You may have seen the series of interviews we’re doing with typeface designers over at the AQ blog. We just released the fourth today, and we probably have another two or three in us before we retire (in the Jay-Z sense) the series.

O-bon gave me a few moments to reflect on what I’ve learned about type designers, the state of type, and interviewing. Incomplete and in no particular order:

• With output of just a few fonts a year, it may not seem like it, but type designers are very busy people. In addition to actually designing fonts, there’s research, customer support, gathering of specimens, website maintenance, customizations for special clients, teaching, conferences, type history consulting for movies, newspaper articles, not to mention all the usual office b.s. we all deal with.
• Like great artists of any kind, ability/interest in talking about their work is not always proportional to the quality of the work itself.
• The best typeface designers generally love and know type history, but don’t let it stop them from searching for entirely new forms, made by manipulating just a handful of variables within fairly-tight constraints of acceptability.
• Asking type designers to pick their favorite letter is just barely easier and smarter than asking a composer to pick their favorite chord, but the non-compliant answers reveal as much about type design as the compliant ones.
• The technology of type design is still changing. The adoption of OpenType and new time-saving software like Superpolator seems to be resulting in bigger, more complete font families, with more weights, better multilingual support, small caps, ligatures, and alternates. But chatting last week, Craig pointed out the possibilities that programming may open up for type in the coming years. The movement he described vaguely resembling what’s happened with software synthesizers. The re-introduction of chaos into clean forms in a much subtler way than the grunge fonts of the 90s, in persuit of the tasty imperfections of past technology to “warm” up the cold consistency of high-definition screens and the flatness of offset.
• Type designers are as susceptible to fashion or suspicion of fashion as any other creator. As far as I can tell, grunge fonts are equivelent to hypercolor t-shirts, and Dutch-inspired humanist sans serifs are foie gras.