00:00:04:00 - 00:00:26:06
Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Future of XYZ. Today we have a large topic when it comes down to design, a major element in everything that I know and love, which is branding and design. And our guest is Charles Nix. Charles, thanks so much for joining us on Future of XYZ.
00:00:26:08 - 00:00:29:05
Speaker 2
It is such a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
00:00:29:07 - 00:00:53:09
Speaker 1
Well, I haven’t even said what the subject matter is which is of course, what you do as a designer and as an educator and as the senior executive creative director at Monotype, which is ostensibly the apex of the subject matter of today, typography. So we're going to be talking about the future of typography. And I think it's important.
00:00:53:09 - 00:01:20:02
Speaker 1
I mean, you're an educator, you're the former chair of the communication design department at Parsons as well as in a school in Malaysia. You have taught dozens of courses all over the place private, public. You have LinkedIn, you know, coursework for typography and you've designed a lot of types, we're going to say type, fonts whatever, systems in your career, including during your time at Monotype.
00:01:20:04 - 00:01:36:06
Speaker 1
I'm curious, as always, we start off these Future of XYZ conversations to define the topic, and we're going to dive into this one because it's a big, juicy one a little bit. But in your expertise, Charles, what is the definition of typography?
00:01:36:08 - 00:02:01:12
Speaker 2
So, I mean, there's no one answer. There are actually five answers, but I'll condense it down to four. The first is typography is fonts. So it's the making of fonts, typefaces, and, you know, part and parcel with that, the sort of distribution of those things. So making and selling type, which has existed for now, hundreds of years, is number one.
00:02:01:14 - 00:02:34:15
Speaker 2
Number two is typographers can be people who use type. And before joining Monotype, I considered myself a typographer very much so, but I didn't make type daily before that. I made it periodically, but I used type regularly. So I designed hundreds of books and lots of branding and other collateral work. And you know, as a typographer I really, as a designer and typography, I really prided myself on the quality of type work that I that I did, the way I chose type and the way I used it.
00:02:34:17 - 00:03:02:08
Speaker 2
So that's number two definition of typography, not just the fonts, but how you choose and use them. The third is the effect that type has on readers. So you can't, for instance, describe architecture without the effect it has on human beings. And so there is this power in typography that the way that words look, the way that language looks actually does have an impact on the way that people receive the information.
00:03:02:10 - 00:03:25:10
Speaker 2
In the same way that my tone of voice or your tone of voice is affecting the words that we're saying. So if we go back again, sort of the first is type of being made, the second is type being used. The third is type being read. And then there's this sort of fourth very meta concept of typography, which is the study, the history, form, and use study of typography.
00:03:25:12 - 00:03:48:09
Speaker 2
And you know, as a typography instructor, professor, I really considered myself a full blown typographer there too, because I was very invested in the history of typography, the evolution and sort of the little clues that exist in studying history as to where it's going next. So I'd say all four of those things are typography.
00:03:48:11 - 00:04:14:00
Speaker 1
Thanks for that kind of really comprehensive walkthrough because I feel like we can talk about each of these. But one of the things that I'm curious about when we think about you mentioned fonts and you know, not all of our listeners are designers. I think most people now that we use computers, understand what fonts are, but what are kind of like the core elements of typography besides choosing what we call fonts.
00:04:14:00 - 00:04:17:03
Speaker 1
But these typefaces like what are the other elements?
00:04:17:05 - 00:04:43:02
Speaker 2
So I mean, this is a sort of I'm very pedantic when it comes to this kind of stuff. I do, you know, fonts are the sort of in this in our modern parlance, fonts are software. So it is the sort of mechanism for delivering the typeface. So we think typefaces and fonts in an everyday language as being very interchangeable terms, but the font is what delivers the face.
