Ilya Ruderman: This is my second interview with you; the first was 20 years ago.
Erik van Blokland: Can we plan the next one in 20 years?
IR: I’m free in 2044, you?
EvB: Let me check my agenda!
IR: I’ve always been a huge fan of your illustrations. I know you’ve been very passionate about making small prints that are only sometimes related to typography.
EvB: Illustration, lettering, and the silly stuff I’ve been drawing, which is not commercial work, allow me to try out things and see where ideas come from and where they could go.
I think illustrating type also means that you can much more freely explore new ideas or ideas that other people came up with (because basically, you’re making typography, and within typography, it’s quite accepted). You don’t actually have to make a typeface. I think in terms of exploring ideas, Béziers
Bézier
A map created by Erik van Blokland
IR: One of your typefaces is a part of the MoMA architectural and design collection. How do museums acquire typefaces for their collections? Do museums still acquire fonts nowadays?
EvB: I don’t know. I think that was a one-off. I think it was a curator who wanted to make an exhibition focusing on an aspect of design culture that was maybe undervalued or not seen enough. MoMA has a great collection. They have a helicopter, industrial design, graphic design, and many other different things. And they said, let’s also do type. I think it needs to happen more often, not just with my type, but to show that type is appreciated. It’s a valid curatorial discipline. It’s necessary to do this.
Beowolf by Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland, part of MoMA architectural and design collection
IR: You once said that we shouldn’t underestimate not fucking up as an achievement. Where is the line between a typeface fucked up by a designer and one that’s not fucked up?
EvB: That was just about getting through the day without major incidents. Sometimes that can already be an achievement. But in terms of type. I think type is a process that involves many decisions, and it is usually quite slow. You just spend too much time on a typeface for it to be really terrible.
IR: In my understanding, for instance, when you’re working on a painting, it’s sometimes a question of where to stop and how to not overwork something. But in type design, it’s
EvB: There’s a whole set of steps in how we design type. When I look at older versions of a typeface I’m working on, I think: “Yeah, this attribute had to go,” and I understand why it had to go, but also, it was meaningful to have it in one particular version. Especially if you go from lettering to type, there are a lot
LTR Very Bauble by Erik van Blokland
Asterisk from LTR Very Bauble
IR: If we look at the technical aspect of font production, probably the most precise representation in vector happened in the age of Ikarus A type design and typography software that was introduced in 1975 and was widely used until the emergence of the PostScript format. The designer controlled the curves almost manually, and the tracing was perfect because it happened in huge formats.
EvB: Were the drawings good?
IR: Depending on the designer, of course. But would it be correct to say that since then we’re generally moving towards simplification of form? Or does that also depend?
EvB: I don’t think that’s a technological problem. Ikarus also had major issues. We can see why they made it that way, but we can also know that Bézier curves were a better solution for type.
In terms of drawing, I think the only Ikarus drawings that are still around were the ones drawn very precisely, and it’s easy to say: “Look, in Ikarus days, everything was drawn with much greater precision.”
I don’t know if the average drawing quality depends on the technology. You could say technology made it more accessible, so a lot more people are drawing, and by definition, a lot more people are on a learning curve of varying steepness. Not everybody has the patience to acquire the skills they want. Sometimes youthful energy and disregard for rules actually make nice things. Sometimes they don’t.
IR: As we mentioned Bézier curves, I have to ask: is there theoretically anything better for us in the future, in mathematics maybe?
EvB: Oh, spline math is well above my pay grade. There’s a thing by Raph Levien called Spiro, where he uses Euler spirals. It’s possible to implement those in a normal type design workflow, but it’s difficult to use, whereas Bézier curves, with all their flaws, are at least a method we understand.
It’s good to have such a method, but it is also good to see its limits. And I think if you really appreciate point structure, and realise that this is not only from a technical point of view, you have to ask questions. Would this be an interesting way to put this into points? What happens if I do this? That curiosity will get you new things.
Inconsolata by Raph Levien designed with Spiro
IR: You mentioned somewhere that it’s important for type designers to have an understanding of the trademark industry, to know how code works, and to have a technical curiosity. They also obviously have to be skilled in type and graphic design and have a good grasp of the history of typography. Isn’t that too much to ask for one person or even for one profession?
