As Elizabeth Price opens a new show featuring her SLOW DANS trilogy, October 25 at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, we speak with Matthew Fenton on the custom typeface his design studio created for the works, two of which are also on view in the Walker exhibition, Elizabeth Price.
Founded in 2012 by Haakon Spencer and Matthew Fenton, Spencer Fenton is a design and creative direction studio that employs a breadth of visual disciplines including art direction, graphic design, and typeface design. The studio recently launched British Standard Type, a contemporary digital foundry that specializes in bespoke and retail typeface design. The foundry was established to explore the potential of developing type design technologies, with the aim of providing organizations and individuals with effectively crafted tools for typographic communication. In this interview, Fenton reflects on the studio’s collaboration with Elizabeth Price and the design of bespoke typefaces that appear through Price’s new trilogy of works, SLOW DANS, of which two works—FELT TIP and KOHL—are currently on view at the Walker.
PAVEL PYŚ (PP)
To start, could you please describe Spencer Fenton and in particular any projects you’ve done with artists before?
MATTHEW FENTON (MF)
Spencer Fenton is a design and creative direction studio, and we work across analogue, environmental, and digital mediums. At the core of the studio is a passion for typography, which has developed into a specialization in type design. Before embarking on the studio, we left London to study typeface design in Switzerland at ECAL (Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne), which gave us a good grounding in the discipline. We have created typefaces for artistic projects including art galleries and cultural publications but none to the specificity and extent that Elizabeth required. What we find interesting within our practice as type designers is that most of the typefaces we draw are custom designs and made for specific purposes and contexts.
PP
How did the initial conversation start with Elizabeth? Can you describe the brief that was given to you?
MF
We were introduced to Elizabeth via Film & Video Umbrella, with whom we have collaborated previously. On the first occasion that we met, she had quite a concise brief ready and showed us some visuals of neckties from photographs that she had created. She explained the ideas behind the work and the kind of relationship that she wanted to create between the digital and the analogue and exploring the historical world of weaving. Elizabeth sent us a little snippet of text, which read:
I want it to be modular, created using variations and arrangements of a single unit, shaped like a stitch or a seed, with hints of jacquard looms, pianola scrolls, and Tetris games. I think we should maybe only go for upper case, so we can risk some legibility in favor of being experimental. (When I use headlines, they usually just repeat words in lower case elsewhere, so they can risk a bit of being illegible.) But, it would be good to identify a lower case that will work well with it. Also, given that its destination is possibly only moving image (rather than printed matter) I would like to design it specifically for that, considering the modes of animation and effects, such as glow/shine, and some 3D characteristics—considering these possibilities from the start.
She also supplied us with images of textiles showing men’s necktie patterns in detail. So straightaway we were offered a quite unusual brief, which served as a background for us to imagine the direction. After some back and forth discussing the specific uses of the typeface, we agreed that we should make a headline typeface for large use and a supporting body copy typeface for longer texts that would be derived from the headline version once that was complete. Immediately, there was a breadth of references in terms of digital typefaces, and we delved into different genres of typefaces that we felt might relate. Besides pixel- and screen-based typeface designs, we looked at machine-readable typefaces (typefaces designed to be read by a computer, like those you might find on a bank card or train ticket) and modular typeface designs whereby the fundamental shapes used in the letters are recycled to create each letter.
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An example of a typical dot-matrix typeface found on LCD displays. Source image provided by Spencer Fenton
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An example of a typical dot-matrix font found on LCD displays. Source image provided by Tinsharp
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An example of a machine-readable typeface designed to be read by computers. Source image provided by Spencer Fenton
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Early bitmap typeface found on Apple computers. Source image provided by Spencer Fenton.
We were looking at that quite a lot because this idea of something being modular and programmable offered a systematized approach; that’s something that we saw throughout. You can see this kind of pattern within the reference to weaving, and when looking at the pianola scroll and jacquard looms, there is a digital binary language apparent. That led us to look at a lot of early digital typeface references that are made from a single unit like the dot-matrix fonts found on LCD displays. Elizabeth wanted the module to be rounded and something that referred to a seed or a single unit.