00:04:43:02 - 00:05:11:09
Speaker 2
The face is the design of the type. It's the shape of the letters. So I mean, in the pedantic sense, they're very separate from one another. In the common parlance, they're sort of one part and parcel. A font generally contains all of the, we call them glyphs, but normal people will call them characters. It contains all the characters that you need to sort of combine and recombine to set language within a script.
00:05:11:12 - 00:05:44:04
Speaker 2
So most of what we set English in is the Latin script, but Latin script is also used for French and Italian and German and Dutch and lots of other languages. There are fonts for setting Arabic, obviously, and Chinese, Japanese and Korean and Thai and special Latin based fonts for Vietnamese. So it is this combination of characters that act as a sort of machine for creating typesetting, for typesetting language, for giving language form.
00:05:44:06 - 00:05:55:12
Speaker 2
And it may help at this point to sort of like just walk back a little bit through how we got to where we are in terms of my mom knowing about fonts or your mom, knowing about fonts.
00:05:55:14 - 00:06:00:00
Speaker 1
My mom, like you, studied communications and graphic design so she knows about it all.
00:06:00:02 - 00:06:31:18
Speaker 2
So your mom and my mom are probably special cases, but like my wife's mom did not know about fonts because her husband wasn't a printer, but now she does. And it's not just because I'm her son in law. It's because over the last 30 years, fonts, typefaces have sort of entered into our lives. Like, there's not a day that goes by that that any of us are not typesetting, which was not the case when I was a child like, and definitely not the case when I was a teen.
00:06:31:18 - 00:07:01:23
Speaker 2
But now every time you pick up your phone and type a text message to someone, you're setting language into type and, you know, essentially virtually printing it out and sending it away. You may not know what typeface you're using when you're typing a text message, but when you choose type from a menu in Microsoft Word, you certainly are choosing type with with purpose, or at least with knowledge that there are different ways that you can change the shape of the language.
00:07:02:00 - 00:07:27:19
Speaker 2
Prior to that, typography was a very specialized subject and sort of setting type was not something that everyone had available to them. I mean, we could set headlines with with press type and sort of rubbed down type, but generally speaking, real typesetting was not at everyone's beck and call like it is now. And prior to that it was even more specialized when it was metal.
00:07:27:21 - 00:08:04:19
Speaker 2
So we've gone through this evolution over the past 600 years from a hyper-specialized trade of creating typefaces into something that's, you know, by virtue of the digital tools that we're using much more much more part of the fabric of everyone's life. And not just designers, but like I said, everyone's everyone's mom and brother and sister, not only knows what typefaces are, but they probably have a few favorite typefaces and ones that they like to joke about, like, you know, curls, and papyrus and, you know, courier, and comic sans.
00:08:04:19 - 00:08:12:16
Speaker 2
So the world has changed very dramatically for typographers, in the last 20 years, specifically.
00:08:12:18 - 00:08:54:06
Speaker 1
It's interesting because I think back, I do this talk about calculated risk taking in the face of basically constant disruption and change, and you start with the fire and wheel and all these, you know, disruptions and inventions, if you will, and things that humans have harnessed. And of course, like one of the major, major changes happened in 1448 where the printing press, where the Gutenberg printing press, you know, and then it shipped off a couple of decades later to England and, you know, kind of modern, let's say, information age was entered and those that's what you're talking about, metal typefaces that was one of the major factors was, of course, how you set mobile
00:08:54:06 - 00:09:06:15
Speaker 1
type in the printing press to replicate and duplicate very rapidly. And that continued until what we're talking about, which is the digital age, which really only came about in kind of like the fifties and sixties.
00:09:06:17 - 00:09:15:18
Speaker 2
Yeah. And it really didn't take hold in a in a sort of meaningful way in mass communications until the eighties and nineties.
00:09:15:20 - 00:09:49:15
Speaker 1
Well, and that is the age we're in now. We're, we're, we're almost in like, we're not in a post digital age, but I don't know what's coming next, and it's changing so rapidly. I'm curious. I mean, obviously Monotype has hundreds of millions, I think, of fonts, but certainly hundreds, hundreds of thousands. You guys are kind of the custodians of the worlds type at this point in this digital age, which is no longer, as you just mentioned, where type typography is no longer the same level of craft where everyone has access.
