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I am a type designer as well and I thought maybe I would, every once in a while, explain where certain fonts came from
In 1994, I was doing some design work for a series of aerospace instructional manuals. The client kept asking for a font face that was professional but hand-drawn and relaxed for the “notes” that were laid across many of the maps and technical documents.
I came up with a simple kind of architectural typeface that was pretty nondescript and they, at first, were happy. As the project progressed, though, they seemed less happy with it.
I asked the client, once, while we were sitting there alone, to be really honest with me. She didn’t love the typeface but didn’t have any reason to dislike it. So I just asked her to pretend that there were no bad reasons- no stupid reasons and just tell me.
So, she told me that it looked like the person who was writing the notes was boring and unattractive. We both had a good laugh about that and she wasn’t wrong. The architectural type was clean and easy to read but it did feel like I wouldn’t LIKE the person who was writing. Like he was the kind of guy who never put salt on anything.
So we sat there and came up with a kid of person who was writing. He’s male. He’s sort of nerdy about things like maps and history, aviation, and old-school tech. But he’s also a bit of a romantic and he loves dating, writing love notes, being a little effulgent about his feelings. His name was Roman and he had a head for dates. He could always tell his partner what they were doing, together, on this date last year. He liked Italian food and tended to write small, enjoying the feel or staying on the lines while expressing some of the letters a bit whimsically. He smiled easily and was a hugger.
So I went home and started drawing this font up. This is how I imagined Roman would write. But it wasn’t working, at first. It was too thin. And the thinness of the characters Made roman feel tinny and untrustworthy. I didn’t believe him when he wrote.
I ran over to the paper source and bought about 10 different porous, uncoated papers. I liked the kind of sloppy pen I had but the paper wasn’t really taking it. I finally landed on this mostly linen paper that was SUPER unforgiving. It wanted to suck up all the in. So I had to draw it larger so that it wouldn’t blot completely. She liked it and we joked a lot, for the rest of the job, about how Roman really worked hard to get this.
Two years later, I cleaned it up and added additional characters. I released it through T-26 and Monotype as a 1 face family. I really couldn’t force myself to do a bold version because I liked the weight of it so much.
About 4 years after that, I had moved to Boston. I was walking through a bookstore and, during that period of time, this font had sort of exploded for use as book covers. I remember noting that about 30 books in the store were using it on the cover and all I could think, for a second, was that I was happy that Roman was doing so well as a writer.
Good on you, Roman.
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Photo credits:
Featured photo: Shutterstock
Inset: The author