Text and Subtext
Adapted from a presentation given in Taichung (October 2017)
Graphic design is communication, it’s cultural and commercial wayfinding. It’s economic and transactional: business cards, storefronts, concert posters, book jackets. Designs have to communicate their intent. Yet take any one of them, strip down its color — it’ll still work. Strip down its pattern — still functions. You can even wipe out the illustration. But without the text, it’ll almost always fail at its primary job. (Worth noting, every single first prize for visual design at the TISDC in the past years has been solely black and white.)
Thus, early in my design career, I rooted my practice in typography. It taught me to start with the absolutes and build everything atop that foundation.
TYPE DESIGN
Even the simplest typographic element communicates much more than what is being read: There’s history and influence. Values of simplicity or preference for decoration. Regional tonality. Speed exerted. Memories triggered.
It’s a machine with an infinite amount of settings, and any slight mis-calibration can send people away with completely different sub-communications.
So I careened through a journey to learn how to operate it, first through working as a type designer at Hoefler & Frere-Jones, through Monotype, into multi-script design at Apple, and onto consulting for clients such as Google, Adobe, Font Bureau, Intel, and YouTube.
Through those experiences, I’ve acquired understanding of additional alphabets and varied display technologies, and developed a more refined eye for microscopic shifts in text and texture.
Language is how we pass on culture, how we relate shared experiences. This is doubly true with type, where both words and letters hold significance. We remake the characters — updating their shapes, remixing them with styles from other alphabets — and remake the stories in tandem, passing both on to those with whom we interact.
Erasing someone’s memories of a letter is erasing a part of them. I remember moving from Russia as a child, first to Italy, then to the United States. The first letter of my name, the K, is given a slightly different form in the different cultures, even though they’re close enough that often type designers place them interchangeably. The Cyrillic one is balanced, it curves, it takes a slower way to move through the shape. The Latin, in contrast, is asymmetrical, it’s faster, rougher, often top-heavy. I remember thinking it felt like it was going to tip-over, or like it got slammed into a door. But the change is often so small, I started doubting my perceptions. Looking for that other K like a memory that I wanted someone to corroborate.
Each typeface designed becomes a dialect. A regional in-nod, a slow refinement of certain shapes that come into fashion in much the same way slang enters the lexicon. Our opinions on proper type shift with the trends of the times. Are you utopian in your belief that there’s a single, optimized typeface that can be suitable for everything? How much do you lean on the studies of legibility? How much do you cringe at stretched type?
Often people think that as long as they can get the words out, it’s enough. For English-speakers, many will often exasperatedly ask when will we have enough typefaces? Even a Berber friend recently asked why any additional Tifinagh typefaces might be needed, as he was already able to text a friend on the phone. My retort has consistently been that we’ll have enough when each interpretation of life is represented.
In addition to historical typeforms being extended and revived, there are constantly new, edgy opinions being expressed through typography. It becomes the most micro of rebellions. A way to bring energy into an established artform. An evolution that allows the next generation, and fresh ideas to come into its fold.
Type collects our thoughts and encodes our memories. Providing a guiding light, and fodder for remix. Retelling our heritage and unique points of view. A subtle and covert way of infusing meaning and history into our shared experiences.
So you followed my advocacy on the need for shifts in type, now falls the other shoe. What goes into making a new typeface? The process that goes into designing type is a little magic, but mostly just meditative, repetitive design. Countless hours spent individually drawing each glyph, checking that it’s bezier curves line up to register properly on screen and with printers.
Looking at sets of glyphs together, and constantly combing over them, working towards a perfectly balanced set. Negotiating the space: within characters, next to them (spacing), and between unusual relationships (kerning). Then, taking advantage of the unique things that contemporary fonts can do, such as an adaptation for scripting ligatures, variants, or more complicated dynamics.
A job can come in, and on its most basic level, you’re adding in an extra set of glyphs, but to someone else, all those forms carry a weight of connotations. While working for global giants, that responsibility becomes even greater. Any change made gets instantly transferred to a wide marketplace. You want to to show the people reading via your typefaces that you’ve heard them, that you’re noticing them. That you understand their K might carry a special shape. You’re responsible for representations of minority languages, and which languages get acknowledged and included. Simultaneously, you’re negotiating a large corporate system that’s not designed to care until there’s a mass-tilt in consumer demand.
In this world, I can’t accomplish everything that I want, but what I am able to do is help other people tell their story through type, to tell it beautifully. What I can do is make my medium convey their message. Help make what they see align with their reality and perceptions. Because in a space of clarity, and visual pleasure, we’re more capable.
BRANDING
Those same skills from type design often get pulled in for smaller, often more esoteric projects: logo and branding designs. Because every typeface carries with it the connotations of its history, every other time it’s been used or seen in public, these often call for custom lettering. This need arrises even more in Kanji-based (compared to Latin- or Cyrillic-based) projects, as their large character sets prevent the over-abundance of font options to choose from, as are available in the West.
