Ohno Radio

Gen and Zrinka sit down to chat about meeting in grad school, starting a type foundry, and the perils of raising a child while being a type designer. We announce Yumex, the new typeface designed by them, and released through Ohno.

Summer is here, and so is this 18 minute identity crisis as I navigate running a business, renovating two homes, with two kids, and moving Ohno headquarters from Oakland to San Jose, California.

Jen Wagner didn’t come to design as a designer; she actually studied marketing, had a slew of businesses, eventually landed in fonts, and just hit the ground running. Today she’s a powerhouse, running her foundry Jen Wagner Co. She is prolific and has an incredible knack for hitting the nail on the head stylistically with each release. I absolutely loved talking to Jen, because it was so refreshing to hear someone thinking strategically with this different background. In our conversation, I learned about how just a single kernel of an idea from Jen’s marketing education—the minimum viable product—and a chance encounter with a mentor led to her discovering a whole new way of making a living. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Jen Wagner.

I’ll be honest, this episode was recorded in July, but some things, like the work of our guest, are timeless. I talked with Kris Sowersby for almost two hours, which makes this the longest Ohno Radio episode in history. You know Kris’s work, it’s top notch, in both concept, and execution. I hate him, because he can take even the most well-trodden thing, like I dunno, Helvetica or Times, and still manage to do it in a way that even the most jaded graphic designers can find compelling. Kris’ type foundry is called Klim, and you know that already, it’s on Future Fonts, but what you might not know about is the Future Fonts Slack channel. I’ve seen Kris being super helpful, offering sound advice on topics about pricing and ethics. You know who doesn’t take a ton of time to write helpful posts there? Me! Our conversation gets a bit raw and Kris talks about his mom sadly passing away. When I re-listened to that part, I found myself struggling to understand his grief. But since this episode, I lost my brother. So if my reaction sounds a bit like someone who’s just unable to fully empathize, well, I think my reaction now would be a little different. Anyway, sorry to be bummer! I hope you enjoy this conversation with Kris Sowersby.

Today on the show we have Rutherford Craze, the designer behind the foundry Mass Driver. In just about 2 years, Rutherford has taken his Mass Driver from a little baby, to a fully adult foundry. It’s a truly remarkable trajectory, and I wanted to talk with him, and just see how he did it. You might have seen his Future Fonts release entitled MD Nichrome, and you might have also seen his other Mass Driver releases like MD IO, MD Primer, and MD System. His work is meticulously clean, and technically impressive—but his talents seem to go beyond just producing excellent typefaces. The marketing is genuine, and on point. His website is beautifully designed, he even has a few free web tools he's made available—so here’s the thing: If you’re looking for the blueprint in setting up a niche business, just look at Rutherford, because he seems to have it all figured out. I was eager to catch up, see how the pandemic has treated him, and why he moved back to The Hague.

This episode features Fabiola Mejia, the founder of the brand new type foundry, Supercontinente. I'm always urging people to start their own thing, own 100% of the work they create, and release their own stuff. Do their own marketing, make the type, just do it all, yourself. I think it's mostly because I've had a lot of fun going that way, and I truly believe in owning all of your own work. But, here's the rub: it takes an extremely specific person, and personality type to do that! It's hard. But that's why when I see people, like Fabiola, doing that exact thing, it just makes my heart happy. She's put in the time to become viciously talented, and has conviction in her own ideas that she's bringing to life on her own. So before you even listen to this, I encourage you to check out supercontinent.com if you haven't yet, and follow @supercontinente_ on Instagram, just so we have a shared frame of reference for the stuff that we talk about in this interview. Fabiola is a force of nature, she's someone I truly admire, so I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation, as much as I enjoyed having this conversation.

