So Mod

“Birding has so many connections to type”🦉🐦‍⬛🦢

Mid-century shifts to clean lines as we situate two more women type designers and their work: Montan by Anna Maria Schildbach (1924–?) and Thomas Schrift and Versalien by Friedel Thomas (1895–1956). We know very little about Schildbach besides her work at Stempel. Thomas was a student at the Handwerker- und Kunstgewerbeschule (BURG) in Halle, Germany, then an assistant at Anna Simons' Munich studio, returning to Halle in 1922 to direct a new printing workshop at BURG Giebichenstein. A bookbinder, printer, designer, she taught for decades at multiple schools.

Bethany and Stephen (aka Stewf) talk about wider design trends—Viennese Secession, Bauhaus, Jugendstil, Art Deco, etc—around this mid-20th century modernist period, plus how birds, chairs, and fonts are linked. We consider the craft of type design, Germany’s type foundries, technologies that empower those on the margins, and the joys of Letraset.

Special guest: Stephen Coles, Associate Curator & Editorial Director at Letterform Archive, co-founder of Typographica and Fonts in Use, fan of birds

PSA: The best way to mix typefaces? Contrast.

📚

• Indra Kupferschmid, “First/early female typeface designers,” Alphabettes (2017)
• Gerda Breuer & Julia Meer, eds, Women in Graphic Design 1890-2012 (Jovis, 2012)
• Trajan’s column
• Die Fläche
• Type terms like descenders, swashes
• Montan: Stephen’s post on Montan; more via Fonts in Use, Letterform Archive, Klingspor
• Thomas Schrift and Versalien: Fables etc are in a portfolio + type specimens for VEB Typoart Dresden, 1958 (not online); more via Fonts in Use, Luc Devroye, Typographie.info, Letter Library

Transcript

Re(un)Covered Podcast

Season 1, Episode 5: So Mod

Release date:  23 June 2026

Copyright © 2026. 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 This text may not be published online or distributed without written permission.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.

[intro music]

Bethany: This is ReUnCovered, the podcast about what lingers in the archive and why it matters. Episode five: So mod.

Recorded voice: The linotype machine sets solid lines of type called hot type, creating that powerful element of communication: the printed word.

Bethany: So, Joe.

Joe: So Bethany.

Bethany: Tell me what comes to mind when I say mid-century modernism?

Joe: Lots of cool looking furniture. The middle of the century.

Bethany: Yes.

Joe: Those are the big things honestly. Were they writing, were they making words?

Bethany: Oh were they making words.

Joe: Oh where are they.

Bethany: So one of the things we're going to be talking about today is where does mid-century modernism come from. It's a reaction to, in many ways, this more ornate, kind of over-the-top, organic style that we saw in some of our earlier episodes.

Joe: So lots of things that, as I always say, look like they could be on the labels of absinthe bottles.

Bethany: Exactly. So we're moving from absinthe bottles to West Elm.

Joe: So people no longer like that?

Bethany: No. They like... So, like, how do we get to Eames chairs is basically the subtext of this episode.

Joe: That's one of the furnitures I know.

Bethany: We're thinking about today Two women designers, Anna Maria Schildbach and Friedel Thomas, and both of these women are working in Germany. They're designing typefaces in the 1950s, Schildbach, worked for Stemple and the 1950s. And she designed this font named Montan. Montan is an all capitals typeface, that is made to complement grotesque fonts. And grotesque is another word for sans serif, and people who are real into this will tell you what differences there are, perhaps, between those. But for our purposes, sans serif. Grotesque. Very similar. And so it's a titling typeface. This is something that you would put on signs you would put on. You know headline.

Joe: Definitely is giving welcome to Montana.

Bethany: Like the M really does feel mountain-y to me I think because it has, it's somehow there's roundedness on the inside of the curves. But the outsides are sharp.

Joe: Yes. Yeah. It looks like there's a I mean, it feels peaks and valleys, you know, like there's steep slope, little round bottom and then steep slope up.

Bethany: So this is a type specimen, where you can see here. And we'll have this in the show notes as always. But up on the top above where it says Carta permanento has 14 p, four kilograms and then I don't know actually the 50a stands for.

Joe: So 14 points.

