Nice one

There is something quite satisfying in any endeavor involving creation: of taking ideas and concepts and giving them life. However, as you noted, it involves a lot of work. Work can be boring and mundane, but the byproduct of work+ perseverance is success.

good point bemerx

it takes bloody ages to do, and a lot of it is repetitive and boring

One of the nice things about type design is that the work is never boring, because every decision as to where to place, say, an accent, or exactly how to shape the bowl of a g, is really important, so there is no fall-off of diminishing returns. The more work you put in, the better the typeface gets. If a task is repetitive, it can be automated.

But of course, there's more to life, as with any line of work--who wants to live a mono-dimensional life?

I suppose it's a question of flow; balancing challenge against your skill to complete it (a lot of everything I do, I learn when I'm doing a project, and need to find out how to do things in order to progress. Too much or too little skill for the challenge can cause boredom and anxiety.
Also, what I'm trying to say more phisolophicalisiphally, is: what is that (if any) all type designers have in common? Is it a search for the zen?

I think all people share a universal quest for identity and meaning. Type designers just happen to find much of it in type design.

Hello Owen. Thank you for asking this question. I have a few answers which are mostly personal. I don't think I can speak much for other type designers.

One thing type designers all have in common may be a desire to express ourselves in a universal way. This we effect by "drawing lines around letters" (was it Benguiat who said that?), or redfining the alphabet. It doesn't even have to be the Latin alphabet. But alphabets are universal and affect whole cultures, entire civilizations. That's a pretty universal and widespread thing to make an impact on. Letters, and typefaces, are tools of language and culture, and we are attracted to the potential of shaping language and culture thru typeface design. To a large extent our influence is subliminal, going largely unnoticed, yet the influence of type may be more persuasive than is generally realized.

I have tried to make the influence I exert on the Latin alphabet philosophical, taking into account much art history and history of type design. For other type designers the quest is more a matter of pure aesthetic influence by way of fashion and visual prominence.

. . . how important is everything else?

Everything else is very important. Type is not my obsession (interest in the one thing to the exclusion of all other things), but the rest of the world weighs heavily on my mind and has a huge influence on the kind of typefaces I design and the way I design them. The "tyranny of the mainstream" in the sense of mainstream culture for example, is directly responsible for my fonts based on the very idea of non-conformity and bucking conventions. That philosophy in itself runs counter to the basic premise of type design, the integration of disparate letterforms into a homogenous unified regiment. Even so, I've found it is possible to design fonts that defy certain rules of integration yet are stylistically unified at the same time. The effort to make such consistently inconsistent types is also driven by my strong support of tolerance within society. Tolerating people and things that fall outside the mainstream, even those I dislike, is very important to me as a person, so it makes sense to extend this moral philosophy into typeface design too.

Everything else is important. I love architecture and industrial design, and try to put those things into my type designs. The nature of cats, spiders, cephalopods and dogs all influence the appearance of a couple of my fonts. The nature of spirituality and emotions bordering on religious conviction too, relativism, my near-death experience and second lease on life, the suffering of disenfranchised and "gifted" people I converse with on the street (we used to call them handicapped), the innocence of a child, the loss of a friend. Everything else is important and affects the fonts I design. Every bit of it.

j a m e s

I have a question to add: how many type designers can be happy without commissions? I sometimes get the impression that a great deal of high-end commercial type design is client driven, and the the design ideas and inspirations are rooted in client requests. Would it be harder to be a type designer if one were to design type completely independently, as opposed to doing at least some work on commission?

I do all my stuff completely independent, but that only works (commercially) because of the huge number of visitors of my site and blog I can redirect to MyFonts.

I just came here to add something about commissioned type versus retail font sales to another thread.

There isn't a lot of money in retail fonts unless you are a large vendor like Fonts.com, Myfonts, Ascender Corp or Veer, with sizable collections from numerous sources. There isn't much in the way of retail font sales to be had by font makers thru those outlets unless the font maker is prepared to make trendy, commercial retail faces. I prefer to call those ones "shitty trendy", because so many of the very successful ones are quite shitty from the standpoint of type design. So far I have refused to make trendy commercial fonts for retail sale, as that would be way to close to prostitution or fobbing my soul to the devil (not that I believe Satan even exists). Instead I have made only the fonts I want to make for retail, and enjoyed mild sales success. Thank you Myfonts.

I've earned much more money from commissioned font design and production. The problem with commission jobs is that they are, as you say, client-driven, and that usually means very boring specs for the designs you make for them. Making clones of Impact, Arial and other popular fonts whose owners charge exorbitant license fees for bulk-o # of seat installation --- is not much fun or creative challenge, but it pays well and is slightly more fun than making trendy commercial fonts for retail. Trendy commercial retail fonts don't offer much creative challenge since their specs are already well established before they hit the market; nothing to figure out, nothing to design, a foregone conclusion, boring, boring, too boring even for pretend consideration unless you enjoy doing that sort of thing.

j a m e s

But to answer thread title question: Can type design make you happy, or do you need something else?

Type design and making fonts has not made me happy, mainly because I'm not prepared to make the kind of fonts people will pay money for, whether retail or commission, makes no difference to me. It's the everything else that makes me happy. I don't even try to earn a livelihood from type design. Kept my day job, wouldn't even consider throwing in that towel. The prospect of working full time in what is a corrupt business populated by a lot of no-talents who rip off each other's work and demonstrate the most unprofessional conduct you'll see this side of the fashion industry -- does not appeal to me much.

