Discovering typography

- [Interviewer] Could you just take us back to the beginning? So you've been designing type fonts for decades, and your work is some of the best known out there. Anyone who's got a Mac has used Hoefler text, probably many times. That's been on all Macs for quite some time, right? - [Jonathan] It has since system 7, the operating system in the '90s for which Apple commissioned Hoefler Text, and it's been theirs ever since. - [Interviewer] That's incredible. What got you into this space? - [Jonathan] I've always loved lettering. It's something I've always paid attention to, even as a kid. My dad was a set designer in the theater and made most of his living in the '70S and the '60S working on industrial musicals, which were these strange inventions, sales groups who bring together their sales staffs from around the country to have a three-day weekend at a hotel and be dazzled by song and dance and the new products and so on. And he did those, and that ranged, in his case, from doing set design and sometimes costumes and so on to doing all the multimedia. So he always had dry transfer lettering in the house. Press Type was the brand at the time. Letter Set was the next one. I grew up with these things as a kid, and I knew the names of typefaces from childhood and desperately wanted to make them as an adult. And found when I turned 18 that you could study graphic design, and you could be an art director, but there weren't yet programs to study typeface design or really jobs in typeface design. So I found myself kind of doing this as a freelancer very quickly, but at the time when the Macintosh was new, and magazines especially were converting to electronic publishing, and there was this sudden appetite for fonts on the computer. So I learned by doing some work for some very respectable designers early in my career and then branching out to do freelance work for art directors, and it all unfolded from there.