(mt) Faces Type with Elliot Jay Stocks
Elliot Jay Stocks is a designer, illustrator, speaker and the publisher of the instant success, 8 Faces. 8 Faces, a project (mt)’s proud to support, is a new magazine for fans of typography that asks eight leading type designers compelling questions informing the arguments behind “good” type usage. (mt)’s Jason McVearry interviews Elliot, a long time (mt) partner and client about this latest project and the story behind 8 Faces.
Elliot, your work spans the web, print and I know you dabble in music. How does one medium affect or inspire development in another?
8 Faces has been my biggest print project to date and I learned a lot while doing it, especially about typography. I went back to doing some web client work just after I’d finished the magazine and found I was paying attention to all these different things that I hadn’t before, and realized immediately how much of an influence it had had on me. The reverse is also true and I think pretty much every medium informs the other, but I don’t just mean in a technical way — jumping between media really opens your mind to another way of working. Look at a designer like Mike Kus, who comes from a print background. You can see that strong print influence in his work and as a result it’s way more interesting than the majority of websites out there.
You highlight the cultural and historic aspects of typography in 8 Faces. When you got into this project, did this topic become more of a back story in typography than you initially thought?
When I conducted the interviews, I basically had no idea what would come out of them. I was asking certain questions and letting those questions guide the general topics of each interview, but I kept it intentionally loose and let everyone wander off-topic if they needed to. A very important thing to me was to keep the interviews conversational, like you’d just bumped into that person in the bar. That’s why I was adamant about not conducting them via email. Jon Tan and I did his interview while we were having a beer in Bristol’s harbourside and Erik Spiekermann and I did his while we had lunch in London. Everyone else was interviewed via Skype, but even over Skype it was still natural.
It’s refreshing to see the personal illustrative style of Jessica Hische. How do the two styles, illustrative vs. more traditional type design affect the overall typographic landscape.
I think it comes down to their uses. Jessica’s work is all about custom lettering and large format editorial work: in other words, display type. Contrast that style with a typeface like FF Yoga and they’re obviously two very different things. That’s because they have very different applications: FF Yoga is suited to body type. Everything has its place, it’s about choosing the right tool for the job.
Have you found an inherent difference in designing a font for web vs print?
Well, I’m not a type designer myself so I’m not really qualified to answer that, but a very important difference is that a font should be hinted for on-screen use, and many fonts aren’t, which results in inconsistent rendering and / or generally poor results. Like all print / web crossovers, it’s about treating the file appropriately for the medium in which it’s being used.
As a designer that works in web and print (or at least really really understands print)..how do you feel about the use of traditional print fonts for use on the web? Have you seen some really good/bad applications of these fonts?
I’m really excited that type is finally coming of age on the web and we can at last use ‘real’ fonts. But obviously there’s a huge potential for misuse there: with great power comes great responsibility! I strongly believe — and this is echoed many times by the interviewees in the magazine — that you’re actually better off with a very small number of typefaces and sticking to them for most of your projects, because truly great typefaces are ultimately very flexible and it’s not essential to have a giant font library at your disposal. This is why I picked the number eight, although it turned out that many of our interviewees had a hard time picking that many!
8 Faces comes across as a contemporary design “story” as opposed to a tutorial or eye candy piece. How do you want it to be received?
It’s contemporary in that it deals with designers working now, and to an extent it deals with topical subjects like web fonts. But it’s really a celebration of type, and many of the typefaces we’re celebrating are very, very old. One of my main goals with 8 faces was to make type accessible to everybody. You don’t have to be a complete type nerd to appreciate it; a passing interest in type is enough for you to really enjoy the magazine. And hopefully that will then lead some people on the road towards real type fandom. I still consider myself a type amateur. I’m learning all the time and I’ve got a long way to go before my knowledge is up there with most type-heads. Bringing together all these great designers who do wonderful things with type has been inspirational and educational to me, and I hope it does the same for our readers.
What can we expect from 8 faces in the future?
We had some really great interviewees for the first issue and I’m happy to say that we’ve got some really great people lined up for the second one. The format will remain roughly the same for the next issue, but I’m going to tweak the design a bit and there will be more articles. There will definitely be a noticeable change. Plus I’ve been discussing another 8 Faces-related project that will hopefully see the light of day in the not-too-distant future.
This being your first book, what was the most surprising challenge in getting this project published?
I really underestimated how long everything would actually take. I was thinking about the project in terms of writing and design, but I wasn’t really thinking about how long it would take to sort out the advertising, the website, the subtle nuances of printing and all the distribution stuff. Fortunately, now that I have a sort of ‘system’ in place for all of that, putting together future issues should be a lot quicker and easier. But realistically I think the magazine will now account for around 25% of my annual work schedule — it’s a big job!
What are your 8 fonts?
I suppose it’s only fair that as someone asking the interviewees to name their favorite eight typefaces, I should know my own. But in all honesty, I’m completely undecided! One of my all-time faces has to be FF Unit Slab, which is what I’ve used for pretty much all the typesetting in the magazine (the rest of FF Unit). FS Clerkenwell has to be a close second (I’m quite partial
to slab serifs), but beyond that I’m not sure what else would be on my list.Follow Elliot on Twitter @elliotjaystocks, and @8faces
