Would you recommend being a type designer?

Typofactory

Hello,
For those of you who are making a living (or any significant source of income) making fonts, would you recommend it to anyone who seems to like it? I ask this because I kind of want to be a type designer when I am an adult (I'm a teenager, asking this because of college advising). If so, why? If not, also why?

John Butler

Design degrees are for kids with rich parents. If you were born into money that you can fall back on, you can safely pursue an education in design. The same applies to degrees in the humanities and soft sciences. Otherwise, if you’re going to purchase a formal education in the future, especially with borrowed money, get it in hard sciences or math. Build skills in very wide demand. Otherwise learn a mechanical trade like electrician, HVAC or plumbing. Print production, even. Draw the fonts in your spare time. Don’t depend on it for a livelihood.

People with existing design educations and design jobs may be skeptical of this view. But the future is looking pretty bleak at the moment.

Typofactory

John Butler said:

But the future is looking pretty bleak at the moment.

What do you mean by that? Just in general, or specifically in type design?

John Butler

I mean both. Automation is coming for jobs in general and for type design in particular. Type design will still exist just like fine press book editions will still exist, but good luck depending on it for your livelihood.

Hoefler bowing out was the tipping point for me. He saw it coming, and he tweeted about it intensely for a while.

James Hultquist-Todd

Jeez, that’s pretty bleak. Are you a full-time type designer, John?

For the OP, I would suggest studying design (either in school, or by yourself, or however it would best suite you). It’s hard to jump right into type design without really having a solid understanding of the foundations of using type—and a solid understanding of design trends and applications (not software applications but where and how design is used).

Type design is a tough industry to make a living; there aren’t a lot of studios hiring (as most of us either work alone or with a very small team). If you go it alone, it’s tricky to establish yourself in the marketplace (I think all of us are always working at this). 

It’s also a lot of work—a lot of which is speculative. Typefaces take years to develop and you never really know if it’s going to pay off. A lot of type designers rely on custom type commissions to pay the bills.

If I were starting over, I think I’d still study graphic design, spend more time working as a designer (to find my niche, develop my eye, and make contacts in the industry), take classes like Type@Cooper —or learn type by myself at night—and then transition to type design.

John Butler

James, no, I am not a full-time type designer. I tried once, twenty years ago, then moved into “font engineering,” i.e. programming OpenType features when OpenType was new and the tools were more primitive. I made part-time money from it but soon slouched back into an IT generalist career with wider and steadier demand. I burned through lots of money and one marriage and racked up lots of debt learning this. Don’t Do What I Did. If we ever meet in person, and sufficient alcohol is available, I could go into further detail.

Again, some kids have rich parents and money to fall back on, in which case go nuts.

Here’s another way to look at it: while type livelihoods have gotten harder to achieve, type design output itself has gotten easier. Tools are a hundred times more powerful today. My favorite recent font is Elstob, a multi-axis variable font with unprecedented features, given away free of charge by retired professor Peter Baker, who has posted here in the past. Calls himself an “amateur” type designer and produces THAT. So, yes, by all means, design new fonts. Digitize old ones. (I’ve got one in mind myself.) Expand existing ones (where the license allows.) Produce the output, buy the tools to help you do it, but don’t bank on the output being your livelihood. Certainly don’t borrow money to study it for four years. (I notice you appear to live in the fantastic state of Texas, Typofactory. My advice about studying is in the context of American higher education specifically.)

Thomas Phinney

Type design is a lot like acting in the sense that there are a lot of people who want to do it, vs the number who make a decent living at it or the much smaller number of stars.

I make a perfectly good living doing font production and font forensics. But I have been very fortunate. 

Nick Shinn

I would contradict Mr Butler’s advice.
In my opinion, the humanities will be more resistant to incursion by AI (or whatever the latest round of “tech” will be) than STEM.
Of course, one does require some proficiency with digital media, but a human being who is able to draw, or even perform calligraphy, in tactile media, will be something special in a world run by robots.

However, the real question is: are you fascinated by the shape of letters, by typography, by the phenomenon of reading text? Lucky indeed is the person whose passion coincides with their career.

Vasil Stanev

The question of employment boils down to the question if one can tap the money pool in a certain industry through some skill, position, or other means. The best way to stay employed is to learn new skills and innovate in some way that might be small but gives you some edge. The old model - of setting shop on the web, and waiting for customers - is pretty much dead  IMPO not only because everybody and their aunt do that, but also because the logical, organic way of building a following of buyers through social media has been skewed by monitoring bodies. The market is changing rapidly, more so than before, because the whole world is changing rapidly. Yet imagine, if you will, that some political or social movement gets entangled with font production for some reason. This will produce income for those that know how to tap it.

