Type design tends to be a self-taught skill—one that a formal education can augment, but not one that requires it. Nathanael Bonnell, Erik Faulhaber, Hannes von Döhren and César Puertas are four young designers who have created some exceptional typefaces—and each designer will tell you that formal education in typeface design was not an essential ingredient in the success of his work.

Nathanael Bonnell is only in his second year of college, and he is not studying to be a type designer. “Although I am not studying typeface design,” he says, “I’m sure my font making will influence my eventual choice of concentration. I may go for a concentration in linguistics.” Bonnell spent his childhood in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has been drawing alphabets for as long has he can remember. “My mom has old sheets of paper on which I had drawn the alphabet and then put serifs on all the letters … including the O,” he observes. “As I got older, the letters I made began to look better and better.” Bonnell eventually found a trial version of a crude font-making software and started creating digital type. “I’m entirely self-trained,” he says. “What I know about type design I’ve derived from carefully examining every font I see, noticing what makes letters look good and gradually learning the conventions of the craft.”

Even though he studied graphic communication and has long been interested in typeface design, Erik Faulhaber will be the first to tell you it was his apprenticeship at Linotype that honed his type design skills. Not only did he have the good fortune to work closely with famed type designer Adrian Frutiger, but “Linotype let me work on commercial fonts from the beginning,” he recalls. “I learned about character design and the importance of creating proper figure/ground relationships, as well as what it takes to make an industrial-strength font.”

Hannes von Döhren says typefaces were his teachers. “I didn’t take formal classes in typeface design or have a typeface design professor,” he says. “My teacher was—and still is—the typefaces themselves. I am always looking at typefaces and lettering; you can learn so much by carefully observing well-drawn characters. When I started designing my first text typeface, I did a lot of research. I studied hundreds of text typefaces and compared them to each other. I wanted to understand exactly how they were built.” Von Döhren did study graphic design, and his first job was in a large advertising agency. But in his free time he made fonts. “I began to create fonts just for fun. None of them was good enough to sell, yet neither were they all bad enough to be left to rot in a drawer, so I distributed them as free fonts.”

A native of Colombia, César Puertas says, “I’ve liked drawing letters since I was in design school—which was a good thing, because I didn’t own a computer or have access to digital fonts. Later on, when I knew that my love for type was real, I went to a graphic design conference where I could attend a lecture given by Argentinean type designer Rubén Fontana. That sealed my typographic fate.” Puertas drew several typefaces, then decided to return to school to study typeface design at Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (The Royal Academy of Art) in The Hague, Holland. When asked why he chose to return to school, his response is, “I went back because I approach typeface design in a very intuitive manner and believed I would benefit from a grounding in academic knowledge. I think both are important in creating successful typefaces.”

DRIVING FORCES
Puertas’ desire to learn more about typeface design is what drives him to create new alphabets. “It’s a never-ending process,” he says. “Every new alphabet I draw becomes a lesson in typeface design. I am always learning.” Faulhaber says he simply cannot help himself when it comes to typeface design. “I have this need to inundate the world with new typefaces.” Von Döhren finds his inspiration in the world around him. “I always look at typefaces when I am walking around or when I’m handed printed material,” he says. “When I see beautiful letters and words, ideas come into my mind. They may be the concept for a complete typeface design—or just a small element for one letter. I usually start by playing with the idea in sketches. Sometimes it goes no further than that. Other times, before I know it, I’m totally involved in my next big type project.” So far, Bonnell’s fonts have grown out of idle sketches. “My designs,” he says, “generally have their beginnings in doodles I make when I should be doing something else—like taking lecture notes. Once in a while, something leaves my pencil just right, and I refine it in my sketchbook over the course of days, weeks or months.”

BONNELL: BEYOND SKETCHING
Two fonts that have graduated from Bonnell’s sketchbook are Solvejg and Cyril. The former is a calligraphic stressed sans that could be seen as a send-up to Optima, while the latter, Cyril, is a soft serif design that Bonnell says was inspired by Cyrillic lettering. “I saw a Cyrillic typeface one day and thought, ‘That looks really cool.’ So I took the dark styling of that design and began to draw a new one.”

His first commercial typeface is Newt Serif, soon to be released by Veer. It is a four-weight family that evokes a myth-enshrouded time with fairies and wizards roaming the earth. There is a sense of mystery and fantasy in the design’s basic shapes. Serifs are soft and irregular, curves are sensual, and stroke weights show the influence of a calligraphic pen. The Newt Serif italic also displays a strong script influence. A number of the characters could easily have found their way into the design from brush-drawn script lettering. The combined effect is that of a typeface drawn by the light of mystic moons. One can easily imagine the title on a J.R.R. Tolkien book cover rendered in Newt script.

