Aucklanders have a there own taste of the festival via a set of billboards designed by Philip Kelly (the designs will also feature at the festival, and Designworks designer Josh Barr is representing there. Anyway, fans of guns and typefaces (or irony; surely there's been no greater invitation…) might be interested to note that there is a free font, designed by Neville Brody, available from the ADF website.

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The good news, for fans of New Zealand designed typefaces, is that Kris Sowersby has contributed two of his fonts to the redesign: Founders Grotesk and  Tiempos Headline. There's a nice rundown on the design of Founders on the Klim Type Foundry website. As far as we know, this is the first time a New Zealand-designed typeface has been used for a New Zealand newspaper… let us know if you know otherwise.

Another Weekend Herald font Publico Text, was designed by Christian Schwartz, famous in type circles for his work on the Guardian redesign. Scharwtz, who spoke in New Zealand about the Guardian type design project at Typeshed11 last year,  has an interesting back story about Publico's design here.

Feedback please. What are your thoughts on the Weekend Herald's new look?

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It’s a deceptively simple idea, but a stroke of genius when it comes to self-promotion. A young Brooklyn-based type designer leaves her day job to go freelance in September 2009, and needs a personal project to keep her motivated and show off her skills. Blogging? It’s been done. Online portfolio? Already got one. So the designer, who draws every new alphabet by hand, vows to create one new letter every working day — a decorative drop cap. After a brainstorming session with friends, she also decides to make each letter available for online use only, “for the beautification of blog posts everywhere” — a sort of open-source style dictionary.  Ten months later and with a target 12 alphabets on their way to completion, the Daily Drop Cap is keeping people engaged with what designer, illustrator and typographer Jessica Hische is producing, while keeping the spotlight on what she’s good at and allowing her to set her own agenda.

“I realised it wasn’t just making the letters that would make it popular, it was making it more interactive and allowing people to re-use the drop caps,” says Hische. “I’ve had unbelievable amounts of feedback. Months and months later, people are still sending me stuff, and I get so much traffic because of people posting about it on different blogs. What I thought would be a side project has been helpful for my other projects as well.”

Just twenty-five, Hische (“just like ‘fish’ but with an H”) says the Daily Drop Cap project has also encouraged potential clients to overlook her comparative youth.

“It was a hindrance at first, being young,” she says. “But I got so much exposure that people now just take me seriously, as well as taking it as an inspiration for how quickly you can do things.”

And, given the way she works, Hische is quick. It can take her as little as a couple of hours to draw a new typeface, though her first commercial font, Buttermilk, was three months in development (on and off). Her trademark vintage-look, hand-drawn style is created in Illustrator rather than Fontlab, the preferred software for most typographers as it generates crisp, perfect curves. However, Hische says a bit of wonkiness works better for her.

“I don’t want it to look too mathematical or perfect, or for my work to look like it can be made by anyone,” she says. “Before I started the project I was already pretty fast, but any practice makes you faster, and I make decisions faster. There’s a lot of fine-tuning that happens. It takes me less time now to make a new display font for something than to scour the Internet for something really good.”

As a promotional enterprise rather than a profit-making one, the DDC sits alongside Hische’s identity and book design projects, and her other work as a freelance illustrator. This has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, and often includes her characteristic swirly, vintage-look letters and wry anthropomorphic drawings of animals — such as the one featuring partied-out, passed-out cats produced for the new year’s issue of a financial magazine.

Her calendar is, she says, generally clogged up for four weeks in advance. She gets so many questions emailed to her from students and other designers that she’s created an FAQ section on her website to avoid having to respond to each individually. Hische’s success is, however, not an accident. She spent three years freelancing heavily at night after clocking out of day jobs at Headcase Design in her native Philadelphia (where she worked on, among other things, Dirty Blonde, a compilation of Courtney Love’s scrawled, illustrated diaries) and New York-based studio Louise Fili, which specialises in packaging, restaurant and book design.

Hische admits that, right now, she has five new drop caps to catch up on, but says that coming up with new ideas has never been a problem. “I never know what I’m going to do until I sit down, which can be intimidating. But I always want to do something completely different to what I’ve already done. It’s always good to know what you don’t want to do — given limitations I tend to do better. I actually thought I would be more experimental than I have been, so I’m going to push myself more for the last ones.”

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Electric Wire Hustle album cover.

ProDesign\\ The biographical info on your website reads a little like this: Christchurch, Melbourne, New York. What’s the best place you’ve worked at as an art director?

