{"id":3342,"date":"2009-07-02T00:00:13","date_gmt":"2009-07-02T07:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fontstruct.com\/news\/?p=3342"},"modified":"2018-04-17T05:10:13","modified_gmt":"2018-04-17T12:10:13","slug":"focus-on-fontstructors-paul-d-hunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fontstruct.com\/news\/2009\/07\/02\/focus-on-fontstructors-paul-d-hunt\/","title":{"rendered":"Focus On FontStructors \u2013 Paul D. Hunt"},"content":{"rendered":"
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(This article was originally published on\u00a0FontShop<\/a>\u2019s \u201cFontFeed\u201d blog. Many thanks to\u00a0MonoType<\/a>\u00a0for permission to reproduce this article here.)<\/em><\/div>\n

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We continue our series of mini-\u200binterviews with FontStructors<\/a> with Paul Hunt<\/a>. Besides being a FontStructor from the early days, Paul is a \u201ctradi\u00adtional\u201d type designer. Although he hasn\u2019t been an active user since some time, he still has the most downloaded FontStruction to his name. Struc\u00adturosa<\/a> 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-\u200bLatin scripts including Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew. It has been downloaded over 6,000 times, and spawned over 20 clones.<\/span><\/p>\n

Paul Hunt<\/h3>\n

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Born and raised in the rural north of Arizona, early on Paul Hunt became fasci\u00adnated with the languages and cultures of peoples at home and abroad. He attended Brigham Young University<\/a> and received a BA<\/span> degree in Inter\u00adna\u00adtional Studies. Paul got involved profes\u00adsionally in design when he took a job as a graphic designer for The Winslow Mail<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Ever since I was young, I have been fasci\u00adnated by art, language and culture. I guess it\u2019s only natural that these interests have come together in my love and practice of type design.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Paul Hunt relocated to Buffalo, NY<\/span>, to enroll in an appren\u00adticeship at P22<\/a>, where he started digitising classic typefaces for the Lanston Type Co.<\/a>, then moved on to designing his own personal type projects Kilkenny<\/a>, P22 Allyson<\/a>, and P22 Zaner Pro<\/a> for IHOF<\/span> – Inter\u00adna\u00adtional House of Fonts<\/a>. With each new project that he faced at P22, he pushed himself to increase his design and technical skills.<\/p>\n

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\nThe Latin typeface Grandia and its Devanagari counterpart Gandhara which Paul Hunt designed in partial fulfilment of the require\u00adments for the degree of Masters of Arts in Typeface Design<\/a> from the University of Reading<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last year Paul pursued an MA<\/span> degree in Typeface Design<\/a> from the University of Reading<\/a>, and added Devanagari to the list of exotic scripts for which he has designed type. After gradu\u00adation, he worked for a few short months with London\u2019s finest at Dalton Maag<\/a> before he was offered his current position in the type team at Adobe<\/a>. You can read his typographic and other musings on his Pilcrow<\/a> type\u00a0blog.<\/p>\n

Paul Hunt regis\u00adtered 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 capti\u00advated by the wonderful possi\u00adbil\u00adities that this tool makes available to the unini\u00adtiated designer of\u00a0type.<\/p>\n

In what way \u2013 if any \u2013 do you think having FontStruct around when you origi\u00adnally started in type design would have influ\u00adenced your design method and style?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019m not sure that FontStruct would have partic\u00adu\u00adlarly influ\u00adenced my actual design method and style as much as it would have probably given me more confi\u00addence to just start playing around and trying new things in designing type.<\/p>\n

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\nMed Splode<\/a> by Paul D.\u00a0Hunt<\/span><\/p>\n

You are a \u201ctrue\u201d type designer. How does building FontStruc\u00adtions compare to conven\u00adtional type design? What are the pros and cons, both artis\u00adti\u00adcally and technically?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 \u201cB\u00e9zier wrangler\u201d. At any rate, there are some inter\u00adesting contrasts between designing modular type designs and designing more refined typefaces.<\/p>\n

With the modular nature of building a FontStruction, it reinforces the idea that there is an under\u00adlying structure to a good type design. Even within the limita\u00adtions 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 \u2018d\u2019 and get a \u2018p\u2019 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\u00a0flaw.<\/p>\n

For something that really reads well, you need more nuance. It is possible to achieve this level of sophis\u00adti\u00adcation using FontStruct, but there would be much more work involved than by using tradi\u00adtional 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\u2019m sure that just sounds like a challenge to some of the more hardcore FontStruct contrib\u00adutors out there). Even if a FontStruct user (or team of users) came up with a flawless set of glyph shapes, more tradi\u00adtional software would be needed to address such concerns as kerning and OpenType<\/a> featuring.<\/p>\n

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\nStruc\u00adturosa<\/a> by Paul D.\u00a0Hunt<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you feel it helps being a \u201ctrue\u201d type designer to create FontStruc\u00adtions, or does one on the contrary benefit from approaching the font creation site with a blank slate and an innocent eye?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 refine\u00adments I made to Struc\u00adturosa<\/a> that made it stand out from the other Fontstruc\u00adtions based on the FontStruct logotype. I believe it is the small details that I added to my inter\u00adpre\u00adtation of the popular logo in font form that led to it being the most downloaded font on the\u00a0site.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I think because I have condi\u00adtioned myself to see letters in their most simple forms I would never have thought to come up with something so wonderful and striking as Fontstruc\u00adtions like DeTrayne<\/a> and A Fault in Reality<\/a>. The great thing about FontStruct is that it makes available a simple, powerful font-\u200bmaking tool to creative designers who might not otherwise delve into producing exper\u00adi\u00admental types.<\/p>\n

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\nSlabstruct<\/a>, Slabstruct Stencil<\/a>, and Slabstruct Too<\/a> by Paul D. Hunt<\/span>
\nHeader image<\/a>:<\/strong>: Typo-\u200btoque \u00a9 Paul Hunt, edited &<\/span> manip\u00adu\u00adlated by Yves Peters<\/span><\/p>\n

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(This article was originally published on\u00a0FontShop\u2019s \u201cFontFeed\u201d blog. Many thanks to\u00a0MonoType\u00a0for permission to reproduce this article here.)   We continue our series of mini-\u200binterviews with FontStructors with Paul Hunt. Besides being a FontStructor from the early days, Paul is a \u201ctradi\u00adtional\u201d type designer. Although he hasn\u2019t been an active user since some time, he still […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-focus-on-fontstructors","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fontstruct.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fontstruct.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fontstruct.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fontstruct.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fontstruct.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3342"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/fontstruct.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3383,"href":"https:\/\/fontstruct.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3342\/revisions\/3383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fontstruct.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fontstruct.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fontstruct.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}