Maine College of Art & Design and AIGA Maine presented Fonts are Easy, Books are Hard, an artist talk with James Edmondson, a type designer and founder of OH no Type Company. OH no Type Co. publishes retail and custom typefaces with the intent of making graphic design fun for everyone.
In his talk, Edmondson spoke about the intersection of typography, personal influence, and the realities of publishing. In addition to the talk, he visited Amy Parker's Typography III class to teach Graphic Design and Illustration students about TypeCooker, a hands-on, constraints-based type design training program. Each part of the workshop is a structured exercise designed to teach designers how to draw typefaces by providing specific "recipes" or parameters for designing letterforms. This helps students in their design work to be able to create custom letterforms that relate to identity system work: branding, editorial, and type system development in the field of visual design.
Amy Parker spoke about the experience, saying, "What an opportunity for Graphic Design and Illustration students! As one of the most prolific working type designers in the field today, James Edmondson brought us the 'TypeCooker' workshop to introduce letterform drawing. We practiced forming letters through a series of small, timed exercises to understand scale, proportion, mood, tone, and concept – the why behind developing shape languages. Through this process, we diverged in our discussion of how letters work within a system of glyphs, their common and alternative anatomies, and how to solve optical conundrums such as how to construct the tricky letter S and why X's are not symmetrical. The workshop echoed themes from our Branding and Visual Systems class –consideration for overshoot, x-height/ cap-height, and optical alignment, as it relates to letterforms in identity systems. These conversations reinforced how interconnected these niche disciplines are within the field of graphic design."
Learn more about the Graphic Design program at Maine College of Art & Design.