Jordan Jelev opens the box, unwraps the wine, and studies the label.

The wine label is his canvas, a place where he transforms his design and lettering into hand-crafted works of art.

Jelev, a designer from Bulgaria, has earned a reputation for his excellent wine labels—his nickname is The Labelmaker—but his work goes beyond labels. Lately, he has been experimenting with different approaches, different tools, and different styles. Making letters has become his work, his play, his obsession, his passion.

The free bottles of wine aren’t bad, either.

“Yes, I am a dedicated wine drinker, though I consider myself a total amateur in this field,” Jelev says in an email, adding his usual at the end.

The fact that Jordan Jelev is making letters at all is something of an upset.

He graduated with an Economics degree and was preparing for a career as an accountant or bookkeeper. He probably wouldn’t have discovered lettering had his father and wife not given him a set of automatic pens and some pen nibs as a surprise gift.

“I do not know how it happened—seriously. It just happened,” Jelev says. “I think I will have to kill myself if I had to work according to my education…a bookkeeper, for example. Funny—could not stand it.”

We communicated via e-mail over the past few months for this Q & A.

How would you describe your fascination with letterform?

For me, letters are maybe one of the most interesting things and phenomenons in the world. I mean it because I see it everyday in my work and in my life. It’s a real miracle to express yourself with writing…to make a long, long swash when you are happy and a short, sharp stroke if you are angry. Calligraphy gives you a true chance to be what you want to be, to be yourself, to free your emotions, and your senses. And if it is really good, people can read it.

You’ve received a lot of attention for your work on wine bottles. How’d you get involved and what do you like about that medium?

It all began some 13 years ago. I started working for www.factor-r.net and the studio already had some wine clients I started with. Then, I made my own style of how to make labels and packages and the number of clients grew bigger and bigger. Of course, there is no need to say that a large part of my wine labels is based on calligraphy, or sometimes my whole label is totally hand-crafted.

The calligraphy itself makes my labels more distinguished, more recognizable. It is really hard to find one that uses custom lettering in the 21st Century—instead of a large amount of digital fonts. Anyway, I am addicted to calligraphy. It gives life, color and emotion to my work. It all looks different, and here, in my country, almost everyone knows it is done by me.

How did you make the switch from Economics to design and lettering?

Well this happens here really often—you can see a doctor driving a cab, or an engineer selling tomatoes. My case is not exactly like those I mention above…Here is the situation: After finishing my service at the Navy in March of 1996, I had three things of importance:

1. I got my discipline in the Army.

2. I wanted to get a good education.

3. I already had the experience of graphic design and pre-press while doing everything around the Navy newspaper Morski Dnevnik

So having 1,2,3 on my mind, I decided that an Economics degree will be good for me in the future, and on the other hand, I was totally convinced I would have to both study and work.

I started working at Zograph Studio from 1996 to 1998—there I had my experience with pre-press, graphic design, typography, some different machines like several imagesetters, etc. And while being a student in Economics, I began to realize I had some extra powers as a graphic designer and even pre-presser. In fact, the truth is that I am popular as a graphic designer, but I have remarkable experience in the pre-press field and in offset- and flexo-printing that I keep a secret, though some of my colleagues know it.

Your secret is out.

Yes. They use me as an adviser on some difficult projects. So I saw that my skills are in graphic design and I started developing them. Now, I do not even know where my diploma is. I think it is somewhere in a drawer at my office, but I do not think I would try to find it.

Was your family disappointed you didn’t stick with Economics?

Nobody was disappointed, because it was quite obvious I had a lot to show in the field of design and less as an accountant. So nobody got disappointed and nobody ever thought to give me directions in my life—I have made a choice and I followed it on my own.

So as a designer, you are self-taught?

Yes, completely self-taught.

What is Bulgaria like for design?

That is a long conversation. We should make a separate one for this question exclusively. I wish there was a better design climate here and because of some regional exceptions here, I do believe the situation will change in the near future.

Where did you look for design inspiration?

Well, I started to look at what others do. In 2000, there was almost nothing to inspire me, except my friend Dimitar Traychev. In fact he is an inspiration for a whole generation in Bulgaria, I think…but that’s a long story too. He is a very interesting person!

You are also following in the footsteps of Luca Pacioli, right?

Luca Pacioli was the father of double-entry accounting, but in fact, he was an artist. He even designed his own typeface. So I am not an exception—seems there is some strange liaison between Economics, calligraphy and design.

You’re learning more new techniques and styles and pushing yourself in different mediums. Why is that important to you?

I think I would never stop learning more and more. For me, that is the only way to find myself, my mood, my emotions—it is something like fitness, but not for your muscles, but for your soul.

I’ve always had some crazy ideas, some of them already seen, but I think I have far more to learn from now on.

Your work has been evolving, from Blackletter to Islamic calligraphy. Can you explain the connection?

Yes, I mix them…there is a close relationship between those two writing styles. I think the origins of Blackletter are in the Islamic culture. I do believe this is true. I am a Blackletter addict. This inspires me really a lot—every letter is a unique logo. I can write Blackletter every day. This love of mine led me to follow Islamic calligraphy, Persian especially…and I found for myself the relationships between gothics, Islamic writing, and those artistic strokes we can find in graffiti…it is all same thing, same culture, same vision, spread over several centuries of history.

Who are some of the calligraphers who have inspired you?

There are two great guys that give me a lot of inspiration every time I look at their works—Hassan Massoudy and Julien Breton. I love their work and I am learning from them—it’s like trying to play something from Mozart, Beethoven, etc., but in calligraphy. I am trying to get to their level and style and from this state, to generate my own calligraphy.

You’ve been experimenting a lot with rice paper. What attracted you to this texture, and how has that been working out?

Well here, the most interesting things are:

1. The ink stays really wet on the paper, and makes small ink spots on it, which basically forms the texture inside the letters.

2. You can use a backlight to make your calligraphy glow, which I found is really interesting and really simple to do. Just put a lamp behind it and everything changes.

Can you explain Asemic calligraphy for those who might not know what that is?

Asemic calligraphy is a group in Flickr I came upon a few months ago and I loved this name. Asemic stands for means nothing—strokes, letters, swashes, moods, gestures—it is just calligraphy that means nothing and could mean anything.

What different tools and ink that you use for your different types of calligraphy?

I do not use so many tools as it possibly looks. I use a thick paper nib, or a wood nib for the wide strokes. I often use bayonette nibs, copperplate nibs, oblique pen holder….what else, automatic pens, coit pens…and a pilot parallel pen thanks to my friend Maxim Ivanov. And I sometimes use some strange tools like pipette, chopsticks, and many others. I have recently started working with acrylic ink for airbrush of Pebeo—Julien Breton advised me so. But I mostly use Windsor and Newtone inks and Talens Ecoline.

Recently, you collaborated on a typeface with FontFabric.

Yes. It is a strange Blackletter type called Grant. But this is only the beginning. We want to start two more projects—the Kaloyan Typeset and another Blackletter type that is still unnamed.

You got a Wacom tablet in late 2008. What can you tell us about the results digitally vs. the results with ink on paper?

I think both cannot be compared. They both do calligraphy, but the result, the feeling, the style—everything is totally different. In digital, you have software, wires, some strange tools, plastic surface, digital simulation pressure levels etc…and a digital print finally.

What are some of your goals for the near future?

Well, there many goals, in fact a lifetime would not be enough for me to make everything, so I stay with only 3-4 of them.

1. Maybe I will concentrate some efforts in type design.

2. Maybe I will try to approach some wineries in USA and Australia.

3. Maybe I will continue mixing my style in calligraphy between digital and traditional.

4. And of course I will look after my kids (two daughters) and wife.

What are 5 things people don’t know about you?

1. I read a Latin dictionary in my bathroom.

2. I read a wine encyclopedia in my second-floor bathroom.

3. I am afraid of heights.

4. I love to use my 4-stroke engine Honda lawnmower.

5. I hate to walk barefoot.

LINKS

Jordan’s website

Jordan’s Behance Profile

Cargo Collective site

SEE ALSO

Jordan on Facebook

Asemic calligraphy group on Flickr

FontFabric

Dimitar Traychev

Maxim Ivanov

Morski Dnevnik newspaper

Julien Breton

Hassan Massoudy

Luca Pacioli Wiki

MORE

THE COMIC BOOK VENDOR with the moustache sneered at me.

I’d asked him a simple question. Now, he seemed offended.

“You wanna take a picture of what?” he asked.

“The letters.”

“The letters?”

“Yes. Some of the lettering.”

“And why is that?”

“Because…I like letters.”

He went silent. He was studying me.

“Okay, fine, you can take some pictures,” he said, finally.

He watched me carefully, and at one point, he showed an interest in a few of the lettering examples I’d chosen to photograph.

“You know, I’ve never noticed some of this stuff,” he said. “Interesting.”

He managed a thin smile, and I smiled, too.

And so went another awesome Comic-Con, which ended Sunday in San Diego.

The San Diego Comic-Con is an annual celebration of fandom, a pop-culture explosion of freaks and geeks, nerds and noobs, Twilight addicts, and grown men in spandex Tron suits.

