Seb Lester - Guest Speaker

Seb Lester - Typography talk

Seb began by showing an A to Z in calligraphy.

Seb was interested in Art and BMX’s as a child, it was the BMX name stickers that sparked his interest in typography and his first experimentation was to recreate this. At college Lester became interested in photo-realism and thought that this would be his vocation, however, Lester stumbled upon ‘The Graphic Language of Neville Brody’ and became captivated by typeface design. He noticed a link between one of Brody’s typefaces and the BMX typography.

Ambigrams read as a different word from another perspective

Lester began looking at ambigrams, he tried some out Love/fuck, Life/death etc.

Audio Visual Student Work

Seb made a video of typographically styled lyrics to a drum and bass track, this was his first experimentation with animation.

Seb showed an interest in experimental font families, they were often quite unusable but Rolling Stone magazine bought one of them.

He also did quite a lot of work around 3d fantasy style scenes and this was what got him a job as they were looking to use this sort of work in their marketing.

After college he got a job designing album covers before getting a job at Mono Type, this was his first step in to the corporate side of the industry.

Neo Sans was born, this typeface became the Intel font of choice, Lester also created a full typeface for Waitrose based on their existing logotype, which was a mixture of future and gill sans.

Another big job was for The Daily Telegraph, they wanted to modernize without alienating their existing customer base, Lester opted for a more robust and simplified version of the original masthead, which was well received.

Other clients include British Airways, Barclaycard and H&M where he was required to make a full C E character set (including all symbols, upper and lower cases and numbers)

Lester stated that the key to font design for retail is to be distinctive but not to over do it, as it must also be highly functional.

Neo Sans and Neo Tech are fonts designed to be futuristic and modern by Lester, they have been adopted by many large brands including Specsavers, Washing powder, The Winter Olympics, Cars, The Labour Party branding. He has also spotted his typeface next to Angela Merkel, Condoleezza Rice and Arnold Schwarzenegger, his childhood hero.

When designing Soho Lester asked himself What would look good on a cool magazine or brand?

GQ magazine ended up using this font, as did Angler Magazine, which shows the versatility of a good font.

Soho and Soho gothic include over 40,000 characters and are the product of three years work for Lester, he also created a sans version.

Lester also produced some video advertising for Soho gothic ‘a new typeface – works at all sizes’ to promote it’s versatility.

Type design is an anonymous profession, Lester told us ‘ my work was everywhere but no one had heard of me’

Lester began work on some promotional pieces of work featuring his typeface design depicting the meaning of the words, these pieces feature 3D design, Lester also worked with illustrative letterforms, which he animated. His idea was to make words emphasize themselves by the way they look, eg How can you make the word beautiful more beautiful? He adapted this concept to ‘Brutal’, ‘Faith’, ‘Evil’, ‘Love’, ‘Danger’, ‘Future’, ‘Nature’ & ‘Freedom’. This work is fantasy style, virtual reality. Lester told us that ‘almost no one liked my 3D illustration work so I went back to the drawing board looking for a new direction.’

Lester decided to strip his work back to basics and began creating limited edition prints of expressive words.

Lester has spent the past two years immersed in calligraphy, he is a self confessed addict. He told us that calligraphy, although an ancient art form is relevant today, there is an appetite for hand rendered design.

Lester has used Shakespeare quotes in his calligraphy, he is also fond of expletives in his work.

Lester has found recent fame through calligraphy when he uploaded a video of him working on his calligraphy, it has currently had over 800,000 hits in three weeks. He has also had marriage proposals and a request from a Lady in Africa for him to design the sign for her sex shop.



Sketchbook, February 2013 from Seb Lester on Vimeo.

(There videos of Seb Lester calligraphy on vimeo)

Lester advised that, as long as you are producing good work, people will find you. He also stated that design is ‘a lifestyle choice, you don’t really stop thinking about it’

He showed us some of his preparatory work for a BMX company design he did for the ‘emer swift’ bike, ‘people like to see drawings’ the drawings documented his journey through the design, finding out what works and resolving problems.

The design for the BMX must have been significant for Lester as he told us at the beginning of the lecture that this was his first type inspiration as a child.

More recently Lester has completed an illustration job for penguin, the designs were being signed off by JD Salinger himself, which was intimidating for Lester as Salinger is known to be a recluse. Lester described this as a culturally significant project that it was an honour to be asked to do.

Seb Lester’s talk was inspirational, It was nice to see the journey of a designer from childhood to success. I love the attention to detail in his typeface design and I am fascinated by the enormity of designing a 40,000 character set. I will definitely be taking his words of wisdom on board and applying them to my work in the future. I am also intrigued by his calligraphy and I will be taking a look at his tips on getting started in calligraphy on his blog.



"Ladies and gentlemen, Seb Lester"...