Transcribed with Otter.ai
Guest Nick Shinn
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Hey. Hey everyone. Welcome to unique ways with Thomas Girard, an audio podcast got a notable guest on today. He’s a typeface designer that was born in London, England in 1952
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he attended Bedford School, then Leeds Polytechnic, where he earned a dip, A, D, in fine art of his typeface designs, he says the beautiful letters aren’t enough to make a successful typeface. He also wants to create faces that are design solutions. Please join me in honoring and welcoming. Nick Shin, welcome,
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hi. Are you ready for 20 questions? Yes, shoot, okay. Question one, tell me a little bit more about yourself. What do you do?
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Well, give you an overview of my career.
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After I
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graduated,
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I left England and moved to Toronto
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and began a career in advertising at the bottom, because my degree was in fine art, I was pretty much self taught in
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how to make artwork for well, in those days, it was for print production.
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So anyway, I started at the bottom, worked my way up
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to become an art director and eventually creative director. I worked in both
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retail, consumer advertising and business to business
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and and then
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I changed, changed horses, as it were, in
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1988
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and I got myself a Macintosh computer, set up and started business as a freelance graphic designer.
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And for about the next 10 years or so, my work was quite varied, but two of the main areas were book cover designs and also marketing newsletters, which had a very strong editorial design content and and then
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during those first two phases of my career, I’d been trying to get my type designs published and without much success, a little bit of success here and there, and eventually, after having several designs published by by font shop as part of their font font series, I decided to take the plunge full time in 1998 and I launched the shin type foundry with my wife Carrie as a partner. And since then, I’ve been working pretty much exclusively designing typefaces. Most of the work is my ideas, which I then hope people will buy licenses for. But I’ve also done some, a fair amount of custom work,
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and at the moment,
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I still have lots of ideas for typefaces, but I haven’t I’m not publishing quite as much as I used to, and recently, I’ve been working more on a couple of other I guess you call them side projects, one of which is making documentaries, and the other is
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graphic images involving my own Type designs, I guess you call them text based art, and these could be available in anything from
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a fine art print in a gallery to being printed on merchandise such as mugs and T shirts.
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So that’s that’s a brief overview.
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Great. That sounds great. Just to know for our audience, Nixon and I don’t know each other until now, but we’re starting to have some great response in the typography episodes, with Eric speakerman Being a notable guest and our most popular guest so far. So of course, Nixon is a great addition to this. So number two, what’s the key piece of knowledge that makes you different?
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Well, in the area of type design, I would say it’s, it’s that background as a typographer, um, first in advertising and then in graphic design.
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So I’ve actually, you know, I’ve specked a lot of type in various
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in various media as the technology has evolved so. So that’s something that informs my type design to a large extent. For instance, my first really successful type.
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Type was Fontes, which was,
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well, that there was, there was a lot of the the sketching that I used to do in comps for ad layouts back in the day using marker pens. There was a lot of that casual quality in that typeface which
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kind of fit nicely with the deconstructed, grungy era in which in which I designed it
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nice. Yeah. I mean, your conversation kind of makes me think of our previous guest, Debbie Millman, who is, I guess, more known for branding, but when there are typographic elements in that it becomes typography, in a way. So it’s super interesting.
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Okay. Number three, why this of all things? Why do you do what you do?
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Well, you had actually given me a list of these questions before this interview, and that one, I think, caused me the most cause for introspection why I do what I do, and I think I’ve gravitated towards
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type design for
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going right back to my my early education And my experience with the education system was that I’ve always been interested in in everything.
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And as you move through the school system, they keep closing doors on you that you have to specialize more and more. And I didn’t want to do that well, because, as I said, it’s all grist for the mill, and I felt that going to art school would give me the best opportunity to continue to work, both academically
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with words And also using my hands, because,
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you know, they, during my education, they, they pointed, kept pointing me in these academic directions. But I like drawing and as much as I like to write poetry and so, so that’s why
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I, I moved towards advertising, because that’s somewhere,
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especially in the in the print era, where one got to work with both text, words and images and and I like that idea, and also advertising, I felt was at the center of the consumer culture that’s so dominant in the way we live, and I wanted to get inside it and experience it, to to see what it was like, so that I could learn as much as possible about it, and Also
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maybe learn how to use some of those skills
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to help make the world a better place.
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Great. And just another note for the audience, if you’re liking this episode, stay tuned for an upcoming episode with Ellen Lipton. She’s a great writer, but has a typography focus. I think so. Number four is a difficult question for some of our guests, but the question is, what does your future look like?
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It’s It’s,
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well, like I said, I got those couple of side gigs on the way at the moment,
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the the documentaries. And I’m a great collector of books and records.
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I’m always perusing thrift stores and that sort of place, looking for
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curiosities. And
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so some of the documentaries I’ve been making under the title of the treasures of this institute.
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It’s about the things I’ve collected and
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the meanings I can unearth in them once I’ve got them back home and started to look at them more closely and consider how, how they all make sense.
