 As you've seen today, once upon a time, fonts were shipped by the kilogram, or as you call them, the pound. The design, production, manufacture and distribution of them was a massive industrial endeavour. The design of new typefaces was a slow, laborious and expensive process involving lots of people. But tech changed in the 50s and 60s. Phototype setting was introduced. And letters were divorced from lead and they became married to light. And typefaces were uncoupled from the rigours of lead production. This meat manufacturing costs could come down and it opened up the door for more and more people to participate in the process of designing typefaces. And this is probably the most important part. The maturing and cheapening of type technology opened the potential for all sorts of people to create typefaces. What was previously a field dominated by white European men started to creak open a little bit. And, as we know, since the 90s, typefaces have been created digitally and this has led to massive disruption in the industry, both financially and stylistically. The PC allows almost anyone to create a working and usable typeface. The barriers to entry are almost zero and distribution online is frictionless and immediate. And this means that participation from anyone on the gender spectrum or cultural background is now possible. A typeface once took a whole platoon of people to produce and now it can all be meaningfully done by a single person. Now, in 2016, I wrote an article on my website called, Welcome to the infill font foundry. It was a direct response to a quote by Rudy Vanderlands from Emigre. Now, in the 90s, we all know Emigre are one of the first digital pioneers and they paved the way for independent typeface designers and they proved that it was possible to design, manufacture, market and sell your own digital fonts outside of the major industry players. Now, this is what Rudy said and what I responded to in 2016. In terms of new typeface designs, we believe we've reached a point that we refer to as infillism, where designers are simply filling in the few remaining options left, which begs the question, how many more Helvetica or Futura-inspired designs do we really need? We coined the term infillism because it's something we've been thinking a lot about lately and it's easy to imagine that each edition there are fewer type design options left because type design is restricted by the structure of alphabetic characters and although the options are technically infinite, it became increasingly difficult to see the differences between designs. We're left with filling in the gaps and the gaps are getting smaller and smaller and we're starting to question the point of adding one more variation. That pissed me off for two reasons. Firstly, emigrate themselves, sold and designed typefaces inspired directly by the classics. Mrs Eves and Philosophia are revivals of basketball and Badoni respectively and they were their best sellers. And secondly, implying the concepts and ideas embodied in Futura are the best and only expressions of those ideas is dangerous because it leads to a veneration of the classics as any critical reappraisal or reinterpretation by future generations and it foregoes Futura from being viable and valuable source material and it kind of suggests that it has a cultural or aesthetic half-life and for any kind of subsequent works that reference it. But what I think Rudy was effectively saying was we don't need any more copies. Now these days, particularly in American and European cultures to say something is a copy is to use the pejorative it's saying it's not original and if it's not original it's no good and to call something a mere copy is to imply that it's a lesser creation it kind of even says that it's not even a creative act. Now I remember the first time I heard the song Hurt by Johnny Cash and it's a very powerful and emotional song it's basically like having a punch to the gut and so I bought the whole album and I listened to it heaps and several years later I heard the song Hurt by Nine Inch Nails and I immediately thought wow what a terrible cover why did Nine Inch Nails have to ruin a perfectly good song of course while later somebody told me that the Cash version was the cover and the Nine Inch Nails version was the original and when Trent Reznor, lead musician from Nine Inch Nails heard Cash's version he said it was a good version and I certainly wasn't cringing or anything but it felt like I was watching my girlfriend kiss somebody else but then he saw the video clip that accompanied it and he changed his tune and he said I lost my girlfriend because that song isn't mine anymore and there's further parallels in music and it's possible for us now to know what an original Bach symphony sounds like well we have now recreations and performances with contemporary orchestras using contemporary instruments but we don't call them copies and we don't think they're not original we consider them in their own terms my point here is that our first exposure to the classics is often by a contemporary reinterpretation or reproduction in a reverse chronological order for example we see images of paintings or sculptures on websites in order to discern whether we want to see the real ones in the galleries and once we get to the galleries we're not really faced with the so-called originals in their original state the passage of a time that fades colour and erots