He believes that “good spacing reigns supreme”—so much so that he named his foundry after letter spacing. When designing a font, O, H, n, and o are usually the first glyphs people design, because they determine so much of the forms of the rest of the alphabet as well as the spacing between many letters.
James Edmondson tries to “respect history without reinventing the wheel”. All of his fonts feel fresh and unique, but he refers to how type was done before the digital age when designing much of his type. Beastly, Eckmannpsych, Blazeface, and Fatface all come with optical sizes, since their high-contrast designs appear different at different sizes.
He also strives to “create quality work that highlights underappreciated genres”. OHno fonts certainly all belong to different genres, but they’re all extremely high quality. There’s something about a James Edmondson typeface that just makes them feel special. He draws a lot of inspiration from “blue collar graphic design”—signpainting, stretched default fonts on laundromats, peeling vinyl lettering on storefront windows—and that comes through in his work. Hobeaux and Viktor Script would be perfectly at home on store windows and signs.
A main driving philosophy in his work is that default fonts are boring. In his Typographics 2019 talk, Changing Out Of Your Typographic Sweatpants, he argues that people should stop gravitating towards fonts like Helvetica, Gotham, Times New Roman, Futura, and Avenir, and instead use more interesting typefaces. One of his biggest gripes is the trend in recent rebrands we’ve seen of major companies all changing to generic humanist sans-serif type for their logos—he believes that it’s more valuable to express personality through logotype than it is to “fit in” or be “trendy.”
