Full Char­ac­ter Set

Spread from Joseph Churchward.

David Ben­newith, in his bio­graph­ical endeav­our Joseph Church­ward, presents us with the rational and intu­it­ive sides of the type designer and recip­i­ent of New Zealand’s highest hon­our for design­ers at the recent BeST Awards. The book reflects on an extens­ive body of work – span­ning four dec­ades and encom­passing over 600 fonts – which Church­ward ten­derly describes as a gift that he had to pro­duce. In fol­low­ing the back­story, Meena Kadri dis­cov­ers that more gifts in the form of postal cor­res­pond­ence between bio­grapher and sub­ject shaped the sense of treas­ure the volume exudes.

(From ProDesign 104, with addi­tional images)

“The intu­it­ive mind is a sac­red gift and the rational mind its faith­ful ser­vant.”
–Albert Einstein

Joseph Church­ward cover.

While some books are meant merely to be read, Joseph Church­ward is very much a book to be exper­i­enced. Its com­pil­a­tion of anec­dotes, archival mater­ial, cor­res­pond­ence and com­ment­ary presents a loosely struc­tured yet ever-insightful por­trait of a pro­lific designer for whom typo­graphy is a con­stant in life. Nos­tal­gic remin­is­cences of draw­ing let­ters in the sand along a Sam­oan beach, which were in turn devoured by an insa­ti­able tide, are recalled, referred to and repeated. Ben­newith men­tions that he would receive pack­ages from Church­ward of up to forty sheets and that at times he was over­whelmed by such repe­ti­tion. “But over time I began to see this as an essen­tial ele­ment of trans­lat­ing the wealth of mater­ial that was arriv­ing – items became re-contextualised in rela­tion to the things they were pack­aged with and a richer story began to emerge.”
The exchange developed between the pair when Church­ward was in Wel­ling­ton and Ben­newith was a researcher in design at the Dutch Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Ben­newith pays subtle trib­ute to this geo­graph­ical polar­ity by pla­cing the book’s foot­notes at the head rather than the foot of the pages. Ini­tially Ben­newith found his side of the hand­writ­ten exchange chal­len­ging, not­ing that you can’t eas­ily delete what you’ve writ­ten, but he star­ted to dis­cover a dif­fer­ent approach to text and an appre­ci­ation for the phys­ic­al­ity of Churchward’s work. Hand let­ter­ing, from full char­ac­ter font sets to postal cor­res­pond­ence, came more nat­ur­ally to Church­ward – whose busi­ness card proudly pro­claims that ‘Hand Let­ter­ing is Super­ior.’
Ben­newith would dis­patch to Church­ward samples of the designer’s typefaces that he found in use, as well as his own typo­graph­ical exper­i­ments; in return he would receive bio­graph­ical and archival excerpts, often in no par­tic­u­lar order, which he would be left to decipher. But Ben­newith observed that edit­ing is an inter­gral part of graphic design and took it in his stride to apply such skills to his search for a nar­rat­ive grasp of Churchward’s life.
Joseph Church­ward grew up in Samoa as the pro­geny of the colo­nial Pacific and with an ances­try that includes Eng­lish, Scot­tish, Tongan, Chinese and Sam­oan. As a teen­ager he arrived in New Zea­l­and by boat to fur­ther his edu­ca­tion, which in time led him to the Wel­ling­ton Tech­nical Col­lege. Exhib­it­ing a flair for hand-lettering he took up work at the Charles Haines advert­ising firm upon gradu­at­ing, where he would manu­ally craft head­lines. As his expert­ise and exper­i­ence grew he foun­ded Churchward’s Let­ter­ing Ser­vice in 1962. A sales rep from the Ger­man Ber­thold com­pany that sup­plied type­set­ting machines encour­aged Church­ward to sub­mit a selec­tion of his typefaces to their head office and they became the first inter­na­tion­ally licensed font designs by a New Zeal­ander.
More inter­na­tional atten­tion fol­lowed when in 1971 he earned a stash of prizes at the Amer­ican Let­ter­graph­ics Inter­na­tional Alpha­bet Design Com­pet­i­tion and by the mid-70s he was licens­ing from Italy to the US. The end of the dec­ade saw Church­ward com­plete 150 alpha­bets and secure mem­ber­ship with the Asso­ci­ation Typo­graph­ique Inter­na­tional (ATypI). On home turf his work fea­tured in the pub­lic domain on brands from Wool­worths to the Wellington’s Even­ing Post and by the height of the 80s boom his office boas­ted a staff of eight­een. How­ever the inev­it­able crash signaled the clos­ing of Churchward’s ven­ture and a return to Samoa. In the mid-90s fam­ily pulled him back to Wel­ling­ton and he con­tin­ues to pro­duce typefaces from his home stu­dio – now aged 76.

