Full Transcript for Tom Foley: How to pair typefaces and why the best brand fonts go unnoticed

I think that probably goes for all design, right? I think understanding cultural contexts and understanding why stuff is a certain way or where certain styles of design come from, where they emerge, whether it be subcultures or music scenes, wherever it's coming from, it's helpful. Having an appreciation for that makes you a better designer.

Tom Foley didn't set out to design typefaces, but that's what he does today. As a postgraduate student at Central St. Martin's in London, he was researching why Ireland, unlike Switzerland, the Netherlands, or Germany, never seemed to have a confident typographic voice of its own. The answer led him through centuries of colonial history to a so -called Irish type, invented during the Reformation to make printed scripture look the way outsiders thought Irish readers would want it to look, and back further still to 5th century monks who may have given us the first true lowercase letters and the word space.

The best response to that research, Tom realized, was to create a typeface. He called it Nib, and it now lives in Dublin's heritage plaques. That mix of deep research and hands -on craft has defined his career since. Tom worked on the first phase of Netflix Sans, a typeface you may see every day and probably never notice. At Monotype, he rose to executive creative director and led custom work like the National Portrait Gallery's contemporary serif.

This year he walked away from that role to become creative type director at Studio Drama because he wanted to get back to making type. We talk about how cultural context shapes letterforms, how to balance heritage with something that feels modern, and Tom's practical framework for pairing typefaces. We also get into why he left a prestigious executive role, how a childhood struggle with reading may have sharpened his eye for letters, and the books and typefaces he thinks every designer should know.

This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Willard. And I'm Aaron Walter.

Hey, it's Aaron. If you only listen to the podcast, you're missing the best part of Design Better. That's our community. Annual members get access to our private Slack with talented designers and former guests like Brad Frost, Bob Baxley, and Meredith Black. Slack members share their work, they trade feedback, and they help each other find jobs.

Every other Wednesday, Eli and I meet with members on Zoom for Design Club. We critique work, we do a show and tell, and we talk through career questions with expert guests. Members also get ad -free episodes, our weekly newsletters, our full e -book library, and job alerts. All for just $72 a year, which is just $6 a month. And pro tip, most companies will let you expense it.

You can learn more and become an annual member at designbetter .com slash join. That's designbetter .com slash join. We'll see you in Slack.

We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

Design Better is brought to you by Masterclass. For years, I treated design reviews like debates, thinking if my rationale was sharp enough, I figured I'd win. But I kept losing to leaders who just didn't like the direction we were heading. Here's what changed that for me. Nobody can hear your argument until they feel heard. So now before I defend anything, I try to identify the concern out loud.

It sounds like you're worried that we're going to push the launch back. Then I just stop talking, and more often than not, the tension drops, and we start solving real problems together. That came from former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss and his class on the art of negotiation. He calls it labeling, and it works as well on stakeholders as it does across a negotiating table.

That's one lesson from one class. Masterclass has 200 -plus more, taught by people who define their fields in business, writing, creativity, wellness, and more. Audio mode turns your commute into a classroom, and plans start at just $10 a month, billed annually. And every new membership comes with a 30 -day money -back guarantee. Masterclass keeps adding new classes all the time, so there's never been a better time to get in.

Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15% off on any annual membership at masterclass .com slash designbetter. That's 15% off at masterclass .com slash designbetter. Head to masterclass .com slash designbetter to see the latest offer. Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero Powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body.

With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

And now, back to the show. Tom Foley, welcome to Design Better. Thank you, Aaron. It's very nice to be here. It's a pleasure. We're excited to talk to you about your career in typography. You were at Monotype and recently left and moved to a new studio where you're designing type for brands, custom type for brands at Drama in London where you are right now.

But let's start from the beginning. When did you first come across typography? The first time where it was exciting and kind of lit you up? Pretty young. My uncle Tony, who's still alive, he was a sign painter. So growing up, I was familiar with the idea of making a living from drawing letters. It was a thing, you know. From a pretty young age, I was a little bit obsessed with handwriting and styles of handwriting and joined up writing.

