Interview: Rian Hughes

Written by Yves Peters on February 3, 2005

Rian Hughes mug by Norman HathawayAfter studying at the London College of Printing, Rian Hughes worked for an advertising agency, i-D magazine, and a series of record sleeve design companies.

Under the name Device he now provides design and illustration for advertising campaigns, record sleeves, book jackets, graphic novels, and television. Since setting up his studio he has worked extensively for the British and American comic industries as a designer, typographer, and illustrator.

His advertising typography earned a Campaign Press Awards Silver in 1996 and a Merit Award from the New York Art Director’s Club in 2000. In addition to designing typefaces for FontShop’s FontFont range, fonts for clients such as MacUser, 2000 AD, Newquay Steam, and PC Format magazine are released via his own label called Device Fonts.


He has contributed to numerous international exhibitions, lectured widely both in the UK and internationally, and a one-man show of his work was held at London’s Smiths Gallery. A retrospective book was published in 2002.

He has an extensive collection of Thunderbirds memorabilia, a fridge full of vodka, and a stack of easy listening albums which he plays very quietly.

As last year marked the tenth anniversary of Hughes’ emergence on the digital type scene, I interviewed him for Typographica. Since we spoke, he has released a bundle of new fonts now available at Veer.

Yves Peters: It’s been ten years since your first digitized typefaces were commercially released. Were you always meant to be a type designer, or did this originally happen as a by-product of your illustration work?

Rian Hughes: Looking back, I’ve always had a broad spread of interests — or obsessions, possibly. One of these was type. I have many, many sketches and inked alphabets from when I was 13 or 14 — I rediscovered these recently and there are actually a couple of good ideas there that might actually form the basis of some upcoming fonts. They tend to be the kind of decorative headline type of type.

The illustration, comics, and design work has always proceeded alongside this, and an old passion — photography — has just recently fired me up again. I took hundreds of shots on my travels all over the world in my 20s, and now with a new negative scanner I’m going slowly through them and cleaning up the best in Photoshop. Many of them have the exact same concerns with layout and composition that my illustrations have, if anything in a purer and more starkly abstract fashion. They also feature some nice typographic oddities. Maybe I need to look at putting a small book together and finding a publisher.

YP: Your illustration work shows you are very Bezier-literate. When you design a new typeface, how much is drawn on paper and how much on screen?

RH: I worked designing fonts pre-digital with Rubylith and PMT, so didn’t come to Fontographer as a font design newbie. I’d say I do sketches to work out the general drift of a font, then jump right into the digital realm. I’ll then go back to the odd sketch or two to resolve matters as I progress. It also changes from font to font — some require, by their nature, a hand-drawn approach, whilst the more mechanical, geometric faces evolve more naturally on-screen.

YP: Does this way of working influence the “character” of the typeface and infuse it with a specific aesthetic?

RH: Again, what’s appropriate to the style of the font in question. I’d say that the bezier is very versatile, but can still leave its signature in the curve of a bowl or the bend of an ‘S’ in some hands.

YP: Though your typefaces are unmistakably of the now, they have a certain retro feel to them. How do you explain that?

RH: I guess it’s a fascination with ’70s and ’80s headline faces as epitomized by the Letragraphica range. None are meant to be historical recreations or pastiches. I think the flavour of a font sometimes emerges from the internal construction without much duress from the designer. Certain underlying frameworks have been popular at certain times, so using these forms to structure a font lends them that flavour by association. English Grotesque, for example, fills the same “idea space” as Gill because it investigates the same idea — a sans based on traditional Trajan serif proportions, most obvious in the wide ‘W’ or ‘T’ and narrow ‘S’ for example. This style of font through use has become associated with early modernism, especially in the UK.

YP: From the onset you became well-known as a designer of whimsical display typefaces with distinct personalities and a recognizable signature. Then you surprised everyone with Paralucent, a “serious” sans serif face which has turned into a superfamily. Is this a one-off or a natural evolution?

