 I named the title of my talk, Owning It. I just thought it was kind of a funny phrase to turn around, but it has a couple of important meanings in terms of type design and intellectual property. So to break it down, the first meaning is the literal ownership. So you're making this thing, who gets to own it? In lots of cases, the fonts are proprietary to the client. But in many others, there's a period of exclusivity after which type designers can release the work. And the second point, and you hear this a lot these days, especially with custom typefaces, is the idea of ownability, point of differentiation between the typeface that a company is investing in and all of the other options that are already out there. And the third is the kind of tongue-in-cheek owning it, just kind of taking pride in what you've got, not apologizing owning it. So for those three reasons, I thought it was a good topic. Ownership is an important topic in this field. So I'm going to break the talk down basically into two sections. First, some history, which is a little new for me. I'm usually just showing my own work, but I thought this was a great opportunity to dive a little deeper and look at what the history of custom typefaces really is. And then afterwards, I'll just talk about myself for a little while. So I'm not a type historian. Steven, if I get anything wrong, just shout out the right date or correct me. So these are really just, it's a personal history. These are projects that have influenced me and that are meaningful to me. So the first one I want to talk about is Peter Barons and the work specifically that he did for AEG. He was a German designer, came of age right around the turn of the 20th century. A lot of his early work was very influenced by Art Nouveau. So this poster here, or this is actually the door to his house, which he also designed. He was also an architect, an engineer, a product designer, the father of German industrial design. These are all in the collection of MoMA, no big deal. But as a graphic designer, you may be most familiar with this, his logo for AEG, which is the, I'm gonna butcher this, but Algemein, Elektriz Zittatz, guess I left the shaft. They were a company in Germany and Berlin that made electrical equipment, air turbines, as well as consumer goods. And Peter Barons was the designer behind all of their really great work. The company was founded in 1883, sold to Daimler-Benz in 1985, but a lot of this work is still around, including in the collection of MoMA. So the work that he did for them, and this is one of the most beautiful examples of the identity program, not only is he the father of German industrial design, but also this is the first corporate identity program in terms of consistent, easily recognizable brands. It wasn't always like this, and it was really groundbreaking to have this consistent approach for illustration, this consistent look of typography. And so he was not only coming up with that system, he also drew the letters, we're led to believe. It's not totally clear, but I did some research prior to this, came across what appear to be his drafts of the lettering and the way that they were used. So these are a lot of the advertisements, the posters that were used for AEG. He was also a published type designer. So this is Barron's Scrift and Barron's Antiqua, which were both published. And he designed this factory. Actually designed the entire building, as well as the lettering on the front, and that lettering on the facade, apparently still there in Berlin today, and it's beautiful. So that's really the first custom typeface for a corporation, as well as the first corporate identity that I'm aware of. Would love to hear any others if people know of them. The next project that I want to talk about is Times New Roman, which was produced by Monotype. And the story goes, in 1932, the London Times underwent a design. And while this wasn't the first custom typeface for publication, that distinction appears to go to Century Roman by Lin Boyd Benton for Divini Century Magazine. But I've chose to focus on this because it has a much brighter story. So Stanley Morrison, the type director, I'm not sure what his position was, for Monotype commissioned this and worked with Victor Lardent at the Times, who was a designer artist there, to produce the letters. And what we have here on the left is the existing typeface that they were using for text. And on the right is Times New Roman. Times had a larger X-height, sharper details, narrower proportions, and was apparently inspired by Monotype Plantin, which was a 1913 release. But to modernize, and part of this is just a Times New Roman bias, because we've seen it so much, on the right feels a little strange as a newspaper face. On the left, this is a bit, maybe we've just returned to form more of what we expect as a newspaper face, although it's a little bit wide. It's not so different than Imperial, the typeface they used for the New York Times, for text. And this was the first usage in 1932. You may notice there's lots of drop caps, apparently no headlines. I was surprised to see this, but this is what's shared on the Monotype site as the first homepage. And then they published it in 1932, or actually I'm not sure when they published it. The commission was in 1932. It went on to be the most successful metal font in Monotype history, and that's the end of the story, or is it? In 1994, Mike Parker, formerly of Linotype, produced an article with a radical claim that no, Stanley Morrison and Victor Lardin were not the originators of Times New Roman, but rather it was this guy, William Starling Burgess, who designed it in 1904, and almost 30 years prior to that commission, and somehow was erased from history. A little bit about Starling Burgess, he was a yacht builder, a poet, an aviation engineer, and a type designer. So similar to Peter Barron's, very accomplished in all these different areas. The way the story goes is that, I'm not sure his first name, Giampa, who was a colleague of Mike Parker, found evidence of, he purchased Lansing Monotypes Archive in 1987, found evidence of this, and shared it with Mike Parker. They worked