canvas and cracks statues well we often see the current state of the artwork as interpreted by conservationists trying to preserve or restore the work over the intervening centuries now even in modern art there are philosophical and practical problems one article describes how conservators of modern art are increasingly confronted with the problem of what they call the elusive original one curator says traditionally scientific analysis has been able to distinguish authenticity by the nature and age of materials but what is the status of the original when the artist's hand wasn't directly involved in the fabrication of the work so in one effort to restore a series of Rothko murals at Harvard her preservation team used digital coloured light projection to return the works to their original colour now the interesting thing here is what if the projections alone could produce the same optical effects as the paintings and then the Harvard murals could be displayed anywhere in the world or in multiple places at once and the paintings themselves could be discarded now does this mean that digitisation does this mean that an artwork can transcend one medium to another and still be considered the same thing would we consider the digital projection to be the original now in the same vein I can imagine almost no contemporary practising designers have seen or handled the original original metal Futura fonts but if you ask them what fonts they've been using in their designs they'll say Futura, Helvetica and Garamond for the people actually using our work there's no clear difference it's not important that they're not the so-called originals now as typeface designers we know that they're playing technical things to consider the same type from one medium to another like the Rothko murals for example for us what would be termed the original is it the original form of the typeface would it be the punch, would it be the strike or would it be the print and this is a problem I came up with trying to digitise this thing which is based on the fell types during the process it dawned on me that I was trying to capture an impossible aesthetic and I was trying to mimic a technology that's no longer used so I tried to make it as digital as possible to try to be true to the spirit of the thing and then I made the points infinitely sharp and I detailed it to be contemporary and rigorous and I wanted to be a product of our time and our culture and I think this is what Vanderlands was trying to say that he simply want contemporary designers to make contemporary typefaces or are we to abandon all historical examples completely because that would be an impossible request now we often have to turn to other fields for philosophical and practical nourishment the industrial designer Jasper Morrison says where would we be if human efforts of the past were ignored for the sake of preserving the dubious notion of complete originality working with historical typologies to keep them alive and fresh seems to me a worthwhile occupation and about a year ago I read a book called Shanzai deconstruction in Chinese by the renowned contemporary philosopher Yongchul Han it completely floored me it knocked me over and it really it basically reversed my latent ideas on what constitutes originality now Shanzai is a Chinese neologism that means fake and it was coined to describe the knockoff cell phone market but Han argues that they're not knockoffs, that they're not merely crude forgeries but stylish and multifunctional and sometimes even better than the originals there are also Shanzai politicians and celebrities and books and of course there are Shanzai Harry Potter novels Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll in it Harry is Chinese and he has Chinese friends and he speaks Chinese to me Yandamort but Han explains that these products they don't set out to deceive their attraction lies in how they draw attention to the fact that they are not the originals but that they play with the original they transform the original by beating it in a new context and their creativity is based on the very act of transformation and variation and he goes to explain this cultural process by going back in time and he uses painting as an example and he writes with its unrelenting metamorphosis process also dominates the Chinese awareness of time and history for example transformation takes place not as a series of events or eruptions but discreetly imperceptibly and continually any kind of creation that occurred at one absolute and unique point would be inconceivable to this end it does not accept the idea of the original as originality assumes a beginning in the emphatic sense not creation with an absolute beginning but a continual process without beginning or end without birth or death and I like to imagine typeface design in this way a continuing process of rediscovery and recreation Han uses painting to illustrate this thesis even further it was of no small importance for a painter's career in China to get a forgery of an old master into the collection of a well-known connoisseur he who succeeds in such a forgery of a master's work gains great recognition as it provides proof of his ability for the connoisseur who has authenticated his forgery the forger is now equal to the master now of course this is also standard practice in European painting as well the master's Delacroix complains that copying was becoming neglected and Han