Bethany: Exactly. And then it's four kilograms is how much the set weighs.

Joe: Why is that important?

Bethany: So when you're buying cast type everything's already been cast. So like it's like you need so many E's and so many F's and so many Q’s and so whatever. And so they sell it by the pound or by the kilo. And so if you look down that right, we have like 20 point and that's six kilos. So it's like when we sell you a set because it's bigger. Right.

So because it's bigger it's going to weigh more. It's also helpful to know, how much stuff weighs when you're like trying to figure out how to store it. I also think, much like how archivists, talk about linear feet, so they know how much space they need on their shelves. The thing is, is that so this is since this is a titling or a display typeface, it doesn't get cast in things smaller than 14 because you're not going to set a whole text in this. So the thing that's really interesting about Montan, that's a little different than some of the other typefaces we've talked about this season, is you only can get it big. Because it's a big font. 

Joe: This feels very antique of, you know, there is a, a display typeface, not only because it looks good big, but because you cannot get it in a size that is smaller than a display size. You would not be able to set this as a paragraph, because they don't make it small enough to set as a paragraph.

Bethany: Schildbach made Montan in 1954. It was shown with a couple of other serif typefaces as well because like a contrasting good titling font with Melior and Excelsior, fonts that Stempel also made, and interestingly, Stempel has a report where they list 48 type designers working for them, and two of them are women: Schildbach and Gudrun Zapf von Hesse, who's going to show up later in our journey through women and type. And we know that she worked as a teacher later, Schildbach. And that's it.

Joe: Damn.

Bethany: We don't know when she died.

Joe: Oh, jeez.

Bethany: We know that she was born in 1924.

Joe: She might take the record.

Bethany: Yeah. It's like we know three things. She worked for this place. She made a typeface, she taught some stuff, and she was born. That's four things.

Joe: Usually I take being born as a given, but in this case, I'll count it.

Bethany: So the other woman we're talking about today is Friedel Thomas. She was born in 1895, and she was a typographer, a bookbinder, a printer and a teacher, also in Germany. She went to, she was a bookbinding and printing student at the, handwork and, I don't remember how we have those lovely German school names that are, like, eight syllables long.

Joe: I believe that is the minimum syllable length in German.

Bethany: In fact yes, it is mandated, I think, by the, yeah. 

Joe: The German state. Yeah.

Bethany: So it's now called the BURG.* [editor’s note: this school was the Handwerker- und Kunstgewerbeschule in Halle]

Joe: Great, I love that.

Bethany: So that's what we're going to call it. She was one of Anna Simons’s first lettering course students in 1917.

Joe: So this is Anna Simons’s sphere of influence expanding. And this is one of the people that she ends up teaching?

Bethany: Yes.

Joe: Very cool.

Bethany: And then Thomas actually works as an assistant in Simons Munich studio in the early 1920s. And then she goes back to Halle. Or hall, let's call it Halle. In 1922 and becomes this director of this printing workshop at BURG. And she is does a journeyman examination. She does a master craftsman examiner examination that she passes. So she's like a certified craftsperson, which is pretty rad. 

Joe: Love that.

Bethany: And then in 1930, she leaves to teach advertising and lettering at a vocational school. And turns this printing and lettering workshop at the BURG over to Herbert Post. She goes back to the BURG in the 1950s, taught typeface design. She also taught graphic design there, probably until she died in 1956.

And she designed two typefaces for, VEB Typoart. So she designs Thomas Shrift and then another Thomas, Thomas-Versalien, which is a caps, a title thing. And these are both issued posthumously. So they're issued in 1958. 

Joe: Oh, wow. 

So one of the cool things about Friedel Thomas is Friedel Thomas doesn't sound like a woman's name.

Joe: Yeah. I was kind of thinking about that.

Bethany: So the way that I learned about her, which a lot of people did, is this alphabettes, first female type designers blog post, which is sort of an Ur text, for our our research here. Florian Hartwig adds, like in a comment, like, here's this person. She made these things, for Typoart. This is like she worked for Anna Simons, like, and has this sort of like, blurb, citing the women in Graphic Design from 1890 2012 book that came out in 2012, which was a very useful resource.

