 Hi. I want to introduce you to our second speaker today, Greg Gazdovich. Greg Gazdovich is a type designer. He hails from the suburbs of Gaithersburg, Maryland. He escaped to study at the Maryland Institute College of Art, MICA, where he found his deep passion for graphic design, type design and cycling. Greg has worked as a graphic designer at branding studios, startups and nonprofits before working in the field of typeface design. He completed the type at Cooper Extended Program in 2014, months after joining the design staff at Commercial Type, where he has since worked on custom typefaces for branding, publications and online design and contributed to Publico, Text Mono, Chiswick, Sands and Lejeune, which are typefaces. I'm really excited to hear more about Greg's sort of process. There was actually a question earlier on, how do you design a typeface? So we'll find out all about how exactly you go about doing that. Thank you, Greg. So I'll talk to you about type design. I guess just to get a sense of everybody, you all know what a sans serif is and a serif? Okay. I mean, that's not that important. I was just kind of curious. All right. And I guess a quick overview. Wow, it's crazy seeing this big. I just wanted to give like a short intro to the studio to kind of show like how we operate and how we make our work, which will kind of lead into the idea of vanilla relating to a specific typeface. And that will kind of lead into the two types of typefaces. And then I'll finish on my own typeface for release that came out a couple years ago. But hopefully like all of this will come across. I'll get the idea across that type doesn't really live in isolation and it's kind of all about context. Hopefully we'll get that. I don't know. We'll see. So like she said, I work at a commercial type. I would kind of describe commercial type as a digital type foundry that mostly does custom typeface design. And yeah, we have like a large range of clients that we work with art museums, magazines, tech companies. And we're comprised of like seven to nine people. It kind of varies who you ask. I won't explain that. But so we have two partners, two designers, me and then Tim, who's sitting right there. He's the other one, a font technician, licensing specialist and a studio manager. And we're like relatively small. There's studios that are way bigger. There's some that are actually even smaller, like just one person in their room drawing type. And we usually have a lot of like close collaborators and freelancers working with us. So that's kind of why it seems a little bit after changing. And so this person is Christian Schwartz and Paul Barnes. These are the two partners. Paul would kind of describe Christian as more of a professional typeface designer. He's made typefaces such as Amplitude from Font Bureau, Farnum also from Font Bureau, FF Bow from Font Font. And I guess he's most known for Neutrophase. There was even that, you know, silly video made about it. And Paul would call himself more of a graphic designer even though he's designed a lot of typefaces. But he mainly calls himself that because he really got his start out in magazines. He was an art director for Spin Magazine. He's done some logos and typefaces. This one for Bjork. He's done a logo for Kate Moss. He also has like a long running collaboration with the designer Peter Savill. And they've worked on various projects like one of them being this kit for a soccer team in England. And even more recently they worked on the rebrand of Calvin Klein. So we as a studio make functional typefaces. We also make expressive typefaces. We make modern typefaces. And a lot of it really kind of is historical. But we also make historical typefaces. We've worked with large cultural institutions like the National Trust which is in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Brands like Sprint. Even Umbro. Paul did some numbers for them a while ago. Kind of like a quick project. And we also collaborate with a lot of graphic design studios. This was an art exhibition in Istanbul with the studio formerly known as Project Projects, now known as Workshops. I feel like there needs to be a transition period with that studio right now. Because people need to make the jump. Also really like high-end luxury watches, you know, we've done it all. Landmarks, then Empire State Building. Left-leaning Italian newspapers. Some fashion magazines. Men's magazines. Pop culture magazines. And Oprah's magazine. And that typeface actually was one of her favorite things. So it's always nice to remember. Okay, so the idea of vanilla. And as it relates to the typeface graphic by Christian Schwartz. What I mean by vanilla is, you know, the opposite of being so expressive or something that is more neutral. Kind of sits back when you use it. But is quite ubiquitous and versatile. And it's important to note that most of our ideas come from graphic design rather than just like straight-up type design. We don't always just like directly look at a specimen book and just draw what's there. It's kind of important to know that these things were used by graphic designers. And the typeface graphic really kind of comes from Christian's love of certain designers