Talk:Joshua Darden

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@Blythwood Can you help me understand why this Creative Commons licensed (CC BY-NC 2.0) image was not valid? Stewf (talk) 23:56, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I'm afraid it's not a mistake-Wikimedia Commons doesn't allow files with a not for commercial use licence. It's listed in the guides here. Your best bet to include the image would be to contact Mr. Porchez and ask him to change the licence to one of the permitted ones on that list. When I saw the deletion I decided to substitute with the other image. Blythwood (talk) 00:01, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

@Blythwood I see that you are active on this page, so I wanted to explain the relatively major revision I made to the opening section of the article. This was also my first Wikipedia edit, so I'll take any recommendations or advice on that front. I put a some detail on the comment: I don't believe that the reference to the "Fonts in Use" citation is sufficient to assert that Joshua Darden was the first African-American type designer. In some research I found three African-American type designers one of whom, John Bush was born in 1725. The others were Charles C. Dawson and Aaron Douglas. I'm not an expert by any means, but based on my research, in order to be a type designer one need not design the entire alphabet or design for print. In the Merriam Webster definition and the Typeface wikipedia article, neither stipulates that the design must be for a complete set of alphabetic letters.

I'm completely open to additional discussion and I'm creating a new page "List of African-American type designers", that will start with these three designers and Joshua Darden. It hasn't been approved yet, so I'll link to it when the page goes live, and continue to research other African-American type designers to add to the list. TiaNewt (talk) 00:45, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Hi TiaNewt, thanks for raising this and that's a really interesting set of links. I do stand by what I wrote in the article lead, though, I'll explain why. Firstly, ultimately, we have to go with what reliable sources say. I agree with you that these people were clearly doing something similar to Darden because they were designing and executing lettering with an artistic purpose. I think that statement this article starts with comes with a very big caveat though. I think the modern concept of what makes something a typeface is that it can be assembled into any order you choose, it's something that you can buy and use to typeset your own book or poster. That's distinct from lettering, where someone designs letters but they can't be reassembled into a new composition. That was much more common until the late twentieth century, you often see people on graphic design forums asking "what font is this" and the answer is "it's not a font, each letter was hand-drawn for this specific design". (And obviously until the nineteenth century all metal type was hand-cut by a punchcutter, until the twentieth all type was a physical object.) Until phototypesetting and then font design software and font sales websites became common, a lot of the people with an artistic skillset who would now be designing and selling fonts would have been doing custom lettering or carving tombstones or something similar.

People publishing typefaces were very few and far between until the twentieth century, because manually cutting punches was a lot of work, launching a metal typeface required a lot of capital and confidence it was going to make a profit, and so most typefaces tended to have a quite conservative design (see e.g. Caslon and Vincent Figgins whose early work often started as drop-in substitutes for other ones), in my view what was going on in typeface design in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries was less interesting than what was going on in lettering art like tombstones where any individual could do whatever they wanted that the client was OK with. (And I can very easily imagine that there were tons of people who've designed reproducible letters outside the regular printing industry e.g. stamps for putting letters on pottery or machine parts, tooling for book spines (how Caslon started) and so on who didn't get their name in lights.)

There's a lot of overlap though, of course, because influential lettering was copied as models (e.g. the Trajan Column lettering which was for many people the definition of "what capital letters should look like"). In the post-war period there was a famous lettering book series called Lettera (need to do an article on it) and people often just photocopied the designs and used them as typefaces (see e.g. Haettenschweiler), sometimes even not complete alphabets, so there's a Fonts in Use entry that comments "Not really a typeface and not even a full alphabet, but a piece of lettering...“La jeunesse dorée de Baar les Bains”, in all caps" and a designer copied those letters. And what a font designer does clicking on coordinates on a computer is arguably much closer to drawn/painted lettering than punchcutting where you had to physically carve a letter out of steel.

