Leah Maldonado Invites You to Her Digital Playground
Leah Maldonado is an experimental type designer interested in alternative education, language, and finding four-leaf clovers. She is based in Portland, Oregon where she was raised, and where she plans to stay. Her work ranges from the boring stuff she does for money to the interesting stuff she does for her love of letters and community. She is very proud of gardens, both physical and digital.
What motivated you to create the workshop “Drawing a Letter Up In a Tree” and how did you come to visualize it as a Zoom meeting and participation on Google Slides? Did the current pandemic affect your plans?
One of my biggest dreams is to open the field of type design to as many people as possible. It’s a stuffy little corner of the design world that is incredibly important to all of humanity (we all need to typefaces to text our moms!) yet is controlled by a relatively small portion of thinkers. This consolidation of influence results in a really homogenous visual approach that doesn’t mirror the diverse and chaotic nature of language at all. It’s a big problem and I believe that as a member of ~the type world~ I have a duty to make it better. Organizing this workshop was my way of reaching out my hand and helping as many people climb over the walls that keep them out of type design as I could. Software is expensive, and type education is sparse, but Google Slides is free and learning through play is easy! “Drawing a Letter Up In a Tree” is just a different approach to an entry way into the type world. It assumed that participants know everything and nothing about type design, that peer-to-peer learning is as important as teacher-to-student learning, and that alternative tools exist in places you least expect. Given the pandemic, I knew that I already needed to reject the idea that you have to be in a classroom to learn, and through that rejection I was able to reject a few other notions about education to organize the experience that the workshop provided for the participants.
We thought the workshop was very interesting and collaborative, the way you had people from different countries together to chat about type, including a Portland mayoral candidate (!), to everyone working on the same Google Slides at the same time together. What parts of having the workshop online did you really enjoy and used to the best effect? Also, if you were to do an IRL version, how would it be different?
I’ve always wanted to be in a room with all my internet friends but since they live all over the world that wish is sorta impossible IRL. But online we can all meet if we agree on a time and a digital space. If I were to do this same thing in IRL, I would need to buy a lot of plane tickets. I loved watching the Google Slides go crazy with all the collaborators; at first I just sat there and watched. I couldn’t help but laugh! It was truly, truly, FUN to see that type of interaction. The pandemic forces us to replace a lot of our normal social life with digital replacements that are not the same at all. FaceTiming my mom while drinking a latte isn’t the same as letting her make me a latte—which is one of her favorite things to do haha. I think it’s felt universally, these digital interactions are no replacement for the real ones. But this workshop felt different because it didn’t feel like a replacement, it felt like an addition.
You’ve been working on making type design more accessible to everyone. Why is that a big mission for you and what do you envision for it? How are you working towards that?
In school I really loved my art history class because it felt like a poetic way to understand civilization. My perception of history has largely been shaped by those courses and I’ve been able to retain that timeline because of the visual association I have with it. The visual world we create has always been vital to us as a species, it’s another manifestation language. The stories we tell with language; spoken, written or drawn, are part of a larger story that is our history. It is in our best interest to tell the truest story possible for our history. To me this means both expressing facts and shared emotions (which are separate from fact, but not truth). When we exclude things via canons we erase huge portions of our shared story (history) and in doing so tell a story that is true for few but false for most.
Okay so what the hell does this have to do with type design? Well typefaces are valid mediums for human expression just like paint, marble, or music! And in the 21st century we increasingly use our typefaces in place of our speaking voices. They provide a link to humanity as we descend into the digital abyss (dramatic of me, but true I think LOL). In the same way that excluding folk art erases history, excluding all voices from becoming a typeface erases a full picture of humanity in the field of type design. It also begins to become colonized, where particular writing systems with less typefaces get replaced with other writing systems that have more. It’s important to me to have a wealth of typefaces in lots of different writing systems made by lots of different people because that is how our voices are. Have you ever gone through the amazing feat of learning another language to suddenly be terrified of your new skill because you have an accent? Accents are beautiful, no one should have to face that fear. That fear is created from a puritanical view of what speaking should and shouldn’t be. Those same backwards beliefs exist in the type world. I think through working on more accessible education those backwards beliefs can be squished with new schools of thought.
How did you create a type community that was beyond your physical surroundings? How did it start and how do you all keep in touch?
The internet of course! During college I worked for an amazing company called Future Fonts. They are an independent marketplace where you can support type designers by buying their work while it is still in progress. That job helped introduce me to their corner of type designers, who were often experimental, running small independent foundries. And from there I began to get to know their studio mates, their students, and their friends. After just a little while I suddenly found myself intertwined in a web of experimental type designers, which was very convenient given my new interest in type design. I flew around like a pinball asking this person and that person for advice and feedback on my thesis project which turned into my first professional project: GlyphWorld. The loving support from the experimental type community is wonderful and I think everyone should experience it. The people that operate in that space are kind and generous and always respond to emails :^)
We would love to talk about your interests beyond type. For example, we know you’re a great writer and have written several stories and you do a lot of illustrative work as well. How do you see yourself as a creative person? Are there mediums you prefer and that you’d like to explore in the future? How do you think the world or the industry sees a creative person like yourself?
I ~do~ love to write and illustrate. Sometimes I feel an idea in my head and making a typeface about it just isn’t the answer, so I look for other mediums to get the swirling idea out of my body. I read somewhere that you can become sick with an idea and the only way to cure yourself is to express it. I really agree with this. I do not think any of my ideas are my own, instead I think they are dropped into my body by some hidden, metaphysical force that enjoys watching me pace around my house looking for my notebook so I can write it down. Recently this force asked me if emojis were a universal language and asked me to find a way to get lots of people to write emoji haikus. I’m not sure what medium this new idea will live in, but given my past it will probably be a medium that I know nothing about and must teach myself about late into the night. I am curious about the world, I like to work out these curiosities like a child does, through experiment and play. No child as a formal education in painting yet every child makes beautiful paintings that delight their parents. That is how I see myself as a creative person: a child that has no idea what she is doing but her parents smile at her when she shows them what she did.
The industry seems to look at me, squint, and then ask the person next to them if they like what they see. All I can do is hope the person next to them is in a good mood. That’s how I get freelance jobs haha!
Are there any exciting projects or personal goals you’re looking forward to in the near or far future?
I am working on more ways to engage people with digital tools to inspire an interest in type design. I have recorded and then re-recorded a tutorial on how to use the software for making a typeface but I’m just no good at doing tutorials like that. I think I’m better at organizing spaces where we can teach each other and learn in our own ways. I’m inspired to do more workshops that are free and accessible to everyone so I'm searching for more tools like Google Slides. I’ve recently joined a Discord called, Earth Coincidence Control Office, it’s a space for students and professionals to share what they know about type design and spread resources. I’ve been talking with the organizer, Ryan Scheuer, about doing a lecture series within that discord. Maybe that discord will become like a digital free school where we all teach each other!
I’ve also been working on growing dill in my garden. In the far future I hope to have enough dill to make many, many batches of mashed potatoes!
Text by Leah Maldonado
Illustrations by Sarah Nason
Interview by NSC