Remix a demo poster using OH No Type Co. typefaces, and a library full of Adobe Stock assets.

When it comes to type design, James Edmondson’s wildly imaginative work lends an exuberant, often psychedelic flair to everything from gig posters and editorial design, to packaging and apparel. We had a conversation about his motivation and his influences, where he’s been and how he sees the future, and the unique evolution of his typefaces.

Psych Out: A fresh take on a classic genre.

After graduating from Type & Media in 2014, Edmondson started developing his concept for OH no Type Co, his one-man foundry. Graphic design was coming out of its Mad Men era; the prevailing styles were steeped in mid-century modern and the 1960s, with clean, crisp, and precise typography.

“I thought, well, probably the next thing that will come into popularity is the 1970s,” he says, “because the pendulum always swings the other way.” Having a great love for its typography, fashion, and music, Edmondson wanted to explore this era creatively.

That moment coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love. Edmondson was living in San Francisco, three blocks away from Golden Gate Park, right next to the Haight. All kinds of events were happening: an exhibition at the nearby de Young museum, Grateful Dead cover bands in the park, and so on. It struck Edmondson how many of the posters and flyers advertising those events weren’t fun or inspiring; to him, the designs didn’t feel authentic or interesting.

“Most of the time, it was just a lazy interpretation, aping the original style from that period,” he says. “It was as if they commissioned designers who had no real connection to the art movement and asked them, ‘Can you try a Wes Wilson or Victor Moscoso thing here?’”

Then, he came across the poster for an exhibition called Hippie Modernism at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Edmondson was struck by how it brought a different lens to the seventies style. The design wasn’t merely copying the old, but reimagining it, elevating the poster to a higher level.

Edmondson believes there’s a lesson there. “There’s a way to hybridize those signature styles with what else is going on now, to turn them into something new,” he says.

This kind of update is exactly what’s happening now with the Psych Out design trend from Adobe Stock. More than referencing the psychedelic 1970s and Art Nouveau, Psych Out combines the old and new to create funky, loud, and escapist universes.

“That was something I was keeping in mind when I started building my type library,” says Edmondson. Because well-trodden genres like the geometric sans and the grotesque were already taken care of so well, he prioritized exploring what, in his opinion, were underrepresented styles. He set out to create personable typefaces that he wanted to see out in the world and — as a designer walking through a city — would photograph. This approach led him to draw some of the most expressive contemporary psychedelic faces out there today, daring designs that were still firmly rooted in sound typographic practice, like Cheee, Beastly, Eckmannpsych, or Ohno Blazeface.

The “snowball theory” of type design.

When I mention that I still notice his personality shining through in more conventional typefaces like Degular or Obviously, Edmondson counters that by saying, if that happens, it must be accidental. He says he doesn’t approach type design with a set agenda.

“My favorite thing about type design is that, as you start a project and it becomes its own entity, it’s just like pushing a snowball downhill. The typeface turns into the thing it wants to be,” he says.

Edmondson prefers to be a facilitator rather than the obsessive architect trying to control every detail. “It’s simply more interesting when it evolves naturally. There comes a moment — or a series of moments — where the core idea crystallizes into something beautifully succinct and distilled. I love it when you can describe a typeface — or a project or a song or anything — in a singular sentence or with a singular thought, and it’s very clear what the thing is and what it’s trying to do. Sometimes that comes at the beginning of the project; other times it comes after a lot of sketching and iterating.”

Hobeaux Rococeaux is a good example of a typeface where, as soon as Edmondson nailed the concept, the design didn’t really change much from the sketches to the finished product — it all came down to the production work of drawing and digitizing it. And then there are typefaces still in the works that have something about them, but he doesn’t really have that singular thought distilled yet, so he keeps working on them. “These are tricky projects because I don’t know exactly what sort of story I’m trying to tell with them yet”, Edmondson says. “They just have to marinate and I have to sit with them for a while longer.”