Christian, you’ve just received the Prix Charles Peignot of the worldwide typographers’ association, ATypI. Congratulations! What did you think when they gave you the news?

I was out getting a cup of coffee when [president] Jean-François Porchez called to deliver the news. He left a very funny, very cryptic message on my voicemail, instructing me to call back “immédiatement”. Since he had never called me before, wouldn’t say what he was calling about in his message, and it had been 4 or 5 years since the last Prix, I had some suspicion that this was what he wanted to talk to me about, but it was still a shock when he actually said that I was going to receive the prize. Although I have some really great collaborators, they’re all far away, so I spend almost all of my time working in my little office at home, by myself, which makes my job seem very anonymous. It’s a real honor to be recognized by my colleagues.

Apart from these special occasions, what is it that gives you most satisfaction in your work?

I have a lot of interest in following the news – local, national, international – all of it, and by extension I love reading newspapers and magazines. Books, too, but my first love is newspapers. Being able to contribute to the experience of reading publications is what I enjoy most about my work as a type designer.

It seems your relationship with typography began at a very early age – at three or four years old. How did that happen?

My father is an animator. He works with computers now, but when I was really young he still did everything by hand, including setting type with dry-transfer lettering for the occasional map or title. When he was done with these sheets, he would let me have the leftovers, for labeling my drawings.

You were fourteen when your first typeface, Flywheel, was published at a professional foundry. Was that a major event in your young life? Were you surprised?

I was very surprised. I felt a bit like I was getting away with something – I was accepted by the first foundry I submitted anything to! The difficult thing was following it up. Real curves turned out not to be as easy to draw as rounded rectangles.

How did you learn how to draw type, and how to use the software?

The software is fairly easy to learn, although I still get confused at times in FontLab Studio. I learned some good habits at Font Bureau, and have slowly developed a production process that works for me. Drawing type, however, is a real craft. I’ve learned it by doing it a whole lot, and getting a lot of really terrible work out of my system early. Self-editing is the hardest thing to learn.

The most important thing I did to help my development as a type designer was probably to look at a whole lot of existing typefaces, to analyze what really made them work (or not) – everything from Franklin Gothic to ITC Charter. Tobias Frere-Jones encouraged me to do this when I was an intern at Font Bureau during the summer of 1996, working under his direction. He taught me the essentials of drawing type – the rest has just been practice. David Berlow taught me about spacing during that same summer.

At what point in life did you decide to fully concentrate on type design?

I have tried to move away from type design a couple of times, but I keep getting pulled back in. When I graduated from Carnegie Mellon, I had every intention of using my graphic design degree for doing actual graphic design, but instead I ended up as an in-house type designer at MetaDesign in Berlin (starting an ongoing working relationship with Erik Spiekermann), then spending about 2 years working at Font Bureau before I moved to New York with dreams of becoming a magazine art director. It took me about 3 weeks of freelancing at Roger Black’s studio to realize that I just wasn’t cut out for magazine design. Roger had apparently anticipated this but had patiently waited while I figured it out for myself. He immediately had a lot of lettering and type design projects for me, and I haven’t looked back since.

You’ve become Erik Spiekermann’s right hand for most of his type design projects, and the two of you have created some impressive work together. Who does what?

Erik Spiekermann has plenty of good ideas for typefaces, but has little to no interest in sitting down at a computer to draw the thousands of characters it takes to build a usable family. He’s far too busy, and probably too impatient. In any case, I think he got the “boring” part of type design out of his system back in the ’70s, when character sets were smaller but everything had to be done by hand.

When Erik and I work together, I take his big-picture ideas and translate them into typefaces. We also discuss details the whole way through – does the i need a serif? Is the M too wide? He’s fond of saying that I always do what he asks, and then I do what I think is right. I’ve learned a lot from him about how to figure out what kind of family a corporate client needs. I also learned a bit about how to speak their language. It’s nearly impossible to use aesthetics to sell a new typeface to people who are not very savvy about type. It’s far more digestible when it’s wrapped in a compelling story, and Erik is an excellent storyteller.

You’ve also continued to work for Roger Black, whose main speciality it is to do high-end magazine redesigns. What’s your working relationship like?

Roger is much less interested in the micro level than Erik is. What I really enjoy about working with Roger is that he often describes what he wants in non-typgraphic terms. When we were working on the first round of sketches for the Houston Chronicle, he didn’t say, “there’s too much bracketing on the serifs.” Instead, he told me, “You need to do something about those ridiculous bellbottoms!”

You’re not yet thirty; so you belong to the first generation of designers to whom personal computers have always been around. Do you still think it is important to be able to draw by hand – or to know how the old technologies worked?

I did some letterpress work in college, and did a bit of old-fashioned paste-up work, with a waxer, blue pencil, and a light table at my job in high school, so I have some vague familiarity with the old technologies. I don’t really think it’s necessary to do beautiful drawings by hand to be a good type designer. I think my own sketches are incredibly ugly, but they help me to quickly develop ideas, which is the important thing. The only potential issue I see with working 100% on the computer is that even the earliest proofs are seductively clean and crisp, so you have to be very careful to keep your critical eye sharp and not decide prematurely that the work is finished.

You’ve designed an incredible array of typefaces in an amazing range of styles, many of which are historically inspired. Is there a historical period of style that you prefer?

I’m not necessarily focused on one particular period. I think I’m more of an omnivore: I like to skip around and see what I can learn from various ways of putting type together – Granjon’s italics are absolutely incredible, beautiful, and inspiring, but I don’t think I could say I like them more than 19th century British Egyptians, or mid-20th century Swiss sans serifs.

When you do a revival or reinterpretation – how much of your own heart and soul can you put into a typeface?

If expressing my innermost heart and soul through my work was my number one priority, I would probably go back to painting, or become a writer. The way I see it, my job is to make tools for other people, not to indulge myself through drawing wacky letters. I’m not saying that personal expression is a bad starting point for a typeface, just that it’s not a way I feel comfortable working. I don’t think I have interesting enough ideas for “blue sky” projects. I have to have a problem to solve, even for non-commissioned work. Amplitude attempts to adapt the engineering needed to make tiny type readable into a stylistic trait. Farnham updates Johann Fleischman’s fantastic transitional faces to fit contemporary magazines.