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So documentaries are one thing, and the other one is the the aspect of my work as text based art. I mean, I did study Fine Art originally and from the era when conceptual art first became a really big thing. So I’m familiar with
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text based art that one finds in galleries, and another area that I found it in typography is.
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In specimen books, that peculiar kind of concrete poetry that was recognized by Alistair Johnston in his
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important work on the genre. And that’s something that’s fascinated me. And I sometimes wonder if it isn’t the the type specimens,
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collecting them, studying them, making them, if that isn’t, you know, one of the driving forces in my interest in in typography, as much as actually designing the type faces.
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Great. Okay, so switch gears here. Number five, the we say this is unique to this podcast. The question is, let’s talk about location. How does the notion of place play into what you do?
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Well, the most important thing for me has been
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to
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to work at home, because I’ve never liked commuting for the
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the environmental footprint it places, not only on on traveling, but on having
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two places to live and work, as it were, your workplace and and your home. So it always seemed to me that it was, it was a good idea to work from from one’s home, and I’ve been doing that for about 30 years now.
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If by location you mean what part of the world you have to be be living in.
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I moved to Toronto because it was
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halfway between where I come from in England and where my wife comes from, which is Winnipeg in Manitoba, and Toronto was
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a happening place back in in the 70s, and that’s where we raised our kids, and
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so yeah, it all seemed to come together for us in Toronto, but
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13 years ago, we moved out of the city to a Small town north of it. And one of the reasons for that was the was climate change. We were looking for a place that would be least affected
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by by the change in climate and cities being heat sinks that didn’t appeal to us. So Orangeville is actually 300 meters or 1000 feet higher than
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than Toronto. So and we looked at the maps, and it seems to be,
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seems to be better place to live than some of the parts of Canada that are getting devastated by
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the climate crisis.
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Nice, good, okay. And number six, we had to start from the beginning. What advice would you give your former younger self?
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Well, that’s
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I don’t think I can answer that, because I’ve always been terrible at taking advice,
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and I I don’t think I’ve made any mistakes. That’s not to say that I was made the best decisions, but I don’t see any point in looking back and second guessing what one’s done in the past. It it’s happened, and there’s no,
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I don’t think that thinking, Oh, I should have done that, or I should have done this. I don’t think that makes I don’t find that,
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yeah, I just don’t relate to that. Sorry, right now, that’s great, okay, seven, what’s a day in your life like?
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Well, a typical work day would involve rising at noon,
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going downstairs for breakfast, getting the getting the Globe and Mail off the front step,
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putting,
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putting a record on the turntable, usually Mozart and having half a great food and some porridge with my wife, she would be doing the Sudoku while I’m reading the news, which is always
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a great pleasure, as the globe mail is entirely set in my fonts.
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After that, I would go upstairs to my studio, where I would do some email and catch up on little bit of social media to see what’s what’s happening in the world,
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and
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then Carrie and I would go for a walk to.
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To the coffee shop.
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When we moved to our present location, we made sure it was in within walking distance of a nice coffee shop, because when you’re working in your studio and sitting in front of a computer, you need to get out and stretch your legs once in a while. So we go to the coffee shop in the afternoon, then maybe I’d get a little little bit work done in the afternoon. In the evening, I would probably go down to my sports club. I’m a keen squash player, so I would work out in the gym or play some matches dinner in the evening, and then later in the evening or and in a small house, that’s when I do most of my work.
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Nice. I like it. Number eight, lifelong learning is a popular topic. How do you stay up to date?
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Well, like I said, I read the newspaper and
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I rely on social media to point me in the direction of various news about what’s happening. And there is, oh yeah, I watch a man, poor and company on TV. I find that that’s the best TV news program. I mean, like yesterday, she was interviewing the president of a Serbia. It was, that was, that was pretty impressive,
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nice and halfway. Number 10. How do you deal with Oh no. Missed one tools. Can you talk about your use of digital and analog tools?
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Well, in an analog
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I’ve I have done quite a bit of calligraphy, so I do that occasionally,
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but I don’t actually use it in
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in in in my digital work, I do sketch with a pencil in notebooks to help work out ideas, but
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But generally speaking, I work on on the computer, and I Use font lab for designing type faces and my preferred layout application is
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Adobe InDesign. It was Quark Express for many years, but I use it in design to make all the specimens
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for the fonts. And these range from from booklets,
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PDF booklets. Now I have had a few printed pieces that I’ve made in the past
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to your typical
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poster images for for font font sales. And these would be online and that they would be, usually in the two to one horizontal ratio. I am quite proficient in Photoshop as well, and just recently for the documentaries, I’ve started using
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Premier Pro to make them
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awesome man, fun. Next. Number 10, how do you deal with work life balance?
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Well, I I’m not sure that balance is the paradigm I would you apply to the relationship between work and life. I’ve always found it difficult to disentangle the two.
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And as far as work goes,
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for many people, it’s a form of play, if you’re fortunate and you’re not working on an assembly line. So if you looking back on my career, it’s more a question of autonomy. I think that having autonomy is good for one’s work life balance. So when I, when I was working in the ad agencies, I was on a payroll, and the boss told me what to do.
