Gadgetory

hello everybody I'm Lila associate editor at C net here with Steve Madison creative type director at monotype imaging thank you for joining us Steve absolutely great to be here thank now what is a creative type director I've been a type designer for over 20 years and now I direct a team of type designers and help my type designs get executed by a whole team of type designers and type projects can range from one typeface to multiple weights in a family and it requires really a team effort to get a complete family done and what is your first font that you've ever designed the first typeface I did was a typeface called Andy and it was based on the handwriting of a childhood friend of mine who had wrote with his left hand and his letters kind of slant back to the left and you can see on the top line there's sort of a back slant it's kind of a laid back looking handwriting and he had the same kind of handwriting all the way through adulthood and so when I first started my career I was starting to learn how to draw type and digitized letter forms and he sent me a letter and I thought wow this would be really cool to digitize so I digitized the handwriting from the letter and then wrote him back a letter typed in his own handwriting so it's kind of a fun way to get started in the type design business and what kind of other fun fonts have you done another design that's you see everywhere and a lot of people love to hate is called curls it was commissioned by Microsoft so they commissioned me to do a design that they would put into the publisher product that people could use using scrapbooking and that sort of a thing and now we see it used everywhere and sort of people are tired of it and so it's it's not one of my most proud moments but it fulfilled the customer specification of a very curly fun design and another font that people see everywhere is actually something that are isn't a lot of phones and you designed the Android family fun is that correct that's correct in 2007 Google approached me to do a typeface for the user interface for the Android platform they required a design that was neutral but not so neutral because Google sort of a fun company and so we wanted to have a little bit of levity to the to the sign and sew droid sans' was drawn and then they needed a serif family as well to browse web pages that had serif to text and for those who might not understand what is a serif font a serif typeface is what you would typically see in books and printed books and of course the seraphs are the the little ending strokes on on the letter forms and you can see that there's a lot more contrast of thick and thin strokes in a serif typeface as well which makes it better for reading so what other fonts have you designed for Google well their branding group was very impressed with the way Android the Android platform was working out and they liked the typeface droid sans' very much and what they didn't like was droid sans is sort of compressed it's a little bit narrower design because it was designed for the mobile space and had to fit a lot of information on a narrow screen and so for a branding approach they wanted a little bit wider version so Google sans it's now called open sans is what they're using throughout their Chrome OS and through their branding and advertising and as this still retains some of the playfulness that was enjoyed yeah that was the intention was to keep the it's somewhat neutral but it has the playfulness of the the two-story lower lowercase G and when you add a little bit of asymmetry you add a little bit of playfulness a little bit of click casualness to the design and Microsoft actually commissioned you for another kind of fun as well yes so in 2003 Microsoft decided to do a rebrand and that they wanted to start from the typeface and work that throughout the entire brand from their user interface on the desktop to all their packaging and promotional promotional material and so we designed a new face that was neutral and humanistic and friendly and approachable in appearance but it had to be very legible on screen because they were going to use it for the user interface now they've adapted it to include in the Windows Phone so that it really ties together the entire Microsoft corporate brand and where exactly have we seen some of your other funds so I mean I've seen in phones I've seen in these tablets and what kind of devices we might see your designs in well the first product I think my typefaces were shipped in where was the original Xbox the great big black angular aggressive-looking gaming device and so that called for very aggressive angular looking typeface designs and then just a few years later they decided that that was the wrong brand voice for the Xbox and so they made a much more contemporary smooth looking device and I worked on those typefaces which again they complement the brand of the actual piece of hardware are there any other places that we could read your designs yeah the typefaces are becoming much more popular on reading devices such as the Barnes and Noble Nook and the Kindle and on the iPad they the pixel density of these new screens are becoming so sharp that you're getting close to print when it comes to the resolution and so you can actually change the typefaces in what you're reading on these devices to more correspond to what your what your preference is and so I've done designs for the Barnes and Noble Nook for instance that are designed specifically to look good on that that ePaper screen which is a very challenging environment to to work in and on devices like the the Samsung Galaxy you can read droid serif when you're browsing the web so well thank you so much for joining us absolutely thank you