Episode 73: On Typeface

I'm working on a typeface and I want to talk about it with you.

Like this? Join us on Substack and subscribe to get the podcast and all my other work delivered straight to your inbox.

Follow me on Instagram (@jamesvictore) for all my big ideas and inspiration!

Transcript

Confessing The Typeface Dream

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I am drawing a typeface. Or font. I don't know what you call it. And it's something that I would like to say has been in the works. But in reality, it's just been on my mind for a very long time. And as possibly a therapy session, I'd like to share the process with you. So, DJ Badoni hit the canned music. So I'd like to share this process of creating a font with you. But I haven't really prepared as much as I usually do with this episode. So bear with me as I kind of uh freestyle and let my brains spill out. If something comes on comes to me, I will I will touch on it or I won't. And this brings on many aspects of me and my work, and my my thought process, my practices, my emotional foundation or lack thereof. I consider myself a designer and an artist, but I'm not a painter. I don't draw pictures. I wish I could paint soothing bucalic landscapes, but I paint in words. Typography and letters are my medium. They're my tools. Typography and hopefully matched with brilliant, pithy, poetic words and phrases, are my ouvre, my MO. But a pal of mine approached me in the fall and said he'd love to help me to get a typeface or a font out into the world. He said, You draw the letters and I'll do the back end. And that's generally what I need to get off my butt is someone to jump in and lend a hand, or at least be there for support. Listen, I'm a self-starter, I get shit done, and I work hard. But sometimes I need to hold somebody's hand while I'm doing all that. Maybe I should get an emotional support dog. Let me put that on my list. This font thing has been suggested many times. There are a number of reasons why I haven't started this before. And the best way to describe it is this. Perhaps you've heard it. It says, This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine. This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine. Right, it goes on like that for a while. But there are two reasons why we don't let our light shine. And I've never thought about that before, or at least as it applying to myself. And one is because it's too easy. It's too easy to let our light shine because we poo-poo our gifts. We're too close to our talent. It's too usual for us. The work comes easy. And maybe even folks have said in the past, hey, you're really good at matching colors, or I really like those drawings that you do. But we're bad judges of our own work. We're bad judges of our skills and our good looks and our sexy bodies and our powerful opinions. So for me, I look at my lettering, I think, who would want this? It's just me. It's crappy, I never learned to do it correctly. Even after years of validation and proof, it's still just my handwriting. Which, you know, I get it. Obviously, it's not. It's even performance sometimes. The second reason we don't let our light shine is that it's too hard. Because once we recognize that gift, then we have to share it. We have to do something. And that scares the bejesus out of us. The fact that I don't know what the back end meant. I'll take care of the back end. Um, yeah, sure. Or how to start to monetize it, or how to even begin. All these things that are second and third and fourth steps stopped me from taking the first step. Now, being someone who draws in words or paints in words, I don't really have heroes. You know, I don't really look up to a lot of people who make interesting letters or fonts. Or at least the way I see that I want to make letters or fonts. There are masters of calligraphy, but I don't really do that. I remember taking a calligraphy class when I was like, I don't know, what was I, 14. And I thought, god damn, this is hard. There was a there was a in there was a level of perfection in it that I was like, no, no, no, can't do that. And there are people who make real fonts. But that stuff leaves me perfectly flat. It just looks like math to me. And most of it has to happen on the computer, so I'm completely uh out of my depth there. My typographic style has grown over the years. It's an active process and it's always changing. Occasionally I'll see um an S in some signage, or a really great G somewhere. Or notice how Picasso draws his P or his lowercase S. And I'll I'll collect that. I'll try to put that in my uh in my quiver. So my lettering is a collage collected from old postcards or letters or signages. I have a few letters that were written to me by one of my uh early mentors, the father of the modern poster. His name is Henrik Tomashevsky. And they're they're beautiful letters. And they're they're what I call um the his uh uh shaky old man lettering. Really lovely stuff. And uh the shaky old man thing is something that I kind of aspire to, which I think I will probably get if I hang a lot hang around long enough. As a lettering artist, there are thankfully not a lot of sources to pull from. There are not a lot of other artists doing what I want or making the kind of letters that I want. There are certainly schools of lettering, like classes that you can take that you can that teach you how to make like grocery signs that are good for the grocery store, you know, really kind of quality lettering with a flat brush. I'm not interested in that. Then there's this