with Matthew Carter to digitize it. That's what we see at the bottom here is a digitization of the only existing evidence of Lansing 54, which, as the story goes, went on to become Times New Roman. But the whole story is wrapped in mystery and unfortunate circumstances. The evidence of Burgess's drawings were lost in a fire in his factory. Giampa's documentation was lost when his house flooded. The only known printed records of these drawings is at the Smithsonian, which is now quarantined for asbestos contamination. So it's just like this thing where no one can really know what it is. All we have is this very lengthy article that Mike Parker made. So here it is, one Roman wait, a sketch of a few italic characters, but there is some additional evidence which points in the direction that this could be a true story. Monotype pitched the typography for the launch of Time Magazine in 1923, and Lansing 54, this, you know, the Burgess design was used. And I forgot to say, so Burgess submitted his design to Lansing Monotype, and that's how it became something they were using. His article is exhaustive in detail. Here we've got, you know, and these four lines plantain at the top, and then Lansing number 54, then the design that was made for Time Magazine, and then Times New Roman. And to look a little bit closer, focusing on the second and the fourth line, the Lansing, the Starling Burgess, and the Times New Roman, these things are almost indistinguishable. The details are incredibly close. Lower case as well. And as I said, it is a huge article. I'm about a third of the way through it, but you know, I'm gonna keep going, read it before bed. You know, there's no definitive proof. Monotype denies it. It's possible that Parker made all of this up. He could have just been a merry prankster, but geez, what a lot of work to put forth this story. Anyways, it's a fun backstory for this font, but the reason that most of us know Times New Roman is because it was packaged with Windows ever since version 3.1, and it became the default font for Microsoft Word. So up until 2007, it was, oh, you can't see the gray background. It was the default font. And so that's why we have all of these legal briefs, resumes, menus and restaurants. It's just everywhere. And so, although the design itself has merit, it's not a poorly designed font. We're just so habituated to it, and its use has been so mediocre in terms of this undesigned presentation that now we're just immune to it, and it doesn't even feel like a designed typeface anymore. But don't worry. Both Callathon and Font Bureau have released their own revivals of Starling Burgess' designs. On the left, this is Burgess. By Callathon on the right, Starling by Font Bureau. So happy ending to the story. We get to talk about them 100 years later. The next project I'm gonna talk about is Edward Johnston's London Underground, which really is the first, as I'm aware of, the first custom typeface for corporation in the sense that we think of in terms of a consistent font that was used systematically, whereas AEG was really a collection of letters that were employed in different illustrative ways. So along with Rudolf Koch, Edward Johnston is considered the father of modern calligraphy. He was truly a master of the written form, and he worked with London Underground. Prior to his commission, this is what their communications looked like, very inspired by the arch and crafts movement, and he wanted to make a sans-serif typeface that would reflect the modern age. Certainly wasn't the first sans-serif typeface. That distinction goes to Caslon from 1816, followed later by Figgans in 1832, and a whole slew of other sans-serif typefaces. But what makes Johnston Underground special is that he really married the rhythm and the craft behind calligraphy with this geometric sans-serif design. And he wrote extensively about his ideas about these things. This is a diagram of his thoughts about the way the sans-serif letters should be constructed. This is the draft of Johnston Underground, and lots of nice little notes in his perfect penmanship in the middle. And a later production drawing of the Underground Roundel, which became the symbol for the Underground. And after this program was, after sort of being used, these are the sorts of illustrations and consistent use of typography that the Underground was employing. So although to us, this still feels old fashioned, it's quite modern in comparison to the arts and crafts posters that they were using previously. Just a couple of other examples of the font in use. This is one of the first London Underground maps of this design by, I'm not sure his first name, Beck, in 1933. And just to look at the evolution of the Roundel over the years, in the middle, that's his actual Edward Johnston design. It was redesigned several times since, but it still includes that element of his original design. Still in use today, including in this beautiful image here. And Johnston wasn't commercially available. And so, as I'll mention next, Gil Sands ended up becoming much more popular and used in some places. So Eric Gill, a student and colleague of Edward Johnston, experimented with an even simpler design and that's how we ended up with Gil Sands. This essay is talking about the apparent benefits of Gil Sands over Johnston Underground and that's debatable but we certainly see a lot of Gil Sands these days. Two books that I would recommend, if you'd like to learn more about Edward Johnston is that his document, formal penmanship on the left and then a great book that I just picked up about Johnston and Gil by Mark Ovindan. Another project, this is the last custom font history lesson that I wanna talk about and it was really a special or an important one for me as I was starting to learn about graphic design, which is the mobile oil program by Tramai I think Geismar. So prior to their redesign, this is what the mobile ads looked like you know and they, sorry, the Tramai I think Geismar design took this very geometric approach to the letter forms and it was inspired by these designs by Elliot Noise. He designed, he was a very prominent architect who designed the service