00:09:49:17 - 00:09:57:07
Speaker 1
How has digital changed both the craft of typography, but also, let's call it the business of typography?
00:09:57:09 - 00:10:41:23
Speaker 2
Yeah, So I mean, I do like a sort of back of the envelope graph for folks who join Monotype every once in a while to sort of describe to them how the business models surrounding type have changed as the technology has changed. Yeah, So I think for even when I was a young person, you would still go and request type from a typesetter and you would get a physical object back from them. When it became digital, it was a big liberation for folks like me who had a yen to create typefaces because I was really as a student, creating typefaces with pen and ink on paper and reproducing them photographically.
00:10:42:00 - 00:11:15:02
Speaker 2
I suddenly had available to me the tools to make functioning font software. That I mean, there were there are not many of us now who were there at that moment still making type. I mean, I can I can think of a handful. But what happened within the ensuing 10 to 15 years was that the making of type became incredibly popular.
00:11:15:04 - 00:11:47:09
Speaker 2
It became accessible and had a lot to do with everything to do with the Macintosh. But, you know, a few key design programs. So first Fontographer and then FontLab and now Glyphs, Glyphs app, which is that the software that we use to make types at Monotype. Those all came into existence and each time they got easier and easier to use, although it's hard to imagine anything easier than Fontographer thinking back to it, but they become more powerful and more intuitive.
00:11:47:11 - 00:12:17:23
Speaker 2
And we are living through an explosion of typographic form the likes of which the world has never known. There have been moments like this in history, but nothing, nothing matches it. There are just more type designers now and more typefaces being made than ever before in the history of the world. And it's a super exciting time. It's confounding because the variety is just overwhelming.
00:12:18:00 - 00:12:33:18
Speaker 2
But at the same time, like, you know, like our human voices, there are, there are typographic voices for so many different sort of inflections of meaning that I can’t think of a better time to be alive as a typographer.
00:12:33:20 - 00:12:57:21
Speaker 1
That's pretty exciting. I want to come back to that, Charles, as we think about like where that leads us. And there are lots of aspects, but I want to put a pin in something that you and I, I think both have strong opinions on, which is the purpose of typography, especially in today's world. Like historically. Okay. You know, like again, it was a craft and it was like a core element of branding.
00:12:57:21 - 00:13:11:13
Speaker 1
And every brand and company had its own typeface and all these things like in 2025 and looking ahead in the near future, like what is, what is the real purpose of a typography? If it's changed, maybe it's the same.
00:13:11:15 - 00:13:37:09
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, I would say there's the pivotal change from the earliest days of type was that at first it was a very functional asset, like it really was trying to speed up the process of encoding information and like it's a sort of simple and functional as that like, can we make these books faster? We could if we just mechanized the writing.
00:13:37:09 - 00:14:05:17
Speaker 2
And so it didn't matter at that point what the type looked like it needed to look like, what people were familiar with reading. And, you know, it's like anyone said, well, people did comment on Gutenberg's Black Letter, but we don't have a lot of like type criticism from the 1450s. So that sort of sort of foundational functional aspect of typography persists.
00:14:05:19 - 00:14:34:24
Speaker 2
We do need typefaces to encode information from our brains so that others can decode it and that we can transfer meaning from one mind to another. But what has happened in the past 200 years is that the variety of typographic form and the familiarity of the reading audience with varieties of typographic form have led to this sort of layering of meaning on top of the language that's being set.
00:14:34:24 - 00:15:19:01
Speaker 2
And so typography in its formal aspects now as a differentiator, it works still on that functional level obviously of encoding language, but there is a there's a sort of moment of recognition on the behalf of the reader and then there's some there is a, there's a moment at which the the uniqueness of the form of the language actually identifies it with, with the sender and sort of not encapsulates, but sort of includes some of the, the intent of the, of the writer.
