Type & tattoos with Dan Rhatigan

Type & tattoos with Dan Rhatigan
Seeing words: Letraset, zines, maximalism and why fonts feel different 

What happens when letterforms become part of your life story?

In this episode of Seeing Senses, typographer and educator Dan Rhatigan joins Sarah to talk about how letters move from page to body, from analogue to digital and from work to play. Dan brings a joyous sense of curiosity to the craft of type. He shares how making comic books as a teenager set him on the path to typography, how Letraset taught him to trust his eyes, and how his tattoos have become a living archive of type history.

Dan reflects on his work at type foundry Monotype, his zine projects and his fascination with the tactile side of design. He shares how hands-on making changes how we see, think and feel. Why a little imperfection can bring designs (and designers) back to life.

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Listen if you’re curious about:

• How a love of comic books led to a career in typography
• What Letraset taught a generation of designers about precision and play
• How physical, hands-on processes change creative decision-making
• What it’s like to manage one of the world’s largest font libraries
• How type design trends reflect the mood of the moment
• Why Dan’s tattoos make him unforgettable in summer

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Key themes & takeaways:

• Maximalism as joy: Type is for play, not perfection
• Zines and community: DIY publishing as sensory storytelling
• Creative constraint: Limited tools lead to unexpected ideas
• Flow through physicality: Movement and making reignite creativity
• Analog memory: Letraset and letterpress evoke embodied learning
• Type tattoos: A living archive of letterforms and meaning
• Cyclical trends: Why soft, emotional typefaces return in uncertain times
• Font choice as power: Every visual decision changes how words feel

Head to Seeing Senses on Substack for visual references and tattoo photos. 

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Guest:

Dan Rhatigan is the Senior Creative Foundry Director at Monotype. He is a renowned typographer with eclectic experience as a typesetter, graphic designer, typeface designer, and educator. He went from an MA at the University of Reading to senior roles at Monotype, Adobe Fonts, Type Network, and The Type Founders. He publishes his own typefaces and collaborations through Bijou Type, and a long-running zine, Pink Mince. 

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Bonus for multi-sensory thinkers:

Head to Seeing Senses on Substack for updates and extras.
You’ll find sense-hacking experiments and book recommendations from the guests. Become a paid subscriber to support the making of this podcast.

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Host:

Sarah Hyndman is a designer/researcher, author and speaker. You can book her for a Seeing Senses talk, workshop or event. Sarah is the founder of Type Tasting, curator of The Sensologists and author of the bestselling book Why Fonts Matter (Penguin/Virgin). 

Seeing Senses. Where there’s more than meets the eye. 

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Theme music by AudioKraken. Typeface Magnet, Inga Plönnigs.

#Typography #Tattoos #TypeDesign #SeeingSensesPodcast #MultiSensoryThinking

Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:10.766)
Why is this episode's guest more memorable in the summer?

My arms and now chunks of my legs and torso are covered in tattoos of letter forms from different typefaces. You live with a few letters and you're like, you know, that could be counterbalanced by something in a different spot or maybe needs a spot of color here. I feel a little bit anonymous looking in the winter. In the summer, everyone wants to talk to me and everyone wants to know what's going on. No one forgets meeting me in the summer.

Speaker 2 (00:50.456)
My guest is the renowned typographer Dan Rhatigan. He's the Senior Creative Foundry Director at Type Foundry Monotype. He also has his own business initiatives, including LetraSlut, PinkMintsZine, and Bejew Indy Type Foundry. His happy sense memory, PICTURES

Venice! I like to go kayaking because it's cool to be on the water in Venice to see it from angles that you don't see walking around.

and how his career was inspired by making comic books as a child.

I had it in my head that I wanted to grow up and draw comic books and draw these big, fun letters. But the big thing for me was this totally new idea that if I picked a different lettering style, things felt different. And it just started those wheels turning and slowly morphed into the idea that like, there's a profession where you could get paid.

This episode is packed with visual references. Head over to SeeingSenses on Substack for lashings of eye candy to serve up with this episode. Nerd alert, we get very geeky around two thirds of the way in. Dan is a genuinely enthusiastic and generous human and I'm delighted to have him as a guest.

Speaker 2 (02:15.426)
Welcome to Seeing Senses, where we uncover the magic and science behind what makes us feel starting at first sight. Join me, Sarah Hyndman, as I talk to the experts from different fields who have inspired my interdisciplinary approach over the last 12 years. Discover how they connect what we see to what we sense, feel, experience and remember.

