What sparked your desire to create your first original typeface?
RPK: My first type was designed for my Masters thesis project at UB for which I enlisted the help of my colleague Mike Want. I needed to have a novelty typeface based on Marcel Duchamp's handwriting, and you just can't run out to ITC and buy that.
That being said, I know that your career as a book artist preceded the Duchamp font. How much influence have the titans of the typography - from Aldus Manutius to Hermann Zapf - had upon you in the design of subsequent typefaces?
RPK: Quite honestly, even though I was doing book arts I was pretty much ignorant of the traditions. I was making books on my own terms, not really studying the history of the book. Now, in looking back and finding that the book arts are so closely related to type design, it just seemed to be a natural progression.
How would you characterize The Full Fonty," P22's entire collection? What purpose do the fonts serve?
RPK: Well, it's interesting. I look at them - our fonts - as historical revivals. But in the strict discipline of type design, they aren't really. I'd say something like redoing Janson is a historical revival. Whereas we take historical letter forms and create font sets. Most of the historical letterforms we have recreated could not have been resurrected except with present technology [the Mac and its complement of software]. The Cezanne handwriting typeface is probably the most successful in this regard. It subverts the computer look, based as it is on 19th-century handwriting. Basically, these typefaces are digital interpretations of 100-year-old designs. Someday I'll design a typeface, but these are things that would otherwise be lost. To the vast majority of the public, these things never existed. Why work under the pretense of inventing something new when there are so many great works waiting to be rediscovered; yet for "originality's" sake, someone comes up with a grunge type or takes an existing font and blurs it with Photoshop filters then labels it a font - it's ridiculous.
There are people in the industry who say that there are just too many fonts.
RPK: That was what I myself believed back when we made the Duchamp font. There was no intention to market the thing for that exact reason. It was an experiment and it was not meant...let me put it this way: the way it looks is only defined by mechanically arbitrary processes. This is its defining characteristic. There is a conceptual reason behind the Duchamp font which has nothing to do with the way it looks. For people to call it a beautiful font to me is still kind of funny, but I have seen it used well. And I guess that goes to show that the [graphic] designer has at least - if not more - opportunity to make a type look good than does the creator of the font. Because, as we all well know, even a good typeface can be used badly.
Your fonts have been used by nationally prominent designers and in prestigious publications. Which publications, what prominent designers?
RPK: Prominent designers: Gail Anderson, Fred Woodward, Rolling Stone. They've done great work with our fonts. Kerig Pope, art director for Playboy, has taken an interest in our fonts and has consistently used them in every issue for the past few years...or so I've heard.
Who else?
RPK: Locally, let's see...Art Voice, Alling & Cory, Just Pasta, Alleyway Theatre, George Johnson, UB Publications... Most recently, Starbucks Coffee. They were using the Duchamp font, now they use Cezanne. It seems that of the people who use our fonts we have a great number of "repeat customers," which is interesting because I think each design is unique, for its own sake, yet these clients see a similar appeal throughout the "line."
I understand that Rod McKuen is a big fan of P22, that he has sent you fan mail. What's that all about?
RPK: Rod McKuen is a huge fan of P22. He has his own record label and used our Daddy-O font on one of his "lounge revival" records and gave us a credit. He has since ordered all of our fonts; and other record labels have used our fonts - Geffen, Virgin, and Vanguard come to mind. Oh, and of course, the P22 label uses them.
Where else have your fonts shown up?
RPK: The New York Times did an article on the Arts and Crafts movement and used our Arts & Crafts font in the headline and - this is unheard of for the New York Times - they gave us a credit line.
How did the London Underground font come about?
RPK: With London Transport. They approached us about a project and I broached the subject of the "sacrosanct" Edward Johnston types. I knew nobody else would attempt to do it because London Transport is so notoriously protective of these types. But I presented the idea in a way that made sense to them...that didn't conflict with their interests. My interest in actually seeking to do it came from an issue of a rather amazing journal of the book arts called the Matrix. One of the articles was printed in a set of the smallest known wood type of the Johnston Underground and it referred to a book called London's Handwriting, which was published by the London Transport Museum. I managed to borrow a copy from them - it's the best source for actual printed impressions of wood type. Otherwise, I would have had to work from photo reproductions or go to London and find old train stations I could do tracings from.