Tom Foley
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Design Better · Tom Foley: How to pair typefaces and why the best brand fonts go…
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Which Typefaces Does Tom Foley Recommend?
Tom Foley recommends three typefaces more people should use: Lexicon, Macklin, and Blenny.
Lexicon, from the Dutch Type Library, was designed by Bram de Does for dictionaries and hard typesetting. Foley calls it the most beautiful typeface in the world and says it is underused because it is expensive. Macklin is by Malou Verlomme, a colleague from Monotype. Foley thinks it came out around 2022. It is a large family of serifs, slabs, and sans, all variable, and he thinks it was one of the first big variable families. He loves it and wishes it were used more. Blenny is by Spike Spondike, who worked at Dalton Maag, then Colophon, and now Monotype. Foley thinks she released it at Dalton Maag ar
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How Do You Pair Typefaces?
Tom Foley says you pair typefaces by matching structure first: where the letters come from, their vertical proportions, and their weight.
A modern or Bodoni-style headline, with high contrast, shoulders that blend into the stems, and fine serifs, pairs better with a grotesque, because that modern model evolved into grotesques and they share a structure. He starts with the calligraphic root. Trace the letters back and ask whether they come from a broad nib or a pointed nib, which other designers call expansion versus broad nib. Then match vertical metrics. The x-height, the ascenders, and the cap height should be as close as possible, so the features sit at the same height. Stem weights shou
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What Is Irish Type?
Irish type is a letter style invented in Queen Elizabeth's reign, during the Reformation, to look the way English printers thought Irish readers would want scripture to look.
Tom Foley says the familiar old lettering on Irish pubs and on sayings hung on the wall is a mashup of Anglo-Saxon, half-uncial, and roman forms. Printers produced Church of England texts in Irish and invented Irish types as a naive, antiquated impression of Irish taste. A chronology of those types existed, but it left out the cultural context. Foley wrote a thesis, then asked what Ireland's letters might have become with an evolution of their own. He went back to fifth-century manuscripts. Some academics credit Irish
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What Book Should Type Designers Start With?
Tom Foley tells type designers to start with books, and the one he always recommends to students is Designing Type by Karen Cheng.
He says there is a lot of type design material online, but a book engages the theory and the method differently. Designing Type explains the work in plain language, with strong visual examples, and it brings process in early. Karen Cheng shows how the first letters are drawn. When you draw an O, you also start to solve a C and a G. She covers proportions and structure, then spacing, and builds the work up as a process. Foley says a typeface designer needs systematic thinking. You can have crazy ideas that are brilliant, but at some point you have to systematize
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Why Did Tom Foley Leave Monotype?
Tom Foley left Monotype, where he was executive creative director, to make type again at Drama.
He describes an eight-year itch. Monotype had given him exposure and colleagues he liked, and the role kept him close to clients and to strategy, but he had moved too far from making type and from helping other people make it. He had coffee with the people at Drama a couple of years after they started, liked them and their work, and kept seeing that work while judging Design Circle and other competitions. When they posted a creative type director role, he emailed. About six months of conversations later he took it. He wanted a kind of experience he had not had, even after 15 or 16 years, and he w
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How Do You Design a New Typeface?
Tom Foley designs a new typeface by absorbing the brief until it sinks in, then sitting down to draw. The same habit carries from historical projects into commercial brand work.
A custom typeface for a brand starts with the brand. Foley takes in the strategy, the positioning, whether the brand is evolving or transforming, and how the strategy becomes a visual identity and a design system. He looks for the parameters the letters need. Once he feels comfortable with the subject or the question, he sketches by hand, including calligraphy, and moves to the screen when a form feels right. Foley says he has probably developed the instincts after years of experience. At the beginning, a lot of the
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How Did Nokia Get Tamil and Malayalam Typefaces?
Tom Foley designed Tamil and Malayalam typefaces for Nokia while he was at Dalton Maag, and he says cultural research is what made that possible.
Nokia's project started in 2010 and ran for a few years. He had been thrown in at the deep end on complex writing systems. Skills from his master's, studying the cultural origins of shapes, served him well. He found the research enjoyable and says he translated a lot of it quite instinctively into pretty good typefaces. Native-speaking designers and linguists who knew the scripts helped him learn quickly.
He says the cultural and historical side of type design is crucial for work at a global scale, in other script systems, or in niche areas. He t
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Is the Nib Typeface for Sale?
Tom Foley says the Nib typeface is not commercially available. He never put Nib on sale because Dublin City Council’s use of it on heritage plaques already felt like a complete journey.
Around 2012 and 2014, Dublin City Council redesigned cultural heritage site plaques. Foley compares them with the blue plaques in London, the kind that mark a building where Jimi Hendrix was in 1964. Dublin replaced the plaques with a more consistent design system and used Nib on them. The plaque lettering was the only commercial case Nib ever had. Foley decided not to use the typeface anywhere else because the plaques felt like the perfect fit, a quiet part of the typographic landscape of Ireland.
He kept
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How Did Tom Foley First Fall for Typography?
Tom Foley first fell for letters pretty young, long before he knew the word typography.
Aarron Walter welcomed him to Design Better and asked when typography first lit him up. Foley grew up around an uncle who is still alive and worked as a sign painter, so making a living from drawing letters was already familiar. He was a little obsessed with handwriting and joined-up writing. He says he was maybe seven or eight when he pestered his dad to teach him cursive.
Later he found that a few generations back on his dad's side there were stonemasons carving headstones and lettering. Right through school, art and design were the only things he was good at. He was terrible academically. When he got