Creative Characters: Up and coming — Lemonthe

Graphic designer and font creator Dwi Ahidian, the founder of Lemonthe Studio, found himself on a newly creative path just five years after his 2015 graduation from Politeknik Piksi Ganesha, a university in Bandung, the capital city of Indonesia’s West Java province, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in Information Technology and where he also lives and works.

If, on his entering the job market, Ahidian initially took a more traditional route, first accepting a position as an office administrator for logistics company Sinarmas, and then as a credit marketing officer for Adira Finance, he eventually emerged into the realization that designing typefaces could be lucrative.

Still, creating fonts started as his side-hustle. In a recent email interview with My Fonts, he explained that he began designing typefaces as a way to earn extra money on weekends, before deciding to quit his day job to launch his own business in 2020.

At that point, setting up a one-man foundry seemed like a solid economic decision, he explained, adding that “after a few months, I saw that this job represented a great opportunity for my career, going forward, so I decide to focus on it.”

Our conversation has been condensed for space and clarity.

MyFonts (MF): Even if you have roots in pragmatic areas of industry, your design process for creating script fonts sounds highly associational. Can you explain how it works?

Dwi Ahidian (DA): The first process I used involved randomly writing someone’s name, or cities in the world — or whatever it was — using a pen tablet. And inspiration always arrived when I finished writing it. Most of the script fonts I created were designed with that method, including Brigend and Bluegold.

(MF): Many of your fonts strike me as upper-crust in their shapes — they look like well-spaced, elegant scripts — as well as their names, like Brigend and Bluegold, as well as your script The Billion. Was that intentional?

(DA): Actually, the names of those fonts were obtained only from what came to mind at the time. I never thought consciously about what my fonts would be named. I just named them randomly, even if it didn’t have any meaning.

(MF): Your script Dockyard, too, is beautiful. But to me, it conveys a more muscular feel, one in line with its name. Did you create it for a specific client, or did you design it and then decide the perfect user would come? (Here, I’m imagining a user like Marlon Brando’s character from the film “On the Waterfront.”)

(DA): No, none of my clients requested that Dockyard be created for them. I made it so my font collection is more varied, as I rarely make bold script fonts. And I hope that users who like bold script fonts can add Dockyard to their designs.

(MF): Speaking of film, is that an art form —or are there other art forms — that influence your work?

(DA): I don’t know if any art that I like affects my current work. Maybe so — but, if that’s the case, I didn’t realize it.

(MF): Where do your biggest clients come from, and what have you worked on together?

(DA): They come from my own country, Indonesia, and they’ve asked me to make some fonts.

(MF): What are you developing now that truly excites you?

(DA): I’ve been creating a team. Because I’ve been working on my own, that can start to feel boring. So, I brought my closest friends into this creative process of thinking about design. It feels like that could be great if we could work together as a group. I hope that will be realized in the near future.

(MF): If you could spend one day in the presence of a published font — as if it were a live companion — which font would it be, and why would you want to hang out with it?

(DA): Brigend Signature. Because he has a lot of styles, which would certainly not be boring!

(MF):  Are you surprised that you left IT for font design?

(DA): No, leaving something I’m pretty good at and learning something new I think is fun.

(MF): What does your family think of your new career choice?

(DA): My family has always supported the career path I chose; I am happy to have a family like this.

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We hope you enjoyed this interview. Check out previous interviews of up and coming creative characters.