“Wherever you look, you see type…”
Elena Schneider (40) is an independent type designer from Germany, currently living in Húsavík, Iceland, with her husband and their two children. She loves swimming in cold water and hiking in the wild, but she also loves city life just as much. She’s a guest lecturer at the University of Arts in Reykjavík where she teaches type design, and mentors and supports young professionals weekly as an active member of Alphabettes - a network to support and promote women in the type industry.
When asked about her background in and fascination for type design, she takes us back to her childhood. She reminisces about how she watched her grandfather do letterings for the price tags in the local DIY store, writing giant red figures on big yellow card signs with a broad pen. Through this experience she learned to really look at letters and not just take them for granted. “It’s this thing that, wherever you look, you see type (…) and yet many people know so little about it; some are even surprised by the fact that every single letter and font on their computers are designed by humans. Type design is such a niche but so many are using its outcome.”
She would later take this fascination and turn it into her livelihood. After attaining her diploma in communication design from the university of applied sciences in Dortmund, Germany, she took the leap and moved to the UK to get a masters degree in type design from the University of Reading. By then she had already co-funded a studio together with her friends from Dortmund, and business was going great. The interest for type design, ignited by her grandfather, set fully ablaze by a trip to DenHaag for an open day at KABK in 2003, caught up to her eventually. And so she decided to take a step out of her comfort zone and into her future. “To take this step, when everything is going quite well, and “abandon” your friends and partners to focus only on one thing for a year, was not easy. But I am really glad I did it.”
Although she has invested a lot of time in educating herself through university, she says working for and collaborating with other designers, like Dirk Rudolph and Miles Newlyn, has been the most educational. “I started to work with Dirk in 2004 in an internship and later as his assistant and I still work with him today on a freelance basis, occasionally helping him develop logos and types for his artwork. Dirk is a genius and self taught graphic designer and his way of working is quite unconventional. Or at least it’s very different from what I learned in university. Miles, I got to know after the master’s programme in Reading. I sent him my portfolio and asked him for freelance work. And indeed, he hired me for my first ever type design project. I still work with him occasionally as well. Both of them were great mentors and still are very good friends. I owe them a lot.”
Elenas work is unique in the variation in her designs, exploring different styles and genres of type freely. She is interested in form and enjoys experimenting with unusual shapes, angles and edges, investigating and exploring what the limit of legibility is. “See, nowadays there’s no lack of really good fonts, all wonderfully designed and delivering a balanced result. And I can do that too. But it’s not very challenging to finish a “boring” font all the way. What I find much more interesting is to start something that looks as if it won’t work at all and then figure out a way to crack it. That’s the magic moment at which the font suddenly starts to develop itself. Reaching that point is not always easy and it can be very frustrating. But it is what drives me. I love playing on the edge of legibility.”
Her inspiration comes from doodles she keeps in her sketchbook, and through good communication with her clients. She draws a lot and tries to use her sketchbook daily, gathering records of everything she finds interesting or resonate with. “The sketches are quick, totally scrawly and not very beautiful. They are just ideas that I bring from my head through my hand into the book. Most of the time I leave it there and return to it at a later time. I often go through my old sketches and look for inspiration and then pick it up again and develop it further.” (…) “By working together with the client, a certain style usually emerges quickly. And as every client and process are unique, the project usually reflects that uniqueness rather easily. The most important part is good cooperation with the customers. This includes a well defined briefing and a lively exchange throughout the process. Most customers really appreciate being involved.”
It is clear that Elena’s got a deep focus on her clients foundation and the distances they want to reach. She knows very well that «Type has the ability to frame how brands are perceived”, and that“it supports the essence of the voice that companies use to communicate with their customers.» Whether it be for a local business or large corporation, he type will reinforce how the world perceives the brand. And so, Elena works delibaretely and consistently in making brand’s custom fonts that make their identities multilingual, coherent, unique, and recognizable all at once.