I remember I was maybe seven or eight years of age pestering my dad to teach me how to do cursive because he had learned cursive at school. Things like that. So I think there was an interest in, for whatever reason, I don't know, in letter forms. Very, very young. And then later in life, I found out that on my dad's side of the family, a few generations back, there were stonemasons, carving headstones and lettering.

So there was some kind of craft element within the family that was there. Right through school, the only thing I was good at, like most designers, was art and design. I was terrible academically. Automatically, I wasn't good at really anything apart from design and artistic subjects and drawing and stuff. So it always came in there as well.

So it was always there. When I finally got to art school, I discovered it had a name. Typography was a thing. And it was a very specific and foundational component of graphic design. That's when I really got hooked on typography as a medium, let's say. But designing typefaces, again, came later. It was during my postgraduate at St. Martin's in London.

And I did some research that was part of my coursework. And the way the course was structured, you had to design in response to your theory. So you do your thesis and your research first, and then you create a design practice based on that. And I did some research that led to the only solution or the only design response being a typeface.

That was it. And that's how it really started. And that's when I got really obsessed, really obsessed with letter forms. So, yeah, that was 2007.

That's when it really started. So that's kind of the highlights of the early career. And then my education, really, and my interest in it. And then after I graduated, I kind of floated around different studios for a couple of years and ended up at Dalton Mag in 2011. That's my first proper typeface design job. And that's what I've been doing ever since is typeface design and creative direction around type and things like that.

Talk to us a little bit more about your thesis. We read a little bit about it and it's very interwoven with the history of type in Ireland and the actual typeface that you created. I believe it's called Nib. Tell me why that particular design response was something that you came up with. Are you ready for this? Sure. Brace yourself. I'll try and give you the abridged version.

The whole thing around the reason I got interested in this subject of type and the place of Ireland is that I grew up in Ireland. I did my undergraduate in Limerick in the west of Ireland. I grew up in the southeast of Ireland. Then I moved to London in 2005 from Limerick. You're kind of surrounded by this international cohort. You've got people from Switzerland and America and France and Germany and Holland and Japan and China.

All these places actually have quite a strong typographic history and identity. But Ireland didn't. I became really quite quickly within my course and group of people like how typographically apologetic I was. Ireland didn't have its own kind of established style or didn't seem to have a kind of a confidence with type in the same way that a lot of other sort of design cultures did.

And you start to dig into that and quite quickly you realize, of course, that's because it was for however many hundred years. You know, some people say 500. Some people say 800. It was a colony. It was colonized by other people, other countries, other cultures. So its connection to its language and its typography is broken. There's a natural disconnect between the spoken language and the visualization of the language.

Other aspects of the culture, too. So it's not just type, but, you know, same from perhaps music or for painting or other aspects of Irish culture. But again, digging into that subject more and more over kind of a few months and a year in terms of research and speaking to people about this within the industry and I found two things. So there was this clear sort of disconnect, kind of a gap within Irish visual culture typographically that it was all either imported styles.

Most of it was Dutch. The kind of typographic vernacular was really Dutch typography from the 50s and 60s. And then how little was written about it. No one had really researched it or it was a little bit of research done by a gentleman called Donald McGuyn, I think. But he wrote a book on Irish type, quite a well -known book on Irish type.

But it's more of a chronology of what this style of typeface that they call Irish types, when they started, when they were designed, who designed them, right? There was no cultural context given around these typefaces. And this style of typography, this style of lettering called Irish type. And that's where it started. So I dug into this and I kind of came to some sort of conclusions of my own in the research that, you know, you can't really separate this style of Irish typography, which you probably recognize.

If you think of it like an Irish pub, a certain ye olde style, right? You can probably see it in your head, right? It's all over my parents' house. They have all sorts of Irish saying things hanging on their walls. You know exactly what I mean, right? Yes. Yeah. It's Cade Miele Faltze, set in this certain typeface, things like that. So if you dig into, again, the kind of history of it, the kind of typographic history of those forms, they're a real mashup.