stations with these circular forms as well as the fuel pumps that they were using at the time. The idea behind the mobile typeface was to marry the geometry of Futura with the even proportions of standard or as we know it accidents grotesque today. And the way it was applied was beautiful. It was consistent, clean, modern, certainly very stark indifference to the ad that I showed you just a moment ago. So this is the full alphabet and the numbers and unfortunately I couldn't find a whole lot online. These are some of the only images that I really found to document the mobile program. So I took a drastic measure that I would recommend to all students and I emailed Tom Geismar. I figured out what his email address was, I sent him a message and he wrote back to me and that's something that I've done quite a few times over my career and it's really paid off. The worst thing that somebody can do is not reply to you and you won't get 100% rate of return but in general designers are nice people and they will make time for you. So to students in the audience, I really recommend reaching out to people if there's something you wanna know. So I had a lovely conversation with Tom Geismar this morning and he sent me a bunch of images. So now we can supplement what I've previously shown you with a couple more images. This is from the very first presentation to mobile where they're showing how the program works, the application of the alphabet and it was a pretty novel idea, this sub-brand usage of a single typeface and then using the same font after the brand name to create these sub-brands. The first oil can designs, the way it was employed on the packaging and actually we have a copy of the original standards manual for mobile. So just a couple more images of that and this was the very first of the new mobile service stations, this was in Connecticut and not many of these are around anymore because in these days, they only had the one grade of gas so they were single pumps and then 20 years later, they worked with Elliott Noise again to create the modern service station which really hasn't changed that much ever since with the multiple grades of gas, self-service was now an option and all of that, I was able to get a little more information about the project just by reaching out to someone and it was a lot better than the images that I found online which still are using the font pretty consistently. So those are a couple of examples that have been important to me in terms of how Custom Type has been used throughout time. A little bit more recent examples, still very important. Most of us have heard the Port Authority bus terminal, this vernacular lettering is what inspired to Biosphere Jones to create Gotham which was originally used for GQ Magazine and then obviously has gone on to do lots of other things. A famous application was the Obama campaign in 2008. Another Heffler design from 2001, Archer, this was originally commissioned by Martha Stewart Living, was exclusive to them for a period of time and then was released later. One more example, the Guardian typeface by commercial type, Christian Schwartz and Paul Barnes. These are all examples of fonts that have found a home in a corporate or publishing usage that then, that gets developed, that gets supported, gets rolled out and then after a period of time becomes available to other designers. And I think there's real benefit in that that there's something sad about a Custom Typeface that's only used once. A brand can then go through a redesign and if the designer doesn't have any rights to it, that font never goes on to do anything else. So as designers living in the modern world with access to social media, you've probably been hearing a lot about some Custom Typefaces. The sad reality is that for a lot of companies, this is a financial decision. Enterprise licenses from some of the bigger foundries can be incredibly expensive. Not only in a one-time fee, but in an annual fee. So there's a desire to have custom fonts and there's also this desire to own them. This has resulted in a lot of companies commissioning Custom Typefaces and I'll show you a couple of notable recent examples of them. But the other thing I wanted to say is that, custom fonts have become even more important because our typographic world is just much bigger than it ever was before. When I first started designing fonts, print was really the only way that you were gonna use a font. Web fonts weren't around yet, let alone app fonts. Now there's even examples of fonts being used in virtual reality. The sky's really at the limit and there's just so many new ways that companies are interacting with their audience and Type is the primary medium for communicating with their audience. So this is TCC Unity, Custom Typeface for Coca-Cola by Neville Brody and Associates and it's a finely executed font. The one thing I wanna point out is that there's a problem when the marketing department gets ahold of your story and they start telling the general audience some details about the font. So we end up with things like teardrop counter follows the language of brand and liquid, whatever that means. I can kinda go along with the slice T evokes the hyphen but the Q looking like a glass with a straw, sure maybe they all do. It's just not necessarily that useful of a story to tell but I get it. I have clients, people love a story and that's really what can sell the idea through. When it comes to the marketing department though maybe let's fine tune the message a little bit. A bit better the way the Netflix sand story is told but still we're hearing about the cinematic curve and enhanced geometry. Not sure what exactly that means. These are well-designed fonts that are just explained in kind of a convoluted way. Airbnb just came out with their custom font. They went a lot safer with just describing tall, excite, open aperture call today. But the most recent, or actually not even that most recent, it was 2017 that it first came out but most notable custom typeface of recent news for me was this IBM Plex font by Mike Avink and Bold Monday for IBM. What's notable about it is not only its beautiful form but the way