Henrik Kubel, co-founder of London-based type foundry A2-TYPE.

0:08Claire:Welcome to My Life in Design, brought to you by the DBA and design-focused PR agency, Red Setter. I'm Claire Blythe, co-founder of Red Setter. In this series, I'll be speaking to more people who are shaping the world of design, finding out how they discovered that design was a thing you could base a career around, and how they got to where they are today. This week, I'm here with Henrik Kubel, co-founder of A2 Type, an independent type design studio. He's won most of the major design awards. He's a graduate of the Royal College of Art. He's former president of the UK chapter of the AGI, which is Alliance Graphique International, which, in case anyone doesn't know about that, is a collection of most of them, or a lot of the major sort of designers around the world.

0:53Claire:Basically, there's talented people around the world. Would you say that's a good way of describing it? It's a very old organisation and you cannot apply to be a member. You're being selected from your country and then you're then being vetted again by an international council. And if you're lucky to get through the eye of the needle, then you're part of a group of like-minded people from all over the world. And it's just a wonderful forum. Henrik's Design Typefaces for the New York Times magazine, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, The Economist, great british railways and the king's trust amongst many many others that i'd like to get into now yes so henry welcome to the podcast oh thank you thank you so much i don't do a lot of these but thank you thank you thank you oh i'm really excited to find out you know what can we start because what you do is different from a lot of what the people i've had maybe everyone that i've had on the podcast has um it's done tell me about what is what is a typographic or what is a type designer?

1:54Claire:What do you do? What does A2 do? Ah, so yes, what do we do? Do you know when you open your computer and you go into the font menu and you pick something you like? Yeah. That's what I do. We draw fonts. It's essentially what it is. We draw letters, A to C, numbers, everything. Draw all the weights. We draw all the italics. We do everything. That's the overriding thing, really. We work with the institutions and organizations, magazines, companies and brands, and we draw their farts. Whenever you see a message from someone and you kind of, maybe it's distinct, it's probably the fart that gives you that.

2:29And that's what we're behind. We call it custom farts. For instance, we've done it for the New York Times Magazine. We did it back in 2014 and we just delivered another massive suite. They came back 10 years later saying, do you want to do it again? And we've just done a hundred font package for them, which is an enormous project.

2:48Claire:There are millions of different typefaces out in the world. Why would the New York Times Magazine not just choose one that's out there already? Why would they get a custom one designed? Well, they had custom fonts back in 2014 where we did a huge set for them. At the time, the magazine was run by Gail Bickler. She's the art director there and there's many different art directors also working with her. At the time, 12 years ago, there was a good friend of mine now, a designer called Matt Willey. He's now a partner in the Pentagram office in New York. He came to the New York Times Magazine. We just finished his redesign of the independent newspaper here in UK, and he commissioned us to do all the farts.

3:25It was my first newspaper typeface, so it was very exciting. And then he left, he went to New York, and he called up and said, I'm at the New York Times Magazine now, and do you want to work with me again? And he had this vision for designing a whole palette of farts. Then they used those farts. For 10 years, they still use the farts. And then last year, they came back and said, everything is changing. we want to align our brand more to the core newspaper. And they used two very specific typefaces. They used one called Cheltenham, and they used one called Franklin. The job was to do a new version of the Cheltenham.

3:58It was a typeface from 1903, if I remember right. And Franklin is around about the same type, two well-known typefaces, but they didn't really exist in all the iterations that they wanted. We did the magazine's version of these famous typefaces. They basically match the mother brand of the New York Times, but they have their own set of those typefaces. So we started from scratch doing tons and tons of research from the original sources at St. Bride Library, and we have a lot of specimen books in our own private library. Basically went back to the beginning and said, let's look at everything. We drew the fonts again.

4:37We drew a lot.

4:37Claire:It's a different way of communicating and they'll be able to communicate in a slightly more bespoke way that the New York Times magazine wants to. They choose a custom font. Yeah, custom fonts gives you your own unique voice. That's very important when everyone is shouting. Yes, absolutely. That's a good way of describing it. Custom topography is hugely important and there's been a shift over the last 10 years. Fonts run brands. That's what you see. back in the days it was photography then it was illustration but now most brands what you see first is the font yeah it's the language and if most of them have some brilliant copywriting it's the font and you recognize their message by looking at the letters and you do subconsciously but that's a lot of his customs typography yeah absolutely very very strong thing to have in your toolbox if you're a brand it doesn't matter if you're a museum or you're a newspaper or a magazine The King's Trust, everybody benefits from this.