They're part Anglo -Saxon, part half -unseal, part Roman. They're a mixture of forms, the basis of them. And that goes back to their origins. So they were produced during the Reformation or the Late Reformation in a period of Queen Elizabeth's reign, where the Reformation in England was under threat. The Reformation in the English colonies was under threat by this Catholic resurgence in those places.

And part of that then was they started to produce New Testament or Church of England, let's say, testaments in the Irish language. But they wanted to give it a form of language that they felt looked more Irish. So they invented this typeface called the Irish Types. It was an invention. Kind of a naive sort of impression of what they thought Irish people would like to read at the time.

Keeping in mind, like, you know, it was small parts of the population that could read back then. Probably also somewhat derogatory in the sense that it looked very old. It looked antiquated. It looked markedly different to the Roman scripts in the way that it was set. So it's hard to separate the colonial origins of these artifacts, these visual artifacts like the Irish type, from what was going on at the time culturally.

So that was the research basis. And then a very long story short, I wrote a thesis on this and came to a position. And the only response then was to look back through Irish history and think, well, what if Ireland had had a typographic evolution of its own? What other reference points are there in Irish typographic and calligraphic history that you could take to inform some typeface designs? And I went back to the fifth century to some very old manuscripts where there was innovations around writing, where there are some academics who credit the Irish monks working in Ireland in the fifth century with the invention of the lowercase, for example, the first true minuscule.

Or there's another academic that credits monks at the same time developing the word space as well. So there's these kind of very big innovations in the practice of writing, which is the basis for typography, which probably happened on the island of Ireland, which at that time was a Catholic rival to Rome. It was really a cultural hotspot.

It was a really important place in Europe. So I took some cues from there in the research and I developed some typefaces based on some analysis of those letter forms, those innovations in writing. And I came up with this typeface called Nib, which in looking back was pretty naive. It was like it was pretty basic design, but that's how it started.

That's also a very untypical journey into type design because it came from pure research. I had no idea I was going to design typefaces. So I think it gave me a sort of a grounding in context, which became very useful later in my career, which I didn't realize. Is Nib out there for people to download and use? It's not commercially available.

So Dublin City Council in around 2012, 2014, that time, they were redesigning their cultural heritage site plaques. You know, if you've been to London, you see these blue plaques on buildings. It's like, you know, Jimi Hendrix was here in 1964 or lived here. The equivalent in Dublin, so they decided to obviously replace them with a more consistent design system.

So they designed a new system of their heritage plaques and they used Nib on those plaques as a sort of typeface. That's the only commercial sort of use case it ever had. I decided to not use it anywhere else because it just felt like the perfect use case. Thinking of the full story, you know, where this whole thing started and coming back and becoming part of, I guess, the typographic landscape of Ireland, even in some quite subtle way, but it felt very fitting.

So I never made it commercially available for that reason, really. It was that, I don't know, it felt like quite a complete journey for that project. This is one of the most fascinating parts of typography is the rich history that is often behind things that we look at every day and don't really think about. I think the first time I became aware of that was when I heard about Tobias Ferrer and Jonathan Heffler doing deep research to create Gotham, which was a typeface that was created from New York.

You know, what were these common letter forms in signage and various letter forms in New York? How did this connection to history and typography, how does that inform the work that you do today? Maybe there's two buckets to that answer. So there's a historical lineage of craft through type, the evolution of letter forms, the development of type faces as metal type, the evolution of those metal type forms through technological innovations, right, through the Industrial Revolution and then into digital type.

But there is a historical lineage in the forms themselves that type designers, I think, need to understand. Why do certain type faces look a certain way? What's the origin of that? What's going on culturally, technologically? There's that aspect of the craft aspect is quite important. And then the other thing for me is then is like this cultural context.

And that's maybe more my own personal take on it. But having gone through this very meandering journey into type design, which was really about research and grappling with my own Irish identity as an Irish living in London, it's such a cliche, but you move away from home and you realize how different you are. And like how you see the world differently and was part of that.