like Max Bill or Karl Gerstner. And their use of European grotesques. So this is really weird. This is all really squished on the screen. And yeah, there's also, you know, the B-sides of European grotesques. Like Paul Renner's lesser known plaque. It's a great typeface and it heavily influenced graphic. And I don't know if all of you know Paul Renner is probably most well known for drawing Futura. Everyone probably knows that typeface or has at least seen it. And then also the typeface noiseite. These typefaces were used but they weren't, you know, like at the forefront. They weren't accidents. They weren't noyahas. And graphic kind of sought to synthesize all of these things as all of these ideas into one typeface instead of just pulling from one directly. And it kind of ends up being kind of interesting. It has this geometric simplicity while having the warmth of a grotesque. And it can go up to a very heavy weight. And just recently a lot of different widths. We have like graphic XXX condensed and all this stuff. It's a very versatile typeface. But, you know, with it being vanilla it can take on a myriad of different voices. A lot of different tones. So it can be very straightforward and clean. It can be projected in light. And then it can also be beat up and like be more illustrative. This is a poster designed by the international office. And because of it being so kind of like bland and kind of sitting back, designers can really take advantage of it and just break it up and do interesting things with it, create interesting textures. And this leads me to say like there are two different kinds of typefaces and I'm curious to see if anybody knows what they are. Anybody? That's an interesting one. Anybody else? You in the back? That is a good answer but it's not the answer I'm going to say. I should have maybe worked that one in. So how we see it is typefaces that do whatever you want them to do versus the typefaces that do most of the work. And I think this is kind of an important distinction because of this idea of being vanilla. So another typeface, Atlas grotesque. It's extremely neutral and can be used in so many different situations, in different tones. For example, it can be very informational for this company that uses or makes really data heavy reports. And Atlas was actually made as a custom typeface I think for this company Munich RE reports. And it actually saved them millions of dollars because it had a little bit of a tighter copy fit. You could actually save a lot of paper. It saved them millions of dollars apparently. But it can also be just very straightforward as in like this person's personal website. It just is very stripped back. It's very plain. And it can be a little bit more modern and clean for this Danish wood company. Or it can kind of embrace its techy kind of vibe and take this on as a tone. One step further away from that in the more interesting direction is Marsans. It's a little bit less neutral. It really gets this interesting vibe when you see these strange characters like the lower KCG. It just jumps out at you. You kind of encounter its strangeness as you read it. But what's great about it is that as you're reading it, you notice that there's character, but it's not overly jarring. It definitely has its own presence, but it's not shouting. It's kind of just like talking with an accent I'd say. Because Paul did design this, he is English, so he has an accent. And on the further away on the other spectrum is platform. You know, it's hardly neutral at all. We would say it's vanilla with flavor. It has a lot of character because of its drastic proportion changes. Like the lower case letter forms are almost as tall as the caps. And that gives a very large presence. The round characters are extremely wide while everything else like the N, U and H are very narrow. It kind of makes it an interesting texture that you don't really quite see very often. And a lot of this is drawing from like the history of geometric sans serifs. It's not solely, you know, something out of the blue. And what's great about it is you can just set it really big on a poster and it looks great and it kind of becomes graphic design just by using it. You don't have to do much to it to make it interesting. You know, in contrast to if you set the same poster in graphic, something more vanilla, it just kind of doesn't have the same punch to it. You can kind of see that platform, you don't have to do much graphic. You have to do a little bit more. And similarly, if you use another geometric sans serif like Futura, the same kind of thing happens. And I guess another great example is this website that uses platform. You can see it has a very specific voice, the way they use it. And if you saw it in anything else, it just kind of like destroys that voice all together. Let me... And so, Noya Hoskar test, probably the most vanilla typeface you could get. It was originally commissioned by Richard Turley, actually for the Guardian like a long time ago, but that got shelved. And then later again, when Richard Turley was at Bloomberg Business Week, he was like, okay, let's dust this off and like, let's use this. They were kind of thinking that they need something that