The Unanxious Influencer

“History: problematic and cool, all at once” 📜✒️🗃️

Anna Simons (1871–1951) taught hand lettering to a generation of designers. She studied calligraphy with Edward Johnston at Royal College of Art (UK), then taught courses in his place in Germany and translated his work into German. After WWI Simons went on to teach how to use broad nib pens across Europe for decades. She also designed some 1400 titles and initials for Bremer Press.🖋️

Simons was part of the BUGRA (Weltaustellung für BUchgewerbe und GRAfik; the International Exhibition for the Book Trade and Graphic Design) in May 1914 in Das Haus der Frau (The House of Women) pavilion. She was listed as a Schriftkünstlerin (type artist) but did not design typefaces. The bombing of Munich in 1944 destroyed her home and the Bremer Press building. She won many awards, influenced many designers, and died in 1951.

Since we’re talking about typography and design this season, this episode also helps everyone get on the same page about what type design includes, some key terms (letterforms, typefaces, typography, type design, typographer, fonts...), and where the metal type era fits into the bigger history of design. Nina and Bethany even talk about Comic Sans (“not that horrible“), why design is never neutral, and the “inspiration soup” that’s all around us. Plus how type design’s history of self-mythologizing influences what we know today.

Special guest: Nina Stössinger, type designer at Frere-Jones Type, teacher at Yale School of Art, fan of Nicolas Jenson’s Roman typeface

PSA: How often do you think about the Roman empire?

References 📚 Samples of Anna Simons’s work (mostly in German):

• with Peter Behrens, Dem Deutschen Volke ("To the German People") on the German Reichstag building, Berlin (1916)
• Bremer Press lettering work: Titel und Initialen für die Bremer Presse, Bremer Presse, 1926 (images via UW-Milwaukee Special Collections)
• “Der Staatliche Schriftkurs in Neubabelsberg,” Kunstgewerbeblatt, March 1910, pp. 101–7 (Simons’s students work on pp. 108-13) 
• Want more? Search for Anna Simons in Gebrauchsgraphik and other period trade publications via the International Advertising & Design Database.
• See also German Designers, Luc Devroye, and A Short Introduction to Graphic Design History

Credits
Creator and Producer: Bethany Qualls
Editor: Joe DeGrand
Original episode artwork: Trifoxatops aka Jenna Mauro
Social Media Whisperer: Elizabeth Giardina
Music: "Sneaky Feet" by geoffharvey

Transcript

Re(un)Covered Podcast
Season 1, Episode 1: The Unanxious Influencer
Release date: 5 October 2025

Copyright © 2025. All rights reserved. This text may not be published online or distributed without written permission. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

[sound effect: steps]

Bethany
This is ReunCovered. The podcast about what lingers in the archives and why it matters. Episode one: the anxious influencer.

Recorded voice
The line of tape machine steps, solid lines of type called hot hype, creating that powerful element of communication. A printed word.

Bethany
Hi, Joe.

Joe
Hi, Bethany. How are you doing?

Bethany
I am totally not at all irritated with anything right now.

Joe
Exactly. Recording and research is actually so easy to do.

Bethany
Welcome to the first full episode of ReunCovered. We're going to be talking about Anna Simons, who taught a generation of type designers, but she never actually designed a typeface herself. And then I'll be talking with Nina Stössinger about all things type related. What goes into talking about type, its history? Why type matters, what words look like, and just why the Swiss are so linked with design.

Joe
We love Nina. We love the Swiss.

Bethany
We love the Swiss. We love Swiss Miss. Sometimes, but only seasonally.

Joe
I don't know, out of all the Swiss things, I think Swiss Miss is low on my list.

Bethany
It is not the best Swiss thing ever. I don’t even think it’s Swiss.

Joe
Yeah, true.

Bethany
And, Joe, do you know anything about Anna?

Joe
I don't actually. Could you tell me everything we know about Anna Simons? Because with the subjects of this series, it's always surprising. Like what we do know and what we don't know about these people who have had huge impacts throughout history. Sometimes, you know, but sometimes we don't even know when they were born or when they died. So what do we what do we know about Anna Simons?

Bethany
We know a fair amount about, okay, she is one of the more well-documented ones. So basically, she taught hand lettering to a generation of type designers.

Joe
Okay.

