Interview with Stephen Coles: Letterform

Hello, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today. My name is Angel. I work here at Extenses, and today we have a wonderful opportunity to interview a unique individual, and I will let him introduce himself. Hi. I'm Stephen Coles. I'm the associate curator and editorial director at LetterForm archive. And I also work on a couple of other projects, typographical and fonts in use. Yes. I'm so excited about this. And my name is Ashley. I'm the social media manager here at Extenses. Let's go ahead and dive in. Amazing. Well, Steven, thank you again for joining us. We really do appreciate you taking some time out of your week to be here. One of my first questions, this is probably my favorite one here. But if you and I were at my favorite coffee shop here in Portland, Oregon. Just talking about life and just going about our days, how would you describe a letter form archive? And both what your goals are as a as a community and what inspires you to do it? I would probably if we were at a coffee shop that if it's your favorite, maybe it's one that has some cool signage or there's maybe the the name is sign painted on the opening on the door there coming in, and I would point out some lettering that's around us, whatever that might be, and say that that type is all around us, and a lot of times people don't really think about it, but it's one of the most omnipresent things in our lives. And so what I'm really interested in doing is to kind of open up that hidden world that's all around us to other people and get them excited about it sometimes it's people who are already really into typography, and other times it's just maybe someone I met at the coffee shop and they notice it and they think about it maybe in the subconscious, but it's fun to kind of dive into that world with them and and help them discover who makes these things and what their history is and where all of these letters come from. So at Letter from archive, we do that by collecting material by exhibiting it and doing tours and putting it up in a website we call our online archive and just introducing the world to the history of writing and lettering and typography through all of this amazing material. I can already imagine us just kinda hanging out me drinking my Americano almond milk some honey in there. Having that conversation, I can just I can just imagine it. You know, coming into this role, it was it was such a unique experience for me because I never thought of fonts the way people like yourself do and just as you explained it, if you go about just branding in general, I mean, there is so much that goes into it, but what an amazing opportunity we have here to learn more about it. Maybe you can share a couple of things with me. What are a couple of your proudest moments at LetterForm archive? Well, I would say that just I I was fortunate to be around when the nonprofit opened to the public. And that was a really exciting time. I had been visiting the collection when it was in private hands, Rob Saunders, our founder just have this amazing collection of books and posters and original lettering and sketches and he would invite friends to come and and visit and and to see it in person. And so we'd come over to his house, and he'd ask us who are favorite designer is or artist and he'd say, oh, I've got some of that and he'd pull it down to his living room and we'd look at it together. So opening to the public and allowing anyone to come and, you know, be part of that experience, that was very exciting. So that was the first thing that that kind of open my eyes to what the possibilities are in letting the public have access to this material. And then the second most exciting thing was just opening the exhibition that we opened in the fall that's running here now, which is called strike through typographic messages of protest, and it is all about the ways that people use graphic design and type in getting an important message across, and that was really important for us because it also expanded our audience. We started out as a place that people who are really into type or really into calligraphy would come to visit, but we're now broadening into graphic designers of all kinds, and then beyond that, anyone who's interested in letter forms. So that could be someone who isn't a graphic designer, isn't in a creative field necessarily, but is just fascinated or is interested in the history of civil rights, for example, now we have something that kind of ties in that history of letter forms into what they're interested in. So expanding our circle of who we are speaking to and who we're serving, that's been really exciting recently. What a door you guys opened for creatives, you know, such such an amazing thing you guys are doing out over in California. It's it's incredible there. This is a fun one too, and just, obviously, the holidays are coming up. So this is a question I have to ask. But if you could go anywhere in the world for the upcoming holidays, where would that be? I am going to go to Salt Lake City where my family is from, so that's how great, but I do that every year. But one thing that would be really exciting is to go to Sardinia where my wife my her family is from. We go there sometimes in the spring or summer, but I've never seen it around the holidays, and it's the wintertime, so that would that would be pretty cool to see. It's an island nation, but it's free mountainous, so they do get snow there. It'd be kinda cool to see