Interviewer: That’s a hard process to go through for any business. It can kill a lot of businesses. Sounds like you’ve found a way through it.
Bruno: We were very close to going under. Not because we didn’t have enough work, simply because it started being so chaotic. At some point we just had to say, “Stop. No more work coming in.” We basically turned away any work that was coming in for about three to six months. We just tried to calm it down and regather the troops.
Interviewer: I guess that dovetails with what I was going to ask, about what it’s like having offices in various parts of the world, not just in London.
Bruno: It takes time to establish the people in the offices abroad. I’m trying to develop communication channels that are appropriate to everyone. Communication with Brazil is going extremely well. The advantage there, as well, is there isn’t such a huge time difference involved. At the worst, this time of the year, it’s four hours. In summer, it’s only two hours. So it’s not too bad. Fabio, who heads Brazil, is extremely talented, not only as a designer, but he also has got a good business head on him. He understands communication, how important it is.
Within Brazil, actually, they’re not located in one office at all, they’re spread over three cities, Porto Alegre, São Paolo, and Rio de Janeiro. Their communication is all telecommunications and it works fabulously. They are actually our most effective and efficient team, strangely.
Running the business
Interviewer: What is the balance like for you, running the business, but also for the people working there, between business development and the actual creation of.
Bruno: For me, personally, it’s completely changed. To be honest, I haven’t drawn a letter in the best part of ten years now. I doodle, at home sometimes, on a Saturday morning when I do the shopping list, I doodle. That’s when I do my drawing.
I do miss it, I must say. Sometimes I hanker to just be a designer, sit down at a computer and draw letters, not having to worry about everything else. Just get my pay pack every month, go home and follow my own interests. But to be quite honest, I wouldn’t want to miss it the way it is now. I’m really enjoying it.
Having started the business back in ’91, having seen it grow now to probably the biggest drawing studio now, I
‘m pretty chuffed, I must say. It makes me really proud of myself, but also for everyone involved, how everyone has pulled together and made that happen.
It’s also required that the business is now clearly divided up in different areas. We have a business development area, we have client services, we have operations, we have production, which is design, engineering, hinting, all that. So the roles have to be quite clearly defined.
There’s always going to be a little bit of overlap. At some point, maybe people in font development are expected to do business development, say if they talk to a client and they see an opportunity where you could maybe expand on a project.
They’re not required to, but I hope they keep their eyes and ears open, will always report back and say, “Hey, there might be an opportunity to go in there and have a chat with them.” This is just business development, really.
I’m now the chairman of my company, which is actually quite nice. It allows me to do what I really want to do, which is travel the world, go and meet people, talk about type, occasionally run workshops, work with students or with design agencies, things like that. I really enjoy doing that, very much so, but sometimes it would be nice to be drawing a little bit. Even if it’s to make sure I still can do what I preach. To my mind, that’s quite important.
I always try to keep up with the technologies as well. Back at the ranch, I chat with the engineers and make sure I know what the latest developments are – even though I may not be able to do it, or fully understand it, but at least I have an idea. If people have a conversation, I can participate in that conversation.
Sometimes I do try to sit down and actually experiment with technology for myself, so that I understand the processes. That then helps me to explain the process to a client much better as well, and actually advise the client correctly. I think that’s important.
Using fonts
Interviewer: Dalton Maag is a type development company. Do you get into how your fonts are used very much? Particularly I’m thinking, not just obviously in print or on phones, other devices, but the current move towards adaptive, responsive layout, do you have any involvement with that?
Bruno: No, not at all. We focus solely on the type. We will give some guidance how the type should be used in terms of sizing, or more importantly, how it shouldn’t be used. Once you come into responsive designs, it’s not our bag. Again we can only say, “OK, optimal reading line length is this and that, mind it.”
Interviewer: There is an interesting question. Maybe because you’re only focusing on the fonts, I don’t know how much you deal with this, but how much do those kinds of parameters change between scripts? What is optimal line length in Bengali, for instance?
Bruno: We do that sort of research as well, trying to find out what it is. Most of the time there are no hard and fast rules, we’ve found. In many cases we’re actually finding ourselves in a position where we’re advising the client on how we think the font is being used, and thus establishing typographic principles.
I remember once in a project we did back in ’99, we did the Hebrew, and the question came up, “Which way do you slant the italic?” We were talking to Nigel Roche of St Bride’s Library when he was still there. He’s a native Hebrew reader and he’s typographically quite clued up as well.
He basically said to us, “I haven’t got a clue. There are no rules. You do it in one way and that will be the rule.” You are in a situation, all of a sudden, where you are creating those rules. That’s interesting, sometimes.
At the end of the day, you can’t control it. Once people have your font, they do with it whatever they want. I’ve learned not to get too upset about things, or too concerned about it.
