Gen and Zrinka sit down to chat about meeting in grad school, starting a type foundry, and the perils of raising a child while being a type designer. We announce Yumex, the new typeface designed by them, and released through Ohno.

Elizabeth Goodspeed can speak in paragraph form. It’s pretty impressive to me, someone that has to write in paragraph form and then read it aloud. I had been wanting to talk to Elizabeth for a long time, because she’s so funny. I knew she was smart, and a great designer, but I still don’t understand how her brain works. She’s known for spotting trends, naming them, creating archives around them. But her understanding of design goes far beyond aesthetic tropes. In this interview, we talk about punching up vs punching down, why she’s reluctant to get on tiktok, and how she can’t quit twitter.

Summer is here, and so is this 18 minute identity crisis as I navigate running a business, renovating two homes, with two kids, and moving Ohno headquarters from Oakland to San Jose, California.

We go behind the scenes at Ohno to tell the story of our new typeface, Casserole. It began as a reinterpretation of Louis Minott’s Davida from 1966. I got to speak with his granddaughter to learn more about Louis as a designer, father, and grandfather. Then, we have a breif conversation between Colin Ford, and Jamie Otelsberg, the Ohno designers that worked on the project with me.

Jen Wagner didn’t come to design as a designer; she actually studied marketing, had a slew of businesses, eventually landed in fonts, and just hit the ground running. Today she’s a powerhouse, running her foundry Jen Wagner Co. She is prolific and has an incredible knack for hitting the nail on the head stylistically with each release. I absolutely loved talking to Jen, because it was so refreshing to hear someone thinking strategically with this different background. In our conversation, I learned about how just a single kernel of an idea from Jen’s marketing education—the minimum viable product—and a chance encounter with a mentor led to her discovering a whole new way of making a living. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Jen Wagner.

Lynne Yun, what hasn’t she done? She worked at Apple, worked at Monotype, she’s got her own stuff through her foundry Space Type, she’s a calligrapher, type designer, lettering artist, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg somehow. More recently, she attended the School of Poetic Computation and has become an expert on generative typography. Now, Juan Villanueva, grew up in Peru, as well as New Jersey, that old classic combo. He went to Reading. He’s holding down at MOnotype these days, but has an affinity for aligning himself and helping out with numerous organizations like Society of Scribes, Type at Cooper, Type West, he even started Type Crit Crew which is a free resource for type design students to meet 1–1 with experienced type designers for virtual critiques. Then, Lynne and Juan, who are buds, looked at each other, and said, we don’t have enough going on, so let’s start a type school. A real one, not like Ohno Type School. An actual school with classes, and instructors, and students. It’s an ambitious undertaking, and truly noble in my opinion. Their mission statement is to form a more inclusive and equitable future in type and design by increasing access to education.

I’ll be honest, this episode was recorded in July, but some things, like the work of our guest, are timeless. I talked with Kris Sowersby for almost two hours, which makes this the longest Ohno Radio episode in history. You know Kris’s work, it’s top notch, in both concept, and execution. I hate him, because he can take even the most well-trodden thing, like I dunno, Helvetica or Times, and still manage to do it in a way that even the most jaded graphic designers can find compelling. Kris’ type foundry is called Klim, and you know that already, it’s on Future Fonts, but what you might not know about is the Future Fonts Slack channel. I’ve seen Kris being super helpful, offering sound advice on topics about pricing and ethics. You know who doesn’t take a ton of time to write helpful posts there? Me! Our conversation gets a bit raw and Kris talks about his mom sadly passing away. When I re-listened to that part, I found myself struggling to understand his grief. But since this episode, I lost my brother. So if my reaction sounds a bit like someone who’s just unable to fully empathize, well, I think my reaction now would be a little different. Anyway, sorry to be bummer! I hope you enjoy this conversation with Kris Sowersby.

A few months ago, I saw Ben Kiel talk about a covid scare in his family that kept him home from the Typographics conference. I knew Ben was planning on attending, and I knew he was stoked to go! Now, I was also feeling just a bit of fomo about the conference, so I reached out to talk. Now if you listen to this podcast, you probably know who Ben is, but if you don't, he's what we call in the industry, a low-key hitter. Ben is behind many of the most popular typefaces being used today. He's worked at House Industries, done work for Sharp and Klim Commercial, and many of the bigger independent type foundries, and now, he's 1/2 of XYZ type alongside Jesse Ragan. Ben studied type design at the University of Reading blah blah blah bio stuff. Here's what's interesting. Ben has kids, and teaches basically full time. And he's a total expert in font production, and can draw as evidence by his fantastic typeface Ballast which is my personal favorite from Ben. I am pretty freaked out by people that can solve every side of a problem. Like, if you can draw, you shouldn't be allowed to also know how to make world class fonts, from a technical perspective. Whatever I'm just jealous at this point. Anyhow Ben is also doing social media for his foundry, follow them on instagram and tiktok by the way. XYZ underscore type. AND they recently pushed a bunch of new changes to the XYZ website. Anyone who has worked on a type foundry website before know that those projects are just an insane amount of work. I've known Ben for years, but still he's the kind of guy that just makes you feel like you've known him longer than that. So I hope you enjoy this interview with one of my favorite people in the type design biz, Ben Kiel.