It’s also a chance for the world to get a sneak peek at what’s in the pipeline—film, TV, comic books, toys, and video games, among other things.

On Sunday, amid the chaos of more than 30,000 people roaming the hallways of the Convention Center, a few of us checked out the custom lettering, which was drowned out by the heavy presence of Comic Sans.

Stuart Sandler (Font Diner), Rian Hughes (Device Fonts) and Nate Piekos (Blambot) were among those spotted over the course of four days.

And for a few hours on Sunday, I tried to capture some of the Custom Letters at Comic-Con. Not the greatest photos ever, but with Chewbacca and Pikachu hovering about, it was easy to get distracted.

As we approach the halfway point of 2009, we’ve begun seeking out the best and brightest in the ol’ Custom Letters Dept. And we are asking for submissions—if you see something we’ve missed, please send us a link.

Custom Letters is an evolving category that includes calligraphy, sign painting, graffiti, stone carving, digital lettering, hand lettering, paper sculpture, and type design (we’d prefer to feature new/original type over, say, revivals).

Custom, in this instance, means built from scratch; we aren’t looking for customization—a type treatment or 3d treatment—of an existing typeface.

We’ll be adding more pieces as the year progresses, culminating with a Best of 2009 at the end of the year.

Now to the good, the great, and the notable stuff we’ve seen so far in 2009.

ARON JANCSO

LUCA IONESCU

ENKELING

NANCY HARRIS ROUEMY & PATRICK GRIFFIN

TRAVIS PITTS

RANDY JONES

CHARLES BORGES de OLIVEIRA

MICHELE ANGELO

MICHAEL TYZNIK

ADAM GARCIA

LUCA IONESCU

NATE WILLIAMS

ANDY SMITH / WILL BRYANT

ADAM GARCIA

GIAMPIERO QUAINI

RAY FRENDEN

BEEJAY

KENNETH FRASER

ANDY SMITH

JESSICA HISCHE

ALEJANDRO INLER

ANDY SMITH

JORDAN JELEV

GIULIA SANTOPADRE

B.T. LIVERMORE

JOEL BIRCH

JESSICA HISCHE

DAVID CROY

ESTHER AARTS

JOEL BIRCH

MIKE GIANT

JEDREK KOSTECKI

GREG JAMES

JESSICA HISCHE

SARAH KING

MAXWELL LORD

NATE WILLIAMS

PEDRO SCANDIANI

PAUL HOLLINSWORTH

LENNARD SCHUURMANS

RICHARD PEREZ

GEONETIX

SANTAAAH

SEB LESTER

ALEX TROCHUT

LINZIE HUNTER

ISABELL SEIFFERT

SHOE MUELMAN

JESSICA HISCHE

ALEX TROCHUT

PARRA

HANDMADE FONT

STEVEN BONNER

GEONETIX

HANDMADE FONT

OSCAR MARCHAL

GEMMA O’BRIEN

ERIC WAETZIG

JON CONTINO

BU DESIGN

GEMMA O’BRIEN

SERGEY SHAPIRO

ALBERTO SEVESO

JON CONTINO

ALEX TROCHUT

DAVID CROY

PAUL TORRES

ALEX TROCHUT

JON CONTINO

CRYSTAL KLUGE

VON GLITSCHKA

VICKY NEWMAN

DAVID CROY

CHRISTIAN SAN JOSE

ALEX BELTECHI

CHARLES BORGES de OLIVEIRA

ALEX TROCHUT

JOHN LANGDON

LUCA BARCELLONA

BEEJAY

BRADLEY FASTCODE

JOSHUA TETREAULT

ADAM DEDMAN

FIODOR SUMKIN

ANGELA DUNCAN

CHRIS PIASCIK

SIMON PAGE

WOJTEK POLAK

UPDATE: MORE WORK HERE

please send your links to: brianjar (at) earthlink.net … or UPLOAD to Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/customletters/ … thanks!

If you were an independent type designer, circa 1977, these are the tools you might use to create a typeface.

These were the tools that Mark Simonson used to create Kandal, a wedge serif typeface with an intriguing backstory.

The Making of Kandal spanned three decades, four Presidents, and a move from ink to digital.

Simonson began the typeface in the 70s, and called it Excalibur; it was tweaked in the 80s; and it was finally released in the 90s as Kandal.

Simonson, whom we interviewed last fall, agreed to an in-depth discussion of the typeface.

In an age of digital creation and instant gratification, it’s instructive to look at how things used to be done, sans computer. And Kandal is also a story of persistence in pursuit of a dream.

We go back to 1977.

Simonson was in college, studying graphic design, when he really started to pay attention to type. For example, he was intrigued by the differences between Univers and Helvetica.

He didn’t think about making type. Until…

One day at school, he noticed an oversized publication scattered about. He reassembled the pages, and that’s when he discovered U&lc, the magazine.

“It was like a bolt of lightning to my interest in type at the time. And was a major factor leading to my interest in designing typefaces,” Simonson says.

His immersion into typography sparked a desire to publish a typeface. The best place to do that was International Typeface Corporation (ITC).

“Their faces were very popular, they were not tied to any particular typesetting company or typesetting method, and the offer of an up-front payment ($1,500 for each weight/style) plus royalties (10 percent) seemed very good at the time,” Simonson recalls. “Letraset or (VGC) might have been good alternatives, but their fonts were tied to a specific manufacturer, for example. There was practically no place else like ITC.”

Now, if you look carefully at the jpg at the very top of the page, in the lower right corner, you’ll see a note, partially obscured.

Please write and tell me what you think of my design and how I can make my dream come true. Typographically yours, Mark L. Simonson

The dream was real, and Simonson was living it, doing everything he could to make it happen.

“I was composing the letter I wanted to send to ITC,” Simonson says of the note. “I was naive and full of myself, and getting all worked up about it…It’s sort of embarrassing, like those notebooks from high school with the name of a girl you had a crush on, all over them.”

Simonson, in his own words, describes how he created Excalibur, which was influenced by the Jenson-esque type that Jim Parkinson was creating for Rolling Stone.

Simonson: The preliminary sketches were not unlike what I do nowadays. The finished sketches—which I intended to be the basis of the final art—were in pencil on tracing paper, about 4 inches on the cap height. I traced these using markers onto tracing paper in order to ‘preview’ how the final letters would look.

I did the uppercase, lowercase, numbers and some punctuation for the ‘regular’ weight. I also did a few letters for each of the other three weights and italics I had planned, enough to spell out the names of the weights (Light, Book, Black, etc.). I also did sample finished art for the regular weight ampersand. This was drawn on illustration board with a Rapidograph technical pen, and filled in with a brush. Corrections were made by scraping ink from the board with an X-ACTO knife.

I used ellipse and circle templates, French curves, and straight-edges as aids in drawing the curves, following my freehand lines. Most of the measurements were done with improvised rulers (marks on the edges of paper scraps) and marked with notes about what they were for.

Interpolation was done similar to Frutiger’s method.

I made scaled-down photostats of the ‘preview’ letter drawings (about 48 point) and pasted them up and made a film negative, which was then used to make dry-transfer sheets using a system that 3M had at the time. Basically, I wrote a cover letter I intended to send to ITC and counted out how many of each letter I would need and used that as a guide when I made the transfer sheets. I then ‘set’ the letter in my typeface using the homemade transfer sheets. This was reduced further to make the final letter as a photostat with type about 14 points.

HE SPENT MOST OF HIS FREE TIME ON EXCALIBUR, MONTH AFTER MONTH, FOR nearly a year. In September 1978, he was ready to submit to ITC. He put together a package of stuff. A year’s worth of work, ready to be judged.

“There was a hand-written cover letter (two pages), a sample of the a ‘final’ drawing, using ink on illustration board…and a second cover letter, the one I made with the homemade transfer type, which served as a sample setting of the typeface,” Simonson says.

“I was really glad to finally be done with it. It took much longer than I expected it would and was agonizingly tedious at some points. I really questioned at the time whether this was something I wanted to do again.”

Then he waited.

He waited some more.

Finally, in January 1979, the mailman dropped off a return package from ITC.

Rejection.

“It was a big letdown because I felt like I had spent so much time and effort on it,” Simonson recalls. “I thought it was really good, but I had no perspective or experience. I had an inkling that it might not be as good as I thought when I started trying to set the cover letter and when I saw it reduced to text size. I realized I had created some serious spacing problems with the way I designed the serifs—they were way too big. I sent it anyway, figuring that, if it was accepted, these problems would be addressed. In the end, the flaws probably didn’t help its chances.”

He got sick of working on Excalibur; he had some better ideas, anyhow.

But Excalibur would remain in the back of his mind, and he still hoped to improve it.

One day in 1981, while browsing in a used book store, he found a book written by Adrian Frutiger. He was told that the book had been specially ordered from Europe, by another customer, who failed to pick it up.

Despite the $67.50 price tag, Simonson bought it. And when the other customer tracked him down and wanted the book back, that’s when Simonson realized he truly had something special.

Frutiger’s book, Type Sign Symbol, revealed many of the tricks of type design, and gave him some new ideas to improve Excalibur.

Then, in the mid-80s, when the Desktop Publishing revolution was taking shape, Simonson discovered Fontographer and he jumped back into type design mode.