00:15:19:05 - 00:15:35:09
Speaker 2
So values, ideas, concepts, feelings, get a ride along and end up inflecting the message. So it is a moment of of the medium truly becoming part of the message.
00:15:35:11 - 00:15:55:00
Speaker 1
And do you see a world ever in which the visual goes away as people, I mean, I think about I mean, okay, videos are still visual and there's still type treatment, right? But people seem to be processing orally more these days than visually. I don't know if that's true, but I wonder.
00:15:55:02 - 00:16:30:24
Speaker 2
I've thought a lot about this, obviously, especially of late. There are, you know, a book, book reading and global literacy have sort of flatlined, but they only flatlined because they reached the, you know, 90 plus percentile globally in the latter half of the 20th century. So everybody can read. The big spike in global literacy from 1950 to 2000 had everything to do with books, long form reading and short form reading,
00:16:30:24 - 00:16:49:08
Speaker 2
magazines and periodicals and newspapers also function as part of that. But this is people reading narrative fiction and nonfiction and becoming literate. People don't read as many books as they used to per capita, and that just the way it is.
00:16:49:10 - 00:16:50:09
Speaker 1
I mean guilty.
00:16:51:10 - 00:17:22:17
Speaker 2
But we read constantly. It's ludicrous how much we read. And so the effect that typography or the role that typography plays and the effect that it's having on us consciously or subconsciously and mostly subconsciously, from the moment we wake up and peek at our phones to the moment we go to sleep peeking at our phones, we are encountering the world through a gauze of typography.
00:17:22:19 - 00:18:00:20
Speaker 2
And I have no I have no fear within my lifetime, I mean, I've gotten older, but no fear within my lifetime that typography will not have a central place in human communication. If anything, the sort of nuance of it is becoming almost fever pitch. So yeah, I'm kind of I'm kind of confident that the true typographers, people who invest in joining message and form, will have work for decades to come.
00:18:00:22 - 00:18:31:23
Speaker 1
I love that. I mean you, in our prep call, Charles, you made a comment that really struck me which I think you've talked about history and a lot of the different aspects of this conversation already. And you said that you love problems that bring us face to face with Time's passage. I think about, you know, in prep for this, I was looking at the Monotype website and I came across the launch video for a typeface that you created called Ambiguity, which I just loved and ambiguity in it
00:18:31:23 - 00:18:53:24
Speaker 1
you said it's like, you know, the the state of ambiguity is a shift in perspective. And then it's as much a design tool as it is a challenge to designers. Tell me, in light of the excitement that you have about typography in 2025, why all of this matters to you so much?
00:18:54:01 - 00:19:37:05
Speaker 2
I thought about this this morning in relation to this like, well, and because you had posed to me in prep for this call like, you know, what is it specifically about your journey that has led you to this place or gives you any sort of unique perspective on the topic of typography? I was born the son of a printer, and as a child, like from my earliest I mean, one of my earliest memories is stealing paper from my father's paper closet in the basement so that I could practice handwriting before I knew how to handwrite. I had a ballpoint pen and I had a fresh ream of white paper, like good quality paper.
00:19:37:11 - 00:20:08:07
Speaker 2
And I just sat there on the floor in the basement making sort of imitations of my mom's cursive handwriting, pre literate pre and not pre-verbal, but I just sort of I wanted to make letters. I loved my mom's handwriting. She's a great calligrapher and fantastic Catholic schoolgirl handwriting. And we had U&lc magazine and Inland Printer and other sort of like industry rags just sort of like hang around the house.
00:20:08:07 - 00:20:41:21
Speaker 2
They were on the coffee table. All of this, I mean, even even decades later still strikes me as ordinary. Like what kid aged five wasn't reading U&lc magazine. So I knew about Herb Lubalin by the time I got to the Cooper Union and the Lubalin center was opening. His career had come to a close and they were memorializing it in the Lubalin Study Center.