Today on the show we have Rutherford Craze, the designer behind the foundry Mass Driver. In just about 2 years, Rutherford has taken his Mass Driver from a little baby, to a fully adult foundry. It’s a truly remarkable trajectory, and I wanted to talk with him, and just see how he did it. You might have seen his Future Fonts release entitled MD Nichrome, and you might have also seen his other Mass Driver releases like MD IO, MD Primer, and MD System. His work is meticulously clean, and technically impressive—but his talents seem to go beyond just producing excellent typefaces. The marketing is genuine, and on point. His website is beautifully designed, he even has a few free web tools he's made available—so here’s the thing: If you’re looking for the blueprint in setting up a niche business, just look at Rutherford, because he seems to have it all figured out. I was eager to catch up, see how the pandemic has treated him, and why he moved back to The Hague.

In today’s episode, we answer a question from Tony Quintero who wrote in to ask how students can get the most of whatever program they’re in. The answer to that question boils down to Sister Corita Kent’s 10 Rules for Teachers and Students. We dive into the rules, and talk about why this short piece of writing has been hugely influential to me. Special thanks to my Typograph 1 teacher, Angie Wang, who first taught us about those rules.

This episode features Fabiola Mejia, the founder of the brand new type foundry, Supercontinente. I'm always urging people to start their own thing, own 100% of the work they create, and release their own stuff. Do their own marketing, make the type, just do it all, yourself. I think it's mostly because I've had a lot of fun going that way, and I truly believe in owning all of your own work. But, here's the rub: it takes an extremely specific person, and personality type to do that! It's hard. But that's why when I see people, like Fabiola, doing that exact thing, it just makes my heart happy. She's put in the time to become viciously talented, and has conviction in her own ideas that she's bringing to life on her own. So before you even listen to this, I encourage you to check out supercontinent.com if you haven't yet, and follow @supercontinente_ on Instagram, just so we have a shared frame of reference for the stuff that we talk about in this interview. Fabiola is a force of nature, she's someone I truly admire, so I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation, as much as I enjoyed having this conversation.

Here's why I like Christian Schwartz. Ok, the guy was like a type design wunderkind. Christian was releasing type—not just designing—at age 15. So that's page 1 of this bio. Now where does he go from there? The banger of bangers Neutraface. He does that when he’s 25! What was I doing when I was 25? Jack Shit is what I was doin. Anyhow, Christian has released world class type at every foundry known to man, won every award, worked with some very very fancy clients, but honestly, I don't care. All I care about, is when I see Christian, all he wants to talk about is, how cute his kids are. He is a sweet, sweet man, and he's always been really kind to me. I hope you enjoy this interview, with Christian Schwartz.

It was TypeCon Portland 20212 where I first got to meet Travis and Lizy, and was immediately impressed with how gregarious Lizy is, and this was right around the time that Travis’ typeface Chartwell came out. They both seemed nice a smart, and they would usually head out to Typecon, so it was easy to maintain a friendship with them. I remember a specific moment when hanging out with the two of them just felt like being at summer camp or something. Nice, smart, hardworking, genuine folks. Then many years later they reached out to talk about an idea they had to release typefaces in versions, before they're totally finished. Around that time I had just done a series on my instagram that was 50 unfinished typefaces. I guess they saw that and thought I'd be a collaborator on that project and we began working together to assemble the first group of foundry partners. I did a lot of the branding work, Travis and Lizy handled everything about for the website, and I got to witness first hand the level of detail that Tbone and Lizy bring to a project. These folks sweat details. I cannot reiterate that enough. They're possessed. It's a level of craft that goes across every discipline, whether its design, or messaging, or interfaces, or typefaces, Travis and Lizy, think about it. A lot. Of course they have done more typefaces over the years, and brought lots of other projects to life, but I think Future Fonts is really a perfect example of everything they can do. Now I'm not participating much on Future Fonts these days, cause I just wanted to focus on running Ohno, but they have taken it an RAN. If you're listening to this podcast you probably know about it already, but what you might not know is that there were a lot of other projects that came before. There was Exif, a way for photographer to protect their work online. Notch, an iphone app for keeping score of analog games, all their work for Design Week Portland and XOXO Fest, and now they're putting up a new label Vectro, for all their type design. They have a forthcoming release with the intriguing title of Kablammo, and honestly, I just wanted to catch up with them. So we recorded the conversation and here it is.

