Even the most typographically challenged can rattle off a string of typeface designers’ names. These, however, are almost always the “rock stars” or Zen masters of type. Yet there are currently hundreds—maybe thousands—of people designing type and building new fonts. Many are young … and a few of these are already masters of their craft. Christina Schultz, Laura Meseguer and Alejandro Paul are three such.

YOUNG MASTERS

Christina Schultz is a Berlin-based designer whose work, in addition to type, focuses on iconography and interface design. She recently received her master’s degree at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London, where she was able to combine her favorite disciplines of type and iconography into a thesis titled Alphabet Invaders—How New Technology Has Transformed the Way We Communicate. Part of the thesis is a font that uses its own letters to create icons and integrate them into text copy. Called PicLig, the design won honors in the Type Directors Club TDC 2 2006 competition for a type system and is currently available from FontShop.

Laura Meseguer is a freelance designer specializing in editorial and identity design. She also lets type and typography sneak into just about every aspect of her work. She was the cofounder of the Cosmic design studio in Barcelona, in addition to being a member of the Type-Ø-Tones typographical group. Meseguer’s early work tended toward organic hand lettering and alternative-design typefaces. Then she attended the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. The mix of refined Dutch sensibility and Meseguer’s Spanish fire has lent a profound mixture of gravity and energy to Meseguer’s work … and is enabling her to produce some remarkable typeface designs. Rumba, a typeface family that she designed during her postgraduate work at the Royal Academy of Arts, has also been awarded a TDC Certificate of Excellence.

Alejandro Paul’s early typefaces were inspired by the hand-painted signs and calligraphy of his native Argentina. Paul’s work, however, was not noticed outside of his country until he began to revive a series of 1950s hand-lettered scripts for Veer. In 2001 Paul founded Sudtipos, a design studio specializing in typographic solutions. This has enabled him to take on projects that are typographical challenges—and to reject those that aren’t. According to Paul, “From then on it was like the German philosopher said—I stared too long into the abyss, so it stared right back into me. And here I am now, very happy doing what I’ve always liked to do most.”

DIFFERENT PATHS TO THE SAME DESTINATION
The three designers came to the world of typography by very different paths. For Paul, it was something he grew into. A single spark ignited the typographic flame for Schultz, and Meseguer probably has had type in her blood since birth. “My father used to work as a letterpress printer, also my grandfather,” she says. “I grew up surrounded by lead type, ink and paper.” It wasn’t, however, until she began working as a graphic designer in 1992 that she began to design typefaces. “I was working in an advertising agency. When the first Macintosh arrived with several digital fonts,” she recalls, “I saw type in a completely new light.”

Paul became enamored with type and typography while in college. “About halfway through my second year,” he says, “I became unbearably curious about the semantics of type and its humble yet profound impact on graphic design. My first dabbles with type were simple attempts at perfecting letterforms for my own assignments for school. It didn’t take much for me to realize that the work I was putting into the typefaces was just as enjoyable as the graphic design projects they went into.”

It was a book—but not a type book—that sparked Schultz’s interest in type. “I developed an interest in pictograms when I worked as a web designer,” she recalls. “During my studies I worked on a pictographic cookbook, solely based on visual language. I focused on pictographic and type projects, and finally I combined both interests in a font that uses letters to form symbols as well as words.”

SCHULTZ: MULTITALENTED CHARACTERS
Christina Schultz’s newest typeface PicLig, the outgrowth of the cookbook project, pushes OpenType font technology to extremes. “When I developed PicLig I thought about constructing icons out of characters: first, to give them a similar appearance and second, to make them more suitable to be mixed with text,” Schultz explains. “Some character combinations already looked like icons. For example, the figure 8 and the single guillemet <, when combined, begin to look like a pair of scissors.” Schultz found Open-Type technology and its discretionary ligatures to have the most potential to easily combine letters into symbols. “While OpenType usually connects several characters to a typographic ligature,” she says, “I decided to use it to bring several characters together into an icon or ‘picture ligature.’”

