THE ART OF THE LETTER, by Doyald Young, published by Smart Papers, 2003. ART DIRECTORS: Tim Needham, Tom Kleimeyer; PHOTOGRAPHER: Greg Kuchik, KUCHIK PHOTOGRAPHY.

SB: Do you get a lot of inspiration from your students?

DY: Do I get ideas from students? No. Many students are content after a few sketches, even if they don’t adequately address the problem. I have to prod them to do more, to get all of those old ideas out of the way, so they start thinking about the problem in a different manner, working at it until something fresher emerges; sometimes I suggest directions for appropriateness.

SB: Tell me about your own education. I know you took quite the circuitous route to graphic design.

DY: Well, I didn’t finish the 10th grade. I ran away from home (in Orange, Texas) on June 12, 1942, when I was 15. I got a job as a bellhop at The Lamar Hotel in Houston, then at New Orleans’ Roosevelt Hotel. I was an usher at Radio City Music Hall and a shipping clerk in San Francisco. I went back to Texas, helped my dad out in the wrecking yard for a while, and was rejected by the Army because of my asthma. I worked as a freelance sketch artist for Jack Huey in Houston, who gave me some pencils and a sketchpad and some change. I would take a bus to the department stores and sketch merchandise, because I could draw accurately. I’d bring the sketches back to him and he would do the actual drawing and I would ink it, then he would put a wash on it.

My Dad suggested that I go to New Mexico for a dryer climate. I worked in a dairy loading milk trucks. I finally got a job working for Fred Harvey as a newsstand clerk in Ashfork, Ariz., a tiny town on Route 66. Then I got a job with the Santa Fe Railroad as a freight brakeman. When the war ended I went to Chicago. With no education, good jobs were hard to come by. I worked at a golf club factory, and then finally came to Los Angeles and realized that I had to go to school. I enrolled in evening classes at Frank Wiggins Trade School—it’s now Los Angeles Trade Technical Jr. College. I took a course in commercial art and saw that a lot of the guys in the classroom were getting jobs doing tech illustration. I wanted money so I switched to tech illustration.

I didn’t finish the course, but I got a job inking performance curves for Lockheed in the aerodynamics department. I liked it, but then I decided it was a dead end, so I went back to Frank Wiggins and later got a job designing a magazine called Labor Guide. I did the layouts here in Los Angeles, and it was printed in Washington, D.C. The office closed because the boss had a heart attack, so I decided to go to school again.

ECLAT was used in the title design for BEAUTY SHOP. DESIGN: Nina Saxon.

I did a couple of semesters at Los Angeles City College. In 1953, I enrolled at Art Center. I took four semesters from Mortimer Leach. He asked me if I would like to teach, so I began teaching in the fall of 1955. The rest of my education is derived from my innate curiosity bequeathed to me by my parents. I read a lot, too. I think that reading makes me a better designer.

SB: Who are your mentors?

DY: Joe Gibby, my teacher at Trade Tech, package designer Mary Sheridan, the great industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, and Hermann Zapf, a hero—all remarkable people. Much of what I believe about letterforms comes from Mort Leach at Art Center. But the education that you’re given on the job is irreplaceable. The first three months seem almost equivalent to four years in school, because the pace is so fast. The demands are so immediate.

SB: Has the perception of the job of graphic designer changed?

DY: I think so. The technology of the computer has made it possible for the graphic designer to do many tasks that before were left to specialists: photography and photo retouching, for instance. The computer enables the designer to bypass film and go directly to plate. The designer is now a stripping department. Steve Jobs, in a recent address at Harvard University, took credit for beautiful digital typography. If you own a computer, in essence you are a typographer also. I can produce typography on my Mac that previously required a workplace, a generous investment, plus an ample workforce. The designer is often expected to write copy, and sometimes to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear—that is, dress up an inferior product.

SB: How do you feel about that?

DY: That’s a personal choice, and one that I’ve not had to face. The need for money has many mitigating circumstances, whether it is clothes for the children, medical expenses, or the unforeseen catastrophe that can turn a world topsy-turvy. When business is slow, the landlord and the telephone company must be satisfied, and an unsavory project can be viewed in a different light. My dad, a simple, uneducated wrecking-yard man who held high standards for himself (and his children) often told me, “Every man has his price, and I don’t want to know mine.”

SB: When do you lower your fee, or accept the interesting and challenging low-budget job?

DY: Generally, I think that designers are less interested in money than in doing what they do, because we like doing it. We see it as a challenge. We see it as something to achieve, whereas making money is a hard-nosed, daily necessity. Clients are always whittling our price and we oftentimes accept less money just to do a job that we really want to do. Lucky is the designer who gets the great job and is well paid.

Designer Steve Hartman from CREATIVILLE used ECLAT for this promotional poster. Hartman refined the script to make it more elegant.

SB: You mentioned a Twyla Thorpe quote about inspiration.

DY: “Don’t wait for inspiration. Get to work.” I think that makes a lot of sense. One sketch often suggests something else, so one thing leads to another. Either you start refining it with variation, or it takes you in different directions. There are days when ideas don’t come—a condition that I do not fully understand. On those days I go to other resources. I look at type books. I have a wonderful encyclopedia of typefaces. I keep a morgue of things that I like, and I think it’s why graphic designers acquire a library, because occasionally you need something that’s a catalyst to spark an idea. But to be inspired—I don’t think in those terms. It’s just a problem that I’ve got to solve.

Sometimes a client doesn’t like what you’ve done or would like to see different directions. Then you’ve got to go back and that’s a whole other ball game about ideas. Sometimes you don’t like what the client wants you to do, so how do you solve that? Maybe inspiration comes there. I think creativity and inspiration all stem from genetics and education. What we learn becomes part of our mental process, part of our data bank. Sometimes we store a lot of that very deeply. I think we start drawing from our own experience (the mystics say that out of nothing comes nothing).

SB: What are you working on now that you’re most excited about?

DY: Well, I have said that I’m through designing fonts, but I do have a font called Young Finesse. Its genesis was on the cover of Fonts & Logos and it takes a deep, deep bow to Optima. I have three fonts of that—a light, a regular, and a light italic. I have been working on them off and on since 1993. A couple weeks ago, Linotype hosted a birthday gala for Hermann Zapf in Germany. Hermann talked about his great age and said, “Here I am at age 87 and people want me to stop working. I don’t want to stop working to garden and write letters. I still have more ideas.” He urged the audience to continue doing what they’re doing.

Later, he asked me about a book that I was planning and had started to work on. I told him that I had put it aside and he said “Well, I’d get back to it!” So, at 79, a scant 8 months from 80, I have the book in front of me, and three fonts that still need a lot of work. As for excitement, it is dampened by the tedious and enormous amounts of work and time involved. It takes a lot of time for me to fit a font and kern it properly to get it right. I can’t seem to devote all my energies at it for a long slot of time, so I tend to stretch things out. I look at it, put it away for a while, look at it again, and change my mind again. Books are different; they are never finished. So that’s what I am doing now.

SB: If you had one piece of advice to give to students or to a young designer, what would it be?

DY: Decide who you are, decide what you want to do, and then do it, because it is surely possible. When I was 15, I never dreamed that I would write three books.