EvB: For the profession, as a community of people, it is not too much to ask. How well you do each of these things is entirely up to you, but the type designer cannot be isolated, so you’d better understand as much as you can. You will never understand everything, but I think if you’re curious and understand how the technology works, you may make better decisions. If you understand how the commercial side works, you may have a different conversation with the client. If you understand the history better, you may find nicer things and be inspired by something. So it’s not an absolute, but it’s definitely an invitation to be better than what you are.
LTR Limited Grotesque by Erik van Blokland
LTR Limited Grotesque by Erik van Blokland
IR: How do you decide whether to take a project solo or to collaborate?
EvB: That’s a very interesting one. Some projects are very dear to me. When you’re exploring something, and you desperately want to do it all by yourself. There are also more commercial projects where you need to make something that involves other people from the beginning. There’s a client, or you are invited to join a project that other people have started. You’re already in a conversation, so you already do not own everything, and the question is how can I contribute? What can I bring to this?
There’s something about ownership of the
But then there is a different question for the people you collaborate with because they’re handed a full plate of decisions that are already taken. That can be nice, but it should probably also not be the only thing that you do.
IR: I’m happy that we mentioned the Amsterdam project. It’s beautiful.
EvB: Thanks!
Lettering for the new UvA Library in Amsterdam. Layout: Erik van Blokland. Greek: Aleksandra Samulenkova with help from Irene Vlachou. Cyrillic: Anya Danilova. Arabic: Bahman Eslami. Hebrew and Yiddish: Daniel Grumer. Cuneiform: Erik van Blokland, with Prof. dr. J.J.M. Hazenbos
IR: You have your own newsletter. Everybody should sign up for it. Do you think newsletters are the new blogs? And what design newsletters do you read yourself?
EvB: Newsletters are ancient internet technology. I used to have one decades ago when it was the only way of building a community. Then it went away, and now it is back because in a sea of all the visual noise, signing up for a newsletter is a very clear statement.
A hundred subscribers to a newsletter might be more effective than 10,000 followers on Instagram in terms of how many people will actually look it up and interact with your work. This says more about Instagram than the newsletter, but I think so far it’s fun. And I don’t design them very well. For instance, Nick Sherman pays a lot of attention to the HEX Projects newsletter. And I think Commercial Type does a really good job because they get writers in, and they talk about something interesting in terms of fonts.
Excellent letters drawn in imaginative and novel styles from the Letterror newsletter
IR: You wrote a very impressive thread about contracts, advice for the younger generation, and distribution. In that thread, you mentioned that distribution isn’t something you need to give away your intellectual property for. What, in your opinion, is worth giving up your IP for?
EvB: A foundry that makes designers sign over their intellectual property just to have it distributed by that foundry is wrong. In many ways. But there’s no reason why the foundry needs that. Why or when would you give up your intellectual property? I think if you know from the beginning that a company will pay for it. It has to be part of the license talks before you sign any contracts, before you put a single point in the file. You have to explain: "I know you ask for this because it is a thing you heard about. However, selling IP is a very meaningful thing, but it’s also quite an expensive thing. The client probably wants the font for as long as the art director is there, which is two years? Three years? And they would be happy with an exclusive license for three years, and that’s fine.
IR: Have you ever sold the IP forever?
EvB: Yeah. But in those cases it was on the table from the beginning, and it was part of the pricing. Every step we took in that process, we knew that this was going to be theirs.
IR: Here is the teaching section of the questions. Our editor Adelina wanted us to memorize Gerrit Noordzij as we kind of live in his legacy. She wanted to ask you to describe what he was like as a professor. But I would extend it with maybe you were influenced by some other designers?
EvB: I have learned and continue to learn a lot from my peers. I also learned a lot from my older brother Petr. Maybe from the younger Erik Spiekermann who gave us a shot at a young FontShop.
PowerLift by Petr van Blokland
Noordzij as a teacher… I think that his contribution to type and typography is that he took something very
I think the stuff our students draw now is a lot wilder than what we ever dared to do. Later Noordzij proved to be broad minded when it came to odd things like RandomFonts. We were drawing type, and then it would stay on the page and wouldn’t go anywhere because there was no market for it. Although we knew somebody who had sold a font to Linotype. That was exciting, but it was not going to be for us. And then the Macintosh happened, laser printers, PostScript, Fontographer and a demand for new fonts for these machines. Some of us discovered that this was the stuff we knew how to do. And then we took the experience we had and started making fonts.
Noordzij’s cube built by Erik van Blokland
IR: Speaking about TypeMedia, what does your role as head of TypeMedia involve? How much time do you dedicate to it each week?