Bethany: And then Lauren, from our last episode, learned about Friedel Thomas by looking at this thing and then also comments and is like, oh, now I'm going to get that and add her into my thesis. So like we see this really cool, I just really love the like,

Joe: The little daisy chain of information. Yeah.

Bethany: And like one of the things that's bizarre is some people say that Thomas like they use like Friedel as um, they use he as a pronoun and like, it's like, weird because they think it's like Frederick or like Frederick. Like, but it's not. 

Joe: Interesting

Bethany: Yeah. So, like, this is a weird thing where sometimes, you know, if we're not sure about, like, gender, like, we don't know. So, yeah. So we know more about Thomas than, some of the other people that we had. And I'm going to show you some. It's a little more organic vibes.

Joe: Interesting.

Bethany: Yeah. So it is kind of I don't know. So this is a type specimen from Typoart, which is a Dresden based type foundry. And here it is in use.

Joe: Wow. For a book of fables.

Bethany: Yeah. So one of the things that's cool about type specimens, they have them in, like, different use cases.

Joe: So this is a specimen of sort of how the designers themselves are considering it? This would be an ideal use case?

Bethany: So type specimens can sometimes be like this where it's just like, like here are the letters. And then we have things like this,which are,  you know, here are the letters and all the different sizes and then sentences. So this is where like the brown.

Joe: Quick brown fox runs over the lazy dog. Yeah.

Bethany: The reason that we use that sentence is because every single letter in the alphabet in it.

Joe: Yes.

Bethany: And then. Yeah. And then sometimes type design like type specimens are like very design-y, like this one. Yeah. So this one, has like examples in use of this and some other typefaces. It's not just that. And then here we have, these are different typefaces. And here's Thomas Shrift, and Thomas Versalien. So it's like the title face and then the, but these are all like other fonts that they make.

Bethany: All right. So 

Joe: wow. 

Bethany: The E is very, it makes me think of, like, Celtic calligraphy. 

Joe: Yeah. I was kind of, you know, maybe it's the umlaut that's kind of making me think about this, but it almost reminds me of, a somewhat more modern and sleek looking version of the way that Bilbo Baggins writes things, or the way that Tolkien writes things. It looks kind of similar to that script, in a way, at least. Like that's the E reminds me of that a lot.

But it is like this sort of median point of it's not quite like arial of just straight up and down, and it's not quite embellished all the way. It's somewhere in the middle, which is interesting.

Bethany: Yeah. And it's, it's, it is funny to see sort of like again, it's much like the furniture or the architecture, like clean lines, very smooth, very like, drastic in simplicity. Very bold. It looks very modern. In our, in our sort of way. Now our conversation today is with Stephen aka Stew Coles, who is a type aficionado, par excellence. And he really gets into this shift into modernism, from and, like, what's happening sort of in the larger typographic space as well as what these women are doing. 

Joe: Great. Can't wait to hear from him.

[Music]

Bethany: Hi. Can you quickly introduce yourself? Who are you? What do you do? What's your vibe?

Stephen: My name is Stephen Coles. I'm the associate curator and editorial director at Letterform Archive in San Francisco. And essentially what that means is I help bring in collections that pertain to calligraphy, typography, type design, lettering, and share them with the world, through writing and tours and exhibitions. And it's a dream job for me because that's what I love is letters.

Bethany: And how did you get into type history? What are some highlights from your journey in this world?

Stephen: I think the thing that really connects it all is I was a birdwatcher. Birding has so many connections to type and one of those is that it is just very omnipresent. Birds are everywhere. Everyone sees them. They experience them in some way. They usually don't give it a second thought, but it's there. And I as a kid was just so fascinated with things like that that were, you know, all part of our daily lives. But no one seemed to know much about them. 

Birds also, they're they're classified, you know, as you know, scientific classifications. They to identify them, you need to know all their little parts and anatomy and all of that kind of then translates into being a font spotter. And, you know, learning about these myriad typefaces that are all around us but people don't pay attention to.

