Average number of type designers in a type design group.

Deleted Account
Deleted Account Posts: 739
in Technique and Theory
I'm guessing this number is around 1.1? That is to say, the vast majority of type design groups, people who work together daily on type design and development, number one person. And there are several thousand of these? Then are a hundred or so with 2, and a dozen that are many more than 2? What do you think?
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Comments

  • Stuart Sandler
    Stuart Sandler Posts: 360
    How would you count a distributed model where one person draws, one spaces and kerns, one does OT, one hints, etc? I think there are now specialists each of these can be outsourced to . . .
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 1,992
    When a type designer generally works with art directors does that count as a group of two?
  • Deleted Account
    Deleted Account Posts: 739
    edited March 2013
    "type design groups, people who work together daily on type design and development" is usually a distributed model and does not include clients, such as art directors. If one is functioning as type director and another as letter drawer, that would be two.
  • Jason Campbell
    Jason Campbell Posts: 100
    I suppose that since these groups are not usually exclusive, you could almost have more groups than designers. That is, when I was a freelancer, I worked with many designers, and they intern worked with other specialists depending on the project. So it gets to be quite a tangled web we weave there.
  • Deleted Account
    Deleted Account Posts: 739
    edited March 2013
    Bas Jacobs has pointed me to this excellent site, http://ruxandra-duru.com/web/research.html.

    Now to get this hooked up to Chartwell. ;)
  • Stephen Coles
    Stephen Coles Posts: 1,006
    edited March 2013
    Ruxandra is working on an update to her survey which will be published on Typographica in the near future.
  • David Sudweeks
    David Sudweeks Posts: 34
    Putting Ruxandra's data into a spreadsheet, and my own I've added in through the past year or so to make it a more comprehensive list, I come to around 1.9 type designers per foundry on average. This is without including a number for Monotype since I have no idea how many designers there are total.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,199
    I'm more of a singer-songwriter than a group member.
    It’s all good.
  • Deleted Account
    Deleted Account Posts: 739
    Checking in on Ruxandra.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    One man band having trouble staying in step with myself.
  • Stephen Coles
    Stephen Coles Posts: 1,006
    David, it is taking a while to get responses from some of the foundries, but most of her work is done. Now on to making it presentable.
  • Delve Withrington
    Delve Withrington Posts: 17
    1.5 here now. The .5 is an intern. I sometimes send work out and often collaborate, if that counts.

    I don't know Ruxandra, so feel free to forward that info to her.
  • James Hultquist-Todd
    James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 416
    .75 here now. Hoping for 1 in the near future.
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 0
    edited October 2013
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • Russell McGorman
    Russell McGorman Posts: 262
    Where's bit about the light bulb?
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,726
    edited October 2013
    Q: How many type setters does it take to change a light bulb?

    A: One, but they will need to know how tight you want it.
  • [Deleted User]
    [Deleted User] Posts: 0
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    Can you make it a Humanistic lightbulb with plenty of language support?
  • Deleted Account
    Deleted Account Posts: 739
    That does it, you're all halves. Which I guess, is better than being 1/2 nots, especially in some browsers.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,199
    edited October 2013
    Sorry, single operators (not to mention ½s) don’t figure into the calculation, because “one” is not a group.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    Half Watt Bulbs?
  • Jan Schmoeger
    Jan Schmoeger Posts: 280
    Is that bold, medium or light bulbs?
  • Stephen Coles
    Stephen Coles Posts: 1,006
    edited September 2015
    David Berlow said:
    Bas Jacobs has pointed me to this excellent site, http://ruxandra-duru.com/web/research.html. Now to get this hooked up to Chartwell. ;)
    Done: http://census.typographica.org

    Here’s the chart for foundry size:



    313 foundries are represented in Ruxandra’s 2013 census. We’ll certainly be increasing that count in the next edition. This census doesn’t exactly answer your question, because it includes those at a foundry who are not directly involved with type development. So the numbers would be even smaller.
  • Thierry Blancpain
    Thierry Blancpain Posts: 210
    I’d love a second representation of that data where the bars are sized by the total size of people, not by the number of cmopanies with that amount of people. That would show how many people work in which kind of environment.
  • Stephen Coles
    Stephen Coles Posts: 1,006
    Sorry, Thierry, but I can’t quite get what you mean. I keep reading it and chuckling about charting the actual size (height and weight) of each type designer. Can you rephrase? 
  • Robin Mientjes
    Robin Mientjes Posts: 132
    Thierry, do you mean percentages of absolute numbers, rather than percentages split into categories? Because I agree with the request; it’s hard to see here that, perhaps, actually more people work together than alone.
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 933
    What might provide an interesting visualization is a series of bars where the heights are the percentage of the total and the width of the bars is proportional to the foundry size.

    The one-person foundry would be narrow and quite tall. The 26+-person foundry would be wide and short.

    Then the area of the bars might give some sense of the relative numbers of people working in each environment.

  • Jongseong Park
    Jongseong Park Posts: 24
    If you include CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) operations, the average will certainly rise. Korean type design usually requires large teams; one major foundry (Yoon Design) has 69 employees, although I don't know what proportion of that number is involved in type design itself.

    But the corollary of course is that there are far fewer type design operations for CJK languages than for Latin, so the impact on the global average will likely be small.
  • Alvaro Franca
    Alvaro Franca Posts: 22
    Nice work on the census!

    May I suggest that in future revisions the in-text footnotes are made clickable? That would be handy :smile: 

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