Anti-utopian type design with Monotype’s Charles Nix

Monotype recently introduced a new typeface called Ambiguity, created by its Type Director, Charles Nix. Its unusual proportions deliberately challenge typographical conventions, going wide where a letter was once narrow and vice versa. I had a chance to talk to Nix about the genesis of Ambiguity and the state of type design; The conversation was interesting enough that I felt I should publish it more or less intact.

The interview has been slightly edited for clarity and conciseness. I started by asking for a little background on Monotype and what Nix does.

Charles Nix: Monotype is a very old company. It’s at least 125 years old, if not hundreds of years, just based on the number of foundries that have consolidated over the last 200 years. The current iteration of Monotype is the largest purveyor of digital fonts in the world.

The Monotype Studio is a discrete section within it that creates and manages type collections. There are around 60 of us, a dozen or so of which are type designers.

We help customers navigate the library, because it’s vast. We make do typeface recommendation, identification, pairing; we also help customers by modifying existing typefaces slightly in order to make them perform more uniquely.

And lastly the studio does custom design work, so we work with customers in order to identify their type needs, then create custom type solutions from the ground up.

Devin Coldewey: You mentioned the company is an amalgamation of foundries and studios from a century and more. The digital era seems like an exciting and weird one to be in type because the tools are so strong and distribution is so straightforward. Is this a good time to be in type versus 10, 20, 50 years ago?

Nix: I mean, you’re talking to a type designer, so any time working on type is a good time. But I agree with what you said, this time and this company, I want to say it’s all been leading up to this moment.

The tools and communication regarding typography, the typographic plenty, the awareness of typographic history, all these things are so amazing and focused at this point, there’s no more exciting time in the history of type to be involved.

Coldewey: What do you think is the biggest change in the last decade or so? Digitally the adoption of high-DPI screens has probably made type look a lot better, but I don’t know whether it’s actually changed what people do, or how it’s designed or approached.

Tools, distribution, and awareness — those three things are coming together to create the greatest typographic plenty in the history of the world.

Nix: There’s a triangulation of factors that are affecting type design at this point. One is the tools — and I always make this distinction, popular tools versus democratic tools. The tools aren’t democratic, but they’re popular enough, and they’re available enough, not freely obviously, but much much more freely and more accessible than any time in the 500 years of type founding, right?

As you pointed out, type is and has been for the last 30 years software. And slightly longer actually, if you look back to the early, early digital type, but now and in the public consciousness, it’s software. So distribution is crazy fast, and widespread.

My mother, she’s a special case because she helped my dad, who was a printer, so she knows more about type than most mothers. But in 1985 she could probably name five or six typefaces off the top of her head. And now she and everybody else’s mother has a favorite typeface, right?

That’s a huge change in the way that the world views type. What will come into sharper focus in the coming years is how those people harness the ability of typefaces to help modulate their own language, to help tell the story of what they say in print.

So tools, distribution, and awareness — those three things are coming together to create the greatest typographic plenty in the history of the world.

MT Fonts Ambiguity Instagram3

Monotype’s Ambiguity typeface and its various proportions.

Coldewey: That’s certainly true. But on the other hand it produces these huge amounts of free and open types. Is the free fonts economy a threat to the paid font ecosystem? In 10 years are we all going to be using free fonts and Monotype is going to be bankrupt, and there’ll be a dark age of typography? Obviously not — but like the free and freemium systems in other areas, how has that changed the business model for providing fonts?

Nix: I mean, free is free, but free is also truly democratic and ubiquitous. The chief benefit of a unique visual voice via typography is sort of undermined by the idea of everyone else having the same free type basis as you. It’s not grasping at straws, given what I do for a living, it’s actually true that people do want to create a unique visual voice. And we’re an essential part of that equation.

So you can’t stop nor do I want to stop people from using free fonts. They perform a very valuable service to people who are strapped for cash or just want to communicate in frank terms. But people who really want to nuance their visual voice will seek out typefaces that speak directly to what they want to say, and they will pay money for it.

Coldewey: I feel like type has also become more international — that being able to put out a major typeface like Noto, where it supports so many types of glyph sets and right to left, left to right, and all that — has it become too complicated to create a font that is global? Is it even a reasonable goal to create a truly global font or something that approaches that?

Nix: Well, I think for any individual, it’s ridiculous. But you know, the Google Noto project, everyone within the Monotype Studio has pitched in some work on that. That work predates my time at Monotype, it includes a huge chunk of one of my years at Monotype, and it continues to go on because, as new sections of living and dead languages come online via Unicode, the Google Noto project has to sort of rise to meet them.

Coldewey: Yeah, I see new communities coming online or adopting new methods of communication. And you’re like, well, who’s going to support their language? Or their classical language and things like that? It’s a fascinating rolling goal.

Nix: I mean, you and I both probably love both sides of this sort of typographic equation. On one side you have people like hyper-nuancing the form of language in telegraphic texts, short bursts of text, changing the shape of it in order to add another level of meaning, or contradict meaning, or cause people to question what they’re saying by virtue of the way they’re saying it.

There are people are just trying desperately to be able to say something in type. Not to nuance it at all, but simply be able to utter in typographic terms things that are said within their language.

