“Trade Gothic. At least that’s what comes to mind, not overthinking it… because of its nice clean feel and it doesn’t feel cold.”—Karin Fong, Creative Director at Imaginary Forces
“The Helvetica Neue family. Versatility, many weights and readability.” —Kelly Kliebe, Creative Director at The Garage
“Big Caslon at 18 point size.” —Joshua Scott Onysko, CEO and Founder of Pangea Organics
“Garamond, because I imagine everything as a book by H.G. Wells trying to stay ahead of an insane pace of change.” —John Hockenberry, Host and Co-Creator of The Takeaway, WNYC Radio
“I use Century Gothic in 12 points for everything. I like it's circularity.” —Kevin Glover, Producer Specialist at Starbucks Global Creative Studio
“Usually some combination of Helvetica or Univers with Sabon. Just two nice typefaces that go well together. I like to use typefaces that have a full range of weights. Sabon doesn’t have that, but it’s a beautiful text face with a great italic.” —Stefan Bucher, the man behind 344 Design and dailymonster.com
“Right now it's Adobe Hebrew. I like the weight of it, and it has old-style numbers, which I vastly prefer. I switched from Adobe Garamond because I could not get it to default to old-style numbers.” —Robert Fink, Professor of Musicology at UCLA
I was taught to handle both ends of the type spectrum. Meaning, you can hand-draw type, which is lettering, where you’re handling three or four words at the max. I was also taught that a good designer has to be able to handle 300 words or more on a page in typesetting. A good designer needs to handle both.
Gemma O’Brien is an Australian artist and Volcom Womens Ambassador specializing in hand-lettering, illustration and typography. In her spare time, she travels and illustrates puke-puns on airsick bags for The Spew Bag Challenge.
Originally from Southern California, Mark Canesco graduated from Otis College of Art and Design in 2004 and then started a hybrid business after school. He is currently living in Oahu, Hawaii and freelances with some agencies and has his own clients. He also runs a digital type lab—ps.Type—which offers custom type design and retail products.
“My favorite typefaces switch over time. Right now, I find myself turning to Univers (Adrian Frutiger, 1957) pretty regularly. With such a large family (21 faces), it can serve so many purposes. And I love that it's available in condensed and extended too. Clean and readable, it's a good workhorse.”
— John Clifford, Owner at Think Studio
"Two words: Flex Friday," says Sheharazad Fleming, Art Director at USC. "We tend to slow down a bit over the month of July, during which, our creatives are each encouraged to take a Friday break from the office to seek out inspiration."
Typography is truly integrated with the business of editorial design, because your goal is to create interaction with the reader. That's why TypeEd spoke to Stefanson about how The Hollywood Reporter keeps typography fresh in their work.
Tim Hankins didn't go to art school, he studied advertising. Hankins cut his teeth in the world of design at the crossroads of music and the Internet in the late 90s. He's now the Director of Design at The Honest Company, and been with the company since October 2011 before the company had any products or even a website.
“There is something immediately comfortable about the typeface. Yet the more time you spend with it, the more of the details you appreciate — while never becoming precious. The letterforms themselves adhere to a tight grid but this structure allows for a flexibility in the ways it can be used to express different ideas.” — Tim Guy, Creative Director at Google
It’s been a little more than a year since I began my interview series, Typography Dojo, and I feel like I’ve learned so much along the way from typographic masters!