GoKawiilFifty years ago this month, March 1976, at 20 years old, is when my interest in type design began.
Me, in spring of 1976, about the time I discovered type design, standing outside the art department at NHCC. (Photo by Dan Bagaus)
I was in my second year of a two-year commercial art program at North Hennepin Community College, in a northern suburb of Minneapolis.
At first I was thinking of pursuing a career as an illustrator, but I was also interested in graphic design. In addition to these, I studied art history, drawing and painting, lettering, printmaking, as well as writing and other liberal arts classes.
Me again, working on a project for a painting class in the graphics classroom at NHCC c. 1976. (Photo by Dan Bagaus)
What sparked my interest in type design was a project in the advanced lettering class. The instructor was Lance Kiland, with whom I kept in touch until his untimely passing in 2013. We mostly learned to do lettering with brushes and Speedball pens. At the time, lettering was considered a basic skill for a graphic designer. At the very least, you needed it to do marker layouts, in order to sell a design to a client before it was set in actual type, which was very expensive. It was a decade before desktop publishing would allow anyone to set their own type on a personal computer and turn the business of typesetting upside down.
Lettering design I did for my high school yearbook in 1974.
I‘d been working with type and doing lettering since high school, as editor and designer of the school newspaper and yearbook. Frustrated with the limited methods we had to set headlines, I started purchasing rubdown type on my own. I fell in love with type from looking at Chartpak and Letraset catalogs, and started developing a taste for typography under the influence of my uncle Knut, who was a graphic designer in Chicago.
The final project in my college lettering class was to design a complete, original alphabet—a typeface.
The issue of U&lc I discovered in the graphics classroom: Volume Two, Number Three, Sept. 1975.
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