00:20:41:23 - 00:21:15:23
Speaker 2
It's it is odd in retrospect and what it has done to me whether I knew it or not at the time or even as it was happening, was that I do see the world through the lens of typography. I am I am always identifying good and bad uses of type less as the as the variety of typographic form as proliferated in the 21st century less at the names of typefaces.
00:21:16:00 - 00:21:49:10
Speaker 2
I felt I had a good lock on them at the turn of the century, but now it's insane. But I'm aware of what people's intentions are, not only in the sort of, the making of type, but the sort of the choice of type and the use of type. And that's the way I see the world. So and it has everything to do with this sort of weird I mean, we had parties as a as children after my dad would finish printing, he had a day job of printing.
00:21:49:10 - 00:22:16:06
Speaker 2
But in the evening we would he would print at home. We had a printing press in the basement just doing sort of local stuff for the church and for block club organizations and stuff. We would have things called folding parties where all of us, and we were a big Catholic family. So me and my five brothers and sisters would sit around sort of cross legged folding tri-folds and bi-folds and other kinds of printed material in order to do the finishing process.
00:22:16:08 - 00:22:18:15
Speaker 2
And again, sounds really bizarre.
00:22:18:15 - 00:22:24:09
Speaker 1
Charles, I had to do the same thing with my mother. You're like, giving me like, PTSD.
00:22:25:05 - 00:22:59:20
Speaker 2
So, so, yes. So you and I, we are peculiar. It's not the way that most people are sort of brought up, but I feel incredibly blessed. Obviously. And, you know, it is a sort of nature nurture thing. I did eventually encounter people in my studies at Cooper and in my life as a designer who reinforced what was probably a niggling suspicion all along that serious people do work with type their entire lives.
00:22:59:22 - 00:23:15:22
Speaker 2
It's something that adults can do. You can, if you love type, there's no reason you can't make a career of it. And here I am now some, you know, almost 30 years into my career. And and yes, it's quite possible and quite enjoyable.
00:23:15:24 - 00:23:36:07
Speaker 1
It's really cool. I mean, and sadly, we're coming up on time. So I have just a couple of other questions for you. But I think I wanted to just touch on one thing very briefly that you just mentioned, which is you can make a career of typography and based on the bullishness that you've kind of said about where the state of the industry is at this moment or the craft is.
00:23:36:09 - 00:24:05:01
Speaker 1
I mean, your experience obviously running a book publishing company prior to coming to Monotype, you know, gives you, I think, quite a bit of that unique perspective on the role of typography in branding and storytelling. But you also live in New York City and you've lived in New York for at least since college, if not before. I mean, New York is just like there's probably no better playground if you love typography than living in such a dense area.
00:24:05:07 - 00:24:25:11
Speaker 1
What's like, and I'm going to use this as a lead in to the second to last question, which is like, what are the references? If you have one or two references for people who are watching or listening to Future of XYZ today for like getting to know typography better. Like is it coming to New York and like just taking a tour of the city and the subway and wayfinding?
00:24:25:11 - 00:24:30:01
Speaker 1
Or is it, is there a book, Is there a movie? What are your favorite references?
00:24:30:03 - 00:25:10:05
Speaker 2
I think that that what you just mentioned, the sort of like, you know, your environment and your travels and your sort of like discovery, creative/curious self eventually become tuned into typography, but it takes a couple of sparks and I think there's a huge piece of or ball of tinder. In Ellen Lupton's book “Thinking with Type”, which is a riff on the fundamental text that that we read when we were at Cooper, which was “Designing with Type”. “Thinking with Type” is a really well-rounded resource for the sort of the new typographer.
00:25:10:07 - 00:25:47:12
Speaker 2
And again, author’s Ellen Lupton, old friend of mine and fellow Cooper Union grad. So we sort of studied at the at the feet of the same instructors at Cooper. It's really good. It's sort of telling you what to look at, like what parts are the parts that add up to the rhythm and melody of typography. After that, I have very personal, very personal recommendations.