If you want to know how the senses shape your audience's emotions, memories and choices and how you can use this to create unforgettable experiences that people can't help talking about, then this podcast is for you. Seeing Senses, where there's more than meets the eye. Are you ready?

Speaker 2 (03:16.962)
My guest today is Dan Rhatigan. He's a typographer, a letraset and tattoo enthusiast, and a zine publisher. He also creates retail and custom typefaces and so much to talk about. Dan, we first met when I was a wide-eyed rookie speaker at the huge typo conference in San Francisco more than a decade ago. was

First time. Well, you know, it's like I we've been crossing paths here and there for so long. I was trying to put my finger on the first time, but you're right. That was it.

I turned up looking terrified and you welcomed me in so brilliantly. remember when I gave my talk, the front row was literally everybody, the who's who of the typography world. And it was just like, my goodness, imposter syndrome to the max. You made it absolutely brilliant. Thank you.

Of course, you made a good impression. mean, that's why we tried to pull you into things when I was at Adobe. You you were doing work that no one else is doing. So you made a good impression and you claimed your space.

It was definitely work that nobody else was doing because I think nobody else was quite bonkers enough, but I'm still here. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining in already. I'm so chuffed that you're here. I'm really, really excited that you're one of the guests because, yeah, for reasons that we're going to talk about over the next little while. OK. It seems like it's almost a form of synesthesia for you, which is quite hard to say. Synesthesia, where the brain makes connections across the different senses.

Speaker 1 (04:23.948)
It's lovely to be here.

Speaker 2 (04:43.53)
I imagine that even as I'm speaking now, you're seeing my words typeset across your imagination, which makes me want to be exuberant and dramatic because I want to know what that would look like in your mind. But how did your relationship with type start?

Well, for me, my origin story, as I describe it, was I just loved comic books when I was growing up and my closest friend and I drew our own comics and he liked writing the stories and went on to become a filmmaker. I liked drawing the covers and especially like big splashy mastheads, which were announced these characters we were making up. And so I had it in my head that I wanted to grow up and draw comic books and draw these big fun

letters and stuff. So in high school in the 1980s in New York City, I joined the high school newspaper staff to draw some cartoons and part of the process of drawing the cartoons for publication in the newspaper was typesetting like a title in captions. And the process then was

for the newspaper production, like fully analog, this is 1984 when this started, was to use this type that would come on these sheets and you would scratch it with a pencil and the letter would go from this plastic sheet onto a piece of paper. And we also had this machine that was like a giant Dymo label maker. Essentially there was a big wheel with letters around the edge and you selected the letter you wanted to spell and it would get impressed onto a piece of tape. So you could spell things out and put the tape down.

on the board that would again eventually get sent to the printer. But the big thing for me with both of these tools that I was expected to use to jazz up my comic strips was this totally new idea that if I picked a different lettering style, things felt different. It's like I was 14, I didn't know what graphic design was, I just wanted to draw comic books. But this was a big thing. It's like...

Speaker 1 (06:39.502)
like you can start to control the personality. If I'm doing doing a hit piece on a teacher in school for the newspaper, I could use like one kind of a style. If I wanted to do something like goofy for a holiday edition, it would have a different feel. And it just started those wheels turning and I started having fun with that. And it was very physical process for me. So I also had to learn a little bit about like spacing and alignment. And I remember my very first design internship.

because this slowly morphed into the idea that like, there's a profession where you could like make things and get paid. That seems good. So I got an internship in my senior year with the graphics department at a hospital in New York where we essentially prepared slides for doctors who would give presentations about their medical research.

I'm just imagining those comic book slides with all of the drama and the blood going everywhere.

Honestly, the kind of slides we were making was for research that felt very, very vivid at the time. mean, talking about sort of a sense relationship to things. I remember in particular, some of the slides were for what was an experimental procedure at the time. I mean, it still kind of is, but of like lengthening bones in the leg, where essentially the upper and lower part of a bone would get attached to an iron ring and the bone would slowly get pulled apart and re-graft itself.

It sounds terrible. It looks like a Frankenstein device. I would be doing these slides looking at these illustrations and just like feeling in my body how weird and painful that must be. But anyway, so we were making slides and you know, I was doing lettering with Letraset for the

Speaker 2 (08:18.614)
And letraset is the rub down lettering and I'm going to ask you more about that later on as well.

