In 1942, Doyald Young’s father owned Hi-way Auto Parts, an auto supply and towing service in a small south Texas town near Houston. Since Young could draw well even at the tender age of 15, his father reasoned his son could also paint the business name on the side of his company tow trucks. “He bought me some shiny black auto body paint and a square-tipped rig­ger brush, and I went to work,” recalls Young. “Hi-way Auto Parts was along name to put on one line, and I decided I could make it bigger if I lettered it on a curve. I painted the phone number on one line at the bottom in a bigger size.” This was Doyald Young’s first lettering assignment.

His second assignment came four years later, when Young worked for W. T. Grant, a five-and-dime store in downtown Los Angeles. Part of his job was to letter the store’s show cards, which were mainly product descriptions and price tags. “I wasn’t good at it,” he says, “but it gave me a healthy respect for the capabilities of the square-tipped brush.” Between these two gigs, Young worked as a hotel bellman, an usher at Radio City Music Hall and as a brakeman for the Santa Fe Railroad. He had left home before completing 10th grade. Once settled in Los Angeles, he realized he needed more education and a trade, if he was to make a steady living. Graphic design and the lettering arts seemed a natural choice.

While enrolled in an evening commercial art course at the Frank Wiggins Trade School ($11 per semester), Young met Joe Gibbey, who quickly became his first mentor. “Gibbey made me use a brush to ink my letters, but first I had to develop the letters on a single piece of paper,” says Young. “Through a process of erasing and redrawing letters, I learned about form, spacing, proportion and weight. Gibbey taught me how to see.” Young also credits the great lettering artist Mortimer Leach at Art Center College of Design with helping him polish his skills. To these, Young adds Mary Sheridan, an educator at Art Center and a client of Young’s for over 25 years; Henry Dreyfuss, the celebrated industrial designer; and the inimitable Hermann Zapf. All exerted profound influence on his career.

MEMORABLE MENTORS
Many years and thousands of design projects later, Doyald Young is recognized as one of the modern masters of the lettering arts. He is gentle and unassuming—almost self-effacing—yet his lettering and type design are clearly the work of a confident and uncompromising master craftsman.

A CAREER LONG & FULL
Since the mid-1950s, Young has designed logotypes, corporate alphabets and typefaces for clients as diverse as California Institute of Technology, The Music Center of Los Angeles County, Mattel, Max Factor and The Prudential Insurance Company of America. He has also created logotypes for more than a dozen hotels, and his entertainment credits include lettering for Liza Minnelli and Frank Sinatra TV specials, Disney’s 30th Anni­versary Celebration, Harry Connick Jr., k.d. lang, Bette Midler, Prince, the Grand Reopening of Carnegie Hall, the Grammy Awards, the annual Academy of Country Music Awards, the Golden Globe Awards and the Tony Awards.

An octogenarian, Young still takes on lettering assignments, writes and teaches lettering and logo design at Art Center. He has authored five books: Logotypes & Letterforms, Fonts & Logos, The Art of the Letter (published by SMART Papers), The Ligature on Ligatures, and, most recently, Dangerous Curves: Mastering logotype design. All are “must-reads” for any student or lover of the lettering arts.

TIME-HONORED TOOLS
In today’s design world of bits, bytes, high-res monitors and design software, Young still begins each lettering assignment in the same manner he learned from Joe Gibbey—with an HB pencil on trac­ing paper. “Depending on how long the logo is, I usually make a rough sketch about 1½- to 2-inches wide, sometimes smaller,” says Young. “I draw the letters in skeleton form to see how the word looks. Often, I’ll explore different character shapes and propor­tions and try to make the logo a distinctive shape.” While draw­ing letters with a pencil first—rather than constructing them on screen—may seem old school to many young designers, the process allows Young to quickly try many solutions to the design problem. “A rough sketch of a logo takes only a minute or so to do,” he says, although he cautions that in-depth knowledge of different type styles is critical to the process.

DRAW. DRAW AGAIN.
To create a logotype for Hotel East 21 in Tokyo, Young followed his typical design process. He submitted more than a hundred proposals to the design firm responsible for the project. Noticing that the hotel’s interior designs referenced the Biedermeier style, Young used letters based on the Walbaum typeface, drawn at the dawn of the Biedermeier period, in several of his proposals.