Bethany
And this is in the early 1900s. So she's a big influence on letterforms on their creation. She is doing calligraphy and hand lettering herself. And then she's also teaching in a couple of different schools, like how to do calligraphy and how and how hand lettering works. And Nina and I talk a little bit about the difference between calligraphy and hand lettering.

Bethany
So she was born in Munich in Gladbach in Prussia in June of 1871, and basically women were not allowed to study at the Prussian arts and craft schools in that time period when she was trying to go to school. So she went to London and she attended the Royal College of Art, from 1896 to 1903, and she studied with a couple different people.

Bethany
But the most important for our purposes is Edward Johnson, who taught her lettering and calligraphy. And he was a real big deal.

Joe
He's like a type influencer at the time.

Bethany
He's like a real influencer who actually has influence as opposed to paid followers.

Joe
Shots fired at influencer culture. We're coming for you.

Bethany
So yeah. So Edward Johnson's like a really big figure in what was like the early 1900s calligraphy revival. But basically in 1905, Johnson was asked to go teach courses at the Kunst Academy, Dusseldorf, which is like the Arts and Crafts academy in Dusseldorf. And he couldn't do it. And so Anna Simons went and taught in his place, and she was there for five years.

Bethany
So Anna Simons works at the Kunst Academy, Dusseldorf, and she's also an assistant to the director, and she's working with the director, Peter Barrett's. He's she's working as his assistant. Anna Simons and Peter Behrens created the iconic lettering on the German Reichstag building in Berlin. So it says to the German people across the top of the building.

Bethany
And they did that like they designed that lettering. So if you have seen the Reichstag, you have seen some of Anna Simons work.

Joe
Cool, problematic and cool.

Bethany
All at once.

Joe
All at once.

Bethany
History problematic and cool all at once. Yeah. Welcome to the early 20th century. One of the key things here is that Anna Simons is teaching people how to use the pen as a design tool. And Nina and I talk about this a bit more. But what you make letters out of changes how the letters look.

Joe
Interesting.

Bethany
Which sounds really obvious when you say it out loud. But if you think about it like if you use a ballpoint pen to write versus like a real squashy like brush, they don't look the same.

Joe
Yeah.

Bethany
And so when you're making typefaces based on those letters, it's a transitive property. And then in 1914, she starts designing titles and initials for grammar, press and grammar. And so this is where she is like making the pretty initial letters that you see, maybe like when you look at a fancy book page and like the first letter is big and fancy.

Joe
It's all filigreed and decorative and.

Bethany
Yeah, so like the decorative letters that maybe are used for that, also like title pages or like book covers like that. Kind of decorative.

Joe
I love that.

Bethany
Yeah. So she, with her assistant Francisco Cobell, designed some 1400 titles and initials.

Joe
Oh my God.

Bethany
They were busy little bees. And in the meantime, London stays her home base until World War one, which, for those of you who maybe haven't studied history in a minute, where the one lasted from 1914 to 1918, and so then she after the war, she continues to teach across Europe, and she teaches for decades. She teaches in Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Zurich.

Bethany
Wow. She goes back to Dusseldorf in the late 1920s and early 30s. It's bringing the broad nib pin as a design tool to Germany. And these pins. So the branded pin is when you think of like a calligraphy pen, it has that tip that is like not a dot but like a line. The thing about the broad nib pen is that it makes thick and thin line variations.

Bethany
So you can have that really dramatic change from like a bold rod letter, like if you think about like a letter R, maybe, and like the, the first line, like the first leg is like big and dark, but then like as the curve of the R is made, it gets like real thin in some parts and then it gets thicker again.

Bethany
So that's something that happens with the broadening pen.

Joe
Yeah.

Bethany
Fonts like Wes Antiqua which was designed by Emil Rudolf Weiss for Bauer in 1928, is an excellent example of this, influence being seen in a typeface. And Emil Rudolf Weiss gives a lot of credit to Anna Simons for, like, teaching him Roman script. One of the things that I just think is so awesome is, like, Anna Simons won a ton of awards.

Bethany
She got all this acclaim. But like, if you were a type designer in Germany in like the early 20th century, you probably took a class with her. Or you took a class with someone who took a class with her. Like she has this sort of wide range of influence.

Joe
All over the place, too. Yeah. Because you she kept on teaching.

