EPISODE SUMMARY

When I say that today's guest was the global design director at Nike—I kinda feel bad for him, because that's one of those thing that he'll never be able to even mention, without it sounding like a flex. It's like having gone to Yale or something—which he also did. Anyhow, that's really the beginning of the story, not the end. In this interview I actually learned some surprising things, like multiple blunders in type design classes, and multiple attempts to attend Type at Cooper, the year long type design program in New York, which he finally made it to this year.But again, that's just the beginning of the story—what I really wanted to focus our conversation on was a small piece of writing Eric put out in June entitled Towards a Decentralized Type Foundry. In it he raises some really interesting thoughts and questions about what effect blockchain/ crypto currency technologies might have on the type business. Specifically he seems curious about how it could make it better in a lot of interesting ways. Obviously this stuff is very technical, and can be pretty confusing, but luckily Eric came armed with a barrage of metaphors to illustrate these ideas for the layperson, which is ME in this case.

EPISODE NOTES

Have a look at Eric’s website, his twitter, his instagram, and his essay, “Towards a Decentralized Autonomous Type Foundry.” Three type designers were mentioned: Gerrit Noordzij, Berton Hasebe, and Stephen Nixon.

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