Spread from Joseph Churchward.

Spread from Joseph Churchward.

Ben­newith does not gloss over the frus­tra­tions and chal­lenges faced by Church­ward, nor ignores his per­sever­ance and com­pul­sion. Des­pite his inter­na­tional suc­cess, local design­ers were at times less respons­ive to his font releases. In 1973 the Queen Eliza­beth II Arts Coun­cil turned him down for a trav­el­ling schol­ar­ship based on their view that let­ter­ing was not an art. Unabated by less favour­able recep­tion to his typo­graphic endeav­ours, Church­ward has pur­sued unso­li­cited design work through­out his career. He dili­gently dis­patched these typo­graphic ‘sug­ges­tions’ to tele­vi­sion net­works, polit­ical parties and gov­ern­ment depart­ments. The book’s inclu­sion of some of the rejec­tion let­ters to this approach serve as a testi­mony of his ded­ic­a­tion to a life of let­ters and let­ter­forms – and amus­ingly includes a polite reply from the Rugby Union man­ager in 1998, set in Comic Sans.

Churchward’s fam­ily have been inter­woven into his pro­fes­sional life, with five of his chil­dren work­ing under him at vari­ous times in roles from type­set­ting to dark­room assist­ing. Ben­newith devotes a chapter to explor­ing Churchward’s Mari­anna typeface which was named after his daugh­ter. Church­ward lov­ingly recalls “Mari­anna was fat in those days and it was a fat design … You were plumpy … it was plumpy.” Ben­newith observes that the recently digit­ised Mari­anna “takes up just 120kb of hard disk space on a com­puter, so – if you have it – Mari­anna is always attend­ant. Whenever I make use of Mari­anna I am con­scious of also send­ing some­thing about you out into the world. Some­thing akin to digital pol­len, trans­mit­ted by wires, disks, sig­nals, film, ink and paper …” Thus Ben­newith raises the notion of the typeface as bio­graphic and the para­dox that this entails.

Spread from Joseph Churchward.

Spread from Joseph Churchward.

Bio­graphic tend­en­cies are alluded to else­where in the book. “He forged his own alpha­bets by rein­ter­pret­ing the famil­iar forms of his daily work and endow­ing them with influ­ences from his cul­ture and sur­round­ings.” Church­ward him­self points to his hybrid lin­eage as influ­en­cing his approach – reflect­ing on char­ac­ter­ist­ics such as Chinese dili­gence, Brit­ish author­ity and Sam­oan flam­boy­ance. In cer­tain fonts he has delved into his eth­nic roots or, in the case of Church­ward Maori, has examined the dec­or­at­ive devices of national cul­tures.
It is Church­ward Maori that Brit­ish artist and writer Paul Elli­man insight­fully describes as “the empire writ­ing back”. He sees its ref­er­ence to local land and cul­ture con­vers­ing with the imper­ial power of typo­graphy as a col­li­sion of Poly­ne­sian and colo­nial entit­ies.
Ben­newith was intrigued by the reac­tions of Elli­man and oth­ers to Churchward’s work and found that they became sig­ni­fic­ant to the telling of his story. “People would respond in rela­tion to their own expert­ise and I saw that this could open the scope of the nar­rat­ive. By includ­ing dif­fer­ent voices I was able to cre­ate more of an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion than a static his­tory.” Chapters such as those by Elli­man expand our under­stand­ing of Church­ward far bey­ond his typefaces alone. The fusion of influ­ence and inter­pret­a­tion that is found through­out Churchward’s pro­cess reflect both an innate curi­os­ity and drive to devise func­tional alpha­bets. This dual­ity in Churchward’s work encom­passes Einstein’s notion of both gift and ser­vant: intu­ition and ration­al­ity – both in har­mo­ni­ous and endur­ing uni­son.
Bennewith’s account of Church­ward embod­ies dis­cov­ery, con­ver­sa­tion and exchange – col­oured by a mul­ti­tude of voices on its cent­ral char­ac­ter. Just as Churchward’s work is framed as process-led, the book design is punc­tu­ated by vari­ous paper stocks which exalt a diversely inspired, practice-based approach while hon­our­ing Bennewith’s appre­ci­ation of Churchward’s “quirks and exactitudes”.

Spread from Joseph Churchward.

Pro­duc­tion shot.

Book pro­duc­tion shot.

Pro­duc­tion shot.

Pro­duc­tion shot.

Pro­duc­tion shot.

Pro­duc­tion shot.