This is the third in our series of mini-​interviews with FontStruc­tors. In this instalment we talk to Emilio Ignozza, better known on FontStruct as Em42. Emilio Ignozza is a graphic and web designer based in Roma, Italy. He origi­nally studied archi­tecture, and geometry, grids and patterns still play a key role in his design work. Because of his daytime job as a software specialist he has worked on many software-​related design projects, ranging from software GUI to packaging. Typog­raphy is one of his interests, as are photog­raphy, contem­porary archi­tecture, and design. His current main project which he shares with his friend Gi is the blog House42[friends], where they catalogue things they like, things they do, things they’ve seen, and places they’ve been to. On FontStruct Em42 is known for his “purist” approach, taking advantage of the modularity of the tool and using a minimum number of different brick shapes.

Emilio Ignozza (Em42)

Emilio Ignozza has a degree in archi­tecture, yet never practised as an architect. His studies covered human­istic and technical topics which developed his interest in arts, design and visual commu­ni­cation. Although he has no formal background in graphic design, he soon discovered many funda­mental rules that are valid for archi­tecture and for commu­ni­cating a project visually are easily applicable to graphic design as well. Indeed his approach to graphic design is heavily infused by the geomet­rical patterns, grids and modules he learned to apply when laying out archi­tec­tural projects.

His first experience with type design was preparing lettering for project drawings. The personal computer wasn’t widely estab­lished yet in early 90s, and the pencil drawings on light cardboard required hand-​made lettering that had to harmonise with the project content.

Presen­tation of an archi­tec­tural analysis of La Casa delle Armi, a fencing hall designed by Luigi Moretti in 1936 with custom lettering by Em42

ONB by Em42

How did you come upon FontStruct?

I discovered FontStruct prior to its official launch through TypeNeu, a blog I regularly visited at the time. For some time I had been working on my first attempt at type design: ONB, a not-so-original modernist geometric display sans (check Mostra by Mark Simonson) based on the lettering used for inscrip­tions found on many buildings built during the Fascist years in Roma. The typeface origi­nated from a set of characters I designed for the presen­tation of an archi­tec­tural analysis of La Casa delle Armi, a fencing hall designed by Luigi Moretti in 1936. I was strug­gling with spacing, kerning, and optical correction issues. Then there it was – this tool that allowed you to generate modular fonts just by playing with bricks, without dealing with the complex­ities of profes­sional font design. I was totally taken and quickly started my first simple experiments.

Invitation to the SUPER aperitivo for the opening of the Spring shopping season featuring Doodeka by Em42.

You are known in the FontStruct community as being some kind of a purist, because you never seem happy every time new brick shapes are added. What is the reasoning behind this?.

Even if I generally follow the less-is-more approach my designs are guided by the restraints that are either inherent to the job or self-​imposed, for instance to comply with the project briefing.

What I like most about FontStruct is the idea to have only a limited amount of basic shapes to design a font with, with no control on spacing nor kerning (basic spacing controls were only added earlier this year). All this may seem severely limiting to what you can achieve, but the real challenge is to create a fully fledged type design within those limita­tions. I suppose that’s why the FontStruct fonts I appre­ciate the most are those that clearly reveal that they are based on “bricks”. Conversely I care less about those that tend to be too much bitmap graphics – any typeface could be rendered this way – or that try too hard to simulate bezier-​based shapes.

Usually I tend to put into evidence the limita­tions of my designs instead of trying to hide them. As it was not possible to define smoothly rounded shapes, I decided to build a set of characters based on a dodecagon in Doodeka. And because by defin­ition pixel-​based font cannot have diagonal lines I empha­sised the jagged “staircase effect” in Escaptionist.

Flyer announcing the sales season at the SUPER concept store featuring Les Bains by Em42, which is based on the lettering used for the signs in Les Bains des Docks by Jean Nouvel, one of the archi­tects Emilio and Gi like the most.
With regards to the addition of new bricks to FontStruct, users sometimes ask for special bricks they think they need to complete a design they have in mind. In the beginning FontStruct only had 97 different brick shapes; now there are 167 – almost twice as many. Ironi­cally we’ve come to the point that it has become so difficult to retrieve bricks in the toolbox that some users keep on asking for bricks that are already available.

The simplest analogy I can think of are Lego bricks. When I was a kid I used to play a lot with them. Yet when in the late 70s they started to add special bricks for the more complex designs in the Space series I started losing interest. Of course it became easier to build more complex models with those special compo­nents, but for me personally all the fun was had in constructing special designs with only those first basic bricks.