But that process made me become more aware of my own cultural origins, my own cultural context. And I guess to be more respectful to my own origins. So then later when I got into more hardcore type design and I was working on quite large projects at Dalton Mag, I was thrown at the deep end and I was asked to figure out how to design Tamil or Malayalam scripts for Nokia when Nokia existed back in the day.

But they did a massive project back in 2010 with Dalton Mag and went on for a few years. In that project, I was working on some really complex writing systems and creating typefaces for those writing systems as part of that Nokia project. And the research skills that I developed on that master's journey, looking at context and cultural context and understanding, trying to get a grasp of the cultural origins of shapes and forms served me really well because I found that research side very enjoyable.

And I was able to translate a lot of that research, I think, quite instinctively into pretty good typefaces. Part of that then was working with a lot of native speaking designers and linguists and people who understood these writing systems really deeply to help me quite quickly learn about these things. There's that side too. So understanding the cultural and historical aspects of type design is crucial as well, I think, particularly if you want to do it on a global scale, if you want to work in script systems and more niche areas and stuff.

But I think that probably goes for all design, right? I think understanding cultural contexts and understanding why stuff is a certain way or where certain styles of design come from, where they emerge, whether it be subcultures or music scenes, wherever it's coming from, it's helpful. Having an appreciation for that makes you a better designer.

We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

Design Better is brought to you by Masterclass. For years, I treated design reviews like debates, thinking if my rationale was sharp enough, I figured I'd win. But I kept losing to leaders who just didn't like the direction we were heading. Here's what changed that for me. Nobody can hear your argument until they feel heard. So now before I defend anything, I try to identify the concern out loud.

It sounds like you're worried that we're going to push the launch back. Then I just stop talking and more often than not, the tension drops and we start solving real problems together. That came from former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss and his class on the art of negotiation. He calls it labeling and it works as well on stakeholders as it does across a negotiating table.

That's one lesson from one class. Masterclass has 200 plus more. Taught by people who define their fields in business, writing, creativity, wellness, and more. Audio mode turns your commute into a classroom and plans start at just $10 a month billed annually. And every new membership comes with a 30 -day money -back guarantee. Masterclass keeps adding new classes all the time, so there's never been a better time to get in.

Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15% off on any annual membership at Masterclass .com slash design better. That's 15% off at Masterclass .com slash design better. Head to Masterclass .com slash design better to see the latest offer. Low energy, unfocused, foggy. You might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body.

With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

And now, back to the show. When you're working on a new typeface and you have maybe these historical inspirations or cultural context and inspirations, how do you balance that with creating something that still feels contemporary and fresh and new? For me, I guess there's a process of absorbing all this information about something. If I move away from the kind of historical projects and the big heavy stuff into like a more commercial context, it is transferable.

You're given a brief or custom typeface for a brand. You really have to absorb and understand the brand. What's its strategy? What's its positioning? Is it evolving? Is it transforming? How are they translating that strategy into like a visual identity, a design system? What are the parameters this thing needs to exist until you absorb all of that? And then you let it sink in and it just comes out then.

You just sit down and you draw. That's basically how I work. It's a process of informing yourself and feeling comfortable with the subject or the question and then just having at it. And I sketch a lot by hand. I do a lot of calligraphy and calligraphy sketching. But then quickly move on to screen when something feels right. After years of experience of doing this, I've probably developed these sorts of instincts.

But I'm sure at first it wasn't like that. At the beginning when I first started doing this, a lot of it was looking around at other typefaces. As a person who uses typefaces, a graphic designer, you like certain typefaces quite instinctively. You have an immediate emotional response to something. I like that for that reason. It just works or feels right.

You probably don't think about it too much. But then when you start to move into the design of letter forms, you have to start thinking about that. Like, OK, why do I like it? Why is that typeface really popular right now, whereas these typefaces are not? And then it's part of becoming aware and looking around and learning and comparing one typeface to another.