5:35Having your own thought just puts you ahead of the game. And we are one of the studios that do it. We've been doing it for a long time.

5:44Claire:Tell me about what made you want to become a designer. Did you know design existed when you were a child to know that you could form a career around it? And certainly did you know typefaces were a thing? I had no idea. I grew up in the 70s and I was always creative. I knew I wasn't very good at adding up numbers and math and all that type of stuff. but I was good at drawing and I was always encouraged by my mum in specific also my dad he was an engineer working for the railways for the railways he was third generation working for the railways and my mum was working with the children but she was very creative and I was always kind of encouraged and so growing up I mean there was nothing called design there was nothing it was this design was i mean maybe a piece of furniture was designed but there was nothing called i had no idea but i wanted to be an illustrator so this is growing up in copenhagen growing up just outside of copenhagen and then eventually i wanted to be an artist and i was doing terrible paintings but i wanted to be an artist and i applied for the royal danish academy five years in a row and then i ended up going to a drawing school learning how to draw proper and i loved it and there was a tutor there and she said why don't you apply to back then it was called school of art and craft I think yeah I thought I'm just gonna try that I did and I got in first time and it was incredible I was very unsure but I made a decision to pursue the design and forget about the art and go 100 % in on the design and I just ended up being a graphic designer and I loved it and that was 92 yeah and back then there were like some tools were coming in some font tools and we started drawing fonts on the course like not very good but but it's a funny story because at the time there's a guy called david carson he was traveling the world doing workshops yeah cool so the school i got into eventually changed his name to denmark's design school i had a sabbatical because i had to join the army which i didn't do but if you don't want to join the army it's mandatory but then you have to work in a government agency oh really wow and i was like i don't want to graduate and then having to do this after three years i took a year out i served my duty in some public agency where i actually ended up doing websites is that for a year or so yeah that was a year and then during that time david carson came to the school and he did this workshop i happened to come in and everyone was giving him their typefaces on floppy disk yeah you heard about that it's like this little black thing you can put into your computer it would have stuff on it yes came in and i was like i want to give him some of my fonts and i ended up passing a floppy disk to him with one of my thoughts on and six months later this new magazine came out in america called speak magazine and he used my typeface as the master and for every single thing in the magazine wow it's incredible and i was like he probably got 100 fonts when he was at the design school but he picked mine and it was on the cover it was and i was happy with him doing that well it was incredible i remember i got hold of the magazine eventually i heard on the great one that some of my fellow students had seen it and they all knew about it but no one there telling me because they're all jealous yeah i finally got it myself i was on top of the world wasn't i and i remember then eventually i applied to the royal college about in uk i remember my interview so back then you would send your portfolio and then they've probably got hundreds of portfolios they just select i think double the amount of people that can get on the course yeah and you're invited for an interview i remember you're there with your portfolio and there's about 10 people sitting around the table all the professors and senior tutors asking you questions and you're like english certainly wasn't my first language this was in 98 and i remember i put the the speak magazine on the table saying this is david carter latest magazine and this is my typeface i think everyone's like how's that happen and i i think in a weird way that got me to places yeah that's because it's such a mad thing to be able to do i'm young yeah and then eventually i ended up just like well maybe there's something here and i just started drawing fonts like but i also did a lot of graphic design because it wasn't a font business at all existing well yeah did it even exist so people weren't not to my knowledge Like designers or anything at this point?

10:08Not at all. I mean, everybody was dabbling and everybody had drawn a font, but it wasn't really a career choice. I mean, it's just like, if you like doing it, yeah, go and do it. And if you keep doing the same thing, you end up getting good at it. That's what happened. Yeah, definitely. So that's how it all started. I was pretty much self-taught. And then over the years, I realized, well, hang on, I don't actually know if I'm doing this right. And then I did like a year-long course in Antwerp, the Plantin-Moritas Museum. I was taught by a hero of mine, Frank Lachland, who runs something called Dutch Type.

