Slow Fonts

Lest anyone be under any illusion, type design is not a get-rich-quick career path. At least, not the way I practice it.

My typefaces tend to undergo a long gestation. I’m talking years and years. My friend, the amazingly talented David Jonathan Ross, runs a Font-of-the-Month club.¹ We’ve joked that I should start a Font-of-the-Decade club. That seems to be my track record to date.

Ebb and Flow

My designs typically develop in fits and starts, with long fallow interludes. Inspiration will strike and things might advance quickly; but then I inevitably hit some speed bump — a disappointing proof or some unruly, seemingly unsolvable characters — and I set it aside again in discouragement.

If the design has any real merit, though, then it will eventually resurface, maybe months or even years later, and fresh eyes will find a new way forward. While I may be slow to finish, I’m also slow to completely abandon an idea.

I also tend to be quite ponderous and deliberate when I am working. For better or for worse. I may spend a disproportionate amount of time laboring over a small detail that perhaps, in the grander scheme of things, is not that critical. What can I say, I can’t seem to help myself.

The British composer William Walton, who was also notoriously painstaking and slow in his creative work, is said to have quipped, “It takes me an hour to decide to place a note; and then another hour to decide to take it back out.”² Oh yeah, I definitely get that.

I’m not claiming these patterns are all virtuous. My fussy perfectionism definitely has its dysfunction. This is a confession of self-awareness. And an admission that, really, I’m not likely to change.

To Every Thing There Is a Season

There’s certainly good sense in not wasting time in business — “time is money” and all that. And I’ve certainly worked to deadlines where I’ve had to manage my time accordingly. But I do think that our society today has developed an unhealthy obsession with efficiency and speed. There seems to be an ever accelerating drive to do everything quicker, spend less time, get there sooner, move fast and break things.

I think there is often greater value in pausing to reflect, in taking the time to allow a thing to ripen and mature.³

I am lucky to live where I do, in a rural area surrounded by fields and woods. And this has fostered in me a different sense of time, I think, than urban dwellers.

There is a natural rhythm to the year; and it does not serve the tree to rush to leaf out, bear its fruits, and drop its leaves quickly, out of sync with the sun in its steady path across the heavens.

It does not serve the bird to lay its eggs and fledge its chicks before the flowers have bloomed or the insects have emerged.

There’s something to be said for finding one’s own rhythm and letting it carry you.

Up to a Point

That said, ten years really is a ridiculous and impractical amount of time to spend between font releases!

With the launch of my own foundry, I have a fresh opportunity to improve on my record. I included the In The Works section on this site as a place to share some of my works-in-progress publicly, in hopes of overcoming the worst of my dilatory tendencies.

So who knows? Check back in 2036 and see if I’ve managed to release another typeface before then.

1. Honestly, I don’t know how he does it. And the creativity and quality certainly doesn’t suffer at all. Sometimes I envy him this boundless capacity. But we’re clearly built differently. ↩︎

2. This might be entirely apocryphal. I could swear I heard it in a recorded lecture by music historian Robert Greenberg, but I’ve never been able to find it again. And more importantly, I’ve never located a primary source to confirm. If you know anything about Walton and this quote, please do let me know. ↩︎

3. I realize that this is largely a privilege of age and circumstance. If I were younger and trying to raise a family, I wouldn’t have this luxury. Nor if I lived somewhere else, under more challenging social and economic circumstances. I do acknowledge this. ↩︎