RH: It’s an investigation into Helvetica/Akzidenz, whereas (as mentioned above) English Grotesque is an investigation into Gill/Johnston Railway and Regulator an investigation into Spartan/Futura/Kabel. Paralucent has proved to be very popular, so you can count on more in that vein coming soon. It’s used on Loaded magazine and Heat magazine, and Ice has just picked it up. If you know of others, let me know. Kodak just ran a campaign featuring it in LA.

YP: Your very first fonts were released under the FontFont umbrella. Next came Device, and nowadays licenses for your fonts can be purchased through various outlets like T26. What made you decide to self-publish?

RH: Device fonts are distributed direct from the Device site, or by Veer (who do a monthly catalogue that’s very good), Fontworks, FontShop and T26. I had a huge backlog of fonts that just couldn’t all be published as FontFonts, and I really preferred the idea of bringing them under a personal library banner. That way I could create a unique range with it’s own character, something that’d get lost if my work was subsumed into a larger collection.

YP: What are your experiences with Device?

RH: No one got rich by designing fonts! Device is a project that sometimes I will not work on for up to a year, depending on other commissions. I see it as a slow build over a long period of time. It’s the home for fonts that derive from commissioned work (say for advertising campaigns, magazines etc) but importantly more personal type experiments. These I can send out into the world to find their own uses, which is one of the most interesting aspects of type design — seeing your font in use unexpectedly on someone else’s design.

YP: What is the difference with selling your fonts through “established” channels?

RH: Less control.

YP: As a reader of American comic books, I noticed at one point that some of the better designed comic book covers sported your typefaces. Upon further investigation I realized that you design more than a few of those covers, for 2000 AD, DC and Wildstorm amongst others. How did you get into this field?

RH: It happened naturally, as a result of knowing the artists and writers. I did many covers for Titan Books, Knockabout and 2000 AD. It was a great opportunity to work with some of my favourite artists and in many cases to repackage material that had already been designed for the US market in ways I felt were more interesting and appropriate. I discuss this at some length in the back of my book.

YP: The comics industry is not exactly known for being sensitive to design nor typography, as they mainly use hand-lettering and stereotypical typography. Is that a misconception?

RH: No, it’s generally because it’s a very conservative industry. The powers-that-be were initially very suspicious of my designs, designs that now seem very tame. I think that once they’d been proven to sell and be popular, the role of the designer was better appreciated. I have to say, however, that there still are many poorly designed covers out there. I’d love to have a crack at sorting Marvel‘s image out.

YP: The covers for the initial run on Wildcats Version 3.0 made it quite obvious that you contribute more than just the cover logo and type. How do you collaborate with the artist of the comic book when you design a cover?

RH: In this case (and in the best cases) Joe Casey outlined the first story arc’s conceptual basis , and than the three of us (Joe, Dustin [Nguyen, the artist] and I) kicked ideas back and forth. We decided that a corporate Halo-inspired approach was the relevant way to go. I then produce a visual using my own art or a lifted piece of Dustin’s art, and Dustin takes it from there. He is very good at taking the concept and turning in results that surprise you, but are completely on the money for what we need. Some artists have a better and more inventive design sense than others. Some still prefer the “group of characters running towards the reader” cover, and if you as a designer are called into a project too late, there’s nothing that can be done except to place a nice little logo at the top – there’s no art direction. The best results come about when the designer is art directing the process rather than acting as assembler of others’ finished pieces.

Many thanks to Mr. Hughes for his time. For printed samples of his typefaces, be sure to catch the new 128 page anniversary catalogue, available next month from Veer.

Illustration by Norman Hathaway with S. Coles

See also: Identifont profile : Bald Condensed on Typographer.org

Yves Peters is a graphic designer / rock drummer / father of three who tries to be critical about typography without coming across as a snob. Previously a columnist for Typographer.org and editor-in-chief of The FontFeed, he currently divides his time between teaching at the Communication, Media and Design department of Artevelde University of Applied Sciences, and publishing at Adobe Create and writing for a variety of type foundries, weaving pop culture and design trends into foundational typographic stories. His ability to identify most typefaces on sight is utterly useless in daily life.

2 Comments

  1. Finally! More interviews! Nice job, Yves.

  2. Ricardo says:

    Great interview! Keep �em coming!

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