What started you being interested in typefaces?

[William Berkson]

My Uncle Ben Lieberman got me interested as a teen. This book actually came later. He had already written books on printing as a hobby, and convinced my Dad to buy a press. So I had fun doing letter press printing as a teen.

Lieberman had been a journalist. He rose to being editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, but they wouldn't let him touch the presses because he was not union. So he bought a small press and became fanatic about all things printing and type. Among other things, he founded the American Printing Historical Society, whose annual lecture is named after him. He had written his PhD in political science about freedom of the press, which he interpreted rightly first of all as freedom to own a press. He would have loved desk-top publishing.

[quadibloc]

I'm not at all sure.

Was it my interest in computers and related devices making the Selectric Composer particularly interesting?

Was it an article in Popular Science on setting up your own home printing press?

Or just various books on typefaces that introduced me to their beauty?

[russellm]

Lettraset.

[rs_donsata]

This.

[Ryan Maelhorn]

Wow, what is that, rs?

[Nick Cooke]

I think that would put me off.

[Joshua Langman]

I was reprimanded in second grade for adding swashes to my upright handwriting exercises.

[ldavidson]

I was fresh out of school with a CS degree in 1983. I went to work for the only start-up tech company in town that any of the profs knew. The company made printer controllers that let you print bar codes, different fonts, and other graphics - for all kinds of dot-matrix printers. I was hired to take over the software development for the existing business, so the senior guys could work on a new project. The founder and CEO told the R&D dept. he was "betting the company" that we could compete against HP in a new market for low-cost laser printers - we were in line with HP to receive the first shipment to the US of the new 300 DPI Canon laser printer engines, the first ones on the market. You had to buy a lot of them to place an order.

The CEO refused to pay the license fees Adobe was asking for their fonts, so we (the R&D dept) were told to make our own fonts. They hired two people of artistic bent (but no font design experience) to start. Soon after the gurus had the engines printing at all, test fonts started coming out, and the results were not what the artists expected or wanted. The gurus were busy, so they asked me to have a look. So I learned about the technology between them and the paper, and helped them sort out the problems (inside corner fills, outside corner rounding, unexpected thicknesses, bad curves, etc.) and got to draw some shapes of my own. My interest expanded from there.

[Richard Fink]

I had been quietly studying up on screen "readability" with the intention of writing about it. I had also done web development for the New York City Transit Authority. Intranet work, mostly.
So when it became clear that fonts were finally going to become web server based resources, I felt there was an opening for somebody to focus on that.

There still is. We're almost at the end of the beginning by my reckoning and I'm planning on ratcheting up my involvement quite soon. I think the last tally I read - and give some credence to - was that about 8% of web sites now have web fonts in use. Only 8%.

I have my tastes, but I'm certainly no designer. My interest is more technological - getting fonts to work well - consistently and predictably - onscreen in web pages. I'm also interested in the impact a greater range of typefaces has on expression onscreen. To take a metaphor from musical theatre: Typefaces are the alphabet in costume and typography is the orchestration.

[CorpusMilti]

For me, it was 'Helvetica' by Gary Hustwit.

[rs_donsata]

It's the logotype of my favorite teenage rock band Ryan.

[Karl Stange]

Being handed responsibility for a corporate type library which included hundreds of unique original assets and having to start from scratch sorting it out.

[studio-k]

My first introduction to typography, barring a kid’s set of ABC building blocks, was the pocket money purchase of a John Bull Printing Outfit, a sort of do-it-yourself rubber stamp kit with rubber characters, tweezers and an ink pad. I used it to create a business card which proclaimed me as leader of our neighbourhood gang, and learned my first lesson in the authority of type: people will believe anything they see in print! Read the rest of the story under my profile - Keith Tricker - at myfonts

[Nick Shinn]

I too had a John Bull set.
And played with Letraset.
But there are many things I “started to become interested in” that didn’t end up as my career(s).
With type, I would say in retrospect that an accumulation of influences and circumstances made me an art director and subsequently a type designer.

Had I been a better art director, I would no doubt have worked at an agency doing broadcast ads rather than B2B type-heavy print, directed commercials, and eventually become a movie director like Ridley Scott.

Rather than a serial accumulation of prods in this direction, there may well have been a turning point when two or more influences coincided.

I can certainly attribute my career as a (successful) type designer to one person. In the mid 1980s I gave up on type design, having had a couple of faces published—a lot of work and precious little remuneration. Then in 1993 David Michaelides, the manager of the FontShop store in Toronto, organized a type event with Carter and Brody speaking; he then suggested I present some type concept ideas to FontFont, which I did, and they published Fontesque, which became very popular. Had it not been, I would probably not have pursued type design any further.

A lot of turning points, serendipity, personal inspiration, opportunities opened up by new technology, and so on.

[hrant]

Cheers to David Michaelides then!

hhp

[Richard Fink]

@ nickshinn

>and eventually become a movie director like Ridley Scott.

And, hopefully, not end up in the drink like his brother Tony at the age of 68. Physically, it sounds like he was in good health.

A shame, I liked his movies a lot.

[russellm]

... sounds like he was in good health.

brain cancer., they say

[mjr]

I remember getting a musty old book from the school library, but for the life of me I can't remember anything about it except the typefaces. Whenever there was dialogue (and there was a lot), each character "spoke" in a different typeface. One was italic, one was hold, one was sans-serif, one was Old English, and so on. It was incredibly hard to read, not only because the story line was boring, but the mixture of typefaces was physically jarring. Being an artistic person, I realized it must be something in the design, and I set out to study type design.

[_null]

For me it was graffiti, getting to point where I could produce tags like this led me into Gerrit Noordzij and the rigour of type design.

Also...the black and white purity of it really appeals.

[hrant]

Michael, you must be talking about one of Avital Ronell's books. BTW the best place I've seen that idea applied subtly enough to remain easily readable (unlike Ronell's books) is -of all places- a cheesy novel called "The Interior Life" by Katherine Blake (Dorothy Heydt).

the black and white purity of it really appeals.

Indeed.

hhp

[hrant]

What great photos, Peter!

hhp

[William Berkson]

Fascinating, Peter, thanks.

[enne_son]

Reading Charles Bigelow’s 1983 Scientific American essay with Donald Day on Digital Typography.

But the background was probably my father’s box of sample sheets.

But maybe my father’s sign-painting abilities…

…which he inherited from his father may have had something to do with it.

(that's my father on the left)

And perhaps my grade 6 & 7 teacher had something to do with it as well. He did things like this:

Clearly the young artist at the centre (me) hadn’t read Gerrit Noordzij’s writings yet.

[DTY]

For me the most important reason was being asked to do the typesetting and layout for a journal I was editing. But prior inclinations already existed, going back to when I was little and my grandfather was a newspaper publisher. I saw the printing operation a couple of times and found it fascinating, and he also had a cabinet of old wood headline type in his basement. And I've also had some experience with epigraphy.