Method Acting In Typeface Design

In 2024, Tal Leming was tasked with designing a new cartographic typeface for the National Geographic Society. This new typeface needed to pair with Society’s long-serving cartographic typefaces. Not much was known about those typefaces, so he started digging into their origins and stumbled onto an amazing story of the Society quietly inventing a form of phototypesetting in the early 1930s. This discovery led to all sorts of concrete and abstract questions that affected the scope of the new typeface. Who designed those typefaces? Why do they look the way that they do? Am I making a new typeface or am I reviving a typeface? Am I even the designer of this new typeface? In this talk, Tal will lead us through the project and share the discoveries he made along the way.
Tal Leming is a typeface designer and letterer based in Baltimore, Maryland. He has created original work for numerous brands and organizations in the editorial, education, entertainment, retail, sporting and technology fields.