James Montalbano

I have no formal design education. I went to college and grad school studing Industrial Education with a graphic arts specialization. I was very good at traditional print production and had a very steady hand when it came to a ruling pen. This allowed me to work as an assistant art director in the days of traditional print production. I worked in the magazine business for many years before the computer took over print production. When that occurred I transitioned to digital and thanks to a magic marker lettering class I took with Ed Benguiat in the late 70s became obsessed with designing type digitally using the newly available font making software.

A chance meeting with a colleague when I was freelancing as a QuarkXpress production hire on the soon to be launched "Allure" magazine gave me the opportunity to work on converting many of Conde Nast's custom photo fonts into digital assets. This gave me the income to start designing my own library. Which I have been doing for the last 30 years.

So luck and timing are most important.

@Typofactory Do you feel lucky?

Craig Eliason

I would love to know the ratio of people making a living off type design to people trying to do that. Remember we tend to only hear from the former. Do type design schools advertise the percentages of success among their graduates?

My own part-time foundry I would still call "fledgling." It would likely be bigger and more profitable if it were my full-time occupation, but so far there hasn't been a single quarter of sales that didn't provoke conscious gratefulness for my more reliable day job. 

There are successful type designers with their own foundries encouraging people to likewise follow that dream. The spirit of that encouragement is uplifting, but I wonder it's singularly bad advice in actuality, given the numbers, the reliance on luck, and the seeming necessities of building a library and exercising patience. And that's not even mentioning the trajectory issues of AI, distributor consolidation, and devaluation of the product. 

As John mentioned, the costs to get in the business are indeed minuscule, historically speaking (one piece of reasonably affordable software and you're in business). But it now feels like for retail fonts you need a largish library and ongoing marketing efforts to even get into position to maybe get that lucky strike. So barrier-to-entry is small, but barrier-to-success might require more capital and time (and time is money) than before, which is disheartening. (Of course, it's also Economics 101 that lowering friction for suppliers will tend to increase competition and drive prices and revenues lower.)

It's a good piece of this trade to have out in the open, so I'm glad to see this thread. 

It should be said, my perspective is coming from foundry proprietorship and emphasis on retail, and there are other ways to be a professional type designer, some of which have been mentioned upthread.

James Montalbano

I do think that much of my success has come from being at the right place at the right time as I presented in my previous post. I've taught type design to many students over the years and I can't identify any who has gone on to have a successful type design career. But most did go on the have very successful careers in graphic design.

Mark Simonson

Something to keep in mind is that while there are about half a million graphic designers worldwide, the number of people who earn money doing type design is probably around 5,000, and only a fraction of those are full-time (note: this just my guesstimate—if anyone has better figures, please share). In any case, it's a very tiny industry.

Yves Michel

Nick Shinn said:

... However, the real question is: are you fascinated by the shape of letters, by typography, by the phenomenon of reading text? Lucky indeed is the person whose passion coincides with their career.

Nick summarizes the most important aspects of type designing.

If, becoming an adult, you still have the fascination he describes, follow your passion, if not professionnaly, as a hobby.

And with the wonderful tools available, create, create, invent, be original, which is very rewarding (but time consuming!)

Cory Maylett

I've been a designer and art director (and a dabbler in type design) for over 40 years with a BFA and MFA. I've made a good living at art direction and done well. However, I entered the profession at just the right time, but 2023 is not the right time. Making good income as a designer has never been easy, but in all my 40-plus years doing it, I've never seen a time when the future of the profession has looked so bleak.

Vasil Stanev

Cory Maylett said:

I've been a designer and art director (and a dabbler in type design) for over 40 years with a BFA and MFA. I've made a good living at art direction and done well. However, I entered the profession at just the right time, but 2023 is not the right time. Making good income as a designer has never been easy, but in all my 40-plus years doing it, I've never seen a time when the future of the profession has looked so bleak.