The Legorama series was inspired by Lego, the most famous construction set in the world. Legorama, Legorama Fill, Legorama Every­where, Legorama Every­where Fill by Em42.

When I was browsing through your FontStruc­tions I noticed the similar­ities between Dioptical and OPTICA Normal, Manuel Guer­rero’s typeface that won a Certificate of Excel­lence in Type Design at the most recent TDC2
awards.

I know OPTICA and there is indeed a resem­blance with Dioptical, even in the name. But I was not influ­enced by Manolo’s work, nor was he by mine. I started on Dioptical in September 23rd (as you can see in the font info) and only
became aware of Optica in the November 28 edition of The Week in Type on I Love Typog­raphy. I think we both were inspired by the same popular optical trick usually seen in the image library of optical illusions. Yet the two sets
seem quite different in my opinion. Surpris­ingly enough the comments on BlueTypo mention even more type creations similar to Optica and Dioptical. It seems that different people came out with a similar idea around the same period of time without being influ­enced by one another.

To be honest I did not show Dioptical any earlier because I thought it was not inter­esting enough to share – and quite hard to download because of the large amount of bricks involved. I left it in my private FontStruct lab, together with other unpub­lished fonts. After the critical success of Optica I decided to give it a try and released it. This shows how poorly I judged what would be of interest to the public, and what not.

Skineskin laser-​engraved leather covers for Moleskine notebooks featuring Dioptical and Escap­tionist by Em42.

Tell us more about those classy Skineskin laser-​engraved leather covers for Moleskine notebooks you designed that are featured on your blog.

When Helmut Pfanner from Studio Lago asked us to create some artwork for the Skineskin covers, it seemed quite evident for us (me and my partner Gi from House42) to use fonts I created with FontStruct. On the one hand we were curious about using typog­raphy not in a mere graphic design project, but in product design where the text could generate a tactile sensation, as the artwork becomes coarse and slightly embossed when laser-​engraved in leather. On the other hand the covers were for notebooks in which you usually write down notes, and the use of text to decorate them was so “meta” that we simply could not resist.

In two of the covers the text creates a pattern decorating the complete leather surface. There were some issues with engraving the Dioptical pattern, as the optical effect could be easily lost if the lines became too thick or too thin. Eventually we were very happy with the result: when seen from a distance the pattern seems uniform, and only when you take a closer look you can see letters spelling PER–SO–NAL–NO–TES. The Escap­tionist pattern is twice “meta” – the text used to create the pattern is the filler text “Lorem Ipsum” created by an on-​line generator.

Skineskin laser-​engraved leather cover for Moleskine notebooks featuring Monkey Pizzaz by Em42.
The last cover (not shown on our blog but featured on the Skineskin site) uses the Monkey Pizzaz dingbat face, lining up small monkeys in columns and rows. The font consists of twenty-​six monkeys with different expres­sions (A is for angry, B is for blind, C is for crazy, etc.). The upper case letters have front view and the lower case the rear, which made it the perfect choice to be used on the front and the back cover respectively.

Lamina by Em42 is a typeface composed by arranging side by side slim layers obtained by laminating fat letter­forms.

Proclama by Em42 is a reverse italic construc­tivist sans with built-​in banner elements featuring geometric fringes and swirls, for creating propa­ganda.

Magnetor by Em42

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

On April 1st FontStruct – FontShop’s award winning free online platform for creating and sharing modular, grid-​based fonts – quietly slipped into its second year. More than just a font building tool, it is also a thriving community of type and design enthu­siasts which number at almost 150,000 confirmed regis­tered users. As its creator Rob Meek recently commented on Brick By Brick: News about FontStruct

Thank you! FontStruct is just an empty shell without your work and that of all FontStructors.

Indeed, the numbers speak volumes – as I am writing this there are 27,684 active FontStruct sessions, and this already impressive number is only a portion of the grand total of 166,341 FontStruc­tions, 7334 of which are public. But who are these FontStructors, these talented, dedicated tinkerers who patiently construct fonts, literally brick by brick? Well, what better way to find out than simply ask them? The coming weeks The FontFeed will be running a series of mini-​interviews with FontStructors to introduce this bustling community to you. And hopefully to entice those of you who aren’t familiar with FontStruct yet to give it a go yourselves and dive into the wonderful world of brick-​based modular type design.

