We continue our series of mini-​interviews with FontStructors with Paul Hunt. Besides being a FontStructor from the early days, Paul is a “tradi­tional” type designer. Although he hasn’t been an active user since some time, he still has the most downloaded FontStruction to his name. Struc­turosa is an impressive achievement in minimal modular type design, a beautiful showcase of the artistic potential of FontStruct. With its 283 characters this single case alphabet, despite using only a minimum amount of bricks in only two shapes (square and quarter circle), manages to cover a whole slew of non-​Latin scripts including Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew. It has been downloaded over 6,000 times, and spawned over 20 clones.

Paul Hunt

Born and raised in the rural north of Arizona, early on Paul Hunt became fasci­nated with the languages and cultures of peoples at home and abroad. He attended Brigham Young University and received a BA degree in Inter­na­tional Studies. Paul got involved profes­sionally in design when he took a job as a graphic designer for The Winslow Mail while still living in Arizona. His affinity for languages and design converged within the realm of typeface design, which he initially started as a hobby.

Ever since I was young, I have been fasci­nated by art, language and culture. I guess it’s only natural that these interests have come together in my love and practice of type design.

Paul Hunt relocated to Buffalo, NY, to enroll in an appren­ticeship at P22, where he started digitising classic typefaces for the Lanston Type Co., then moved on to designing his own personal type projects Kilkenny, P22 Allyson, and P22 Zaner Pro for IHOF – Inter­na­tional House of Fonts. With each new project that he faced at P22, he pushed himself to increase his design and technical skills.

The Latin typeface Grandia and its Devanagari counterpart Gandhara which Paul Hunt designed in partial fulfilment of the require­ments for the degree of Masters of Arts in Typeface Design from the University of Reading.

Last year Paul pursued an MA degree in Typeface Design from the University of Reading, and added Devanagari to the list of exotic scripts for which he has designed type. After gradu­ation, he worked for a few short months with London’s finest at Dalton Maag before he was offered his current position in the type team at Adobe. You can read his typographic and other musings on his Pilcrow type blog.

Paul Hunt regis­tered as a user on April 2, 2008. This was during the last days of the site being in beta mode, before it was announced to the general public. From the get go he was impressed with the technology behind the site and capti­vated by the wonderful possi­bil­ities that this tool makes available to the unini­tiated designer of type.

In what way – if any – do you think having FontStruct around when you origi­nally started in type design would have influ­enced your design method and style?

Had this resource been around when I was first delving into typeface design, it probably would have been one of the first places that I would have started to explore making fonts. I’m not sure that FontStruct would have partic­u­larly influ­enced my actual design method and style as much as it would have probably given me more confi­dence to just start playing around and trying new things in designing type.

Med Splode by Paul D. Hunt

You are a “true” type designer. How does building FontStruc­tions compare to conven­tional type design? What are the pros and cons, both artis­ti­cally and technically?

Thank you for that compliment. Perhaps now that you have called me a type designer I can move on from referring to myself as a “Bézier wrangler”. At any rate, there are some inter­esting contrasts between designing modular type designs and designing more refined typefaces.

With the modular nature of building a FontStruction, it reinforces the idea that there is an under­lying structure to a good type design. Even within the limita­tions of a modular typeface, much care must be taken to harmonize the details of each character so that they blend together as a cohesive design. The advantage of making a font in FontStruct is that typically there are not too many of these kinds of details, and shapes can be reused: you can rotate your ‘d’ and get a ‘p’ or flip it to get a b and you will probably only have to rearrange your serifs (if there are any) to make this work. In addition to being the advantage of a modular design, this simplicity is also its flaw.

For something that really reads well, you need more nuance. It is possible to achieve this level of sophis­ti­cation using FontStruct, but there would be much more work involved than by using tradi­tional type drawing software that allow for outline drawing instead of building up with bricks. Building a functioning text face with FontStruct would be a monumental achievement. I suggest that anyone reading this article not attempt this feat (I’m sure that just sounds like a challenge to some of the more hardcore FontStruct contrib­utors out there). Even if a FontStruct user (or team of users) came up with a flawless set of glyph shapes, more tradi­tional software would be needed to address such concerns as kerning and OpenType featuring.

Struc­turosa by Paul D. Hunt

Do you feel it helps being a “true” type designer to create FontStruc­tions, or does one on the contrary benefit from approaching the font creation site with a blank slate and an innocent eye?

Sure, I think that having some previous training in typeface design helps a designer to make better decisions on both the micro and macro level. I like to think that it was the refine­ments I made to Struc­turosa that made it stand out from the other Fontstruc­tions based on the FontStruct logotype. I believe it is the small details that I added to my inter­pre­tation of the popular logo in font form that led to it being the most downloaded font on the site.

On the other hand, I think because I have condi­tioned myself to see letters in their most simple forms I would never have thought to come up with something so wonderful and striking as Fontstruc­tions like DeTrayne and A Fault in Reality. The great thing about FontStruct is that it makes available a simple, powerful font-​making tool to creative designers who might not otherwise delve into producing exper­i­mental types.

Slabstruct, Slabstruct Stencil, and Slabstruct Too by Paul D. Hunt
Header image:: Typo-​toque © Paul Hunt, edited & manip­u­lated by Yves Peters