Ray Larabie - Interview

Este é só um excerto. A entrevista toda aqui http://www.myfonts.com/newsletters/cc/200905.html onde podem ver imagens e links para completar esta entrevista.

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As a type designer, you’ve “grown up in public”: people with an eye for type have been able to watch you learn, acquire more skills and get rid of mistakes. Did you ever feel uncomfortable about that?

I guess I didn’t have as much of an eye for type design as I had thought. Everyone has some kind of artistic blind spot. The thing about blind spots is… you don’t see them. I considered going back to school but I took a driving course and was reminded how much I truly hated school. What was really helpful to me was the occasional e-mail from very brave people who pointed out faults. In 2000, I remember someone letting me have it about my overshoots. That’s what I needed to hear. I had been making overshoots…. but so tiny. I wasn’t uncomfortable with it because I never thought real type designers would ever notice my work. The world of freeware font design, back then, was disconnected from the mainstream. There was a divide and if you trace it back I think you’ll see that MyFonts and MyFonts alone broke that divide. It seems really clear to me. MyFonts took the “quality bar” and put it in the control of the customer. We’ll let the historians deal with that one.

You have made over 1,000 fonts. Why so many?

The first few hundred were easier because there was so much less to make back then. I’d bash out an alphabet, autokern it, come up with a funny name and upload it to my website. I didn’t have to deal with accents, proper kerning, proper metrics, OpenType coding, promo graphics, ad copy, keywords, testing, multiple formats, etc. Within minutes of finishing a font it was on my site. One Saturday I created 3 fonts.
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Thanks Ray. Keep going with the flow.