what like at this time of year. That was one of my questions too. What's the weather like? Yeah. I don't know what it's like in winter. I've only been there. You know, we we we go on holiday in the summer and enjoy the beach and exploring the island, but it's yeah, they do get snow too, so it could be pretty. Yes. That sounds so exciting because I'm so ready to go on vacation. And I say every year that I'm gonna tap out the last two weeks just to do nothing. Yeah. It's good. And I know you've you do so much and you've had a busy year. I'd like to really ex you know, I'm new to the font world. I've now I started with extensive earlier this year. And before then, I really didn't pay fonts any attention. It's And like Angel said, they're everywhere, how did you even tap into this world? It was it something that Did you have an aha moment in your childhood? Or how how did that even happen? I think it was when we got our first family computer. It was a it was one of the original Macs. It was all in one. It was a Mac five twelve k, so it was kind of their second or third iteration back in the early or the late eighties, early nineties. And what opened the world's of fonts to me there was that you had the opportunity to change the font. It was something that was fairly new at the time on personal computers and you could do a lot of things on that system that you couldn't do before and once we started getting connected to the Internet with those early modems, there were places we could go and download you could that people were making their own fonts with Photographer, one of the early font editors. And and so I started to just kind of learn more about it by through internet communities. And then it grew when I went to college at the University of Utah and worked at their newspaper there a student newspaper. It was a daily newspaper, so we were writing and designing every day something new, and there was a ton of fonts on the system and I got to experiment, you know, kind of before the web web design became the main way of designing, I was designing for a newspaper that was published every day. So that meant you had a lot of opportunity to experiment and see the results of what you were doing with the typography. So that was a huge education for me just in action seeing how, you know, making a choice of what you use for text or what you use for headlines, how that affects the layout of the page, how it affects the reader's experience. That was a really eye opening few years for me and that's when I really dug deep into the types. Yeah. And it's led you to be you know, kind of where you're an entrepreneur. I know you have a lot of different business ventures. Can you tell us about those that you're leading right now? Sure. Yeah. It started out with typographical, which was it was a early blog. It was back in the the early two thousands when if you wanted to get your voice out on the Internet, there wasn't social media as as we know it today. And so you would start your own website and or you join a forum perhaps or something like that, but blogging was kind of the way that you built community, the way that you learn to yourself and also just you would kind of dig deeper into your interests. And so typographical was one of the first blogs specifically about typography and new fonts, and so I ran that with a few friends for many years. It's still active, but not as of as it was then, but that's the first thing. And then before I joined here at Letter From archive, I started a website with some folks called fonts in use and that is a way of just documenting what's going on in graphic design and index it by what typeface is used because often we see all this great design, maybe it gets awards, maybe the person who made the work as credited or even the person who made the paper as credited, but often the type designers aren't credited. And So we really wanted to draw more attention to that part of that ingredient of design and and make people aware of who is making these typefaces where, you know, the humans that are behind the fonts, and also just give people a resource for making good choices of you know, what typeface works with this typeface or how do I emulate the look of the nineteen twenties? I'm doing a project that's kind of looking, but I wanna be historically accurate. We have things going all the way back several centuries all the way to current design and it's a way of getting a sense of how typography's changed and how to how to make good choices with your with your so much. Wow. So typographicA letter form archive, fonts in use. They all seem like they're part of a cool subculture if you would, a part of an online typography, underground, if you would call it that. How would people find your freelance work, or do you look for them? Well, I think when you say subculture, it's interesting because it's true that there's a really tight community people who make fonts, people who are aficionados, they're really into type. That's a really small tight knit circle, but as I said with like letter from archive as we start to expand our audience, we're also really interested in reaching people outside that circle. So that's one of the the things both about fonts and use and and letter from archive that have been exciting is to build resources that anybody can use, whether they are super font nerd or they are totally just getting started in design so that they have yeah. So there's there's some kind of way for them to access this these resources and be inspired