And I did a lot of that in my early career, looking at typefaces, understanding why they work the way they work, looking at proportions. Why is that typeface x height so big? Why is the stroke contrast so high? All this kind of stuff. Kind of learning through others, but learning by looking as well, because there's a lot of information out there that's not explicit.

If you look for it, it's out there. You can find it. And also because I didn't have a formal type design background, I had to learn in other ways, I guess, to form an opinion about type and to develop a process and a method around designing type. But, you know, you speak to another typeface designer and they might completely disagree with me.

They might say, no, no, it's very rule based. It's very rational. It's like this and this and this and this. That's the beauty of it. It's like any form of expression is that there's definitely a quite personal side to type design where it's really about your own background, your journey, how you got there, how you understand the world, things like that.

How do you think about pairing? This is a challenge that most designers, even those who have some typography chops, it's a struggle. What are some principles that designers should be using when they think about pairing? It can feel quite daunting, but there's some really good principles that can make it a lot easier. And they're actually looking at maybe less expressive stuff and more structural things.

So you've got a serif headline typeface and let's say it's a modern or a bodoni style. So it has kind of like high contrast and the shoulders blend into the stems. It has like fine serifs. That typeface model, that modern model, eventually evolved into grotesque typefaces. So those typefaces always pair better with grotesques because they have the same structure.

So that's one thing you can look at. If you've got a starting point for your pairing, if you can understand it's not to sound too nerdy, but it's calligraphic route. If you could trace this back in time, what structural aspects of this typeface have come from? Which calligraphic tradition? Broad nib or pointed nib? Or, as other designers call it, expansion versus broad nib.

But that can help, that's the first thing. The next thing is to start to look at structural things and proportions, like X -heights is a big one. So if you compare very different styles of typefaces and find similar vertical metrics, meaning that the X -height and the ascenders and the cap heights are all kind of similar. Or as close as possible.

That really helps too. It starts to give them parity in terms of how the design features appear when you use typefaces. Also the stem weights, so how the weights work together. And then the next thing is weight matching. So if you have a good understanding of its calligraphic or structural route, a good understanding of the vertical metrics and proportions of the typeface that you're pairing with.

And then you're looking at weight range and colour and texture. That's the next thing you can look at as a way to pair things successfully. And then that helps you narrow down, I think, quite quickly what could work. Particularly if you're trying to pair something more functional with something quite expressive. That gives you a good starting point.

We mentioned earlier that you recently left Monotype to go to Drama. What pulled you away from that role? Because it seemed like that was kind of a dream role to be at Monotype, which is such a huge foundry, has a lot of influence over design. And you were executive creative director. What made you make the move? I kind of think I have like this eight -year itch thing where after eight years somewhere, I get itchy feet.

It was a great place to work Monotype. I got a massive amount of exposure and experience and I worked with some really great people. I think for me, I just moved so far away from making things. As an executive creative director within the structure that we were in, I was very close to clients. I was working on more strategic problems in the business and working across different parts.

But I think I just become so detached from the thing that I loved, which was making type and helping people make type, that I think I just grew a little bit curious. What else could I do next? And I met the guys at Drama a couple of years ago when they just started and we actually had a coffee together. And I really liked them and I really liked their work.

And then I'd been judging a couple of design competitions over the last couple of years, Design Circle and a few others. And their work kept popping up in these competitions. And I kept thinking, wow, they're really making waves. And they got an interesting formula going on. Something's happening in that studio, which is creatively very fruitful.

So I had an interest in them. And then they put out a job post for a creative type director. And I just sent an email in and said, hey, we met a couple of years ago. We had a chat. I'd be interested in the role. And it went from there. Maybe a six -month period. We had a lot of conversations and talked about what it could look like. And then I decided to make the jump.

It was more wanting to get closer to the craft, but also wanting to be somewhere where I felt like I could get an experience that I hadn't had before. Even having done this for, whatever, 15, 16 years, there's still so much to learn. And there's so many places to try this out and things to do that. And before AI takes all of our jobs, I thought I'd go out and get a job where I'm actually making type again.

