Valerio is originally from Rome, where he studied graphic design at RUFA. After his bachelor's degree he moved to Barcelona where he attended a Master in Editorial Design at ELISAVA and then a Master in Type Design at EINA. He was then contacted by Pangram Pangram to distribute his first typeface, Gatwick, and has been collaborating with them ever since. He currently works from Barcelona or Rome as a freelance type designer for a range of different foundries including Type01, CAST Foundry and Blazetype.
Your last typeface project, Rader, mixes historical references to deco aesthetics, the functional sturdiness of DIN lowercase structure and an experimental “counter-inktrap” approach to design. How did this post-modern typeface come to your mind?
Rader was created for the 36 days of type challenge on Instagram, which requires you to create a letter every day. Alex Slobzheninov had already taken it to a higher level, doing a whole typeface every day and I decided to shamelessly try and make the same thing. In the end I realized that it’s a crazy amount of work, and in the end I managed to finish 40 typefaces in two editions, starting from some sketches I had.
For Rader the starting point was this uppercase R where the counter is a rectangle with rounded corners, and as I drew it I started wondering how this shape could work along a weight axis. It’s an interesting problem, especially in light weights where corners can become very dark if you keep rounded counter spaces. By the way, the first comments when I published the sketches on social media were very positive so we started working with Mathieu Desjardins of Pangram Pangram on it. He suggested using industrial grotesques like DIN as a reference, to balance the playfulness of the round counters. The condensed, geometric skeleton has a more contemporary aesthetic, like it's assembled from modular elements and this idea - to create letterforms from a few fixed shapes pieces, like Tangram pieces - is very big right now. The trend is to make everything automated, either doing it yourself or making it more standardized.
It’s very interesting to hear that your design was actually inspired by thinking about the variations in weight for the shape you had drawn. Is it possible to create typefaces starting from the possible variations in the whole family?
Actually it’s not like I have a passion for creating typeface families rather than individual typefaces… quite the opposite! Sometimes it makes sense to draw a single weight, because when expanding a family, compromises often have to be made, as it is difficult to translate the ideas into a design.
I recently created a font called Sagittaire, which works well in the Extra Light version, but when gaining a little more weight, the shapes in interpolation become far less interesting. Still, today it makes more sense commercially to have a full family, and, thanks to the advances in typographic tools, also quite easy. Surely much faster than in the past, where you would have to hand-draw each weight…
"To create letter forms from a few fixed shapes, like tangram pieces: that idea is very big right now."
Do type designers expand families so much type only for commercial reasons, or it's rather that they see it as a way to explore and find new extreme and interesting letterforms, even if that impairs type legibility and functionality?
I believe that we need to reconsider the idea of what is the purpose of type. There’s naturally the traditional approach, which is more focused on text faces, and puts legibility first. But typography can also convey a certain aesthetic message, and there are situations where a designer needs a typeface for its expressive values. So you can have display fonts that are not strictly optimized for legibility, and even asemic typefaces that are completely unreadable - but they still have a purpose and an utility. But it’s a purpose that requires a quite different work than the one you do on text typefaces, where you optimize for legibility, testing micro-details, hinting, and so on.
As David Carson said “You shouldn’t mistake legibility for communication”... but that is not probably what they teach to you in typographic schools. And speaking about schools, how did you build your skills and got to become a professional type designer?
I attended a typography Master at Eina in Barcelona. It was a small class, only 9 people, and it was shut down the year after my graduation… And then I was extremely lucky, as I got the interest of Pangram Pangram foundry, one of the most interesting and commercially successful independent foundries around. Honestly I didn’t understand why they were interested in my work, considering that there were thousands of better type designers than me around. But then I realized that it was more my attitude than my font that interested them.
Actually I see there’s a quite common path for type designers: almost everybody starts with a serious study path in an important academic institution, and it’s thanks to platforms like Type Department or Future Fonts that they get noticed. Both have this thing where you can publish first and develop later, which is their great strength.
This also puts a lot of importance on the idea and its storytelling, rather than just the looks. Are you interested or involved in storytelling and marketing of your typefaces?
I'm not particularly good at this, in the sense that for me the work ends when I've delivered the design… But it’s because I'm lazy! I perfectly understand that drawing it is only half of the work, because any design doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but through the narration that is made of it. And it’s especially true for typography, since fonts are extremely redundant as a product, and you need to create their attractiveness. The allure, as the French say. (Everything in French always sounds better, isn’t it?) In my opinion, it is necessary to understand this contextual constraint in order to prevent typography from becoming sterile. We often see beautiful, fantastic typography, but if we can't explain why I would use it, not only from a formal viewpoint but from a conceptual perspective as well, the font will lose not only meaning but also commercial value.
In this Pangram Pangram is exceptional. Mathieu is an excellent strategist and therefore knows exactly how to position fonts. Naming is something that he does wonderfully, I learned a lot from the way he chooses the name for his fonts. Fun fact: I actually have a note on the phone with a long list of names…Sooner or later they will click with an aesthetic and become real fonts!
"Drawing, it is only half of the work, because design doesn't exist in a vacuum, but through the narration that one makes of it."
What is your relationship with the users of your fonts?
For a long time I thought my fonts were completely useless, and I rarely even used them because I’m not one of those designers who obsessively tests, and for my own design pieces they felt a little too self-complacent. The feedback I get is after publishing the font, so it’s pretty rare that user feedback influences me during the design phase, as it’s probably normal on Future Fonts. In Rader, on the contrary, IG was the spark to decide to develop it further, though in the end it didn’t become as successful as Migra, that was a huge, unexpected success.
Speaking of Future Fonts and of alternative models of typeface distribution, what is your relationship with the open source idea? Is a business model based on free open source fonts viable for designers?
I don’t think so. You need some sort of revenue to make it a real profession. It's a symptom of working privilege to simply be able to to give away one's work for free. And I’m saying it while consciously admitting I’m part of it, and it does not deny that they’re fantastic fonts and also a wonderful resource for students and professionals. But from the designer point of view I would say that is a model that apart from not being sustainable, it’s actually implying type design has no real monetary value.
Not to mention the new advances in AI that substantially question the value of creative work… How do you think neural network-generated design will impact type?
Is there any part of our life that won’t be impacted by that? I wonder. Typography seems to be, at least for now, less impacted by it. But this is not going to happen, because I think this is as big a change as we have ever seen. I would even say that as a paradigm shift in creativity, Gutenberg was less important than this.
Any past revolution, movable printing, even the Internet that has been the greatest change we’ve witnessed, has not the magnitude of this thing. On a creative level but even more on a social level. This is truly… a different thing.
Migra Serif
This interview is part of the Type Trends 2023 Lookbook / Vol 5: The counterspaces – Typography in the Age of Black Swans
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