that they've chosen to make it available to everyone. So there's an open font license, you can download these fonts from GitHub, you can use them however you like and rather than saying these are ours and we're gonna own them and no one else can have them, they're saying these are ours and you can use them in new and interesting ways but they've been drawn in a way and thought of in a way that still makes them ownable to IBM in terms of the ideas. So it goes on to have another meaning but the IBM DNA is still there. All right, that concludes talking about other people and now I'm gonna tell you a little bit about some of my own work. So as James mentioned, my first font was a font called Router. I was living in New York at the time. In 2006 was when I first started working on it. It was a moment of inspiration in this subway station, 33rd Street and Park Avenue. As a designer living in New York, I had been taking photos of type for some time but on this particular day, I saw this sign and there was just something that caught my eye, this charming A with the tail, this eight that curved back on itself. A lot of details that I thought were really great and what made it seem fair game to me to use as inspiration for a font was that this was a piece of lettering. It wasn't an existing typeface although it appears to have been inspired by Helvetica or based on Helvetica. You can see that the ease and ejector and emergency are different widths. These have been done by hand. All of the other letters are slightly different. So I started drawing and at first, it was just getting familiar with the tools. I was working an illustrator at the time and I was incredibly prescriptive in terms of following the source material. I was really just tracing it. And this is in the days before Type at Cooper. I actually signed up for a class at Cooper Union, a custom typeface design class. The day before the class was to start, I received a call and was told that the class was canceled because I was the only person that signed up for it. And so similar to, deciding to reach out to Tom Geismar, I reached out to the instructor, a guy named Hannes Fomira. And for the next six months, I went to his apartment once a week and was tutored. He taught me the design program. We looked at proofs of my typeface and marked them up just as you see here. And that's really my introduction to type design. I never went to one of the graduate programs though I thought about it. I just learned by doing and just kept working and kept going that way. So at a certain point into the education in type design, I came up with this draft and it was a difficult conversation. But Hannes told me, you've made this font, you've stripped all the personality out of it. I could just use some other font that already exists and there's no reason for this font to be. Every font has to have a mission statement. There needs to be a reason to exist. So while that was hard feedback, it was necessary. It's something that I take to heart and I think about still. I went back to my source material and noticed that when the router was carving the letters out of plastic, there was kind of a stress point at the beginning and end of the strokes. So I made that the defining characteristic of the font. And so here's the final version of router and you can see that there are these swellings at the end of the strokes. And so that's what I made the font about and that's what gave it its special characteristic. There's also an italic and I did a full weight range. So I published that in 2008 and not too long after was pleasantly surprised to see that people had started to buy it and this was the first big usage of router for the MinuteMade redesigned by Duffy and Partners. And it's not super prominent but it's on there, orange and 100%, that's the font I drew. I was happy. And as James mentioned then, not long after, it was included in this design exhibition at the Walker Art Center and then at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. And around the same time I got a call or I was getting emails one morning, pick up the New York Times on a Sunday and it had been used in a special education issue of the New York Times. So as a graphic designer, I wasn't working at top agencies or doing work that was getting national exposure. And suddenly as a type designer, I had found something that I enjoyed more that was opening more doors for me and was starting to get visibility on a different level. So for all of those reasons, it started to feel like the right thing for me and I really went even deeper in drawing more fonts, starting to get some custom work and then eventually firing my graphic design clients, which was great. So next I'll show a couple of my custom projects but my early custom projects, I was fortunate to get to work with Michael Beirut on the nuts.com typeface, which was a great experience and doing some other logos. James mentioned on Twitter today, I did the craft logo a while back, I did the Etsy logo. And those were important landmarks for me of starting to fill out my portfolio with some bigger recognizable work. But one of the first big projects in terms of the number of components, the visibility and the importance that meant a lot to me was when I got to start working with Adidas. Excuse me. So Adidas has been using Audinoya, their brand font ever since 2011. It was initially designed by John Carlos Casasin for Sid Lee's All In campaign and it existed only in lowercase in three weights. This is all there was and I had worked on a small project for Leon Emus, creative director in Portland for Adidas previously. I'd worked previously with him. And so he called me and wanted to fill out the family, do some other weights, do some metallics, do a condensed and do some uppercase characters. So I jumped at the opportunity, an initial way that I looked at it was what is the information we have here from the lowercase, some characters that immediately relate in terms of their construction. There was also another Adidas font by Tal Lemming called Dribbler that was used in basketball. And that served as information for a lot of the proportions and the forms in the