could take on different tones of voice, but wasn't yelling its own. They could really use it as a basis to build on top of and to illustrate with and to just like, you know, do whatever they want with it basically. But also it can just sit back when the imagery really needs to jump forward. It kind of does this double duty. It can be very serious, very neutral. But to be honest with you, it can be extremely boring and a lot of work. For example, like making this spread, you can imagine like being the designer for this, having to like chop up the letters, arrange them, or if you write a script to do that, you have to think about how to do that and what program or whatever. Tim could probably figure that out. But it's time consuming altogether. And when you're working at a magazine that's a weekly, you don't really have a lot of time. So imagine doing this, you know, working very hard with this bland typeface to make it more interesting, to make this spread. And then all of a sudden your editor might call and be like, oh, hey, like the headline changed. So you need to change that whole treatment. And you're like, so they kind of started realizing like, hey, maybe we need to like add something to this typographic palette to make our lines a little bit easier on this like short time crunch. And at that same time, they had commissioned these numerals from Burton, Hezebe, who was working with Commercial Type Awaago. And it was mainly used for like infographics, you know, like big data stuff in the magazine like here. And after like using it a lot, they really love the numbers. They're kind of thinking like, oh, maybe this could be the direction we go in for having something to use against Noya Hasker-Tess, something that's a little bit more punchy and makes our lives easier. And so they looked back into history, of course, at a type specimen. But really what they were really finding is that, okay, we should look back at like the hallmarks of editorial design. And one of them being Willie Fleckhaus' twin. This is like still like magazine designers like reference this magazine to this day. It's a great magazine if you ever get a chance to look at it. So they were kind of going back to this and for inspiration. And really in this magazine, there was a lot of like contrast in the typefaces that they use. It was something really wide, something ultra condensed. It was very like in your face. And the spreads are like pretty impactful. And this was kind of like the jumping off point for what would become what they use. So this became the basis for a drug. And the drug can be set tight. It can be set huge. It's super condensed. The letter form is just kind of like locked together in these great word shapes. And they're just very striking. You can set it really large and just becomes, you know, your life as a graphic designer becomes so easy. You just have to like set in drug and you're just like, all right, boom, done with that. Next spread. And it has so much personality because of its proportions again. It being very condensed. It bearing very heavy. These extreme italics can really play off of Roman really well because they're more italic. You know, they're very angled. And with this magazine, I'm sure some of you are familiar with it. If you're not, they have a problem where they have to deal with a bunch of old white dudes being on the cover. And like, how do you make that interesting? Like you really have to work hard, you know, because this might all look the same. So drug really helped them solve that problem by having like, okay, you can just blow up Carl Rhodes face really huge and then throw some drug on there. And it becomes a very striking cover. You can play with a lot of things here. It's made the designers lives like super easy. And you can still beat it up because it has a denseness to it that you can play with, which is interesting. It can be more illustrative too. But also just played straight. You can do it however you want. Around 2013, they retooled the culture focus etc. section in the magazine and it needed something to play against the condensed styles. They were like kind of, alright, we're like going through emotions again of like we're getting, we're overusing this typeface. Like we need something else to contrast it. Like what could be, what can we do? So we go back to ceiling graphic from graphic design. The Dutch connection. So looking at designers like Pais Wart, Willem Sandberg, who are like notorious for using a non-scrotesque. It's just like a super wide, super heavy typeface that just has a lot of like heft and like meatiness to it, very punchy. But these people use it in very vibrant ways. So this is like a jumping off point for the next thing that will be used against truck condensed. It's just kind of like what they needed was the obvious step to go into. And also kind of tying everything back to the inspiration of Twin Magazine in the beginning. So as you can see, having the other extreme creates a great contrast with the vibrant layout. You can really just like play with the quick change of weight and density and width. And it just becomes extremely just like interesting, just kind of like clicks together in a way. And you know, while