A Day in the Life of Tobias Frere-Jones
The eminent typographer reveals his influences, how he stays focused, and the one thing he wishes he’d learned earlier.
Tobias Frere-Jones is one of the most famous typographers in the world, and whether you notice it or not, you probably see his work every day. For instance, his Gotham typeface has been used on everything from Coca-Cola cans to Saturday Night Live’s opening credits and Barack Obama’s HOPE election posters. He also designed such fonts as Surveyor (initially for Martha Stewart Living) and Whitney (developed for New York’s Whitney Museum), and Retina (commissioned by The Wall Street Journal to increase legibility while saving space), also available from Frere-Jones Type.
Last year, he released his first font following his much-publicized contentious split from his former business partner, Jonathan Hoefler. Called Mallory, it’s a highly personal design, blending two typographic personalities: British sobriety and American cheeriness. (He’s the son of a British mother and American father.) Here, he talks about his creative life as he starts over with his eponymous Brooklyn-based type foundry.
Contributions by Graham Bradley, Erin McLaughlin, Aoife Mooney and Tim Ripper
Kid Alarm
The day begins with a five-year-old jumping on the bed. The early morning is about the family, just the mechanical stuff of getting ready and having breakfast. It’s time with us all together before any thought of work comes into the picture. I’ll take a quick look at email, and if something is on fire, or it involves someone who’s in a European time zone and they’re about to leave the office, I’ll reply. With a few things excepted, work stuff can wait until I actually leave the house. Either before I get on the train or right after, I get coffee. That has to happen.
The Commute
The subway ride, even though it is only three stops from my home in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill to the office in Gowanus, is where I start lining up the priorities, so that I can take care of the most urgent stuff first. That could be giving comments to one of our designers so they can proceed, or writing a proposal, or answering an email from a client.
On the Right Foot
I have noticed that it helps my concentration to complete something as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter how big it is. Turning something around and getting it off my desk is satisfying, and it starts the day on a positive note.
Email Zones
Email is amazingly potent at cutting the day up into tiny bits and draining concentration. I try to herd all of the email activity into two hour-long zones at the beginning of the day and again in the middle or late afternoon. Some days go a lot better than others, but that’s the goal, and hopefully, the space in between is less fragmented.
What Me, Hungry?
I have to remind myself that I need to eat at somewhat regular intervals. I routinely just forget and then won’t notice it until I feel kind of weird and can’t keep a thought in my head for more than a minute. Oh, it’s because it’s four o’clock, and I haven’t had lunch.
Soundtrack
Music is never really all that far away when I’m doing any kind of work. I listen to a few different kinds — a lot of it is electronica of some vintage or another. Just about everything I listen to does not have lyrics of any kind. I just find that too distracting. Music with lyrics that I’ve known for decades, however, will get a pass on this particular point. Putting on New Order’s “Brotherhood” still reminds me of sitting down at my desk when I was 15 years old and getting out a technical pen and trying to figure out how to draw letters.
Mentors
I had the fantastic luck of working alongside [type designer] Matthew Carter. He taught me about how the micro scale of decisions and the macro result will influence each other. Also, I absorbed his attitude about history as the foundation but not a boundary. He had this great way of putting it at a guest lecture a couple of months ago: “We do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants, but that obliges us to look out further.” The late Mike Parker also taught me a tremendous amount of history around the craft of typefounding — not just aesthetic but technical and commercial.
I was a painter before I was a designer and had two indirect painting mentors: Kazimir Malevich and Kurt Schwitters. Malevich had a way of provoking an emotional reaction with the simplest shapes. It feels relevant to drawing a set of caps and a set of lowercase marks — they’re there to convey information but should have some kind of emotional dimension as well. It’s important to remember that Malevich was able to pull this off with shapes that are so much simpler than anything in the alphabet.
Schwitters is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Malevich. Malevich was up in this abstract plane, effectively a religion he invented for himself; Schwitters was down on the ground in this tactile, visceral reality. There’s a texture and vitality in his collages, which he made from bits of type that are on the pieces of paper that he tore up and pasted back together. I try to remember that more kind of earthbound — for lack of a better word — perspective.
Takes Notes
The advice I’d give to my younger self is: Be more disciplined about writing stuff down. There are plenty of ideas or insights that I found at one point or another and then I lost because I didn’t think I needed to write down. For instance, I had been talking to a client about getting better copyfit on their narrow columns. I realized that horizontal scaling not only distorts shapes and rhythm, but can’t deliver a matching increase of copyfit. The hyphenation would require a syllable’s worth of compression (not just a letter) before any line breaks change. So you’d need to do something pretty conspicuous before you saw any difference, and the type would suffer accordingly.
Now, I have notes scribbled all over the place. I’ve found that it’s better to get them down in fragments than to stop the train of thought and figure out the absolutely tightest way of patenting the thought. I’ll worry about that later. The subway ride home can be a place where I’m thinking out a lot of ideas. If my subway stop is coming up, I need to figure out some way of writing them down very quickly, otherwise I’m going to end up in some other part of town.
