IMPOSSIBLE IDEAS

Maria Doreuli named her studio after a typography theory, then spent a decade proving the name right. In our interview, the Contrast Foundry founder talks about pushing ideas through forty versions, the letter that took months to solve, and why she had to throw out the idea of originality altogether.


Maria, you founded Contrast Foundry in 2014, and the studio's name has held up, with each project contradicting the last. Was that the principle all along, or has it come to life while doing the work?
The story behind the foundry name goes back to my studies. "Contrast" comes from Gerrit Noordzij's theory of writing and the contrast models behind any typeface, very deep. My good friend and classmate Krista Radoeva was the one who came up with the name and was kind enough to allow me to use it.

Only later, as the library started growing, did I begin thinking that the name is even deeper and also reflects how I approach each next typeface. I realized that in each next project, and I am particularly talking about personal typeface projects, I like to question what I did before. It can be a contrast in application and style between William and Chimera, where William is a revival superfamily based on Caslon and the next one, Chimera, is a wild display typeface that is not based on any existing typeface.

It can be a more subtle contrast, like between CoFo Sans and CoFo Gothic. CoFo Sans is primarily a body copy typeface with low contrast and generous spacing, and CoFo Gothic is a tight, higher-contrast design.

CoFo FlicFlac and CoFo Plusha: in FlicFlac I experimented with how big a building block in a modular typeface can be, and in Plusha, the opposite, I tried to keep each of the forms as unique as possible and brought a lot of unusual handwritten constructions into the typeface.

Our typeface library reflects this: we do not only release large type families or wild display ones. It is a big range of styles and now also scripts, all influencing and cross-pollinating each other, and we want to keep moving in this direction.

Contrast Foundry is one of the few woman-founded, majority-women teams in type design, which you've said wasn't planned. Has it changed anything practical, in how you run the studio, hire, or decide which projects to take?
Up until this year, we've never had an open position in the studio. All the team members came to us naturally, they either started with an internship or were recommended by a friend, and later we made a position for them.

I believe it naturally happens that we find it easier to work with those who are similar to us, whether it is gender, roots, taste, or anything else, on a subconscious level. So this is how it started for us. At times we were 50/50, but then, without realizing it, the team gradually became primarily female. I am proud that we are one of the few primarily female studios. I also believe any team is stronger when it is balanced and diverse.

I don't think that being a woman-founded team ever influenced the projects we take or how we run the studio, and even if I suspect it does play a role somewhere, I just can't compare, because I do not have other experience. What I definitely see more and more these days is the support from female design leaders. They push our work forward in a world where the larger chunk of business is still in men's hands. We see our typefaces being chosen for various feminist projects, and this warms my heart. I never planned for it to be this way, but the amount of support is amazing, and we are all very grateful.

You put every idea on paper, no matter how wild or uncomfortable. Can you think of a recent idea that looked like a dead end on the page and turned into something real anyway?
Honestly, I don't really remember a case where we've had a seemingly dead-end idea that turned into something. If we do not believe in an idea, we do not move forward with it. It is more likely that we have wilder ideas and less wild ideas, but we believe in both.

Just to clarify, by saying "putting an idea on paper," I do not necessarily mean that an idea has to be drawn on paper by hand. Sometimes it is good to use a marker and quickly sketch, but sometimes you go and draw digitally right away. The important thing is not to keep ideas just in your head, but to find a way to put them in front of yourself, to materialize them.

Putting "on paper" is a great way to both test an idea and document your ideas in general. You may have all kinds of ideas in your head, but they are not real until you and others can see them and reflect on them. And only when you've drawn all of them, the first things that came to your mind and those you only got to at the end, when you had completely exhausted yourself, only then can you be sure you have really tried everything. The one you land on might often not be "the best," but a compromise that "works" in the given case.

I find this approach particularly great when working on a wordmark commission. During the first presentation to the client, we usually show very different concepts. We don't give them references, we draw a wide range of ideas and present how they work in their wordmark directly. This is how we narrow down the directions. In a project for LOAM, we did the same, and we were happy to see that the client went for the wildest one.

I would not go as far as to say that we did not believe in this idea, we loved it. But it was definitely on the most expressive side of the spectrum, and that side does not always happen to be chosen. We are so happy they chose it.

Once an uncomfortable sketch survives, what's the next hard step? Where do most ideas get stuck on the way to a finished typeface?
It is relatively easy to draw A–Z. Even among them, there are lots of tricky letters, the diagonals (v, w, x, y, z), for example, that may take months to resolve. And it is best to think about the hard ones beforehand, when you are still conceptualizing.

Then you want to draw multiple weights, sometimes widths, and optical sizes, and you get ambitious about designing a larger character set that will allow more people to use the typeface to set texts in different languages. And this is the hardest bit, it can easily get overwhelming and you lose the motivation to continue.

