Jonathan Hoefler

New York, June 1996

What is your relationship to history?
A little like my relationship to gravity: truly inescapable. Most of the work for which I am known has a strong connection to history, at least insofar as history is represented through the history of typography. The historical precedents come through in varying degrees: a typeface like Mazarin, which is an explicit revival of a specific artifact (Jenson's type of 1470), obviously has more historical footing than a face like Ziggurat, which is a synthesis of an entire idiom (the nineteenth-century "egyptian"). I think all work has a connection to what has gone before, and that it's a twentieth-century conceit that typefaces can be designed outside the historical continuum.

What I find challenging is the investigation of historical styles and their expansion into new territories. Replicating an old font isn't as interesting as expanding on a historical theme. The Proteus Project is a family of typefaces I created for Rolling Stone. It's a sort of "theme and variations" built around nineteenth-century lines. The family takes the slab serif Ziggurat as its foundation, and plays out that structure across a variety of nineteenth-century styles. There's a sans serif Gothic, a wedge-seriffed Latin, and a chamfered Grecian. I left history behind with the italics, for which (in two cases, the Latin and the Grecian) there are no historical precedents. The project was less a matter of imitating historical styles, and more a question of examining historical motives. The ultimate result is a family of types with internal cohesion but an unpredictable level of historical fidelity.

None of this is to suggest that a typeface needs to be inspired by or rooted in historical forms. Some of the most fulfilling projects I've undertaken have been inspired by conceptual inquiries, rather than any affection for traditional forms. My hope is that someday I'll be able to reconcile these two extremes.

Describe the field of type design today.
The community of professional typeface designers working today is very small, although Fontographer seems to have brought all the world's graphic designers into the guild. This has brought some new voices into what might otherwise be a stagnant conversation. Although typography has traditionally had a strong backbone of scholarship, it has missed out on the critical discourses that graphic design brings to the field.

We do seem to be making progress now toward a canon of typographic critique. Part of it has to do with coming to grips with history, and recognizing how our work relates to convention. Jeffery Keedy, Barry Deck, Jonathan Barnbrook, and Miles Newlyn, none of whom would have been traditionally called "type designers," have contributed some thoughtful work that takes a distinct historical stance--albeit an ironic one, or an aggressive one.

Most of the typography of this century can be traced back to an approach taken up by William Morris in the closing years of the nineteenth century, an approach that involves looking to the past to retrieve something lost. Right now we're beginning to recognize that we've exhausted this approach, and are caught up in the rush to find something new.

What about history in graphic design more generally?
I came into graphic design through an affection for historical style, at least as reenacted by designers of the 1980s who appropriated it for their own ends. It was those handsome book covers in Constructivist and Secessionist lettering, which I found so seductive as a teenager, that got me into the field. They brought me into contact with design history, albeit through a circuitous route. That nebulous quality of a typeface that allows it to be both historically correct and visually fresh has a direct counterpart in graphic design. Graphic designers and type designers share the same responsibilities to history: to be part conservator and part harvester.

© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum