Points for the interview
- Ask her about her jobs at Future Fonts LLC, and Wieden + Kennedy. What were her roles, and did any of her projects really stand out to her?
- Ask about her approach to type design - how does she begin coming up with the idea and how does she realise it? Researching process, sketch process, softwares, etc.
- Glyphworld - what inspired it, and what made it translate into an exhibition using textiles and other mediums?
- Outside interests - Numark Party Mix DJ controller, biggest inDesign file she's ever had?
- Article on It's Nice That - how I found her and how did she get the interview?
- Her other projects - More Type Design, Clickbait Mag, Alter Ego, OTF Club - biggest as there's a separate instagram
- Her animations... how that progressed into graphic design.
Her Jobs
Future Fonts LLC
Based on LinkedIn, Future Fonts LLC is based in Portland, Oregon, where she lives and studies, and employs about 2-10 people. I believe it has such a small amount of employers as it's counting the people who run the website/business, rather than the people they've worked with as they're a marketplace for designers to shop, create and use experimental typefaces.
https://medium.com/future-fonts/introducing-futurefonts-xyz-8c0569777db6
"This platform encourages designers to release workable versions of their typeface throughout the process, similar to how software versions are released. This makes new styles available sooner and helps fund a long, and therefore expensive, creative process. Since these typefaces are beyond fresh, they haven’t been overused yet in advertising campaigns or existing design work. They are all making their initial debut in to the design scene with Future Fonts."
"In addition to being a marketplace, Future Fonts is a platform for creative fundraising and early feedback. Buying one of these typeface helps fund its development, gives you a voice in which styles get made, and is a way for type designers to test if there’s an audience for their new idea."
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/leah-maldonado-glyphworld-graphic-design-251119
"With a graduation date on 9 December and currently working at Future Fonts, she seems ready to face the future. "
Can't find out for certain whether she was one of the actual employers or a user of the platform, however I am leaning more towards being one of the employers as it's where she lives and stated on her LinkedIn, so either way it would be interesting to ask about their values and how it relates to her.
Wieden + Kennedy
Wieden+Kennedy is one of the largest independently owned advertising agencies, and is most known for its work with Nike, which explains why Leah Maldonado follows them on LinkedIn. Their first advertisements were three televised adverts for Nike in late 1982. http://www.adweek.com/creativity/wieden-kennedy-finds-its-first-ads-ever-made-nike-dusty-old-tapes-156511/
They state that their values are creativity, and building strong relationships between companies and their customers which is clear through their advertisements - they often focus on really heartfelt themes based on family and communities. Their adverts usually evoke happiness.
Leah Maldonado began worked there in December 2019, and I initially wanted to ask how she managed to approach and land a job with such a large company a few months after graduating however through more research, I found out from a post by her mother that she was approached by them after her art exhibition as she also won an arts award - The Arlene Schnitzer arts award.
Arlene Schnitzer Arts Award
This award is what gave her the exposure to landing a job with Wieden+Kennedy.
Based on the Portland State University College of the Arts website, the Arlene Schnitzer Arts Award was "created in 2013 with a gift from the Harold & Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation to help raise awareness of the quality of art education at PSU and to honor Arlene Schnitzer, a devoted and inspired leader of art and culture in Portland." https://www.pdx.edu/art-design/arlene-schnitzer-visual-arts-prize
1st Prize – $5,500
2nd Prize – $4,000
3rd Prize – $3,300
Students majoring in Art Practice, Graphic Design or Art History are allowed to apply.
Maldonado won the first prize, and the pictures and information on the website are:
Leah Maldonado, Gaag, 2019. Typeface design, Risograph print on cream paper.
Leah Maldonado, Caramelo, 2019. Typeface design.
"Leah Maldonado’s interests focus on how visual language impacts society. To her, typeface design is the vessel for most of that language. She sees it as the architecture of communicative culture. Seeking to understand the impacts of visual language, and its limits, she finds expression through conceptual ideas that exist in the medium of letterforms.
Leah is a member of a council to establish a typographic community in Portland. She is also the founder of the type collective Club OTF, where she facilitates collaborations on experimental type design. Her writing has been published in Pathos Literary Magazine, Willamette Week, and independently. As an activist, her educational and animation work–done in collaboration with the Sierra Club and Sunnyside Environmental School–, helped to stop two LNG terminals from infiltrating the Oregon coastline. During her senior year at PSU, Leah joined the women's lacrosse team where her team won regionals and went on to nationals. She works at Future Fonts, a platform that supports experimental type design in progress, and is finishing her undergraduate degree in Graphic Design at Portland State University.
leahmaldonado.com
Instagram @club.otf "
Glyphworld & Glyphworld Exhibit
Her largest type project which carried on into an exhibition.