FAULHABER: TYPE FOR ALL MEDIA
Where Newt Serif is organic and sensual, Faulhaber’s Generis type family is a cerebral system of industrial-strength designs. The idea came to Faulhaber while he was traveling in the U.S. “I found the inspiration for my first typeface in a shopping mall,” he recalls. “Seeing typefaces chaotically mixed together motivated me to create a system of typeface designs with interrelated forms. I wanted to create a system of typefaces that would work well for everything from newspapers and magazines to signage and posters—even on the computer screen.” The first design in the series, a space-saving sans serif modeled on early 20th-century American gothic designs, was followed by a serif typeface with classical overtones, a straightforward slab serif design and, finally, a suite of faces called Generis Simple. This suite is a distillation of the other designs into the most basic character shapes. Even though they represent divergent typographic styles, the Generis designs were developed to work in harmony. Character weights and proportions are the same in all the designs.

Faulhaber is currently working on his second typeface family, Aeonis. His inspiration for this design, he says, is industrial designer Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s famous Düren lamp. “Designed in 1952,” says Faulhaber, “it is typical of Wagenfeld’s work, where round and rectangular forms are in counterpoint to each other. I’ve tried to incorporate this balance of simple angular and curved shapes in Aeonis.” The result will be a large typeface family of seven weights, with each weight in regular, condensed and extended proportions.

VON DÖHREN: FUN WITH FONTS
Von Döhren’s typefaces tend to be whimsical and cheerful. His first typeface design, Quench, is marked by a charming juxtaposition of inside and outside forms. Character counters are nearly straight and are defined by right angles, while the outside curves are smooth and rounded.

Snoogle would be just another overstuffed, Bauhaus-esque typeface were it not for the extensive set of ligatures and dingbats von Döhren drew to augment the design. A “smart” Open-Type font, Snoogle has ligatures that can be inserted automatically as copy is set. Although Snoogle is a sans serif design, it takes on a script-like quality when the ligatures are used.

Von Döhren collaborated with Livius Dietzel on the Chino typeface family. It is a suite of three designs: a very light and a very heavy weight for display work, and a collection of text fonts for longer blocks of copy. As with von Döhren’s other typefaces, the display versions of Chino are quite fanciful—it’s almost a mono-line vertical script. The text designs, however, have a more conservative demeanor.

Opal is the most serious of von Döhren’s designs to date. A serif design with a hint of Eastern European influence, Opal is a small family consisting of a roman, an italic and a bold. In addition, von Döhren drew a connecting script version for those special occasions when a simple italic is not enough.

PUERTAS: ALPHABETS WITH CHARACTER
Urbana is typical of Puertas’ typefaces. It has personality without being quirky. He uses the contrast of soft curves and sharp angles to differentiate the characters and add sparkle to the design. Vertical stroke tops have a soft right and an angled left edge—a nuance that almost goes unnoticed. This contrasting design sensibility is also applied to character counters. Some of the inside curves are rounded while others are nearly right angles. And there is an underlying skeleton of brush-drawn script shapes in many of the characters, making Urbana both lively and inviting.

Puertas’ Obliqua is a humanistic sans serif design in the tradition of faces like Frutiger and Slate. Puertas wanted to draw a face “that combined the proportions of humanist, foundational handwriting with the industrial features of a traditional gothic design,” he says. “My goal was to create a legible and personable typeface that could be used for setting both running text and display headlines.” The Obliqua family includes a cursive italic specifically designed to save space and to complement the roman weights.

PRACTICE WITHOUT PEDAGOGY
Typeface design is a craft in which visual acuity, a love of letter-forms and design talent are combined in a unique and remarkable manner. A formal education may be beneficial in refining the skill, but this quartet of designers proves that it is not an absolute prerequisite.

FIND THESE FONTS:
Newt Serif will be available from Veer in 2009.
Generis can be purchased at Linotype.com.
Aeonis will be available from Linotype in 2009.
Quench can be purchased from Linotype.
Snoogle and Opal will be released by Linotype in 2009.
Chino will be available from International Typeface Corporation in 2009.
Urbana can be purchased at MyFonts.com.
Obliqua will be released by International Typeface Corporation in 2009.