‘A man of let­ters’ — used to call in­di­vidu­als in the Renais­sance times who were en­gaged in crit­ic­al think­ing, read­ing, re­search, and hu­man self-re­flec­tion about know­ledge, life and so­ci­ety. That defin­i­tion per­fectly suits Peter Bil­ak: he writes, lec­tures, pub­lishes, and more of that it re­flects a lit­er­al one di­men­sion of the term — he makes let­ters.

I loved cal­li­graphy but thought that if these people are in charge, it will die. I star­ted to real­ize that I had to open up to oth­er ideas and then the pro­cess star­ted. I was 30 years old by that time — pretty late, I thought. Any­way, at least it happened.

People are not per­fect, why should typefaces be?

Due to the pop­ular­ity of Sum­ner Stone’s typefaces, re­leased at the dawn of the di­git­al age, his name has al­most be­come a com­mon noun, but the world-renowned de­sign­er and founder of the Adobe Type De­part­ment is about much more than his early suc­cesses. Es­pe­cially for Type Journ­al, Sum­ner Stone talked to Misha Be­let­sky about type tech­niques, life, work, teach­ing and his plans.

We just like to print — one can find the state­ment on the spreads of the journ­al PA­PER, which Erik Spieker­mann pub­lishes with a small team of type-en­thu­si­asts at the let­ter­press work­shop p98a. At 70 years of age, hav­ing stepped down as chair­man at Eden­spieker­mann and switched between Font­Shop to p98a—after the ac­quis­i­tion by Mono­type in 2014—he doesn’t seem to be re­tired (al­though he men­tions the word re­peatedly).

Back in 2016, NORM Stu­dio gave a lec­ture at the Serebro Nabora con­fer­en­ce in Mo­scow. It was a case-study present­a­tion with the main fo­cus on type design. Look­ing closely at the works, one could find one­self in a world some­where between their Swiss pre­de­cessors’ ex­per­i­en­ce: such as Ad­ri­an Fru­ti­ger’s sys­tem­at­ic at­ti­tude to type design and Max Bill’s math­em­at­ic­al way of visu­al think­ing.

Typer­a­dio is the ra­dio chan­nel on type and design. Since 2004 the archive of the in­ter­net ra­dio stream keeps grow­ing and counts at the mo­ment nearly three hun­dred re­cords of in­ter­views with design pro­fes­sion­als. This time Typer­a­dio (Liza En­e­beis and Don­ald Beek­man) an­swers to ques­tions from Ilya Ruder­man at the type con­fer­en­ce Serebro Nabora, Septem­ber 2015, Mo­scow.

Since 1982, the As­so­ci­ation Ty­po­graph­ique In­ter­na­tionale (ATypI) has awar­ded the Prix Charles Peignot, named after the or­gan­isa­tion’s first pres­id­ent, to a de­sign­er un­der the age of 35 “for an out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tion to type design”. In 2013, Al­ex­an­dra Korolkova won the pres­ti­gi­ous award.

I con­sider my­self to be a prac­ti­cing type de­sign­er who is less fo­cused on the his­tor­ic­al basis of his work and more in­ter­es­ted in try­ing to cre­ate something rel­ev­ant and new I take up pro­jects on the con­di­tion that there is a pos­sib­il­ity to come up with something unique that could con­trib­ute to a cer­tain part of type her­it­age or world cul­ture in gen­er­al. Al­though it prob­ably sounds too pre­sumtuous…

I’ve al­ways been very curi­ous, and I think curi­os­ity is a very fun­da­ment­al Dutch qual­ity. When you make a design, the first ques­tion you ask when you’ve made it is: What else can I get out of this? Is there any­thing more? Is there any­thing bey­ond what I have done so far? So that was an­oth­er thing that I’ve learned in the 60s as a stu­dent: nev­er be sat­is­fied with what you can do, but al­ways try to get a bit more out of your­self and to ex­per­i­ment. I think this is what I have in com­mon with many of my Dutch col­leagues.

I was go­ing to a Ukrain­i­an type event, and I was sud­denly struck by the thought that here, in Rus­sia, there's noth­ing sim­il­ar, while there are a num­ber of such events in Ukraine. I found this so un­fair and even hurt­ful that I thought, “I have to fix this—right now, today”.

A suc­cess­ful text typeface to me is the one in which both the char­ac­ter set and the fam­ily struc­ture are well or­gan­ized. That’s what we star­ted our pro­ject in the Neth­er­lands with. Even us­ing just a few let­ters, you can de­cide on which ex­act styles are ne­ces­sary. After all, even a small de­tail af­fects everything else. You have to start with a broad over­view: what’s go­ing to be part of the fam­ily, and how the styles are go­ing to work with each oth­er.

Typefaces do not ex­ist in a va­cu­um: they take form and mean­ing be­cause they are re­sponses to many oth­er typefaces that ex­ist already, and to chan­ging con­di­tions of use. Good re­search skills, and a suf­fi­cient un­der­stand­ing of ty­po­graph­ic his­tory and prac­tice, are es­sen­tial.