It's interesting because this is a really common problem where designers, they fall in love with the craft. They get some experience. They climb the ranks in a company. And that comes with great benefits. Like you make more money. You get more influence inside the organization. And that feels good. And yet you feel trapped that you are doing less and less of the thing that you're really passionate about.

What did you wrestle with when you were making that decision? Did it feel like a risky thing for you personally in your career or maybe even financially in your family? Of like, I'm going to not be an executive creative director at a big company. I'm going to go make type again at a smaller organization. Definitely it was a very difficult decision because you're right.

You're working at a big company and you have all the perks, the salary, the pension, all this stuff. But I never had any ambitions to be an executive creative director anywhere. I never went into this gig thinking I'm going to climb to the top of this ladder. It just kind of happened. For all the perks in any role, when you get quite senior, it's not all fun and games.

It's not all easy. It's not all nice conversations. And it's mainly not glamorous. It's mainly quite difficult conversations sometimes. I just don't think that was ever really my end goal to be in that position. So I didn't find it that difficult. When I made up my mind, it wasn't really kind of a painstaking decision. I think it's a healthy thing to do, to be honest.

For me personally, staying in a role like that, which from the outside might have a lot of prestige attached to it. It's naturally quite restrictive in many ways. I don't think it's healthy to be that restrictive for that long. I started having health problems. I started having physical health problems from the stress of the job. Maybe two and a half, three years ago, that started.

And I think I got to the point where I was like, that's something that I can't sustain forever. And then on a very personal note, then this year I've lost three people very close to me. I've lost my best friend's husband passed away. My wife's mother and father passed away this year. So we had these big shocks in our family. And I think they jolt me to thinking, OK, look, life is really short and you can spin your wheels somewhere for years.

Telling yourself that these perks are worth it. Or you can just go out there and try and find something that's more meaningful and interesting and could lead you somewhere else. Somewhere completely unexpected. Yeah. Sorry to hear about your family loss. Thank you. Yeah. Speaking of meaningful things, in addition to being a designer, you're also a musician on the side.

What kind of music do you do? And does that interplay with your design work in any way? I mean, I would use the term musician very loosely.

I tinker. I wouldn't say I'm very good. I think I used to play a lot of music when I was younger. Music for most designers, I think, is a form of sustenance. I think for most creatives, even if you don't play, I think music is a very important part of washing my brain out every day. Listening to like a new album or something I know very well.

Or for me, listening is a really important part of music. I just love to listen to music. Yeah, it's crucial. It's like a part of understanding the world. Also, I think in a very emotional way, because you can kind of get caught up in yourself, in your job, in your day to day. So I find it really helpful. I'm not genre specific. I listen to all kinds of stuff.

When I do play, I used to play a lot of blues guitar. I don't think I was very good at it, but I used to try and emulate Rory Gallagher, Irish blues guitarist, super influential guy from the 70s, 60s and 70s. He was like virtuoso. So nowhere near as good as that. But that's kind of what I enjoyed to play. Blues rock guitar is like the thing I kind of gravitate towards.

Why do you think so many designers are attracted to music, either playing or listening? What's the connection? I think I think it makes them look cool.

I think. No, I'm kind of joking. If I focus in on typography, there's a lot of synergies between, I think, how those parts of the brain work. The part of the brain I use for music feels to me like the same part of the brain I use for typography. So maybe there's something there. Maybe it's a language thing. Maybe it's linked to language and the use of language and how we understand.

For me, I think also pretty sure I'm an undiagnosed dyslexic. So I think for me, there's something in that too. You know, I struggled when I was a kid to learn to read and I'm a terrible speller to this day, but I was always quite innately good with form and music. Those things that I kind of were quite fluent in. So I suspect it's something like that.

I do think there's a language component to it, though. So as a designer, you're kind of dealing with language on different levels. You spoke language, written language, but there's visual communication, all the different forms of gesture that go on in form and color and the levels of communication and language that happen in visual language.