at once this is an homage to Dutch graphic designers of the mid and early 20th century, it still has like a very interesting fresh and expressive contrast. And you can use it in very interesting ways by, you know, playing with the density. And this has become a look, but it's still like a striking effect, I think. So in the end, the Druck family is a family without a middle, just the extremes and no compromise. It just like gets heavier and heavier and wider and wider. You can make these really wonderful lockups that are just like super eye catching and you don't really have to do much, honestly. You just kind of like set it and it's like, this is a great poster. I want this poster. And it also kind of takes on this structural quality. You know, people use, like for instance, the Space Matters website. It's very interesting seeing all the different weights and widths used together in this interesting way instead of just kind of how other people were using it. It's not going to be a quick note. I guess, okay, so a transition into the next section. A little bit about myself and how I got into typeface design. I had originally gotten a documentary from my type and lettering teacher, Ben Kiel. It was a very interesting documentary about the Dutch book and typeface designer, Bram de Doze. And you should probably look him up. He's just a very interesting person in general. He's only made like four typefaces, I think, in his whole life. But I think that was like kind of great about him because he was all about making type as a specific tool. It wasn't just kind of like fiddles to him because he was a book designer at first. So he was making typefaces for books, specific uses. And that's what I think sparked my interest in type design is that it is a tool. I'm making tools for graphic designers to make graphic design with. And that's kind of like an interesting idea that I can inform graphic design and graphic design can inform my work. And it's just like a very interesting relationship. And so I'll talk about my typeface Robinson. And this actually started like a really long time ago when I was an undergrad. I was just like, again, learning about typeface design and like getting super excited and I have all these ideas. But I really sucked at like drawing and spacing and all that kind of all the important stuff. So it was kind of the typeface that I learned how to design type with in a sense. And this typeface, I would work on it like after I graduated, you know, when I had time like nights and weekends because I was working at like graphic design studios. I wasn't doing typeface design as a job yet. And this typeface really came out of my love for typefaces like Lydian, which was used on a lot of different book covers in the like 50s, 60s and beyond. Other typefaces like Samson also again like used on book covers, record sleeves all over. And also the typeface Franklin Gothic. Just because of me being an American, I kind of just grew up with this. This has just always been around, same as Helvetica. Another inspiration was the work of Berthold Volpe. He created the typeface Albertus. He just did these like wonderful book covers that just have so much life and energy in them. He was just like trying to figure out a way to capture that energy in this typeface. And upon like working on this typeface and researching and looking at stuff I like looked at when I was a child, I realized like, yeah, this typeface is all over the place like throughout history, all over books. And that's what I thought was kind of great. You know, I read This is a Child, This is in my school library. But it also spanned into other stuff like idealism by like a German philosopher and even like racy like romance novels. So it was like really all over book covers like throughout history, which I thought was kind of interesting. It had really like interesting texture to it. I think what I love about is the calligraphic feeling that you get from Lydian. It was actually based off of the designer's steel brush calligraphy. I forget his name. Do you remember, Lynn? The name of... It doesn't matter. He's old. And I also love the typeface Franklin Gothic because it has such straightforward stripped back kind of versatility to it. Kind of an opposition to what Lydian is. It's kind of this more trendy kind of looking thing that people use. And I think that's kind of what I hated about it is that when you used it, it just kind of looked like you were jumping on a trend. And it wasn't actually that useful. It kind of just was more like it was trying to be calligraphy instead of something else. And I was kind of thinking in my head like, well, as a graphic designer, I don't know if I don't really want something that just like looks like calligraphy. I wanted to have a little bit more versatility, something more like a grotesque. And I love the energy and the detailing of calligraphy and the structure of a sans. And I was like, oh wait, maybe there's something here. Maybe I should try my hand at making this typeface because I think it would be an interesting thing that I would want to use on books or general graphic design. And so this is the first attempt I made. And for some people, they're