Font Bureau was built by type designers. Tobias Frere-Jones is one of those vital practitioners who defined what we do and how we do it. We are proud to offer some of his earliest and most interesting typefaces — work that continues to have relevance and utility today.
By David Berlow || Meeting Tobias Frere-Jones can be a forgettable experience, but only if you don’t talk to him. Reserved is his natural state. But below the surface lie exceptional versatility, observational skills, and inventiveness. This all can be seen in the early typefaces he developed at Font Bureau. Gathered here, from Garage Gothic via Interstate to the Poynter and Benton series, and on to the fanciful ones, are those early families: effective, practical, timeless, unique.
Garage Gothic began as fallen receipts from a Brooklyn parking garage. Tobias didn’t have a car, and I never knew him to drive, so I assumed at the time he walked past the garage and found them, or walked past the garage to find them. Either way, what he found was not nearly as interesting as what he made.
Interstate began when the specifications for highway signage fell into Tobias’ hands. For some time he pored over it and we discussed the differences between signage and printage, before he began slowly designing a new family. There were plenty of typographic diversions on the way, leading to the extensive, multifaceted series Interstate is today.
Poynter began as a well-publicized study of modern newspaper types circa 1990. I was mystified by Mike Parker’s advice on a proper direction, but Tobias heard and saw something that took several years to become roman, italic and the first system of graded weights in response to newspaper printing issues.
Those, and more, are now available in updated font formats and progressively released for web use, even after all these years.
Tobias Frere-Jones was born in 1970 in New York, where he would come to appreciate the elegant and cultured, as well as the derelict and corrupt. His adolescence was divided between the galleries of Manhattan and the dockyards of Brooklyn. At fourteen he began exhibiting paintings, sculptures and photographs in New York galleries. An artist being raised in a family of writers and printers, he learned the power of written text, and naturally slipped into design of letterforms. By the time he entered Rhode Island School of Design, type design had displaced most other interests. He graduated from the Graphic Design Department in 1992 and began full-time work for Font Bureau, where he was a Senior Designer for several years. In addition to his numerous contributions to the Font Bureau retail library and custom work, he made three fonts — Reactor, Fibonacci, Microphone — for Fuse, a journal of experimental type design. (See a full list of Tobias’ typefaces here.) He joined the faculty of the Yale University School of Art to teach a class in typeface design with Matthew Carter since 1996. In 1999, he left Font Bureau to return to his native New York.
The Royal Academy of the Arts in The Hague awarded Tobias the Gerrit Noordzij Prize in 2006 to honor his unique contributions to typeface design, typography, and type education. (Exhibition and catalog designed by the Type & Media class in 2009, catalog published by Uitgeverij de Buitenkant.)
In 2013, he received the AIGA Medal for exceptional achievements in the field of design.
Feeling that experience from one style can inform new efforts in another, he aims for the widest possible range in his work. He feels equally at home with a traditional text face as with a grungy display face. He seeks inspiration from deliberately non-typographic sources: the music of Schoenberg, the theories of Tesla and Pythagoras, and a row of shopping carts have all provided the initial spark. When asked if the world really needs any more typefaces, he replied: “The day we stop needing new type will be the same day that we stop needing new stories and new songs.”
Upon leaving Font Bureau in 1999, Tobias passed on a 3,366 word / 18,644 character instruction to his coworkers, explaining “the recipe for making Font Bureau specimen pages” in the style of Font Bureau’s iconic stacked-and-justified type showings that have since become a standard in the type industry. The occasionally snarky writing style takes a cue from Thomas MacKellar, who personally wrote much of the text in the specimens for the MacKellar Smiths & Jordan foundry (an early constituent of ATF).
“The idiom of the composition is drawn primarily from nineteenth century woodtype posters, which would often combine fonts more by their lateral measure, and somewhat less by their vertical measure or even the design itself. The result is an interior made very active with its mix of sizes and styles, and an exterior made stable by the strict delineation of the type area.” — Tobias on the Font Bureau specimen design
With this, TFJ built on a style introduced by David Berlow and Roger Black in Font Bureau’s very early days. David: “When I was first asked to digitize Franklin Gothic and Cheltenham in 1989, I wanted to calibrate my process to the original metal faces via the specimens as closely as possible. So, I recomposed the ATF specimens exactly in Pagemaker with the new fonts, learning details of sizing the font to the em, leading, and optical size issues by trying to compose the pages with a single outline.”
“Roger Black was already doing this kind of composition in his publication design work, and I soon learned that anything I made a specimen of in this way, he’d love. So it stuck until the next generation had been convinced of the utter beauty of type composed as art imitating life.” — David Berlow on Font Bureau’s stacked-and-justified specimens