Type Design Influences: Lloyd Reynolds, Hermann Zapf, Jack Stauffacher

Lloyd Reynolds
When I finally took Reynolds’ calligraphy class at Reed College, the picture in the back of the Graphic Arts Studio was, interestingly enough, a portrait of Rudolf Koch, not Edward Johnston, William Morris, or John Ruskin. As one entered the building there was a letterpress printing shop – unused. The class I took was the very last one that Reynolds taught at Reed. It was supposed to be team taught with Robert Palladino, his replacement, but in reality it was almost entirely Lloyd’s show. Mr. Palladino was a protege of Edward Catich. Michael McPherson, now a Boston area graphic designer, was the star student of Reynolds’ at the time – the one who got to do all the “commissions” ( e.g. posters for the cafeteria wall). Michael was very generous in spending time critiquing my work and suggesting approaches to practicing.

As you know, Lloyd had many connections with the English school – Johnston, of course, from whose book he learned calligraphy, but later Alfred Fairbank and the italic handwriting movement also became extremely important to him as you know. He always paid homage to the Arts and Crafts movement. One of his favorite scripts was the blackletter cursive.

The content of his lectures and discussion always seemed to be grounded in a very broad context. William Blake and Joseph Campbell were constantly popping up, and he was fascinated by Asian thought. It permeated his talk. Chi, spirit, life energy. He seemed particularly focused on the mystical and metaphysical. This aspect clearly had an important effect on me. Making letters seemed magical. It still seems magical after all this time. Magic is not a thing acquired by indoctrination. It is itself acquired by magic.

Lloyd inspired; he illuminated the magical, a remarkable teacher.

 

Zapf, et al.
During the summer calligraphy class which I took from Reynolds (two years after I graduated from Reed) he showed a film about Hermann Zapf made at Hallmark Cards. Zapf talked about lettering and calligraphy and was shown making letters with various tools. Watching him write had a profound effect on me.

From relatively early in my calligraphic experience I was a bit put off by the English school. Edward Johnston was remarkable and italic handwriting was wonderful, but the letters that I found myself really attracted to were those made by 20th century Germans and Scandinavians who were using the edged pen to make letters that looked contemporary. A very influential book in my development was the three volume series by Erik Lindgren called something like the ABC of Lettering and Printing Types. I had already seen examples of Zapf’s work before the film, but seeing him make the forms added a completely new dimension.

I then learned that Zapf was a consultant to Hallmark and spent part of each year there and that Hallmark was hiring young lettering artists. By the next summer I had sent them a portfolio of my work and was hired to work there.

My introduction to letterpress printing happened while I was working for Hallmark, and was connected Zapf. Phil Metzger was an amateur fine printer in Kansas City who had befriended Zapf, and Rick Cusick, Dale Wittenborn (a student of Catich) and I became drawn into the scene. Dale and I bought what was for both of us our first printing press. There was a small type design group at Hallmark, which Rick Cusick became part of, and although I did not get to work in that group, I was fascinated by what they were doing. That was my first taste of typeface design.

As my interest in typography grew, I had the same lukewarm reaction to the English school of type design as I had to their calligraphy. Gill was not my hero at this time in my career. I was much more impressed by what Johnston had to say than by what he did. Actually, although I tremble a bit to say it, the same was true of Lloyd. I have come to appreciate the English more in recent years – and also Lloyd’s calligraphy – but at this point, I was still focused on the continental calligraphers and type designers.

After leaving Hallmark, I taught calligraphy for the eight years I was in Sonoma, California. Sometimes two or three classes a week, and summer school. These classes were mostly through San Francisco State, but also through the UC Berkeley Extension and during the latter part of this period at my own studio. I started out teaching what I had learned from Lloyd, but I soon migrated toward an approach, which had some aspects of Rudolf von Larisch who liked to begin his course of instruction with a skeleton capital letterform. Also, my own interest in the formal humanistic minuscule and the roman capital become more prominent features in the teaching. I felt at the time – and I guess this has not really changed much – that the radical fixation on medieval letters which were so different from our current visual culture was too extreme. I wanted connection. I find myself right now reading through material about the beginning of roman type – the culture and the process which transformed newly revived letterforms, the caroline minuscule and the imperial roman majuscule into the forms we use today. The mainstream of letterforms used for text has been my interest for a long time, and it continues.

Jack Stauffacher
During my last couple of years in Sonoma I began to do serious reading in the technical aspects of type design and typography. It was during this time that I wrote computer programs to generate a variety of letterforms from simple skeletons. This was before I knew about Donald Knuth’s work with Metafont. I learned a great deal about the current scene in the companies that manufactured typesetting equipment and were therefore involved in making type. I became aware of the many of the details of recent history of ATF, Ludlow, Haas, Stempel, Berthold, Monotype, Linotype, Deberny & Peignot and Compugraphic, of Fred Goudy, R.H. Middleton, Stanley Morison, Chauncey Griffith, Mike Parker, Gunter Gerhard Lange, Adrian Frutiger.

My first job in typeface design and production was at Autologic Inc. in Thousand Oaks, California where I was hired to direct their program of typographic production. It was there that I undertook my first real efforts in reviving historical typefaces. We did a revival of the Kis/Janson types.I hired Jack Stauffacher, proprietor of the Greenwood Press in San Francisco to be a consultant on the project. He had purchased the metal foundry type, which was cast from Kis’s original matrices from the Stempel Type Foundry in Frankfurt, Germany when he first set up the Greenwood Press in San Francisco. He was deeply familiar with the types from using them and studying them, and had produced a beautiful book about them. This collaboration with Jack was the beginning of a very long association. When I worked at Adobe, I asked Jack to become part of the Adobe Type Advisory Board.

After leaving Adobe and setting up the Stone Type Foundry I embarked on an ambitious course to develop a range of text typefaces which would be cover a vast area of typographic usage, from condensed versions for use in newspapers and magazines to formal book typefaces in sizes corresponding to those used in metal type. During this process Jack was a faithful user of the types and used them in many books and other projects. His close attention to detail and beautiful use of the types inspired me to continue with the project. The Cycles family has been the result.

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