There's something in that sort of interplay within a designer's brain as they're educated and as those skills develop that I think also are similar to how maybe musicians' brains grow and develop as they learn to become more fluent and to become better musicians. So maybe it's something like that. You said that you think you have undiagnosed dyslexia.

And there's a deep irony that a person who would struggle with words and letters would find themselves in a profession that is solely focused on words and letters. Do you think it is in some way a superpower for your work? It's not a superpower for my emails. Thank God for Spellchecker because I would not have a job. My spelling is that bad.

I mentioned earlier on in the conversation about as a kid being quite obsessed with letters and writing. And I think that comes from there was a time in school when I was really struggling, I think, to learn to write. So I must have been about five, six, seven, that age. I remember having to have these extra media classes every day where I'd go and I'd get extra tuition and how to read and how to write and stuff.

It's quite possible that the obsession with letter forms and being so focused on the forms of letters started there because I was obviously trying very hard to understand this thing. I was probably seeing them differently too. I was probably not really seeing them as words, but maybe seeing them as individual shapes. Maybe, I don't know. So there could be something there.

The reason I think I'm not is because I have such bad spelling. It's notably bad. I don't enjoy reading that much. I've always struggled to read. And I had all these academic problems in school. It's probably dyslexia. But then also my nephew has been diagnosed. My brother, we think, has it as well. So it's probably in the family. So there's some grounding for it.

But yeah, as a superpower, I don't necessarily think it's a superpower for me. I just think that you learn to cope with it and then develop workarounds. Because you're not diagnosed and because you're not being taught to deal with it in a kind of a structured way, you develop pretty idiosyncratic ways of thinking around problems because you have to.

They're very personal. And that maybe gives you a little bit of quirk or distinction or gives you a little bit of slightly janky thought process, which makes the things you make or the things you explore a little bit more distinctive. So that's the only thing I can think of. But I don't know if superpower is the right word. I think it's just more when you have these challenges like everyone in life, we all have something.

You develop resilience and that resilience becomes part of how you operate yourself, what you do. We've been lucky to have a few pretty well -known typographers on the show. Now you're amongst our collection of typography geniuses. For folks that are just getting started or maybe we just want to upskill a bit, are there any books or references or places to start that you would recommend for designers in this area? Yeah, definitely.

I mean, there's loads of starting points. In terms of the designer typefaces, I mean, there's lots of stuff online now. I think to keep in mind, there's lots of resources out there. But I do still think starting with some books is a good place just because it's a different way of engaging with the theory of it and the method. So there's a book called Designing Type, which is quite old now by Karen Cheng.

That one's really good. I always recommend that to students. I think what it does is explains what typeface design is really well. Very plain language. The visual examples are great. But it starts to be in this idea of process early on. She talks a lot about like, OK, you start with these letters and this is how you draw them. And, you know, when you're drawing your round characters, then you're solving problems for also for like if you draw an O, you're also starting to solve a C and a G and so on.

She talks about proportions and structure. And then she starts to talk about spacing and she builds it up really well as a kind of a process. I think that's really important because one of the most important things you need to develop as a typeface designer is this kind of systematic thinking. So you might have crazy ideas, which are brilliant, but at some point you have to systematize them.

They have to work within a typographic system. And that system can be as complicated as you like, but you have to start thinking that way. That one's really good. Then recently I've been reading a book called Type Revivals by a friend of mine, actually, Michele Patanet. And it's a little yellow book. And it just talks about the process of if you're taking a historical model of a typeface, practically how you analyze that.

Say, for example, looking at Caslon 8 point from some certain particular facsimile or some impression of a typeface, how you take that, you photograph it, you analyze it, you rationalize it, you develop digital drawings from that. Because that's a really valuable process for a young type designer to go through, to take a classic style like a Caslon or a Pdoney or a Baskerville and try to recreate it through their own process of revival.

So you just learn so much about proportion, shape, form, contrast, all these things that become your vernacular as a type designer. That process of reviving type is really a valuable thing to do. And that book takes you through the process really pragmatically. It's really good. And then in terms of typography, there's a book I still use today.