like, OK, yeah, that looks kind of interesting if your taste is bad. But I was making it. I was like, man, this is awful. What the hell am I doing? This is not the cool idea ahead in my head. And this is the earliest version I could find on my hard drive that could make words. And I was just kind of looking at it and like, what is wrong with this? And really, again, like playing catch up with my skills and also catching up my skills with my idea. But what really makes this unsuccessful in my point of view is that the forms weren't really utilizing the characteristics of calligraphy and the structure of a sans is kind of roughly there. But it was just kind of like I was hinting at things. If you explained calligraphy to an alien and that alien was like, yeah, this is what calligraphy is. It kind of just had these, the logic wasn't there. It just wasn't really coming together. The structure is maybe getting a little bit closer here or something, but it just kind of gets worse from there. I was really like, OK, I'm really not understanding this. I should probably just go back and practice calligraphy. And I'm in no way like a good calligrapher at all. But really, it was just to understand what I was doing, what I was trying to do and see that the structure has a logic. There's a ductus. There's a way to do this and just really understand the forms. And so later on, after years of figuring it out, you can tell that the pen is present, but it's not so explicit that it looks like it's written out. It kind of strips away the dust of what Lydian has or had and hopefully injects some kind of energy into it. Some magic energy that's spelled wrong. But this is important to show because I wanted to ground it in something very familiar just because I feel like it needed this to make it more interesting. If I just digitized calligraphy and made it kind of more sans-like, it's like, OK, it's not really going that far. So I really try to make sure that the structure of it resembled something like Hovettica or Franklin Gothic. It has the idea of something constructed. And I try to expand this out to the family as a whole, not just the idea in the forms. So the italic is actually a lot narrower, a little bit lighter than the Roman so that there's an actual shift change when you're reading in text because italics, how we use them today, is for emphasis. And when you're writing an italic hand in calligraphy, you actually have to change your tool angle and it becomes a little bit more condensed and a little bit lighter. And so this is the full range of weights. The heaviest weight is really good for posters. It kind of just like punches you in the face and just has like a lot of energy in it. The regular italic are great for setting text and it brings a nice warm texture to it. It kind of has that familiarity of Franklin Gothic but with more warmth in it. I wouldn't go as far as calling it rustic, but it has this kind of warmth to it. And the lighter styles are great at either sides. They're just kind of becoming elegant and pretty at that point. And so the first uses actually were the Whitney, which I was like over the moon about because I've always wanted to work with cultural institutions like the Whitney and it's right next to a Christopher Wool piece. Like how cool is that? I can't. But again, like here it brings some kind of warmth to something that could be very bland. More recently it was used for a bar up in Astoria. My friend Luke Williams had designed all the branding for this. He even hand-painted it onto the front of this thing, which I don't know why he would do that, but it sounds like a lot of work. And here's some in use in the drink menus. And then this photographer had used it for their branding. And I think it's kind of interesting here because it's such a clean and straightforward website with very clean and straightforward work that it brought this little bit of edge to the website. Just like the slight 2% that you need to make just that much more interesting, where it kind of brings up warmth that the photography and maybe the website itself may not have. I think it complements it well in an interesting way. I don't know how well you can really see that, but... It was also used by the designer Benjamin Shakin in collaboration with the artist Mark Dion for this book. And this is kind of like coming full circle in a sense that it's inspired by typeface lettering and on book covers and whatnot. And also funny enough, it's on the back of a car tire somewhere in America, I don't know where. But I think it's the only commercial typeface to be on one, so I'm pretty proud of that. And that's, I think, all I got for you, so thank you. I don't know if you have any questions. Yeah, we'll take some questions. I didn't really tell you exactly how to design a typeface, but... Which is not possible to do in 45 seconds. Yeah, if I could do that, I'd be like Matthew Carter or something like that. Yeah, we'll take some questions. What was the process for deciding that the dots on the eye would be round for the typeface? It's something that always makes me sweat. Robinson or for something else? Yeah, for Robinson. Oh man, I drew so many different eyes for that. And it really kind of