uppercase, but there was still lots to fill out. In the end, there were now four weights of Audinoya that also had the uppercase, pretty extreme italic, which I haven't seen used too much, but I'm sure they'll roll it out at some point with 16 degree angle, condensed styles and a full character set that included a lot of alternates. They wanted the avant-garde left and right leaning AMVW. There's some narrow caps, some wide caps. And then in the numbers, there are a couple of alternates and then a condensed set of numbers that also have additional alternates. A little bit later, I added some additional weights, Crazy Light and Ultra Black. I was working with a developer at the time and he said, I'm not sure Crazy Light is really the best name for it, but it's actually an Adidas product. So there was a tie-in for them. And another aspect of the Audinoya Profants were some ligatures. A source of inspiration for the ligatures was the mountain or the badge of sport, the three stripes mark. Using that as this way to slice into the other glyphs, let them compress the message, make something that feels a bit more like sport to them. So this is just a fraction of the ligatures. These are just the A ligatures. So it goes on from there. But the very first usage was this there will be haters campaign. And it was pretty great to see it used prominently, looking pretty good. So I was happy to be working with them. Just recently for the Pyeongchang Olympics, they were using Audinoya Pro with the ligatures. I don't know if you can see, the Germany has many ligatures, the R, M, the M, A, the A, N. And can anybody tell me who this gentleman is in the, you know, the older gentleman here? Anyone know? His name is Frank Wolter Steinmeier and he's the president of Germany. I felt very ignorant to learn that Germany has a president. I thought there was just a chancellor. They also have a president. Apparently his role is not as prominent, but very important in his own way. One last image of Audinoya Pro. It's always fun to encounter the work out in the world, out in the wild. This was a particularly ironic usage where the message is destroy order and we've got an upside down S. No semblance of a baseline. Just a complete lack of order here. So Audinoya Pro was great. It was great to be working with Adidas, working on something that was being rolled out worldwide and used prominently. But what was even more interesting to me was when they reached out and wanted to work on something that was really drawing something from scratch instead of working with somebody else's intellectual property. So these were some sketches they had done. They wanted an athletic octagonal sands, particularly for this Adi Zero line of products. And wanted to work with me to develop that idea further. One initial source of inspiration is this United States Air Force font, which is used for identification on the aircraft. It has the octagonal shape and some really strange proportions, some pretty unique design details. In the design process, I tried to include elements from their first sketch. So the kind of strange R shape at the top, these Zs with asymmetrical joins. And also looking at, do we do the octagonal on the inside of the shape or not? Another important consideration they wanted. I don't know if you guys can see, but we're doing these facetings. So on the left, there's no faceting on the interior shapes. And then we're adding these little 45 degree moments, which just adds a little bit more visual intrigue when you're using this larger. We ended up going with the interior faceting, but figuring out exactly what is the radius of that and not doing the exterior faceting. So same way, weight range as Adanoia Pro. And I thought it was great. Here we go, another font, but then they wanted to do some more. So this was the full character set. And Leon had been talking for a long time about making a special extension that would let them choose from lots of different widths and weights of fonts. This was before variable fonts, really existed. So I did a sketch for them and he said, looks great at the top, love the condense, but can we make the wide go like three times wider? Which I thought this was already pretty wide, but I said, okay, sure, we'll go just a little bit wider. And so that's what we did. We've got, this is called Adanoia Chop. And so full character set on all of these and quite a wide range of weights and widths. It looks pretty great when you mix and match them and it really goes from pretty narrow to pretty ridiculously wide. And if you understand what variable fonts are, it allows you to drag anywhere in between the different positions from any of these masters. And the reason that's important for Adidas, sometimes variable fonts are just giving people too many choices, but what they really wanna be able to do is fill any space with typography. Another big part of their business are these uniforms for colleges, for professional teams, where they need to be able to use a templated system and fill that space with either the number or the team name, the player's name. So this becomes a tool for them. So I'm gonna leave the safety of keynote for a moment and show you a special tool that we made. Which, so in Illustrator, oh, you guys can't see that. Sorry, I need to, I'll just, here we go. All right, sorry about that. Let me bring these things over. Okay, so this is Adanoia Chop, variable font in Illustrator. You can change the weight, any weight you want. You can change the width, but what's really fun and is this custom plugin which will fill the space with the widest version of the font available. So this was built by Kenneth Normandy, a developer in Vancouver I've been working with. So you just hit the button and instant design. You know, it becomes even more interesting if you start mixing the weights around. Not easy to do behind your back. Yeah, so it's a special tool that lets them access the fonts and use them in a way that works for them. Of course you can access the variable fonts natively in Illustrator, but it just becomes a little bit more unwieldy to go back and forth in this drop down and also if you have multiple