EvB: The role of the department head has changed a lot. Jan Willem Stas was before me. He started the department, hired all of us, gave us a lot of freedom to build the curriculum, got us involved with the first accreditations and making things more official, and then he retired, and I stepped in. Since then, there have been a lot of changes to the job. The organisation wants all the department heads to also
But the organisation also expects us to be educational managers. You need to know about accreditation processes, evaluation talks, and crisis management. Each of these things is necessary, but at some point, it is more than I can do. The academy claims more time. I meet with students, one staff department, another staff department. Each meeting is short, but at some point all my days are full. At the same time, I’m supposed to run my professional practice, and also make time and do my own research, coding or drawing, whatever it is. Sometimes you have to be fairly strict and say: “Yes, the building is on fire, but now I’m away, in my studio.”
Excerpt from Erik’s ongiong research on triangulated designspaces
IR: We might need to address one question about the selection TypeMedia has. How do you select students?
EvB: Very well, if you look at the results.
IR: I agree, but how do you manage to select people that perfectly?
EvB: You need to make peace with the fact that there are going to be disappointed people because they did not get selected. Most of them are just as motivated as those who did, just as interested, and just as curious. And they go on,
Bibubator by Zhenya Spizhoviy, 2024 TypeMedia graduate
Loza by Anna Khorash, 2022 TypeMedia graduate
Aerograph by Felix Bamforth, 2024 TypeMedia graduate
IR: Students have been asking me how different the course was 20 years ago. That’s funny because the assignments and the practice have changed a lot, but the core things remain the same. And it already looks like a tradition.
EvB: Yeah, but things do evolve. Tradition might imply that we do things because this is the way we do them and we never critically review any of it. In that sense tradition can be risky because it means you’re comfortable with something without questioning it. I think the programme has changed and grown. It grows steadily because insight and reflection takes time. And I think we have a good programme, so therefore we have to do this responsibly and carefully.
IR: I’m sure there is a lot of growing inside each assignment.
Vander, Ilya’s TypeMedia graduation project, 2005
EvB: I think that one thing will not
The second thing is that if you draw, you respond to the things that you see. The hundreds of muscles in your hand, all the rods and cones of your eyes, do get involved and will change your initial plan. The thing you started drawing will turn into a different thing. But the different thing is so much nicer than what you had initially in your mind. That’s a good outcome too.
It’s all about physical drawing. Vector drawing is very clean, but it creates a false sense of precision. So you get a drawing that is very sharp, it is doing what it needs to do (except that every point is in the wrong place). Whereas a drawing with a pen or pencil has
But it’s a very tender transition from drawing to vectors. It might feel like boarding an airplane. Now everything is modern and clean. You sit down. And now, for the rest of the flight, it’s going to be digital. But you need to go back, print it out, paint on top of it, cut things up, do the analogue thing again, go back to digital, print it out, go back again.
There is a RoboFont extension Frederik Berlaen, Ryan Bugden and I worked on for our students, called Crayon. It exports an image of the current glyph to iPad. And then can draw things in, for instance, Procreate and Crayon pastes it back in the editor background, with perfect position and scale. It is just the bitmap; it does not edit the outlines. I drew most of Principia using it. All of this sharp stuff was basically coming out of the hand, even though it existed as a digital thing.
Principia by Erik van Blokland
IR: Okay, I should try it! Can you share what major updates we should expect from UFO 4 Unified Font Object (UFO) is a source file format for digital fonts?
EvB: I think discussions on UFO4 were already quite a few years ago. But, speculating, now that we are fully committed to variable fonts, perhaps it would be interesting to see if we can integrate that more. So a variable font approach to kerning might be a place for improvement. I’m not saying that it’s a problem that needs to be fixed, but I would say it’s probably a field to look at if we are going to look at UFO 4.
IR: Variable kerning?
EvB: To have more masters next to each other, to have a single place for groups…
IR: Do you use AI to help with coding? Or did you try it?
EvB: I’ve tried. It’s good for certain applications that happen frequently, like building a login screen for instance, but with something that’s very specific, AI is not good at all. To kern a full family, with a couple of axes, a couple of dozen masters, there’s not enough data for these models to train on. Feeding a model more typefaces or more masters is only going to add noise. The model is not going to understand type this way.
Such models might be useful if you have finished a typeface. You can then train a model on all of the weights and then make it go through all possible combinations, as a final proof.
IR: Sounds useful.
