get no clue about spacing, how the letters look together. We used to do this. We used to make smoke proofs. We would cut them up tiny little pieces and paste them up to make an alphabet or words, unbelievably laborious. But still, it’s not really a very satisfactory way of doing it. But it was the only way to do it in those days.
Debbie Millman:
What made you decide not to go to Oxford after you had planned to go?
Matthew Carter:
Well, I think it was just this year I’d spent and got interested in type, although as I say, the particular craft, I mean, it takes more than a year to become a punch cutter, but I had some sort of journeyman proficiency. I kind of knew what to do. As I say, I couldn’t make a living that way, but I had got interested in type. And I think that although my dad never pushed me to sort of follow in his footsteps, he said, “Who needs two typographers in the family? Conversation at the dinner table would be much more interesting if you went and did something else.” But then, when I did say that I’d gotten very interested in this, he was very supportive in that sense. But I think it was a combination of my liking the experience that I’d had at Enschede’s not liking the prospect of learning Anglo-Saxon, that decided that for me.
Debbie Millman:
You were really struggling initially to find work, to get a job.
Matthew Carter:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
You were drawing alphabets for modernist designers.
Matthew Carter:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And wanted to develop contemporary Sans-serif type during a fairly conservative time in the country.
Matthew Carter:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And you started working with Alan Fletcher and Colin Forbes, two of the original partners at Pentagram.
Matthew Carter:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Talk about that experience. First of all, did you meet Alan through the boarding school experience?
Matthew Carter:
No, no, no. Here’s what happened. I moved to London in 1958, I think it was. In 1960, I had a great stroke of luck, which actually did sort of change my life. I was given a sum of money. I think it was 300 pounds, but 300 pounds went a long way in 1960. And what I chose to do, to this day, I’m not exactly sure why, I chose to spend it on coming to New York. So I spent a few weeks in the spring of 1960 here, and I was gobsmacked. I mean, I went to Push Pin, I went to Geismar, I went to Lubalin, they all handed me around, and so on. And I saw graphic design that I didn’t know existed. I mean, I was amazed. But the thing that really turned me on the most was going to Mergenthaler Linotype.
Mike Parker, who I already knew had been working there about a year, I think, an assistant to Jackson Burke, who was the director of typographic development at Mergenthaler. Mergenthaler, by the way, then was sort of dark Satanic mill down by the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, between the Pratt campus and the Navy Yard. But I loved it. I really loved the factory atmosphere and so on. And I kind of let it be known to Mike and Jackson that I loved to work there. There was no job for me at that point. And actually, in retrospect, that was a mercy because I don’t think I had anything to offer at that point.
But then in the intervening years, I did go there in ’65. So in the intervening five years, when I got back to London, sort of charged up with everything I’d seen here in the studios in New York, I can’t remember exactly how it started, but the fact that Alan had been to Yale and worked in this country, I did do quite a lot of work for him and for Colin, for Bob Gill when Bob came over and joined an ad agency in London for Derek Birdsall, David Collins. There were a handful, not a great many, but there were some very, very good graphic designers in London at that time who wanted to work in a sort of international modernist style. But the type-setting trade in Britain was incredibly conservative at that time. Helvetica was released in Switzerland in 1957. In 1961, we could not get Helvetica set in London.
Debbie Millman:
Why not?
Matthew Carter:
No one had it. They had the monotype faces. They had some Stephenson Blake grots and so on. Nobody imported Helvetica. Nowadays, if someone introduces a new typeface in, I don’t know, here or in Berlin or in Tokyo, people are using it in seconds. The fact that there should have been a four-year time lag between introducing a face like Helvetica and [inaudible 00:40:11]. But that, in a way, I benefited from that because I got to draw a lot of lettering, sometimes whole alphabets, sometimes logos, and so on for those designers. And this was a really great training for me because they were very exacting and they made me get it right and get it on time and all that good stuff. So it was really a very fortunate thing I kind of fell into.
Debbie Millman:
Matthew Carter in 2018.
Kris Holmes is a calligrapher and typeface designer. I spoke with her in front of a live audience at the Type Drives Culture Conference for the Type Directors Club in 2019.
You’ve stated that calligraphy literally means “beautiful writing,” but to you, it also means efficient writing. So, can you talk a little bit about the distinction?
