Tobias Frere-Jones has designed typefaces for clients like Martha Stewart Living, the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Carnegie Hall, Stacey Abrams, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral office, the American Civil Liberties Union, New York City Football Club, and many more. Years ago, a friend of his asked him what he thought what letters are made of. Frere-Jones’s answer came quickly and in a single word: negotiation.
As a culture, we agree that letters take a certain shape and carry specific meaning, says Frere-Jones. Running his own typeface foundry in Brooklyn, he describes himself a translator, oscillating between a client’s idea of what their brand or project communicates and his own understanding of the shapes that make letters and what any given design of those shapes communicates to the people looking at it.
Says Frere-Jones: “An important part of my process is to be able to either alternate between two modes—engineer or artist—or hold them in my head simultaneously so they can collaborate with one another.”
The shortest version of my story is that I am a writer who wanted to be a painter. That’s how I came to this. The slightly longer version is that through high school, I was pursuing every kind of visual art I could get my hands onto: drawing and painting and photography. I also enjoyed writing. My brother, father, and great-grandfather were all writers. I came to settle on abstract painting. That’s where I thought I’d want to go. I thought I’d have to choose one and abandon the others. I discovered by accident through my father’s work in advertising that there was this thing called typeface design. I realized it was an intersection of working with abstract expressive form and language at the same time. I wasn’t even looking for it because I didn’t think it was possible.
In 1992, no one was teaching this. I realized that I was not going to learn what I wanted to learn in school. At the time, typeface was too specialized to include in most design school curriculums. That has since changed. My first job was a junior designer at the Font Bureau in Boston. I was going to learn on the job, which is how designers centuries before me also learned. I was most acutely aware of all of the things I didn’t know. I was trying to soak up everything the designer I worked for gave me—a guy by the name of David Berlow.
There are two schools of thought on how designers position themselves in the world. One is that they are engineers; they are solving problems and maximizing results and all of the vocabulary that comes through that more practical viewpoint. The other is that they are half a step removed from being an artist; they bring intuition and expression that can be this necessary color and animating force in what they provide for their clients. Both are true. An important part of my process is to be able to either alternate between these two modes—engineer or artist—or hold them in my head simultaneously so they can collaborate with one another. That kind of crossover is an important part of how I work.
The two fields that I turn to most frequently are music and history. In a very amateur way, I play keyboard and synthesizer and make sound audio collages. I think that has a lot of overlap in typeface design and in programming—which is something that’s very close to typeface design. It’s really a very narrow palette of elements. There are only 12 notes, really, in Western music. Everything is a variant or a combination after that. The other place where I give my attention is history. I’m particularly interested in the history of New York. It’s my hometown, and it’s all around me. It feels parallel in the same way that the alphabet is this set of shapes that have meaning because we all agree they have meaning. The city and its streets have a similar aspect in being developed, handed down, and modified, and interpreted and handed down again, resting critically on consensus as to how this space works and what it’s for.
The design and production of typefaces has always been close to the technology that delivers it. It’s involved right from the start, whether this is someone cutting punches for hand casting in the 15th century or making machine drawings for automated line casters or making digital fonts now. We need to be really, really close to the technology. There are designers who are also programmers; I can read code and see what it does, but I can’t write it myself.
There is a lot of attention, and also anxiety, directed to the portfolio a student will have when they graduate. If they want to find a job they have to be showing something. But when I’m looking at designers, I’m looking less at the actual thing in front of me, but at how deeply they understood what they made. That’s hard to tell from looking at a résumé. That has to come from a conversation. I’ll ask plenty of questions I already know the answer to, but I want to see how they answer it and what it says about their priorities and how they think.
My job is to be a translator. I translate between their [clients’] brand objectives and a set of shapes. I need to translate one into the other. It’s an important part of how I work with clients, though I won’t describe it that way. I will describe it in whatever terms that are native to them and their internal culture and their problems. I need to translate a cultural history into something that will be meaningful to the chief marketing officer, and so on. Often, that will mean speaking to different stakeholders in different ways. The legal team will care about one thing and the web developers will care about something else. The CFO will care about something else altogether. If I can speak to all of them, and make everyone feel like they are heard, that’s the basis of a successful project.
A long time ago a colleague of mine was writing an article, and asked his friends to give the quickest possible answer: What are letters made of? Negotiation. They are made of a designer negotiating between a design concept and the strict but weirdly difficult-to-express rules about what the alphabet is, what is a letter and what isn’t. The negotiation between one period of history and next about what’s normal and what’s weird about typographic style.
One of the things I collect is children’s spelling primers, the first book a child would have. It’s fascinating to see what should be a starting point for a child to think what letters are. Turn-of-the-century America and 19th century Germany are going to look kind of weird to us now but that was their idea of normal. The way that has drifted over time is telling. It’s fascinating all by itself, but it is something as designers we need to keep in mind. In those forms that are presented as normal. I think there are assumptions about the context that they’re being seen in. Whether that’s a social context or technological context—and I think there is an unspoken connection to what has preceded it, that is not explicitly pointed to, but I think is still felt.
I find my best or clearest solutions when I’m talking something out. I find it valuable to work with people with whom I can have some meandering conversation and, sort of in a less guarded or less structured moment, see something I had missed before. I think being able to describe the problem in the clearest, most concise way is a really reliable way to figure out what the solution ought to be.
My days are difficult to have a really reliable routine. So much will depend on what kinds of conversations we are having with clients, what kind of proposals or pitches. I try to limit interruptions, or herd them into spaces in the day so the space in between can be spent in creative work and thinking. I’ll check headlines in the morning, look at lunch, and then again on the way home. I try to keep all of that clear for the rest of the day, and be conscious that this little technological marvel of a phone is so adept at shredding my concentration.
I try to be aware of how much time and energy gets lost in switching gears—whatever mode it is—business planning or design concept. I try to stay there for at least half an hour or ideally a full hour before I turn to something else.
I think there’s a parallel between this field and, say, costume design for films. Even if we don’t explicitly consciously notice what a character in a film is wearing, it will still be there exerting an influence in the same way the color cast of a scene will quietly set a tone, the way the texture of a fabric and a suit jacket and the way its cut and fit will very quietly tell you, “This guy is the villain.” That’s the kind of space that typography can work in. It can also be much more overt and draw attention to itself and be very upfront about its characterization.
More people have the experience of needing to choose what the font is. They can see for themselves what the effect is if they put something on Instagram and format the caption like this or like that. They can see how it affects what they are trying to say.
This business has gone through a lot of changes in the last 10 or 20 years, but the public always seems to be getting more sophisticated when it comes to typography and aware of it and the work we do. I can remember when I would need some amount of time to explain to someone what my job is and how someone can make a living at doing that. It’s been years since I’ve had to explain my work like that to anybody.