Second-guessing yourself
Interviewer: Do you ever get feedback that makes you want to change what you’ve done, and do you ever get the opportunity to do that? If you really get feedback that this would’ve been better if you’d gone in this direction.
Bruno: Sometimes. It’s not very often, but sometimes you do. Particularly the Nokia project, we have been getting feedback, because the client was very involved in the project. There have been moments where we went back and did change things.
I remember Nokia Arabic, we did the initial draft in Kufi style; it was all very good, it looked really good, it read really well, until we came into the Persian market. Persians just said, “No, we’re not reading that. We can read it but we don’t want to,” at which point we had to completely reconsider the design. We created a completely new Arabic for Nokia.
Interviewer: A completely new Arabic for all of the uses of Arabic? Not a specific one for the Farsi market?
Bruno: No, for the whole of the Arabic market. It would have been logistically too cumbersome for Nokia to have different versions of an Arabic. So we created a design which was acceptable to a broad range of Arabic script readers, whether they’re in the Arab world, the Persian world, or the Urdu world. That was then accepted by a broad range of people: “Let’s compromise, we can live with that.”
But sometimes we look in our own library of fonts. Even in the Latin as well, every now and then you go through an update cycle, say, “We could actually change that…”
When you update your fonts, the big problem is you have to consider the impact it has on the users. Your fonts are already out there. For a custom font, you may have 100,000 users, they’re on devices and everything. What is the impact of that? You have to consider to make it as consistent and compatible as possible so you’re not upsetting layouts and things like that.
There may be instances where you think, “Oh, I’d like to change that design, it doesn’t fit quite right,” but then you have to weigh it up against the impact the change has, and say, “It’s not worth it, it’s not worth all the support calls you’re going to get, all the upset you’re going to cause,” or you say, “We’re making this a new product, we’re going to rename it.” In essence it’s still the same, but we’ll label it with, “This is a new product. We’re happy to give you a free update if you’re an existing user of a library font, but be aware it may change things.” It becomes a bit of a logistic question as well.
Continuously, things evolve and change. That’s the thing about type, it’s an organic creature, it’s a living beast. You always have to react to it. Of course, as technologies change, and maybe fashions change as well, you want to adapt things a little bit to that.
And as your own personal experience changes, you learn more, you understand more, therefore particularly in the non?Latin scripts, you think, “I could actually do this better.”
Seeing your type designs put to use
Interviewer: What have been some of the most interesting, or appalling, or brilliant uses of your fonts you can remember?
Bruno: Personally, I tend to ignore all these things because I have no control over it. If you see a font used really well…
Interviewer: It must be gratifying.
Bruno: It’s really gratifying. You think, “Yeah, that is good.” You can see your font and you can see how well it harmonizes with everything else. You can see that the typeface really supports all the other elements around it.
For me as a type designer, this is one of the most important purposes of the typeface – obviously besides conveying the message that is written – that it actually supports all the other elements. It’s like building a house, it’s the foundation. If the foundation
is solid, you can throw anything you want on top of it and it will still work. It still has a functionality and a beauty to it.
I thought the work we did with King’s College was quite nice. They used the fonts quite well. For them, we redrew Caslon, it was a revival, specifically for their needs. We created two versions, a text version optimized around nine?point, and a display version optimized around 24 point and above. I like the way they are using it.
The other day we got a proof sample from Switzerland, they’re using Lexia and we had to do a modification, add German medieval characters into it. It’s a book source for legal precedents from medieval times, and they were written in medieval German. They needed all those various medieval characters in order to properly transliterate the texts.
Although it’s just a plain book, almost like a dictionary, just page after page of text, the typeface looks really good… “Yeah, I like this!” It reads well, it’s nice. It’s solid enough on the page but not oppressive. You think, “I’m not interested in the law but I could actually read this.” I was really chuffed with that.
Then, obviously, the way Nokia’s been doing their work. I thought that was really nice. I really liked that. What they have been doing, and also how they’ve been proud of the typeface themselves. They created the Nokia Twenty-six Characters book, you can get it at Gestalten Verlag; that’s a really nice piece of work. Just generally how they’re using it is good, I think.
I can’t recall anything specifically, but I’m sure there have been instances where I got a bit upset, and think, “OK, I mustn’t get involved in this. There’s nothing I can do about it.” If the person who’s using my font doesn’t know the first thing about typography, it’s not my problem. I have to walk away from this.
Different fonts for different purposes
Interviewer: What is the difference in how you approach designing a face for content, even if it’s on a phone, say, versus for the user interface?
Bruno: In a sense, both of them require functionality. In the user interface, I would suggest that functionality is even more important. You can’t do any distracting design features. It’s all about legibility. It’s all about not recognizing the typeface.
You also know that it’s going to be at a fairly small size. You know that it may be set in different resolutions, as well. Again, it’s all about functionality. I would suggest that in most cases you would probably choose a sans-serif, putting you on a good road of meeting your requirements.