And then on the other side, in the Google Noto universe, there are people are just trying desperately to be able to say something in type. Not to nuance it at all, but simply be able to utter in typographic terms things that are said within their language. And I want to help both of them.

Coldewey: Ambiguity obviously isn’t meant to be a universal typeface, but it’s definitely among the former of what you were talking about, of changing what you say by how it’s presented. What led you to this design? In someways obviously it’s completely backwards — what led you to want to make this sort of weird upside-down decision?

Nix: So in 2016 I was at a conference in Toronto called Design Thinkers. And one of the keynotes was by Paola Antonelli, who delivered this presentation called “Are we there yet?” which was looking at the concept of utopia via design — and the sort of repeating abject failure of them.

She was using that as a sort of stage setting to ask everyone in the audience to sort of step two paces to the left to get a like parallax view of this idea of utopia, like just change your focus a little bit and accept that it’s the definition of utopia that’s incorrect. Accept that beyond it are fluid states, ambiguous states that don’t fit neatly into categories that are canonical.

The problem isn’t utopia, the problem is you’re conceiving of utopia incorrectly.
If the silos can be broken down, and we can accept a mingling of things that formerly existed in those silos as a state of perfection, accept that fluidity is perfection, then we can achieve utopia today. You can have it and I can have it. It’s just not to fit that sort of standard 20th, 19th, 18th, 17th-century trope of what utopia is via design and architecture.

I found this really compelling. I love the idea that it’s a sort of design-oriented way of reframing the problem — that the problem isn’t utopia, the problem is you’re conceiving of utopia incorrectly. So I wanted to play with that idea in my own work.

The first thing I did was start with the silos, the things I consider, I don’t know, holy texts in typography. These ideas, these proportions handed down from the Romans via inscriptionals for capitals, and the proportions handed own from the renaissance in terms of lowercase, are something that, even when you’re acting against them, you’re still reacting to them. They formed the fundamental aspect of most typefaces designed in the last 500 years. I wanted to break those first.

Not because I wanted to but because I felt I had to if I was going to find out what the other side of tradition was. If I could move away from this idea of utopian visions of typeface proportion, where would I go?

Just sort of the opposite way of what I understand to be true. And then once I had destroyed it, or at least contradicted it, I started doing what Paola Antonelli was championing, which is the idea of mixing things that are adjacent but considered separate.

ambiguity sheet

So I mixed the idea of Tradition with the contradictory force of Radical, then gathered all the skinny letters together to form Thrift, and all the wide letters to form Generous, then I truly began to blend them in creating the pejoratively named Normate.

That’s a fine sort of design experiment for me, but talking to you now, and having people read about the typeface, or listen to me talk about the typeface, or even use the typeface is actually more the point than the design itself. Which is sort of a crummy thing to say… I think the typeface is fun and interesting. But to me the conversation about ambiguity and fluidity as states of perfection is as much what I want out of this design as anything.

Coldewey: Thanks for giving me the long version, I was going to ask for it anyway. One more question. You mentioned that awareness of type is at an all time high, probably. But I feel because the world has become so type-centric that a lot of people, when they are getting into creation, they just go with the default.

You know, they just pull down the menu, and it’s amazing that they have 45 typefaces to choose from, but they just pick a sort of medium-looking one. People stick to the defaults. How can we get people more interested in type, in going out there and looking at what’s available, rather than assuming what they have is the full extent of it?

Nix: I consider myself a sort of arm’s length designer. That is, I collect books, and I visit the library sometimes, and I do enjoy seeing the world. But when I’m designing I tend to do my design with my mind and the things I have within the room I’m sitting in.

And that’s because I’m average. I’m like the people you just described, and I’ve seen students do it for decades now, ever since the computer has been part of our design process.

Try setting the same word in 50 different typefaces. That seems to be a starting point for most novice designers. The only thing that probably changes between novices and experienced designers in that regard is that the set of suspects becomes smaller, inasmuch as you’re not trying all the typefaces in the font menu. You know which ones to ignore, where to go to find new versions or variations on themes that you’ve grown accustomed to.

I wanted people to play that game of like, ‘Well I’ll just try all of them and see how the word reacts.’ It is a typeface that causes you to question the way that proportions and typographic voice interact with the message that you’re sending.

And now you don’t have to like write the foundry and ask them for a price list. Especially with things like Monotype’s Mosaic, you just click and the typeface installs. So that’s how I wanted Ambiguity to play, by naming the expressions or states of the typeface provocatively, tradition versus radical, thrift versus generous, with Normate stuck in the middle. I wanted people to play that game of like, ‘Well I’ll just try all of them and see how the word reacts.’

It’s not like this is a typeface that does everything for everyone, but it is a typeface that causes you to question the way that proportions and typographic voice interact with the message that you’re sending.

All of us get to a deeper understanding of a topic by experiencing that topic over and over again. And the way that people become more in tune to the typographic voice, and the modulation of a message through typographic voice, is by using type to achieve something.

And the goals are very, very different. Some people just want to make a message more pretty. Some might want to make a message more convincing. And some might want to make it more emphatic. There are a lot of reasons to use type in order to manipulate the message. You get to a better understanding of how to do that effectively by repeating that process.