I keep forgetting it's so much, letraset is a catch-all term for me, but it is one brand of this dry transfer type technology where you scratch down a letter and it moves from a sheet onto a piece of paper, you'll eventually photograph.

of listeners sitting there just going, my, I remember that.

Let's get back to that. In that way about how you have to learn things through doing and through making, which is what I like about having to do things in a manual way, you can't take things for granted that it's going to look okay. I was doing out these captions and the designer I was working with just said, it's like, just be careful what you're doing. If you have a letter that's round on the bottom like an O, it has to just sit a little bit below that pencil line that you sketched out or else it's going to look like it's jumping up into the air. And he was totally right. I could see it.

immediately once he pointed it out. That single remark when I was 17 years old has stayed with me ever since because it's like, yes, of course. I see. I see the immediate result of what you're talking about. And that's turned out to be like just fundamental to dealing with typography is you have to trust your eyes sometimes more than the abstract rule that sits in your head about how things go.

Speaker 2 (09:33.462)
And do you think that might have unlocked you going from just being a, not just being a graphic designer, but going from being a designer to a type designer, understanding or thinking about the way type was constructed?

Well, typographer. I wish I had clocked that type design was a thing you could do when I was much younger. I studied graphic design. I practiced graphic design for many years. Typography was always the part that I loved about it. Like, no question. Type made more sense to me than color made sense to me. Then art direction made more sense to me. That

ability to manipulate these things that you could see or touch could have such a like a big abstract impact. The implicit experience of looking at a thing could be governed by what you do with typography. Always felt very powerful and very satisfying to me to be able to manipulate. But the few people I know who tried working on fonts made it sound terrible. A couple of my teachers in school at the time I was at

Boston University for college had done some work on font production. And I, I realize now that of course they were working in the early days of digitization where it was proprietary tools and very difficult to use. They just made it sound like it was more, more work than pleasure. And it put me off thinking it was something you could

Before this type was literally made by hand. This was the in-between stage before we have the tools now which we I guess we don't even really think about half the time.

Speaker 1 (11:01.102)
Yeah, exactly. This is before like desktop font editors. Those started appearing, you know, at, at scale around the same time that I was in design school. But, know, I guess my professor had already been burned by the experience of the early days of digital tools, which, as I said, were very proprietary used by very big companies and were a matter of taking visual outputs and trying to map the contours and then using a variety of software tools to refine them.

for a long time, typography has felt like it's quite an intimidating thing that you have to be a real specialist and you have to talk about it in hallowed terms. And it almost felt like they were kind of gatekeepers to it. So it sounds a little bit like that's part of it.

It, it, that's very correct. And it's, that's something that I've tried to consciously counter my whole career as, an educator, as a practitioner is trying to open up that gate to people and get them to realize, you know, make choices that you like, try something, see what happens. You will never develop any sense of how to get what you'd like at the end, unless you try, unless you feel around, you don't have to study all the rules and

internalize that before you have the courage to touch something, especially now that fonts are embedded in almost every experience people touch. People should not be afraid of selecting a font and just saying something. That's what's powerful about the ubiquity of fonts today is every person, the moment they realize they are offered a choice, suddenly gets a little bit of creative power because they think it's like, my choice means something and changes the feeling of what I can do.

Like it's exactly what started me down the path when I was 14 is like, if I choose one thing or the other, it feels different. Huh? So what do I want this to feel like?

Speaker 2 (12:48.738)
And what I love is it's so instinctive, especially if you do this with, with schools with children before they ever think it. And when I do games where I ask people, which of these fonts would you go on a date with? And people have very, very, very clear choices. I would date that one. would maybe have a one, one date with that person. No, no, no, no, no. And they quite often surprise themselves that these strong opinions are even in there. You showed on Instagram, a cover of drunk.

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (13:17.72)
drummer magazine, which I thought was fabulous. And you were holding it up. It's covered in so many different type styles. And I can literally hear the cover while I'm looking at it. And you talk about maximalist and exuberant type. I think that's what's very much coming across from what you're talking about.

Well, I think most people when they meet me, if they start me down the road of talking about type, it's so clear that this is this is my thing. I have strong feelings. I have a lot of excitement. I get energized. Like when people start talking about what they like about fonts that they see or things that they do that seeing other people make that connection makes me feel like I'm not crazy that this thing that I'm deeply immersed in.

is a part of other people's experience.

