I almost always start with words.

Before a colour, before an image, before a grid, there’s a word or a letter on the page, waiting to see what it might become. A name. A line. A single character that seems to hold more than its share.

That habit started in the late eighties, in the pages of The Face and Arena. I didn’t know what I was looking at yet. I only knew that Neville Brody had made type do something I didn’t think it was allowed to do. Then came Emigre, and Rick Valicenti, and the sense that letters could be loud, strange and personal and still mean exactly what they said.

So my education went forwards and backwards at once. Forward into whatever came next. Backward to Sister Corita Kent, who turned scripture and advertising slogans into joy, and to Alexey Brodovitch, who gave a magazine page room to breathe. Later, to Paula Scher putting type at architectural scale and Matt Willey drawing headlines as if each one deserved its own alphabet. And to the handful of type designers in South America, Europe and the Arabic-speaking world who are still drawing letters by hand and eye, keeping the craft alive while the rest of us scroll past it.

Somewhere along the way, my love of letterforms ran into my love of language. They’ve been tangled ever since.

Letters hold more than they say

Typography is a form of poetry. A letterform is shorthand for a much bigger idea. The letter A began as an ox’s head. A word set in the right face carries a tone of voice before anyone reads it.

Type moves forward with technology, from metal to film to code. Yet it stays intrinsically human. It’s ancient and symbolic, and it’s baked so deep into our psyche that we barely notice it. It is permanent and ephemeral. Abstract and concrete. Sometimes in the same word.

What the work has in common

The pieces here span a career. Some were client commissions. Some were personal projects. Some were experiments that never had to answer to anyone.

I’ve never settled on one style, and I don’t think I should. Looking back, though, there are tendencies. One is a pull toward geometry: letters built from lines, mazes and modules, where the reader has to work a little to decode the word and is rewarded when they do. The other is a maximalist streak: type that fills the frame, overlaps the image, crowds itself and makes noise on purpose.

Underneath both is wordplay. WE turns into ME. A band name becomes a maze. A year becomes a building. Type at its best rewards a second look.

Why it still matters

Type design is underappreciated. Most people only notice it when it’s wrong. But the crafted letterform is one of the places where graphic design stays human and expressive, especially now, when so much of what we see is generated, templated and smoothed into sameness.

A drawn letter has a hand behind it. You can feel the decisions: where a curve tightens, where a stroke ends, what was left out.

Letters in space

More and more, I’m interested in what happens when letters leave the page. On a wall, a building or a sign at the end of a long corridor, type stops being something you only read. It becomes something you move past, around and through. Scale changes everything. A letter the size of a doorway carries a different kind of meaning.

That’s where much of my work is heading now: brand in three dimensions, with typography as part of the architecture of a place.

These are some of the letters that have kept me company over the years.

Just my type.|

‹›