Bethany
And one of the places we see Simons work is in the BUGRA, which is this German exhibition that opened in May of 1914. This is this big like international exhibition of book trade and graphic design. And the subtitle, the sub-subtitle of this whole series is how can Bethany mispronounce German?

Joe
This whole series is just a trap I've laid for you to mispronounce German words.

Bethany
Yeah, my German ancestors are sad and upset for me. But I'm sorry guys.

Joe
Welcome to Bethany butchers German. The show within a show where Bethany takes a stab at how to say something in German.

Bethany
You can find the real German names in the show notes, because also things like Schriftkünstlerin which I don't think I said right, but is a type artist is how she's just like in a directory. It sounds very cool.

Joe
Very cool.

Bethany
And thankfully we do have some native German speakers who can say things correctly. Anyway, in the BUGRA, which is this again international exhibition for book trade, graphic design. So it's like a world's fair, but for graphic designers and bookmakers. She is part of the Committee for England, but she does a lot of titling work. So these are some pages from this collection.

Bethany
Wow.

Joe
So, so she's doing all of the big letters here.

Bethany
She's doing all the letters here. All of this is her. Wow. So these are like initials like initial letters. So initial letters basically we call them drop caps now in modern design okay.

Joe
Yeah I love that. There is the variety is so interesting also. Yeah. Like there's they have little feet on them.

Bethany
Yeah. And so that's the little feet are what one of the things that broad nib pen does nicely.

Joe
Oh interesting.

Bethany
Because of how when you hold it at the angle it like makes that like mark. Basically it also is very much influenced by Roman letters, which you may recall often got carved into buildings. And when you're using a chisel to carve stuff, a chisel looks a lot like a broad nib pen.

Joe
Oh, cool.

Bethany
Yeah, because they have that kind of edge. So basically Anna Simons is based out of London, running around Europe teaching everyone things, being a lady about town, that's not what she's doing. She's being a design fiend, making cool stuff. And then sadly, in World War two, there's a bombing of Munich which destroyed her home and personal belongings and most of her collections, along with the Bremer Press building.

Bethany
So a lot of copies of her work, like the drafts are like early work or whatever we just don't have. And she was able to salvage some of her work, but like, a lot of stuff was lost. Bombings are good for that.

Joe
Yeah.

Bethany
She died in 1951. Being cared for by relatives in her final years. And yeah, she won awards. She made all these really cool things. And one of the reasons that we're starting with her is this idea of influence.

Joe
Yeah, I was just thinking about that. The only way to see NSC bins work is to see it through her influence on others, which is, you know, sad and beautiful, kind of tragic but tragic in the way that history works.

Bethany
I mean, again, a lot of the UNanxious influencer, as this episode was called, is because we often, you know, people get real weird about being too influenced or not influenced enough or whatever and design, like all art and really human stuff, builds on the stuff that came before it. And we'll see in a Simons like imprint sort of pop up later as well.

Bethany
And, you know, the other thing that Simons lets us do is I'm going to guest show that you don't think about things like seraphs every day. That's like every.

Joe
Are you on are you on TikTok at all?

Bethany
I'm not on TikTok at all. I am an old.

Joe
Do you do you know this thing about the Roman Empire?

Bethany
No.

Joe
This will be so dated by the time this comes out. But. But there is this TikTok trend of people asking, usually men, how often they think about the Roman Empire.

Bethany
Oh my God. And it was probably a lot.

Joe
Yeah, yeah. The answers are always like every day. So yeah, I think about serifs less than I think about the Roman Empire is my official answer.

Bethany
So basically, because we're going to be talking a lot about design minutia in this season, I really wanted to make sure that, like, everyone was at least somewhat on the same page about what things mean and has like things you can go look at, because again, audio medium but like visual thing we're talking about in this conversation that's coming up with Nina, the idea is to sort of give you some terms, situate ourselves about where metal type fits in sort of a history of type design, both past and present, and get us, you know, geared up for what's come in dot, dot, dot,

Joe
It gives us a chance to talk to Anna Simons of our time.

Bethany
Which is ironic because she really is not about calligraphy. And so basically, if you want to know about type history, there is no one better to call the Nina.

Joe
I can't wait to hear it.

[music]

Nina
Hi. Yes, I just had the Ghostbusters, theme playing in my head. I was like, yes.