And then once they do, once you kind of start to dig under the surface, you're like, oh, there's a ton of history and culture and people that actually drew these things and made these things that I did not realize. And then because it's everywhere, it just means you're always experiencing it. You're always learning something new because it surrounds us in our, especially in our, urban landscapes.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, after the college thing, I mean, I was supposed to be going to, to like to design classes. I was a graphic design major, but I just ended up hanging out in the newspaper office the whole time and learning from writers and other designers. And that was kind of my education. And then after that, I, you know, during that experience, I started a blog, which was back then when blogs are the thing, you know, there's no social media.

There was no there was nothing of that sort. No Myspace even at the time. And so, Yeah. So the place that you would, you know, you'd have, you know, you have GeoCities or you'd have a blog or you'd, and I started a type blog and it was one of the few that was around at the time, like one of the first kind of very subject specific, blogs for typography.

And that was how I learned basically, as I would just I need to post something today and I'll post something I learned or some news or some, you know, hot topic in the type industry. And and then I invited a bunch of other friends to also be authors of the blog. So it just kind of became a forum, for people to chat about type and not.

Bethany: Did this turn into Fonts in Use then? Is that what the?

Stephen: In a way, I mean, so this was called Typographica and it's still there on the web. And then we started doing annual reviews of fonts. Every year we pick our favorite typefaces and write about them. But yeah, people I met through that and other kind of online for, I started Fonts in Use with, and I worked in the font industry for while, I worked for Font Shop, which was here in San Francisco, for a while. And that was all. Yeah. You know, but besides having a tiny little stint as a graphic designer, it was really all about just the type for me.

Bethany: You know, this episode I'm thinking about mid-century German typography. What do you know about German type foundries in the mid 1900s that could help us set the scene?

Stephen: Germany was interesting in that at that time, I think there were 8 or 9 foundries still around in the in the 50s, and that was not the case in the US even. I mean, everything had consolidated into ATF. So Germany was kind of the last old out of metal type founding that was outside of that mechanical composition scene.

So they were really good at kind of taking what would normally be hand-lettered and turning it into typefaces. You know, one thing that foundry type or handset type is better at is doing one letter at a time and taking a lot of care in the placement of those letters. And that's something that, you know, mechanical typesetting couldn't do as well. So script is one example. If you're doing something you know, feels like handwriting or calligraphy, it's better to have it at a foundry type than it is, you know, on a linotype machine. And so they were really great at just turning hand lettering styles into typefaces. And there was just, you know, continual production of this kind of type into the 50s. And 60s, which wasn't happening as much in any other part of the world. Maybe Italy was the closest contender.

Bethany: What are the design aesthetics of the 1950s like? I think mid-century modern and I think furniture, but like what's going on with type?

Stephen: It's funny you bring up furniture because that was my other my second love before the type, I got really another great parallel because a chair and a typeface so much in common, and it's like it's got to be a perfect marriage of form and function. It's a thing most people don't think about when they enter a room, but then if it doesn't work, then they really think about it. It's there are a lot of parallels there. 

Mid-century modernism. So there's always this, you know as, as a historian, you know there's this, this kind of pendulum swing between different styles. And you had the Art Nouveau that was all about, you know, organic things and drawing from nature. And then you get to the Bauhaus and it's kind of pulling away from the Art deco, pulling away from that. And then you get to the 50s and there's a little swing back again.

And, so this era is kind of a mix of things being very systematic and clean and organized. But then some folks wanting to bring back more of humanity and nature into their work. And so that's one reason that in Germany, with these typeface styles that were coming out in the 50s, a lot of them derived from handwriting, were kind of trying to, you know, come back to that, kind of handmade feel.

So Art Nouveau would be around, yeah, 1890 to 1910. And then at the tail end of that, you had the Viennese Secession and, and Jugendstil and going into the 20s, and then Art Deco took over and Art Deco was, was more about celebrating the machine and, more crisp and lines and geometry.

So Art Deco and the Bauhaus came in the mid to late 20s, up till the 50s. And then you have kind of mid-century modernism, which, like I said, could be a mix of those things.

Bethany: I do love. Yeah, it is that like pendulum of like, it must be the most ornate. Oh, it must be the most clean. Oh. Like, it's it is this weird iteration, I guess. I don't know what the, actual word is for that.

Stephen: And also there's technology that enters into it too. So because things could be made more mechanically, they naturally started to get more of that aesthetic. So even if it wasn't, purely for a cultural or a, you know, political intention, it often just comes from whatever tools people are using.

