what is inspiration ?
Soya ohboy of catslock.com, on what you really get out of a good prof :
“Aren’t there enough fonts? Isn’t there enough music?”
—Ed Benguiat
I love fonts. I love the feeling of their glyphs; the thicks and the thins, the bowls, that negative space that sometimes makes up more of the shape than the strokes themselves. I am downright romantic when it comes to type. So last summer, as a graduation present to myself, I took a typeface design class with Ed Benguiat at SVA.
Taking a class with Ed is indescribable. The man’s a legend. From start to finish, he’s telling the class stories - stories about being a sort boy at a printing press, about the start of digitized type, about the founding of ITC, about the time he and Milton Glaser and Herb Lubalin crashed the field at Yankee Stadium, piss drunk. If he never gave me any information related to design whatsoever, I would still feel like I was learning something so important, so precious and esoteric. Because Ed can teach me how to set a round next to a straight, and he can walk over and refine my serifs, but that’s not going to give me his mind or his vision. Learning from people like Ed isn’t about technique or tips or tricks. It’s about being inspired, being so overjoyed that a person like this exists and is telling you about anything, about his new Cessna plane, that the energy overflows your body and pours into anything you’re making.
I’m taking another class with Ed now. He remembered me :)
(emphasis is my own)