The task of designing the typeface, however, was not just about drawing letters and combining them through OpenType technology. The letterforms had to be designed to allow for an intuitive visual connection when merged into symbols. The individual characters were also drawn to serve as both letters and parts of symbols. In addition, the places where the letters might connect to form an icon had to be drawn on the same horizontal plane. “The result,” according to Schultz, “is a font that is not only a text typeface, or only a suite of symbols. It unifies both and distills them into one system.”

MESEGUER: NEW MOVES AND OLD TRADITIONS
Laura Meseguer’s Rumba is a delightful typographic confection that brings more to graphic communication than might appear. At first blush, it is a friendly calligraphic interpretation of classic old style design traits (a “modern” old style, of sorts). If type can have a personality, Rumba is also a feminine design—with a hint of attitude.

A closer look, however, reveals that Rumba is more than just another pretty face. There are three versions of the basic design, Rumba Small, Rumba Large and Rumba Extra. While they all share the same basic design characteristics, the individual designs have subtle deviations to optimize performance at a range of point sizes. Of the three designs, Rumba Small is the chubbiest. Its serifs are soft and round, curves are wide and full bodied and character proportions are somewhat extended. In addition to making a particularly cuddly design, these are also the classic design traits of a traditional text typeface. Rumba Small is both delightfully distinctive and remarkably legible at small point sizes. Rumba Large is more svelte, serifs are slightly sharper, curves are more pronounced and the width of the characters has become narrower. It has been designed to perform best at mid-range type sizes. Rumba Extra is the most elegant of the three designs. It has the greatest contrast in stroke thickness, is proportionally the thinnest of the designs and has the most sensuous curves. Rumba Extra is also the most animated of the three designs with several characters taking on cursive shapes. It is the quintessential display design.

Laura Meseguer's RUMBA is designed to vary its personality depending on what size it's set.

OLD SOURCES FOR NEW SCRIPTS
Alejandro Paul has recently won international acclaim for his series of Bluemlein script revivals. From the lettering of Charles Bluemlein in a 1940s Higgins Ink catalog, Paul created a suite of 32 script typefaces that capture the charisma and vibrancy of showcard lettering. Even though he had to create many missing characters for each style, Paul saw this project as “historical conservation” rather than a series of new typeface designs. The original lettering was presented as a series of signatures, and Paul has kept the myth alive by giving each typeface the name of the original signatory.

Another Paul design, Ministry Script, is a send-up of American pop calligraphy that pushes the envelope of current type technologies. According to Veer, the exclusive distributor of Ministry Script, “Never before has a script typeface given you so many creative options. Ministry’s OpenType features include contextual and stylistic alternates, swash characters and a galaxy of ligatures. A single face with over 1000 characters to explore.” If this is true (who’s going to count all those characters?), Ministry Script has outdone both Bickham Script and Zapfino for glyph extravagance.

Christina Schultz’s PICLIG is an opentype font that makes it possible to create symbols out of typed characters. The automatic substitution of certain character combinations allows the direct integration of icons into text, enabling highly expressive graphic communication.

“An Argentine-flavored ode to the long-forgotten strength of calligraphy in sign making” is how Paul describes his typeface Affair. He first saw the letters that were to become the face while on honeymoon in New York City. Paul was wandering the streets with his new wife when he was inexplicably drawn into the city’s massive public library. “To this day,” he recalls, “I can’t decide if I actually found the worn book, or if the book called out to me. Its spine was nothing special, sitting on a shelf, tightly flanked by similar spines on either side. Yet it was the only one I picked up—and I only looked at one page before walking to the photocopier to make a copy to take home.” It was this copy of a 9 x 9 in. page from a 1950s Hunt Brothers lettering book that became the basis of Affair. The final design is another OpenType tour de force, awash with swashes and alternate characters.

Meseguer, Schultz and Paul may not be rock stars of type—at least not yet. They are, however, designers who bring a wonderful mix of iconoclastic enthusiasm and traditional artisanship to their work—clearly a step in the right direction toward stardom.

Alejandro Paul, dasmas@arnet.com.ar | Christina Schultz christina@piclig.net, Laura Meseguer, laura@cosmic.es