Kris Holmes:
Well, calligraphy really was originally not invented, but developed for reproduction of books because if you can’t print books, you have to have some way to write them out to share the literature. So I think that these scripts evolved over time, not to be fancy or eye-catching, but just to kind of get the job done. And what evolved were letter forms that are very efficient. Every major part of the letter is done with only a single stroke. So if you’re doing hand lettering with a crow quill pen or something, you do a whole bunch of little strokes to outline the letter, but with calligraphy, you just go whoop, whoop, and there’s your letter.
Debbie Millman:
I learned this while researching you, and I am astounded at the difficulty of calligraphy, which looks so effortless and beautiful and is almost irreplicable. It’s just not something you can do easily. It’s something that requires so much more skill than meets the eye.
Kris Holmes:
Yeah. They say that it takes 10 years to make a good calligrapher. And when I heard that during my first year, I thought, “Oh, no, I’m never going to make it.” But I did make it at just one step at a time.
Debbie Millman:
After you left Reed, I understand that you had a job at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City. How did you get that job, and what did you do there?
Kris Holmes:
I was a lettering designer there, but I didn’t last very long. I got the job-
Debbie Millman:
In two months, right?
Kris Holmes:
Yeah. Two months. I got the job because-
Debbie Millman:
Were you fired or did you quit?
Kris Holmes:
I was not fired. I quit. But Hallmark Cards was just interested in finding lettering designers, and they asked for portfolios. I sent my portfolio, and they hired me. But when I got there, I just found that I really didn’t like the work very much, the sort of saccharin messages that we were writing out. It’s a wonderful place to work. And I learned a lot about hand lettering just in two months, but I just thought, “I really don’t want to do this forever.” So I left the job.
Debbie Millman:
And you had a major detour in your life at this point. You decide that you want to study dance, you want to become a professional dancer.
Kris Holmes:
No, that wasn’t at this point in my life. The reason I decided to study dance was way back at Reed. I used to hang around the Reed Calligraphy Studio because Lloyd Reynolds hung around there, too. And you could go in and watch him just practicing with his big coit pen and the letters just kind of flowing out of his hand like water. I love to watch him. And one day, he kind of put his pen down, and he growled at me. “So you want to get into calligraphy, huh?” I said, “Oh, yes, Professor Reynolds, I do.” He said, “If you want to be a good calligrapher, get into modern dance. That’s where you really learn how to move that pen across the paper.” So I ran right out and signed up for a modern dance class. And again, I had the luck of finding a fantastic teacher. Judith Massee taught there at Reed, and she was so inspirational that I thought I wanted to be a professional dancer.
Debbie Millman:
And so you went to New York. Now I believe, was it after Hallmark or before?
Kris Holmes:
Yeah. No, it was after Hallmark.
Debbie Millman:
After Hallmark, you tail it to New York.
Kris Holmes:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And you decide … So at that point, you studied with Martha Graham?
Kris Holmes:
Yeah. At the Martha Graham School.
Debbie Millman:
At the school. And you studied at the Alwin Nikolais School?
Kris Holmes:
Yeah, that’s correct.
Debbie Millman:
And so what made you decide not to be a professional dancer?
Kris Holmes:
Well, I wasn’t good enough. It’s that simple. I went there, and I took classes, and I went to auditions, but just technically, I was never going to be a top modern dancer. But while I was in New York, I took a class at SVA.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, you did.
Kris Holmes:
From Edwin Gatt.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, you did. I interviewed him last year, quite a feisty interview we had.
Kris Holmes:
Yeah. And he taught hand lettering, and that was really another in a string of great teachers. That was another teacher. And he took me from being a calligrapher to being a lettering designer. And he was incredible. His finished work was just so perfect. And at that time, the way you did finish work in lettering was with black ink in a crow quill pen and then you corrected your mistakes with white plaka. And it was so agonizing. I was never very good at that, but he was great at it. So I took his class and I thought, okay, I’m failing as a modern dancer, but I’ll bet I could succeed as a lettering designer.
Debbie Millman:
That was Kris Holmes in 2019.
You can hear the full interviews and hundreds of other interviews with some of the world’s most creative people on our website, designmattersmedia.com or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll be back next week with another special episode called from the many years I’ve been recording Design Matters. Yes, this is the 20th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced by the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.