EvB: AI-generated images are only a very generic interpretation of the stuff the models were trained on, which is probably fine if you want to have scantily dressed people in armour in front of dragons because it doesn’t have to be specific; But type is super specific, and a detail that may appear only once might have great significance elsewhere. These things have almost no statistical meaning, and it’s a connection that these models cannot make.
The machine learning technology itself is not new, the mathematics are old. The only new thing is the willingness of investors to buy or provide centralised computation. I think generative AI is an attack on the liberal arts. It claims possession of work that has been done, and it tells people that whatever they do is going to be insignificant in the light of the thing that a computer can do in a couple of clicks. AI tries to take away the possibility to make something new or to be curious or to even have the godforsaken notion that maybe you want to have your own idea. And I think that is scary.
IR: It’s kind of manipulating our expectations from ourselves.
EvB: There is value in messing stuff up at first and slowly getting better. You become familiar with the pace of how fast you get better, and you need to make peace with that. You can sit next to your friend, who is so much faster, and become sick with envy, or you can say: “Well, I know people like this exist, and I admire them, but I also appreciate my own speed.” I’m sure there’s a metaphor for running in there somewhere. Most of the people who run marathons are not winning marathons. They learned how to pace, how to continue, and how to enjoy the process.
LTR Federal by Erik van Blokland
My father was an industrial designer, and he worked for a factory that made wooden toys. But it was a small factory, so they had a particular number of drills, a particular number of saws, and a particular type of wood. My dad spoke of one of the directors of the factory who would never ask: “Where is the product? How are we going to sell this?” He was just looking at the progress. And at the end of the year, they would always have a new collection.
But despite the slow-moving process, despite the history that can be stifling, and all of the stuff that happened before, you still have to somehow find motivation in small things and make new things. Sometimes you make something that’s
IR: Prioritising is difficult. Now I just wanted to ask if there is something that I didn’t ask but you would like to address. I don’t know if you want to talk about the M. corporation thing…
EvB: No. Not at all. I think something that is interesting for small, independent foundries, or independently operating designers who sell their type, is that there is value in collaboration. I think we have more in common than we compete. The great competition is M., which is set on destroying our market. If all of the independent type designers stop working, M. will not mind.
Another competitor is free fonts. This is G. I know that it’s also a source of income for many colleagues and friends, but free fonts also affect the kind of business you can do afterward. If you make something and G. pays you for it and they publish it, that’s nice. But then the font is free forever, and you have to compete with it. That can be difficult. Is your new design really 100 euros better than the free one?
It’s difficult that our generation of type designers has been put into a situation where we have to choose: between working for a world-destroying billionaire or the other world-destroying billionaire? The tiny files that we make, the relatively safe work that
LTR Neither Confirm Nor Deny by Erik van Blokland
LTR Neither Confirm Nor Deny by Erik van Blokland
IR: Do you think we are losing the market?
EvB: I think the days when creating a website to sell fonts is enough are gone. Maybe your experience is different, but I’ve seen these days.
There is a book, Chokepoint Capitalism. It doesn’t describe the font world, but while I was reading it, I was thinking: “I know one more example.” But, as far as I can tell M. is now obliged to pay $156 million in interest every year just to service their loan. So your company, financially, is more sound than M. My company is financially more sound than M. We are not in crazy debt.
When M. has to draw a custom design, it will take them as many hours as it would an independent designer.. And if you price your work properly and you talk to the right clients, you can say: “I can build this whole family with all of the writing systems and all of the support and all of the things that you need. Me and my associates can draw and engineer this for you. And it will cost less than what you would have to pay M. in a year.” We have to cultivate connections to the art directors and in-house design departments. We have to let them know the custom type is just better design and inevitably more affordable to their clients.
In the last two years, we’ve seen these big, high-profile identity projects with custom typefaces drawn by young colleagues. There is a financial motivation, but I think the indirect effect of that will be that design will become more diverse. Giving room to the voices of younger people from different parts of the world. This is something I can contribute to.
IR: It’s a good motivational speech for us to collaborate more and be a little bit more united.
EvB: It’s not the only way to collaborate. In a small community it is also super nice to share your tools like people on RoboFont Discord do. In some ways, the people there are competitors. They’re all making shiny fonts. And they all want to fish for the same attention in the same pond. But there’s a working economy. I know that if I share my tools, it will be useful to me because others will be more likely to share theirs with me. And even though we’re not looking at each other’s fonts, we can help each other whenever possible.