Fine lines in type design – with Thomas Jockin

09/27/24 • 35 min

Everything we read is coloured by its typeface. And humans read a lot, so font choices probably affect more people than any other field of design.

In our daily lives, we rarely appreciate how much work goes into good type decisions, and how much energy we spend accommodating bad ones.

Every day, by choice or otherwise, we read messages, posters, menus, documents, web pages, and, of course, books. Not only did someone design their layout, but someone designed the fonts in that layout. Every single letter was painstakingly designed. And every letterform has a personality: it’s trying to make you feel something, just like Comic Sans feels like silliness, and Times New Roman feels like school.

In this episode, Arthur talks to type designer Thomas Jockin. Thomas is the founder of TypeThursday, a worldwide community of type designers, and a lecturer in design and philosophy. They discuss how type decisions are made, how type designers work on new and existing typefaces, how fonts can make it easier for people to understand what they read, and what technological advances mean for type design, for reading, and for society.

Links from the show:

The End of Print: the Graphic Design of David Carson by Lewis Blackwell
Lexend
Readex Pro on Google Fonts
Quicksand on Google Fonts
TypeThursday
Exploring Hangul with Aaron Bell
Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices, edited by Laura S. Scherling
Electric Book Works

Everything we read is coloured by its typeface. And humans read a lot, so font choices probably affect more people than any other field of design.

In our daily lives, we rarely appreciate how much work goes into good type decisions, and how much energy we spend accommodating bad ones.

Links from the show:

The End of Print: the Graphic Design of David Carson by Lewis Blackwell
Lexend
Readex Pro on Google Fonts
Quicksand on Google Fonts
TypeThursday
Exploring Hangul with Aaron Bell
Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices, edited by Laura S. Scherling
Electric Book Works

Previous Episode

Risk, reward, and reality for indie bookstores – with Griffin Shea

There is no place more universally loved than a good bookstore. For its owner, achieving that is not as simple as it seems.

The best book shops are much more than books on shelves and a coffee bar. Behind the tranquillity, its tiny team is buzzing for twelve hours a day, liaising with publishers, distributors, authors, literacy projects, landlords, even local government, trying to build a community of people who’ll buy books and help others to buy books.

No one exemplifies this energy and broad-mindedness better than Griffin Shea, our guest in this episode. Born in Louisiana, USA, and once a journalist with AFP, Griffin now runs Bridge Books in Johannesburg, and the incredible African Book Trust, a non-profit that gives African books to libraries and schools across South Africa. He and Arthur talk about sourcing and pricing books, working across languages, connecting booksellers, the highs and lows of running a business in the inner city, and judging South Africa’s most prestigious non-fiction award.

Links from the show:

Bridge Books
The Golden Rhino by Griffin Shea
Bridge Books Underground Booksellers Walking Tour
The African Book Trust on forgood
Griffin Shea and Ekow Duker in the Sunday Times, on chairing the judging panels at the 2022 Sunday Times Literary Award
‘“Star Wars” locations that actually exist’ by Griffin Shea for CNN, annotated by Mark Hamill
Electric Book Works

Next Episode

The fine-press printer’s art of not forgetting – with Graham Moss

At the heart of everything book-like is a printer, standing at a hand-powered press, turning paper into pages.

When you hold a book that’s been typeset in metal, printed by hand on fine paper, bound and sewn with board and cloth, you realise with a visceral whoosh just how much a book can be a work of art.

In this episode, Arthur speaks with Graham Moss, the founder of Incline Press in Oldham, near Manchester in England. Incline Press works with poets and artists to make limited-edition books with hand-set, metal type on vintage machines. This year, Graham was awarded the prestigious Cobden Sanderson Award from the Society of Bookbinders for his work in hand printing and publishing.

Graham’s deep knowledge and rich story-telling is a joy to learn from, and reminds us that, no matter the technology we use, book-making has always been about people, love, and dedication.

Links from the show:

How Books Are Made - Fine lines in type design – with Thomas Jockin

Transcript

Arthur Attwell00:00:03.439

Hello, and welcome to How Books Are Made, a podcast about the art and science of making books. I'm Arthur Attwell.

Arthur Attwell00:00:23.015

My dad once pointed something out to me about Beethoven. He said that, as you listen, each note is totally unexpected. And yet once you've heard it, it seems like the only note that could possibly have come next. And this is just like great typography. Even if it surpris