Maybe he could revisit Excalibur?

“Working on it in Fontographer caused me to reconsider its potential as a viable typeface,” Simonson says. “In fact, working in Fontographer taught me how much I didn’t know about designing typefaces. It’s one thing to imagine the design and draw some letters, which is what I had been doing for years before using Fontographer, but it’s quite another thing when you start setting those letters into words and paragraphs. I found out that I didn’t know anywhere near what I thought I did.”

Simonson worked on several other faces, including Proxima Sans, and by 1992, he was ready to make a pitch to Mark Solsburg at FontHaus. (Excalibur’s name was changed because an existing typeface had the same name.)

“In July 1992, I faxed FontHaus a list of one-line HAMBURGERFONTS samples of fonts I was working on, about 1-inch tall on the cap height,” he says. “They picked Felt Tip Roman, Kandal (8 fonts), and Proxima Sans (6 fonts) and I signed an exclusive distribution agreement with them in August.”

Excalibur/Kandal finally had a home, 15 years later.

“I was excited,” Simonson says. “But it also meant I had a lot of work to do…I didn’t really think of it as the same face I submitted to ITC, which I regarded as a half-baked failure.”

At the time, Simonson was drawing his letters in Illustrator, and the ‘fonts’ he’d shown FontHaus were really just glyphs on a digital artboard.

“One thing that surprised me was that I was expected to create the finished shipping fonts,” Simonson says. “With ITC, it was taken for granted that experts would turn the designer’s artwork into an actual font, and that the design would most likely be adjusted and optimized by people with years of experience producing fonts for typesetting. The fact that FontHaus offered very little technical or production help kind of freaked me out.”

Kandal was finally released in 1994.

Now, Simonson works entirely digital, primarily in FontLab.

“I would never go back,” Simonson says. “You do get a certain sense of accomplishment mastering things like French curves and technical pens, but the process is just so unforgiving and inflexible and slow. Unless you are trying to give a typeface a handmade look, it’s just not worth it. Plus, with the efficiency of working digitally, you can do so much more than just draw the letters. You can work out the spacing at the same time, play ‘what if’ scenarios with different design ideas, see how a partially designed font looks set in a paragraph, things that would be impractical or impossible working with traditional tools.”

And finally, Simonson adds a postscript…pun intended?

Kandal is not done.

“Fifteen years later, there are a lot of things about the 1994 release I would change,” he says. “I’ve already revisited Proxima Sans and it’s likely I’ll do something similar with Kandal at some point. So, I don’t think it’s the last version yet.”

LINKS

MS-Studio
Mark Simonson dot com
Mark’s Pangram Helper
Mark’s National Lampoon Site

SEE ALSO

Kandal page
FontHaus
Frutiger’s Type Sign Symbol @ Bookfinder.com
Jim Parkinson

MORE PICTURES

next up: interview with Jordan Jelev, June 15

Growing up in New York City, Doret was surrounded by classic mid-century American icons. He lived in Brooklyn, near Coney Island, where he came face-to-face with bold and freaky graphics and signs. Those influences shaped him and his work, as Doret reveals in this interview, conducted at his Los Angeles studio.

You grew up near Coney Island. When did Coney Island transform from an amusement park to a source of inspiration?

I wasn’t really aware of how influential that place was until a couple of years ago when I rediscovered an old photo of my brother and me in Coney Island. I had just never thought about it. I looked at the photo in which we’re surrounded by all this colorful signage, and I had an epiphany that all this stuff had made an indelible impression on me and had heavily influenced me to a very large degree in terms of the work that I’d eventually become known for. See this guy? →

Around the same time that I found the photo, I just happened to find this placard—the Tilt-A-Whirl company from the photo was still in existence, and the placard was actually in that old photo I spoke of. My work has so much in common with all the banners, signage, placards and such that would surround you in Coney Island that I concluded that it was no accident that I ended up working in the genre that I do. So, to answer your question, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I knew that Coney Island was my Muse.

My dad had worked on Broadway in Times Square, and I also came to realize that “The Great White Way” had had the same effect on me as Coney Island. It had incredible billboards, signage and advertising. I remember an actual living logo—Mr. Peanut—walking around on Broadway. There were also the Brooklyn Dodgers and plenty of baseball ephemera, which I was surrounded by at that time. Now I know that all that stuff was somehow working on my brain and pushing me toward my predilection for bold graphics and letterforms. It’s as simple as that.

You graduated from Cooper Union in New York City. One of your first jobs took you to the studio of Ed Benguiat, who along with the International Typeface Corporation, ignited the type industry of the 1960s and 70s. What did you do in his studio?

He didn’t have his own studio. He worked at a company called Photo-Lettering, which was one of the first and certainly the largest photo-typesetting house in the world. Their font library literally filled volumes. House Industries bought a lot of these fonts and has digitized them. Anyway, I worked there as Ed Benguiat’s assistant for a year. He ran a little division in Photo-Lettering where they did more custom work for clients who just didn’t want straight type set. We would take the film output and he showed me how to customize it, whether it was drawing with ink on top of the film, scraping away the emulsion on certain letters and filling in other areas, cutting it apart and moving it, or all of the above. It was all very primitive compared to what we do now on the computer. My getting that job right out of school was a total fluke.

When I was at Cooper, I had a typography class in which one of the assignments was to design a font. Mine came out pretty well—for a student—and it was suggested that I submit it to Photo-Lettering. I did, and they “bought” it and it’s in their Alphabet Thesaurus Vol. 3. It’s something I did as a student and now it’s a little embarrassing, but kind of funny. At the time I didn’t even give it a name. So they named it “Doret Shaded” because it had a dimension to it. As a student I was such a contrarian. I thought “I’m just going to reverse the weights to be where they wouldn’t ordinarily be” so that the verticals were thin and the horizontals were thick.

So you freelanced while you were working at Photo-Lettering?

No, I did that afterwards. I was an art director for a sales promotion agency, and I held several other staff positions over the next few years, until I went out on my own. I was getting freelance work and taking it home at night. For some reason, the work that I did always seemed to come back to my drawing letters. So I started getting more and more work until it got to the point that in order to continue, I’d have to quit my day job.

Did you have a mentor or collaborators when you went on your own?

While I still had my day job, I was taking my portfolio around and somebody suggested “Why don’t you go up and see this illustrator named Charles White III?” Charlie was a pretty big name in the illustration field at the time, being one of the leading airbrush artists of the day. He’s currently being lauded in a book called Overspray—about him and the three other leading airbrush artists of the time. So I went to see him. He was actually the one that convinced me to quit my day job and go out on my own. He offered me a drawing table in his studio. I took his suggestion, quit my job and started working out of his studio. In addition to the work I brought in for myself, he started hiring me to help him with his illustrations. One piece we worked on was the “Octopus” record jacket. I designed the lettering that went around the bottle. To complicate matters I had to figure out how it would go around a curved surface in perspective. We had no computers to help us in those days.

You bent the lettering around the lid too?

Yes.

So I started doing my own work and doing stuff for Charley on his illustrations. I helped him design a huge poster for a popcorn/candy called “Screaming Yellow Zonkers”. At that time, I would draw the lettering on tracing paper, then rub it down on his illustration board and sometimes ink it in. Or he would paint it. He was looking for ideas on how we could design and integrate all the typography into the illustration, and I came up with the banner idea. He loved how I could make the ‘Z’ and the ‘S’ reflect each other.

So what it really became about was this: We ended up doing this thing with illustration that no one had done in a long time—which was to combine the typography and the image into one and make them completely interdependent—not just leaving a blank space into which someone could insert type. Just one integrated, cohesive image. And we did a lot of that stuff. I don’t know if it’d ever really been done that way before or since. Like that Octopus cover, the title and all the information was all there, integrated into the image. There was nothing else required.

You came up professionally in the 1970s. It was seemingly the golden age of design and advertising. You were disappointed with how type was used with image, why?

To my way of thinking, the art of hand lettering was at a low point. We’d gone through the ’40s and ’50s and into the ’60s with tons of lettering being done by hand. I think that discipline was being lost because of photo typesetting—the same way that certain disciplines are being lost today because of the computer. There was hand lettering still being done—but it didn’t excite me. There were what I’d call the Lubalin/Carnase and the Rudolph deHarak schools of lettering and typography. They were more classically influenced. What I did and still do is influenced more by pop culture, and is more instinctive rather than learned. The work being done by the more classically trained and influenced designers like Lubalin and Carnase was not really that interesting to me. I was trying to fill a void in an area that at the time nobody else was filling. And I first got involved with it through working with illustrators like Charles White III and some others like Doug Johnson. Through them, I was being indoctrinated into the vintage/retro thing. At the time we were really at the beginning of that sensibility. In the early ’70s there was the beginning of a new appreciation and awareness of the aesthetics of the ’30s, the ’40s, Art Moderne, Art Deco and into the World War II period. Looking back to the past in that way was not something I’m sure had really been done up to that point. Of course it seemed like there had always been antique shops, but antiques were considered something from the turn of the century, something to be admired but perhaps not emulated. A friend of mine named Kenny Kneitel (the grandson of Max Fleischer—the creator of Betty Boop) had opened a vintage shop named Fandango, which was one of the first of its kind. He dealt with things like Bakelite radios and a lot of other memorabilia that were, before then, considered junk. All of a sudden they were now being looked at again in terms of their design qualities, and as things to be admired. So I got involved in that whole world. That kind of thinking got instilled into what I was doing and just moved me completely away from classically oriented design.

