Open Source and Non-Latin Type Design: An Interview with James Puckett of Dunwich Type Founders

ThomasJockin

TypeThursday sat down with James Puckett of Dunwich Type Founders. We talked about learning non-naive scripts, getting funding for such projects, how to handle the code in these projects, and the importance of open source resources in type design.

“Sharing documentation and resources are important because the lack of knowledge of how to build and test fonts holds people back.” — James Puckett

Read the whole Interview on Medium

John Hudson

I love the idea of 'non-naive' scripts. Non-naïve scripts would be even better.

Richard Fink

John Hudson said:

I love the idea of 'non-naive' scripts. Non-naïve scripts would be even better.

Yeah, well, innocence once lost, is impossible to regain, don't you think?

Nina Stössinger

Thomas, now that you’re even getting sponsoring for your interviews, what’s your excuse for not proofreading them, much less editing a bit more carefully? They’re kind of hard to read, tbh.

ThomasJockin

John Hudson said:

I love the idea of 'non-naive' scripts. Non-naïve scripts would be even better.

Ha! I like it 
That seems to be a common theme based on the conversation with Erin and now James.

Nina Stössinger said:

Thomas, now that you’re even getting sponsoring for your interviews, what’s your excuse for not proofreading them, much less editing a bit more carefully? They’re kind of hard to read, tbh.

Thanks for taking your time and reading the interviews, Nina. TypeThursday interviews are meant to be conversational and only edited for clarity. That's a vague target, that I'm trying to improve on with each interview.

I would be the first one to say there's room for improvement. If you would like to help, I invite you to email me at [email protected] 

kupfers

I was also wondering if it’s good to post a link to each interview as a separate thread in the Education (or Business) category. I always understood this section to be for discussing type education topics. Maybe these links fit more into “Announcements” as they are promotional and linking outside, or in only one thread, dunno. 

Nina Stössinger

Thomas: proofreading aside, I suspect that a ‘conversational style’ in writing is not ideally achieved by only minimal editing from an actual conversation; there’s a degree of ‘translation’ needed for representing speech in text that’s actually nice to read. (If you want it to be as direct as possible, why not publish as an audio podcast?) Anyway, I’m not an editor and couldn’t take this on myself, but there are some fine people out there – I would encourage you to find someone to support you.

attar

I thought the interview was good, personally.

ThomasJockin

Indra Kupferschmid said:

I was also wondering if it’s good to post a link to each interview as a separate thread in the Education (or Business) category. I always understood this section to be for discussing type education topics. Maybe these links fit more into “Announcements” as they are promotional and linking outside, or in only one thread, dunno. 

That's a fair concern, Indra. The value of posting these interviews on typedrawers is the possible conversations with type people on this forum. Like what happened with the Laura Worthington interview and PUA usage.

http://typedrawers.com/discussion/1387/casual-users-and-the-font-market-an-interview-with-type-designer-laura-worthington

But I'll be happy to post to whatever spot the admins believes is most beneficial to typedrawers

kupfers

I’m no admin and I don’t want to derail this thread or harp on about principles, but you could also have discussion on Medium where you are posting these interviews. Alternatively, if you want the discussion here, why not post the text of the interview here, too. To me, the links just mostly don’t seem posed as questions to start a discussion but more like “look what I posted elsewhere”.

Richard Fink

I had no problem with the writing style in the interview. And incidentally, I knew you meant "native". The meaning came through. And making fun of typos is fun.