Interview

Deciding what the thing is for. A typeface that is trying to be usable everywhere is usable nowhere in particular, and the market is now saturated with those. The hard part is committing to a set of constraints early enough that they actually shape the drawing, and then not flinching when someone asks for a weight that would break them.

The drawing is maybe three times faster. Interpolation tooling got genuinely good, and variable fonts removed an enormous amount of duplicated work. But the total time is roughly the same, because the expected character set has quadrupled. In 2006 a professional release meant Latin with decent kerning. Now it means Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, a real italic, and somebody will ask about Vietnamese.

So the tools got faster and the job got bigger, and those cancel out almost exactly.

Draw text faces, not display faces. Display work is more fun and gets more attention, and it teaches you almost nothing about spacing. Spacing is the entire craft. You can hide bad spacing at ninety point and you cannot hide it at nine.

Enormously, and mostly for the worse. Web licensing priced on pageviews means the people who benefit most from a typeface pay the least attention to who made it. I have had a family on a site with forty million monthly visits, licensed for less than a single custom logotype.

The custom side subsidises the retail side now. That was not true fifteen years ago and I do not think it is healthy, but it is the arrangement.

A newspaper face, which is a category everyone says is dead. It is dead in print and it is very much alive on screen, because the constraints are identical: small sizes, dense setting, long reading. Nobody wants to call it that, so we are describing it as an interface text family and pretending we invented something.