It's been a bit of a break, but we're back with a sort of special episode where I interview my friend Erik Marinovich. I've been friends with Erik for years, so I went into this episode with no notes and no research! Erik and I chat every week, and over the past year I've been helping out with him launching his own type foundry. Today is special because today, right now, these things that he's been working on are available for the first time! Erik has a background in lettering, and of course that’s still a part of his livelihood but we wanted to document the birth of a foundry, and the transition that someone takes going from something else, to the world of selling fonts. Maybe you can get something out of our conversation because maybe you're doing the same thing. At any rate, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Erik Marinovich, of Nuform Type.

Today we're talking to one of my favorite people of all time, Bob Aufuldish. When I was in my very first year of design school at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, another one of my favorite people, Angie Wang was my Typography 1 teacher, and she just knew that I'd love Bob, and implored me to take his class. I ended up having Bob as an instructor for 2 different semesters in my undergrad and that was a very big deal to me. Bob ended up becoming a sort of role model for his design sensibilities, his sense of humor, being an educator. Everyone loves Bob, so the question becomes, “How do we be more like Bob?” I don't think I know, but it's a good thing to imagine. Bob is primarily a print designer, a husband, a father of two, he's designed type, identities, tons and tons of books, he’s fond of wearing a striped shirt with a striped tie. He's absolutely disarmingly unpretentious and talented, which is one of my favorite combinations. Bob’s a member of the AGI, but never mentions it. When I was in school, Bob began his class by saying “This is supposed to be fun.” That idea has echoed in my brain since his class, and has basically become the mission statement of our type foundry. Bob came to my garage studio for the first ever LIVE recording of this podcast, and brought ME flowers.

Have you ever seen a graphic designer act like a jerk, or act all cool, or have their nose in the air in some way because their list of clients was pretty high profile? Or they were running like a successful studio or something. Here's the antidote to that problem: Jeremy Mickel. the founder of Mckl his Eponymous foundry, and the designer of some amazing retail fonts, and a wildly impressive list of custom projects. I'm talkin Adidas, Uber, Ogilvy, logotypes for Fisher Price, American Express, Etsy, like are you kidding me? Whats interesting is the steps he took to get this this thing really goin are not shrouded in mystery. There is no secret to his success, and in our conversation he shares totally openly the things he did to make it happen. It's not easy of course, and the guy has been pounding the pavement for years, but it's not complicated either. I really admire Jeremy for his taste, and drawing ability, work ethic, his sense of where there are still gaps in the type market, but most of all, just because he's a really nice guy. So I hope you get something out of this interview with Jeremy Mickel.

Our second installment in the life saga of Corinne Ang, and I talk to my dad, George R. Edmondson, about when he became an adult (tl;dr: age 37).

Today I'm talking with Jaimey Shapey, who is yet another graduate of Type@Cooper in New York. You know those people that come out of high school, and seem to immediately be on a path? They graduate in four years and get thrust into doing what they're gonna do when they're like 22? That was NOT ME, but it seemed to be the case for Jaimey. I first met her through Type Crit Crew about a year ago, and was wondering how she was doing, so I invited her to come on the podcast to catch up, and I'm really glad I did. Jaimey is really funny, candid, sincere and really fun to talk to. Our conversation spanned a lot of topics, I learn who Thanos is, she talks about how Jeff Keedy kept her in check, but mostly I just wanted to talk to her about her tweets.

I met the designer Jérémy Landes at the Lure Typography conference in the South of France, and he just turned out to be such a lovely individual—and when I say individual I mean it. His typeface Digestive was started as something he just put together, then it came over to Future Fonts, then finally when it was done, we released it into the Ohno library as the first typeface that was not drawn by me. So Jérémy and I became friends, and a few weeks ago he emailed to just set up a time to chat, and catch up. Now here's where I pulled a real jerk move. I was like "let's record it for the podcast", thus, commercializing, a moment between friends. I'm sorry for this Jeremy, but because he's a nice person, agreed, and here's the resulting conversation. If you're not familiar with Jérémy's work, I'd characterize it as pretty avant garde mostly display faces that seem to throw out every rule in the book—but if you look deeper, you find an intricate system working effortlessly. His stuff is contemporary, beautifully drawn, and unique, just like he is!

Today we talk to an absolute powerhouse among independent type designers, Flavia Zimbardi. Flavia is from Rio de Janeiro, and spent the first 10 years of her career focussed on fashion editorial work until she abruptly moved to New York, and began attending Type at Cooper. Flavia is one of those people that you meet, and instantly love. She is stylish, and warm, and fun, and all these things are equally represented in her typefaces.