Bethany
Yes!

Nina
Yes. So my name is Nina Stössinger. I'm a type designer, senior typeface designer of Frere Jones type or a small type design studio here in Brooklyn, New York. Originally, I'm from Switzerland, as is compulsory for type designers. That was a bad joke. I also teach an intro to type design at Yale School of Art in the Graphic Design MFA program. Yeah, I like a type. I like I talk about letters, a lot.

Bethany
We're so glad you're here. How are you? What got you into type? How did you get into type and type history? I guess maybe it comes with your Swiss citizenship?

Nina
I grew up in a house full of books with a dad who was an actor, and a mom who was a writer and an editor and a literary critic. And so type was kind of always around, but it took me years and years to, like, figure out that, like the formal side of that, like the actual making of the letter forms is a thing that humans do.

Nina
Somehow that hadn't occurred to me. What happened was I have like a intro to type and like how to like draw Roman letterforms. And that was just a moment where it kind of clicked and I was like, oh, this is what I want to be doing. I think we're going to be talking about what exactly that means.

Bethany
So let's think about so like type covers a huge range of stuff. Right? We have digital fonts. We have metal type. So like how do we how does one parse out typography versus type design versus graphic design. Lettering I'm sure there are other big concepts I'm forgetting here. Like break that down.

Nina
There are a lot of like, words that kind of seem like they mean about the same thing and and get and get blurred. But so type generally has like a sort of a mechanical technological component because it's the idea to make like written communication and, more, more effective than if somebody just sits there and writes it, which, of course is the origin of all this stuff.

Nina
A lot of the history of type really is a history of like just making things more efficient and more mechanized and more, more faster. Typefaces are sets of reproducible and recombine able letterforms that go together in any which sequence. You make a set of symbols, but you don't know yet how they're going to be arranged. So this used to be for for many centuries, this used to be in the form of like little metal blocks, right, that get cast and that have like a face, like each little metal block would have the face of a letter on it, like mirrored, of course, plus some amount of space, around it.

Nina
And so you could, like, arrange those in a sequence and then print them on a piece of paper. So type design is the it's the designing of typefaces as recombine of letterforms. Typography is the application that's the using of the types. The type designer and the typographer would be two different people who usually don't even talk to each other.

Nina
Right. Because one person makes the design that goes into a font and the other person uses the font to like set a book or whatever other related concepts are. Lettering is the drawing in the widest sense of letterforms, but usually an unknown sequence or context, which of course allows for a much bigger range of like, you know, choices of how to design that, but also allows for, you know, having the letters basically respond to each other, respond to the context because, you know how much room you have.

Nina
You know what letter comes before, what letter comes after. So you can kind of accommodate that. Whereas with if you're using an existing typeface, you're basically stuck with the shapes that the letters have in that typeface. And then calligraphy is, is sort of the even more hardcore version of that because it's essentially writing. So you're also making letters in a specific context, you know, but you're also basically doing them in one shot.

Nina
Right? Like lettering can be iterative, like you can draw, you can build up the letters, calligraphy. You're doing it once. So the shape that you see on the paper is a trace of the movement that your hand makes.

Bethany
Okay. So we have type design is making this set of letterforms that moves around. We have typography is using those letterforms someone else made to put things onto a page or a screen or an object to make an object, we have lettering which is making words or making letter forms for words, you know. So like, if I may, a book cover, I don't need to design a W.

Bethany
If there's no W, then we have calligraphy, which is like one shot, like I'm writing it out by hand. You know, when we do, when we talk about typefaces, there are just a ton of terms, right? So we have like serif and sans serif. So like what are some sort of like key concepts that like if I'm looking at, a font so that other people know what I'm talking about?

Nina
That's a great question. I like to talk with my students about sort of high level parameters that a permeate design. For example, we have the parameter that we refer to as weight, the weight of a letter, which is like how bold is it? How light is it? Right. How thick are the strokes? Or in other words, how much?

Nina
If you look at a given area like how much black is there versus white? And then what's also really useful, I find, apart from weight, is the concept of contrast or stroke contrast, which is basically the difference between the thinnest strokes you can find in a in a set of letterforms and the thickest, and there are some designs, like a lot of sans serif, so that designs have like almost no contrast, right where it looks like the the lines are pretty much the same thickness throughout.

