Behind the Scenes

Many know Cyrus Highsmith as one of today’s most original type designers. He combines an energetic, illustrative approach with enthusiasm for typographic communication, leading to a diverse library of original designs. He has created exquisite scripts, industrial workhorse sans, and dynamic text serifs — all with equal ease and distinction. Highsmith considers himself a draftsman above all, and his work demonstrates a lifelong passion for drawing. In this video, he invites us into the world of his sketchbooks.

It’s been three years since we printed our Third Edition One-Line Type Specimens booklet and it was about time we did something similar again. So we made a supplement, which presents the very latest additions to Font Bureau’s retail library and also includes Webtype and Reading Edge web fonts prepared for the rigors of the web.

We went on press a couple of weeks ago, to the fine folks at Kirkwood Printing.

Meet Robert Brown, who could shepherd any print job even with his eyes closed.

And our stellar pressmen, Steve Toomajanian and Jim McLaughlin.

Harry with a ...

Every year for many years, probably ever since Font Bureau started, we’ve had offsites. They started out as a once-a-year weekend gathering to some non-Boston locale to determine which fonts we’d be releasing in the coming year. We still gather once a year, usually now to Martha’s Vineyard, but do more than just look at fonts. We still do look at a lot of fonts, though.

Several weeks ago, David Jonathan Ross and I spoke on a panel at the cherished Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. Following a screening of the documentary Helvetica, we talked about our experiences as typeface designers. The event was coordinated by GLIMPSE journal, a captivating, beautifully designed publication that examines the art and science of seeing.

We were privileged to share the stage with Dr. Matthew Schneps, Director of the Lab for Visual Learning at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who has been investigating the strengths that people with dyslexia have in processing visual information. His research about dyslexic readers being ...

Earlier this year, Fortune magazine launched a new redesign featuring a new logo drawn by Cyrus Highsmith.

Just recently, Fortune’s creative director John Korpics came back to us to commission a special version of that logo to add some depth to the cover of Fortune’s annual investment issue. He was looking to capture some of the complexity and dimensionality of old banknotes, but without straying from the logo’s strong, contemporary look.

Cyrus had started some 3D sketches while designing the original logo, so I had a great place to jump off from. That meant I was left ...

Draw a letter, any letter! And so you did. We thank all of you at TypeCon who stepped up to our exhibit table in Los Angeles and participated in our letter-drawing collage.

It’s rare for Font Bureau to have an intern, but for three weeks we were delighted to have Louise Paradis intern with us in our Boston studio. She hails from Montreal, worked in Los Angeles for a time, and is now a graduate student in art direction at ECAL, Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (University of Art and Design Lausanne) in Switzerland. I had a chance to talk with her before she left.

MLM: What led you to Font Bureau?
LP: Well, one project for a class of mine was by my professor François Rappo. He required us ...

It was that familiar time of year again: the first weekend in May, when we all descend on Martha’s Vineyard for yet another offsite meeting. This year’s gathering included more than twenty of us — Font Bureau designers and staff, consultants, and type board.

There are two reasons why we have offsites — to socialize and to work. Since we’ve become a distributed work environment, it’s a chance for us to reconnect face-to-face with co-workers and to keep connected as a company. We review what we did in the past year, strategize where we’re going, and calibrate ...

My friend Joanna sent me an email a couple of weeks ago saying, “I heard a news blip this morning that I thought was sort of fascinating.” She went on to quote the news item about the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s decision to switch to Century Gothic as the default for all printed campus e-mails.

“You should design a ‘green’ font,” she urged.

I began to respond with a dissertation about how there are plenty of so-called “green” fonts already, but it got me thinking.

As some news articles have noted, most fonts that are light in weight or ...

At the heart of calligraphy is the stroke that comes from the pen, the brush or whatever tool you choose to dip into the black ink and pull across the white page. Type design can of course be looked at through the lens of the calligraphic stroke. And it often is.

But what interests me is what makes typography and calligraphy different. In movable type, each character has a certain amount of letter space, and a fixed amount of line space, that belongs to it. In foundry type this is becomes the body, it’s a physical thing. In my ...