There are enough of us, every now and then, especially talks at places like the St. Bride Library in London, you get a room full of people who will laugh at jokes about kerning that the rest of the world will just sit there and go, I have no idea what you're laughing absolutely.

That brings me back to what I wanted to get back to, the LetraSet, the dry transfer type. I, a little bit of preamble, but this is probably the right audience for it. I studied graphic design at a time when desktop publishing was coming to the fore. So I was taught my first year or two with all analog methods, and I was itching to use the computers just to get things done faster. And it seemed interesting and cool, and I wouldn't have to laboriously do all this stuff by hand.

Speaker 1 (14:49.196)
So I very quickly raced to digital means of making stuff for graphic design. And it was years later that I came back to the experience of doing things with my hands and playing around with these analog methods of manipulating type and making imagery, which is very different experience of practicing typography, doing it with your hands or relying on text magically appearing on a screen. So I eventually started collecting Letra sets.

Tell us the name of the company that you do that under.

That's a that project is called Letterslut. Again, it's it speaks to my my sense of maximalism about this. There's no need to be choosy. Bring it all on.

which is the best name in the world.

Speaker 2 (15:33.79)
And I think that's also what everybody else will be sitting there going, that's what I'm so excited about. The name literally coins the emotion that we feel for it.

And no one from the current over of the trademark has hassled me about it. So I'm also grateful for that. I began researching Letraset and the typefaces that were produced by the company and other makers of dry transfer because of my interest in looking at vintage magazines. And I was like, there's a marriage here, the kinds of typefaces that were available and the process of setting type that was very unique to a certain time and a place and a way of making things.

And in talking about this research, particularly about the use of Letraset and how it works and why you would lead you to design things a certain way, I can look out at the audience and the audience just cleaves into to other people who have no idea what I'm talking about and people who clearly are having this vivid sense memory of the hours they spent laboriously setting letter by letter on

non-repro photo blue pencil lines, trying to line things up, trying to make things look good. It's connected to this idea of the sense memory, this whole thing that you talk about. You kind of deeply embody analog processes in yourself, especially if they took more time and it took lots of time to perfect certain perceptual skills and visual skills. If you're suddenly remembering like, my God, it used to take me an

an hour to like lay out an ad that has two headlines.

Speaker 2 (17:14.414)
And then somebody spilled a cup of coffee on it.

But of course, students who are not exposed to that, if you've encountered type in an era where it magically appears on a screen for you, and your biggest hassle maybe is the font I'm thinking about available on the machine in front of me or not, it's very hard to put yourself in the space of like, why did this seem like a good solution? What do you mean a letter was on one piece of paper and then it was on another?

And again, I bet people listening to this are having the same divide of like the folks who went through it became so immediately obsolete after years of dominance in the professional practice. Like why, why would you know about transfer type if you arrived into design and typography after it was obsolete?

I think there is still a huge love of it. Students know about it because it's a really experimental, visceral, instant way of playing and doing it.

That's a big part of the reason I'm so interested in it now. It's not just historical curiosity for me because I've experienced myself and I try to share this experience a lot about this way of making decisions when you're designing something totally changes depending on how you're setting the type and especially physical analog means take you down totally different paths than digital ones. I started playing with LetraSet after collecting it a little bit because I was doing an issue of my zine.

Speaker 1 (18:42.51)
pink mints available on

You're getting to my questions before I can ask them. Carry on, carry on.

It's perfect. So I was doing an issue of my zine that was about the intersection of punk culture and queer culture. So was trying to make it look like a punk fanzine of the kinds that I grew up seeing and making when I was in high school. And I realized very rapidly after playing a little bit in Photoshop, was like, I can't, I can't make this look.

punk rock with a filter. It still looks too artificial, too smooth, too regular. I should just get some old letcher set and do it properly. I should make my type like I was making a punk fanzine. So I did that. bought some, found some letcher set on eBay and it was brittle and dried out, which is a problem that happens with old transfer type. So as I began setting letters down, of course these cracks appear throughout the letters because the

physical transfer process is not as smooth with older material, but it made it look so much more punk rock. And then the trick that I had after years of being a typographer and type designer at that point was my reflexes for spacing and alignment are too strong. Even though the quality of the individual letters looked

Speaker 1 (19:59.938)
very like rough and distressed. The way I was setting them was quite precise. Those are just like the habits embodied in my eyes and my hands. So I started as I was doing these headlines, I had to kind of like close my eyes almost every now and then and just sort of arbitrarily put things down in order to make them look irregular. But it-

got me thinking about this other aspect of playing with physical type is that you can only use what you have in front of you. If the letter is no longer on the sheet, you can't spell something with that letter unless you graft other pieces together to like duplicate that letter.