Recently, the New York designer Louise Filli aptly described a logo as a typographic portrait. From the macro of culture, ethnicity and region, we move onto the micro of describing an individual, or a group of individuals coming together for a common cause.
Whereas with type, most of the time was spent in the weeds of the unicode spec and the rebalancing of minutia, in developing a brand’s ethos, more time is spent on research than execution.
Through discussions and interviews, the strategic designer learns exactly what a particular company’s essence and ambition is. Those ideas, through writing and re-writing, idea-grams, and morphological charts, are compiled into the company’s brand guidebook. Moodboards are assembled and reassembled, calibrating the conversion between language and vision. You can’t score without a goal… though once you know what you’re aiming for, a skilled professional can get you there with a straight shot.
You want to understand the drive behind the company’s mission, their values. This requires watching as much as asking, and clues can often come from unexpected places that end up making it into the final design. What is their aspiration? The unique elements that set them apart from their competitors? If it’s a product, inspiration can come from any differentiating element: the weight, the texture, the movement, the process (It’s Toasted!). If it’s a service, there might be something unique in the founder’s beliefs, or in the way they approach their clientele.
The second line of exploration hovers around who the company is trying to attract. Who is the current market? Who is their dream customer? What are their concerns, and how is the company meeting them? What vantage point will they be looking at your design from, both psychological as well as literal: Will they be holding your sign in their hands or approaching it from a fast-moving car?
The third side of the triangle of consideration is technical. Different type is required for a matchbox than for a neon sign, and a whole other set of considerations if it is to be assembled out of tile. The final design will be at the Venn diagram nexus of all three of these explorations.
It’s often invisible work, only getting noticed if it goes wrong. If you have a company touting attention to detail, but its logo looks slap-dash, a disconnect develops. What about a boutique brand using a mass-market font, would something feel off? You might think most people won’t notice, however the noticing happens on an instinctual gut level. Our organisms have evolved over millennia to take in a lot of information and send our brain alerts if anything feels even slightly mis-matched.
The job of a branding designer is calibrating the audience’s expectations. On the extreme end, success is no one walking towards a coffee shop thinking they’ve found the emergency room, on the detailed end, is pleasure extended from the first interaction all the way through a customer’s experience with the service or product.
Since no brand is ever just a single image, building that ecosystem means using that same discovery and decision process and extrapolating outwards. Designing in powers of ten to make sure the details and the whole resonate in sync. Creating a living brand means constantly layering elements and expanding them into an encyclopedia of merchandise, digital experiences, photography, spaces, and ephemera. With each, my approach is design by elimination. It either speaks to the goal, or it’s out. In the same way that bezier curves register with the minimal necessary amount of points, perfect brand communication is clearest when there are no extra notes.
We’ll take on putting together a team, finding people perfectly suited to the task and making sure they do their best work and do it in unison with each other. Once assembled, we’ll instruct that team on exactly how to execute the vision, beginning-to-end, keeping in mind any pitfalls that may arise. When art directing photography, it’s essential to be well-versed in film and art history, the photographic canon, and current global trends, thus ensuring no analogy — intentional or accidental — is left unaddressed. While we’re working on the images, we’re also plotting the layout, and future juxtapositions, to know what the final visual should be before the first shutter click.
In tandem, we’re assembling assets: sealing photos, typography, and text together while shuffling through a pantheon of paper choices and printing techniques. We employ our relationships with local and international printers, as well as our experience working a printing press and understanding what it needs from the other side. Careful consideration on this front saves the client money, while presenting something unique enough to the customer to make sure the memory is embedded. That’s the only way to fold, trim, flip, win print awards, and delight clients all at the same time.
Our close convivial relationships also enable us to build unique digital experiences. We work with developers who understand brand, and brainstorm together to find unique and unexplored ways to make the concept shine through into interactive assets — whether it’s a distilled rainbow or dispersed salt on your screen. We create thoughtful sites with craft at the forefront, even if we’re using a familiar back-end, because we fully believe that thoughtful design doesn’t age.
The trick for someone in my shoes is pulling apart how it works, finding the necessary consistency without falling into a vat of mind-numbing repetition. Learning how to do that requires being of the world — traveling, conversing, seeing trends, studying history, having discussions with people outside your realm with no distinct expectation of what might happen. It’s an openness to being wrong, because in at least some small way, we always are. If design is, as we believe, the most direct, impactful communication possible, building out a brand or creating a typeface becomes finding the syntax. And when all the elements are carefully composed from the same vision, the message comes through clear.
These are the methods I bring to my practice, and these are the questions I bring to my assessments whether I’m art directing, teaching, judging, or writing reviews. It’s less about something being good or bad, and more about something being apt and having coherence.
This presentation has been edited to better fit your reading experience, with an abridged image-to-text ratio, trimming transitional slides and visual examples accordingly. For the full version, book a presentation by getting in touch directly.
