A short bonus episode showcasing a few standout moments from this week's guest interview with Eleni Beveratou from Dalton Maag ~

Daring Forever. Podcast with Radim Malinic

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Radim Malinic: Welcome to this bonus episode of the Daring Forever podcast. As you know, this is my chance to zoom in on a few standout moments from this week's interview, find the moments that deserve a second look, and dig deeper in what makes them special. This week, I spoke to Elaine Beverato, who's a type designer and creative director at Dalton Maag, where she crafts bespoke typefaces for many of the world's leading brands and systems.

In our conversation, we talk about why accessibility and creativity belong together, how new technology is reviving forgotten craft, and the responsibility of designing letters for billions of readers. The episode published a few days ago was titled Dare to Stay Curious, Letter by Letter, and it was a conversation about curiosity, collaboration, and why knowledge can be fast-tracked.

 if you haven't checked out a full episode yet, here are four standout moments

I think there are two kinds of us, or sometimes it's the same person but we disassociate from it. I have made a pact that I try when I walk to, not be too judgmental about how type is used out there because, people are people and they're gonna use type the way they want to. sometimes some things really catch my attention and I'll get the picture here and there.

Eleni Beveratou: if it's something very pretty or something very unexpected or very unusual, I'll photograph that. But I try personally to not, lose my sleep over that. But I think some type designers can only see type, when walking outside. I try to, switch off a little bit when I walk in the street because otherwise I'd get obsessed with all the bad kerning and all the bad, alignments of type and 

Radim Malinic:  kerning is usually the worst one.You might expect a type designer to groan at bad kerning, but Eleni grins instead. She's made a pact with herself not to judge every sign she walks past because people will always use type however they like.

gaps still catch her eye. Though on a Greek island this summer, she noticed boat after boat, small and large, with misplaced letters, telling me how she find it hilarious how all that money spent on the boat and no effort at all on kerning.

Instead of getting annoyed, she starts imagining the story behind it. Who made the call? Why nobody said anything? Because it's a lovely reminder that expertise doesn't have to turn into snobbery. Seeing more can make the world more interesting and a perfectly typeset world, as she puts it, would be boring

Eleni Beveratou: Oh, there are so many benefits to it. I'll try and contract them. I think the first one, which to me I find very, very exciting, is that it brought things that actually did I know you mentioned that, oh, we had a lot of things that didn't exist before. But fun fact, a lot of the things that variable fonts cover now existed in the printing, time.

So what I just described with the optical sizes, back in the days, punch cutters would create, the large size because it was a, an actual object that you would hold. The design was slightly different it was not an accident. It was on purpose. it was created differently than the one in very, very small sizes.

So the concept of optical sizes, for example, exists for many years ago. But when we came into the first digital era, because it was very new technology and all those things were not supported, people had to go with, one typeface, one weight. And then, it's simplified a lot of the things.

And it's only bit by bit that, OpenType features came into place, to have ligatures. So again, ligatures were something that existed in the printing, era and times. And so all those things kind of, are coming back with a better support of technology. And variable fonts are a perfect example of how you can bring back all those elements and all the amazing things.

Radim Malinic: This one flips the usual story about progress. We tend to assume new technology brings new possibilities, but Eleni points out that the punch cutters were already doing much of what variable fonts do today by hand long time ago.

They cut large sizes differently from small ones and spaced display sizes more tightly. Then early digital type design arrived and simplified everything to one typeface and one weight, and a whole generation of designers never learned what had been lost. Eleni admits she only found out once she became a type designer herself.

Now the technology is finally good enough to bring that old craft back. It's a great nudge and reminder for anyone in the creative field that some of the best ideas aren't new at all. They've been waiting in the past for someone curious enough to look.

For example, I'm Greek, so I know the Greek writing system. So we already have a lot of, in-house knowledge because we are a very, international company, which is fantastic.

Eleni Beveratou: but we also bring external consultancy, to our projects a typeface is a system, so it's also important to ensure that.

the Greek will behave the same way as the Latin, you need actually those two writing systems need to work together in one typeface.

But, yeah, we develop them in-house. We have a lot of knowledge in-house because we very often have, people from those, countries that use those writing systems. but we bring also external consultants to our projects. And of course, when we work with clients, if they are, if they have, an office in Japan, we will ensure that they bring that team also as part of the,judging process.

But they do it themselves as well. And I think this is where, and back to my very first point, I think nowadays overall, we are a lot more aware that not one person knows everything, and you need to involve the right people at the right stages. And our clients do that very well of, ensuring that the team in Japan will be very much, co-creating and giving feedback and collaborating with,with us to, to, for the end result.

Radim Malinic: So it's a combination of all the above and constant learning, which is fascinating.This is Eleni at her most personal. Growing up in Greece, she read type that borrowed Latin shapes for Greek letters, and nobody seems to question it because it was all they knew.

She says that if someone had asked her back then, she would have chosen the version that pushed aside her own writing system. And that is the hard part for designing for any culture. What people are used to isn't always what's right for them. Type designers gradually choose to do the right thing, and over time, habits changed.

Today, she hardly sees the Latinized forms anymore. It shows how many small, patient decisions can restore something a culture nearly lost. She's honest that there will be mistakes along the way, and that doing your best with your research is how the work moves forward

It's definitely a necessity. And,I wonder if a lot of it?

Eleni Beveratou: comes from curiosity as well. For example, one thing that fascinates me at Dalton Maag is that we are a lot of different people from very different backgrounds, and, when we draw something and we, curious about, oh, how do you handle the quotes in French, for example.

you can, pop a question and different people will chime in and because the sources of knowledge can be endless, in terms of how do you acquire it. But because it's a very unique space we have a lot of people that I can reach out instantly, very quickly to 47 people and get their opinions and their findings and their knowledge.

I think it's, very unique and very special. But I do think it's a necessity that as designers we need to be as curious as we can. Of course, there's limits of how much we can research things. but I also don't think it's something you go from zero to 100. It's something that you build bit by bit.

Radim Malinic: and I think we need to allow ourselves to get that time to not get it right from the first time, and to learn and to build our knowledge and to document it or, ensure that, we've learned something, we've put it in practice, we are open to learn something again, or to even be proven wrong from something we've learned in the past.Well, let's be honest, the internet is full of different ways of learning something in five days, become an expert in two days, taking a coaching program in seven days, and 

 Eleni's view is just honest and simply honest. "Curiosity is a necessity for designers," she says, "but you don't go from zero to a hundred. You build knowledge bit by bit, and you give yourself time to get things wrong for the first time." Her studio shows how that works in practice It has 47 people from many countries, and a question about how to handle French quotation marks gets answered from a colleague within minutes.

Knowledge grows through practice, through conversation, and through being willing to be proven wrong about something you once believed. As I said in this episode, that Bartley Kern sign would have looked absolutely fine 20 years ago. But the idea we have today is everything we've learned since, and there's no shortcut to it.

It's a compounding knowledge. Thank you for joining me on this bonus episode. I enjoyed having Eleni back on the show. She's always a ray of sunshine and knowledge about type. If you've ever seen her work, her talk or her workshops, go and see her and talk to her because, if anyone was as excited about anything else in the world of creativity as she is about type, the world would be a better place.

Thanks for being here, and I'll be back on Monday with my conversation with actor Rob Brownstein. Thank you.