Can you give me the scope of the kind of research you've done for other projects?
RPK: Well, I think probably the font Hieroglyphics is the extreme circumstance because it's not a Roman alphabet. Before I started on it, I could not have spelled my own name in hieroglyphics. But now I can. I can phonetically translate a hieroglyphic slab in the museum for you if you like, because most of the phonetic characters are fairly limited. It was very interesting and to do it right I put enormous time into it.
How about the Preissig font. Can you tell me something about its development?
RPK: Vojtech Preissig wasn't even a type designer but more of a Renaissance man. He strove to be, let's say, a Czech version of William Morris. In his time he was well known - in the 1920s and '30s in Czechoslovakia, though during that time he was actually working in the U.S., teaching at a technical college, The Wentworth Institute. But he never really felt his work was going to the audience who would appreciate it. As far as I can tell, very few people know who he was or hat he existed, except as an occasional footnote in graphic design books.
Why the name P22? I've always been curious and I wonder if your customers have the same question?
RPK: Yes. It's probably the most commonly asked question on our technical support line. The short answer is that it means nothing. The long answer is that I found a rubber stamp that had the characters "p22" on it and it seemed to be a good combination of numbers and letters and for no reason at all it became the unofficial name of an unofficial art movement, if you will. A few friends and I decided to apply the name, for example, to the P22 Snow Sculpting Team which represented Buffalo in Milwaukee
P22 is better known nationally and internationally than it is in Buffalo. How do people find out about P22, and how do they order fonts?
RPK: People can find out about us and order fonts through our website. (www.p22.com) Also, our distribution through museum shops has been a real grass roots way of getting the product out there. We do a fair amount of direct business and are our own distributor, aside from the museum shops. Recently we broke down and licensed select type distributors to sell our fonts digitally.
What is the future of type design?
RPK: It's interesting you bring that up because there is a whole shift about to take place in digital typography: "open type technology" is sort of pushing the envelope of what can be done with respect to how letters act next to each other. With open type, it will change things quite a bit.
How do you mean?
RPK: Sort of built-in ligatures, where for every letter next to the letter "e" you can design different letters so instead of kerning, you actually create a letter that will show up next to...
So what we know as kerning tables would be outmoded?
RPK: No, it takes kerning to another level. There would still be kerning, but in a way, you wouldn't need kerning because the letters take the place of spacing - you would substitute letter pairs for kerning pairs. Instead of having 256 characters in a font, you would have tens of thousands of characters.
You know what Gutenberg's downfall was, of course...
RPK: He designed too many ligatured characters. It wasn't quite as simple as they always made it sound in the history books.
His contribution, his invention was complex...but it wasn't economically feasible and, therefore, he lost his shirt.
RPK: But it looked good.

©1998 Timothy J. Conroy