Passion is defined as a powerful and compelling
emotion, a strong enthusiasm for anything. In my case, I can say
that I have a passion for typography. It all started when I was
fifteen years old.
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Victor DeCastro,
Unifonts Founder. |
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At a very young age I realized that I loved to draw. As I was
growing up, my favorite uncle who worked in advertising,
noticed my skill and decided to help me.
He introduced me to one of his friends, an old man who owned a type
foundry. The place was huge and had been in business for generations.
I remember that the studio had many graphic artists, typecast machines
and tons of big printing presses.
All
the work was done by hand with wooden and lead type.
They used to set type for advertising agencies, design studios and
publishing companies. After school, I loved to go there and see all
the work being done. I loved the smell of the ink on paper, the people
and their work.
When I was in college, one of my projects involved researching the
history of moveable type and its great influence in the development
of Western civilization.
After college, my first job was at Gray Advertising in Rio De Janeiro,
Brazil. There my work was to render headlines on the layouts by hand.
After a while, I knew the majority of available typefaces by heart.
When I became an art director, I continued
to research and design type. I still have a collection
of U&lc.
When I moved to the United States, everything changed. That was
when I was introduced to the Macintosh and I found out that this
little machine could do everything that I ever dreamed of and more
in terms of typography. As a hobby, I started to digitize some of
the fonts I had designed years before. First, I outlined the characters
in Illustrator and used FontStudio to built the fonts itself. FontStudio
had an elegant drawing interface but crashed like crazy. When Fontographer
came on the scene, I switched right way. I still love Fontographer.
My first font was a sans serif geometric face called Unitech,
followed by Arjorie,
an elegant serif face with a calligraphy flair. Then came AndrewSans named
after my son. Adriana,
named after my first daughter. Audrey named
after my second daughter. After a while I realized I had hundreds
of typefaces.
In 1993, I started Unifonts and today I have designed more than
a thousand typefaces. Besides the research and the precise care dedicated
to each character, I pay special attention to the kerning itself.
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Preliminary sketch for the Florina Italic
typeface.
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In the good old days, when we had typesetter professionals who
knew how to set type, the tracking, the kerning, the right
character, all was done with an artisan's care. With the introduction
of the computers, this work has become the designer's responsibility.
On one hand, it liberates creativity and experimentation, but on
the other hand, it makes it much harder to produce great typographical
work. The problem is that many designers skipped the class on typogography
and forgot to learn the fundamentals of type. As a result,
typography is becoming a lost art and good work is rare to find.
It kills me to open a magazine or a newspaper and see all this type
lifted right from the computer without any editing and care.
Good design
is a craft based on knowledge, care and detail.
Going back to type
design, I pay a lot of
attention in developing the kerning tables. The majority of my fonts
carry more than 2000 kerning pairs. This makes the designer's life
much easer since the the right spaces are built in the font itself.
In 1997, Adobe licensed some of my designs and the Pompeia
Inline typeface was introduced as part of the ATM package. Needless
to say this made me very happy and pushed me to develop more typefaces.
Today my passion for developing original fonts continues and more
typefaces are in the works. If you work with type and appreciate
good typography, take a look around this site and let me know what
you think. Your comments are always welcome.
Sincerely,
Victor DeCastro
Type Designer
victord@unifonts.com
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