She created a website dedicated to it, Glyphworld.online in which she also allows free downloads of the font. When downloading the font, the Agreement states "This is a freely downloaded font for any type of use, personal or commercial. You can alter this font." This and Future Fonts conveys Maldonado's focus on allowing everyone to experience her studies and values within design.
"Their forms have been shaped by a lineage of our ancestors and will continue to evolve past the death of their authors. Each new author follows and simultaneously betrays the rules of the previous authors, creating new styles of nuanced letterforms. Readers feel these stylizations as a multi-sensory experience. First, the body feels the structural form through the eyes. Then the ear hears what our eyes touch and translates this into a tone that is experienced internally. These silently heard tones are like the audible inflections we use in speech, where a tone can change the meaning of the content. Stylized letterforms enable our telepathic voices to be as expressive as our outer voices, equalizing the cacophony of our inner and outer worlds.
Gardens are like this—existing because of the collaboration of the universe and the individual. As we walk through other people's gardens we see the universe: familiar things that might exist in other gardens, imagined or real. But we also notice the author, the gardener. We notice the gardener's choices, some practical, some decorative, we see the landscape that the author has created, but we understand the gardener must use the land that the universe has created. A typeface is this way. It's author is a gardener who creates something to sustain and adhere to a system that is beyond them. GlyphWorld is my garden. Each stylized letterforms has been planted and nurtured by me. I am their author, I grew them—but they will continue to grow without me. "
The idea that they will continue to grow without me is directly related to the ability to download and alter the font freely for any use. “[Glyphworld] is free to download because I want more people to participate in something unique and changing in the type world,”
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/leah-maldonado-glyphworld-graphic-design-251119 i
itsnicethat Interview
"“The typefaces correspond to their namesake landscape the way certain sounds can correspond to genres of music, or how articles of clothing might correspond to social tropes,” Leah tells It’s Nice That. “Legibility isn’t always a goal, use cases don’t really matter and monetary return doesn’t dictate design choices,” she adds, talking about the movement that she calls expressionist type design. “Glyphworld is my contribution to this movement.”"
"Another stream of influence was grotesque digital aesthetics – deep fried memes, pyramid scheme sites and clickbait images. “I think clickbait is totally bizarre and I love the disgusting images that get you to click on a listicle,” she says. “What shapes make us feel smart? What does a letter look like shaped as greed? It’s similar to clickbait – ‘typebait’. Letters can elicit emotional responses independent of their message.” Another meme-culture classic, the alignment chart, features prominently in Glyphworld. “I thought it was interesting that so many people could relate to these categories and agree on placements within them,” she says. “Like most memes, it’s a way to visually show a shared experience, or a shared feeling.”
" “The cap height, x-height and weight of Airland are shared across the entire Glyphworld family,”"
"`Leah has turned this project into an exhibition, showing analogous textures and items that correspond to the various natural worlds she’s trying to express."
Numark Party Mix DJ Controller
Beginner's DJ mixer with built in lights.
More Type Design
Carmelo, Gaag, and Gorpite are the other typefaces Leah has made. Carmelo is a slime-like serif that is based on her perception of herself as an older woman. Gaag is about the absurd. Leah observed what makes humans awkward and tried to translate that into letterforms. Gorpite is a sharp serif based on the shape of graphite.
"Carmelo is a typeface whose letterforms are drawn to represent a personality I conceive for myself as a mature woman. I evaluated the woman I wanted to grow to be: her traits are strong, noble, soft, and confident, and used those traits to draw letterforms that when flowed as text takes the tone of her voice. What is less obvious about Carmelo is the naive trait it exudes as well, it is the idea of maturity from an immature source—her form reflects this. This typeface uses organic slime serifs, and alien like terminals to embody the bodies mature women live in, but combines it with a tall x-height to give confidence to it’s form. When I write my name is written in Carmelo, I feel as though I am signing the name of myself when I am at the final chapters of my life."
Clickbait Mag: Deep Fakes Issue
Click Bait is an experimental publication that explores what results when modern, digital interfaces are printed out and interjected into real, physical space. The first issue explores the idea of DeepFakes, which are techniques for human image synthesis based on artificial intelligence. Within ClickBait Issue 1, the realm of DeepFakes are investigated through the content; i.e. the artificial personality of Lil Miquela, the plasticity of pixels, and the Looksmaxxing culture of incels.
Alter Ego
Alter Ego is a collection of Leah's writing and her closest friend, Raven's, photography. They worked independently, but the short stories and the photos Raven captured felt like they co-existed the way their friendship did. While the two bodies of work are completely unrelated in a multitude of ways there is also something about them that makes them work perfectly together.
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