But does that also make it more interesting, that there’s ah-
I’ll probably have to be careful what I say…umm…college’s could be accused of taking people for the money they bring rather than the quality of the students…let’s say…so that presents problems, people go to college for the wrong reasons, cant speak the language very well…so…it’s a very passive relationship there, and that’s frustrating. The best students come from, well, wherever in the world, you know, are great, umm, but, you know, I think it can cause problems and the British students can sort of feel…a bit not a home almost, you know…and…and some of the foreign students just cant keep up with the way we talk and…you know, its just the way it happens…so, you know, so the whole dynamic is sort of different. And I think, you know, the sort of technology and everything now is quite different to what it was even when I first started teaching you know, the Mac had only just come in and the tutors, you know, didn’t really know what to do with that…and the students apparently did but actually didn’t really (laughs) and then you know, we started to use them and get more on the ball and then we discovered how to incorporate software teaching with design teaching, because the two things are quite different…umm and now technically the students are much much more professional than they ever were 20 years ago or certainly the better ones were…
When you say professional…I mean…what do you mean by professional?
Umm…knowing the technology and knowing how to do things to a professional stage…umm…I think, you know, I think their quite on the ball that way and also how to go out and work and talk to people and so on, I think their a lot more savvy to all those things than we were umm…so…I think…yeah…the Mac and having this thing that you can do everything with a sort of empowerment, but I think a lot of them sort of think that knowing how to use software is knowing how to do design, which is like saying that drawing is illustration, you know, its miles away.
Hello, your listening to Phil Baines, and this is Typeradio and now were talking.
What sparked your interest in design and typography?
Umm I had the interest in design architecture initially, going back a long time, when I went to art school at first, I went to Carlisle and did a foundation course which is a year of sort of everything and try it…I realised pretty quickly that while I was interested in art and aspects of self expression and so on, really what I was better at and more interested in was design and then finding out about things and sort of try putting all these facts together in this sort distilled fashion, umm…so then I applied to different graphic design courses, I wasn’t specifically interested in typography at that point, I mean, I was aware of work by people like Neville brody, peter malcom garett, and peter savlry, who where doing all their stuff that they were known for doing at that period in the early 80’s and then the sensibility of typography specifically came after the martins, then from the foundation course I kept sketchbooks and stuff and wrote notes on where stuff had happened and so on and then gradually over the 2 years the notes got bigger and bigger and the drawing part got smaller and smaller and then I started using stencils, and paints and making more of the letters and integrating them and so on, so I got interested in the words and what I was saying the way I was saying them so it became typography, and then I started using a letterpress at college, not for historical reasons but if you knew how to use letterpress you could be left alone in the room and let with the printing presses so then you had control over everything, you didn’t have to do mark-up of everything, give it to Malcolm and then get it back 2 days later and stick it up as a paste up and then it was just a paste up, if you could do letterpress you can print everything, you have control, so it was like the Mac’s, just not the Mac’s.
That’s funny because most typographers and designers have a story like oh my dad, or my uncle or this neighbour, and its very funny this thing that you’ve gradually grown into it…
Yeah…you know, I grew up in a house of books and so on and I think the importance of book and stuff weren’t avertly instilled in me, they were just there you know and you look at that stuff, so you know…they were where you turned for knowledge and looked for things in this book, or that book, or wherever so yeah…and there were things from a young age that I didn’t really realise until 20 years later sort of thing.
Do you have a hero?
Umm…there’s a piece of work I did in 1987 actually saying, “I have no heroes only the stonecutters and the sirens, I can make my own straight jacket”
Is that true?
Not entirely but its quite a good long line
To set the timer you know…writing onto letters
Is there something you hate about type design?
I can’t draw the letter S that is a bit worrying…
Would that be the letter you would remove from the alphabet?
I quite like other peoples S’s but I just find them quite difficult…I don’t know…I was going to say as you get older things worry you less but that’s not entire4ly true, umm…I used to really hate the fact that in the first 10 years of the Mac, say up to the early 90’s umm, I just hated how all the manufacturers kept putting old faces on to the Mac and I found that really quite depressing that they didn’t put any new faces, there were some novelty faces but no new ordinary every day faces and there was a book I edited quite some time ago called the Handbook for Type Designers that wasn’t really good enough at that point so I had to edit it or whatever, but anyway I learnt a lot from doing it, one of the things I did start to realise is that we are emerging with new types and new type designers when I got my first Mac in ’91 I gave myself the little rule to not use any type of typeface that was created before I was born which just seemed to be a good discipline which I kept to for quite a number of years, so it was quite a good incentive to go out and collect some new types and so on.
How many illegal types do you have?
Umm I have a few.
Right that’s it, interviews over (laughs)
I’m sure everybody says the same thing
No actually you’re the first one,
There’s all sorts of grey areas ad things, I try not to because I know so many type designers, umm…yeah…
What do you thinks more important, type design or graphic design?
Graphic design
Why?
Umm…well that’s the end products, you know, I don’t think of type design as typographers, they just design type, they don’t do anything with it, and a lot of the time, and they don’t know what to do with it because they space things badly…you know, mono type has this weird curning pan with a space and a cap A or a cap V or a cap T and it looks like there’s no space there, and you have to edit the curning pan to take it out…
Do you write the letters?
No I’m not good at writing letters, no I just grumble about it at times like this…type design is just like bricks, I’m more interested in building things, so graphic design is more important.
Do you have a favourite brick? (Laughs) I mean type?
I like a lot of the fonts by Gerard ? Swift would be one of my favourite everyday serif typeface, ? by Matthew carter, I like some of his more decorative things, Sophia, Montana, I suppose I tend to like things more with some historical angle perhaps or just general everyday typefaces because most of what I do is book design which is fairly text heavy…
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