Font of Design

Font of Design

CHRIS DUFFEY; FONT DRAWINGS COUTRESY OF DELVE WITHRINGTON

Delve Withrington


Crafting custom typefaces is a global business for Alamedan.

Are you, right now, thinking about the serifs on this font? Noting whether it’s got a bouncy baseline or if it’s a heritage-derived typeface? Admiring the letterforms or sighing at their banality?

I’m going to guess not. Unless you’re one of the approximately 500 font designers in the world, like Alamedan Delve Withrington.

He does what most of us do not do: He thinks about the shape and form of letters, whether they’re round and friendly or angular and mechanistic, what personality they have, how they sit on a line. Type design is something we’re all affected by—you know that the Coca-Cola logo font wouldn’t work well on a tax form, and Comic Sans would look notably out of place in a company memo. And yet, although typeface affects our responses to any word, it’s something we rarely think to consider.

For Withrington, however, most of his waking hours are filled with thoughts of fonts. He’s the founder and sole proprietor of Delve Fonts, a “foundry” that creates custom typefaces that can be used in logos or product packaging, computer apps, or online ads.

He had never thought about a career in font design, until he started his first job out of art school, at a premier sign shop in Massachusetts. Hand-lettering signs taught him a lot about fonts—how to take them apart, understand their construction, and put them back together. Since then, he’s kept working on font design, although he moved away from hand-painting and into the digital world with jobs at Monotype and other tech firms.

Eventually, he started designing his own typefaces, then selling them online. Suddenly, he found he had a business. He now works with designers and clients all over the world. “Most good design is problem solving,” Withrington says. “You have to find out what the client needs, and address it.” He does this by paying attention to things you probably never thought about.

This article appears in the November 2013 issue of Alameda Magazine
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