Nina
But then there are other ones where there's a very dramatic layering going on, and some, some bits are very, very thin and others are very dramatically thick. And then that would be called high contrast and can be very dramatic, can also be very hard to read, especially if it gets very small. So that's one thing to look out for.

Bethany
Like I think one of the things sort of broadly about design is like good design doesn't get noticed, but bad design, like trips you up.

Nina
Absolutely. Especially for a time. One of the really fascinating things about it, I think, is that it works even if we don't notice it and it works, especially by us not noticing it. Right. The like the fact that, like when you're reading, you don't like the average reader is not going to sit there and be like, oh, this is a beautiful G.

Nina
But they're going to be like, oh, if the G doesn't work, then they're going to get annoyed.

Bethany
For me, that's one of the things that's been really fascinating is like trying to convince people who haven't thought about it before, sometimes to be like, so how we take in information is like very, very, very influenced by how it is put together. And that depends on design elements that come from hundreds of years of print technology.

Nina
It's really easy, I think, from, you know, where we're sitting to just talk about the history of time and really mean the history of Latin type. Because also like, movable castle, multiply bold type, in, in the, in the sense of those metal swords is a German invention. Right. So it was really developed for the Latin alphabet.

Nina
That's a it's a relatively simple alphabet. We have 26 capitals. We have 26 lowercase letters. And then you have things like for example Chinese where you have thousands and thousands of characters, some of which are very, very complex. You have things like Japanese where you have those as well, and then you also have two other writing systems that interleave with those, then you have what we call complex scripts, for example, in, various languages in India or in other places in Southeast Asia, which are languages that don't necessarily have, like distinct letters that sit next to each other.

Nina
But, they interleave, they connect, they form a lot of ligatures. They have, for example, some Indians Indic scripts have like lines that go across the tops of all the letters. And then it's like, oh, how do you align this so that it all links up? Then of course you have things like Arabic, which, you know, goes first of all goes from right to left and not from left to right, which already messes with a lot of technology like, oh, that was an assumption we didn't question.

Nina
But also in Arabic, everything connects, right? It's like it's really hard if you don't read Arabic to sometimes even tell where one letter begins and the other one ends. So when this technology came into other geographical spaces and into other writing systems, it kept running into roadblocks were like that. Technology didn't really work. So that language and then, you know, it was kind of patched up and kind of kind of evolved and kind of kind of updated and kind of made to work.

Nina
But I think there were also a lot of like local, customs that were just kind of compromised by the, the introduction of, like, printing where letterforms were like approximated in a word, in a way that wasn't really correct, but it was just like the best that they could do. And then, of course, messes with the way that people think of their letters.

Nina
Right. Like a lot later when that technology isn't necessary anymore. It has it has still impacted the way that people see their printed letters in that kind of context, digitalization has really sort of removed a lot of roadblocks. It used to be unbelievably difficult and unbelievably expensive to make type, back in a metal type era, people.

Bethany
Would.

Nina
Literally carve letterforms into tiny pieces of steel, like an actual size. Right? So you're making a text phase for like six point type. You are carving it into steel at six points in reverse and then making a set that like, goes together, which like blows my mind. But so that's a very like intense process. And today it's all digital.

Nina
But still it's like, in a digital font. Every single letter is drawn by somebody, so there's not. I always used to think there's like, you know, you input some parameter somewhere and then something comes out that's unfortunately really not how it works, like somebody does that stuff.

Bethany
We've touched on this a bit, but let's maybe dig more in. Like, how do you pass typefaces influence our ideas about design today? Like one thing that keeps coming up, in the things I've seen is we have like, revivals versus like influenced by. And then we have like new things. How is that how is that past churning through, our ideas about design right now?

Nina
Oh, man. It's so everywhere. Like, it's almost hard to say. There actually are new things.

Bethany
There's nothing new. I mean, there's the same plots, like plots are the same, like everything is the same and yet sort of not the same. It's fascinating.

Nina
In a way. This is actually what happened in text typeface design in, the 1800s is that, people got carried away with technology because, like, the paper got a lot smoother, the printing got a lot better. And, also the, the creating of the typefaces got easier and just more doable. And so people were like, oh, look how thin I can make these little hairlines and look how high I can crank up my contrast.