Bethany: So like, how do you see so sort of this mid-century period where we're mixing some styles, how I mean, modern, right. Everything's modern. It's modern right now. Like it's modern in the past where we were always already modern. But like what? How does it set up for the design that comes after the 50s, that like, what's the, where does this head I guess is my question.

Stephen: Yeah. Well, the when I was just speaking back to technology, when I think about it in terms of typography, what came after, you know, the 50s and the early 60s, where the end of metal era, essentially in terms of, of type setting, especially foundry handset type. And so what came after that is photo type. And, return to more hand lettering, or at least hand lettering that, you know, was converted into photo type, and rub down, transfer lettering, Letraset. So the technology shift from metal to photo is what I often track when I'm looking at how did things change after the middle of the century.

Bethany: I know that you are a fan of Montan, so like, what makes this typeface so appealing? Why do you like it so much?

Stephen: One of the things I love about it is just that it kind of contradicts all the assumptions about what women were doing in lettering, calligraphy type design. You know, it's so many of the stories that are told about the women working at the time is about, well, she did this really frilly, calligraphic thing, but this, you know, proves otherwise.

It is super tough and bold and loud and brash and yeah, it's a very well, actually it's I assume the name comes from mountain. And I think that the goal was it, it feels like it's made out of stone. It's rectangular. It's very square shouldered, bulky, it's bold and it has flat sides and flat top and bottom.

So it feels like, almost like each letter is a brick and you're just cutting the letter out from inside that brick and kind of different than everything else at that time. There were a lot of kind of really scripts, like I said, that were being produced as display type in in Germany at the time. And a lot of really, you know, light, you know, delicate text faces and serifs and things like that.

So this was something that really stands out when you look at it in a specimen book, like we have an archive here, you just you see it right away because it's so, bold and heavy.

Bethany: And why, I mean, it's an all capital letters typeface and like, why, why have that? Why not have lowercase? 

Stephen: That's a good question. I mean, often these designs would have been commissioned or submitted as a partially complete design. And they might say later on we'll add a lowercase. So many typefaces have multiple stages where they start and as we'll hear about Thomas-shrift, you start as one design and then it expands. You know, maybe there are new weights added or there's lowercase or more characters added.

I don't know what the original intention was if it was always meant to be just all uppercase. But when you see it in use and we have a few examples on fonts and use, actually, you'll see that it's just a really good contrast to a brush script or a delicate, Roman or an italic. It's just, really good to use in addition to something else. And that's one thing that, you know, is always a challenge for designers is: how do I mix typefaces? How do I pair them? The most common question I ever get, and the best answer is always contrast. 

Bethany: Yeah. 

Stephen: And if you have something like this that is so different than everything else, it makes it easy to like set things apart using this tool.

Bethany: Yeah, I think it's I'm actually looking at the fonts in use page right now. I think it's Virtuosa.

Stephen: There's yeah, yeah, there's an example it with kind of a really delicate, you know, elegant script over the top of it. And so that's something you wouldn't, you know, you couldn't use a lot of other typefaces at the time to have that effect. It works because there's just so much bulk in Montan that can be behind that script.

Bethany: So the other person, that we're thinking about in this episode is, Friedel Thomas, who has a confusing name because it looks like a man's name, but she was a woman. She had a long career in design. And one thing I have noticed working through this, you know, archive materials, is she taught a lot. She was a student of Anna Simons in the 1920s. There seems to be there are very few women who are doing type design in this period, but a lot of them seem to be teaching too.

Stephen: Yeah, that is a really interesting point. I mean, I, I don't know enough about the history of the schools where they were teaching, but I do know from my experience at the archive and, and just reading type history, is that the, the designers whose names were attached to products are the ones whose name gets remembered.

Teachers rarely get remembered unless they have a long lineage of really famous designers who made products being taught by them. So that includes Simons, for example. She may not be known if there weren't so many famous calligraphers and designers that came from her, from her teaching. So it's really interesting when we start digging into education of how many women really were involved in design, they were just not involved in a commercial way. And there's a book that we just published, about the Viennese Secession, which I was just talking about. It's the Wiener Werkstätte, which was the Vienna workshop, produced this magazine or a kind of an art periodical called Die Fläche, which is “the surface.” And the beautiful thing about it is that so much of the work in that was done by women, because they were very interested in having educators and people in the schools, submitting works to the publication.