came down to just what looked best, honestly. I had drawn four or five different eye dots, and I showed them to my boss, Paul, afterwards. And he was like, these all just look wrong. I was trying way too hard, and it was really just like beating a dead horse, basically. And it just needed to be something a little bit more simple and straightforward. Because everything else made it look like it was just trying way too hard. And it was just kind of a little bit too much. The A changed its shape between the normal font and the italic font. Yeah. I was wondering what was the reasoning behind that. So that's a common thing. I guess maybe somebody that does calligraphy, like Lynn over here, could explain this better. But the italic hand really came from... I think I'm going to get this wrong probably, but it was meant to be faster. And someone said save space, but I don't know about saving space. And so they were really trying to focus on writing quicker. And instead of doing like an A that goes like that, if you just do one motion, it's faster. So that kind of set the precedent for how that form should look throughout history. And that kind of like has followed through just until now. I mean, there's a lot of typefaces that have italics that don't have that form. It's just kind of what I thought fit best in this typeface. If you look at, you know, another boring Sans, it's probably going to have the A as same as the Roman. So, yeah, it kind of just came back to the idea. Is it possible to combine or would you recommend combining two different typologies in the same text? I think the heading and the body. Yeah. I mean, honestly, like, I think if you have an idea for why you're doing that and it looks cool, then, yeah. I don't know, because I feel like, you know, sometimes people have very strict rules about graphic design. I don't know if I would feel that way. You know, I think as long as it looks good, it works with the idea, then, yeah, you should really be able to do it. I'm not so like strict about stuff. If it looks cool, I think it should be done. Do you still make graphic design or are you sort of more focused on type design nowadays? I try to, but like I made a poster for a friend recently. But I was like kind of like, oh, I'll just use the typefaces that I haven't released yet. So it's like kind of like testing out stuff that I've been drawing. What are you working on now? Right now, I'm working on a serif typeface. Well, two serif typefaces. One is custom. One is like my own personal project. It's just kind of a, I don't know how much you want me to go into it. When you say custom, you mean you have a brief from a client. It has a very specific application. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They're asking very specific things that, especially with like the character set, how many, what letters they want and everything like that. They kind of left it up to us how it looks. There was some stuff early on, but as a project evolved, the brief kind of changed strangely enough. There was a very big focus. That never happens in design? Well, yeah. Yeah. It happens all the time. Like for this, it was like very specific focus on like, okay, low quality phone screens that a lot of people use in like other countries. And then one day they're like, oh wait, you don't have to worry about that. Like, just, yeah, don't worry about it. All right. We'll just keep going then. So yeah, that's like, and our time is usually split between either custom projects, our own personal project project and release stuff. Like we have stuff in the backlog that we're trying to release through the foundry. And then hopefully our own work will be released. There's a recent trend where graphic designers are often releasing their own bespoke typefaces. I was wondering what your opinions, thoughts were on that. I don't know. Kind of on the fence. Because you know, some graphic designers are actually pretty talented and they can make a really great typeface. Sometimes they have really great ideas and it could be great to collaborate with somebody instead of maybe trying to do everything on your own. Yeah, I don't know. If it's cool and it works well, like that's great. If it doesn't, then you don't have to look at it. It's very simple, I feel like. What's your favorite scale to design a type ad? Sorry, let me repeat that question. What's your favorite scale to design a typeface ad? That's hard actually. I guess because there's so many different solutions and problems that you have at certain sizes. Like small sizes, it's like, well, can I get enough character into this to make it interesting at such a small size? Like is that even possible? And I guess with big stuff, it's like, well, how do I make this as crazy as possible and also work at a big size? I don't know. I'm going to be annoying and say both. I like all the sizes. I'm not discriminant in a sense. Whatever opportunity comes that's interesting is kind of fun for me. I don't know if that answers your question. When y'all, do you work for graphic designers and kind of end user clients like the restaurant or something? Or is it typically through like one step removed through a graphic designer? This is where it gets