The TYPOBerlin 09 “Space” conference was where I met and made this interview with Nick Shinn – a famous type designer and the founder of the Shinntype foundry. He is a regular contributor to the well known typographic community and forum typophile. I love typophile, it is a marvellous place in cyberspace which reminds me of my university lecture halls. Where I used to drop in and listen to the discourses on visual perception and the lectures on the history of art. It’s sometimes mundane, sometimes very technical, but whenever I visit there I always find something to satisfy my curiosity.
I’ve done some Turkish support in a few typefaces. The biggest technical challenge for type designers is how to encode the ‘fi’ ligatures so that they don’t work in Turkish! And the other thing that’s difficult is to make sure that you keep your dots on the small caps ‘I’.
Beaufort Pro
Duffy Script
Figgins Sans
Oneleigh Pro
Paradigm Pro
Pratt Pro
Scotch Modern
Softmachine
are the designers’ fonts which have Turkish language support. Azerbaijani, Uzbek and few other Turkic countries use Turkish letters extended with some of their own characters.
What inspires you to create a new typeface?
I would say a collision of ideas. And then working out how this collision can resolve itself – that’s the typeface. I just try to come up with a different idea for each typeface. Like, I’d never done an exact historical revival in all my typefaces until the Modern Suite. So I thought, I haven’t done that yet, so I should give it a go. I always try to do something different. For intellectual reasons and also for marketing reasons. Because my theory of marketing is that if you want to survive as a type designer and as an independent foundry, you have to have products that fit the Long Tail theory of marketing, which says that there’s a lot of people in the world, there’s a lot of people online, you can have a lot of products, and that way, as long as the products are unique, no matter how crazy they are, there will always be someone somewhere in the world who’ll find a use for them. Not necessarily the use which the designer intended, but if you design something which has its own raison d’être, then it’s got a reason to exist and a personality, qualities that people find useful – somewhere.
Do you work within preset constraints, or do you prefer just a blank sheet of paper?
Well, the constraints are the idea which drives the typeface. Pick a typeface which I designed and I’ll tell you what the constraints were.
Figgins and Scotch Modern?
The constraint was to create a typeface to compete with Adobe products because it seems to me that Adobe typefaces are the de facto standard of the digital era. If most professional graphic designers use the Creative Suite then they will be familiar with the Adobe fonts that are bundled with it. These are fonts such as Arno Pro, and the other Pro fonts. And those fonts have a lot of OpenType features, they have a lot of language support, and they are presented in very nicely designed printed specimens. So, that’s what I set out to do with the Modern Suite – on the one hand to design typefaces which could in theory compete with Adobe typefaces in terms of OpenType features and language support, and secondly to create an accurate historical facsimile. And the third constraint was to create a superfamily of sans serifs and serifs that worked together. Because that’s the way that most designers work, they use a sans with a serif. So those were some of the constraints that I set up and observed from the beginning of the design process.
What makes a typeface modern/contemporary?
Well, the simple answer is, all new typefaces are modern because they are brought into being in the present day. Obviously a typeface which is a revival is still a modern typeface because the way in which the revival is carried out says a lot about the present era. A typeface of mine like Panoptica is modern because nobody else has designed a typeface which is both monowidth and unicase. It’s a new idea, so therefore it’s a modern idea. But on the other hand the Modern Suite revivals are also modern. Not just because they come from the era which first used the term “modern” to describe Didot styles, but also because of certain present-day design techniques I used. For instance, I decided to draw the characters, draw the glyphs directly into Fontlab with its vector drawing tools, without using scans. I would look at my book that was printed in 1869, and I’d look at the 10 point type through a magnifying glass, through a loupe, and then I’d draw it using a Wacom stylus, which is my tool of preference. So I very much went for the old fashioned life drawing: you put the object in front of you and you draw it—but paradoxically to me that’s a modern idea because today when most designers do revivals they use scans. And I wanted to avoid that. Maybe you could say that my idea was old fashioned… I think that if I had drawn from life just because I had traditionally done it that way, that would not be modern, but because that decision is informed by my attitude to modern practice, my decision makes the design modern.
Is type design today still too conservative?
I don’t think it’s possible to generalise because the field is so diverse. There is a huge amount of conservatism in the bundled fonts that most computer users use. So if you look at the ClearType typefaces that were recently done for Microsoft, those are very conservative, there’s not a lot of experimenting going on. If you look at some of the popular foundries in North America, their work is quite conservative. A lot of that is because they are commissioned by publications to do conservative designs and I know that when I get commissions, my clients generally want something that’s conservative rather than experimental. But at the same time I think there’s a lot of design work going on, more in the retail field, that is still fairly experimental. Not as experimental perhaps as 10 or 15 years ago, but it still has new ideas in it, particularly things which exploit OpenType. It may not be so wildly experimental as the classic new typefaces like Dead History or Matrix were, but it’s still experimental in its own way.
Is there anything in your opinion which is holding back type designers or restricting their creativity?
It depends how you make your living. My income is really split down the middle between commissions and retail work. Most of my commissions want something which is conservative, but nonetheless I do get some where I have more free range to come up with new ideas, and so a lot depends on the client. In retail work, if you think, “oh scripts or grunge are popular so I’m going to do a 1950s-style fancy script with lots of swashes”, could that be considered holding you back, because you’re turning lettering styles of the past into fonts? And is it retro in that sense or is it progressive in the sense that it gives new kinds of tools to graphic designers in the form of OpenType fonts which enable them to mimic the kind of extravagant forms which were previously only available to lettering artists…?
