Designing Obsidian

Andy Clymer, a senior designer at Hoefler & Co. and an instructor in the Type@Cooper program, shares the design process behind Obsidian in this 2015 talk on typography. He starts from the point that designers of type and lettering use custom tools to draw and manufacture their work, as true today as it was in the days of punchcutting and steel-plate engraving.

After the Surveyor family of typefaces was finished, Clymer explored an approach in which custom tools could help prototype highly intricate designs that might otherwise have been too complex to put into development. That process led to Obsidian, an elaborately shaded typeface that refers to the same nineteenth-century tradition of engraved lettering that Surveyor is rooted in.

The talk covers the design process, the custom tools involved, and some of the unexpected challenges and discoveries along the way.