How do you craft a typeface that reflects a design studio? XYZ Type shares its wisdom

Versed in making “useful, quietly upbeat fonts” in their joint foundry: XYZ Type, Ben Kiel and Jesse Ragan work between St. Louis and New York, designing custom typefaces for a range of brands, cultural institutions and publications. When Polymode “a queer and minority-owned graphic design studio”, creating thoughtful work in the cultural sector (run by Brian Johnson and Silas Munro) approached the duo to design a custom typeface that represented their studio practice, Ben and Jesse immediately knew that this was a creative pursuit that would take them on a bit of a “wild ride”.

In the studio’s talk as part of the Type@Cooper Herb Lubalin Lecture series last month, Jesse shares that as a foundry XYZ always leads a project by asking: “Why do you need a custom typeface?”, a question they delivered to Brain and Silas at Polymode during the first stage of the project. In Polymode’s case the challenge in crafting this bespoke character set was twofold: they wanted to create something that encapsulated the spirit of Polymode studio, whilst developing a kind all encompassing typographic toolkit for its multidisciplinary practice – not a simple undertaking. From the offset, “the typeface would need to work in many different contexts because Polymode does exhibit design, book design, identity design, and many other kinds of projects”, says Jesse. “Polymode wanted a typeface with a strong, distinctive voice that was adaptable to all those environments. It was a broad brief and, in some ways, an impossible brief.”

It was this multiplicity that allowed the duo to experiment with Polymode Sans as a variable font, not just as a fun and fashionable design choice but rather a series of considerate adaptations and evolutions to a character set that would permit Polymode to truly morph the custom typeface’s expressions to its many functions. In collaboration with Brian and Silas at Polymode, XYZ developed a sliding scale of “realness” allowing different weights and expressions of Polymode to apply for different contexts and functions – evolving their baseline utilitarian sans serif (which they named “Acting Basic”) all the way to its more bold and playful appearance, “opulence”.

Something that forms part of Polymode’s approach is a process of “poetic research” which Brian describes in the Herb Lubalin Lecture, as “bringing your full self to a project”. Influenced by references inside and outside of type design, the studio delivered a broad visual gallery of everything from its thrift store finds to art influences from the duo’s college days, that have all shaped their identity and the kind of work the studio makes. Passing this on to XYZ, the foundry were faced with an eclectic image library as an entry point for type design.

“They really did give us ‘everything and the kitchen sink’. The images consisted of portraits of Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, a silkscreen of a Candy Darling nude over a 3D pop-art typeface [...] It really kept going and going,” says Ben. “I think there was so much of Silas and Brian’s personal identities in this collection that they gave us, that it made the typeface so much more personal,” shares Jesse. This catalogue made the pair rethink “how we thought about what a typeface could be or where it could come from,” shares Ben.

Finding commonalities between all these visuals, XYZ type mapped out some parameters and dug deep into its archive of “vernacular lettering and specimen books” (and millions of pictures of signs), starting with a revival of Lining Gothic found in an American Type Founders specimen. By pulling it away from some of its original appearances, and leaning into its bizarre and quirky details, Polymode Sans slowly took shape. Once they started experimenting with variable font technology they knew they had found their match. “It had the right level of friction that we wanted in the personality of Polymode. It invited a closer look, but also could recede into the background.”

You’ll see Polymode Sans in use in a wonderful range of Polymode’s projects from print to web, to street long installations. XYZ and Polymode studio have made the typeface publicly available “excited by the possibility of seeing the typeface out there in the world and putting their ideas into the hands of other designers,” Ben concludes. “We’re looking forward to seeing it used in unexpected ways. I am impatiently waiting to walk down the street or into a store and see this design in a brand or context that will catch me off-guard; hopefully with delight!”