Talk with Riccardo De Franceschi — Creative Director at Dalton Maag
Riccardo De Franceschi — type designer, Creative Director at type foundry Dalton Maag. Studio has designed typefaces for Airbnb, BBC, Google, Amazon, and other cliens large and small.
On the 14th of May 2020 Riccardo will be having a lecture «Type and Brand Expression».
We will look at how brands can achieve the right tone of voice for their purpose, through bespoke as well as off-the-shelf typefaces, with the help of selected project case studies.
We’ve met with Riccardo earlier to talk about design:
Do you remember when and why you’ve discovered what is typography and that you want to be a type designer?
My notebooks from primary school are full of drawings of letters, which is not unusual for kids — but in mine, you’d find rather “typographic” sketches, like a serif uppercase “R” or a sans serif double-storey lowercase “g”! It didn’t really go further than than until my university days. I studied graphic design and had a type design class there. I immediately fell in love with the discipline, which felt like the intersection between aesthetics and systematicity.
What keeps you interested in typography today as you’re so many years in the profession?
New challenges in a landscape which is ever changing. There have been some important technological changes in the last couple of years, for instance variable fonts. Tastes for type keeps evolving too, which demands us all to keep up to date. I have also had the fortune of traveling quite a bit recently, which brings about new inspiration. And so does looking at history… I make sure I am constantly looking at things I haven’t seen before, through physical libraries as well the internet.
Has the internet changed your life as a type designer?
Indeed, the internet has an impact on how we research, work, communicate and promote our work. I can only imagine how different these things must have been before so many of us had this access. Of course, it also means that typefaces are consumed this way. In this sense, web fonts have pretty much revolutionised everything. I remember the days when text on the web was often an image — that luckily feels prehistory now.
What are some important qualities for a type designer?
A good type designer has an eye for rhythm and colour in text, which is developed with time. If you are shortsighted like me, you can actually use that to your advantage: take your glasses off, move the page away and see if any blobs stand out! You also need a great amount of attention to detail; and in a wider sense, you need a deep understanding of the history as well as the latest trends in letter forms. While the detail is important, it’s equally important to look at the bigger picture, I am now working as a Creative Director, which has allowed me to step further back and look at projects considering this wider perspective, which is not an easy thing to do when you come from a world of vectors and pixels.
What is your main inspiration for work? What influences you?
Type literally connects us with all things in life. Think for instance of the way the style of music or plot of movies are marketed and made accessible to the public using written messaging. Because type is everywhere, I like to think that inspiration can be found anywhere and it occurs in the most disparate of places. We also live in an era of digital communication and a consequential decrease in attention span: I personally think there is great potential in vernacular letter forms that “speak to your belly”. When working on a type design, I like to create a world made of references that link the letter shapes you are developing with the environment the type will be used in. It is the same for custom projects too, where the key is to look deeply into the specific culture of that certain brand, until you can almost breath it.
Do you have a mission as a designer? What do you want to achieve with your work?
I would sum it up as three main points: providing a brand or a group of users with a quality product that is right for them; producing work that stands the test of time; expressing a particular vision through that work.
Are there such things as a bad type or good type? Or what important is context?
Type’s first and foremost function is to communicate contents in a certain context. So that specific context is absolutely paramount: you can easily ruin a user’s experience both by picking the wrong typeface, and by using the right typeface in the wrong way. We will look at that in our session. Having said that, there are objective quality standards from a technical standpoint, as well as aesthetic benchmarks that one can aim to meet, this comes down to understanding history and trends that I mentioned earlier.
Do you have particular brands you like to work with? And why?
With some brands you may be able to be more experimental, and with other brands you may be more limited with the expression you explore. All brands have their own interesting aspects: defining the creative brief for each project is extremely fascinating, and looking at the final result in relation to that is extremely rewarding. I personally like working with brands that have a strong foundational story or historic heritage, that give an opportunity to take hints from.
What are your favorite examples of when the typeface is just right for the brand?
A typeface is right for a brand when it matches its voice, and helps its message reach out to its audience. It needs to be functional as well as distinctive, and that is perhaps the biggest challenge: if you are too loud with that voice, you can overpower the message; if you are too quiet, then you may not stand out. Sometimes you need letters that drive attention to themselves; but very often you need to be subtle, and act on a subconscious level. One project I’d mention is the custom typeface we did for the City of Vienna last year… it meets requirements of a digital typeface for 2020, but also has a powerful expression rooted in the history of the city and the souls of its people: that was a very challenging one, because the brand you need to represent there is not only the institution, but basically the whole population!
All library fonts can be downloaded as trial for free from the website.