But also, you then think, “This is all about clarity. Therefore, it’s more of a humanist design, so I can open character shapes, make them more recognizable and less ambiguous.” You want to keep it a little bit condensed, because space is a premium for the user interface. You want to keep it on the more condensed side of regular, just so you can improve the letter count. All that kind of stuff.
You may want to do some testing as well. How quickly does something read? How easy is it to recognize the menu entries?
When you do it for content, then you have more options. You can consider a serif font, for example, if it’s for continuous reading such as on a tablet or similar.
For content, you have to consider that you have no control over where it’s going to be used. It could be in print as much as it could be on a Kindle or a mobile phone, everything in between. That affects the design, and accordingly you have to do a fair amount of testing in a broad environment. The testing starts right at the beginning.
Even if you do the initial concepts, just a handful of characters, you try to put it on as many devices as you can just to see how it looks, how it behaves, and then start making decisions there. The whole design process is actually more of a trial?and?error, if you want, until you really hone it down.
You do a bit of user testing, you get some people in who are not necessarily type designers, and say, “What do you think about that? How does it feel? Does it read?” That kind of thing.
The inevitable Helvetica question
Interviewer: The last area I wanted to ask you about, or actually David specifically wanted me to ask about. You’ve had some strong opinions about Helvetica.
Bruno: Yes. Oh dear, oh dear.
Interviewer: Besides Helvetica itself, and its relationship with Univers and other typefaces, what about the use or the nature of grotesque typefaces, or neo?grotesque typefaces, in general, and how people use them, as well as how to design them?
Bruno: I haven’t got a problem with grotesque fonts, I like them as well. They certainly have their use. Probably my biggest bugbear with Helvetica is – besides the fact that I don’t think it’s a particularly nice typeface, but that’s a personal opinion – my biggest bugbear with, generally, the grotesque usage is that people who use it don’t really understand type.
They perceive everything grotesque as modern, modernistic and new?world. It is a very limited view of what type can do for you. Maybe that has to do today with design education in general. People are not exposed to enough type and typography. Thirty and more years ago graphic designers as part of their education had to draw type in different styles thus gaining a deep understanding of the type at their disposal and how to apply it.
You developed an understanding of typefaces, what a slab serif can do for you, or a humanist sans. I believe the typographic understanding, today, that many graphic designers have is fairly narrow.
A lot of young designers are not exposed to enough type history… Type history’s maybe the wrong word. Not enough of what the different type styles are and how they can be used. You can use a Bodoni in a very contemporary way, but you need to understand how to use it, and how it used to be used.
Interviewer: Especially a Bodoni.
Bruno: Exactly. Then, of course, a factor is that today, people have to turn around work so enormously fast. A lot of people simply haven’t got the time to time to actually contemplate typography properly, and explore it properly.
So therefore the first step is go to the old favorites. “I know Helvetica, I know how it works, I’ll just use that,” or a grotesque like Univers, or something like that, because they feel safe with it. The biggest thing is this idea that only sans?serifs, particularly only grotesques, can be modern. It’s a very misguided view, and I think therein lies the problem.
Interviewer: If anything I would say that what’s most modern today is the humanist sans serif.
Bruno: Exactly. Huge area.
Interviewer: Used to be tiny. It’s a growth area.
Bruno: For the vast majority of my time at Dalton Maag I have been involved in the design of sans-serifs – quite often humanist – you’re right. Again, I think it’s the result of a very limited view of the typographic world, when often a serif font could do wonders for you.
I think it is a lack of understanding on how to use fonts. On the Mac, you’re designing on a Mac, you create your logo, you worry about the colors, you potentially have to worry about animations, and dynamic layouts, and webs. Then all of a sudden, “Oh, shit! I need to choose a typeface.” You simply didn’t think about it. “What do I have on my menu today?”
I also think that a lot of graphic designers are actually scared of the organic form. Have you noticed, when graphic designers draw type, they always draw everything on a grid? Type doesn’t do grids. Type is organic. Type, as I said earlier, is living. It’s about proportions, harmonies, how black and white and space and counter?spa
ce interact together.
I’ve seen a lot of graphic designers that can’t get their head around that. Because they feel they can’t control it. I think that’s also how they use the fonts. They feel, a grotesque typeface, they can control it.
They use a Franklin Gothic, already on the margins of the different, but it’s just like: “It’s a grotesque, I can cope with that,” but it looks a little bit antique. It’s got this feel of the 1910s, 1920s to it. It’s a little different than Helvetica, but not too different so that we don’t scare anyone away…
Interviewer: That’s always a factor with clients, too.
Bruno: Exactly.
***
Transcription by CastingWords; edited & corrected by the interviewer & the interviewee
This article was last modified on February 9, 2022
This article was first published on August 18, 2014
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