Then other people started picking up and emulating what I was doing. That kind of rubbed me the wrong way for a while. In perspective, those artists ended up going off in their own directions and putting their own personal stamp on their letterforms work. Over the years, I feel like I’ve brought people around to looking at lettering design a little bit differently. Now, what I do, may seem to some a little outdated. But I try not to repeat myself and try to always challenge myself in other ways. I don’t want to keep repeating the same work I’ve always done…to keep repeating my past successes.

The KISS album cover left an impression on me as a kid.

Apparently it left an impression on a lot of people.

You said you drew your inspiration (for the KISS cover) from a job for a (Japanese) magazine cover, IDEA. Where did you get your inspiration for that cover?

The magazine was doing a feature on my work and they asked me to come up with a cover for that issue. I did the cover image to look like a shooting gallery. So the inspiration probably goes all the way back to Coney Island—but the direct inspiration was also vintage tin toys and tin litho target games. Anyway I did the IDEA cover first and the whole KISS / Rock and Roll Over thing came afterward. I loved the way the IDEA cover came out, the way I had them print it in Pantone colors—it almost felt like a silkscreen. I really wanted to go that route again. As the members of KISS were wearing Kabuki-style makeup, the Japanese-y approach I did on the IDEA cover seemed a perfect match. So I came up with that graphic and used a similar color scheme and look. We even did it in five flat colors—not in 4 color process.

(The KISS cover) was like a shooting gallery then?

Not at all. It turned out to be more like a mandala, more Asian-influenced. I was just going for the look I had come up with on that other cover. The visual theme I chose came out of the album’s name, the “Rollover” thing. There was no “right side up” to that cover…An interesting side-note is that after all these years since I did that work for KISS, they’ve come back to me and asked me to design their next CD cover. It’s a big project, and at the moment, I’m totally immersed in it.

You created designs for magazine covers, posters, postage stamps, what am I missing?

I’ve done all kinds of stuff. Logos, record labels, t-shirts, you name it!

You describe yourself as a letterforms artist.

My whole career I’ve struggled with the dilemma of what to call myself. To say I’m a “lettering artist” doesn’t really describe what I do. “Font designer” only describes one discipline that I’ve gotten into recently. I do a lot of different things—but they all usually involve letterforms in one way or another. To use the term “letterforms artist” broadened the description a little bit and moved it slightly away from “lettering”. A “letterer” is the person who, for example, does the lettering on a book jacket over a photo or illustration. Although I’ve done that, it’s only a small, piece of the puzzle. I don’t know if “letterforms artist” is the answer, but it begins to address what I do. When it comes down to it, I’m just a guy who likes to do what he likes to do. I don’t want anyone to tell me what direction I should take with my work. I don’t like to follow trends. But I might be more successful if I did.

What sort of reference material do you keep?

I have a lot of books. If I was a real collector I’d collect things like tin toys. I have some character trademark stuff like “Aristocrat Tomato” the Heinz 57 tomato juice character, “Reddy Kilowatt” and “Mr. Peanut”. But instead of becoming an avid collector of this stuff, I just ended up purchasing books on these subjects I just don’t have the room to collect all the stuff I’d want. There are so many books out there by people who have amassed huge collections of all the stuff that interests me. You can also find plenty of reference online. I look for oddball stuff. I like the stuff done by untrained eyes—people who didn’t know the actual “rules” and didn’t know they were breaking them. There was this online collection of old record labels that just blew me away. There’s just so much available out there that was never accessible before to someone like me. I pull a lot of this stuff offline, creating my own archives because I’m afraid that one day it’ll disappear from the web.

Your design for “Bedlam Ballroom” by the Squirrel Nut Zippers received a nomination for best recording package during the 44th Annual Grammy Awards. It’s a fun piece and strangely hypnotic (for the animation). Your Muse took you one way and the client moved you in another direction.

Not a totally different direction. They knew they wanted this to be in the “roadside” genre, like a motel or a roadhouse neon sign. My initial thought was to make it a little more risque, because they wanted to give it a really outrageous feeling. I guess I may have seen some old signs where you have the neon that has a couple of positions that animate as they go on and off in sequence. So for this sign, I was creating for the cover I had the main lettering flanked by two women…in outline neon, no real detail of any sort…where first you see them with drapery…then disrobed revealing the women’s figures. The lone female member of the group didn’t want any imagery that she considered sexist. So we went back more towards Coney Island imagery again.

The Jewish Zodiac was a departure for you because this assignment required you to incorporate photos of food. Was it a labor of love?

Yes it was, and it was also a challenge. I started with photos supplied by the client. There were so many steps I went through that I can’t really tell you how I did it, but I can say that I used both Photoshop and Illustrator. I enjoyed the process of making the photos very graphic and posterized and applying my own color palettes to them. The idea was that these pieces would be silkscreened on T-shirts, and I had to come up with a way of making both the design and the photos one uniform palette.

How much of the lettering was done by hand and how much was typeset?

It was all hand-lettering with the exception of the smaller text copy and the lists of years. Technically the smaller text was also done by me because I used a font I created—Bank Gothic AS. It’s my version of Bank Gothic to which I’ve added a complete set of lowercase letters. That lowercase was something that, for some reason, Morris Fuller Benton never did.

What compelled you to create the lowercase of Bank Gothic?

Well, I love Bank Gothic and I had used it all the time. It’s a very popular typeface, but I asked myself why doesn’t it have a lowercase, and what would I do if I designed the lowercase? I had the thought that maybe I should do it—so I did it, and thought that people would eat it up. But it hasn’t turned out to be one of my most popular fonts. What I probably need to do is to expand it into different weights, and maybe into a wider version, more extended.

It’s not your first though?

No. My first digital font was Orion MD.

And that came from a trip to Paris?

Well, I picked up this baked-enamel sign “Gevaert Photo” at a Paris flea market. I remember looking at it and thinking that I really liked the way that those letters connected. I hadn’t seen a script font that looked anything like it. I loved the upright, geometric quality it had. So I did a font, called it Orion, and put it out there. I’m really happy with it, but it may not be what people are really looking for these days.

Did this font Orion become the new chapter in your career as a designer?

That’s when I decided that doing fonts might be a challenging and interesting chapter in my career.

That wasn’t too long ago.

2002, 2003. Font design is an area I had always thought about—ever since that font I did at Cooper Union which ended up at Photo Lettering—but had never followed through on. Actually when I was sharing a studio with Charles White III, I did a font for this movie project we worked on together. You know how in silent films you’ll see a panel come on full screen with text that will tell you the dialogue? Well, this was an early film from Merchant/Ivory Productions called “Savages”, and they wanted it to have those kind of title cards. It was a 1930s period film, very extreme Art Deco, so I designed this typeface which I called Chrysler to use on all the title cards, film credits, and even the title treatment for the film for the ads and posters. We had all the letters, numbers, and punctuation photographed so that we could actually set the type on what was then called a “typositor”—a photo-typesetting machine, and so we had all the words set. I don’t know whatever happened to that typositor film.

You did that all by hand?

Yes, you can see that what I’ve scanned is from what’s left of the art that’s survived. This was originally drawn with a Rapidograph in ink on vellum. Many of the curves weren’t compass curves, and I felt that using french curves was cheating. Ed Benguiat had showed me how to take a rapidograph and do beautiful, tight curves by hand in tiny, little stroked increments. I think I would have gotten Chrysler done a lot quicker if I had used french curves and other mechanical drawing aids. I was such a purist that I thought doing that would be cheating, and I might not exactly get the curve I wanted. Why should I settle for a curve that’s only 95% of what I wanted? Make it exactly. I’ve wizened up a bit since then, but I’m still kind of a purist.

How did you develop Orion?

When I did Orion—which was my first font after all those years—it was done for the computer, and after years of experience drawing letters. I’d done Chrysler in the ’70s but Orion, I consider to be my first real font. When I first released it I got a lot of comments to the effect that each word set in Orion was like creating a little logo. I don’t totally understand how what I do is different from what other font designers do. But here’s what I get from talking to people: the gist of it is that I come from this other place, that all my years of experience doing one–off lettering related pieces has informed my font design process in a way that separates it from most other font designers. So maybe I do it a little bit differently than somebody who’s coming from a background of purely designing fonts.

Some of the letters offered very big challenges because in a connecting script the every lowercase letter has to connect somehow with every other lowercase letter. At that point I wasn’t dealing with OpenType, so I wasn’t able to fall back on the fact that if two letters didn’t connect properly I could always do a special ligature or alternate. Also, I felt challenged to make each letter interesting. I wanted each letter to be a beautiful design in its own right. And that’s probably the wrong way to do it because you really have to think in terms of the whole picture. There are lots of ways traditional font designers think that I probably don’t, and need to get used to. I’m getting there now but I wasn’t thinking in those terms when I started making fonts.

Metroscript is getting rave reviews. What was it’s inspiration?