other school that I completely abhor. I was at a local art store, or one that passes as an art store where I live. And they have gift items, and they have signs rendered in some cursive font that you would hang in your house or on your front door that have just dreadful expressions like bless this mess, or friendliness sold here, or some misogynistic expression about your wife, or hidden resentment drawn in a framed circle. Angry expressions about your wife or husband's age or habits. You know the kind. These seem to be done all by um in by one school or one type of lettering. You know, the same kind of crap you see on Hallmark cards. Someone with no real skill whatsoever trying to make something perfect. Typography that looks like all other typography. I mean, this is the stuff that we should really be using AI for, right? Not what human beings do. No, what I look at and what I aspire to comes from painting. I look at the work of Franz Klein. Klein was an American modernist who created these beautiful large-scale black and white paintings. Just exquisite. I see them as as as as calligraphy or cru or or typography. Franz Klein talked about space. He says Vermeer created paintings that had space in them. You felt that it was a room that you could walk into. And he said, I want to make spaces that you could fly a spaceship through. I really love that about him. He was a real futurist, but I look at his shapes and his brush strokes, and I see calligraphy in them, I see letters in them. The same for the painter Sai Tuamble. His smudges and smears are exquisite. And his typography is just so delightful. I look at those as my beacon of perfection. So my friend Massimo was the one who contacted me and suggested a font. Massimo's podcast is called The Angry Designer. You should go see what his he and his pal Sean are doing. It's uh angrydesigner.com. So you'll have to thank him for this Magnus Magnum opus when it comes out. So now I had an urging and I had support. But that was almost five months ago. One of the things that stopped me all this time was I couldn't wrap my head around the process. I could draw letters, but what was needed to assemble it into an actual usable font? I knew that the lettering, a font had to have some basic rules. And of course, I hate rules. There are rules about the cap size, rules about ascenders and descenders, the rules about looking like a family. And when I first started making drawings, I had a huge sheet of paper and my ink and brush, and I just started making letters. And I admit they were lovely, but they were scattered all over the sheet. And how the hell am I gonna scan each of these? And do I cut them out and scan them individually or tape them together like a type sampler? They weren't even uniform in size. So how was I gonna pull a team together? These thinkings and these things slowed me down because I couldn't figure out the technical end. This was the damn back end thing that confused me. Plus, check this out, sometimes my left hand is just not on. There's no flow, it's not working. You know, I'll sit down to to draw something, I'm like, br, no, that's not it. That's not it. I mean, but I mean like really not it, like not even close. The mojo isn't there. So I have to walk away, go do something else, or go for a walk, or sleep. Right? But the other times my handwriting is spot on. It's just quite frankly, beautiful. Those are usually the wrong times. That's when I'm making a shopping list. And when I write the word eggs, vinegar, sponges, chicken, sometimes I look at those letters and I'm like, oh, that's so goddamn good. That's awesome. Now, what do I do with that? How can I get paid for that? Can I just blow that up? Put some put some fluorescent orange behind it and call it a print? Another thing that stopped me from doing the work was that I had to sit. Literally, I had to sit and make time to do the work. And this is what I've learned through um being a writer. I've I know that writing isn't hard. It's the sitting that's hard. And I like to talk about that all the time, because I know it's difficult for all of us. So you have to be able to sit and actually create the work for, you know, half an hour, an hour, two hours, whatever you can, and not judge, but just make and let whatever comes from it come. And I'm terrible at sitting. I'm super fidgety. I want to keep getting up. Hoop, I need some more coffee. Hoop, I need some water. I find these distractions. But I had a window, and my kids were away, and the rest of my work was taken care of. So I had two like two days in a row of an open window, and I figured a few things out. So in this short window of pooping this out, I started by researching grids for letter for lettering, right? Something that would give me some uh some hand rails to hold on to. And I find an I found online some lettering grid of just three lines. Super super easy for me. It was like a cap height, lowercase height, um, and a baseline. And I printed it out. And I printed it out to the size that I like to work in. Sometimes I like to work small, sometimes I will work larger, so I just printed out like something that felt good. Right now, you're thinking, oh man, I wish James Victory could be my mentor, my guru. Hell, I wish he was my coach. Well, you can make that happen. Go to your workisagift.com. There's a questionnaire that will probably help you out, but it'll also give you access to a free call. So let's talk. Let's free you from overwhelm and creative frustration. Let's build your business and help you get paid to do what you