Would you please tell us about your workspace? What does it look like? Are there any objects that you can't do without on your table?
I work very organically, letting the idea take itself in whichever direction seems appropriate and I also work in a variety of mediums so my workspace is a constantly evolving, undefined area. I might work in my home, a friend’s studio or the offices of the advertising agency where I work as a designer and art director. One day I might be working on my living room table with my Adana printing press and type collection, a week later it might be covered in shavings from a lino cut or I might have set up my laptop, scanner and digital camera and turned it into a micro studio.
The one common denominator throughout, regardless of where I work (cups of coffee notwithstanding) is a sketchbook: it’s where every project starts - commissioned or personal, live or speculative - and no matter how crude it might seem hurriedly scribbled on the page, I always keep it there with me while to refer back to while I’m working so as not to lose the original sentiment.
As a city full of graphic design and beautiful typography, does London inspire you? If you have to move from there, where would you choose to go?
It’s impossible not to be inspired by London. Growing up, I lived in a small rural village in Lincolnshire in the East of England where the nearest McDonalds was about 30 miles away. Not that that’s a bad thing but I’m just trying to qualify how remote it was, and London really did seem like another world. No-one I knew lived down there or even wanted to (we called it The Smoke) but I’ve always had this love affair with the place – the allure of the unknown, the tall buildings, the opportunities it presented, the expensive houses and the hustle and bustle. Even before I knew I was going to be a designer I wanted to be here.
It’s a city so steeped in heritage and history that you can’t help but be drawn in by it. I walk the same way to work most mornings and there are still details on buildings that I haven’t noticed before and just knowing I’m there makes me smile. Walking past The National Gallery, through the Theatre district, past The Ivy, hearing 15 different languages in the space of 100 yards: it makes me feel at once so completely unimportant and anonymous but at the same time so glad to be here and to be enjoying the place while I’m young. It inspires at every turn and as England’s creative hub it’s somewhere I feel I can’t afford not to be.
Whilst there’s a part of me that would one day like to get back to the countryside (which can be as inspiring as the city but in different ways), I’ve had a similar crush on New York since I was a child, which is somewhere I’d love to spend some time working if the opportunity arose. It really is the world in a city and while I’ve only spent a short amount of time there, some of the experiences you can have, the sights you see, the people you meet and the vibe you get are all exclusive to it.
"Each letter should have a flirtation with the one next to it" says Mac Baumwell. In your opinion, what qualities make a typographic composition good enough?
Unlike most other creative pursuits there are a lot of rules that you can choose to follow when working with type. In doing so you’ll create something that is considered ‘right’ by the wider typographic community: there will be a grid; things will line up; if you’re working with body copy you shouldn’t have more than 15 words per line and so on and so forth. Of course, you’ll run the risk of creating something that’s been done countless times before. The best typography acknowledges the rules and work that has been done before and decides how to interpret it and to what extent to follow it’s lead.
On a personal level, one thing that unites all good typography is scale and contrast. Some people are afraid of using type above 12pt and hide it away in the bottom left corner of a page – what I try to do is the opposite; to celebrate the type. As soon as you enlarge type it becomes something else – more than just a series of letters. It becomes a shape or a set of curves – something abstract; it takes on a gender and a character and the craftsmanship of the type designer really comes to the fore.
Imagine that Helvetica, Frutiger, Futura, Optima and Bodoni are five different people in a neighborhood. What kind of guys would they be? When you close your eyes, do you see what they are doing now?
Helvetica (or Helv to his friends) has his own seat at the bar in the local pub. He’s a quiet guy, works hard (though no-one’s quite sure what he does) and doesn’t have much of an opinion but he’s always there whether you notice him or not. He’s occasionally joined by his old friend Frutiger, who Helv has known for quite a while, I think they might have grown up together.
Frutiger is also quite reserved but at least likes to offer up more in conversation and can be a little more emotional. Helvetica usually agrees with him because it’s easier than getting into an argument.
Futura is one of my best friends. We can go anywhere together and he’s good at most things. He’s straight up, honest and dresses well, especially now he’s put on a bit of weight and he always knows how to turn on the style.
Optima and I rarely cross each other’s path. I know he’s done well for himself, you can tell by the places he hangs out and the company he keeps but he’s not ‘my kind of people’ and I think it’s mutual. He’s got a financial mind, is always polite (if a little insincere) but he lets his guard down occasionally and shows he can be softer.
Bodoni is the town’s own Mrs Robinson: a glamorous and curvaceous older woman who still likes to flirt with fashion intended for girls half her age. You know she’s been around for a while but you still definitely would.
We have recently celebrated the 50th birthday of Helvetica. While Swiss graphic designer Wolfgang Weingart says "Anyone who uses Helvetica knows nothing about typefaces", Alexander Gelman says "Any good typeface can be completely destroyed when misused or extensively overused. Helvetica seemed to sustain a beating like no other. Still fresh, still popular, Helvetica is the king." How do you feel about this super-popular font?