It was TypeCon Portland 20212 where I first got to meet Travis and Lizy, and was immediately impressed with how gregarious Lizy is, and this was right around the time that Travis’ typeface Chartwell came out. They both seemed nice a smart, and they would usually head out to Typecon, so it was easy to maintain a friendship with them. I remember a specific moment when hanging out with the two of them just felt like being at summer camp or something. Nice, smart, hardworking, genuine folks. Then many years later they reached out to talk about an idea they had to release typefaces in versions, before they're totally finished. Around that time I had just done a series on my instagram that was 50 unfinished typefaces. I guess they saw that and thought I'd be a collaborator on that project and we began working together to assemble the first group of foundry partners. I did a lot of the branding work, Travis and Lizy handled everything about for the website, and I got to witness first hand the level of detail that Tbone and Lizy bring to a project. These folks sweat details. I cannot reiterate that enough. They're possessed. It's a level of craft that goes across every discipline, whether its design, or messaging, or interfaces, or typefaces, Travis and Lizy, think about it. A lot. Of course they have done more typefaces over the years, and brought lots of other projects to life, but I think Future Fonts is really a perfect example of everything they can do. Now I'm not participating much on Future Fonts these days, cause I just wanted to focus on running Ohno, but they have taken it an RAN. If you're listening to this podcast you probably know about it already, but what you might not know is that there were a lot of other projects that came before. There was Exif, a way for photographer to protect their work online. Notch, an iphone app for keeping score of analog games, all their work for Design Week Portland and XOXO Fest, and now they're putting up a new label Vectro, for all their type design. They have a forthcoming release with the intriguing title of Kablammo, and honestly, I just wanted to catch up with them. So we recorded the conversation and here it is.

Today we're talking to one of my favorite people of all time, Bob Aufuldish. When I was in my very first year of design school at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, another one of my favorite people, Angie Wang was my Typography 1 teacher, and she just knew that I'd love Bob, and implored me to take his class. I ended up having Bob as an instructor for 2 different semesters in my undergrad and that was a very big deal to me. Bob ended up becoming a sort of role model for his design sensibilities, his sense of humor, being an educator. Everyone loves Bob, so the question becomes, “How do we be more like Bob?” I don't think I know, but it's a good thing to imagine. Bob is primarily a print designer, a husband, a father of two, he's designed type, identities, tons and tons of books, he’s fond of wearing a striped shirt with a striped tie. He's absolutely disarmingly unpretentious and talented, which is one of my favorite combinations. Bob’s a member of the AGI, but never mentions it. When I was in school, Bob began his class by saying “This is supposed to be fun.” That idea has echoed in my brain since his class, and has basically become the mission statement of our type foundry. Bob came to my garage studio for the first ever LIVE recording of this podcast, and brought ME flowers.

Our second installment in the life saga of Corinne Ang, and I talk to my dad, George R. Edmondson, about when he became an adult (tl;dr: age 37).

I met the designer Jérémy Landes at the Lure Typography conference in the South of France, and he just turned out to be such a lovely individual—and when I say individual I mean it. His typeface Digestive was started as something he just put together, then it came over to Future Fonts, then finally when it was done, we released it into the Ohno library as the first typeface that was not drawn by me. So Jérémy and I became friends, and a few weeks ago he emailed to just set up a time to chat, and catch up. Now here's where I pulled a real jerk move. I was like "let's record it for the podcast", thus, commercializing, a moment between friends. I'm sorry for this Jeremy, but because he's a nice person, agreed, and here's the resulting conversation. If you're not familiar with Jérémy's work, I'd characterize it as pretty avant garde mostly display faces that seem to throw out every rule in the book—but if you look deeper, you find an intricate system working effortlessly. His stuff is contemporary, beautifully drawn, and unique, just like he is!

When I say that today's guest was the global design director at Nike—I kinda feel bad for him, because that's one of those thing that he'll never be able to even mention, without it sounding like a flex. It's like having gone to Yale or something—which he also did. Anyhow, that's really the beginning of the story, not the end. In this interview I actually learned some surprising things, like multiple blunders in type design classes, and multiple attempts to attend Type at Cooper, the year long type design program in New York, which he finally made it to this year.But again, that's just the beginning of the story—what I really wanted to focus our conversation on was a small piece of writing Eric put out in June entitled Towards a Decentralized Type Foundry. In it he raises some really interesting thoughts and questions about what effect blockchain/ crypto currency technologies might have on the type business. Specifically he seems how curious about how it could make it better in a lot of interesting ways. Obviously this stuff is very technical, and can be pretty confusing, but luckily Eric came armed with a barrage of metaphors to illustrate these ideas for the layperson, which is ME in this case.

Today we have a live episode from the Typographics conference. Of course it's not actually live—just a video call we were on with a bunch of people asking questions. Libbie asks where ideas come from. Louie asks how do you split your time between show horses and workhorses, and Colin asks where the best places to eat are in Oakland!