Well that design I completely made up out of my head. I had always put words with letterforms like that into my jobs. Basically it’s an amalgam of various ’40s and ’50s scripts. There was this one job I did for the Post Office that required me making a lot of words in that script style. I painstakingly lettered all of it. There must have been 30 or 40 words—a huge job for me. So what happened was this: I was in contact with Stuart Sandler who runs two font houses—Font Diner and Font Bros. Stuart’s been my font creation guru. I was talking to him about what I should do next in terms of creating a new font. He said I should look at my work, that maybe there’s something I’d find in there that could be applicable to becoming an unusual font. So I put together a bunch of word samples from past projects including a few words from that Post Office job and sent it to him. He basically told me that if I could figure out how to make that script into a font, that it would be huge. So I started working on it. I thought it was going to be really difficult to make it work, to make every character to link up properly with every other character. But what really made it possible were the features of OpenType. When I created Orion I used Fontographer, the old workhorse of digital font creation. Since then, FontLab had come on the scene. With FontLab you can create fonts which literally have thousands of glyphs. You can have any amount of alternate characters. You can code it to set type in a way so that as characters are typed they change before your eyes, depending on which character precedes or follows another. Mark Simonson, a fellow lettering artist, did the open type programming for Metroscript, and did a brilliant job. I couldn’t have done Metroscript without him!

I’ll show you the glyph palette on this font I’m working on called Deliscript. (now finished). I’m doing tails again like I did in Metroscript, and there’s 120 of them in six different styles. They’re variable length so people can use it to fit a short word, medium word, long word, whatever. The amount of times you type the underscore key determines how long the tail is. OpenType has all kinds of features that can be taken advantage of. It’s great to be able to look into the glyph palette to see what’s in the typeface.

The influence of Deliscript?

I’m always looking for inspiration. The Gevaert Photo sign was a jumping off point for me for Orion. In similar fashion, I was looking at the lettering that made up the Canter’s Delicatessen sign and somehow saw something in it I could take off from. The lettering in the sign may not resemble what the font ended up looking like, but I saw some interesting facets to it that I thought I could appropriate. I liked the idea of an upright script with the two-story ‘e’, and how things were connecting in it, and I liked its proportions. Anyway it started percolating in my head. I named it Deliscript for fun, but the font really has nothing to do with delicatessens. It could really be for anything. I hope the name doesn’t limit people’s uses of it—that it doesn’t suggest to them that they should only use it for menus and restaurant logos!

Where did you start? Lowercase, uppercase? Did you start writing words?

I just started with the letters for the name Deliscript, and created a sample. The way I used to work was I’d make very detailed drawings, plot angles and so on, and make all kinds of notations so that everything would be precisely worked out. As years have gone by working on the computer, and as I’m getting more and more comfortable with it, I’m doing less and less tight, finished drawings and just doing more looser drawings, just to get the sense of what I’d like to do. Now I’m scanning those looser drawings and then doing in the computer what I’d used to do in the tight pencil stage—all the measuring and plotting of angles, working out consistent widths, etc. But it doesn’t eliminate for me the requirement of still having to draw. And I can’t just start drawing in the computer as some people do on a Wacom. My pencil drawings have gotten a lot looser and I can amplify the drawing much easier now in Illustrator. Anyway this is the only drawing I did. I ended up with these certain letterforms that were in the letters of the name. I just started taking the pieces of these letters and started pulling them apart and reconstituting them into other characters. I never really did do a drawing for Deliscript. All the characters would change a bit as I went through a back and forth process of creating all the letters and characters. I’d start putting different letter combinations and different words together and see where I’d have to align things. I’m still learning and looking at other fonts to understand how to make some of those foreign characters. This process of creating Deliscript took about 6 months and was a constant back-and-forth process.

Deliscript has over 800 glyphs. In this case, it was a guy named Patrick Griffin who was my FontLab life-saver! I couldn’t have it done without his expert help and guidance. He has his own font foundry called Canada Type. Patrick completed all the OpenType programming for Deliscript, and that part of the process took about a month to finish.

It’s only because of OpenType that I could create fonts like Metroscript or Deliscript. It makes accessible to the font designer certain capabilities that weren’t previously available to them. I enjoy creating those little extras because I think it makes it more fun for people, and it gives them the ability to creative with fonts in ways they couldn’t do with fonts before.

Have you seen your other fonts in action?

Metroscript was used in the movie, “The Hulk.” That was pretty cool!

Would you comment on the impact of the computer for better or worse on type design and lettering?

On the one hand, the computer in general has created a lot of lazy people, as far as them being unaware of everything that’s gone on before. If you can’t find it in Google Images, then for most people it might as well never have existed at all. I think that I definitely have an advantage over a lot of other people in that I’ve had the experience of drawing with my hands, of doing actual hand lettering with pen and ink. Curves have a certain tactile or sculptural feel when you can draw them by hand rather than using Illustrator’s Bezier curves. On the other hand I think that I’ve seen a lot of really terrific stuff done with computers that may not have gotten done otherwise. I think it’s a two-edged sword. I know that I was very reluctant to switch over from doing things with pen and ink to the computer. My wife, Laura Smith, who is an illustrator, saw the writing on the wall and she really pushed me to get a Mac. That was back in 1995. And once I did it, I took to it like a fish to water. Most of the work I’d been doing and my whole approach to design had been kind of calculated and mathematical—so translating that to the computer was kind of a no-brainer. Working with Illustrator, I really enjoyed being able to see my work appear instantaneously in color rather than what I used to do, drawing in ink on drafting film. I’d have to work in multiple overlays, one over the other in black ink, and then try to figure out with my best guess on how the color was going to work. And I wouldn’t really know if it would be a success until the finished printed piece came back. I think a lot of the capabilities of what the computer can do are really helpful to people like me because I can experiment graphically with a lot of things that I would otherwise have never been able to do.

Los Angeles has some amazing and battered signs and marquees. Has anything stopped you in your tracks?

I’m thinking every time there’s something good, it gets torn down—like the Brown Derby. But there’s still a lot left. There are huge neon signs on the tops of many buildings here—like The Ravenswood, The Broadway, the Hollywood Roosevelt. There are so many others—The Pantages Theatre, The Frolic Room, the sign over the Santa Monica Pier, Philippe’s French Dip, all the old movie palaces on Broadway…and did I mention Canter’s Delicatessen? There’s still a lot of amazing stuff still out there.

What are 5 things people don’t know about you?

1. When I was around 12 I found myself at a crossroads—it was either a life of art or one of astronomy.

2. One of the most amazing sights I’ve ever seen was the Aurora Borealis on the night that it extended south as far as Brooklyn—and probably beyond. What was almost more amazing was how it seemed that almost no one out in the street bothered looking up.

3. I once did a portrait of Zacherle and sent it to him. I think I remember him displaying it with others on his TV show.

4. Shortly after graduating college I became my roommate’s uncle.

5. My birth name was Dvoretsky—but was later changed by my father.

LINKS

Michael Doret

Doret’s Blog

SEE ALSO

Doret @ FontBros.

Doret @ MyFonts

FontDiner

Canada Type

Editor’s note: This is the first interview from contributor Alex Savakis. His work can be seen at www.agsavakis.com

June 8: Mark Simonson and the story of Kandal.

June 15: interview with Jordan Jelev

We correct that today.

If you follow pop culture, you’ve probably seen his Sopranos logo, some of his fonts, or his movie posters, most recently, his work on Watchmen, which opens everywhere at midnight on Thursday.

Indeed, Watchmen, based on the celebrated graphic novel, gave Holms an opportunity to do a lot of highly visible poster work. But it’s the relatively invisible details that we’ll talk about here.

Like many typophiles, Holms noticed that something was off with the Watchmen logotype, which was set in a cut of Futura Extra Bold. Someone manually scrunched the C in WATCHMEN so it would sit on the baseline, eliminating the top and bottom overshoots, making it appear smaller than the other letters. Such a trivial detail, but a huge deal to someone who deals with letters. Holms, and his agency, Los Angeles-based Mojo, set out to make things right.

After Mojo got the Watchmen account, how apparent was it that you might have to fix up the logotype?

When we received the call from Warner Bros., we were all so excited about getting it that the idea of the logotype never entered our minds. I don’t think it was until we saw the Comic Con posters in situ that we realized it didn’t sit right. We thought we were being faithful to the comic, but it still didn’t look right. But without better ammunition than a gut feeling to back us up, we didn’t feel it appropriate to change the Watchmen logotype.

Can you describe how and why you ended up remaking the entire logotype from scratch?

The director was really behind the idea of everything being as authentic as possible. You can take the comic book and see that the panels are used as key frames throughout the movie. We felt that it would be appreciated if we followed suit. The work that was done for Comic Con was based off the logo used on one of the trade paperback versions of the comic. My creative director, Andrew Percival, was somehow able to track down an original promotional pack that featured large-sized versions of the comic covers, the French comic covers, and the original ads that accompanied the launch of the comic. So with more accurate source materials, we were able to see some details that we were unable to tell for certain on the set of original comics that I brought in. That was when we were able to redraw the logo and make it as faithful to the original comic as possible.

Did you work in Illustrator on this one, or FontLab?