Jeff Docherty\\ I’d have to say New York, the city is filled with so many inspiring and talented people. You buzz off your fellow creatives, it’s like when you go skateboarding with someone better than you, you want to progress and push each other to improve. Saying that, I’m in Christchurch at the moment and arrive in LA in a few weeks.PD\\ You’ve worked on a number of publications, including The New York Times Magazine and i-D Magazine. Where do you think magazine design is heading these days?
JD\\ Magazine design should alway focus on telling inspiring and interesting stories. Great content and great images equals a great magazine – it’s simple math, but it is tough to pull off. Learning to exercise restraint is a quality rarely considered. I often see magazines designed for designers and not readers.

PD\\ Am I correct in inferring a strong geometric theme in some of your work – fine lines, triangles, cubes. If so, where do you think the fascination for this style comes from?
JD\\ They tend to be bold and stick in people’s minds, we are trained to remember simple symbols in life, like a stop sign is red and usually an octagon. Implanting a memorable moment is a challenge in this day and age, with the abundance of advertising… Simplicity is king.

PD\\ Do you have a favourite piece of editorial work?
JD\\ Hands down my work for The New York Times Magazine, they justify both sides of the story – neither the design or the editorial content is compromised in telling the story. The design speaks louder when needed, and in other cases the editorial text pushes forward to take centre stage.

PD\\ How did you come to work for the band Electric Wire Hustle?
JD\\ I was lucky enough to work and live with one of the band members in Melbourne, we have always kept in touch. When they travelled through New York I made it obvious that when they released an album I wanted in! Great thing about working for EWH is that they trust your creative input, you really need good clients to do good work.

PD\\ What was the logotype typeface you used?
JD\\ The EWH logo was a custom typeface I built. It was inspired by those old style 50s and 60s neon signs.

For more examples of Docherty's work check out jeffreydocherty.com.

– MB

Electric Wire Hustle — plane detail.

Album detail.

Album detail.

Compact disc cover.

Neon sign styling of type design.

CD design.

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Frank Black monogram (unused).

Here’s a rock-related story. Peter Oxley is a rock climber. So too, as it happens, is the Pixies’ band manager. In a slightly convoluted chain of events, Oxley, creative director of Christchurch design firm Ratio, who knew the band manager from London, got thinking about Pixies frontman Frank Black (or Black Francis as he’s sometimes known). In particular, he got thinking about a monogram, as he’d been told that Black, with his wife Violet Clark, was about to set up a new record company.Oxley eventually designed a monogram (above) – a play on an interrelation between the letter ‘f’ and a musical note. He also designed a poster, incorporating the logotype into a circular, clock-resembling piece.
“I really liked the poster’s time-based image, created by just using the monogram. It envisages the idea of how much his music inspired me over the years and how much he is totally dedicated to producing great work.”

The designer sent the works to Black, but they weren’t used – Black subsequently changed his name back from Frank Black to Black Francis (his given name is actually Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV). But this is not a bad news story. The singer, remembering Oxley’s unsolicited work, recently approached him to design some additional material for Grand Duchy, a rock band formed in 2008 by Black Francis and his wife Violet Clark. “It was due to the monogram and this poster image that he commissioned me directly for the Grand Duchy work,” says Oxley.

“He remembered the earlier work and this led to Ratio designing and art-directing their new CD – Petits Fours. The main element of interest with that project was the design of a bespoke font for the band that supported the idea of light and dark between Charles Thompson (aka Black Francis) and Violet Clarke within the band.” MB

Frank Black Poster by Christchurch firm Ratio.

Logo (top), letter 'G' and CD.

Grand Duchy new font.

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Work in progress – Origin Design's koru-inspired typeface. The typeface is currently called "Brizo", after the designer.

More feedback after airing this story in our last issue. Origin Design's Brian Slade describes Wellington type designer Kris Sowersby as "a man after my own heart". Slade is developing a  typeface for an as-of-yet unspecified client that also uses the familiar form of the koru motif. Slade says this design solution, part of a "brand refresh brief", is for a client that is "spread across New Zealand with a real need for cohesive comms and distinctive visibility".

"I elected to tackle it [the visibility dilemma] with a typeface they can call their own to communicate their intrinsic New Zealand understanding and value," says Slade. "The type treatment is part of a palette of graphics that can be built into a strong illustrative visual language."

Slade says this kind of influence comes from New Zealand's more confident self-awareness – a desire to " identify with our own visual language and stories, rather than those handed to us from Britain or the USA."

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