And this was one of the greatest skills of using Letterset, was being able to comp different letters together to make them missing, usually E's because they were produced without enough letters for that reason.

Actually, intentionally. They usually had one fewer E and one fewer S than the stit-

So you would buy more sheets.

Speaker 1 (20:56.974)
And there's, but you know, the process of making things, and this is why a lot of fanzines of the era looked the way they did, is, well, if you needed the letter, well, you just pull it from somewhere else, another typeface, maybe it's a typeface of a different size, maybe it's a number one instead of an L, or vice versa.

five instead of an S the other way round.

you just had to make do and go along. And it leads you to very different choices. The way that constraints open people up to creative possibilities. If you have to be loose in your approach, you go to a loose result. And that could be very vibrant and very exciting. So I really like to do workshops now when I get the opportunity where I bring in a stack of LetraSet, hopefully with people who've never used it before so that

They get this light bulb moment. But I've done this with a bunch of class projects. It's like, here, here's a pile of stuff. Type set your name and immediately the results are more interesting because it's a bit of a challenge. It's a new material. And as soon as people start like the mixing and matching and realizing that it's not coming out in a clean line, suddenly they're rotating letters. They're playing with the arrangement and the positioning, playing with scale. It immediately.

gets people into this space of, can't assume that this is just gonna be okay. So if I can't make it look great, why don't I make it fun? And it's very easy to make it fun because you're just pushing things around. You're making choices and seeing what happens. And I think that is very, very freeing. I love doing this with design students and especially type designers who are so caught up in a world of precision to be like, just see what happens.

Speaker 1 (22:40.366)
play and see where you get. And you are not, it's not a fully abstracted process of something where you are looking at a screen and making changes and looking for a menu, looking for a bar where you make a specification. You are just rapidly moving things about with your hands on the surface. And you get this connection of what is your body doing versus what is, what is your eye seeing? And it opens you up to surprises.

And I think that idea of what's your body doing, because traditionally type lettering is such a physical process. The early letter forms, the shapes of them come from the way your arms move or the way you would carve things. Printed letters, are, it's a very physical process. So this idea that it will take it back to that physicality, just it makes sense because it's human communication.

Yeah. And I don't know calligraphy very well at all, for instance. I don't draw letters very much physically. So this experience of playing with physical or analog type is how I experienced this full body connection to type for me. That's what loosens me up is when I get out of my head and I get into my hands and my arms. This is what I love about letterpress printing, working with dry transfer type.

working with stencils, working with any sort of combination of physical elements, or even with publishing a zine or making other things. I love working with a rhizograph where you can, you're manipulating what's happening with the inks and the layering and the effects. Like designing for print and staying as close to the physical processes for me feels very much like sculpture on a very, very narrow plane. It is very physical, even though the result is flat.

and that physical part of it leads me to a lot of things that a lot of places that I can't get to. And I'm just looking at stuff on screen.

Speaker 2 (24:28.344)
two strands come from that for me. Firstly, our brains work differently when we're feeling things and moving things around. The way that our creativity suddenly connects all of these different abstract points is very different to when you're sitting there looking at an illuminated screen. Kind of jumping to an end point without going through all the previous processes. And when I'm doing something physical, there's that feeling of just being in flow when you're just got into the...

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (24:56.322)
really into it and you're not feeling like you're thinking.

very often when I'm, I have a deadline, I'm on a project I'm trying to meet, it's very difficult to get in a flow state. And if you've experienced it, I imagine you know what I'm talking about. When you get into this flow state, it's magical. It's like your happiest place. Things go away, your decisions feel like sharp and energized, and it's a wonderful place mentally to be. And I almost feel withdrawal after it goes away. But when I can't get into that productive,

fully focused state, I will sometimes just go down to like my basement, which is my studio with all my physical stuff, and I will mess around with paper and letraset, even like sorting some of the letraset or going through these old clip art books that I've collected that I'm trying to find things in. Engaging something other than just my brain and my eyes activates more of what happens.