We start by designing at least a few scripts, which is already several times more work, so we try to take slower steps in creating large families. Also, I strongly believe that more styles are not always better. Having to choose from a hundred styles in a family can be overwhelming for designers and actually scare them away.

Getting stuck in a project is normal, no one can draw the same thing continuously for many years and stay sane. But being a type designer requires the ability to get yourself unstuck: you need an inner motivation to keep going, and to limit your appetite. Focus on the core, then release it. You can always add more styles and an extended character set later on.

The typeface Chimera was the project where your method clicked. What's one thing you did on Chimera that you now do on everything, and one thing you had to throw out?
The most important thing that I've learned while working on Chimera is that if you really push an idea, even if it feels unsolvable at the start, you will make it work. It does not happen easily; it comes with a lot of compromises, killing your darlings, reconsidering the core elements, but you will make it work.

But I think that for some projects you need to be mature enough and have enough experience to make them work. I used to devalue my work on William, because it was a revival and "not my own design." But now, having grown as a professional and teaching as well, I do think that you first need to learn the rules and the tools. It is too much to design your first typeface and aim for it to be original at the same time, that is setting yourself unrealistic expectations. And also, can you be truly original in type design? That could be a discussion on its own.

So the one thing that I now do is this: when I am stuck on a problem, I just exhaust myself, draw dozens of variations of a letter while putting it in context with the others. A solution always comes up in this process. Like it did for the "g" in Chimera.

And what did I have to throw out? Hm, the concept of originality in type design. Originality in type design comes from a careful, thoughtful, and personal combination of things that existed before you. And from craft, the level at which you execute.

Hamburgerfonts turns the whole catalogue into something a stranger, even a child, can pick up and play with. Where did that format come from, and did it actually reach people outside the design world the way you hoped?
When we started our collaboration with The Office of Ordinary Things, the first thing we did was a research visit to the Letterform Archive in San Francisco, to see all the possible ways designers have promoted their typefaces. We saw a few examples of mix-and-match specimens during our visit, and after exploring a bunch of ideas, we chose Hamburgerfonts, because it is very bold, very expressive, and I don't think that anybody else would have gone that far. The small children's book format itself came about later in the process.

And this is another way in which "contrast" plays out in our name. At least for me, it means we are not afraid of doing things differently, of shaking up type design conventions. And this is probably the thing that I like doing the most.

As for the reach, it definitely exceeded our expectations. I would not say that we have many people with no connection to design ordering it, but I do see that non-designers can relate to Hamburgerfonts more than to any other type specimen. Quite a few designers get Hamburgerfonts for their children or their friends' children. We've heard feedback from our small readers that there are "too many words" in the book. Maybe this is something to consider for next time, can we actually design a type specimen with no text? Or very little text? Something to explore in the future.


You've said quality typography is getting harder to make because everyone wants it faster. What's one thing in your process you refuse to speed up, and one place you've found a shortcut that works?
I don't think there is any shortcut that you can take that is not cheating. We don't want to speed up the conceptual part, it is better to think the idea through before you start than to keep redrawing it later. And we also definitely don't want to speed up the production side, the part often considered "boring," this is where the idea gets its hard test and small but important decisions need to be made.

Something that helps us is having a strong in-house team by our side. It also helps that some of us are based in opposite time zones, work can keep moving almost around the clock when we need it to, and still within everyone's normal working hours. Not really a shortcut, but I think it helps.

Type is infrastructure, built to be used and scaled, but the work is also playful. On a recent project, was there a moment you had to choose between the fun version and the practical one? Which won?
As you said, it all depends on context and on the infrastructure you are designing for. Sometimes you need to prioritize, make the typeface calmer so that the reader does not get distracted, but there are many cases where the purpose is exactly to distract, to grab attention.

So what I am trying to say is that you don't have to choose. You can combine both, and this is what we did in our project for Muse, the typeface system we designed together with COLLINS.

The display type family Muse Display consists of four styles: three of them are super playful, and one is designed to be the workhorse for when you just need to set a regular headline. I think this is a perfect example of how playfulness can work at scale if you design it to do so.

We've also designed a custom version of our CoFo Sans and CoFo Sans Mono for them, they chose one of our most practical type families and made it a little more their own. Not necessarily playful, but even more usable in their own infrastructure.


You've said an idea often takes forty versions before it feels right. Is there one sitting in the studio now that still looks impossible, the next thing you're trying to make work?
I need to sit down and finally finish CoFo Plusha. It was released on Future Fonts back in 2020, crazy to realize it's been six years. Since the release, it's been used a lot already, but it has not "graduated" yet. I still see many things that I question and consider unresolved. From the start of the project, I've been pushing the inconsistency, mixing uppercase and lowercase forms, roman and handwritten constructions, bringing uniqueness to every shape rather than copying from one to another. I think it works really well in certain cases, but in order to make it work on a larger scale, I need to bring in more structure. The question is how much structure a typeface built on inconsistency can take before it stops being itself.