It's called Detail and Typography. It's a small white book. The author is a guy called Just Hakuli, I think must have passed away maybe 10 years ago now. He was a Swiss designer, a Swiss book designer. But it's a really small little handbook, a manual about basically his process of typesetting. It's really good. It's very pragmatic and rational.

Very Swiss. I think he's Swiss, but it's very European in this kind of process. But it's a super good reference for like, how do you handle rag? How do you handle line length? How do you handle ledding? It's a really nice little manual. Any student of typography will jump ahead reading that book and using it day to day. And you can reference it.

You can just keep it by your desk. And if you encounter a question when you're typesetting, usually there's an answer within that one. Is the Robert Brighurst book still seen as like canon of typographic design? I think it probably is up there, but I never enjoyed it. I always struggled with it. Probably because I'm dyslexic. Because I couldn't read it.

And the language in it is beautiful, but it's really complex. And for me, it was too much. And I think that's why I really enjoyed it. On the flip side is the Just a Cooley book. The detail and typography. Which is almost like if someone said, can you make a version of this book for a simple minded Tom Foley? It would be that one. That would be the Just a Cooley version.

Because, I mean, Robert Brighurst talks a lot about the golden section and all these kind of theories of scaling. And that's really amazing. But I could never get my head around it. I just couldn't do it, personally. But I think a lot of people love it, right? A lot of people really have a lot of love for that book. So normally when we wrap up, Tom, we ask people what they're watching, reading, or listening to.

But let's take a different approach with you. Give us two or three publicly available fonts, commercially available, that you love, that you think more people should be checking out. The first one's easy. So there's a typeface called Lexicon, which is available through Dutch Type Library. And that's typeface designed by a designer called Bram de Deuz.

I think the most beautiful typeface in the world. It's very underused because it's very expensive. I think it's quite pricey. It was a book designed for dictionaries and kind of a very hardcore type setting. But as a type designer, I think it's just incredible. There is a typeface by a designer who I used to work with called Malou Verlom, who I worked with at Monotype.

And he, I think in 2022, released a typeface called Macklin. And it's a really big family of serifs, slab, serifs, sands, and it's all variable. It was like one of, I think, the first big variable families to go out into the wild. And I just love that typeface. I see it used now and then, but not loads. But I would encourage people to check that out.

And Malou's an amazing designer. He's this very, very talented guy. One more I'll mention, just because I think it's become a typeface of our age. You see it everywhere now. But it's a typeface called Blenny. And it's by, again, an ex -colleague of mine, Spike Spondyke. And she worked at Dalton Mag, then worked at Colophon, and now works at Monotype.

But she released Blenny at Dalton Mag, I think, in 2015, 14, 15 maybe. But it's this like single weight, really fat face, serif typeface. But it's just so distinctive. She managed to create something that is instantly recognizable. And that people love because of its quirk and its warmth and its energy. And I just love it because I know her and I know the process she went through to make it.

It was a challenge. It was a long process. But I love to see something like that become a part of the typographic landscape and the visual vernacular of a time, which I think it has actually. It's quite phenomenal. And to do that is amazing as a designer. I don't think you can plan it. I think it just happens. But she managed to do that with Blenny.

It's beautiful. Tom, where can people learn more about you and the work that you're doing? I'm always open to chatting to people so people can stalk me on LinkedIn if they want to. And if I can vet them and if I can spare some time, I'll chat. But I think, I mean, there's a few podcasts out there of me blabbing on about stuff. And I released a typeface a couple of years ago called Cotford, which is quite a bit written about that.

If you check that out, that's on the, I think it's still on the Monotype website. But yeah, if you Google my name, you'll get some stuff. I'm pretty invisible. I don't like to do too much social media because I just think it's a toxic wasteland for me. I tend not to do it. But yeah, apart from LinkedIn, of course. Well, Tom Foley, thanks so much for being on Design Better.

It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Eli. Thank you, Aaron. Yeah, it's been a really nice conversation. And thank you for having me on.

This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast .com.

It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.

Bye. Bye. Bye.