In its young history P22 had already created fonts inspired by art. Carima went through a few examples in her presentation. The Duchamp font or Daddy-O inspired by the Beat times, all packaged up in a 7 inch vinyl size sleeves, including the font on a disk of a few 100 octets. As the technological progress allowed open-type to stock more characters, the Cézanne font was expanded to 1200 characters.
Carima El-Behairy
Carima El-Behairy began her journey into the type world with the launch of P22 Type Foundry in 1994. She is a founding member and has been the CFO since its inception. Her areas of expertise include contract negotiations, marketing, financial knowledge, start-ups and the ability to find money. She and P22 hosted Typecon 2008 in Buffalo, NY and helped facilitate the one-day conference “the Business of Type” in 2008 as well in Seattle. She is also a founder of Oracle Charter School, the Charter School Coalition and the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative. With over 20 years of non-profit and corporate experience, she currently sits on three non-profit boards: Planned Parenthood of Western New York; Irish Classical Theatre Company; and Atypi. In addition to P22, she consults on Business Coaching and Evolution, Museum and Educational start-ups, Board Governance, raising Basenjis and overseeing homework for her two boys on a daily basis.
200 characters aren’t enough for a written font. If you want the font to look handwritten, you have to get some intelligence and randomness in there. In other words: you have to work! With their new designer P22 worked on replicating the smoothness of ink on paper, of drops of ink. Detail work leading to a new collection of 1200 characters for a worldwide font which has sold more than 50 000 copies. Keep an eye on “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” when it comes out, or next time you open up a bottle of wine, and stay surprised like Carima, because “you can’t pick where they put it”.
Text: Louis Currie