Type designer Felix Braden delves into the details.

Just how does one become a type designer? For German designer Felix Braden, who grew up with an architect father who practiced calligraphy on the side, the gravitation towards typography took root at a young age. A year after graduating from the Trier University of Applied Sciences, Braden started his own foundry, Floodfonts, as a supplement to his graphic design practice. “Flood was planned as a free font foundry at first, as I never thought that I could earn money with type design,” Braden admits, though he’s now been producing commercial fonts and operating Floodfonts for 20 years.

While Braden designs digital fonts, his methods often begin in analog, with a series of hand drawn sketches. Sometimes, a design will involve more manual forms of art making — as with Pulpo Rust, a typeface that he made by digitizing handmade wood prints. “Designing typefaces is very meditative, in a way,” Braden says. “It’s really important for me to design something that’s useful, because the creative reward is having another designer create something beautiful with your typefaces.” As typefaces continue to evolve along with technology, designers must also take into account a range of contexts and considerations, from legibility and accessibility to a range of devices and screen sizes they might be used on. In every case, there is plenty of character and nuance involved. Braden’s latest Adobe Fonts release, Tuna, is a serif typeface optimized for on-screen reading. “The message of a text is very much determined by the font you use,” says Braden. “When we read text, we consciously perceive the information, but we subconsciously perceive the design of the letter. That’s the strength of typography; it’s a really direct connection to the brain.” —Aileen Kwun

Sarah Hyndman gets sensual with type.
 

Understanding just how large a part type plays in our lives can be overwhelming, which is why designer and cultural expert Sarah Hyndman works so diligently to make the culture of type accessible for all. “If I am going to explain type to somebody, I actually want to show them,” she says. For the past eight years, Hyndman has devoted her time to creating interactive, hands-on events and authoring books — including Why Fonts Matter, How to Draw Type and Influence People, and a range of kids’ titles — that explore how typography subconsciously informs our decision-making and our moods. “Every letter we see, whether it is on food packaging or on a book cover, has different layers of information that our brains then filter and match to certain feelings based on personal experiences and circumstances.”

Backed by research and collaborations with psychologists, Hyndman’s workshops bring tangible, hands-on experiences to convey abstract concepts to a wider range of people, designer or not, in a memorable and tangible way that connects with the five senses. In one such workshop, Hyndman asks participants to pick one of a selection of coffee packages with different typefaces, then she can reverse-engineer the reasoning behind their selections. Participants are apt to walk away learning more about type, as well as themselves. For example, if you take your coffee habit very seriously, you may be more attracted to a bold font with curves and serif and close letter spacing, but if you’re having a bad day and are in search of an instant pick-me-up, you may be attracted to a minimalist and clean sans serif font. —Ariela Kozin

Kookie Santos shares her love of lettering.
 

Like any other art form, type design is a mode of expression. And for graphic designers and illustrators, there’s arguably no purer form of expression than creating custom and hand-drawn lettering. Where traditional typefaces prioritize legibility and clarity, seamlessly blending into the background of our lives at times, custom lettering demands attention — asking us to look first before reading.

For Filipino designer Kookie Santos, creating hand-drawn type lends itself to spontaneity and the permission to mess with the rules. “It allows for mistakes,” she says. “But it’s also worth adding that I have that confidence to make those mistakes, because I have enough of a grasp of the rules to know when and how to break them.” Santos, who is currently a partner and creative director at Serious Studio, is transitioning into a freelance practice, and often creates custom lettering that is technicolor, curvaceous, spontaneous, and bursting with an effervescence that perfectly matches her bubbly personality.

“What fascinates me about custom lettering is that, on average, people say 7,000 words a day,” Santos says. “Custom type, for me, is what allows people to stop and pay attention, even for just a moment.” Currently, Santos finds creative excitement in exploring the boundaries of legibility, experimenting with forms by bloating her letters and combining them together in an expressive, illustrative mashup. “It’s amazing that there are only 26 letters in the [Latin] alphabet,” she says, “and yet, the possibilities are endless.” —A. Kozin

TienMin Liao translates type design across languages.
 

TienMin Liao grew up in Taipei and studied design and typography at Cooper Union in New York, where she began her career in branding. But it was on-the-job agency experience that led her to specialize in logotype development, typeface design, and multi-script typography and localization. “People would ask me about Chinese fonts, and initially, I didn’t know much about that, because I studied Latin typefaces in school,” Liao explains, but with her combined cultural fluency and design knowledge of Chinese character design and typography, she saw an opportunity to help bridge designs across languages through font pairing and custom logotypes. Working primarily with Latin, Chinese, and Kanji (Chinese characters adopted into Japanese writing systems), Liao works as a visual translator of letterforms, bridging the nuance and character of type design across widely varying typographic systems for clients including Siegel+Gale, Pentagram, Wieden+Kennedy, Kontrapunkt, and more.

Liao began her celebrated Bilingual Lettering project and Instagram account, @tienmin_liao, in 2016, as a way of sharing her findings and documenting her ongoing work in this rarefied field. The challenge of translating lettering and custom logotypes from Latin to non-Western scripts is particularly complex, due to intrinsic differences in structure and weight distribution across various characters. While Latin script is alphabetic, for example, Chinese is logographic, composed of pictorial strokes that combine to a character set of thousands. “As I came up with more pairs, I started to figure out and think, ‘There is a method to doing this,’ and started to write about it to help show people how to do this,” says Liao, who has quickly risen as an expert on the topic. “It is less about creating or finding something that’s visually identical, and more about matching the context.” Even for non-native speakers or readers of either language, the impact of consistent typography across Liao’s multi-script pairings is clear the second you land on her feed. Letterforms convey distinct personality and meaning — even (or especially) when you encounter a written language that’s wholly different from your own. —A. Kwun