The opportunity to design Paul McCartney's memoirs was a literal dream project. Like many people, I'm a fan of Paul McCartney, not just in his prolific collaboration with John Lennon, but many of his later songs, with Band on the Run being a favorite. Published by Liveright, Paul McCartney: The Lyrics is a 2 volume set that reaches 874 pages. Inside is a mix of lyrics and personal memories and mementos of his long musical career. There are two versions— one is a widely available standard edition, and the other is a limited signed and numbered edition of which only 175 were sold.

We generally try to incorporate a bespoke typeface into our projects, and this seemed like a good opportunity to design something exclusive for this project. The typeface came about via a stack of our sketched letterforms that had been sitting in a drawer for many years. We had a serif in mind that we wanted to produce but never had the opportunity to finish. A high contrast face with subtle flared serifs and hooked terminals. After designing a beta version of the face, and getting the approval from McCartney and his team, we worked with Omnibus to finalize the design and build out a small family of display and text styles to use throughout the books. This typeface, dubbed Rigby, after the first Beatles melody I can remember listening to, was paired with the lovely Mallory from Tobias Frere-Jones.

When we were asked in 2018 to design an identity for the Type Director's Club (TDC) prestigious annual competition, we initially proposed to not use any typefaces at all in the Club's communications—instead handwriting everything. We were told to go back to the drawing board, and what we proposed instead was to resurrect a dozen abandoned typefaces that we had designed over the years for various clients. We wanted to break these apart and reassemble them as a single typographic voice in a face we called Cast of Characters. It was an exciting exercise for us. Each of the original typefaces had been crafted in the context of a certain function, aligned to a specific client project, and much care had been given to the relationship between the letterforms within each face. To exorcise the context for each face and juxtapose them with random association gave each typeface an unexpected new life. For the TDC we wanted the visual identity system to begin with the fundamental color palette of type design (black and white) and then introduced a bright neon green (Pantone 903) that would allow us to slice up layouts, frame compositions, and add visual emphasis and hierarchy on both digital and physical applications. Cast of Characters is paired with Chivo for text.