Phill Grimshaw and fellow man of letters Tim Donaldson were often to be found idly passing the time of day. Tim Donaldson usually did most of the talking. On most occasions he had something on his mind and was wondering out loud — either about a font he was working on or about a new calligraphic direction. Whatever it was, it was troubling him, and that troubled his friend.“When it seemed like I was past the point of sensible worry, Phill would just turn to me and say, ‘You’ve got that “art school” problem.’” To Phill Grimshaw, there was nothing to the profession he loved more complicated than this: “If you enjoy what you do, and you’re lucky enough to be good at it, just do it for that reason.” On the evidence of Grimshaw’s body of work, from its early beginnings to his recent blossoming under the auspices of ITC and Colin Brignall, this quietly spoken philosophy remained his guide all his life.
The typo- and calligraphic designs of Phill Grimshaw — bon viveur, mandolin player, watercolorist, and man-about-the-North (of England) — represented a vitality and invention in letterform design that was as irrepressible as their creator. Yet despite designing some of the most popular display faces of the late 20th century, Phill never sought a high profile, either through the press, through lecturing (he was always more comfortable listening and learning than presenting), or through the marketing of his highly marketable work. He remained unfailingly modest to the end, and gave respect to his contemporaries where respect was due. His work, inextricably linked to his personality and his idiosyncratic approach to design, speaks for him in his absence. The designs, as any popularity chart published by ITC over the last few years would show, are best sellers, and their usage truly worldwide. Each has a personality and each finds a home, often answering tricky questions like, “I need a face that means happy/sad/sombre/historic...” Phill Grimshaw’s work will continue to say many things to many people (from nouveau to night time, from speed to serenity). Those same people may never realise how much pleasure that gave him.
During the creation of many of these faces, Grimshaw enjoyed the professional support and friendship of Colin Brignall — ITC’s European Type Development Director. Brignall was an important figure in the flowering of British type design in the ’70s and ’80s; along with colleagues such as Freda Sack, Alan Meeks, and Dave Farey at the Letraset drawing studio in central London, he was responsible for the creation of some 500 or so dry transfer typefaces. Phill’s relationship with Brignall began when he began to submit ideas for typefaces to Letraset — ideas in which Brignall immediately identified an outstanding quality and sensitivity of line. Stencil-cutting at the Letraset studio was an exacting pursuit, involving rigorous training in letterforms, and the development of drawing skills using hard pencil on heavy-duty tracing paper. Grimshaw rose to the challenge of achieving this quality of draftsmanship, producing a number of faces for the popular Fontek range. Throughout these early submissions, Brignall saw in this young and gifted apprentice someone who had a highly developed sense of proportion and a spontaneity of form and ideas which remained present in all his work.
Few people who knew him would disagree with the description of Grimshaw as a no-bullshit character. As Brignall points out, “He didn’t speak when he didn’t know, didn’t criticise without foundation, and dealt with you straightforwardly — taking advice where it was needed, giving advice when it was requested.” On the modesty that maintained his low profile, Brignall is quite clear. “Phill never set out to create a presence in the same way others have, and although he never envied their prominence, it’s fair to say that he had no time for those whose profile was high, but whose reservoir of talent stood half empty.” Tim Donaldson recalls the hours whiled away with Phill creating unsavoury nicknames for members of the type community who for one reason or another had raised their hackles. In the end, ley lines, pagan sites, monoliths, and malt whisky were more stimulating subjects for conversation than type design.
Throughout his professional career, Grimshaw proved to be the ideal collaborator. Once a commission began, or a faxed idea was sent through and approved for development, its completion became a matter of natural ability, enthusiasm, and hard work. The evidence of Grimshaw’s expertise was clear: “You never saw a character,” says Brignall, “even in early rough sketches, where you thought, ‘Oh that’s not quite right.’ He somehow managed to achieve a universal balance to his characters — even in thumbnails.” His eventual embracing of the Macintosh as a studio tool happened so quickly and skillfully that Brignall rarely saw any work between first rough and finished product. Phill was “a heaven-sent blessing” to the Type Development manager. The breadth of his work and the appetite he had for it was enormous, as was the volume. According to Brignall, Grimshaw “was certainly one of the best display typeface designers of recent times.” As for working together — the relationship could not have been better. “Phill knew my background in type design and therefore respected my views on his work — we never argued about art direction. He valued my opinion as a fresh pair of eyes.” Brignall continues: “One man he always talked to about his work was Tony Forster.”