I worked in Illustrator. Since I wasn’t planning on redrawing the typeface, just the logo, I felt it more convenient to work in Illustrator (besides, I’m much more comfortable drawing in Illustrator than FontLab).

You guys sweated some details for something that most people won’t notice. Did you find that it was worth it?

Without question, absolutely. It can be a pain at the time, but it’s always worth it.

Funny that you bring up details that no one would notice—at one point in the project, my creative director and I had an argument about redrawing all the type for an electronic billboard. Since they are very low resolution (700 pixels wide enlarged to the size of a full-sized billboard), I thought that we shouldn’t spend the time redrawing the copy that went on them since the difference would never be perceived. He reminded me that since we don’t always have the opportunity to do things correctly, we need to capitalize on the times we do. I may have been a little burned out at the time because it took a couple reminders before it sank in what he meant, but now I’m very happy that we can say that it was all done to the best of our abilities.

Have you seen the movie?

I have seen the movie three times; some of the other art directors have seen it more, some less. Actually, this week is the premiere, and several of the art directors will be attending to see it another time. It’s weird to see movies in their different stages—it was the same thing with 300. We were privy to early cuts, so we saw a lot of scenes pre-computer animation. It’s fun to see how exponentially tighter the movie becomes when the color is balanced correctly, the CG is in place, and the sound has been sweetened. You get pulled into the story on the cuts I’ve seen, but you get pulled into the experience of the movie with the final cut in the theatre.

What did you learn about Futura Extra Bold during this project?

We learned that the copy of Futura we own was not the correct cut that the comic book used. Doh!

I was unable to source the original cut, but am taking a guess that it was a display cut that was only available as phototype. There was a variance in how the letters were drawn, probably adjusted optically for a larger point size—and the main difference was the lack of ink traps. That ended up being the key to making the type look authentic. Whenever we used Futura in collateral, we redrew it so that it lacked the ink traps.

What are some other custom movie projects you’ve done or are working on?

A myriad of hand-drawn logos for titles, but full typeface work hasn’t occurred all that frequently.

My first one was a billing typeface for the movie American Splendor. The billing block is the very condensed type at the bottom of the poster that contains the movie credits. Since there is a very specific formula for the point size of the billing, it is invariably set in an ultra-condensed typeface like (Univers) 39, (Univers) 49, or Bee. The formula for determining the point size of the billing is to take the average height of each letter in the logo (not the cap height, or the x-height, but the physical measurement of the height), attain an average height, and the billing is typically 25 percent or 35 percent of that size. There were no existing comic book styled fonts that we could find that would work in this style, so I figured out what the width of the letters had to be and drew it up from that. It worked out fairly well.

At Mojo, we recently worked on a custom typeface for the Warner Bros. movie Where The Wild Things Are. It was meant to look like the writing of the lead child actor, and the studio responded very positively to the lettering of Erik Buckham, one of our art directors. So he drew up a bunch of the characters, I digitized them, and built it all in FontLab. One of the problems with making a typeface that is supposed to look hand-drawn is that it never does because of the uniformity of characters when placed next to each other. For example, the double o in book. Erik drew up some alternates, and I programmed an OpenType substitution that made certain that no two versions of the same character ever sat next to each other. Although the computer knows what it’s doing, it appears to randomly select from the alternate character as you type. If you look close, you can see the repetition, but on first blush you don’t see it at all. We felt this was a great combination of utility and art—this allows what appears to be hand-drawn lettering to be stylistically consistent across multiple vendors. We set the tone with the poster, and the people making the T-shirts, or action figure packaging, will be able to have the same lettering without our art director hand lettering every single piece of type for the promotion of the movie for the rest of his natural life. We also recently did a custom psychedelic typeface for the movie Taking Woodstock. Evan Wright (another art director) had some type that he artificially condensed to fit the billing, but when the poster was chosen to be printed, he spent the weekend redrawing the typeface so that the strokes were all consistent and had the custom serif flairs that he wanted. I then imported the whole thing into FontLab, redraw a couple troublesome glyphs, and in relatively short order we had a functional psychedelic typeface that is condensed enough to fit in the billing.

Mojo has done a lot of Custom Letter work for movies lately. Burn After Reading was another bespoke project that we haven’t mentioned. Do you see this as a trend?

I’m hoping it is, because I’m really enjoying it. I don’t think that it was really that much of an option before—sometimes they would do it with a really big movies like Batman, but it was pretty rare. Now that we’ve made it available, the clients seem to be amenable to the idea.

How did you get into fonts, and what do you enjoy about letters?

I think it began in college, the school I went to (CalArts), really supported the idea of independent type design and experimentation. The last semester of my senior year, Jeff Keedy offered the first type design course at CalArts, and I very excitedly took the class. He had us draw calligraphic forms, to teach us the basics of typography, then at the end of the course, we digitized them into a font. To be completely honest, I think he gave me a mercy pass as I was utterly miserable at it. But it only made my interest in type stronger, so I kept working on typefaces on my own after school. I was lucky enough to sell a couple of them to companies to use as their bespoke typeface. Several years later, I discovered Typophile and put a typeface of mine up for critique, which later became the typeface Brea. Grant Hutchinson took a shine to the font and was the one who is responsible for my getting distributed by Veer.

I find working on letterforms to be very relaxing. It allows my mind to slow down and I can background process the day’s events while focusing intensely on something on a very micro level. I get stressed very easily, and working with type forces me to focus intently, which calms me down considerably. I also have insomnia, and I spend that time working on type, which keeps me from getting upset that I can’t get to sleep.

Fontwise, what’s next?

I’m currently working on a new display face that I’m putting the finishing touches on. Hopefully it will be released soon-ish. I’ve got about 4-6 sitting on the hard drive unfinished that I still need to decide if there are going to ever go beyond the sketch stage. Probably not.

Finally, wanted to ask you about Trajan and some of the other ubiquitous movie fonts. At your agency, do you guys revere Trajan, or make fun of him behind his back?

Actually, we had a hang-up about it for quite a while, and would do everything in our power to avoid using it. For the most part, we were able to swap out Requiem in its place and it would slip through the approval process. But now it doesn’t bother me so much. It’s funny, I’ve not really given much thought to it—after asking around the office, none of us can remember that last time we used Trajan on a finished poster. There must be a conscious decision on our part to avoid it, although it has gone unspoken for at least three to four years.

“Trajan had about a 10-year lifespan in movie poster design, and has just simply fallen out of fashion.”

I mean yeah, we all laugh with a bit of arrogance when we see Trajan, the same way we all laugh at Comic Sans or other typefaces that have fallen out of contemporary favor. But when Titanic came out in 1997, no one was chuckling that they used Trajan. I think it’s just a recent meme to bash Trajan as it’s been so grossly overused and it makes you feel clever. I think that the approval process can be so grueling sometimes that it’s tempting to take the easy way out. We’ve found that as long as you use a typeface that holds the same gravity as Trajan, you don’t have to use Trajan. We’ve never been forced to use it—we have had a client ask us to use something more like Trajan, which was just a challenge to find what they were seeing in Trajan, and find another not so commonly used typeface to replace it with.

Trajan had about a 10-year lifespan in movie poster design, and has just simply fallen out of fashion, as does everything. The typeface was overused because it had been used very successfully.

What are five things that people don’t know about you?

I don’t really know very many people, so anything at all is something that people don’t know about me.

1. I have issues with textures, and am completely freaked out by wet paper.
   
2. I love movies about super animals attacking and hunting people—Anaconda, Deep Blue Sea, etc.
   
3. I am color blind (mild, it’s rarely an inconvenience).
   
4. I used to work at Disneyland, where I wore lederhosen and listened to yodeling all day.
   
5. When I was a child I literally cracked my skull doing the hokey pokey.

LINKS

Corey Holms

SEE ALSO

Mojo
Internet Movie Poster Awards / Mojo
Corey’s fonts at Veer

He could draw better than most kids, but he also really cared about his penmanship. He was a cursive freak. Every curve had to be perfect.

“I wanted my handwriting to look exactly like the letters in the book,” Solimine says.

Fast forward 20 years. Solimine now sits uncomfortably in his cubicle at a large Chicago agency. He’s doing mostly web work. Long hours in a stressful environment—kinda like third grade all over again. In the thought bubble over his head, he’s picturing a different life. One in which he could draw every day, work with his hands. He’d be happy with that.

So finally, one day in November of 2006, he quit his job at Leo Burnett.

“I found myself putting a lot of effort and hours into something that I didn’t like and wasn’t learning anything from,” Solimine explains. “Despite the healthy paycheck, I was fed up enough to throw all that effort into something that I actually enjoyed.”

Solimine soon started a freelance business, Spike Press, and began making band posters. Now, more than two years later, Solimine is a sought-after illustrator and poster artist based in Chicago. His screenprinted posters are a hit with collectors, and he keeps them fresh with a dash of Custom Letters.

So how did you transition from agency work to poster making?

It was right around the time that screenprinting was coming back. There were some people in Chicago doing great work (The Bird Machine, Screwball, Kristen Thiele) and I was inspired by those guys to take a class and get my own thing going. It’s a great way to get your work out there independent of magazines/websites/galleries.