Nina
When you get these Victorian like modern Victorian moderns would be like the technical term, right? These kind of, 19th century printing typefaces were like, you can barely see the thin parts and you need to print it on really smooth paper and it's like really dazzling. And nobody wants to read it.

Bethany
No.

Nina
No. But, but the wild thing is that after that, people thought back to what they then called old style text faces, which is basically where the whole where the whole story began. And in the mid to late 1400s, and those are still typefaces that you can look at today and they're kind of crudely printed, you know, and it's all Latin and has weird like abbreviations that you don't understand.

Nina
But in terms of the letterforms, you can make a revival of that and use it today, and it's going to be completely plausible. And you can also use it next to, you know, a sans serif that comes from 1900 and put that next to it and it's still completely plausible. Like the history is, is this kind of grab bag that exists, simultaneously, type needs to respond to its technological context.

Nina
Maybe it's, how the type is made, or be it how the type is like use. In this case, it's being printed on paper. So there's ink bleed. I'd talk about this with my students a lot too, because they work from historical typefaces. And that's like one of the first questions that comes up really big is like, what are we actually drawing?

Nina
Are we drawing the shape of the of the printing type, or are we printing the image? Yeah, we're drawing like how it looks on the paper. This whole technology that we've, that we've somehow invented. Yeah. And also the fact that it can be shaped right, that it's not just that we've invented a whole way to make the code squiggles that make that mean something, but also that we can, like, shape those squiggles very subtly different.

Nina
And then we read this in a friendly voice or in an authoritative voice or, or we don't take it seriously because it looks like.

Bethany
Comic Sans.

Nina
Comic Sans, you know. Comic Sans. It's like I'm, I'm gonna, would like to like, you know, I like being a little bit of a contrarian in that I'm like, you know, actually Comic Sans is not that horrible. And also, like, Helvetica is not the best thing of all time. It's just like it's nice to have nuance, you know?

Nina
But, I actually stand up for Comic Sans because for the purpose it was made for, it is it is quite good. Like it was made to be. It was made for like some cartoon version of a Microsoft interface that I don't think ever actually ended up, being made, but it was made to be in like, speech bubbles.

Nina
So it was like meant to be like cartoony. And then the font was made and then the, the, that interface either flopped or it was never rolled out. I can't remember that part, but they were just like, oh, we have this font now. They being Microsoft, let's just stick it into the system. And then people started of course, just using it for the worse things.

Nina
Right. And, and I think that's really a tragic story of a, of a typeface being, being misused and being overused. And if it had just been released on some cartoon site and you can download it to make your cartoons, then maybe it, you know, would have been better. Also in design, I realized that the things that I understood as normal or as a sort of value free baseline neutral are not neutral at all, but they're actually very specific.

Nina
So that like in Switzerland, you kind of get used to a kind of idea of like clean, minimalist sort of modernist, you know, like stripped down design as being like some kind of baseline. And it took me a while after moving here to realize that things that look that way are actually targeting a very specific audience.

Nina
Right. And unlike the flier that my neighbors made for the block party, that was like using seven different fonts and like all these drop shadows and like too many colors was not actually bad as much as it was speaking to a different audience. And I think that's the thing that's often like gets bulldozed over that when we talk about like, good design, do we actually mean design that's successful at communicating what it's trying to communicate to the audience that is intended?

Nina
Or are we applying some kind of classist filter where we're like, oh no, this is objectively good.

Bethany
So like, you know, thinking about how we trace influence and design, right, more broadly. So like, what kind of influences do we see from like lettering and type teachers on type design today? I mean, are there like go tos or things like, is everyone like we'll never make anything like Comic Sans because it's terrible. Like, even though it's not terrible, it's just misused or, you know, it is.

Nina
I mean, I always I always hope that I'm not one of these teachers where people, you know, will recognize my influence in the work of my students because I, I'm more like trying to facilitate them to kind of find their own, find their own approach. But it's, through definitely influential teachers. Like one of the main ones that that comes to my mind, like back in Switzerland is Walter Käch, who was the teacher of Adrian Frutiger and like made some made this one like lettering book that's like impossible to find.

Nina
And it's like the holy grail.