Tony Forster was the man who trained the young student Grimshaw and who suggested that he send out his work, first to the Royal College of Art, then to the Type Directors Club, and finally to Brignall. He is one of the few people who saw nearly everything that Grimshaw developed, and over the last fifteen years he became one of Phill’s closest friends. Forster, a respected man of letters himself, was Grimshaw’s art tutor at Bolton College, a few miles to the north of Manchester. A notorious truant from the very beginning, Grimshaw was, according to Forster, a natural talent quite unlike any he had seen before. “The course was general graphic arts, but if I saw a student with a particular interest, I encouraged them to pursue it rather than try and teach them within the rigid course structure.” Grimshaw’s regular truancy, which almost saw him expelled, was easily explained: to make enough money to get by, he had taken a part-time job stacking shelves at a local supermarket. He would do that, catch up on sleep for a couple of hours, and then work at home. “He reappeared,” says Forster, “with an amazing portfolio of work. I couldn’t understand how he did it, other than having an exceptional talent.” At the close of the course, Forster suggested that Grimshaw take his portfolio to the Royal College of Art. The College practically fell over themselves to help him. “They were so stunned by the quality of the work,” says Forster, “that they asked Phill who he wanted as his tutor.”
Grimshaw studied for his master’s degree in design at the Royal College of Art between 1972 and 1975. His passage was not without its hiccups. One winter he was so broke that he slept in a makeshift bed in the boiler room of the College. (So resourceful was his camouflage that the College may only discover his hibernatory activities on reading this piece.) On another occasion, Grimshaw and a group of like-minded rascals took a walk through the College and onto the roof of the Victoria and Albert Museum, through which one of the party fell, directly into a packed lecture theatre. His own claim to fame from the Royal College was that he once shared a sink (though not simultaneously) with David Hockney.
By and large, this was a fruitful period. Forster recalls the design of a poster for a summer dance at the College that Grimshaw created around this time. “I knew he needed a solution, and I stood and watched as he found this window that hadn’t been washed for about fifteen years. He fixed his gaze, wet the end of his finger, and in the grime wrote a simple message: ‘Fuck art — let’s dance.’” From the beginning he worked with a variety of implements on a variety of surfaces, only recently turning to the computer to make the final stages of application and creation a more efficient process — almost as if, when the real joy of creation had given way to mere extension of the letterform’s basic idea, he was keen to get moving on to the next one.
Many of Phill’s typeface designs evolved in a similar way. Drawings were often produced while he sat in front of the television (though it was unlikely that he was concentrating on anything but the design). With a glass of single malt in one hand and a drawing implement in the other, he would cause gestural shapes, curves, sweeps, and forms to manifest themselves on as many different surfaces. Taking the short journey upstairs to his studio in a converted loft space, Phill would then work up the designs in Fontographer to a point where he would be comfortable enough to send them to his mentor Tony Forster and to Colin Brignall.
Both Forster and Brignall speak of Phill’s being able to identify gaps in the typeface market. Says Brignall, “The typeface designs he produced remain high in the popularity stakes. There has always been something of a stigma attached to the fact that he created display typefaces. But in commercial terms, Phill produced work that was very successful.” Phill began work for ITC at a time when sales of display type were far outstripping those of the text faces and it happened that his personal aptitude was for the more expressive and calligraphic designs. “If profitability is a dirty word — and I know it is to some — then that was the arena that Phill worked in, and I probably influenced that,” admits Brignall. Phill continually embraced, even when he wasn’t practicing, the two aspects of type design. According to Brignall, “Phill always recognized the two sides of the industry, and that it was not only possible but beneficial to his own development to work in both sides.”