Alejandro Paul’s work well…
Yes, he’s the prime example. So is Patrick Griffin, with his Memoriam typeface, that’s another strange example of the old and the new.
How important are ethical considerations to your work as a designer?
Well, as I said, I hadn’t done an exact revival before Scotch Modern but on the other hand some of my typefaces are very much in standard genres. I follow the principle that one should create original fonts, and if one’s working in a genre that has been well-mined, I don’t think that’s a problem if it’s an historical genre. So a typeface like my Worldwide for instance looks like dozens of other Century kind of typefaces that have been designed in the past, so it’s not very original, but I don’t think being unoriginal is unethical.
What do you say to young designers starting out today?
Well, I do a bit of teaching, and when I first started teaching I set projects which were more open-ended for my students. So they were free to express themselves more experimentally in the design solutions they came up with. But the most recent project I had students do was very narrow. There’s a typeface in Toronto which was designed in the 1950s for the transit system, and it’s Art Deco capitals in a bold weight – that’s the traditional form that’s been used since the 1950s. So the project I set my students was first to digitise the upper case drawings, because they were never originally created as a font. They were created as drawings that were made into signage, so they were never used for printing. The first part was strictly technical – it was to digitise from scans of old drawings. And the second part was to create a matching lowercase face to go with it. So in some ways it’s similar to the Gotham typeface by Tobias Frere-Jones, where he looked at the traditional signage lettering in New York and did a digital version of it and then invented a lower case to match it stylistically. But the purpose of the excercise was to get my students to look closely at a genre and with not much room to be “creative”. Typographers put a great store on choosing – “I’m going to use Helvetica”, or “I’m going to use Akzidenz Grotesk” or “I’m going to use Folio” or this version of Garamond as against that version of Garamond, or “I’m only going to use Helvetica and Arial sucks”, and, really, they don’t look too much different. And with these subtle distinctions, what kind of exercise of taste do professional typographers exercise, and how do you teach that subtlety to students? So I thought that I would give them narrow parameters to work within so that they would become more aware of subtle distinctions by doing tight work, such as deciding how big to make the x-height, rather than trying to express some outrageous idea that might be beyond their technical abilities at the beginning.
What have you learned about the business side of design?
Well, I have my own marketing strategy, which is to have a lot of distributors. I know some foundries have a different strategy, they just distribute directly. With the internet and online sales if you publish your own fonts you make a large percentage, so I decided to set up my own foundry and publish my own fonts through many distributors. And I felt I was in a position to do that because I had a background in marketing and advertising and would be able to market my fonts myself, and I also decided to sell myself as the foundry, so that’s why I named it after myself – because I think we live in a celebrity driven culture. It’s ironic in a way because I went into graphic design and type design because I like the anonymity, the idea that what I created, people would choose on its own merits and not because they thought I was cool or because there was anything meaningful in my personality which informed the design. But by the same token I don’t think you can avoid the fact that to be successful you have to market your fonts personally. And I do believe that typefaces are personal or individual designs. I know it’s possible to split up the design process and have different parts of it done by different people, but ultimately I think a font is successful if it has very strong direction from a single person. You could say the same about other forms of art like music or writing. So it does help to promote myself as the brand, and that’s one of the reasons why I like to speak at conferences, not because I’m vain or want to make a name for myself, but because I think that you do need a reputation in order to be taken seriously. I mean, you could sit back and wait for your reputation to accumulate and be somewhat reclusive, but I don’t mind being opinionated about things and putting my name to statements, and I don’t think that hurts business either. Because it’s publicity.
What inspires you right now?
I use type design as a way of learning and of finding out about meaning. In design and in general. The Modern Suite involved trying to discover why those typefaces looked the way they did, and so I studied the history, and that was one way of learning, by reading books and looking at old specimens. And I also sought out not just specimen books but actual magazines and ephemera from the past because I think that gives a better impression of the reality of typefaces, to see the way they were used rather than the way they were promoted in catalogues and specimen books. My motivation was to explore an area of history that I found interesting and which had been ignored. And it was based on my observations of the way design history focuses on 20th century modernism, which to me, as someone who worked in commercial advertising and has a collection of old ephemera from commercial advertising, none of which is modernist – to me the main story of the 20th century was not modernism, it was historicism. With that perspective I wanted to investigate type designs called modern typefaces that were designed in the 19th century. So my interest in the modernity of the 19th century was driven by my disillusionment with a design history which focuses on modernism in the 20th century. That was the intellectual history side of it. And then there was the idea that I could learn about the past not by just looking at it but by trying to recreate it in a typeface. Those were some of the ideas which inspired me. The inspiration was to try to learn more about, to realise my ideas about design history and cultural history and cultural reality, and do it through the process of critical design.
Which project of yours do you feel has been the most successful so far?
It depends what you count as success. I think the Globe and Mail fonts, which I recently designed, such as Pratt Pro, are some of the most successful because their development was intimately involved with the development and major redesign of a newspaper from the ground up. So the design of the typefaces emerged from the design process of the publication as a whole. While typefaces which are designed without any particular use in mind can turn out very well, a typeface which fulfills a particular need has the opportunity to be quite different because if you have the privilege of working with a client in an environment where there’s synergy, then things happen which bring you out of yourself and make new possibilities happen. So I like to think that working with David Pratt on those fonts was very successful, because we had no idea how the typefaces would turn out before we began work on the project.
© Portrait of Nick Shinn, Marc Eckardt
© Ayşe Kongur. This interview was translated into Turkish and printed in Grafik Tasarim magazine.