I'm surprised to read this. In my opinion, opportunities are now better than ever. Technology has never been as developed as now, it was never easier to create a design. Compare a simple thing like cutting hair from a busy background in photoshop, how easy it is now with the aid of AI. That is all AI is - an AId.
And it was never easier to ask for advice on the web and to reach the biggest names in any industry. Common people are able to communicate with billionaires and royalty! There are many people in many professions because there are more people overall.  Many used to have to do menial jobs but technology has now helped them get out of poverty. I believe we will be able to live to a day when poverty goes the way of slavery. This has driven prices down in some segments of some professions. But, when you compare the work of a seasoned professional with that of a hobbyist that used to do menial work - no, it often doesn't hit the mark. And I often had to couch younger colleagues in my office job, that are so brittle that they take every advice that was meant to help them as a personal insult and end up leaving the company. This is no way to do business... in the end, I have to call up people that I've known for decades and the professionals do the work that was supposed to be done by interns. But when was this not the case? If the intern doesn't cut the mustard, he or she will have to get a lower-level job to pay the bills, simple as that. So there will always be work for professionals. AI has taken the jobs of less skilled workers, but if you zoom in on the details of generated art, you would cry. Look at these flowers and tell me, do they resemble anything found in nature? Is there any visual hierarchy in the ovals and lines of the image? I use hand tracing of complex images as a pause between actual projects so I can let my mind run on autopilot for some time. (This works for me). But I couldn't imagine printing a vector of this and going to a concert with the design on a t-shirt. It is utter garbage to me, on every level - colors, shapes, theme, you name it. It's enough to look only at the lack of symmetry - you need and actual artist to redraw that. If somebody asks me to vectorize this for them, I might even reject the offer, no matter the price.

John Hudson

I have made a living as a type designer for almost 30 years, and it has never been exactly easy, but that is in part because I only set out of make a living and to spend most of my time designing type. My contemporaries who did really well financially out of type design are the ones who spent their time growing a business beyond the scale of one or two individual designers, in which case the work of running the business tends to overtake the work of designing.

My income for much of my time in the industry has come from custom commission work, and more recently from distribution license fees on some existing fonts. I have never made much money from retail licensing, but then I also have not devoted much time to creating fonts for retail distribution or on marketing.

When Ross and I started Tiro in the mid-1990s. I had the sense that I knew almost everyone involved in the type business in North America and Europe. Now, I don’ t even know most of the foundries, let alone the individuals who run them, and the sheer quantity of new typefaces being created and published is more than anyone can reasonably keep track of. Every week, I see new fonts being announced on Twitter—and then they are gone. I hope some of them do well commercially; I hope the people who make them are making a decent return for their creativity and time. I do worry, though, that there may be too many new fonts being made, beyond the needs of paying users, and that many of them are doomed to see little use or earn more than beer money for their creators.

If someone is serious about entering the type design field, my advice would be to learn technical and production skills to complement their design skills. Despite the efforts of some font tool makers to try to make type design and font creation easy, fonts remain complex technical products, and the people who have a solid understanding of the OpenType font format, who know how to work with more than one tool, and who have some programming understanding (not necessarily actual coding skills, although that is also a specific benefit) will find more diverse ways to earn money.

Thierry Blancpain

I’d caution that this forum is not a representative slice of the type design industry.

If you are only interested in type design and none of the other aspects of running a foundry, don’t try to run a foundry. I expect the results to be similar to people replying here who release type on their own, but don’t want to actively run a foundry. Running a foundry would include marketing, business, and usually also customer support activities as everyday tasks.

John Hudson said:

I have made a living as a type designer for almost 30 years, and it has never been exactly easy, but that is in part because I only set out of make a living and to spend most of my time designing type. My contemporaries who did really well financially out of type design are the ones who spent their time growing a business beyond the scale of one or two individual designers, in which case the work of running the business tends to overtake the work of designing.

As someone who is running a foundry while also designing a little bit of type, but is nowhere near a full-time type designer: if you want to run a foundry, run a foundry! It’s a lot of fun and I find it really rewarding. Being able to provide a platform for other designers, and promoting their work, is something that I care about and that is really fun for me. If you don’t want to do all the things involved in that, find your niche in type design and if you’re decent at what you do, you’ll most likely be able to earn a living.

This can for example mean that you release type through one or more foundries who engage in these above activities, or that you become a technical specialist, or that you freelance for other designers and take over production work, mastering, or other such activities for their releases. 

But if you do want to take an educational path to type design, you’ll study graphic design first, anyway. And you have a great head start if you try to design typefaces at your age already. If that’s something you want to do right now, do it! No need to consider your entire career when picking hobbies as a teenager, though.

James Montalbano

I've always hated the term "foundry" when used to describe an entity that creates digital type. During my technology education I had several foundry classes. I don't ever recall having to use molten metal, crucibles, cope and drags molds, heat protective clothing and face shields when making digital type, but I needed all of those in my "Foundry" classes.

John Hudson

I’ve cast metal, so I am sympathetic, James. On the other hand, lots of industries retain historical terminology across technological changes. In this case, the term ‘type foundry’ is a kind of terminological reclamation from pre-industrial typesetting. What it captures is the similarity of the business model of making and selling fonts as the primary product, rather than making and selling fonts in the context of making and selling typesetting machines and systems, as in the hot metal and phototype eras. So there is a kind of parallel between today’s digital type foundry and e.g. the Caslon Type Foundry, but it is a parallel in the business model not a parallel in the technology.