Anyway, my reference in making that distinction here would be Professor Indra Kupferschmid's listing "First/early female typeface designers" which uses the same fairly exclusive definition (metal type only-and that makes the number very low-well below ten before 1945). You could absolutely argue that definition isn't fair and too exclusive, but anyway, it's the standard one historians have gone with. (There's the same definition problem there-a ton of metal typefaces had the working drawings executed by women whose job it was to rein in the dreadful superstar male artist's excesses and do the grunt work of figuring out the spacing, but doing pro modern typeface design often is collaborative-one of Darden's recent designs-seriously go see that website, it's great-credits "Text and Micro designed by Joshua Darden, Eben Sorkin and Lucas Sharp. With advice from Gerry Leonidas, advice and assistance from Antonio Cavedoni. Production assistance by Viktoriya Grabowska and Noam Berg. Kerning of Display by Viktoriya Grabowska. Kerning of Micro and Text by iKern. Project management by Joyce Ketterer." Many superstar font designers haven't been anything like so willing to give their collaborators credit.)

I'm going to ping Stewf (Stephen Coles), the typeface design expert who created this article in case he has further input. Blythwood (talk) 06:43, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

@Blythwood Thanks for your detailed response, I really appreciate it. Like I said, this was my first edit, and I'm glad to learn about editing Wikipedia and the details on how to make a good article.

I think the bottom line for me is that I'm caught up in semantics. I'm following what feels like a rabbit hole of definitions. ie. the definition of typeface - "All type of a single design" Merriam Webster - typeface requires the definition of type Merriam Webster - type. One of the definitions is 2a "printed letters". This requires the definition of letters - "a symbol usually written or printed representing a speech sound and constituting a unit of an alphabet" Merriam Webster - letter. So for me, I haven't been able to find a clear definition of "typeface" that makes sense across the board. I think your point about the "modern definition" definitely stands, but what makes something a "modern definition" vs. a "dictionary definition", albeit a convoluted one?

I'll admit that I'm probably cherry picking definitions to get to an answer, but even with this rabbit hole, it seems like the Merriam Webster definition doesn't require the entire printable alphabet to be considered a "typeface".

So this also begs the question, that what if, Aaron Douglas had created, in his illustrations, enough letters of the same style to complete a full alphabet that one could, with modern computer technology, or even earlier technology of cutting the letters into a set of metal printing "type", create a set of all the letters to be able to, as you say "assemble in any order you choose" or "use in your own book or poster". I doubt this is true, but it's a devil's advocate question. Maybe John Bush actually got close since he designed his powder horns for many different people likely in the same or similar designs. I doubt he would have gotten an "x" or a "z", but again, devil's advocate question.

So to close this out, I tend to agree that when most people think of a designer of letters, they think of the entire set. So the fundamental assertion in the article lead is probably correct. I'd love to have Stewf (Stephen Coles) take on this. As I said, I'm not an expert, just someone who was doing research on African-American designers for another project. I was really surprised that it was only in 1994 that an African-American was credited with type design, and I wanted to dig in.

I do have a few other general questions: What makes Fonts in Use a good primary source? They make the statement: "Born 1979 in Los Angeles, Darden is the first African American credited as a type designer. Founder of Scanjam and Darden Studio." Joshua Darden - Fonts in Use Without any detail on who wrote that comment, and how it was determined. From their staff page Fonts In Use Staff they are obviously industry experts, but in this case they give no details on the biographical assertion they make.

Just a general question on Wikipedia phrasing, why say "According to Fonts in Use", instead of just making the statement that (He was) "the first known African-American typeface designer" and citing the source in the citations section?

Again, I really appreciate the discussion and your feedback.TiaNewt (talk) 15:06, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Great questions, @TiaNewt, and an excellent reply from @Blythwood on which I can’t improve. It’s true that there is some ambiguity in the term “typeface”, but as Blythwood said, the most widely understood definition includes a system of prefabricated letterforms designed specifically to be reused in any order. As far as I know, there is no evidence that Bush, Dawson, and Douglas designed type. They all executed lettering in their work, or used someone else’s typeface designs.

As for using Fonts In Use as a primary source, I am not familiar enough with Wikipedia’s criteria to know what qualifies. I can only say that we are indeed experts in the field and much of our writing is original research including firsthand accounts. That said, our site didn’t always have great citation standards and we’ve improved on that over the years. We try to provide sources whenever possible, and will do so for biographies going forward.

Thanks for holding us to a high standard! Stewf (talk) 19:56, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Oh, btw, on stating that someone is the “first”: I suppose that proving the absence of something can be a sourcing conundrum. We can only state from our extensive knowledge on the topic that no other African American has been credited as a typeface designer before Darden. Stewf (talk) 20:09, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

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