We also looked to older historical references, such as the Romain du Roi, the king’s typeface developed in France in the 17th century. It’s one of the first typefaces that could be systematized and drawn by anyone using a geometrical grid. This coincided with our consideration of the medium and format of the artwork and how the typeface would appear.
PP
What were some of those early digital references that you were looking at?
MF
A lot of IBM typefaces that are probably little known and relatively obscure due to their specific uses. We also looked at early typefaces that were developed for programming languages and to be read by a machine. Monospaced typefaces (a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space) were the main focus of our search. We were very interested in retaining modularity, not only in the typeface forms but also in how the typeface would be used. Elizabeth told us about the tall format of the artwork, being two 16:9 screens stacked on top of each other, so we decided to design the letters to fit inside this somewhat condensed format. After our research, Elizabeth shared her sketches with us. They were pages of pen and paint experiments exploring freely onto a gridded notebook; she was painting with dots and connecting forms. Elizabeth’s sketches and the freedom to play with “illegibility” reminded us of the need to have something that at times should also feel organic.
Based on the artwork screen format, we created variations of grid densities to create pixel-based skeletons of the letters. A coarse grid creates letters with less detail and with a finer grid you can make something that has more detail. So it was also about finding the right grid, and there were lots of iterations and explorations of the grid size initially so we could find enough expression within a letter to get across the kind of visual ideas that Elizabeth wanted to convey. At this point, we had a quite crude pixel typeface, but we then became aware of a technique to merge neighboring pixels. Essentially it’s an interpolation technique whereby neighboring pixels blend into each other; you can automate radiuses and the amounts of overlap as they merge. Quite quickly, we were encouraged to see that from something square and pixelated; we could create something that felt organic. This iterative process and reflecting on the brief lead us to create variations of letters by removing and rearranging pixels on the grid to create variations of the same letters to enhance the organic aspect versus the digital. After working in what was quite a mechanical way we returned to a more classical approach of type design, whereby we optically adjusted the letters and rectified anything that wasn’t smooth or that wasn’t translated correctly by the merging process.
After completing the headline typeface, we turned to the body copy version, and we used the same process again, but with that particular typeface, we weren’t as strict with the modularity and spacing. We made adjustments to the height and counter size to accommodate its use at a smaller size and approached this in a more traditional type design way I guess by more relying on our optical vision to correct space the letters. For us, this back and forth between automating and then returning to work by eye was a significant contributing factor to its end form.
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An overview of the display and text versions of the typeface. Source image provided by Spencer Fenton
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Letter production detail. Source image provided by Spencer Fenton.
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Letter M alternate glyphs included in the typeface, each demonstrating different pixel arrangements. Source image provided by Spencer Fenton.
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Illustration of the merger technique used to create overlapping and rounded forms from pixels. Source image provided by Spencer Fenton
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Early typeface sketches. Source image provided by Spencer Fenton.
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Early grid density tests. Source image provided by Spencer Fenton.
PP
How would you describe the difference between working with an artist and working with a commercial client?
MF
Firstly, there’s a difference in the brief you receive with a commercial project; the world they are trying to create and the world they would like to belong to is often defined. With artists, the brief often needs to be defined, and the world the typeface exists in is that of the artist, a world you need to explore and understand. For this reason, the level of collaboration is higher; so there’s a period of immersion that is required to understand their world and the environment the typeface will exist in.
I think the motivations to make the typeface for artists and commercial clients are also different, and this has a strong influence on the result you create. If you break down the typeface, it’s kind of like, what’s its purpose? Why should it exist? Elizabeth’s motivation meant you get an unusual result that probably would never have been made were it not for this project.
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Elizabeth Price’s sketchbooks. Courtesy of the artist
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Elizabeth Price’s sketchbooks. Courtesy of the artist
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