10:44The thing about that course, you would sit in the museum, Plantin Museum, that's what it's called. Plantin-Moritas, probably got this one now. But you would meet once a month and you would work on this typeface from over eight months. And then I ended up designing a series typeface called Antwork, which was a typeface we didn't really have in our studio. We were doing a lot of magazine work and all that. We needed like a long read, almost historical typeface. I'm going to design this typeface. And then later on, I did further studies in New York. It's going to be called Tyba Cooper. And it was a weird thing because I wanted to learn how to draw fonts.

11:23But the thing is, I already knew. But I always felt like an imposter.

11:27Claire:So you felt like you needed a professional qualification to prove you could? In a weird way, when I entered this course and they didn't really want me there, which was such a weird experience. Felt, yeah, it's a very, very good course. It was like a six-week, very intense. I didn't feel very welcome there. But the way I used it was I had six weeks where I could just do this. And I did. And I did not necessarily font, which was called register. But it was a weird thing because not feeling welcome actually knocked me. The way they were teaching over there, it just didn't work for me. It took me actually a long time to climb back.

12:04I think the way they were teaching was that they'll knock you down to nothing. But it doesn't work for everybody. Thank God I was strong and old enough to be able to say, well, actually, it's not as bad as they say.

12:14Claire:So it took me a long time to get my belief in what you do, get my belief in what I did, get it back. But, you know, it is what it is. And I probably learned a few lessons. But, yeah, it was a weird thing because at the same time, I was also teaching typography at the Royal College of Art. And I have a very different way of teaching than they were teaching over there. It also depends on the tutor. In my case, it's a French tutor. We've since become friends, you know, but he was very difficult. the friends have a weird way of teaching and it's not just typography it's like they basically tell you everything is not very good and hope that from that you will build yourself but if you tell someone who's already insecure yeah what they do is not very good very likely they're never going to continue doing this so i have a completely different approach to teaching which is something I learned from my mom is that no matter how little you have praise it yeah encourage it and I tell you it's like you put a bit of water on a plant yeah it will grow yeah and that was my way of teaching sounds much more positive and productive you'd be surprised how many amazing results you can get from just a little bit of encouragement yeah so my own way of teaching was totally conflicting with the way I was suddenly being taught myself so so I I don't know but but so I did a lot of teaching and I actually think I was I was very good at it but eventually teaching doesn't create a business and we're running a design studio.

13:47Claire:So tell me about that when you finished your own education I know you set up A2 type in 2000 did you work for other people when you left college? When I graduated in Denmark in 97 yeah during all my studies I I were kind of freelancing and associated with different types of studios. Back then, there were a lot of website design going on. And I was doing that. I loved interactive stuff. And then when I graduated, I worked for like a poster designer. And he was actually a member of AGI, one of the old guys in Denmark. And he kept telling me, he's called Finn Nugor. And he's still alive and he still does posters.

14:22That's his thing.

14:23Claire:Oh, really? And I worked for him. And he would always say, you've got to get out there. You've got to get out of Denmark if you want something. You've got to leave. and it really pushed me. But then I also worked for a very large corporate, the design studio, and I thought that all I wanted at the time was to do corporate identities. What I liked about it was that you would have the logo stuff, you would have the manuals. It was like the full package you could get as a designer. You could get to do work on lots of different things and I loved that. And then eventually I was like, this is actually not for me.

14:53I want to go back to studying and then I enrolled at the Royal College of Art. But then at the Royal College of Art, I'm coming back to your question. It was back then when there was a two-year study, and I remember a big group of us, I think we were 30 on the course. It was a guy called Scott, Scott Williams. I thought that he looked like trouble, so I thought maybe we should try and team up with him. And he's such a gentle guy. He's not nothing. He's not trouble at all. He's the most generous and intelligent and smart guy I know. And we ended up teaming up and started working together. And when we graduated in 2000, we set up a studio.

15:26I see. A lot of people from our course actually did that. Yeah. We were one of them. Back then, we were called A2 Graphics SWHK. It was very important for us to get the word graphics into our name because we were doing graphics.