00:25:47:14 - 00:26:20:00
Speaker 2
Not easy to sort of get a hold of, but the the one that I read as a student that I, I still to this day, I think is a pivotal moment in my life was a book called “The Origin of the Serif”. And it's by Edward Catich, a great calligrapher and one of the foremost students and sort of researchers of the Trajan inscription in Rome.
00:26:20:02 - 00:26:44:13
Speaker 2
So this is for typographers and calligraphers. The Trajan inscription is the sort of source of the er versions of capital letters. So it is the skeletal form from which every capital letter in your life is either based on or responding to like running away from or running towards. And it's and it's not so much the the letters in the book.
00:26:44:13 - 00:27:17:10
Speaker 2
It's the it's the description of their construction, which was eye opening to me because it's described cogently, it’s described convincingly, it's described lovingly. And it is not the story that I have been told up to that point in my life. So “Thinking with Type”, “Origin of the Serif” by Edward Catich. And then things start to get really deep. “Asymmetric Typography” by Jan Tschichold.
00:27:17:15 - 00:28:04:08
Speaker 2
Again, maybe not the easiest book to get a hold of written originally in German, but translated to to English by Reinhold in I think 1967. That book, I love that book because it describes again, I think I have an affinity for this kind of writing, and I'll describe some other writers who behave this way. But it is the the ability to describe a complex topic with ease, with clarity, with succinctness in a way that makes you feel what this brilliant author is doing and explaining is within your grasp.
00:28:05:02 - 00:28:28:10
Speaker 2
What they're hiding is that they're geniuses. So I mean, and I put sort of Robert Caro and “The Power Broker”, I put you know, and also a former world and practically everything that John McPhee ever wrote in that same sort of like these people are brilliant and they toss off things in ways that make them seem very approachable.
00:28:28:10 - 00:28:56:09
Speaker 2
They describe complex subjects to you, but it's really difficult what they're doing. But that book is really great for sort of understanding how typography functions in composition. And then there's a sort of American version of that called “Layout in Advertising” by William Addison Dwiggins, and you could almost read them side by side and sort of get the sort of impish American version and the very August European version and sort of play them off of one another.
00:28:56:09 - 00:29:08:10
Speaker 2
In fact, at one point I think I did line for line dual type setting of them because I felt that there was some sort of direct similarity between the way that they were describing the topic at the same time.
00:29:08:12 - 00:29:31:03
Speaker 1
It's totally fascinating and and no, I'm not going to like jump in and be like, yeah, you're a typography geek, aren't you? It's awesome. I love the passion. I am curious and we're totally at time. But I as I ask a final question, which is what is your greatest hope 25 years in the future, 2050 for the future of typography?
00:29:31:05 - 00:30:03:00
Speaker 1
I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the buzz topic du jour, which is AI. And Monotype, I know, for instance, has, you know, comprehensive AI assisted, you know, font management platform. So you guys are already involved in this. It is already coming as it evolves. When you think about A.I., when you think about 2050, where is this state of typography and what's your greatest hope?
00:30:03:02 - 00:30:40:18
Speaker 2
Well, things will change fairly dramatically and fairly quickly. We at Monotype and here I'll use the royal we, not me particularly, but all of us together are concentrating on three, you know, fundamental applications of A.I. at this point. And again, this is nascent. This is what's happening this year. Everything could be changed by July. But we're looking at precisely, like you said, using AI and machine learning as we have been since 2016, to help sort of classify and aid in discovery.
00:30:40:18 - 00:31:01:09
Speaker 2
So we have a, you know, a similarity engine that can look at typefaces and say this typeface is kind of like this one, and it is able to create a universe of typographic possibilities and proximities. And so if you have a typeface and you want more like it, it knows what's right next to it and it knows what's the opposite of it.