says the cult of originality relegates this practice of copying which is essential to the creative process in reality creation is not a sudden event but a slow process that demands a long and intense engagement with what has been in order to create from it and of course Michelangelo was a master forger as well so he was a master forger and was fascinating to me about copies and interpretations is that a Chinese master painter his entire uvra is subject to transformation as well it shrinks and it grows new pictures turn up to fill it up and pictures that will once ascribe to a master's uvra they just disappear for example the uvra of one famous master looks different in the Ming dynasty from how it looked during the Song dynasty Michelangelo describes it very heavily like this a temporal inversion occurs the subsequent or retrospective defines the origin yet thus the inversion deconstructs it the uvra is a large construction site that is always filling up with new contents and new pictures we might also say the greater the master the emptier his uvra he is a signifier without identity he is always being loaded with new significance the origin turns out to be a retrospective construction he goes on to explain that each era visualises the master differently for example the master's true originals are replaced with forgeries that suit contemporary taste in this case the forgeries have more art historical value than the true originals indeed we could think that they are more original than the originals in reference of an era the prevailing contemporary taste influenced the master's uvra pictures treating subjects that are no longer fashionable forgotten while pictures of preferred subjects proliferate and during the raid nasons for example it was normal for typefaces to be replenished piecemeal if a metal sword was damaged or lost a new punch was cut in the same style Jean Janon I can't say that in French he complains about this he complains that nobody wants new typefaces because they're happy with slowly replacing the ones that they have which reminded me of the classic philosophical paradox of theses ship now it goes like this suppose that the famous ship of theses is kept in a harbour as a museum piece as the years go by some of the wooden planks begin to rock and are replaced by new ones now after a century or so all the planks have been replaced is the restored ship the same as the original now a real example of this philosophical problem is the 1300 year old Japanese Issei Shinto shrine in practice this shrine is demolished and rebuilt every 20 years to the exact same plans it's an extremely expensive and ceremonial process it was rebuilt every 20 years as part of the Shinto belief of the death and renewal of nature of the impermanence of all things and as a way of passing building techniques from one generation to another the buildings will be forever new and forever ancient and forever original now this illustrates a nice difference between eastern and western thought now after many heated debates UNESCO removed the shrine and the original list of world heritage sites to them the shrine is only 20 years old it may not be the same physical shrine but to the Shinto worshippers it has the same functional and emotional resonance it's exactly the same resonance as contemporary designer using a contemporary digital futura now over the last 10 or so years I redrew one of my first typefaces national to me it is national it's what I wanted to draw 10 years ago but I didn't have the patience or skill and what I realised that it happened after doing writing this talk is that I'd torn down my own shrine and I'd rebuilt it again but I'm also doing the same thing with futura, helvetika the types of vandun care with accidents grotesque and plantin I'm not going to let them die in the museums and rotten the harbours I'm going to take what I want I'm going to remake them in my own voice, in my own accent, in my own style and it's taken me a very long time to become comfortable with this idea because we all seem to worship at the church of originality whether we are aware of it or not and a few years ago I was inadvertently confronted with a practical example of the meaning of originals and copies and ran a small experiment he scanned a lowercase n and he asked about 80 designers to digitise it all we had to do was wrap our own vector outlines around the same image and send it back to him the fascinating result of this was that with 80 different designers all digitising exactly the same letter form no two vector points lined up from 80 different designers now in retrospect this is a very direct way of illustrating exactly what Han was saying and it made me realise that this is what we're all doing we're all taking the planks from the masters and building our own ships we're making ships in our own image, in our own language and our own accents and from our own cultures but we're not building the single ship, it's going to be an international flotilla it's going to be alive and relevant for the hardworking designers that actually use our fonts and we're not interested in preservation that's the job of all the private presses and museums we're interested in active transformation we are in effect Shanzai designers taking letter forms from the past and embedding them in new contexts we're not merely filling in the gaps with 10,000 fakes we're doing this by making 10,000 original copies thank you