15:39Claire:Yeah. A lot of people were doing interactive stuff, but we wanted to do print stuff. And then time went on, we changed our name to, it became A2SWHK, which is a design studio. We did a lot of exhibition stuff, a lot of books, a lot of magazines. After All Journals, we did the Turner Prize exhibition. basically we did i mean we're so lucky so from our graduate show we we got to do a massive catalog for the craft council called fabric of fashion it was amazing the next job we got was for the vna we did another catalog called radical fashion i'm suddenly ruined this fashion industry and then we started working with how did you do it was it just word of mouth it just this is all based in london wasn't it in shoreditch it just happened i mean getting that first gig from the craft council just a week after graduating was just it's like this is too good to be true and then we got a student shortage it was actually a textile designer from our year so a lot of people from the royal college we're all looking for we kind of wanted to continue what we had at the royal college which was like mini studios this so so someone got a big student shortage and we got like a a couple of desks in that studio so there's a product designer some textile designers and scott and myself and eventually everybody outgrew the business and we ended up taking over the whole studio it was like 100 square meters cost nothing it was crazy it was i think we paid like 13 grand a year which is not a lot of money it was for us but now and then yeah we had that for 10 years which was amazing we didn't know how lucky we were we did mostly graphic design and then around 2010 I think it's a financial crisis, 2009 or 2010 or something like that.

17:20Everything just shut down. So part of our USP unique selling point was we would draw farts for every single project we would do. That would set us apart because no one else could do that or offer that.

17:34Claire:And that was our package. Now everybody does that, but it wasn't so back then. And then when the phone stopped ringing and all that, I actually got a grant from the Danish Art Association, a three-year artist working grant. We'll give you money for three years in a row just to do whatever you want. I spent that money within our studio, not just to pay our salaries, but also to say, well, actually, I don't need to do graphic design. I can just draw farts now. Yeah. Enormously important. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was enough not to have to do graphic design. A lot of people have been looking at our work and said, well, where do I get a font from?

18:13We just drew it for this project and that's what it is, not for sale. So after, you know, we realized, well, maybe there's something here. So we set up a small type studio called A2 Type and that has turned into, well, you could actually buy our fonts.

18:28Claire:Yeah. And that would turn into people calling not to get us to do the graphic design for them, but just to buy the font for their own project. So we split the studio in the sense that part of the studio was called doing graphic design, and then it became the type part of the studio. And then that's turned into doing, we basically do custom work, custom fonts. Custom means it's specific to a client, opposed to when you have a founder, you can buy licenses and everybody can buy the same font if they want. But custom fonts is you work specifically with an agency or a studio or a designer or a brand direct.

19:04we do that a lot and then they get their own font for their business you can still do that now you

19:10Claire:can go on to the website and choose what you want and can you do it that way or is it yeah no we have a retail library there's a lot of stuff there there's a lot of good stuff we have a curator very curated shop or foundry we don't publish other people's typefaces we only do all that's it so we are 200 in charge we are independent we don't sell through any retailers at all yeah which is also different from a lot of other people in the industry. But that's how we chose to do it. So my day-to-day is basically I work with clients direct and draw costs and funds for projects. And I love it. Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it?

19:49Claire:Finding what you love. It's so important. And I always remind myself, well, hang on. I mean, you could work for someone else. You're actually doing what you love. But I just want to come back to the studio. We're in this huge studio. And then eventually they're like, well, time's up. We want to turn this studio into flats. Right. So the whole building, I think Baba Oscar, we were on the ground floor and we were other makers and designers in the same building. We all had big studios for no money and they took it all from us and turned it into beautiful contemporary living spaces. Yeah. And we were like, so suddenly we're like, oh, well, we're just going to find one down the road.

20:28Good luck. Those spaces did not exist anymore. it's really difficult and the price point was different and the state agents knew it and so we ended up next to the town hall in another studio which was less than half the size and four times the cost wow so suddenly we were like 40 grand a year rent which is significant you know yeah because you got to make at least double that if not more to make it worth it but we always said if we want to go out and say we're business we also got to be serious about and have the studio we can't just work from our bedroom or something like that yeah we're not freelancers either we are business and we also need to have a space so we would end up in the studio and it's really nice but the thing about when you rent you are kind of in the hands of the landlord and every single year we will get this email without prejudice the rent has just gone up by 10 % and let you know you always have the option not to and you're like you're stuck because this is just studio and someone just tell now they want 10 % more.

21:27And it went on. We were there for probably six, seven years with that going on. And you can imagine that suddenly we were paying a lot of money.

