 |
|
|
| 03 |---DIGITAL CHICAGO-->-->> November 1997. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From Chicago. |T-26| Gets "Experimental" with Type. Chicago Digital Type Foundary Moves Beyond Grunge. What makes good typography? Ask that question to a room full of graphic designers and you're like to start a debate. Questions of a quality, propriety, style, readability and even the meaning of the words "good" and "bad" will be discussed with vigor and usually without a conclusion. However, two distinct camps have formed during the years since PostScript technology made font design possible using off-the-shelf software. One side believes that the refinement of type should be rooted in history and structure, while the other is convinced that people are flexible in their ability to derive meaning from signs such as letterforms. "Grunge' typographers, as they were called when they burst onto the scene in the early 1990s, pushed the boundaries of what we generally recognize as type by blurring the lines that form letters. They made everything messy and uneven, and asked us to read it anyway. Some of us did and magazines like Ray Gun sold like hotcakes. Now they are many successful designers working with the notion that type can be anything. They call themselves "experimental" typographers now, but the ideas are the same: that people will, given the chance, understand the same meanings given different signs. And there is evidence in the marketplace that they are right. Experimental fonts are appearing more and more in the cultural mainstream. [T-26] is one digital type foundry here in Chicago that has made an international name for its selling experimental fonts. With the September release of "Kit 19," they now offer more than 600 fonts designed by artists, graphic designers and non-professionals from all over the world. Founded in 1994 by Carlos Segura, owner of the graphic design firm Segura Inc., [T-26] made a near-immediate impact on the graphic design industry. Segura and Jim Marcus, quickly became known for their "grunge" fonts and were able to establish themsevles with major distributors like Fontworks in the United Kingdom within their first year of business. Marcus is one of [T-26]'s biggest contributing designers. He has the most fonts in the [T-26] catalog, and is involved with digitizing and refining all of the other fonts created by outside designers. Like Segura, he began designing font type as a way to free himself from the constraints of commercial design. "Designing typefaces is the best way out of commercial design in the world," Marcus said. "You design a font, put it up for sale and walk away. Maybe it doesn't sell at all, but it is your work and it is done." He likens font design to fine art because decisions aren't client-driven and because type designers, through their fonts, challenge peoples' tolerence of letterforms. "Tolerence of typographical forms increases our knowledge and awareness of our environment, allowing different layers of meaning." he said. "You can see it in children. My nephew's tolerence of what is an 'a' or what is a 'b' is so much greater than that of people who are just ten years older." Segura says that people understand experimental fonts when they are used in the right context, and that there are appropriate uses for all fonts. He likes to give his graphic design clients an example told in terms of magazine design: "If Ray Gun was designed like Time, it would have lasted a day, and if Time was designed like Ray Gun, it would have lasted a day. But they have both survived, and there is no reason to negate either one, because they both serve a purpose. It isn't about whether a font is legible or not, or whether it is your favorite font for the right job. All we do is give a choice." Acting on the belief that all fonts are useful means that Marcus and Segura sometimes take risks in producing and carrying especially unusual fonts. They have given opportunties to non-professional designers who otherwise never have seen their work published. One of their font designers is a full-time bartender, another is a school teacher, and many are students. Once [T-26] is interested in a font, they work with the designer to make stylistic changes and refinements until they have a complete chararcter set. Though Marcus eventually finishes every set with Fontographer-finessing path directions, loose points and kerning pairs - he will accept completed character sets in many forms. He has digitized sets from hand-drawn line art, converted sets created in Adobe Illustrator, and translated sets from any number of other software progarms into Fontographer. "We then do a massive amount of testing on Mac and PC," Segura said. "We have a PC station just for that, and that's pretty much all we use it for." In addtion to the IBM Aptiva they do all of their PC testing on, Segura has a room full of Macs used by him amd his seven employees for both [T-26] and Segura Inc. The three primary graphics computers are Power Computing Power Tower 225s with 600 MB of RAM and 12 GB internal hard drives. They run all their basic graphics software on these, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Dimensions, QuarkXpress, Premiere, Freehand, Director and Fontographer. Segura also has older Macs: a Quadra 800, a PowerBook 540C, a Quadra 900, a Centris 610, a Mac IIci and a Mac IIsi. [T-26] was asked to beta-test the most recent version of Fontographer, which Marcus said isn't that much better than the old version. They have also beta-tested Adobe Type Manager and have developed a close relationship with the Adobe Maufacturing Division. Many of Adobe's type utilties have been tested using [T-26] fonts. "We have given them our library to test type against it," Segura said. "We have some fonts that are very straining on a system just because of the fact that they are so large and complicated. Adobe requested our entire library so they could test their software on fonts that are challenging." Most of the time, effort and expense [T-26] spends on a font doesn't see a return. For instance, they carry special EPS line-art sets designed by artist