And so it's one of those few eras where you start to see more women's names because they weren't focused purely on is this the designer of this thing that gets sold? If we want to learn more about what was going on in design in terms of women's contributions, we need to go back to the schools and see who was teaching and how their influence affected the people that then got to be known.

Bethany: Yeah. And I and I know like the project looking at monotype’s history with the women drafting. Right. And like Letterform has a bunch of the characters that are,

Stephen: The drawings, yeah.

Bethany: And so like that it's, it's one of those when you start looking underneath or like behind the, the big names. I mean it's a tale as old as time, right? Like the people who do stuff that's uncredited. Like we started digging around, there were like, oh, here are people who are doing stuff that's uncredited, like those goldsmiths that cut fonts, and became punch cutters. Like, we don't know who all of them were, but.

Stephen: But the women who were working in these drawing offices, and you see photos of the drawing offices, and it's all women. It's not just some. It's like they were doing a lot of the work, and they just weren't credited for the initial design of something. But a lot of that I'm really interested to see some of the, the, the new research that's coming out on that, because I want to know how many decisions were they making?

Maybe they were doing a lot more than they've gotten credit for in terms of expanding character sets. For example, just taking a few letters from a designer, then really turning into a useful, tool.

Bethany: Yeah. So to go back to something we talked about before, about how typefaces will like iterate or expand or like just pick it on there. So Thomas created a Thomas shift and then this caps Thomas Versalien, I don't know how to say this word either, Stewf, thanks. And they were they were issued posthumously, right, for Typoart Dresden or VEB—is it V E B? how do we how do we say these things?

Stephen: V E B, But that means it's basically like incorporated. It's the

Bethany: So it's just Typoart?

Stephen: Like the company name. Yeah. Typoart is what we would say.

Bethany: Typeo, cool. So let's, we'll take two on this one. So Thomas created Thomas shift and Thomas Versalien, which are issued posthumously in 1958 for Typoart Dresden. What does that typeface look like? You did such a good job with Montan.

Stephen: Well, this is very different. It's kind of like going on the other end of the spectrum. It's also sans serif, but it's more like a humanist. So as I was describing, humanist type is based on the pen, and primarily a broad nib pen. So if you hold a pen at a certain angle and start making letters, that determines where the thick and thin parts of the letters are. And so it feels more calligraphic.

It has, classical, proportions, which means the S is a lot more narrow. The round shapes are much wider. And these all come back to the Roman inscriptions to the Trajan column. Those are classical kind of, proportions, whereas Montan's very everything is almost the same width. And the other thing that makes it unique is that it's kind of has these shapes that come from other kind of, early Roman styles.

So anshul? is an example. So if you look at the E it's got a round shape to it. It feels like a C maybe with a crossbar in the middle. And that comes from kind of what we would call Proto Roman or you know, pre Roman designs. There are all of these, ways of writing, that kind of built up to what we know as Roman letter forms.

And so it's kind of it feels a little antique in a way. It feels a little, unusual because it doesn't have the letter shapes you're accustomed to seeing in a traditional serif or sans serif. But I think that's the intention. It's meant to be, kind of, an extra, a display face. I think, Versalien, and essentially means display. And it's it's basically another way to set off some text on the page from this traditional, serif text.

Bethany: And a display, a display face,is like what we use for headlines or like it's like a attention grabbing kind of typeface, right?

Stephen: Right, it's extras. It's, you know, it could be headlines, it could be small, it could be labels. But it's meant to be, the contrast to what's going on in the paragraphs of text.

Bethany: One thing I'm looking at, an example here, and there are multiple A's that have been cut. Is that a is that normal to two typefaces often have multiples of the same character.

Stephen: It would not be the majority, but it was fairly common. These are called alternates. And they're essentially to give the typesetter designer a set of options so they can say, well, this doesn't quite work in this particular word or has a different personality than the other one. And the great thing about alternates is it then gives your typeface kind of a personality shifting quality. It has the ability to do lots of different things based on what these different shapes look like and what kind of feeling they give.

