Rigor as the condition that makes experimentation safe

After years of working on large-scale projects, you became much more selective about the work you take on after COVID. When did you understand that saying “no” could be just as important as saying “yes”? Was there a specific decision that marked that shift?

For most of my career I said yes to everything because I had employees and rent and the alternative was terrifying. When someone asks “how do you choose your projects?” the honest answer is: I didn’t, for a long time. I needed to pay people. Do you have any work for me? That was my selection process. COVID forced a pause that I didn’t choose but probably needed. We used it to rebuild the website, take out old work that I still loved but that I realized was pulling us backward — work that defined us in ways we had already grown past. That editing process was clarifying. You look at what you’ve kept and you understand what you actually want to do next. The selectivity that followed wasn’t really about saying no to clients. It was about being honest about what kind of work makes you want to wake up in the morning. I’m better at that conversation now. Not perfect — the instinct to say yes to everything doesn’t fully leave you when you’ve spent twenty years in survival mode — but better.

Type design has gradually become a central part of your practice—from collaborating with Georg Seifert on Glyphs to teaching “Type Design for Not Type Designers” with Rainer Scheichelbauer. Having also served as President of the Type Directors Club, what perspective has that given you on where type design is heading, and on who should engage with the discipline today?

Type design used to be the most exclusive club in design. For instance, Helvetica was released in 1957 by the Haas Type Foundry — the result of a professional commission, specialized equipment, and resources that put it beyond the reach of individual designers. The knowledge was guarded, the tools were inaccessible, and the discipline was defined by a small group that had largely taught each other. Now a student can leave school having already designed a serious retail typeface, having received feedback from a global community of practitioners, having used tools that professional designers helped shape through direct dialogue with their developers. The average level is extraordinary. What used to take me twenty years to reach, a student can reach in three months with the right program and the right teachers. What concerns me is not the democratization — that’s overwhelmingly good — but the speed at which aesthetic consensus forms and spreads. The same global knowledge-sharing that raises the floor also compresses the range. Everyone sees the same references at the same time and responds to them simultaneously. Type design thought is slightly less homogeneous than branding, because the craft still demands time and forces individuality, but the pressure toward sameness is real and worth resisting.

Too many fucking sans-serif typefaces that look exactly the same.

Has there been a moment in your career when you felt genuinely lost creatively, when the work, or your direction, no longer made sense in the way it once had? Looking back, what helped you move through that period, and what did it teach you about the relationship between uncertainty and growth?

Several. The most significant was the period around downsizing the studio — leaving a large, expensive office in SoHo, separating from a business partner, reducing the team significantly. At the time it felt like failure. The external markers of success — the size of the office, the number of employees, the prestige of the address — were contracting, and I had spent enough time confusing those markers with the actual thing to feel genuinely disoriented. What I found on the other side was that the work got better. A smaller team communicates differently. You go from conducting a dysfunctional orchestra to playing in a band — fewer people, but everyone knows the song without being told. The quality of the output improved. The quality of my days improved. I should have done it sooner, but I couldn’t have known that without going through it. I was also diagnosed with ADHD (I know, like everyone else in the world) in my 50s, after a lifetime of compensating for it without knowing what I was compensating for. Reading Gabor Maté’s “Scattered Minds” a book about ADHD felt like reading an autobiography. Understanding the architecture of your own mind — why certain things are effortless and others are inexplicably hard, why you disappear into font software when you should be doing something else, why the fear of peer judgment has followed you through a career that by any external measure should have resolved it — that understanding doesn’t fix anything, but it makes the uncertainty less frightening. You stop thinking you are defective and start thinking you are specific. Those are different things.

How do you perceive the current state of design education?

Better than it has ever been, technically. The average young designer today enters the field with a level of formal knowledge and visual sophistication that took my generation decades to accumulate. The tools are extraordinary. The access to global reference is extraordinary. The type design programs specifically — Reading, The Hague, and now programs across the US and Europe — are producing practitioners at a level that would have been impossible to imagine when I was learning from annuals shipped from New York to Milan on a three-year delay. Also, not only boys: finally tons of amazing women in the type design world. Will all these students have the same jobs configured as we have been teaching them? I have no fucking idea, but it's very likely that they will not.

In your opinion, what is the role of emerging graphic designers?

To see what we can no longer see. Every rule you learn is also a door that closes a little. Experienced designers navigate the field through accumulated knowledge that is also inevitably rife with assumptions. We know what has worked. We know what clients will accept. We know what the field considers good. Young designers, before that knowledge fully installs itself, can see through it — or around it — in ways that are genuinely valuable. The best thing an emerging designer can do is resist the impulse to look like everyone else right away. The average level is high; the risk is that it collapses into uniformity. Your job is not to match the standard but to find where the standard is wrong and make something there instead. Also, learn the business side of design. Not as a compromise with your ideals — as a condition for protecting them. A designer who can’t sustain a practice eventually can’t make anything at all.

What advice would you offer to a young graphic designer entering the professional world today?

Try to wake up happy to go to work. This sounds obvious and is apparently very difficult, because most people don’t manage it. Make sure you are in the right room — yours or someone else’s — and that the work you are doing is work you would do if no one was watching and the money were the same. You will spend most of your life in that room. The decision about which room it is deserves more attention than most people give it. AS Erik Spiekerman says, “Don’t work for assholes.” And, don’t do work for free. Not because your time is worth money — though it is — but because when someone pays you, they take you seriously, they give you the information you need to do the job well, and the exchange has weight. Free work is easy to ignore. If they won’t pay you, find someone who will. Say yes to almost everything at the beginning and almost nothing at the end. The early career is about exposure — to clients, to problems, to collaborators, to failure. The later career is about focus. Most people get this backwards.