21:35Claire:Yeah. It was unfair. It was unfair. It was happening to everybody. Every single designer we knew running a studio in shortage were on, just the screws were on from the estate agents. They were having a laugh and we were all suffering. because you know and then we're like we got to get out of this game and we ended up actually we called our bank manager and we said listen this is where we are and we want to do something else and we actually ended up acquiring a small building just across the road from us and we'd never seen it before we found it it was a small residential building it needed so much work and we ended up getting that and working out you know it's like in a similar way as having rented a studio but yeah suddenly it made financial sense because now we were paying ourselves rent yeah that's much nicer anyway everybody has their own business so yeah so we basically packed up our studio and put it in storage for a year and a half and we got to this building completely inside and it was a difficult thing to do because it's a small building but it's ours but it had a lot of problems and one of the problems was damp and you don't want to run the science studio where you have lots of books and paper and it's that of course because it's going to ruin everything and it's not good for your health either yeah so we figured out what to do and the thing i'm told some of those things you do alongside your design practice i'm enormously proud of it also because people don't realize you also do these things yeah so the trick to combat the damp was there was actually a beer garden on the back so we have high grounds on the back wall on two walls and the way you combat that you actually dig down you protect your own wall and then you do it's called a french drain and you put like a pipe with holes in two meters down and then you fill it all up with small stones wringles i think it's called okay before we did that it would just rain in the beer garden it was straight into the studio to this earth and where would it go from there going to our studio but yeah the whole studio got basically on the outside two meters below ground got wrapped in plastic.

23:41We put a drain down that then would go into a big drain, put stringles on all that. And you can't just do that because we didn't own that ground.

23:48Claire:Yeah. So I was like, I'm going to figure out how to do that. The ground was owned by Transport for London. Right. I sent an email to every single person from Transport for London and everybody told me, you're never going to find anyone there. It's such a big organization. I sent an email to every single one working for London on the ground and I got an email back. I got one email back from a guy and he said, I'm the guy you need to speak to. Isn't that amazing? Brilliant. And he said, I know your building. It's a beautiful little building. I know exactly what you're talking about and I know it has problems.

24:22I'm happy to help you. So then it goes through lawyers because then you need to get something called a deed of easement. You need permission to basically put a drain on that ground to protect your building. Yeah, okay. And he helped us to do that. It was a massive, massive, massive project. It took like seven months. But once that was done, we could then start doing it inside of the building, but the building was healthy. And then we did everything. We exposed all the brickworks. We put in new heating system. We sourced Victorian floorboards. Oh, yeah. Because it's like an old warehouse.

24:51Claire:Yeah, I've been to a studio. It's amazing. This whole building project was going on while at the same time my dad passed away, my mom passed away, then COVID happened. A lot, yeah. As well as doing graphic design and drawing fonts and working with clients. So this is this like massive three years and our whole studio was also in storage. So it was like, wow, it was mad. So this is where we are now. We're never going to move, but it was a long journey. So that was after almost 19 years of running a studio, we finally got to a place where we kind of feel safe and it was safe harbor with, but it's a long journey, but nothing comes straight away.

25:27Sometimes people forget when they look at your work and your portfolio and they speak to you, it's like, they forget. yeah you know it's they forget what you've gone through it's like uh we've been doing this for a long time yeah we've also been doing lots of other things on the side including having a studio is a big thing yeah it's a really big thing and i'm very proud of it's almost a design project also yes yeah of course isn't it having a studio is a space away from your house or your flat or your home but wherever you go when you don't work and i think that's enormously important yeah i completely agree well it was for us and i also think that's what kept us together i mean we've been going for 26 years we've been very very fortunate because you look at our work and you look at our portfolio there are no clangers in there we've been very very lucky to work with some amazing people and clients and brands and projects and we still are and and

26:25Claire:well yeah tell me about that can you tell me about your role today let's look at Great British Railways that you worked on with Margaret Calvert. What was that project about? What did she do? Oh, that happened in the middle of all this I just talked about. The Breeze Railway has a massive backstory. So in the 60s, 70s, they had a new sign scheme done by DRU, Design Research Unit. And part of that was they would do the signing scheme and Margaret Calvert and Chuck Kinnear had a design studio. They just finished doing all the motorways. Yeah, of course. Jock Kinnear actually used to work for DIU, but then he set up on his own.

27:05And Margaret, in the beginning, started off as his assistant, but she became a principal and a partner in the studio. So DIU, as I understand, got the signing project, but Margaret and Jock got Kinnear Calvert, as they were called. They got the job of drawing the font.