Did you get clients right away? Was there a period of struggle?

There is always some band out there that needs a poster, so getting clients wasn’t a problem—I knew some folks from Dayton, OH (my hometown) in a band called Shesus and also worked with some guys who were in Chicago bands. I guess the struggle part is coming up with your own style, working the clichés out of your system—stop ripping other designers off—so your work stands out in the crowded record-store window.

Looking back at your progression, did you use a lot of fonts in your posters in the beginning? Or have you always been drawing the letters?

I did use a lot more fonts at the beginning…I usually would start with a font, convert it to outlines in Illustrator, and then modify it somehow…but the more I started using my own illustration—as opposed to clip or found art —I started hand-lettering more stuff so I could get it to do exactly what I wanted.

And now it seems like Custom Letters have become more standard for you. Why is that important?

Well I think it allows the designer a lot more control over the design—you don’t spend time scrolling through hundreds of fonts looking for that perfect font—you can just make it yourself—and in the process, it helps to unify the design as a whole. I remember working on projects at the design and ad agencies prior to going freelance, and spending hours trying out dozens of fonts in a layout until I found one that seemed to fit, and thinking to myself that it just seemed like throwing darts at a font dartboard—it didn’t feel integrated or considered. It also helps with making your designs unique because your font choice is literally one-of-a-kind.

As a kid growing up, you said you remembered drawing letters. Can you tell us more about that, and about some of your comic book logos?

I remember—and I still do this in my sketchbooks…picking a shape—square, circle, triangle—and trying to draw an entire alphabet using that shape as a basis for each letter. It was like a game.

You were a bit obsessive in third grade. Are you still obsessive about the letters?

Not in my everyday life—like writing a check or something…but yeah that has definitely stayed with me when it comes to the Custom Lettering.

You’ve mentioned a comic book influence. Can you tell us more about that?

I read a lot of comics when I was a kid—and like I mentioned before, all the great lettering in those really inspired me. Just the fact that all the dialogue was done by hand I thought was pretty cool, like there was some guy who’s job that was to draw these letters in little speech balloons all day. And the classic superhero logos were a big infuence: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Hulk. They were great. The type was eye-catching and colorful and they also told you a little about the character too—like how THE HULK was written in the letters that looked like giant blocks of cracked green concrete. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but later I was amazed by Will Eisner’s use of type on the splash pages of the original The Spirit.

Do you have any modern influences with typefaces or lettering?

Sure. As far as hand-lettering goes, I really like The Little Friends of Printmaking. Not all of their stuff is hand-done, but even the fonts they use have that feel and don’t feel slapped on. And I really dig most of the stuff in that book Hand Job—especially Adrian Johnson and Neither Fish Nor Fowl…and Aesthetic Apparatus stands out for just straight-up typography skills…all looks exactly where it should. Also Methane Studios and Art Chantry.

Your Rilo Kiley piece, the illustration takes a bit of a back seat to the letters. How’d that poster come to life?

After I started trying to integrate hand-drawn type into my posters more and more, my posters usually had an illustration that took up most of the page, with some smaller type worked in somewhere. I guess the Rilo Kiley poster is sort of the logical conclusion of pushing that—so the illustration is secondary to the type, but hopefully still feels good as a whole. When I sketched that, I tried keeping the type small, but I liked it so much, it eventually ended up taking over the poster

It turned out great.

Thanks.

So what’s next for your and Spike Press?

I want to branch out as much as possible—I love doing the posters, but I also would like to try out some different things—editorial work for magazines—which I’m starting to get more of. And I also have been kicking around an idea for a kids book that is roughly based on the poster I did for the Rock for Kids charity.

What are five things that people don’t know about you?

1. I have a collection of almost 200 paperback romance novels from the 60s with Nurse in the title: Ski Resort Nurse, Jet Set Nurse, etc., all found exclusively at thrift stores. Take that, E-bay!
   
2. I secretly still want to draw cheesy men-in-tights superhero comic books.
   
3. In grade school, I won a Scholastic Gold Key Art Award for writing a poem from Lord of the Rings in calligraphy on fake parchment paper, with a colored pencil drawing of Gandalf in the background.
   
4. Met the lead singer of Ratt, Stephen Pearcy, at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis while visiting Graceland.
   
5. Never learned to roller skate.

LINKS

Spike Press

SEE ALSO

Hand Job, the book

Adrian Johnson

Art Chantry

The Bird Machine

Kristen Thiele

Screwball Press

Neither Fish Nor Fowl

Aesthetic Apparatus

Little Friends of Printmaking

Delicious Design League

MORE!

B.U.S.K. — You may have noticed the combination of letters before. The name/alias of one of Austria’s most prolific alternative artists appears all over. Different cities, different mediums of choice, different approaches. From spray paint, to paste ups, to folded paper, to type design. His love for typography and lettering arose around 1995 and since then, he has continued to amaze with his (art)works and stunning output.

So what do you like about lettering and drawing/creating custom shapes and characters?

To write your name legibly…just joking! It is a system of styles developing through time, only the sequence of single styles and signs gives you the basis to interpret the whole content. With this approach you are very free in conception and also in creation. Everything is allowed!

Definitely some questions arise, like the requirements or application area of a special font or font-family. But basically you can approach such projects in an instinctive, or better yet, playful manner. You don’t need to write a pages-long concept—it’s like instrumental music: Either you like it or you change the channel.

When did it all start? And what made you do it?

My interest for fonts as form developed out of the classical ‘writing’. This was in the years around 1995/96. I drew my first font in 2002…a jewel! At the moment, I’m working on a corporate design for a small transport and logistics company.

Which tools do you use? Any preferences?

Ballpoint pens, markers, standard A4 sheets, checkered exercise books, my old digital camera, Adobe Illustrator, Fontlab Studio 5, black and white printer and very importantly: a good pair of eyes.

What would be your favourite word to write?

B U S K

Any favourite (existing) typeface, or do you prefer to start from scratch?

The fonts I’ve been drawing up to now all started from scratch—with the exception of a calligraphy sheet from my deceased grandmother, which I had found. It was a very intensive time as I tried to develop a living font out of that dead sheet. I tried to preserve the character of the signs my grandmother had provided. I just knew her by some photos and suddenly I spent (a) very intensive 3- or 4-month period with her. I think it was a very meditative time we spent together, trying to make her, or at least some aspects of her personality, alive.

With the other fonts I did everything myself. From the first sketches in my imagination to the data-backup of the completed font. For example the City-70. The first sketches emerged at the end of 2005. Then I had drawn the font just as a lowercase and it was impossible for me to find an elegant solution for the uppercase even though I tried hard. I wasn’t satisfied with any result, I now realize that I had the wrong requirements and opinions, but I didn’t understand it at that time. In 2007-08, I was working with the old files for a new logo and suddenly I realized the problem I had two years ago and I drew everything afresh, in lowercase and in uppercase. The logo never came into existence.

Sources of influence? What inspires you? Lettering of any kind and everything else.

Name your ‘heroes’?

Donkey Kong, Joseph Kyselak, Marcel Duchamp

Anything people don’t (but maybe should) know about you?

YEAH…I love my vintage rc-buggy ULTIMA II and many more.

interview by Dav(id) Hubner

LINKS

BUSK

BUSK Flickr

Satoru Nihei, aka Mr. Beautifool, has never followed a traditional path.

His parents are proud teachers—he’s a high-school dropout.

He landed a job with Gento Matsumoto, a legendary designer in Japan—he left the job and moved to the United States.

He went to art school—and found he had a passion for graphic design.

The zigs and zags finally formed a career path, and everything crystallized four years ago when Satoru met 3st’s Rick Valicenti, one of the industry’s most respected designers.

Satoru approached Valicenti at a conference at the Maine College of Art, and they’ve been friends ever since.

“He is my best friend now,” Satoru says. “I just can’t explain how much his presence means to me in my life. I told him over the phone…a few months ago that if he was just one of the great designers, the relationship between us wouldn’t have lasted. He is more than the best designer in my life. He is like a father figure in my life. I have never seen someone who cares about me almost every time and I am not the only person he has to worry about. My relationship I have with him is more than just graphic design—it’s my life now, part of my every day life to be exact. I can tell you more about it, but just so many stories to be told here.”

Satoru now runs his Beautifool studio from New York, and enjoys crafting lettering solutions for himself and clients.

What’s the background on the name, Beautifool?

I wanted to name my design studio like 4 years ago. That was also when I met Rick. I gave him my ideas, but they were so lame, so Rick e-mailed me back with some names for my design studio, and one of them was Beautifool. My gut told me that I should pick that one…now when I write my journal, I am known as Mr. Beautifool. The name Beautifool is really helping me shape my work as I play that role as a designer who does beautifool work. Beautiful is the word anyone can get, but beautifool is different. Your mom won’t like some of my beautifool work…because it may not quite beautiful…but that’s the beauty of doing beautifool work to me.

How did you end up working with 3st? And what were some of the highlights of that association?

I actually never worked for 3st, though I did some work for them. A year later Rick asked me if I wanted to organize the Playground. I did the font called ComeTogether using condoms and I would say that was one of the highlights, along with the Playground.

How do you typically go about creating your pieces?