Wish we could put you in an fMRI machine and watch that brain going... There is loads of research that will actually prove that that is the case. If you're stuck, if you're not feeling creative, the more we can do to move our bodies, to smell things or give different stimuli to our brains, the more creative we become. It's fantastic that you've got a basement to go and play in.

Well, that was the great joy of finally moving out of big cities like New York and London where I lived most of my life. I'm in Portland, Oregon, and I managed to find a house that has a whole finished basement, which now has room for my 13 crates of Letraset and all of my art supplies and my zines and boxes of paper. It is the playground I've always wanted. know, living in New York City for so long, or London too, right?

Speaker 1 (26:41.922)
You you live your life out of a single room often in these big cities. Anything you're working on has to go away when it's time to make dinner and you need that one horizontal surface in your living space again.

This is why you can't see my messy studio, but I have, yes, I have my own version. I'm going to come back to some of the creative lettering again and process, but I just want to very quickly, because you've mentioned about work, talk about what you do. You are the director of inventory strategy for international type foundry monotype. For those not familiar with the type industry, what does this mean and what do you do?

My full job title at the moment, it evolves from time to time. I am the Director of Inventory Strategy and Curation for Monotype, which I sometimes joke that Monotype is big font because Monotype is, it is the largest commercial type business in the world at this point. Well, and as a large company that has evolved, what's particularly significant about Monotype today, for better or worse, depending on who you ask is,

Monotype is the consolidation of a lot of other type companies and libraries. It is an amalgamation of type from many sources, as well as the fonts that we distribute from over 5,000 independent type foundries. And we are platform through which those fonts can be licensed to people. So my job is looking at all of these fonts that Monotype deals with. So very, very macro view because...

We are talking about well over 300,000 individual font styles. I look at what is missing from all that still. What things are the most popular and how do we cultivate them? Because popularity fuels the engine that runs the business. But of course, part of the promise is that you should be able to find anything at a company like Monotype. So trying to keep an eye on what's missing is very important part of my job.

Speaker 1 (28:36.844)
to keep an eye on what we have that is not being surfaced through the search experience. Like what do we have that people don't realize is there that they're looking for? What is emerging that we should try to make sure that we can make available?

And type, style, zeitgeist, it's so cyclical. remember when Windsor, so Windsor is a typeface with a very particular slant and a very particular shape. About 10 or 12 years ago, my friend Sam was doing ghost science tours and he was asking everybody, what's this A? And a few of us were, that's in like historic type catalogs, it's called Windsor. And then literally five years later, it's the most used typeface and it is about a hundred years old.

with.

Windsor had always been there. There was digitization of it right from the earliest days of digital fonts. were older, know, early digitizations were not the highest quality. This is something that a company like Monotype grapples with. We have a very deep catalog of older fonts. This is part of this cultivating things as they become popular. know, font is software and you have to look at it and say, is this still fit for purpose? Does this need a redevelopment or redrawing? Windsor, for instance, is part of a wave of interest

softer fonts. There's always push and pull of what things rise to the fore in the market. The classic example of what set off this re-interest in softer fonts was the Chobani yogurt rebrand. But it did lead to this whole exploration of, you can have something other than a sans. In a way, you

Speaker 2 (30:07.47)
So I'm just going to do, you can have something other than a sans serif for those, because we are starting to talk very jargony. And also I would say that with the soft typefaces, the ciabani, it was also, it was right. It was a moment in time. And especially when COVID came along, I was talking about those squidgy, Cooper Black was another one. They were literally like the banana bread that we're all baking at home of fonts. Just the type literally reflects the mood of the moment.

And Cooper Black is, I think, a classic example of the cyclical nature of typography. Cooper Black has had like three or four moments since it was first done in the early 30s. You know, was like huge, huge in the late late 60s, coasted through the 70s, often as flocked iron on t-shirt lettering. yes. And then there's a pushback against that. It comes back again because it seems retro, but

There's power to these big decorative letters. There's a reason it keeps coming back. But there is this whole wave of... So clean, mostly geometric sans serifs still rule the day commercially. But the things other than that that rise in popularity right now are often these soft counterpoints to that.

I look at data because I'm looking at so many fonts. spend a lot of time looking at data about what's selling, what's moving, what are people using. You know, the top 20 fonts on our platform are mostly sans serifs. The only serif that shows up until like maybe number 25 on that list is a typeface called Recoleta from Latino type, which is soft and expressive and

It just comes in like a breath of fresh air because it does feel a little bit more emotional than these clean lines good for corporate branding and user interface experiences.