love. Again, go to your workoft.com. Let's talk. The other problem was the paper, because previously I was drawing on huge sheets of drawing paper. But I couldn't figure out how to do the family from that. So I needed some kind of tracing paper that holds ink and scans well. And a lot of tracing paper just kind of shrivels up when you put a wet medium like Japanese ink on it. So the paper I ended up with is called um lupo, L-U-P-O, and it's the translucent part of lupo. It's more like I think plastic than paper. But I could see through it and follow my grid without having to draw the grid each time. And then figure, you know, and then I'd like have to have to erase it. And I was that was also another another obstacle for me. And you're probably thinking, James, get a pad or use a tablet. And I quite frankly think that is a completely boring answer. To me, doing this electronically, or any of my work on a pad or tablet, is an act of surrender. It's like asking me to give up on my humanity, to not trust ink and a real Sumi brush, and not get my hands dirty. Why the fuck would I want to do that? And further, then you can just go in and alter each letter, right? That'd be that would drive me crazy if I could do that. You're j just judging and comparing your work as you go along. And losing anything authentic and random and chance and beautiful. Fuck that. So with this paper, I had a limited number of sheets. I had maybe two and a half pads sitting around. And because I I I have to order it because no one near me sells it. So I decided to use the paper and do one letter on one sheet of paper, lowercase and uppercase on one sheet of eight and a half by eleven paper. And give myself that restriction. Again, I wanted it restricted or else I would just spend all day doing the letter A. And I have to start in the lower right hand corner because I'm left-handed. And that was the only way where my hand would not drag through the letters I'd already written and make a mess of everything, which happens often in my work. So I started with the letter A and started with two lines of lowercase A's, probably eight or nine in total. And here comes the good part. I then just had to accept them. I had to accept that there was something good there, that we could use one or two. I could spend all the paper drawing lowercase A's, but every effort, after the first few, is me judging, judging my work, comparing it to the last, and searching for perfection. And all of these are a complete waste of my time. I'm a recovering perfectionist. Even though my work looks like it has no control or has an abstract expressionist quality to it, I can obsess if I allow myself. I could have filled four sheets of paper with lowercase A's and then stressed over which ones worked better. I could have made fifty over lowercase A's and then worried about all the noodly details. But I remove that process because I'm a bad judge of my work. I'm sure you're a bad judge of it as well. We are all poor judges of our work. We're poor judges of our sense of humor. We're poor judges of our bodies, of our sexuality. We're poor judges of our self-worth even. One more thing that delayed this process was my hatred of scanning. I realized I was gonna have to like scan all these letters in, and I just didn't want to spend the time to do that. And I will do I was doing anything to try to figure out how not to do it. But I came up with a a process where in the evenings I'd watch a movie and then just kind of constantly revolve sheets through the scanner and send them off to Massimo. And even after I had done all these sheets with letters, I basically told Massimo, you decide. I don't care what the letters look like. I don't care if they look like what they're supposed to look like. Individually, the lowercase R might not really look like an R until you put it in a word. I've gotten a few comments before from clients about particular letters that I like to draw. My uppercase G seems to be a sticking point for many. They'll contact me and say, you know, it's hard to read the G in that word good. And my response is like, wait, wa wait a minute. What letter? Did you say the G? As if it could possibly be anything else other than a G. It's quite frankly not my concern that it may take a moment or a double read or a double take to read the letters that I write. Immediacy is not a target of mine. I want to invite curiosity. I want the reader to participate in the process with me. This is what I think makes good design and good art. So I like to skate to the edge of legibility and maybe more concerned with beauty and the abstraction of these letters than what they actually look like. And if I wanted to communicate perfectly, I would just use Helvetica and throw all these letters in the trash. So now I've done the first alphabet with a sumi brush. And I'm very excited about it. And I contacted Massimo and said there are at least four other tools that I use regularly that I could make an alphabet with. There could be a bold or thin, or maybe the name of the tool, like Victori Sumi, or Victori Paint Pen, or Victori Uniball. And once I start to see a family of these existing letters, I'm excited about making a few swash capitals or alternate letters, maybe even ligatures, if I can figure that out. How these fonts will be accepted or used or seen, I can't care about that. I'm not in control of that. But I'll tell you this. My cold sweat nightmare is that I'm driving down the street someday and I see that Panera has a new logo based on my typeface. God in heaven, just kill me now.