From the hundreds of preliminary pencil renderings, Young developed black-and-white designs that were presented to the design firm, and eventually to hotel executives. When the selec­tion was narrowed, color presentations were developed for typical applications that the final logo would see. The final logotype is an elegant cartouche of serif, sans serif and script letterforms.

A NEW CENTAUR
For a very different kind of project, Young interpreted Bruce Rogers’ Centaur typeface. After designing the seal for California Institute of Technology, Young was asked to draw the mast­head/banner for its quarterly magazine, named simply Quarterly. Young’s solution was a more flowing and stately version of the Centaur capitals. The letters were drawn narrower than Rogers’ design and with decidedly more vitality. The tail of the Q is sep­arated from the base and gracefully flows beneath the U and part of the A. The tail of the first R is also livelier than in Centaur, and the second iteration flows elegantly into the left serif of the L, creating a charming ligature. The banner’s concluding Y echoes curves in the other letters and provides a demure flourish at the end of the word.

QUICK SKETCHES
Not all of Young’s logotypes, however, are stately works of art. Some pay tribute to his rough and ready roots as a showcard letterer. “Breezy” was drawn for a cologne label. In stark contrast to the complicated and protracted process of creating the logo for Hotel East 21, Young drew only one preliminary sketch for the Breezy logo. He used a soft, blunted pencil on vellum. The quick sketch was then carefully reproduced as final art to retain its cha­risma and spontaneity.

RARE FONTS
Although he has drawn hundreds of custom typefaces for clients, Young has made just four of his designs available to the gen­eral public: three distinctive scripts—Eclat, Home Run Script and Young Baroque—and one elegant sans serif, Young Finesse. Unfortunately, some less-than-scrupulous font providers cloned two of his designs, and this has made Young reluctant to make more typefaces available.

Young’s approach to typeface design also begins with a pencil and tracing paper. Instead of experimenting with the letters of a logo, however, for typefaces he draws letter combinations—the round forms and those with straight sides, then a few combinations of these shapes. He uses Egypt and typography as test words to edit character shapes and proportions.

“I work at various sizes,” says Young, “depending on my mood. Sometimes rather small, about 3/8ths of an inch on the x-height. If a letter particularly pleases me, I might draw it more carefully at a larger size and then reduce it to a size that I think will be ideal. I have no set rules to determine cap height; I try lots of different sizes in very rough sketches.”

THREE SCRIPTS & A SANS
Young’s first commercial typeface, Eclat, was drawn for Letraset. Colin Brignall, who was then type director of the “dry-transfer” let­tering manufacturer, provided guidance on finalizing the design. Eclat is a typeface full of vigor and zest. Although its roots are in showcard lettering, this is a full-bodied and up-to-the-moment design with a robust x-height and tight, even letterspacing. Young took great care to adjust stroke and connector weights so that letters are clear and copy remains uncluttered when set into words.

Young Baroque followed Eclat and was also drawn for Letraset. Where Eclat is full-figured and slightly sassy, with a tip of the hat to showcard lettering, Young Baroque is elegant, stately and bows to 18th-century English roundhand lettering. It is slightly narrower than traditional roundhands, has less modulation in stroke weight and has more elaborate capitals. Like Bickham Script and Zapfino, Young Baroque is a drop-to-your-knees gorgeous design that evokes an awed “Wow!” when it is set well.

Home Run Script also has roots in English roundhand lettering, but this interpretation makes a much more forceful statement. Young challenged himself to draw a bold, condensed design with a tight fit while still maintaining a high level of character legibility. This called for some compromises—like the tall lowercase t—but the end result is at once commanding, easy on the eyes … and great fun.

Young Finesse began life as hand lettering for the dust jacket for Young’s book Fonts & Logos. “The book is big and demanded a big title,” Young writes about the design. “But I didn’t want the letters to be overpowering, because ultimately the book is about the subtlety and nuance of typography.” What emerged was a graceful, svelte, yet full-bodied sans. A very slight incline and a suite of alternate swash capitals mark the italic.

Although Young adeptly captures the essence of a letter with just a few strokes of the pencil, this belies his underlying disci­pline. As Young puts it, “Achieving even a modicum of precision and control requires discipline, observation, perseverance, prac­tice, repetition and highly critical self-analysis.” It is fitting to offer a coda to Young’s words: His accomplishments are big and require a large canvas, yet his work is ultimately about the power, grace and beauty of subtlety, nuance … and “dangerous curves.”