emigre

This text was first published in 1996 in the type specimen booklet for Mrs Eaves. An aspect of Baskerville's type that I intended to retain is that of overall openness and lightness. To achieve this while reducing contrast, I have given the lower case characters a wider proportion. In order to avoid increasing the set-width, I reduced the x-height, relative to the cap-height. Consequently, Mrs Eaves has the appearance of setting about one point size smaller than the average typeface in lower case text sizes.

The Cholla typeface family was designed by Sibylle Hagmann in 1998-99 and named after a species of cactus she encountered in the Mojave Desert. Cholla was originally developed for the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. There, art director Denise Gonzales Crisp and associate designer, Carla Figueroa, collaborated with Hagmann to create a series of fonts that would offer a great deal of variation.

Triplex is my first sans-serif text design. It evolved from working with geometric typefaces. Traces of my earlier Citizen design are visible in Triplex. Typefaces are not intrinsically legible; rather, it is the reader's familiarity with faces that accounts for their legibility. Studies have shown that readers read best what they read most. Legibility is also a dynamic process, as readers' habits are ever changing. It seems curious that blackletter type styles which we find illegible today were actually preferred over more humanistic designs during the 14th and 15th centuries.

This text was first published in 1996 on the front side of the promotional poster for Filosofia. The poster was titled "It's Their Bodoni," and was designed by Massimo Vignelli.

Matrix when the personal computer was very crude and memory space was very expensive. To ensure legibility for text applications, the basic elements are derived from classical forms. The character proportions are based on a few simple ratios and the points required to define the letterforms are limited to the essentials. Therefore Matrix serifs are reduced to diagonal lines; requiring fewer points than even square serifs.