This lecture tells the story of one typeface: Empirica, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones and Nina Stössinger. Empirica starts from the most classic letterforms in the Western canon: Roman inscriptional capitals. It is a source of towering importance in the Western letter arts, but it also has a very limited scope, consisting only of capital letters made for carving in stone at large sizes. Moving outward and onward from this nucleus, Empirica attempts to project its logic forward, across a larger character set and family structure, to create a versatile typeface family that can be useful and appropriate for contemporary applications. It’s a story about extrapolating from history and imagining alternate timelines and solutions; a story of idealized letterforms that shine through the ages, but also adapt and translate between different eras and their specific tastes and technologies. It also illuminates different ways of working and understanding a type-design process, as Empirica’s development snaked back and forth between custom commissions for specific applications and a retail release that prioritizes usefulness across a wider audience.

Nina Stössinger is a Senior Typeface Designer at Frere-Jones Type, and a Critic for typeface design at Yale School of Art. In addition to several retail typefaces (including Empirica and Conductor, both designed with Tobias Frere-Jones), she has co-designed custom type for Microsoft, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and New York City’s Moynihan Train Hall, among others. Originally from Basel, Switzerland, Nina studied multi-media design in Halle, Germany and type design in Zurich and The Hague. Nina lives in Brooklyn with her cat.