really hairy. I'm giving you the most non-answers ever. I'm sorry. But it really spans the whole range. We've worked with a lot of people that are at agencies or design studios that have a client. We've also just kind of done some random custom stuff for graphic designers that are pitching for something else and it doesn't work out. We've worked directly with clients with their design team or something like that, a creative director. Magazines, it's mostly like a creative director and they have to deal with their editor. So it's really like the whole gamut. We've kind of done it all, honestly. And then with licensing, how does that work? If you create this custom type you're designing? I'm really not the person to ask about licensing. This is the answer I give to anybody that calls me at our studio on the phone. I'm just a designer. I can't help you. They get really frustrated with that. Is that because you know a little bit about it? You know enough about it that it's so complicated that you don't even want to engage in that conversation? No, it's mostly because we have a licensing person. I'm like, you just call them and they'll handle it. But yeah, for custom stuff, it's kind of what's agreed upon. Like with magazines, the budgets are getting smaller. So they're not always buying a custom typeface and having it be, what's the word I'm looking for, exclusive. Because somebody might want the typeface to be only theirs first amount of years and that's fine and good. But there's a price for that. Some people, because they have no money now, it's just like, okay, you're just the first to use it and we'll probably release it on our own. Like you just pay us a sum of money for the design work, the production work and you know, the rest is yours. And then for the bar, like my friend just like bought the typeface and just like decided to do that project with it. I didn't really know about it until he emailed me when it was all done. I was like, oh cool, that's awesome. So yeah, it kind of really changes. Could you expand on that a little bit because I, even as someone who has worked on projects with custom typography, which happens rarely because it's hard to always convince a client who's never seen the value of that before to go with it. But we had an opportunity to do that recently. It was really exciting and I didn't really understand even as a designer for a while all the steps in the process of actually delivering that to the client. It's not just the design of the type, right? There's all these, there's a licensing person. Could you talk a little bit about beyond just the type designer, how you get out in the world? Yeah, it really depends on the project too because we've worked with more tech companies now and that involves a lot more technology problems or solutions maybe I should say. And so once it leaves my hands into our font technician, he kind of does a bunch of things to make it really work in all these different environments. Not everyone has a Mac. Typefaces have to work differently for Windows computers and how they render on those screens. And that's just like a whole other thing with hinting so that those things actually work because, I'm sorry, this is very scatterbrained because it's just very technical and I'm trying to condense it down. So yeah, Windows computers, they need different font files because they have different rendering engines to display the fonts. Macs make it easy, they don't take the hinting information, they just take the typeface as it is and just like show it to you. I guess in hope that screens will get just better and better and that we won't really need hinting at some point, hoping. Because it's a long laborious process of trying to make your typeface look like your typeface at all the different sizes that it could appear, which just seems like a ridiculous idea in general. So our font technician has to deal a lot with that. There's a lot of weird stuff with accents, especially if there's like a really extended character set. We're dealing with that now where we're covering languages that I don't even know what they are. It's just very like things that are just combined together and that's like helps for the new language and that's great. But that entails a lot of technical problems that our font technician has to figure out. I have to design it all and he has to just like make it work somehow. I think it's interesting just because it's really no one knows how much goes into the production of a mainstream widespread distributed typeface. I think it's just an insane amount of people involved in hours. Oh yeah, I mean even years sometimes too. And it's kind of funny like you make a new typeface and you're kind of just like doing all this work. And if you're doing it on your own you're not getting paid to do this work. You're kind of just doing it on good faith or hoping that somebody's going to buy this thing when you release it out into the world. And that's what's kind of nice about custom work is that you know there's something valuable in it because somebody already really wants it. And you also get paid while you're working on it, which is great. Thanks. So yeah, I hope that answers your question. I had a few questions