When I was approached by the Production department at CP+B to start managing all licensing of fonts for the agency and clients, I saw this as an great opportunity to immerse myself in an aspect of design that I had always found interesting, as typefaces represent the voice and tone of design messaging. With the emergence of new technology that could utilize custom fonts (webfonts, digial OOH advertising, mobile apps, etc), the licensing of commercial fonts had become much more complex than it was in the past. Consequently, it was a somewhat rarified field in the advertising industry. The days of "buy a font and use it in all your work" were quickly changing and many agencies were inaverdantly exposing themselves to legal risk in their unmanaged use of fonts across different media, so I took it upon myself to become CP+B's in-house font licensing specialist to ensure the agency was remaining compliant with commercial licensing agreements & terms of use. In addition to managing standard commercial font licensing, I also worked with various type foundries on specialized licensing agreements, including unlimited licensing, permission to rename existing commercial fonts for brands, and negotiating licensing extensions to permit small alterations to commercially available fonts, but what I really enjoyed was the process of producing completely new proprietary fonts for brands.

When it comes to purchasing a font for a personal project or even a small or medium size client for limited use in a campaign or even as a CI font, the process is generally pretty simple. On the other hand, situations where a global or national brand needs to use a commercial font as a CI typeface on a large scale in broadcast video, web graphics, live text on a website, and embedded in mobile apps with millions of users in multiple countries around the globe, the licensing process can become very complicated and extremely expensive. In these cases, it can be much more cost effective to contract with a font foundry to create a completely unique proprietary font with copyright owned by the brand. I was fortunate to be able to work with some of the world's leading type designers produce some custom brand fonts during my time at CP+B.

When CP+B was awarded AOR for Domino's Pizza in 2007 one of the primary goals was achieving a complete brand makeover for the iconic pizza chain. The CP+B creative team set about developing a completely new design aesthetic, which included a new typography set. The highly adaptable sans-serif font Trade Gothic was chosen for display graphics & body copy the the elegant Hoefler Text as a serif compliment. As the brand makeover progressed through completely revamping their pizza recipe and developing a cutting-edge mobile app ordering system, it was decided that the pizza boxes would be a great vehicle for communicating all the changes they were making to their customers. Instead of simply gluing a printed ad piece to their existing pizza boxes, CP+B set about turning them into visually engaging, informative art pieces with a distinctive retro-Americana feel, so the typography was an extremely important element.

Using Trade Gothic as a foundation, the design team created a system of layering the glyphs with various outlines, inlines and shadows to highlight a series of hand-etched illustrations and ornaments arranged into mdules that would be arranged and printed on the boxes. While this was a very interesting effect, the ornaments and outlines, inlines, and shadow elements of the display copy had to be manually layered and set in Adobe Illustrator using individual glyphs from the Trade Gothic Font set. Being an extremely labor intensive and time consuming process for the designers and studio artists, they approached me and asked if I could find a vendor who could convert this into a functional digital font package that could be deployed across video, print and digital media. Below are examples of the original hand-set display typeface and some of the original boxes created using the manual layout method.

Monotype designer Terrance Weinzierl meticulously researched antique shadow ornaments in historical print vs. digital screens. Click for larger

Turning this typographic concept from a hand-set copy and paste graphic design exercise into a font software package presented some formidable challenges. First and foremost, it had to be layered when deployed in digital graphics software so each style type was a unique font style. As shown in the construction image above, there was a foundational solid character for each arrangement that was mated with one or more effect layers that sat on top of or behind it. Depending on the arrangement, the font software would have to precisely offset layers with specific tolerances to accomodate variations inherent in the process of printing on uncoated cardboard boxes. In addition, effect styles such as the "antique" shadow and fill had to contain lines of varying width and spacing at different size points so they would not become blurred or create a dizzying moiré effect at very large or small sizes. For the purposes of design integrity, we also didn't want to simply copy Trade Gothic and add layers to it. We wanted to create something truly unique to Domino's. Consequently, this was not a job for an amatuer or run-of-the-mill font foundry so I reached out to the world-class type designers at Monotype Imaging for assistance.

As the copyright holders of Trade Gothic, they had access to the original 1948 metal die cuts and drawings for this famous typeface so they were experts on the subtleties of the lines and curves of every glyph and knew some of its shortcomings in use in modern design, especially on digital screens. They saw this not just as an opportunity to create a custom font for a top tier American brand, they also saw it as an opportunity to make some improvements on the original design. After the initial completion of the layered Pizza Press display font, we progressed to additional phases that included adding a "reverse shadow" layer and a complete sans serif character set for standard body copy (One Dot) as well as a serif replacement for Hoefler Text (Two Dots). In 2014 the Domino's Pizza Press font was awarded Certificate of Excellence in Typeface Design from the venerable Type Director's Club. In June 2018, Monotype Designer Terrance Weinzierl and I were invited to give a presentation on the creation of the Pizza Press font set at Monotype Brand Days Event San Francisco.

In 2017, the legacy non-profit American Heart Association (AHA) approached CP+B to assist them in the implementation of a new brand identity and a variety of broadcast and social media campaign work. As a charity, it suffered from a problem that many similar organizations with a large volunteer staff and ad-hoc pro-bono marketing have-- a lack of aesthetic consistency in the work they create, especially in the typographic elements. As a part of the brand makeover, the CP+B Creative team proposed having a custom, proprietary typface created that could be freely distributed and used in all media types with none of the logistical complications and expense of licensing commercial fonts.

While researching typefaces as inspiration for the custom font we would create for them, we found the symmetrical circles, squares and triangles in Geometric Sans-Serif style typefaces (e.g. Futura, Century Gothic, Avenir, Brown) have a happy, light feel to them, which would support a modern look yet maintain the AHA image as a positive, public health service mission. Geometric Sans typefaces are also very adaptable to both print and digital media, but we also had some technical requirements specific to AHA. In addition to use as an advertising display and body copy font with a full set of weights and styles in italic and non-italic formats, American Heart association also need a typeface that would maintain readability at very small and condensed sizes. As a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit, they publish a number of financial reports each year, so having a typeface with very a very readbable number set that could be monospaced for tabulated charts and remain legible as fine print was also very important. Readability at small sizes (especially for numerals) is not a strength of most Geometric Sans typefaces, so we knew this would present some challenges. With our aesthetic and technical needs established, I again worked with the type designers at Monotype Imaging to create a unique version of this classic 20th Century modern type style in a full set of weights, plus italics and condensed versions with some special touches to improve readability at small sizes. As a reference to the clinical term for the two-part sound of a beating heart, the CP+B Creative team gave this font the name "LubDub Sans."