I always start by making a lot of sketches to see if I can visualize my ideas on the piece of paper. If I can’t put my thoughts or ideas on the sketches, that means I know that I can’t deliver whatever I was trying to do. I don’t get on the computer right away and that never works for me. The outcomes are usually boring and awful. Then I share that with someone like Rick for honest feedback or criticism.

What did you mean by Fuck the Type Police?

I believe that we should treat Type with care when we design something, and some rules should be respected. But I don’t think someone should be this authority figure who tries to rule out what it can be, or how it can be used. That’s what I am saying in the picture…in the end, who the hell is the Type Police anyway? If I can’t push it, I am out of this profession and will become like a Japanese hardcore rapper.

What kind of stuff does your design studio typically do?

I usually keep smaller clients that I like and do some logo design or web stuff, booklet, posters, etc. You know, business as usual, stuff that pays my bills…I love having small clients who love what I do.

How do you describe your current lettering style and how have you developed it?

A lot of people think that my lettering work was influenced by Marian Bantjes, but actually it was influenced by one of Rick’s work.

Has Rick pushed you to develop the style further?

Yes, I saw some room for me to explore and that’s how it started taking off. When I shared the first lettering work I did with Rick, he told me to keep doing. I share some of my work with him almost every time and he pushes me to go further…Every time he gives me great feedback.

Where to next with your lettering?

That’s a good question. I just keep at it, and then see what happens. As Rick says “expectations deny discoveries.” So I don’t want to expect too much. I just do it and keep at it. It will come to my door before I know it. So I am not in a rush. Also I am getting a lot of e-mails…regarding my lettering, so doing a job with it will help me shape my lettering work.

Did you go to school to design? Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

I actually wanted to be a contemporary artist, doing some paintings, etc. I even went to school for that when I was in Japan. But right after I graduated, I was hired by Gento Matsumoto, who influenced the Japanese design scene in the ’90s. He still continues to do so, but that’s how I got into graphic design. Then after working for him less than a year, I came to the states to study Fine Arts. But again, the students in the painting department were doing old-fashioned work and I didn’t see my future there so I decided to take one graphic design class. The professor gave me an A…I thought, I have something here to pursue.

What did you take from the Matsumoto experience?

I was the worst designer there. I only had a painting degree at that time and I didn’t really know anything about graphic design, so in a way Gento introduced me to the graphic design world. He was very patient with me, though I don’t know how many times I was told I’d be fired…I would say he taught me something that you can’t learn or study while you are in college. They never teach you how to work with the work you are about to do, or are doing, in the design studios. You just have to go through so many projects to be able to learn that something I am talking about here. It was very tough and hard to work with him, but I had fun. He is one of my design heroes. Some young Japanese designers have no respect for him these days, but these kids wouldn’t have had the work they are doing right now, if Gento hadn’t done the design he did in the ’90s.

Why did you leave Japan?

I didn’t like some of the way we do things there. I actually tell people that I was too good to be Japanese so they kicked me out and the only country that accepted me was the States.

You’ve mentioned Rick and Gento. Who else inspires you?

Bob Aufuldish, aka font boy, Marian Bantjes, and Elliott Earls.

Where do you find beauty in letters?

That’s a tough question. I would say “in the spaces between the letters”. That is where I find beauty in letters. If you study type design, you can get what I am saying.

What are some things people don’t know about you?

1. I love hip-hop.
2. I speak almost perfect English and broken Japanese.
3. I love cooking.
4. I have a sleeping problem and I write an online journal called “Sleepless Nights of the Beautifool Mind.”

LINKS

Beautifool Studio
Beautifool Type
Sleepless Nights
Playground

SEE ALSO

3st

For 15 years, Dave Parmley and Eric Ruffing have been holding things down in the Action Sports, Entertainment, and Gaming Industries, leading 13THFLOOR Design with a mix of youthful exuberance and a commitment to Keeping things Kustom—they spell it with a K.

“We don’t stress, it’s fun,” says Ruffing. “But we take what we do very seriously for ourselves and the client’s sake.”

Parmley was working as Design Director at surf giant O’Neill in the early ’90s when he hired Ruffing. The two bonded quickly.

“Eric and I have always worked really well together—no ego, best idea wins,” Parmley says. “We found this chemistry…and that’s a big reason we started 13THFLOOR together.”

13THFLOOR has emerged as a go-to resource among Action Sport companies, and both Ruffing and Parmley continue to mountain bike, bmx, and surf the breaks in Orange County, CA, staying in touch with their core audience.

Lately, they’ve been doing a lot of work for Mattel, Hot Wheels, Harley Davidson, X-Games, and Fox Sports. With each piece, they set out to create Kustom Letters.

“We must create our own type solutions,” Ruffing says. “No fonts.”

interview conducted via ICHAT

So you guys left O’Neill and decided to work for yourself. What factors led you to do that?

Eric: I left first, then Dave left about 6 months after me. Dave: It was time to move on—we had done a LOT there and the surf industry life-cycled, O’Neill was having some problems and the creative opportunities weren’t as ripe as the previous years. As a friend of mine once said, “When it ain’t fun anymore, it’s time to leave.”

Why 13THFLOOR, the name?

Eric: It was a name we had come up with for a client (EA) who decided not to use it so we liked it and kept it. We also hate designers who use their own name. Not very creative and too egocentric for us.
Dave: We love the inane superstition of the No. 13. People think by naming it the 14th floor, it somehow is no longer the 13th floor. Don’t bungie jump by floor count!

How has your work progressed over the last 10 years, and why is Kustom so important to you guys?

Eric: I think the market allows for more freedom than it did 10 years ago. Also so much has been done already. We try to push ourselves while developing and maintaining what we think is our unique look.
Dave: We’ve always tried to be original in our lettering solutions. We love lettering and logo design. Depending on the needs of the client and the lettering style that works, we always try to be genuinely unique in whatever we do.
Eric: We still get hyped on all the great design that’s coming out and it influences us to push our work.

Typically, what’s your process with your lettering? Paper and pencil, all digital?

Dave: Paper! Paper! Paper! Learn to draw! That’s what puts the K in KUSTOM!
Eric: Whatever works, twigs on paper, tape, computer. I choose the tool that will get my idea out the best way and closest to what’s in my head.
Dave: It all ends up on the computer in the end! Start on the computer if that’s the look you want—we do when it’s right for the job. Lots of tools to create with!

What are your influences from a design and lettering standpoint?

Dave: Look around—it’s EVERYWHERE! Kind of amazing that it all looks the same now. That’s what we like about the skateboard market—it’s a lot more brand-related art that’s actually unique to the brand.
Eric: For me it’s anything emotional. For me personally it’s paintings (Motherwell, Kline), taggers and graffiti. Also huge influences from childhood: reading Hot Rod Mags, Ed Roth, Racing logos. The general humor that was popular in the branding of the 70’s motorsport era.
Dave: I’m a freak about anything that has f-l-o-w. I dig 60’s psychedelic rock poster lettering, and the 70’s fat style and all of the interpretations and evolutions of these in today’s lettering design. Tats, Flames Hot Rods.

You guys work with clients that allow a lot of custom work. What has the Mattel/Hot Wheels experience been like so far?

Eric: It’s been great. A dream come true. They first asked us to create a lifestyle story for their style guide, Urban, Action Sports, and Race-themed collections. After our first guide, they asked us to come in and be in charge of their Licensing division. I took the job. I was Senior Design Manager of Global Licensing. Basically responsible for all artwork of the licensing guides, about 200-300 pieces per guide, two times a year. 13THFLOOR stayed on as vendor. We had total creative control. It was really important to me (and Dave) that we addressed the trends but also made them unique and ownable to Hot Wheels.
Dave: Hot Wheels has been REALLY cool because we get to do a lot of what we love to do—cars and smoke and flames and Kustom. We have concentrated on maximizing the ability of our designs to become a family in their use for a wide range of applications that licensing requires. We’ll do a design that can be a composed graphic, break out into separate stand-alone designs, become simplified icons, and also create patterns out of these elements.

You guys have received a lot of requests for fonts, and you’ve hinted at them on your site. How soon till we see 13th Floor fonts?

Dave: We’ve got a lot of ideas—some further along than others. Production is our current bottleneck.
Eric: More ideas than time.

What’s next for you guys?

Eric: A surf or a ride if the waves suck!
Dave: I just recently moved down to So. Cal, so i see a lot of surf in my near future! We have some great new clients—Harley Davidson and Fox Sports and some BMX and bike companies that we can’t talk details about—but some killer stuff. And still good flow from Mattel and Hot Wheels.

For the longest time, you guys have worked separately. Are you still working in two separate offices?

Dave: Yup! We’re closer to each other now that I moved down here, but still just far enough away!
Eric: But not close enough to throw rocks at.

I see how it is. Finally guys, what are five things that people don’t know about you guys?

Eric: I’m a vegan (20+ years).
Dave: We’re not tatted up, don’t drink and don’t smoke. I eat anything with sugar or a bun.
Eric: Never done drugs.
Dave: Drugs suck. We’ve turned away a lot of alcohol and tobacco (companies) that used to hound us to do work.

LINKS

13THFLOOR Design
13THFLOOR Blog.