So yeah, it wasn't too uncommon, but it wasn't the norm. It would be like, okay, this is, you know, bonus. This is a lot of this typeface has a little bit extra.

Bethany: I feel like I've often seen, Qs, not that I have a lot of fascination with Qs, not that it's my last initial or anything, but like a super swashy or like, things that are super swashy and then not as swashy so that it's like, for like the descenders that get real descender-y or like, less descender-y, or like—let's just agree that’s not very technical.

Stephen: No, that’s exactly the way I would.

Bethany: Okay, great. Yeah. It's like 

Stephen: The functionality there, it's like if you've got another line of text underneath, you can't have this really decorative long tail coming down. But there may be other occasions where like, oh, that really adds a little bit extra. They want it. So yeah, it's functionally also a nice tool to have alternate. Yeah. It also helps kind of demystify like where these letter shapes come from.

I mean some of them are just purely hand-drawn and totally like it's about the outline of the letter form rather than writing with the pen. But once you start understanding the different tools used for writing, it starts to really... It basically is the DNA behind a lot of letter shapes we see. So it it really demystifies a lot of what we look at in in both lettering and typefaces.

Bethany: So there seems, so again, these earlier designers, they're also doing other kinds of design work. Right. They're, they're doing printing stuff. They're doing art sometimes. They're bookbinding. They're teaching. They're printing. Like these seem like complementary skill sets. And how do they, like, feed each other or like, what is that? You know, it seems like all these people are Renaissance humans who are like, not only do I design typefaces, I also have a laundry list of things I do.

Stephen: Yeah, it's I don't know, this the specific stories of these two designers, but it was really common at the time. But as I was saying, how calligraphy informs type design printing is informed by type design and vice versa because you need to understand what is going to happen once this metal type is inked and then impressed on a page using a press.

And so you will often have, especially in this period, less specialization and much more generalization in terms of, graphic arts. You know, you didn't even have type designers up until the late 1800s. Most of them were printers who wanted, who made their own type because they wanted to their printing to look a certain way. And yeah, you wouldn't even you basically, you had people who did all sorts of different kinds of things. You did have specialization when it, got into the late, well, the mid 20th century and a little bit after that where people then were becoming really, adept at doing specific things with type design. But most of the folks in the early 20th century were doing printing, calligraphy, illustration. Many of the type designers in that area were also architects and product designers.

And then you have Bauhaus school also influencing things, saying you shouldn't just learn one aspect of design or art. You need to learn all of these different things and think of them holistically. And that influenced a lot of other, educational systems too.

Bethany: And do we see this… I mean, when looking at type designers working today, like, do you see a similar kind of pattern or is it people can be more specialized?

Stephen: Yeah. Now today we've come back to generalization. I mean, it was specialized for a long time as you had these large foundries and companies that were making lots of product and people could just specialize in type design. Then, you know, everything kind of collapsed, and you got to the digital era where, people had to not only learn graphic design, but learn how to do it on a computer, learn how to understand the whole production process, learn how to do all sorts of things in terms of marketing.

And so people started becoming much more, generalists. And so most digital typefaces are made by people who aren't full time type designers or they’re graphic designers, or do other creative things. But, you know, again, with the pendulum swinging, we're getting back to a period where there are a lot of independent foundries who are making a living, just making fonts.

And that is due to the ability to sell directly to customers. They're no longer relying on these larger companies or, online retail to, to be their sole source of income. Because of the internet, they can sell directly. And so you're getting folks who are making that their sole career

Bethany: Which is like, pretty cool. Have you made a font?

Stephen: I know too many type designers to want to claim that the really poor, kind of, uneducated work that I've done, it qualifies as such. But I have done some, like, just for fun. I've made things that I, that I, you know, to emulate things I love, like the WPA era, they made all sorts of wonderful, PSA posters, and they had this style of hand lettering that I really loved. So I made a I made a font that's kind of based on that.

Bethany: That's cool. What are some of your favorite fonts, if that's not too loaded a question?

Stephen: I'll give you a very annoying answer, which is whatever is right for the job. I use a lot of Duplicate because that's the typeface that we use for our identity at the archive, and it's very flexible and but also very friendly and approachable. I love that about it. But in general, the advice I always give to people is if you've got to narrow things down, start with living designers.