and feel educated without being spoken down to. All of these things are things we think a lot about because, you know, something that's new in the last ten, fifteen years is that everybody is a graphic designer in some way these days. professionally trained with somebody else who might just be using some fonts or making a type decision for the first time. And so that's what we're focused a lot on with those two projects now is just expanding that community. I love that no boundary mentality. It's it's a great segue into my next question here in that. Is there a person in mind that you would like to collaborate with? Yeah. I got that. I'm glad you sent that question in advance because there's so many people. There are a lot of them happen happen to not be alive anymore, sadly. There are a lot of in type history, graphic design history. We we hold a lot of material work from from historically important figures in in design and art, and I'd love to have conversations with them about, you know, why did you make this thing? How did you make that decision? But in terms of people who are around today and I could hopefully collaborate with some time, I really love the work of Alice Ross Thorn. She is a design critic, does a lot of writing for lots of different publications, both general interest and design. And her her Instagram, her her daily diary that she has on her website about the way that design impacts everyone and how it chain you know, has a has a possibility to change our future. All that's really thing to me, and she's really broadly focused on architecture, city design, graphic design. So it'd be fun to work with her on something to kind of tie those worlds together. The collaboration we didn't know we needed. Yeah. Well, obviously, the Internet has changed a lot since then. In today's version of the Internet, what's your advice to designers or any creatives to help others connect with what you are making happen. And specifically when it comes to inspiration, education, publishing more community. Wow. Great question. I I think, you know, obviously, I was talking about how it was like before social media and how we would reach people and Josh. I don't even remember what that feels like. Yes. Very easy. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, one of the things that that world did is it made you feel like, you know, because you weren't connected to everyone all at once, you didn't feel overwhelmed by everyone else knows more than me. Everybody else has living a life that I can't live, that kind of thing. You just kind of you got into a certain topic or a certain interest and you just learned what you could about it and you'd published something on your blog. And I'd love to see more of us get back to that and to not being intimidated by everyone else and what they're doing to be in that kind of comparison game, and to just start, find what you're passionate about and and publish something about it whether it's on a your own website or or if it is through social media, but to not do it in a way that you feel like you're not contributing something new because you almost always are, each of us has a totally different perspective, experience, and so no matter what topic is even if you don't know more than the next person, you're gonna bring something unique to it because of your personal experience. So that's what I think, you know, I don't know if it's really an answer to your question, but I'd love to see more of us do. That kind of thing is to not be afraid to just you know, publish what you're learning, get dig into something new and then say, here's here's what I learned, here's how it helps me in my work and share it with people. Yeah. We we love what you're doing, Steven. And I think it's so unique and rare. I like to kinda take this interview home and you. Are there any other creatives in your lane that you would like to shout out that you've been watching, and you're just like, I really admire their work. Sure. Oh, man. There's so many. I mean, one of the things I would recommend is just to go to fonts and use and click on the staff picks. Okay. Button, and that will bring, you know, kind of some highlights from those of us on staff that we really wanna draw attention to, and a lot of them are designers who aren't famous yet, but they should be, you know, But in terms of the type world specifically, I really would draw everyone's attention to future fonts. It's a really interesting platform for kind of like the kickstarter of fonts. It helps type designers when they aren't finished with a family of fonts to get an idea up there, allow you to pay a small fee just to kind of invest in that idea and then as more and more people, you know, give feedback and invest in it, then they grow the family and you you become kind of, you know, the in on the ground floor of whatever that type design is. And so what that does is allows a lot of type designers to be more experimental, to do things that they wouldn't have thought might be commercially successful because they can take a bigger chance on it. And it also means there's just a lot of really creative work being done and available to for everybody to use as a font. So check out future fonts. It's pretty easy. Thank you so much for your time, Steven. Thank you for joining me today, Daniel. And guys, look out for some more in used for some cool creatives that we have. I know we're ending this year and we appreciate you guys and the feedback that you've given us and we'll see you next time.