The Shape of a Letter

Joon-ho Park has spent eleven years on a single typeface. It has 1,142 characters across nine weights, and he is not finished. We met in his studio in Seoul, where the walls are covered in printouts of the letter ‘g’ at sizes from six points to three feet.

On why a typeface takes a decade

Eleven years for an alphabet. Help me understand.

You think a typeface is twenty-six letters. It is not. It is every letter beside every other letter — the ‘a’ before an ‘o’, the ‘a’ before a ‘v’, the way a capital ‘T’ leans over the small letter that follows it. There are thousands of these pairings, and each one must be spaced by eye. The alphabet is the easy part. The relationships are the work.

“A reader never notices good type. They notice that they kept reading. That is the entire ambition of the craft — to be the thing that does not interrupt.”

On the voice of a face

You say a typeface speaks before the words do. What is yours saying?

Every face has a temperature and a posture. A high-contrast serif with sharp terminals says: I am serious, I have authority, slow down. A soft geometric sans says: I am friendly, I am modern, do not worry. Most readers cannot name what they are responding to, but they respond. They trust a page or they don’t, and the trust is set before the first word is read.

This journal asked me what voice it should have. I told them: the voice of someone confident enough to be quiet. The rest of our conversation — on the politics of the default font, the letter he has redrawn ninety times, and the one typeface he refuses to discuss — continues below.