Bethany
So like you're saying as a teacher, like you're trying not to, like, stamp your imprint onto your students. But I mean, are there people that you're like, oh, they totally studied with this person because they did X? Like, can you see that kind of thing? Or like, oh, absolutely.

Nina
Absolutely. I mean, there's different there's different ways of teaching type design for sure. Like for example, I did an MA in the Netherlands at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and that's, that's a school that's heavily influenced by the teaching of a guy named Gerrit Noordzij who, was, he sadly passed away very recently (2022).

Nina
But he basically taught the people who taught me at that class. And that's it's a very distinct sort of philosophy and approach to type in that it's very deeply rooted in, writing calligraphy and like, writing tools and still sort of anchoring the shapes, because a lot of the shapes in, in type, like if you enlarge a lowercase a or a lowercase g in like a book typeface, they look kind of weird.

Nina
And you're like, how does anybody come up with these details? And it starts making a lot more sense. Once you think about how writing implements work. And the truth is that a lot of the shapes in old style typefaces go back to like the shapes that, like a broad edged pen, makes not literally, but kind of because historically that's where they came from.

Nina
I tried to resist this a little bit because I think it's I think it's a bit simplistic. And I also think that type is its own thing, and it shouldn't constantly look to calligraphy. It's been 550 years that it's been its own thing. You know, maybe it can grow up, but but like once you start thinking in these terms, it's kind of you get stuck in these particular thinking patterns.

Bethany
Yeah.

Nina
It's the, the like political history of type is like under studied and under talked about.

Bethany
It also sounds like there's sort of not a standard, but like if you're going to learn how letterforms worked in the past, you gotta understand the tools that made them because that influences how they were made. Like, that seems like it's a pretty basic principle, but like.

Nina
Right, except of course, you're studying the tools that made the things that influence. Yeah. Right. I mean, it's a layer up in the layer. So crazy I hope I'll always be working on, like, finding my own exact mix of influences. Right. Because the calligraphic basis of type, I've kind of moved away a bit from, from teaching things that way because it helps to a degree, but I think it's a little bit misleading.

Nina
And so I'm kind of moving away from that a bit. But yeah, it's interesting. I find it really interesting to like, catch myself teaching what I teach, saying what I say, thinking what I think, drawing what I draw, and then try to sort of trace back where these things come from. And oftentimes it really is this kind of mishmash of inspiration soup that just comes from looking at all kinds of things around me.

Bethany
So when I started working on this project that sort of led to this season of the podcast, and assignments just kept coming up and she didn't design any typefaces herself, but she taught hand lettering to, like, a generation two, maybe three unclear, type designers. And so we've touched on this a bit, but like the role of teachers and the practice of design today, like, what connections do you see in teaching and designing, perhaps broadly, perhaps in your own practice?

Bethany
Like.

Nina
I mean, hopefully it would mean the, the, the teaching is somewhat closely tethered to the reality of the making. Right? I'm, I'm, I wouldn't want to be like teaching design and not doing design so much at the same time, because I feel like it kind of, I'd want to come from a place of, of of practice. But, one thing that I find really interesting about this feedback loop is that on the one hand, when you teach, you can't rely on your instinct to kind of fudge your way through a process.

Nina
Right? Because you have to externalize and you have to the moment you have to guide somebody else through that process or like, explain how it works. You have to be able to verbalize. And for me, that has actually helped me a lot. And like because it's really made me think about, well, how do I approach this or how why do I recommend doing it this way?

Nina
And you get a lot of unexpected questions that you then have to answer. And that's actually really, really helpful. And the other the other side of it too, is just getting so much input from people who are in a different generation, who are in a different point in their in their design journey. And that can be so invigorating because you know, the converse of it, of course, is that I've been a designer for like 15 years or something.

Nina
And so you kind of get used to doing things a certain way and you're surrounded by the team that you always work with. And then suddenly a student comes and says, why don't we do it this way? And, you know, maybe you have a good explanation why not? But maybe that's also just a really interesting question.

Nina
And also just seeing like, what sorts of design trends are young people into and what kind of, you know, ideas come up, in that kind of world is something that I find endlessly fascinating, that, you know, where I'm just realizing I'm already like in a different generation and in a different sort of cultural context.