* Typeface design itself is great fun.
* There isn't much money in doing it as a profession.
* The people in this business make me not want to be in it because they're so childish and unprofessional.

j a m e s

Wow James. Thanks for giving the time to make such interesting comments. I see from your MyFonts biog that you're a bit of a polymath; I'm also into video, music, writing etc, and I find type design balances pleasantly with more moi moi kissy type aesthetic activities. I think you're right about universality: typography's literally the full A–Z, twice, and then all those other characters you never thought you'd have to deal with. I know what you mean about wankers in the industry. I got my graphics degree last year, and one of the six people that got a first basically copied everything from someone the year before. I honestly can't put myself in a position to understand how you could live with yourself doing that. It seems to be the opposite of everything that would persuade you to go to art school in the first place. I suppose it is a lot to do with tolerance; but can we tolerate intolerance?

O

Just to add a different tone to this topic: type design for me isn't about chasing the buck or about how to relate to a corrupt bussiness populated by no-talents or wankers in the industry. It's just something I want to do to express myself (I also like to paint and to write). The satisfaction to create something and the process that leads to the final thing are the most important to me. That is what makes me happy. Money earned with it is great and I could make a good living out of it, but it's not of first importance, because I also have a job. I guess the future for (commercially) successful type desigers largely depends on how they can market and brand themselves (on the internet).

So far much of what I've said on this topic has been negative. I'm determined to balance that with the positive side, because telling both sides of the story and giving a balanced view counts for a lot. Typophile's members and readers must be tired or at least bored by my harsh criticism, so I am making this one count for as much as possible.

I owe my whole type design career to Americans and Canadians, whose established type industry sells my fonts to the world. My hat is off. And hey, I mean it. I owe you people an incalculable debt of gratitude and respect. I may be critical of the retail font business but I'm no fool. It's a business. Like any other business, it has its share of problems. It has many strengths too, having expanded the range of fonts available to graphic designers at absurdly low prices. Its health is reflected by the extent of open competition between players and a notable lack of monopoly. "Anti-trust" is not known to us.

I owe much gratitude and thanks to the Typophile community for providing me and every other type designer in the world with a remarkably diverse, tolerant and informative environment of learning and typo debate. No other industry I know of has anything like the equivalent of Typophile. We are unique, our level of talent is awesome (in the true sense of the word), and Typophile's ability to foster new talent makes it a beautiful thing. Coaching up-and-coming type designers in the Critique forums here has been a blast and a distinct pleasure for me. I've met some great young people and managed to pass on some of the skills and philosophy I acquired by a combination of working out for myself and learning from established living luminaries. There are too many of them to list.

". . . an indusrtry populated by no-talents . . . " is a very biased and unfair picture. It isn't all that bad, but it can sometimes look that way. In reality there are hundreds of very gifted artists and designers now working in type design. I prefer to dwell on that than on the bad eggs who specialize in making knock-off fonts. We all know who they are so there's no point, no need to list them here.

If you're in it for the money, there's nothing wrong with making trendy commercial fonts, but be aware of the limitations or that career track.

If you make fonts purely for the love of type and letterforms and a love of language, history and culture, there is plenty still left to do, so go for it.

If you make fonts for a combination of the reasons outlined above that's fantastic too and you should do it as much as you can, as best you can, without regrets. Life is too short for regrets.

Last but not least, a message to the Typophile community: be tolerant. The world is full of things that pisss us off, and so is typography. But we have to live with it. We have to coexist with things and typefaces that grate on us. We don't have the luxury of choosing, or the luxury of getting depressed and upset about it. So just—tolerate it, and things will go a lot smoother. Try to get inside the head of each and every typeface, each and every type designer and type enthusiast, and see yourself and the rest of the typosphere from their point of view. We are all engaged in the same basic struggle. Just trying to survive.

Typophile and making your own fonts does not make the struggle go away. It only makes it more interesting.

Flies in the vasoline we are
Sometimes it blows my mind
Keep gettin' stuck here all the time
—words by Scott Wieland.

j a m e s

Jos, you beat me to the post. I had my last one all typed up in advance. Thanks for chiming in on a positive note. There is a sunny side to the street. I know you make type for art's sake. It's the only way to go if you ask me, so keep at it because you have a lot of fans and followers.

j a m e s

Thanks, James, I will :-)

I'm glad we duo-directed this topic towards a more positive feeling about the happiness of type design.

We have been given a gift - a love of letters - the most basic and integral form of communication. So let us be judicious with our choice of content, style and presentation, lest we miss the mark that God was aiming for through us.

Michael

I find typeface design as something which I can be one with the rest of the world, it is a kind of meditation, and a passion in my blood.
On the other hand there is more than typeface design in life. For me, my family (included my petit dog), my friends & all the people I love are much more important than typography.

Elí

I think font creation is far more satisfying than type design.

Type design is creative. A language has many letters, and oten many additional marks. So, the creativity is multiplied and also multi-faceted. It is multi-faceted, because of a few factors.

1. The general type design must be transfered to take on different but common expression in the various shapes of the letters and additional marks. If the type design is inconsistant, then it fails, because certain shapes are out of place.

2. The general type design is challenged, because each letter shape or additional mark poses its own limitations due to appropriate black/white "color" balance.

But font creation is much greater, because there are many more factors that go into a good font than mere type design.

For example, font creation also includes other creative and technical factors.

Kerning is an example of something both creative and technical that is addressed in good font creation.

Hinting is another example of something both creative and technical that is addressed in some very good font creation.

Both of these examples require the font creator to have a very sensitive eye for detail. Many good artists of attractive type design lack a very sensitive eye for detail.

Encoding is an example of something technical that is necessary for correct font creation.

Nowadays, font formats are becoming increasingly more complicated. For example, OpenType offers many more possibilities to the diligent font maker. An impotant programming aspect is added to the font maker's "bag of goods".

If we tally it up, font creation is much more exciting and rewarding than type design.

There are other things besides type design?

Yes, font creation.