Grimshaw also pursued a love of calligraphy which crossed over into his more “formal” typographic designs. Despite being self taught, he would often excuse his lack of a formal calligraphic training by saying, “I’m not a calligrapher, but I know how a pen handles.” His work was broadly speaking experimental, and he was a regular at workshops, including one memorable visit to a session hosted by renowned lettering artist Werner Schneider. As usual Grimshaw used every implement other than a broad-edged nib to realise his ideas, much to the delight of Schneider himself, who stood wide-eyed at Phill’s more “experimental” ideas. One tool Phill did favour on such occasions was a pair of pencils tied together, to create the interior and exterior shapes of letters simultaneously. Because of his enthusiasm for both areas of letterform creation, his typographic work was influenced by calligraphy and vice-versa, and he himself was influenced and encouraged by experienced practitioners in both fields. Eventually, his more calligraphic work, examples of which adorn the walls of his home, became popular with art directors in the London advertising industry, and along with half a dozen other scribes he became a founder member of Letter Exchange.
The last few years of his life were perhaps his most productive — among his most recently completed projects was the Rennie Mackintosh typeface for ITC, on which he collaborated with both Brignall and Forster, being joined by them on various research trips and gallery visits. Forster remembers the journey back from one of the Glasgow excursions with a wry smile. Having spent the day sketching out ornaments from the Glasgow School of Art building that would eventually find themselves in the extra character set of the Rennie Mackintosh face, and leafing through Mackintosh drawings taking inspiration for the structure of the face, Forster explains, “We got stuck in a snowstorm just outside Wigan. Phill had already cleared the beers and miniatures from the buffet and now the bar had run out. Despite a great day of work, and the preparation of a huge amount of background information, I’d never seen him look so bloody miserable.” True enough — Phill liked a drink, either in front of the TV, amongst friends, or over an Indian meal. On one occasion late in the night, Phill spied a bar-room clock and proclaimed that the night was young. Unbeknownst to Phill, the clock he saw was a reflection; it was 2 a.m., and well past time to go home. More recently, at an ATypI function, the marketing directors, CEO’s, and senior members of type-related companies were gathered together for supper. Such is the fashion for formal introduction that every diner was to stand, announce their name and occupation, and then resume their seat. And so, CEO after CEO, heads of this, directors of that, announced themselves rather stuffily but ever so proudly to the masses. Phill stood quietly and said, “Hi. My name’s Phill. And I’m an alcoholic.” For a second there was silence, and then the room exploded with laughter. An old joke, but an effective ice-breaker nonetheless — and a typically mischievous comment from a man once described, as much for his occasional devilishness as for his impish grin, as “the Jack Nicholson of type design.”
Grimshaw’s recent work has involved a couple of projects exploring the work of other designers — Charles Rennie Mackintosh as described, and Roger Excoffon. The constant reappraisal of the typographic designs of the past and the reworking of some of these designs for the present day have thrown up many debates. In Grimshaw’s case, being commissioned to work on typefaces based on the forms of Excoffon and Mackintosh provided him with two opportunities: first, to step into the shoes of another lettering designer and closely examine their thinking and methodology, and secondly, to re-inspire himself, as a creative person, and explore new areas of letterform design. Criticism has been levelled recently at such projects in general and ITC Rennie Mackintosh in particular. Tim Donaldson doesn’t regard these recent designs as indicating any dropping off in Phill’s innate ability to create. “There are those who might say that on the evidence of the last couple of years Phill had lost his edge. Nothing could have been further from the truth — I believe he was on the edge of his best and most surprising work.”
Work files dated March 1998, well into his illness, indicate that the desire to complete outstanding projects was strong. Two typefaces were very close to completion, and anyone who had ventured into his loft studio saw many more ideas, multitudes of typographic and calligraphic experiments, falling out of drawers, pinned to walls, or lying under empty shot glasses. It is this wealth of undiscovered experiment that presents the most frustrating question: “What if?” Phill’s death at the cruelly premature age of 48 is a tragedy for his wife and two young sons, and for those of us who in both social and professional capacities had the good fortune to know him. During the late stages of his illness, Phill required assistance in most aspects of his once independent life. “It’s a bugger!” he would say. Yes, Phill, dear friend. It certainly is.
As a tribute to Phill Grimshaw, ITC is now offering the Grimshaw Collection, five special typeface packages featuring his work. Each package is being presented at a special promotional price and a portion of all sales revenue will be donated by ITC to a cancer research facility in England in Phill’s name. Click here to see the the Grimshaw Designer Font Pack.