Ray Larabie

The landscape of type design is continuously evolving, with demand for new fonts diminishing but the significance of typographic expertise remains unwavering. In retrospect, the period between 1995 and 2015 appears to have been a peculiar era for full-time typeface designers, where it was possible to be a full-time typeface designer while not having a career as a typographer or graphic designer.

 

My personal experience reflects this change. A vast majority of my font income is derived from typefaces I created prior to 2010. Although some of these works have been expanded and rebuilt, barring a single release in 2016, I could arguably categorize my font releases in the past decade more as a passion project (hobby) than a substantial income source.

 

Considering the advent of innovative design tools, the field is evolving towards valuing a solid foundation in art and design history, perhaps even more than technical acumen. The dynamic nature of type design as a career demands adaptability and a continuous learning mindset. That’s something young people are naturally better than old people at. Young people will use these tools to extend their reach while us old folks will avoid them for assorted reasons.

 

While the days of thriving purely as a typeface designer may be numbered, a broader understanding of typography and its application in design, coupled with a rich knowledge of art and design history, could pave the way for exciting opportunities in the future. So, go for it!

bberning

Wow, bleak indeed! Listen, @Typofactory, it's important to reiterate what someone mentioned earlier: a career in type design can take various forms. 

Most of the previous commenters run their own studios. Owning a business is often more challenging than being employed in any industry. It entails a lot of responsibility and likely longer hours, but it obviously grants greater autonomy. So here's a different perspective: I have always been an employee throughout my professional life. It suits my personality; the uncertainty of income (from retail or custom work) would cause me anxiety. Being responsible for others' livelihoods amplifies that anxiety even more. Doing my own thing was never in the cards for me.

Now, there aren't many full-time positions available. And when they do arise, they are often with companies that the rest of the industry looks down upon. This situation isn't unique to the type industry though. If, for example, you wanted to be a forklift driver, you'd be more likely to find a job at Amazon or Walmart than at a neon sign graveyard.

I know many people who are passionate about creating fonts but not about marketing them. They find it works for them to work for others. Some have chosen to inspire a new generation of designers by teaching about type. Others consult. Others again thrive when they have the autonomy to select their projects and don’t care if they have to do their own accounting and customer support on the side. And there are some of us who engage in a combination of all of the above. Your approach will depend on your personal values.

What I’m trying to say is that I don't want you to be discouraged if you have a passion for becoming a type designer. If you can find your footing, it can be an absolute dream.

María Ramos

@Typofactory, this is important 👇

Thierry Blancpain said:

I’d caution that this forum is not a representative slice of the type design industry.

Like some mentioned above, passion for what we do is something most of us share in this industry. There are different approaches you can take if you want to work in the field, but that comes later when you get to know better the proffesion and the market.

There’s future in the type industry. Like it has happened in the past, technology, economy, society evolve, and our profession must evolve with these changes too.  

My advice is to explore and learn from different disciplines, not only type design/font engineering, but other fields you like. Knowledge will provide you with a broader perspective. Design, type design too, is not only for an elite, people with money. There are different paths you can take.

Stephen Nixon

It was incredibly helpful and informative for me to start my career as a UX/UI designer in tech, before transitioning into type. I learned so much about using type, working with code and tools like Git, working with others, and having a routine as an adult. I don’t know that I could have figured that all out if I had tried to go into type design as a job right out of college (unless maybe I had found a job at a foundry, but those are rare, and especially so for brand-new undergraduates).

Now is a difficult and tumultuous time for the economy in general and tech in particular, and that is having impacts on the type design business. It is a hard time for anyone to be headed towards college, because things feel unpredictable in terms of AI’s impact on the economy. Many people who are well past college are feeling that uncertainty, too.

All that said, maybe the best thing I think I’ve seen on this thread is to not let your long-term career planning inhibit your interest in type design as a hobby. Type design is beautiful and full of discovery and (usually) fun. It’s a bit like a video game, but with more tangible outcomes. It’s great to have a hobby that engages your mind on multiple fronts, and type design definitely does that! And, as worrisome as automation can be if you think too far ahead and put too much faith in it becoming ever more sentient… automation is really helpful for many parts of type design today. The tools we now have enable really amazing type projects, and (arguably) higher-quality work than ever before, especially from those of us who aren’t Bram de Does. 