including Howard Finster, Charles Akins, Margaret Tarleton and Segura himself. The sets are expensive to produce and refine, according to Marcus, and they almost never sell. Segura takes great pride in the way [T-26] deliberately ignores marketplace realities. "We don't believe in just carrying the fonts themselves, we belive in carrying fonts that represent a point of view," he said. "The people on the outside notice this and appreciate it. It is a full-time job dealing with our fan mail." In addition to promoting themselves as a culture-based design house, carrying fonts that express who they are, not just fonts that make them money, Segura said [T-26] offers "the highest royalty rates to designers in the industry" and discounts for student customers. They also have created the "AIDing project." Four times a year, they publish a digbat set composed of logos depicitng an AIDS-related word or concept. All proceeds from sales of this set are donated to AIDS research. In addition, royalties from certain fonts (many designed by Marcus) are donated entirely to Test Project Aware Chicago, an organization that promotes testing and awareness of the AIDS virus. Despite their lack of concern for money, [T-26] does quite well financially, Segura said. "We make a decent amount of money and we spend every single penny of it in the way we make our materials," he said. "There are a lot of companies like us - we are certainly not the first, and there are huge companies like us that have been around for a hundred years like Monotype." "It isn't just about feeling like you're always new because you have new fonts. Those things by themselves aren't going to keep you at the top. The thing that you have to do is truly understand and respect the sensibilities of your customers. Stay true to yourself so the people who like what you like will respond to what you do." However, this is easy to say when you are a designer selling to other designers. All of [T-26]'s product packages play heavily on the "coolness factor" that appeals to graphic designers. Font catalogs are printed on dyed newsprint paper and encased in printed burlap "T" bags. They print countless postercards and stickers with their fonts incorporated into colorful designs on them. And they create elaborate exterior packaging to send it all out in. In addition, the [T-26] website is currently featured on Macromedia's website as one of its "favorite Flash projects." "Our website has many levels of technical achievements," Segura said. Viewing the site requires the user to have the latest version of Shockwave Flash, a plug-in for Web browsers (available free from the Macromedia site). Flash is a vector-based graphics and multimedia program that creates small files that load quickly on Web pages. It also lets the user zoom in view higher magnifications of the artwork. Marcus first created font samples in Illustrator, and then used Flash to convert the files for viewing on the [T-26] Web site. For designers, it is useful to be able to examine fonts close-up before buying. The [T-26] Web catalog allows three magnifications for examining the curvature of the letterforms on line. Their current marketing project is to create a 30 to 60 second QuickTime music video for each one of their 600-plus fonts. "A lot of the materials we produce electronically not everyone can view because it is just too advanced," Segura said. "We communicate to the highest common denominator and are willing to lose the people who cannot get to that level. This puts us in the possible of leadership because we do things that no one else can produce." "We realize that a huge number of the people we deal with are really technically advanced and a large number we deal with are not," Marcus said. "We are trying to span that." Marcus admitted that [T-26] can operate at this higher, riskier level because they are selling their product to other designers, most of whom work on their computers all day. "I feel like we are in this great position with [T-26] to be able to create something that we love, since we are not that different from these people. We're designers - we have the same situations and conditions that they have." Because [T-26] makes "first tier" design tolls, they must think ahead of the market. "We have to design the font six months to nice months ahead of time so designers have it on their disks," Marcus said. "They design a piece, and by the time it is printed and in an annual, it is two years old. But people are seeing as the latest and the greatest." Some of their fonts have hit the mainstream. The logo for the television's "NYPD Blue" is designed with a [T-26] font, and Segura claims that many of today's music CDs use [T-26] fonts in their packaging. Though their fonts are carried though distributors world-wide, 75 percent of their sales happen directly through the Web. [T-26] fonts have been sold online to every country except for North Korea and Cuba. Yet their Web exposure has created Segura's two biggest problems. The first involves credit card companies who don't insure sellers from Web-based sales fraud. Anyone can order a font and then claim to have never recieved it or to never have even ordered it, making the seller responsible for its loss. The second is more direct. People have stolen fonts from the samples published on the Web. Segura says that someone has even burned a CD with [T-26] fonts on it and is selling for profit. Right now, there are five people that Segura is trying to find who have stolen fonts, but he says he has neither the time nor the resources to prosecute them. Only two of Segura's employees work full-time on [T-26], Segura Inc., and Thickface Records, Segura's independent record label. [T-26] is rapidly becoming the largest arm of the three companies both in size and sales volume. "When we started this, we frankly had no clue at all that this was going to be more than a weekend hobby," Segura said. "T-26 is taking over the world. That is our goal."  >> return to "articles" section :-) SEGURA INC. 1110 North Milwaukee Avenue. Chicago, Illinois 60622-4017. (t) 773.862.5667 (f) 773.862.1214 (e) info@segura-inc.com |
