The Faces Behind Typefaces: new web project is a deep dive into type design pioneers

Ever wanted to learn what makes a type designer tick? Want to get into the heads of the likes of Paula Scher, Paul Rand and Gerard Unger? Now, thanks to The Faces Behind Typefaces, you can read in-depth conversations with these type design pioneers and many more.

Specially made to look like an editorial, The Faces Behind Typefaces has been launched to coincide with the 75th anniversary of The Type Directors Club, part of The One Club for Creativity.

The club started with just 20 members in New York and has grown to cater to a global audience of typographers, type designers and lettering artists. It's renowned for hosting dozens of engaging online events, the Type Drives Culture annual conference and the profession's most prestigious awards competitions.

With The Type Directors Club recently awarding Monotype's chief creative type director, Akira Kobayashi, the prestigious TDC medal, Readymag decided to create a web space for meaningful dialogue between generations of typographers.

Designed by Tatiana Egoshina, The Faces Behind Typefaces consists of seven chapters. These include Sven Lindhorst-Emme's talk on Paula Scher's role in type design, Qian Sun's reflections on Paul Rand's legacy, Douglas Davis's discussion on Ed Benguiat's impact on creative fields, Akira Kobayashi's reminisces on Adrian Frutiger and many more.

Alya Datiy, producer at Readymag, said: "Our passion for typography shines through everything we do: Readymag's interface, font library, typography presets and the projects and editorials we produce. Naturally, we have been eager to collaborate with The Type Directors Club for a while. When the opportunity presented itself – the announcement of this year's TDC Medalists – the concept came naturally.

"The Type Directors Club is all about supporting the type community, establishing connections and building new bridges, and with Faces Behind Typefaces, we wanted to highlight their impact. It's why we decided to ask the club's current members, accomplished professionals and creatives on the rise, about the influence of type pioneers on their careers and vision.

"We were pleasantly surprised by how international and inter-generational ties unfolded in our interviews and their stories."

Tatyana Kovalchuk, the chief editor at Readymag, added: "We wanted to convey how modern perspectives, as well as work ethics, could be rooted in the legacy of design figureheads and shed light on exceptional up-and-coming designers. So first off, we chose the members to speak up and then offered them to pick the medalists whose works, approaches and philosophy resonated with them.

"It seems that this ushered in a plethora of mind-bending conversations. There was Luisa Baeta, with a deep hold on her career in typography and an active part of the global female network 'Alphabettes', meeting Gerhard Unger when she started her master's degree classes at Reading University. Later she adopted a few of his teaching approaches into her own projects.

"Then there was Fer Cozzi, an independent type designer, author of award-winning fonts and Professor in the Masters of Typeface Design course at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), who confesses that as a teacher, she is personally adherent to Rubén Fontana's curriculum and methods."

Beautifully designed with slick black and white graphics, The Faces Behind Typefaces contains a wealth of information and context to help broaden your type design horizons or dig deep into a subject area you're already familiar with.

Containing a plethora of type design examples that cover everything from illustration to architectural structures and social spaces, this web project also precedes Akira Kobayashi's presentation of the TDC Medal as part of The One Club for Creativity's Creative Hall of Fame ceremony, which will take place in New York on 27 October 2022.