but they were kind of asked already. But maybe one that I'm sure is like going through students minds. And as a young student, not that old, but you know looking at... Age is relative, whatever. Admiring typefaces, finding them on the internet, downloading them, downloading hacked versions of them. And then kind of meeting people who designed them and realizing like I should pay for these things. Oh yeah, you should. I got student loans. Like I got bills. But one is like kind of an attitude towards that and maybe for, you know, cash-strapped students. Ways of experimenting with things. I mean there's for example like really type does limited editions for students for non-commercial work. But things like that and sort of accessibility in the spirit of kind of intellectual openness and generosity. Yeah, I know that commercial type has donated typefaces to schools before. I know like my alma mater, Micah, we had donated some stuff because they had a very specific project that they were doing. And I thought that was like really cool. And I mean we're all about like specificity. So it was kind of great to see what they made after that. I'm sure we've done that with like a lot of other schools. And it's kind of difficult in general. I mean everybody wants something for free and it's kind of hard to give something away for free because then everyone always sees it as you give away for free first. So why should I pay you now? It's a difficult thing. I don't know. I'm not really sure what the exact answer is. Like I would always want to help out students and stuff like that. So if they emailed me, I would like send them some beta version or something. But yeah, other people are very open with their work and will send their work out. And I think that's great too. And it opens it up for everybody. So yeah, I am kind of like on the fence about it. It's hard. You know, a lot of people want to screw you over, but not everybody does. And it's like how do you navigate that? How does anybody kind of figure that out? Well, the more access like students have to the type phase, the more excited they get about using them. And I think it is this feedback loop. And it is really hard though because you want to encourage a good behavior. I just want to encourage experimentation. Yeah, I mean, I was a student too. And I remember like, oh man, I really want this type phase. So I just stole it and just used it. Nobody will know? Yeah, nobody will know. And then the thing that I realized after realizing, oh, I like type design. This is great. I've been stealing people's work. I should probably pay them back. When I graduated, I bought typefaces that I wanted to use. And the typefaces that I, some of them I tried to use in school. And it's like, you know, yeah, basically, yeah, basically. What do you think of Google Fonts? I'm actually making a Google Font. I think they're getting better, honestly. Like Spectral, I think, is a really good typeface. It has interesting things about it. And I think, you know, it's great that there's an option that has good choices. Like, you know, there's some stuff there now that's like, I didn't use as a graphic designer, but somebody may find useful. I think it's interesting that they're just like opening it up to everybody. And I don't know, that's kind of the thing I think is that, like, why shouldn't everybody have good type choices? And like, if Google is willing to do this, then, yeah. I'll, you know, do it. All positivity. Maybe one last question. So, as a designer, you know, we, I hope to only work on projects that I love and, you know, and be able to sort of stand behind the work that I make of, you know, we all know that that doesn't happen 100% of the time. But as a type designer who gets to work on, you know, your kind of self-initiated projects where you set the brief, you figure out what you're interested in, you find the historical references and or old specimens or whatever, you get to work on that versus these kind of commissioned works, the custom typefaces that you have to do for a certain brand or a certain publication. Do you ever have to work on a typeface that you don't like? Yeah. That happens a lot. I mean, you know, it's kind of the thing, a lot of studios, they do projects that just make them money because they need to, you know, you need to get by. And sometimes those projects are just like really, just really, you know, not fun. But you know, in the long run, it helps out the studio, you know, to do other projects that are more interesting. So I think, you know, in the end, you can kind of see the light in doing those kinds of projects, at least for us. We've made intimate works on the projects that we absolutely hated. We got through it though, and now we get to do the stuff that we actually like. So I think life is about balance in general. You can't really enjoy the good things about it unless you've experienced bad things in a sense. You can't really see the highs without lows. So in a way, I'm appreciative of these projects in the sense that they allow us to do more interesting stuff. But I can still complain about them when I'm doing them. Yeah. I hope that answers. Okay. Thank you so much, Greg. Oh, yeah, no problem.