Bethany
You know, talking more about like, how does type design sort of perpetuate its own history as it happens? Like there has been this history almost of self mythologizing, I would say, you know, like a lot of what we have from, from the older times is like we have the catalogs, but we don't have the design drafts, we don't have the testimony from the punch cutter like we don't.

Bethany
We just have like, here's what they were just trying to sell it. And one thing I find really fascinating as like a, an aside is when you see in the catalogs and they're like, and we're going to stop selling this like this sort of like fire sale last call. Like, you know, these are the fonts that we're not going to have anymore.

Bethany
So like if you want them like get them now, right. And like it's like, well, what why are these why are they selling them anymore? Like, what's up with that? Are they not successful. Is it like we just have too many things we need to clear out?

Nina
Like I think part of the problem, there is a time is such a small industry, even now that it's really it doesn't really have a historiography outside of its own like creations. You know, it's like if you're interested in like, I don't know, painting, just like a ton of people who write about painting, who aren't necessarily painters themselves.

Nina
If you're interested in type, there's a lot fewer people who write about type. And many of the people who write about type are also type designers. And so they're also part of the industry. And I think historically, a lot a large part, let's say that way, a large part of like what has been written about the history of type is, is actually, you know, some foundries 100th anniversary publication, and now they're writing about the history of their type foundry and of all the other time foundries that they've acquired.

Nina
And how, of course, they're the greatest type foundry in the world. So you get like a very, you know, it's not a neutral way to describe to describe a history. And then of course, yeah. The main, the main, source that we have are the sales catalogs. I always get a kick out of the, the really early ones that have, like, the printing machinery in the front as well as, like, here, you can buy this big industrial looking power iron machine with levers and little wheels and stuff.

Nina
And it really makes you realize. Yeah, it really makes you realize that this was like and like an industry thing, like the there's like machines and stuff and like the phones were just like to have you coming back and like buying more like add ons to the machines that they wanted to sell you.

Bethany
So a few last questions, because I know we have way gone over time. And I appreciate you very much doing this. Personal favorite typeface.

Nina
I love this question because I always go way nerdy on people. If I had to pick one one typeface from the history of type, it would be Nicholas Jensen's book Roman of 1470, because it's like one of the very, very earliest Roman book types were a Roman means like non-black letter, right? So it kind of using the same structures that we use today.

Nina
And if you look at it now, it's like, you know, it's printed a little crudely, but the shapes are still beautiful and it kind of blows my mind that it's like, yeah, what, 553 years old? And it's still completely plausible and reads well. And so this guy, like, I don't know, landed from outer space. So what Gutenberg had done, you know, I was just like, oh, I'm going to do this differently.

Nina
And to basically just makes this thing that half a millennium later is still plausible. And I just wish that more designers had that kind of force of innovation in them, you know?

Bethany
That's so cool. Do you have advice for people who are interested in learning more about type design or its history, like just general resources or places to go or or even places to avoid?

Nina
I'm a big fan of just looking at type wherever you are, and I'm also a believer in the fact that you can learn from the quote unquote bad, just as you can learn from like, Hollywood history. You know, it's like I'm a big fan of just like taking photos of all the horrible signage and all the interesting signage and all that.

Nina
Why the hell did they think this was a good idea? Signage. And because it makes you kind of exercise your critical muscle about like, why does this look the way that it does and what does that do? And how would it feel if it looked different? And also it feeds into the inspiration soup that's in your own head, where you're like compiling your influences, right?

Bethany
Where, Nina, do you want people to find you, online in real life? Do you have.

Nina
Don't find me in real life. I'm an introvert. Online. I'm. I'm on Instagram  @Ninastoessinger. I'm still currently there. I always say I'm going to get it off it, but I'm probably not going to manage. But, I'm on there. I'm also you can find our foundry site at frerejones.com for Frere-Jones and yes.

Bethany
Well, yeah, this has been such a pleasure, and I. I'm so glad that you took the time. And just. I feel like we've covered so much ground in a fairly compact amount of time, considering how much ground we've covered. Hundreds of years of.

Nina
History, hundreds of years. This has been amazing. Thank you so much.

Bethany
Thank you so much.

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Bethany
ReunCovered is created and produced by me. Bethany Qualls. Our editor is Joe DeGrand, and we are supported by listeners like you. Llike what you hear? Tell your friends, subscribe to ReunCovered wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. Positive is great. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again in the archives soon.

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