A 55-year-old English man sits across from me in his library, comfortably splayed out on a blue wingback chair. The library's shelves are adorned with old Playboy magazines from the '60s and vintage Wild Woodbine and Senior Service cigarette boxes and tins, judiciously displayed behind glass. The man is giving me a lesson.

Although it is highly imaginable, this stranger is not sporting a smoking jacket and sucking on a pipe but wearing a flaccid beige sweater with a red pin that says, "support your local typeface."

He is Nick Shinn, type designer for Shinntype, a family-run, home-based independent type `foundry' (a reference to how type used to be cast in molten lead).

The sex sign Shinn holds up displays his latest creation: the Softmachine font, a round sans-serif face named after the English prog rock band and a novel by William S. Burroughs.

"When you look at typical fonts like Helvetica ... strange things happen when it is outlined," Shinn points out. "You get really thick places here or doubling up of lines there... I decided to create a typeface that could anticipate when an outline is put around it."

Shinn should know. After all, practice makes perfect and it took him a few years, on and off, to get Softmachine right, not to mention his business off the ground.

Fortunately, a breakthrough in 1985 gave independent designers hope. That was when Fontographer, a font-design program for personal computers, was created.

It made type design possible for anyone with a computer. Typeface designers no longer had to rely on expensive equipment, a massive plant, and large staff to create a new typeface. They could now design at home using a mouse.

"It used to be only a few foundries, but now there are hundreds of foundries and thousands of type designers," Shinn says of the growing industry.

Another reason for the growth in the font industry is the Internet, which allows independent foundries to sell their type around the world and self-publish their own work.

Working independently gives designers like Shinn the freedom to produce fonts on their own terms, developing them with a hands-on approach instead of being filtered through a division of labour, which is a corporate approach.

"But that is where the term `indie' comes from," he says. "The music business, wasn't it? Because the musicians were always complaining about having their creativity stifled by the publishing companies."

The independence of his business has not only allowed Shinn to create custom typefaces for newspapers and corporations but also to satisfy more creative and uncommissioned endeavours, like Softmachine.

Whether or not you've heard of Shinn, you've probably read his work. But the names that ring a bell remain classic typefaces like Times New Roman, Helvetica and Futura, not local, fresh ones like Fontesque, Richler and Softmachine.

"If you are just recycling the past in clever ways or are just using default fonts, that is dumbing down culture," says Shinn. "You have a very corporate form of design that has emerged that really doesn't support independent creative producers around the world. It supports a few people at the high end who are producing stuff that everybody else uses, all marketed by these big software companies like Adobe and Microsoft.

This is cache, read story here