fonts, you're not allowed to edit them together, whereas our tool will let you change all selected text together. So that's that. And I'm gonna come back to Keynote. All right, next project I wanna show you is a collection of movie fonts that I've worked on for Pentagram for Emily Oberman's team. The first one that I did, I hesitate to show this because there wasn't that much involvement for me, but it's part of the story. So I decided to show you. Is this Fantastic Beasts font? They had basically crafted the whole alphabet and just looked to me to improve some of the proportions, make it a typable typeface. As you can see here it's extruded in some sort of mercury glowing metal, but it was a great project in that it was used prominently, rolled out worldwide. There were all these international versions of the logo and it led to some other projects that I got to do with them. The first of which was Justice League, which was the movie that came out last summer. So they had done the logo at the top and then asked me to interpret that as a full typeface. So the first thing I did was kind of an analysis of the font or the logo as it was and notice some inconsistencies that work as a logo but then start to cause problems if you look at it as a typeface. So you can see in the pentagram logo at top the use in Justice and League are different widths and that's because they're justifying this as a lockup, in a vertical lockup. So I just made those things more consistent and in terms of the design process, looking at options from top to bottom. Do we go a little bit wider or from left to right? Do we go a little bit heavier? Looking at a range of character styles for some of the specific characters, trying to use the diagonals as much as possible. So in the B and the R in that second line and then selection of the M's and N's. And I'm glad that we did go with the default. It just creates kind of a more of a superhero vibe rather than the more traditional M and N at the bottom. So this was the approved character set and then we also worked with Ksenia Summerskaya on a Cyrillic. And this is the way I like to talk about additional scripts because I don't know what these characters are. I can evaluate them as forms but when I'm having a conversation with the designer I don't want to say. It's the W with like a little tail at the bottom or it looks like an X but no, there's a T and it has an H connected to it. It's much easier to just say number 47. So this was rolled out and there was a great You Can't Save the World Alone campaign using the fonts and just saw this recently. So this is the Daily Show and they've parodied the logo for the Mueller investigation and they actually used the real font. So this intrigue, it's the real end there. I'm sorry for showing you his face but I wanted to show you the Daily Show. And one more movie font. Just recently I worked with them on a font for Harry Potter's or J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World. The idea behind this was marrying the two type styles of the Harry Potter logo which has these lightning bolts and kind of crooked little diagonals and then Fantastic Beasts which has these beastly barbs and hair and beastly little moments in it. It was actually a really straightforward design process. I just showed them looking at the sketch they had done, how we're gonna handle some of these small details in terms of what are the angles on the C's and the S's. But from there it was really just filling out the character set and then working with them to develop the special illustrated versions of the caps. The client ended up killing this part of it. They thought the lightning bolts were too much so that was the only real edit was getting rid of the lightning bolts going to a bit more consistent on the K, V, W, P so lightning bolt, no lightning bolt. And I don't have too many images of this in use so I'll just show you a couple images from my Instagram. These are a bunch of JK Rowling's Fantastic Beasts, the different words she comes up with for the different animals in her universe, just a lock up of the inspiration and we actually named the font Harry Beast. Harry Potter, Fantastic Beasts and I think I have to actually click on these for it to start. There you go. All right. Two more projects, almost done here. But a big one for me was American Express, working with Pennegram, with Abbott Miller's team, also with Andrew Walters and Kim Walker. And this was an important project for me. From the initial brief, the problem was American Express, this iconic brand, has a bit of an inconsistency problem. So there's the blue box lettering, which is this kind of Euro style outlined type. And then there was the out of the box type, which really had nothing to do with it. It looks a bit stretched, it's got contrast in a way that the blue box type didn't have. So the most important thing was creating a consistent lettering style that can be used for both. So we looked at a range of options, a narrow range, but a range. So something with a bit more of, not humanist, but more of a constructed grotesque approach at the top. In the middle, something very close to the blue box lettering as it was. At the bottom, something more of a geometric construction with the 90 degree terminals at the bottom. We ended up staying pretty close, but looking at, if we do outline the type, how does it work outside of the box? Is it just the regular sensor font, or do we use some sort of outline, some sort of bar system? In the end, this is what we did just for the out of the box font, or the logo, out of the box logo. And there were some details in it that I thought worked out well. It was a challenge to make that CA ligature, not call too much attention to itself, but it was really a bit of a, it was something that the client absolutely wanted. And Abbott had the great idea to include the C angle on the S's at the end of Express, which just dresses it up a little bit, creates a bit more intrigue in that part of the mark. But one of my favorite parts of the project was this shorthand, what we called magnify version of the logo. So these were two versions that we were presenting. In the end, we