Speaker 2 (32:07.406)
The of these typefaces is the designers that are using them, not the consumers on the street.

There's there's always a push and pull like the how much are the people who are selecting typefaces making them more popular through just the repetition of seeing things? What is the amount of market research that's feeding into why those choices are made? It's complex. think the whole our whole visual landscape is a very complex back and forth, which makes it so refreshing when something bucks the trend and proves to be successful like that Chobani rebrand.

Suddenly people realize, we wanted something different and we didn't know what it was and here it is. And people just respond. That's that alchemical magic, I think for almost all designers is how do you find something unexpected and have people greet it like it was what they wanted all along.

It's alchemy that the shape of a word, something that we look at, can evoke such a visceral response in our senses and our emotions. And that you create letter shapes that literally change the entire feel of words. So you're going from the top 10, 20, being these very minimalist, to something that is actually incredibly expressive and exuberant. When you're designing typefaces, where do you start? Where do you get the ideas from?

A lot of my career as a type designer has been working at places like Monotype or Adobe where type design is about a creative brief or a problem to solve. Especially, I did a lot of custom typefaces working at Monotype in my first stint there years ago. I was doing corporate branding typefaces, which meant I was drawing lots of sans serifs. I distinctly remember one point where for three separate clients at the same time,

Speaker 1 (33:52.364)
I was essentially designing the same brief. We want a design that's geometric because that speaks to modernity, but it has to also feel friendly and warm, which is the other end of the spectrum of geometric sans. And it has to be unique and ownable because it's a corporate typeface, but it also should feel pretty familiar because we don't want to rock the boat too much. And I had to, of course, design three different outcomes. So my own typefaces, I didn't publish my own typefaces.

when I worked at Monotype or when I worked at Adobe, because it didn't make sense for those companies to publish the kind of typefaces I wanted to make. I always make things outside of work. The more that I work, the more I have to make things outside of work to kind of maintain my emotional wellbeing and work-life balance. So the typefaces I finally released as Bijuu Type had been long simmering ideas.

that often came out of trying to find exactly the right typeface for something and being frustrated. One family of mine called Ringgold where it's a family of related styles, not multiple weights that just look like a scale, but it is a group of typefaces that fit together. When you switch from one style to another, it just changes the feeling of it. And that started for me of wanting to, trying to use

this typeface, it was actually the typeface used for the masthead of drummer magazine in its earlier years, but a typeface called Egyptian Bold Condensed, which it pops up all over the places. But I don't love everything about the design and every time I tried to use it, I would get frustrated about very specific things. didn't like the spacing. I didn't like, you know, where the weight.

gathered in different letter shapes. didn't like these squidgy bulbous terminals that it had. So I redrew it for the purposes of what I was trying to do. Just looked at it from scratch being like, all right, I know what I want to fix. That led me to a place. And once I got to that sort of place where I'd resolved this design into what I wanted it to be, which effectively became a new typeface, I realized that if I start manipulating specific details, the personality changes.

Speaker 1 (36:08.142)
So if the serifs come off of the main strokes at a 90 degree angle, instead of with some curvature, it feels crispered a little bit more solid and suddenly have a slab serif companion in this family. If you chop this, if you chop the serifs off altogether, you get a sand serif and that spaces a little differently. And then if you round the edges of the sand serif, you get this soft approach, which you know,

feels also very different. If you go back to the slab and remove the stroke contrasts, you make the serifs the same weight as all the other lines with like no round details, you get a version of this like sort of like big chunky athletic, you know, high school sports team style lettering. And that became the idea of the family was you manipulate the details on you manipulate the flesh on the skeleton. And it feels very, very different and speaks in a different tone.

So I'm suddenly imagining them all as different types of chocolate. And I've just worked out why, because the original, I think green and blacks logo was in Egyptian bold condensed. Somewhere it's, but all of your descriptions are now I can imagine exactly which kind of chocolate each one of those would be.

funny how you say chocolate because I know having done some of your taste tests, experiments over the years, it's a similar idea of let's change this variable and see how you respond differently to the end result. So it's like I'm manipulating a recipe like let's let's put a little bit less of this ingredient a little bit more of this ingredient. And it doesn't become a different food, but it becomes a different version of the food that you just had.

