Month: February 2025

Brief Encounters

Since the inspirations for Bijou typefaces (so far) come from the research I have been doing into the history of gay magazine publishing, I get particularly excited when my typefaces are used for projects with a bit of queerness to them.

So happily, the first use of Buckram by anyone besides me was for Brief Encounters: Queer Instant Photography, a small photography exhibit at a gallery here in Portland. When one of the artists, Michael Espinoza, reached out to me about using Buckram for gallery labels and some related text pieces, I was more than to help out. Perfect conceptual alignment!

It’s always useful to see someone else use one of my typefaces for the first time, since I get a better sense of how well it really works after being so close to it for the long stretches of time it takes to finish a typeface. It’s a huge relief to see someone use it well, and confirm that the design has real potential!

Finding a creative jump-start

For the past couple of years, a small town near the foothills of the Italian Alps has welcomed a dozen-or-so passionate typographers and I to spend our holiday not on a beach or by a pool, but rather immersing ourselves in Italian type history. Summer in the Veneto has plenty of charms for the typical visitor – incredible food and wine, sunny skies, beautiful vistas – but this group is more likely to get emotional about vintage wood type, ornate printing presses, and rare type specimens.

The 1895 journal of the Nebiolo type foundry, in the collection of Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione, Cornuda.

All this inspiration is part of TipoItalia, a two-week residency at Fondazione Tipoteca Italiana, a museum of type history in Cornuda, about an hour north of Venice. Tipoteca holds an extraordinary collection of material gathered from printers and typefounders all across Italy, and it serves as the home base for a creative getaway. Participants of TipoItalia get to see all kinds of type and lettering – inside the museum and out – and work together in the museum’s print studio to transform what they see around them into new work, experimenting with letterpress printing, bookbinding, and digital type design.

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