00:31:01:09 - 00:31:22:18
Speaker 2
So we've used that same AI insisted technology to do pairing. So we have a pairing engine that sort of looks at a serif typeface and finds out what the great sans serif would be for it. So that's that's one sort of like using AI to help people find things because, I mean, the haystack has gotten very big. You know, there are lots of fonts out there.
00:31:22:18 - 00:32:09:09
Speaker 2
And so finding the right one is becoming increasingly challenging. So AI assisted search and discovery is one. Right now we're working on we're working on high fidelity typography for generative AI. So the ability to to mitigate generative AI's desire to hallucinate when it encounters typography, I mean, it does so hilariously, but not very usefully. So as much as I enjoy watching it sort of come up with garbled text, we are cracking the code on how to sort of intervene and provide fidelity, high fidelity typography in that instance.
00:32:09:11 - 00:32:43:11
Speaker 2
Well, and then of course, down the line using AI to, to create type, that will definitely be part of the equation in the future. And, you know, that will probably start with augmenting existing typefaces because not all typefaces have the same character sets or the ability to to set across scripts. So yeah, I look at it this way when I, when I started, when I started as a designer, there were no Macintoshes.
00:32:43:11 - 00:32:46:23
Speaker 2
We did mechanicals.
00:32:46:23 - 00:32:48:01
Speaker 1
That means pencil or pen drawing.
00:32:48:03 - 00:33:14:20
Speaker 2
Yes, the Macintosh changed the world in the most amazing way, and there are a lot of people I encountered as a very young designer who said, I can't, I won't. They didn't want to adapt to it because it was too dramatically different from the career that they had made and sort of existed in for decades. I was young and I was like, Give me it.
00:33:14:22 - 00:33:24:21
Speaker 2
And you think that maybe one of those will happen in your life. But then, of course, ten years later, the the web happened and then ten years later, social media is it.
00:33:25:01 - 00:33:26:15
Speaker 1
And the iPhone.
00:33:26:17 - 00:33:29:03
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. The iPhone nobody saw coming.
00:33:29:05 - 00:33:32:01
Speaker 1
Right, exactly.
00:33:32:03 - 00:34:08:22
Speaker 2
And now this. And this promises to be so transformational that it's hard to imagine in the moment that we're in now how much what we're doing will change. But the the sort of essence of typography, the the form of language being important to conveying meaning on top of meaning and being a container for for knowledge, for transfer from place to place and time to time that will persist.
00:34:08:24 - 00:34:45:13
Speaker 2
What we are most concerned with at Monotype, and me especially, is the stewardship and bending the arc towards towards continued relevance, towards continued fidelity, towards continued well, continuance period. Yeah. So I feel very good about that there, you know, it's a lot of unknowns and not known unknowns. These are pure unknowns. So yeah, I'm excited, but I'm excited because I believe this.
00:34:45:15 - 00:34:56:18
Speaker 2
I do think every day about not about how do I get through to retirement, but what will this look like for my children or my children's children? How will typography be relevant for them.
00:34:56:20 - 00:35:07:18
Speaker 1
Yeah and how will it continue to have a positive impact? I love that idea of layering meaning upon meaning like it's it's it's kind of gets to the heart of it.
00:35:07:20 - 00:35:09:03
Speaker 2
Yes.
00:35:09:05 - 00:35:19:05
Speaker 1
Charles Nix, senior executive creative director at Monotype, educator extraordinaire, thank you so much for joining us on Future of XYZ today.
00:35:19:07 - 00:35:21:16
Speaker 2
It is my pleasure.
00:35:21:18 - 00:35:37:15
Speaker 1
For everyone watching and listening, check out Monotypes website if you want some serious inspiration. And be sure to leave us a five star review wherever you get your favorite podcasts. We look forward to seeing you again in two weeks time. Charles, thank you again for joining us on Future of XYZ.
00:35:37:17 - 00:35:39:20
Speaker 2
Thank you, Lisa.