So even though I love all this history and I love learning about especially these under-represented designers in terms of, the stories we tell about about, type history, I really try to support all of these people that are now, like I mentioned, are making their living in design. And so many of the typefaces we know now are by designers who are no longer with us.

And the only people making money from those are, 1 or 2 very large corporations. So I try to find things that are by, you know, young designers or other living designers who are doing really quality, great work, that it's just as good as any of the classics, but, can actually benefit from me supporting them today.

Bethany: I'll accept it. You've done a lot of type research over the years. What are some of the coolest, strangest, gnarliest, most party trick, things that you found, in your work and type.

Stephen: One of the things that I love to show at the archive is, transfer type, or Letraset. And the reason I love it so much is that it was the most, you know, up until that point, you either had to be a letter press shop or, you know, access to a lot of press shop or, you know, or doing engraving or other, some other kind of way to get type on a page and reproduce it. Letraset was like, you buy a $10 or sheet or a $5 sheet of, you know, with an alphabet on it, and you rub down the letters on whatever surface that you want the letters to be on.

Bethany: I okay, that's what I was like. I was like, I feel like I, I remember this like, I remember doing this as a kid and like, you would like, like use your, like, pencil eraser or whatever, and like, just push it onto the. And then you'd have like

Stephen: Yeah, I mean, it's just they're essentially decals. They're, they're, it's a sheet of, you know, you've got a under sheet that keeps it from sticking on something, and then you have a plastic sheet with, with letters on it, and you use, like they call it a burnisher, but you could also use a pen or whatever, and rub down the letter onto the page.

And then you could then go photocopy that, or, you know, you could turn that into a plate and print it, but it… It produced so much really fun, interesting stuff, especially in the 60s and 70s when you had people who couldn't get their work published or couldn't get their ideas published that were suddenly had the ability through that and other reproduction technologies to start making their, you know, whatever they wanted to write in text, known.

And one example is the Black Panthers, the, you know, Black Panther Party had this newspaper called The Black Panther. And, Emory Douglas, who designed it, he used a lot of Letraset to do the headlines. They’d use a typewriter to do the text, and they use Letraset for the headlines. And it allowed them all of this expression through all these different typefaces that were available through Letraset. But, he was able to, to print things that they couldn't print because they wouldn't have had, you know, without the expense of having, oh, a letterpress shop. So that's one of the things I love to show people here at the archive is to bring out all this stuff that was done by independent publishers, poets, designers, people trying to support a cause, that was made with really accessible technology, especially the type of graphics.

Bethany: But is on the horizon or next for your work. You always have a lot of projects going on. What's, what's coming up next for you?

Stephen: Next for me? I'm writing a book called Modern Type.

Bethany: Oh, yeah.

Stephen: Oh, and it will be. It will be about our type specimen collection. So you know it quite well because you have done a lot of work in that collection here, and it's essentially going to be kind of a nice, beautiful visual history book of 20th century type design, using these type specimens as, as illustrations of how type changed over time.

It's a lot of work, but it's very fun. It's, there's so much hidden in archives like this, and it's really exciting to, like, get it on to a, in an accessible format that people can take home with them. So one of the things that's hard when people come to visit, they're like, I want to, I want to have this at home. I want to refer to this to it all the time. So that's why we make books. We want to have people get access and have it on their own shelf.

Bethany: Where do you want people to find you online in real life? Is there a blog you're running right now?

Stephen: Yeah. I mean, it's a letterfromarchive.org. I edit or write a lot of the articles in the news section. There. And then StephenColes.org, which is where all the other stuff I do is linked up  Fonts in Use and yeah, you'll see. You'll find lots of old posts and things like that that might be interesting.

Bethany: I love it. This is so great. Thank you Stephen, I really appreciate this.

Bethany: This is Bethany Qualls, the creator and producer of Reuncovered. Our editor is Joe DeGrand, and we are supported by listeners like you. Want to hear even more? Buy us a coffee and get access to our bonus content from the Re Uncovered archive. Reach out at re Uncovered podcast at gmail.com or find us on the socials. Thanks for listening.