John Skelton (afrojet)

John Skelton is better known as Afrojet on FontStruct. Origi­nally from Saint Paul, Minnesota, he now lives in Portland, Oregon. After going to Lewis & Clark College in Portland he did post-​graduate work for two years in Mexico and Guatemala studying Mayan hiero­glyphics. The image below shows a series of Mayan hiero­glyph sketches he made that tell the story of his ancestry. Trans­lated it says:

On July 7, 1942 A.D. When the Seventh Lord of the Night ruled, it was seven days after the moon was born. On that day Lady Skelton (John’s mother), touched the earth and then she crowned herself The Divine Lady of The Lineages.

31 Years, 5 Month and 5 Days after she was born, on May 13, 1973 A.D. One Katun had passed, and the Seventh Lord of the Night ruled, where the moon was 24 days old. On that day Lord John Skelton materi­alized through divinity.

Mayan hiero­glyph sketches by John Skelton
John Skelton has been a freelance graphic designer/web designer for the last eight years. His only formal type education consists of exactly one class he took from – in John’s words – the incredibly talented Bill Moran. John blogged steadily for years, but after his son was born two and a half years ago he found it much easier to commu­nicate in short bursts of 140 characters or less. Recently he’s taken to posting larger typeface samples on the Behance Network (although he admits it feels a bit like cheating on FontStruct when he does that ;). And for those who like eye candy John has a very nice Typog­raphy set on his Flickr account.

John first discovered FontStruct shortly after its public release in April 2008, “from either the FontShop e-newsletter or the old FontShop blog.”

Do you have any prior experience with type design?

Prior to working in FontStruct, I had never released a font for public consumption. I’ve done projects for clients that involved customized type or hand-​lettering but nothing to the point of fleshing out an entire font. I think one of the reasons that I gravi­tated to FontStruct was that it provided a fast and fun outlet for non-​client driven work. I’ve always been a fan of modular typefaces, and with FontStruct I was able to quickly build out some ideas that had long floated around in my head but were never executed upon.

Playtime by Afrojet

When looking at your FontStruc­tions it’s easy to see you perfectly grasp the modular concept of the tool. Where does your love for modular typefaces come from? And what unique advan­tages does grid-​based type design offer you as a designer?

Good question. I think my appre­ci­ation for modular type is a fairly natural extension of a childhood spent playing Atari, an adoles­cence spent listening to too many synthe­sizer bands, and estab­lishing my footing in graphic design at the same time pixel fonts were so popular. I think it was inevitable that by the time I started looking more closely at type I would be easily seduced by things like Wim Crouwel’s ‘New Alphabet’.

For me the advantage of grid-​based type design is that it becomes fairly easy to visualize an entire alphabet once you’ve estab­lished the grid parameters and designed a couple key characters. I work better with a set of limita­tions. Within Fontstruct, that’s meant smaller grids and fewer bricks.

Hydroplane by Afrojet

You always Share your Fontstruc­tions for others to Clone. How does it feel to relin­quish control over your creations?

Incredible. There are far too many things over the course of a day that I attempt to control. It’s much more fun to free the font and see where it will go. Another reason I like working with fewer bricks on a smaller grid is that it makes it easier for others to remix the shapes or swap bricks.

Sessions by Afrojet

Screen print on canvas of the Sessions Gropius image.

Your Josef Albers inspired FontStruction Sessions was recently picked up by Grain Edit, and many of your designs seem quite popular. Ever thought of branching out into “true” type design, or trying to make some money licensing your designs?

I have. I think FontStruct is a gateway drug to “true” type design. It can be an amazing educa­tional tool. I feel like I’ve learned so much about all facets of type design from both the software and the community in the past year alone. In order to take things to the next level though, I need to become more fluent with “true” font software in addition to learning how to license my designs. Recently, I’ve used FontLab to flush out the Sessions font to include an uppercase, accented characters, and full Latin support. I’d like to add some stylistic sets to it as well. My goal would be to release it as a commercial OpenType font.

Screen print of a new Fontstruction in the works called Gaga.

Gig poster for the band Juniper Tar, designed by Brian Kriederman from Milwaukee, a friend of John Skelton’s, using his font Jettison Stencil.

Logo design on Tshirt for Crossville Home School Chess Team, designed by Drawing on the Promises (dotp – graphic designer Frank McClung and artist Miriam McClung) using Afrojet’s Sawhorse for the text and Sawhorse Braumarks for the illus­trative parts.
This wraps up the first one of our mini-​interviews. Stay tuned for more Focus on FontStructors.
Header image: Men of Complex Mystery and Smart Hand Gestures © John Skelton, edited & manip­u­lated by Yves Peters