Warden Board is a quiet practice working in typography. We look at letterforms the way others look at joinery, checking how each part meets the next. The pace is slow. Nothing here is finished, and nothing is promised. These pages hold notes on how a piece of work is thought through, drawn, and made, before it becomes anything more than paper.
The Room
The room is small and mostly quiet. Light comes from one side and moves through the day, which changes how a letterform reads. Tools sit within reach, most of them older than the work they help make. Paper collects in stacks that seem disordered but are not. Nothing about the room is meant to impress anyone.
The Drawing Stage
Drawing happens on paper first, then on a screen, then on paper again. Curves get checked against straight edges. Counters are measured, then measured differently. We redraw the same shape many times, looking for the point where it stops asking questions. Some drawings are set aside and returned to later, sometimes much later.
How It Begins
Every piece starts with a question, not a brief. A letter, a spacing, a rhythm that seems slightly wrong. We sit with the question before touching anything. Sometimes it stays unanswered for a long stretch. The beginning is rarely dramatic. It looks more like waiting, with a pencil nearby in case waiting ends.
Making By Hand
Where it is possible, the work moves off the screen and into materials that resist it slightly. Ink behaves differently than pixels. Paper takes a line and holds it. We cut, press, and proof by hand, because the resistance tells us something the smooth version cannot. This slows things down, which is the point.
Currently On The Board
- A slab serif with softened corners
- Spacing tests for a long text face
- A numeral set that avoids the usual shapes
- Revisions to an old letterform sketch
- A quiet italic, still unresolved
From the drawing board
On paperEvery job begins with questions, and the answers are pinned above the drawing board. The best drawings are the ones nobody sees, the trials that settled a question. A first drawing is done small and fast, then redrawn slowly at full size. The proportions are checked with a ruler and again by eye from across the room.
In printEvery proof is kept, marked on the back, in a drawer nobody clears out. Proofs are pulled in one colour before any second colour is mixed. Type is kept in cases by size, and a missing sort is noted the day it is missed. The press is cleaned at the end of each day whether or not it was used.
The roomThe floor is swept before printing, because dust finds wet ink. The board by the door holds the week's proofs in the order they were pulled. Shelves of type and paper line one wall; the other wall is kept bare for pinning up work. The studio is one long room with the press at the far end, away from the drawing board.