Interview with Jens Gehlhaar
Jens Gehlhaar is creative director at Brand New School — a production company based in Los Angeles and New York. The prolific and talented type-designer’s typefaces may be visually exciting, impactful, and a bit oddball, but few of his fonts are available commercially.
They are nonetheless ubiquitous, popping up in his on-air identity work for VH1 Classic, Fuel TV, and IMF. Before Brand New School, he worked as an Art Director at Wieden+Kennedy, ReVerb, Imaginary Forces and Dreamworks. He has taught typography at both CalArts and Art Center College of Design and received a myriad of awards: from an Emmy for television graphics, an ADC Gold award for directing, a TDC award for type design to an MVPA award for Best Effects.
Gehlhaar’s typefaces echo one of Eric Gill‘s sentiments about letterforms: “Letters are things, not pictures of things.” His often rough-hewn alphabets reflect their purpose — they are tools designed to communicate. Gehlhaar’s encyclopedic exploration into the form of the sans serif Roman letter in his MFA thesis at CalArts stands as a milestone in contemporary type design and is a testament to his work ethic.
His latest typeface, Capricorn was just released by Die Gestalten Verlag.
A gallery of Gehlhaar’s typeface designs are here.
As a kid, I was always drawing stuff. My dad is a civil engineer with a passion for architecture, so by the time I was ten, I was designing houses as well as cars. When he brought home a Letraset catalog one day, I was hooked, and I realized that I had more fun lettering the captions than drawing the illustrations. I started to draw typefaces for my school’s newspaper and hand-letter posters for my band. I was going to be a graphic designer, specializing in typography. I had no concept that type design could be an end in itself: I simply designed type because as a graphic designer, I had no access to proper production means. Later on, I designed type because at the beginning of the desktop publishing era, there was only a severely limited amount of fonts available. Still later, I found myself designing type because all available fonts seemed to be overused or inappropriate. In all cases, I made typefaces for my own work, not necessarily with the intent of publishing them.
Where did you go to school?
I went through a program called Visual Communication at FH Niederrhein in Krefeld, Joseph Beuys’ birthplace. My undergraduate thesis was conceiving, editing and designing a culture magazine, for which I also designed two typeface families, Westpark and Blindfish (both 1992).
What made you decide to go to graduate school?
At the college in Germany, I felt intellectually under-challenged. There was one class I was crazy about — Design Theory — but that was all. It took me seven years to graduate, because I spent a lot of time making music, and because I had been asked to design the school’s catalog and wanted to finish that job before attacking my thesis. And the catalog ended up taking two years to get made. After I graduated, I went on to work for the little design studio I had founded with two friends. So, for the last few years in college, as well as in my own studio, I was always the most senior designer, and again, didn’t feel challenged by competition (certainly not by the kinds of jobs we had: regional advertising and a few magazines and album covers).
As for a bigger picture, I also felt that German design, with the exception of a few people in Berlin, lagged behind Dutch, British and American design, and I felt I lacked the conceptual abilities as well as the context to make the kinds of leaps that were happening in those countries at the time. I am describing the period between 1988 and 1994, when Dutch designers started to dominate the type design market, when English design generated stars such as Peter Saville, Neville Brody and Vaughan Oliver, and when American design from Cranbrook, Emigre and CalArts started to be known in Europe.
So after I had finished my undergraduate thesis, after I had broken up with a girlfriend, after I had visited a friend at CalArts, I applied there. While I was waiting for September to roll around, I saw an ad for a senior designer position at MetaDesign in Berlin, which at the time seemed like a dream position to me. I applied and was one of a few to be invited for an interview. When I got rejected, it was with the advice to go to California.