The Day I Discovered Type Design

Source: Hacker News

Fifty years ago this month, March 1976, at 20 years old, my interest in type design began.

Early Years

I was in my second year of a two‑year commercial art program at North Hennepin Community College (NHCC), a northern suburb of Minneapolis.
At first I was thinking of pursuing a career as an illustrator, but I was also interested in graphic design. In addition to these, I studied art history, drawing and painting, lettering, printmaking, as well as writing and other liberal‑arts classes.

College Lettering Class

What sparked my interest in type design was a project in the advanced lettering class taught by Lance Kiland (who I kept in touch with until his untimely passing in 2013). We mostly learned to do lettering with brushes and Speedball pens. At the time, lettering was considered a basic skill for a graphic designer; it was needed for marker layouts to sell a design to a client before it was set in actual type, which was very expensive. This was a decade before desktop publishing would allow anyone to set their own type on a personal computer and turn the business of typesetting upside down.

I had been working with type and doing lettering since high school, as editor and designer of the school newspaper and yearbook. Frustrated with the limited methods we had to set headlines, I started purchasing rub‑down type on my own. I fell in love with type from looking at Chartpak and Letraset catalogs, and I developed a taste for typography under the influence of my uncle Knut, a graphic designer in Chicago.

The final project in my college lettering class was to design a complete, original alphabet—a typeface.

Discovery of U&lc Magazine

By coincidence, I discovered a copy of U&lc magazine in the graphics classroom. U&lc was published by the International Typeface Corporation (ITC), and its designer‑editor was the legendary Herb Lubalin. I’d never seen such beautiful typography and design; it was a motherlode for an aspiring typophile like me.

ITC typefaces were available on virtually every typesetting machine and alphabet product, such as Letraset. In U&lc I spotted a call for typeface submissions. If accepted, ITC would pay an advance plus royalties. Lance told me he’d heard of a designer in Minneapolis who had made over $50,000 on a typeface design that got published (almost $290 K in 2026 dollars).

The Uncial Sans Project

Inspired by the call, I conceived a very modern, geometric sans‑serif design based on the underlying forms of uncial calligraphy. I drafted the artwork on a large sheet of illustration board, with 2.5‑inch‑tall letters drawn by hand in ink using Rapid‑o‑Graph technical pens, a T‑square, circle templates, and other drawing tools.

Designing a typeface was exhilarating. The idea of creating an original alphabet fired my imagination, and learning that it was possible to design type professionally was a revelation. I decided right then that someday, somehow, I wanted to design typefaces. From that day on, even while doing other work over the coming decades (graphic design, art direction, some illustration), type design remained in the back of my mind, and I frequently sketched ideas for new typefaces.

Later Reflections

It wasn’t until almost twenty years later, in the mid‑1990s, that I finally got a typeface published. Looking back, that lettering assignment in 1976 was where it all started.