went with the one on the right, mainly because the client wanted it to read like an abbreviation of American Express instead of this new word, AMEX. So while there's something formally very nice about the one on the left, the one on the right worked better for their needs. Then working on the blue box, we looked at a range of options, including keeping the outline, doing something that were just bars, or rather even removing the outline, but it was something that was important to the client to maintain. So the next step was, okay, if we're gonna outline it, how exactly are we gonna outline it? The difference between the left and the right is really just the amount of divots that we included. On the left, we've really removed any sort of extraneous detail. And on the right, there's lots of little details, even around at the bottom of the S. So what we ended up doing was removing all of the small ones, but some on the right were still important, including at the bottom of the R and the shapes around the C. So this is where I thought we had basically solved all the problems. Let's deliver the files. Everyone's happy, but it ended up being an interesting project in terms of the way that we solved the problem for delivering optical sizes for the font or for the logo. So I came up with a system. We're looking at the blues and the whites in the logo. Well, how thick is the blue? How thick is the white? So in this grid, going from left to right, I'm increasing the blue weight. You can kinda see the blue is thinner on the left and heavier on the right. And then increasing the white. So the white is thinnest at the top, heaviest at the bottom. I thought, let's show this and pick one and then we'll move on to the next optical size. But it ended up being a process of refining, just zooming in and then going even further. So I have these numbers at the top, 166, 169. So then what the process ended up being was, okay, then let's look at 164, 165. And I show these just because actually I think they're beautiful. It's really cool the way that they ended up marking them and writing these little notes like yes. It started to get even more fun. And then I knew we were getting close when we started circling things. So in the end, this is what we delivered. There's three optical sizes for this mark and the point of an optical size is that they all look the same. But if you look at the smallest one and the largest one, side by side, there's quite a bit of a difference in terms of the weight of the white, the weight of the blue. And there's some thinning moments that happen, especially in the M on the left. So these are compensations that we do to make it perform correctly. And then this magnified logo, it needed to work at very small sizes, social media icons, just very small places. So the compensations were even greater for that. You can really see the difference between the outline on the left and the right. It's basically one to one in terms of the white and the blue on the left. So this rolled out just a couple of months ago and I couldn't have been happier with the way that they used all of the assets. I really want that pencil. And I can't wait to get a card. All my cards still, or I guess I just have one, but it still has the old logo on it. So soon enough. After it rolled out, it's always fun to read the comments on brand new. The one thing that I learned that was super interesting is that George Nelson, apparently, did an American Express logo in 1961. This is what we see at the bottom. I did some research at the time, but I lost, I missed that detail. So it would have been fun to reference that, but here it is just to share. Now I'm gonna respond to a couple of comments directly. Why not just going this way? Great point, we tried it, didn't work. Worked so much better. Again, I already addressed this, client didn't like it. But here, you've got a point. I see what you're saying. So in the end, it's not worlds away, but it does work quite a bit better. There were lots of really bad little shapes in the previous mark. It didn't work at larger sizes. And the thing that I'm really happy about is this out of the box mark. I think it just really, it shines on its own. They're using it large. They're using it really nicely. So one last project that I wanna share, which just launched last week, is for Ogilvy. And I did this for Collins, New York, working with Brian Collins, Tom Wilder, and Brian Akersky at Collins. And then actually we have here tonight, Graham Bradley, who helped me with one of the fonts. And Douglas Hayes also helped with one aspect that I'll share a little bit later. So Ogilvy, as you may know, Ogilvy and Mayther is an ad agency. It was started in 1948, something in New York by David Ogilvy, a British man who then opened offices around the world. He's really considered the father of modern advertising. And this was the version of the logo that they had used for some time. It's a custom version of Baskerville. He was apparently very fond of Baskerville. So that was, going in, we knew that that was an aspect that they wanted to maintain. Some reference to Baskerville would be honoring his legacy. But more recently they were using this signature mark, which had some semblance with his actual handwriting, but there was a desire to move past this to kind of a return to form. And what was really important in terms of the launch was that Ogilvy had all of these, it's a huge company with, in 30 countries, 150 some offices, 15,000 employees, and all of these different marketing companies, different service bureaus that they had. And they wanted it all now to come under this Ogilvy banner. So initial research, just looking at the Baskerville source material, they had a custom font that they had been using by a storm called Ogilvy J. Baskerville that was incredibly well-drawn, beautiful font, but felt a bit old, just in terms of looking back towards history. And something that was really important in this project was looking at history, but also having something that was undeniably contemporary. One initial sketch that I did, because there was some mention of maybe there's a sans and a serif was just coming