A Career That Fits to a T

The curve of an S, the point of an A, the slope of an F.

Because Ben Kiel cares what words mean, he has devoted his life to how letters look.

He is a typeface designer.

“To do this job, you need a trained eye and a lot of patience,” Kiel says. “It also helps that I have an obsessive-compulsive personality.”

And a little courage. Kiel, BFA ’01, recently was asked to help The New Yorker update its design. He created a custom version of Neutraface for the magazine’s inside headings and redrew its cover font, known as Irvin. Was altering one of publishing’s most recognizable typefaces intimidating?

“Oh, yeah,” Kiel says. “It’s The New Yorker — it’s been around for almost 90 years and has a million subscribers. But because the changes were more evolutionary than revolutionary, the experience wasn’t so scary.”

Kiel is the founder of Typefounding, a typeface design and production studio near the Missouri Botanical Garden. But he got his start at House Industries, a respected type foundry in Delaware. Two decades ago, House struck gold with Neutraface, the “it” typeface of the 21st century. Created by designer Christian Schwartz, the typeface is clean, simple, elegant.

“I can’t go anywhere without seeing it,” Kiel says. “It was the typeface of luxury high-rise condos before the market crashed. And now it’s the typeface of green products and pet food.”

And, Kiel recently noticed, the font of the Washington University daily planner.

House has produced some 70 variations of Neutraface, from Neutra Text Demi to Neutra Slab Display Bold, and Kiel personally has created custom versions for Vogue Ukraine and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The New Yorker wanted its own version, too, and House asked Kiel, who was returning to St. Louis, to do the work from here. Kiel made two key changes to the font — he flattened, ever so slightly, the apexes of pointy letters like A and M, and he made the lowercase alphabet taller and hence, easier to read.

Redrawing Irvin was the trickier task, says New Yorker Art Director Wyatt Mitchell. Created by Rea Irvin, The New Yorker’s first art director, Irvin is quirky and whimsical — a seemingly odd choice for such a cerebral magazine. And, yet, they belong together, Mitchell says.

“What’s great about The New Yorker is that it can deliver the most brilliant writing, but it also maintains a human element, both in the writing and the visuals,” Mitchell says. “Irvin has never been a perfect typeface, but it has that great organic feeling to it. Ben got its essence and gave it more sophistication. His work on Irvin is the star of the redesign.”

Readers have embraced the changes, though most would be hard-pressed to explain precisely what those changes are. That’s the power of typeface design.

“You might not notice that you are picking up on these things but you are,” Kiel says. “You may have had the experience of reading a book that was really poorly printed or typeset, and it made you want to put it down because it was hard to read. So type matters for practical reasons. But it also expresses, in a subtle way, tone. It’s a visual clue.”

Readers have embraced the changes, though most would be hard-pressed to explain precisely what those changes are. That’s the power of typeface design.

“You might not notice that you are picking up on these things but you are,” Kiel says. “You may have had the experience of reading a book that was really poorly printed or typeset, and it made you want to put it down because it was hard to read. So type matters for practical reasons. But it also expresses, in a subtle way, tone. It’s a visual clue.”

TYPE AS FOUNDATION OF DESIGN

Kiel is sharing his knowledge with a new generation of students at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Washington University does not offer a degree in typeface design, but Kiel believes type is the foundation of graphic design.

Professor Ken Botnick agrees. Botnick encouraged Kiel to pursue a career in typeface design and, years later, to return to Washington University to teach. The two now share a studio.

“To go from teacher and mentor to peer and colleague is a special experience,” says Botnick, director of the Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Studio for the Illustrated Book. “It’s been great to watch his evolution.”

Kiel grew up in Columbus, Ind., known by architects as a “modernist Mecca.” The town boasts 70 buildings and public artworks by leading modernists including I.M. Pei, Eero Saarinen and Henry Moore.

As editor of his high school paper, Kiel developed a passion for design. This was the era of the digital type revolution. For centuries, large foundries manufactured metal and wood type. The process was expensive and labor-intensive. The software Fontographer changed all of that.

“Way before the digital revolution hit the music industry or the movie industry, it hit the type industry,” Kiel says. “All of a sudden all of these people who have an interest in font design could make a living from it. You could just be a guy in the room.”

Kiel wasn’t interested in being that guy; he wanted to be a graphic designer. To him, type was just a tool, albeit a very powerful one. But Botnick prodded Kiel, then an assistant in his studio, to attend TypeCon, a convention devoted entirely to fonts. Kiel agreed, figuring he would pick up new ways to use type in his practice. There, he met graduates of the University of Reading, home to one of the globe’s leading typeface design programs. He applied and made the leap from graphic designer to type designer.

“One reason I like type is that it is a microcosm of multiple design problems contained in black-and-white shapes,” Kiel says. “Say you adjust an uppercase G. You have to see if you need to change the C, the O, maybe the D, maybe not. It has to be consistent. Everything has to be different, but they have to live together as a family.”

Not every designer has what it takes to tackle type’s challenges, Botnick says. Kiel may attribute his success to his obsessive personality, but Botnick credits Kiel’s work ethic.

“He can muscle through the really technical, nitty-gritty side of things but still has an appreciation for the refinement and nuance of letter form,” Botnick says. “It’s a very remote corner of the design practice; not many people even realize letters are designed. But he’s a guy who really understands how much work it takes to get the details right.”

Diane Toroian Keaggy is director, Campus Life News.