I made type as a hobby while I was in college, and when I worked in an adjacent field, and today I am very lucky to have a type design and consulting business as a day job. While I very much hope I can keep it going as a career now, the world is unpredictable, and it takes a long time to establish a foundry as a stable business. So, who knows! If I end up having to move back towards another day job, I very much plan to keep going in type design as a passion project.

Best of luck to you in whatever field you pursue, and have fun!

Kris Sowersby

I think it’s amazing that you’re even considering type design at high school. I didn’t know it was a profession until my third year of design school. 

In short: yes, I would recommend it. If you have an interest or passion for art, language, tech, communication, literature or history it can be very rewarding. You’ll need a foundation in graphic design, and decent knowledge of typography. You won’t have to be proficient in either — most type designers aren’t good graphic designers — but you’ll need to know what is expected of the fonts you make. These skills are covered in most tertiary design schools. There are also really good postgrad type design programs all around the world. 

You’ll need to be patient, money may or may not come. Don’t get into anything for “the money”. If money is your goal, pursue business & finance. But rest assured there is a living to be made in this industry. It encompasses a lot of different activities, there’s not just one single thing. 

Twenty years ago, as a student, I told some ad guy I wanted to make typefaces. He laughed in my face, and said there’s no money in fonts. He was an asshole, he was also wrong. 

Christopher Slye

John Hudson said:

If someone is serious about entering the type design field, my advice would be to learn technical and production skills to complement their design skills. Despite the efforts of some font tool makers to try to make type design and font creation easy, fonts remain complex technical products, and the people who have a solid understanding of the OpenType font format, who know how to work with more than one tool, and who have some programming understanding (not necessarily actual coding skills, although that is also a specific benefit) will find more diverse ways to earn money.

I was going to write something similar; thanks for saving me the effort!

As interested as I was in type design when I started out (mid-90s, same as John), I quickly found that there was a pervasive need for production expertise. Although the technical landscape for fonts has changed quite a lot since then, there is still, and will always be, emerging technologies that are confusing to people. Make yourself an expert in some part of it and you’ll have a better chance of finding reliable income.

As it happened, my type career has also brought me together with some very good type designers — so although I’ve not done a lot of type design in the last 20 years, I’ve absorbed a lot and am still comfortable and confident in my skills when I do it. (Keeping up with the technical side is far more challenging to me.)

John Butler

I’d like to reformulate my original advice more concisely, speaking as one American to another.

Do not borrow money to study graphic design for four years in the United States in pursuit of a career in type design. There may be other places around the world where you can do such a thing without paying for all of it yourself—that sounds wonderful, and I hope it’s true.

Higher education in the US is in a precarious transitional state at the moment. Four-year degrees are simply no longer worth pursuing in certain subjects, especially if you come out the other end laden with debt for something with less demand than supply. Graphic design is way high up on that list.

You will learn more about type design, faster, and at less expense outside the environment of a standard American graphic design bachelor’s degree program.

John Hudson

For the record: I do not have any kind of formal qualification or undertook any formal education in type design, nor do I have a background in graphic design. I came into the field via the antiquarian booktrade and small press publishing in the early 1990s, which forstered an interest in typography. I learned to set type first, and still think that is the best introduction to learning about how type works and, hence, how to design it.

James Montalbano

If I think back on what really inspired me to pursue this career, it was the letterpress printing classes I took in high school. Setting type by hand was where it all began.

Thomas Phinney

Broadly, I might echo what Christopher and John have said.

However, one thing I will say is, that while I would not recommend a general graphic design degree, I think the one-year master’s programs from Reading and KABK are awesome. If they had been around early enough that I could have learned about them and done one of those, I think I would have been well-served by it. (That said, my RIT education was also pretty handy in a bunch of ways.)

Education is not just about what you learn in the coursework, but about the connections you make with both students and teachers.

Nick Shinn

One of the things that directed me towards type design was the idea of earning passive  income from dry-transfer royalties. Like rock stars from vinyl record sales. That was in the 1970s. I submitted to Letraset, the major publisher of dry transfer products, for several years, without joy.

With the digitization of the graphic arts c.1990, I started to make some money off font licence sales, as a side gig to my career as an art director.
Eventually I amassed enough fonts, and the market expanded enough, that I was able to do font making full time (including custom for-fee work). The phenomenon was identified in 2004 by Wired’s Chris Anderson as “The Long Tail”.

My point: there is a time and a place for everything, at the intersection of technology, the marketplace, and one’s talents, education and inclination, and if I had been born a little later, I might have considered porting my art & design skills into making apps for passive income, and, later again, NFTs, or today, something to do with AI.

If you can find some way to combine AI with making fonts, as Pablo has probed (to use McLuhan’s term) here, that might be promising.