off the Adidas project, I thought, well, what if we make this blending tool between a sans and a serif? There was some interest, but it didn't really go anywhere. What really caught fire, though, was this sketch by Brian Okarski of the Ogilvy mark, which had some aspects they really liked, particularly this idea of connection. As I mentioned, the companies being reimagined as one single Ogilvy, it had special meaning for them. So my process in terms of seeing this mark and trying to bring some typographic refinement and lead it towards what would work as a final logo was first to look at just evening out some of the proportions, the weight, refining some of the curves, and then looking at some different options like, do we have some sharp details in the terminals? Do we maintain this kind of wild swing at the bottom of the G, or do we go to something that's a bit more sober in terms of almost a horizontal on the G? What we ended up doing was somewhere in between, there's still a little bit of a swing on the G bowl, but most of the drama is in that ligature with the GI. My design process, looking at the Baskerville source material, we looked at a couple of options for the terminals at the top. They really liked this sharp and round play, going much sharper on the details, like on the C in Carson than Baskerville does. There were some parts that I was a little uncomfortable with like the F and the J, but I've learned to just leave some of these things in there and pray, hope, know that they'll get resolved as the project moves forward. So we ended up with something a bit more like the F and J with the ball terminals, but maintain some of these sharp details, like on the tail of the A. For the italic, looked at source material. I've always really liked the steep italic of Jansen and the kind of play between these different angles in the lower case. And then this resort specimen had some really great details in terms of these like really strange hooks that go into the lower case characters like the M and N. So that was an aspect that we used, especially in the lower case, trying to create a form that reflected that, but worked with the Roman. We looked at a range of options, including from second line, symmetrical hook serif, so the top of the U and the bottom of the U are doing the same thing. At the very bottom, a Roman style serif, so it's doing the same thing as what the Roman does in terms of that top flag serif. And what we ended up with was something somewhere in between the second and third option with it still has, it's not completely flat, but it's not symmetrical with the bottom exit stroke. These are just a couple of the different alternates that we looked at, which is just part of the process of figuring out exactly how all of the system works together. And just one note about how this project came to be, Tom Wilder, creative director at Collins, thought of me for this project and had the idea, why don't you come out to New York, we'll spend a week and we'll really treat it as a boot camp and rapid prototype, make as much of this stuff as possible. And I really jumped at the idea. It was a great experience of seeing how they work, being able to see the work in use in real time and adjust pivots and make corrections and I think make the work even better. At the same time, they had a competing design direction and I couldn't help but get a little bit competitive and see they were using this sans serif and I thought, oh no, the client's gonna choose that one and then they're not gonna want a font. So I actually stayed up almost all night and just pounded out a draft of a sands that they could use in the presentation and when they chose the basket of the option, they ended up wanting the sands too. So there's always an opportunity to sell something in. Just some of the alternates that we looked at in terms of designing the sands and I may lose you on this next slide, but it's a very subtle tweak here. We just started to think the serif has some very clear special attributes to it. We don't want the sands to just feel like any other sands. So there were some very fine proportion shifts going back and forth, just like making the H-E-F-L a little narrower, making some of them a little wider and it might not seem like much here, but when you're actually laying it out, when you're actually testing it, it ends up feeling different. It doesn't feel as familiar as another font and that made it for them a little bit more ownable. Last few slides here, we made an italic for the sands. The serif italic is 22 degrees, which is pretty steep. It looked ridiculous when we did that with the sands, so it's a bit more conservative, something more like 17, which is still pretty steep for sands. And last few details on this, there's also a monogram font that for some reason I keep doing these, let's do ligatures or monograms. I'm not sure exactly how they're gonna use it, but this was the design process in terms of looking at how the system works and then crafting all of the monograms. So whatever your name is, if you have hyphenated name, maybe just choose the last two names, but we didn't do the three monogram because that just gets exponentially larger. And this is what Douglas Haley's helped me with. So in the end, we've got the family. I'm really proud of the light. I think it does something really nice for the serif, for the sands, and the logo. And what I think really makes this project shine, Collins is fantastic at executing the design concepts, using it in the real system and presenting the work in terms of the way it's photographed. The colors are fantastic. And I just really couldn't have been happier with how the whole thing came out. Some books and Oklahoma offices. And I've got one last slide here for you, which is really just type born. Here's the monograms. And in terms of ownership, this is something that I retain the rights to. So it will become a public release at some point. So I hope you guys enjoyed this. I wanted to share a little bit about the design history as I understand it, the way that I think about approaching these projects and then showing you a few of my recent projects. Thanks a lot.