It’s easy to think about type as being cold and technical, just another element of craft. I don’t. Type is sensual and tactile. It’s not just nitty-gritty letterspacing. If you get it, you can feel it. When I’m working I feel the type, not just metaphorically, but tactilely at the end of my fingers when it clicks into place or is just plain wrong. I think of type as a sensual object that you have to treat very well, and you only want the best. It should be elegant, not something you’d pick up at a roadhouse bar.

Recently, we needed to make a presentation to a large group— multiple divisions of a corporation. For the most part, everyone was receptive and supportive, except one woman who looked disturbingly like the Little House on the Prairie school marm. We said we wanted one of the pieces to be sexy—we were referring to type issues—and she became visibly upset. She was honestly offnded by this. I told our contact that I wasn’t looking for hard-core porn—I wanted the type to be visceral and beautiful, not clinical. I learned my lesson; typography and sexiness don’t go together for most civilians.

Noreen [Morioka] and I went back and forth about what should be on the STEP cover that would drag you across the room if you saw it on the newsstand. I have to give credit here to our art director, Volker Dürre: His input led us to this solution. We just finished the redesign of Health and we have all of our studies for their cover. We went to newsstands and took pictures, and then in Photoshop we placed the Health cover in different places on the shelf—in front, in back, to the left, to the right. It really helped us determine what elements go where to call attention to the cover.

For STEP, we began with another version—a full-fledged specimen sheet that called out the erogenous zones, emotional zones, and intellectual zones [above, left]. It ended up being much too complex to work on the cover. A cover has to be like a poster. So we went back and thought, “How do we make this feel like a great poster? A giant letterform will be perfect! It will draw people in from across the room to take a closer look” [above, right].

The S is set in Firmin Didot—it’s 18th century French. Lou Dorfsman redrew it for the CBS building signage, resulting in the most beautiful elevator panels on the planet. It’s such a beautiful font—it has crispy edges, and is so refined. And maybe because it’s French it makes it just that much sexier.