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And then when I was
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as a when I was the freelance graphic designer, I was working for clients. It wasn’t quite so onerous being told what to do by clients, but eventually,
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in the type business, I do commissioned work, certainly, but the majority of my work is product development. I develop digital fonts which
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and I can work on them whenever I choose, and do whatever crazy stuff I think may or may not interest people in licensing. So I really enjoy that that level of autonomy at the moment.
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COVID. And the other thing the work life balance. Like I said, I think working at home is good for that. And I’m also I had some heart issues
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maybe 12 years ago. And so I take the health and fitness thing quite seriously as being important to
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to the the equilibrium
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in one’s life. And I’ve also,
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over the years, I’ve been involved in a number of pro bono work, mainly to do with with the environment and that kind of social engagement that, too, I think, is an important part of of the the balance in one’s life.
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Great. That’s great. Number 11, if you weren’t doing what you do now, what would you be doing? Well, I wouldn’t be doing
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anything. I know what you mean. You mean
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what? What would you be doing as an alternative?
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I
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don’t know. I
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Oh, yes, I’d be writing my memoirs. How about that?
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What would you not like to do with your career?
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With my career?
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I wouldn’t like to go back to
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having to rely on on clients for work. And in fact,
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I don’t think I’ll, I’ll have to do that in future, because
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I do have a pension now being
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superannuated, and it’s and I still have a fair amount of income from royalties from types I’ve designed In the past which people are still interested in licensing. So,
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yeah, I don’t think I’ll be going back to having to rely on
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other people’s direction for the kind of work that I’m doing.
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Perfect number 13. If you had a word favorite word, quote or sentence. What would it be?
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Well, I’ve got two answers for that. The the first one I asked my wife, and she said it was, you’re cute, and the the other one is phrase that I’ve been working with
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in some of the
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the text based imagery that I’ve been doing recently,
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it is what it is,
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and that’s something I found that I was able to corral into a square shape and
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render in a variety of my typefaces, and so that’s something that’s finding its way onto
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to the merchandise.
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How about a least favorite word, quarter sentence?
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My least favorite word is fuck, and I do use that word myself, but what I don’t like is when
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a bunch of bros get together and strutting and just talking tough to one another, and it’s like, Fuck is every other word. So I just find that kind of mask masculinity.
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I don’t like it.
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You could choose one word to describe yourself. What would it
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be? ZZ Top,
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because of the beard and the hat. I know that’s two words, but it’s only five letters, so
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cut me some slack. That’s cool. What keeps you up at night?
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What keeps me up at night most is if I have
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a talk or speech or just something to say in the next day, and I find myself just rehearsing it in my head again and again and not being able to get to sleep. So
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that’s something that, yeah, I mean, I do enjoy
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talking and presenting, but it it’s very It’s stressful.
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Final stretch here, what’s a dream you’re chasing?
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What’s a dream? Well, the text based art, I think, is something that
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I’m getting around to. I’d like to have a gallery showing of that kind of work
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in the future. That’s something I’ve been working on.
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Uh, great. And what inspires you?
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Well, for inspiration, I think it has to be something that
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you actually have responded to, and that would be the person who’s really inspired me a lot is Greta Thunberg, the climate activist, when she
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when she took a sailboat across the Atlantic rather than fly so I thought that was a very,
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very inspirational way to say, No, you’ve gotta stop.
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You gotta stop flying. You just there’s no way we can go on abusing the atmosphere quite so much. So, yeah, so I haven’t flown a plane, in a plane for but for several years,
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great, and last couple here number 19, any advice you’d like to share?
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Well, it’s going on from the last question, don’t fly and don’t eat beef and all those other things, which
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putting so much CO two in the atmosphere and using plastic and don’t buy new things, if you can get something old and repair it, and it is possible
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to to do that, although
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I would never criticize or shame anybody for their environmental decisions, because ultimately, it’s just, it’s a systemic problem that we face
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great And finally, number 20, the one that everyone loves. How can our listeners keep tabs on you? Or maybe, what’s our call to action?
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What was that last thing? Call to Action? Yeah, what do you think we should do moving forward?
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Oh,
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well, in design, or just as in general, yeah, it’s kind of a two part thing. How do we how do we best consume your work and and where? Where can it take us, I guess, Oh, me,
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well, I,
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I’ve been engaged in
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type drawers.com,
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it’s kind of a forum for type designers, so I post frequently in there, so that’s got a lot of my talk and ideas, and I do generally try to include a lot of images with the posts I make,
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and some of it’s from my own work. And in social media. I post a lot on on Facebook and also LinkedIn, so
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I don’t have a huge number of
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friends in in those media. So if anybody listening to this would like to
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get in contact with me that those would be the places
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Awesome. Well, that’s super great, you know, with the popularity of Eric speakerman’s episode and then, and then you kind of adding to that realm of content is, I think, really great for our listeners. And I’m excited to keep going with this. Thank you so much for joining. Oh, you’re very welcome, Thomas, thanks for inviting me. Thanks.
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