I can't chat to you without talking about type tattoos because you are literally a one person walking type reference library. And if the electricity goes off, if the internet goes down, we've still got you as a walking type library.

Speaker 1 (38:01.184)
When so I mean, since this is not a visual medium, people may not realize that my my arms and now chunks of my legs and torso are covered in tattoos of letter forms from different typefaces. It becomes a great, a great response. When people know that you're a type designer, there's like, what's your favorite font? And it's a

terrible question that's impossible to answer, but I just will hold out my arms and say, well, this is the shortlist. Clearly, I love the typefaces that I have placed onto my body for the rest of time.

But then I know you keep filling extra gaps because you find new ones that are favorites.

Well, it's it's it's I've new ones that are extra favorites. And like said, I have this maximal feeling about typography, because, you know, how do you how do you choose just one when there's so many beautiful things? But the tattoos themselves are a long running design composition problem. You know, you you live with a few letters and you're like, you know, that could be counterbalanced by something in a different spot or maybe needs a spot of color here to get sort of the distribution of tone.

They also are the ultimate invariable type in not only when you flex, but also as we get older and they will gradually change as time goes or as you move.

Speaker 1 (39:17.774)
For a long time, I did not want to put any type tattoos anywhere on my torso or parts of my body that I felt might be too prone to aging and the shape of my body changing. I finally got over that as I ran out of space on my arms. It's also part of the nature of having tattoos. Once you have something tattooed on you, you don't look at it as like an external picture anymore. It's a part of you.

It grows with you, it changes over time. And you don't think about it so much as a decoration, it is just another piece of you grows along with you.

I'm going to ask you for a photo showing some of your tattoos for the show notes so that people can actually see what we're talking about.

Yeah, I think it'll be obvious when people see them. For me, I get a kick out of the facts. I'm a middle-aged white guy now. I've been doing this for long time. I feel a little bit anonymous looking in the winter. In the summer, everyone wants to talk to me and everyone wants to know what's going on. No one forgets meeting me in the summer. In the winter, I'm just some other bald guy with a beard.

Most of your tattoos are very exuberant. Every single one is very stylish. It has either a place in history or I know you've got a couple that you've designed, but every single one will have a story behind it. So Dan, I have to come on to the final questions. Tell me about an item that evokes happy sense memories when you look at it.

Speaker 1 (40:43.246)
Picture it, Venice, 2023. Basically, I have been, for the last two summers, I have been teaching this printing and type design workshop in Italy in a beautiful printing museum called Tipoteca Italiana, an hour north of Venice.

It's my dream to go to this one year.

you would love it, you'd go crazy. It's an intense two weeks and I like to spend a little time around Venice afterward, just to calm down after the nerdy type excitement. I like to go kayaking because it's cool to be on the water in Venice, to see it from angles that you don't see walking around. The water in Venice can be a little brackish depending on whether the tide is coming in or out. So when you're in a kayak right there on the water, you're very close to the smell of the water.

times. I was kayaking around the canals of Venice with a group of the people I'd just been in this type workshop with and got this incredible strong sweet smell that was delightful and such a refreshing change from the overall smell of the water. I didn't I didn't know what it was. It was clearly floral and

My friend Rory Sparks, who's my other teacher in this group said, that's jasmine flower. You could look up and you could see these jasmine bushes are cascading over the edges of the walls around these Venetian villas. This is quite a picturesque description, but it's really what it was about. It really tuned me in to this experience of like you'd be turning a corner from a canal and it goes from smelling a little briny to this.

Speaker 1 (42:23.822)
beautiful burst of floral scent punching through that. Now whenever I smell Jasmine, it gets me right back to this moment of being on the water with friends, of hyped up because I'd been in this flow state for two weeks. It brings me back to such a very particular kind of special moment and feeling. And it just comes from that trigger of the smell.

That's fabulous. I have a simulon one with Jasmine from visiting my sister who lives in Larkspur just outside San Francisco. And it just takes me. I have one final thing I would like to ask you. What one thing about sight and senses would you like listeners to take away from this conversation?

Speaker 2 (43:48.664)
Dan Ratting and thank you so much for being an absolutely wonderful guest.

Speaker 2 (44:01.068)
Would you like updates, extras, sense hacking experiments and book recommendations from the guests? Head over to seeingsenses.substack.com. We'll take you beneath the surface to explore what's happening inside our brain and body, along with updates on the latest in cross-disciplinary science.