What Happens Next

Every time I try to imagine my next career move, I end up thinking about design. Not the Instagram version of it with the mockups and the variable font animation loops, but the real thing. The work, the people, the culture, the consequences of the culture, the role design plays in production, and the role production plays in deciding who gets to have a life.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that I have a complicated relationship with design itself. I love it. I also think it behaves badly sometimes. Design is tied too tightly to systems that do not care about the people who make it. Visual design has an inextricable link to commodity aesthetics that is not easily washed away by our liberal arts, left-leaning tendencies as a community. If anything, that relationship makes our potential all the more insidious. Yet the people who make the work are some of the most thoughtful, generous, curious, detail-obsessed humans I have ever met. Designers are my people, for better or worse.

Here is the thing. The “worse” part can be changed by all of us.

Designers do not have enough power. We create things that power entire industries, yet we rarely control the terms of our own participation. Designers build the interfaces that make billion-dollar apps function, then go home and argue in a Discord channel about whether they should charge 300 or 350 dollars for a logo. Some of us spend months drawing beautiful typefaces that end up more clearly communicating “management reserves the right to refuse” in multiple languages. We are celebrated when we work for some of the worst companies in the world.

Ours is not a moral failing. It is a structural one. And it is the problem I keep returning to. It is why I started my first studio, and why I started my last one. I have been negotiating my own relationship to power in the industry, and trying to find ways to leverage it for myself, then for my friends, then for younger designers with the same kind of potential and passion I had at their age.

In whatever I do next, I want to help us better seize the means of production. Not in a revolutionary slogan sort of way, but in a practical, everyday way.

I want designers to understand the business side of their work, because this industry will not get any easier. The design industry was never designed for their personal fulfilment anyway, so they should at least understand the rules of the game.

When I look at the past eight years of my type design career, a pattern is pretty clear. I am not the hardest working type designer. I know plenty of people who draw better, refine with more vigor, and care much more about placing the dot at the right point to achieve an optical centre. Yet somehow I have made more money from my type work than many of my peers with similar experience. I promise the difference is not talent. It is the boring stuff: negotiation, self-promotion, strategy, branding, and a willingness to make friends with strangers—even though we know you are a complex, brooding enigma and nobody really “gets” you 😒.

These skills hold the part that designers are rarely taught, even as education becomes more accessible and tools become better. This works well for the interests of large foundries, and for the major distribution platforms, but it also sets the stage for another generation of designers who are even further removed from the fruits of their labour. Monotype will not kill competition, and AI will not kill type design, but sloth might kill type designers. The industry is expanding, and the market is flattening. More designers are entering the field at the exact moment their output is becoming more commodified, and at the exact moment a few entities are consolidating even more power over the distribution of that output.

This means that talent is no longer the differentiator it used to be. People are buying shitty fonts (some of them are really shitty 😭) and using them for major brands, and we are not protesting anymore. Different things matter to designers and their clients, and so much less of it is about how well you can code, or how true-to-form your Jannon interpretation is. This can be an annoyance, or an opportunity. Designers who understand it will survive. Designers who master it will thrive. Designers who ignore it will feed their most valuable ideas into a pipeline that belongs to someone else, and that may be all they are able to feed.

So I want to help. I want to work on things that help make designers more independent, more sustainable, more informed, and more capable of building a life around their craft without relying on hope, luck, or, worst of all, the next ethnic, culturally specific holiday that someone thinks they are “just the right fit” for. Designers and design deserve better.

Some of this trying to help may take the form of writing. Some may become software built specifically to support type designers as creators and as business owners. Some may look like one-on-one support, helping designers think about dealmaking, personal branding, communication, positioning, and the emotional courage required to take themselves seriously in a real way. We are not going to “design harder” until the problems are fixed. Leaning into passion and “purpose” is how capitalism keeps you hard-working (good, sort of) and underpaid (bad, definitely).

Not everyone needs to become an entrepreneur. Not everyone needs to start a foundry or build a product. But every designer deserves to understand how value moves through the industry they serve. They deserve tools that match the dignity of their work. They deserve to know how to turn skill into stability, how to turn curiosity into strategy, and how to create work that can take care of them and the people they love for a long time.

I want to help type designers see beyond the curves and the fontmake configs, beyond the obsession with craft for craft’s sake, and into the systems that decide whose work matters and whose work disappears. I want them to have more freedom to make what they care about. I want them to have more control over the tools, platforms, and financial structures that shape their careers.

Importantly, I am not trying to build a utopia. We will likely continue helping morally bankrupt companies communicate beautifully in multiple languages. But I think we can do better for ourselves than the status quo, while we do that. A world where a decent-enough type designer can afford stability, take a vacation, maybe buy a plant and keep it alive, maybe buy Agyei a cocktail when we are at Jack’s Wife Freda next spring. Imagine.

I still love this field. I still believe in the people inside it. I just think it is time we all started loving it more practically. If you are a designer reading this, especially a type designer, I hope you will stick around. Things are going to get weird, but that is also all they have ever done.

Send me an email. We can talk about what you care about, and how I might help.