It’s a strange thing. I was at a lecture by Erik Spiekermann (who’s work I greatly admire) last year when he started bad mouthing Helvetica. It’s not a typeface that I use particularly often but I certainly don’t go out of my way not to use it. It’s not appropriate for everything but it’s functional, clean, communicative, well spaced and legible so I really don’t see the problem with using it. Ok, so it is literally everywhere but it’s a system font – it comes as standard with every computer and if people are drawn to it and feel it works then they’ll use it so what’s wrong with that? It’s democratic design. I’d rather someone use Helvetica for a sign they’d created than some of the other system fonts, say, Sand, Comic Sans, Impact or Curlz… shudder. And I know it’s a little soulless but look at Experimental Jetset: they do great work with it; it’s virtually all they use! It should be lauded for doing one thing and doing it well. As Wim Crouwel said “It should be neutral. It shouldn’t have a meaning in itself. The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the typeface”.
People who are interested in typography both as viewers and creators, look at the world with different eyes. When we see a wrong use or bad composition, it makes us feel bad. Now, try to think about the logos of the brands you usually see around. Which ones do you like most and which can't you stand looking at? And why?
Most of the shops and businesses I pass on the way to the station are small, independent shops with hand painted signs that peel and flake and who have bigger worries than how nice their logo is. A part of me is tempted to go in and chastise them for it saying “Look, the reason hardly anyone comes in here to eat or buy anything off you or have their hair cut by you is because the outside of your of your shop is falling apart, your company name is (ironically) mis-spelt, your logo looks like your two year old daughter designed it (likely) and you generally look like a bunch of amateurs” but you can’t change everything. I could offer them all nicely designed logos for free but you have to accept that even bad design has a place and to some people it’s just not important. As someone who makes a living from it, that’s a hard thing to say but these places seem to do ok. They get by, they provide a service to the local community and they do what they’re meant to and as far as the poorly kerned, PVC signage outside is concerned; you just have to let it ride.
What I can’t abide is poor design and branding for larger companies - companies for whom their logo is their voice and how they connect with people. I hate to see overly complicated or needlessly modernized logos like when Barclay’s applied a Photoshop filter to their perfectly memorable eagle or the way everything Apple do is now shiny. The Xbox and Playstation 3 logos are hideous (isn’t that the font they used for the first SpiderMan film?) and virtually ANY logo by ANY tourist board makes me fume... Script or handwritten font? Check. Bright colours? Check. Childishly abstracted figure, sun or swoosh? Check. These are logos for actual countries! Is that really how you want to be seen by the rest of the world? It’s a chance to really epitomize your country’s unique selling points and character but instead they all default to this same, rotten template.
Two of my favourite logos belong to the BBC and the Danish haulage company ‘Maersk’. Neither of them are particularly clever or inventive but they’re both just so hardcore: just a really straight, uncompromising stamp of a logo that you can’t ignore. The Maersk logo in particular, when it overtakes you on the motorway in 12ft high letters on the side of an 18 wheeler just looks great.
Are you interested in cinema? What kind of movies and which directors do you find closer to yourself in terms of visual comprehension?
I think there’s a common appreciation of form across all the arts whether it’s design, typography, film or architecture. It was something my first graphics tutor was really into and I love to see a beautifully composed shot where the director has taken control of everything. I’m pretty eclectic in terms of what I like to watch (my favourite film of all time is still Ghostbusters) but in terms of cinematography, the jaunty angles of vintage Hitchcock and some of Peter Yates’ shots in films like Bullit are amazing: each frame could be a beautifully composed photograph in some sequences. Recently, Michel Gondry has worked his way into my cinematic affections – some of the camera work and the ideas realized in Eternal Sunshine… are mindblowing. I should probably confess to a secret love of good horror films too, particularly those from the eighties (The Thing, Hallowe’en, Hellraiser etc) where CGI wasn’t up and running so the props guys had to be really inventive when it came to the viscera.
Do you always listen to music while working? Does it change your mood and affect your creations? What genres do you often prefer listening?
I do listen to a lot of music, and I’ve a very eclectic collection on my iPod but it’s not a particularly essential part of my creative process, rather I like to listen to it while I’m out and about and it depends largely on my mood. When it’s on it’s usually a mix of blues, popular jazz (nothing too difficult), acoustic country and the classics: Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel alongside The Hot Club of Cowtown (not so old) and The Mama’s and The Papas followed by a little Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis. I listen to virtually as much recent music too but these guys were doing it right, first time round 20, 30 or 40 years ago. I guess I’m old before my time in terms of what I listen to but I just appreciate the honesty of someone with their acoustic guitar and the sound of someone really in control of their instrument, whatever it is they’re playing.
Theme of one of the previous issues of Bak Magazine was "2050". What does it mean to you? How do you evaluate the future of the world?
2050 is a big number. I guess I’ll only be 69 by then which certainly isn’t old by today’s standards, but nothing scares me more than the future. The world’s been a pretty dark place since 9/11 and the bombings in London in 2005 really brought it home how fragile life is and that no matter ho healthily you live or how good a person you are, your life is completely in the hands of those around you. It’s something my parent’s generation dealt with a lot in the 70’s and 80’s and even the early 90’s with the IRA but it’s something new to the rest of us and unless someone sorts out the current tensions (which are just waiting to spill over), I can’t really see an easy way out.
Even though by my nature I’m a very optimistic person, it’s genuinely hard to be positive about the future of the world in the face of relentless media coverage of pointless wars, car bombs, global warming (if projections are correct, the town of my birth will be completely underwater by then) but it’s all you can do to get on with it and hope you and those you love keep your health. I have my plans (especially where my career is concerned - and I’m not really one to compromise in terms of achieving my goals); a sketchbook doodle of how I’d like things to turn out, but you really just don’t know and if even half of the things I have planned actually come to fruition, I’ll be a happy pensioner.