Korean type designer
Minjoo Ham had a goal in mind when she arrived in Berlin,
and in this article, she describes the process of designing a display script font called
Teddy.
What makes this so interesting is, of course, the process. The basis for Teddy was not a mathematical vectorised process as we often see for typefaces, but a much more humanistic one:
Fust & Friends was conceived as a haven for lost fonts, and a clinic for letterforms in a coma. Besides original typefaces that somehow were never released, we select forgotten fonts from the past, as well as exciting pieces of lettering, focusing on lettershapes that inspire us to try and add new colours to the graphic designer’s typographic palette.
From the 1910’s to 1960’s, manuals were filled with lettering made by students learning how to do lettering; each with their own styling, those books were eventually revived as a book in its own merit. Here is why this article struck a wonderful chord with me: the way Teddy, the typeface, found its origins:
Teddy started out as a faithful “revival” of an alphabet from the Bentele book that we all found highly entertaining and energetic, but the font ended up as a drastic contemporary reworking of it, with ample cross-pollination from other alphabets in similar books. Mind you, those were not fonts, not metal or wooden printing types! Just hand-drawn examples for teenage students of how to design a striking headline or logo in a then fashionable style.
The type exploration phase for Teddy is beautiful to see in action, as she had to reorganize the family system. The capitals, for example, had been drawn to fit with the lowercase. This also came with its own set of small capitals.