In 1959 two printers developed a wet water slide transfer product where letters on an alphabet sheet could be cut out with scissors, soaked in water and then transferred to paper making a simple type layout, rather like model airplane transfers. Letraset were pioneers in the development of dry transfer lettering. For the younger generation, could you explain what Letraset dry transfer sheets were, and how they were used?

You became a Senior Designer and Studio Manager at Letraset. I would enlarge each character to 150mm, trace it, make corrections and then cut a stencil in Ulano, which is a kind of red masking film. The faces I was drawing at that time were sourced from old type books. In my interview I had shown an interest in lettering so was given the job as a trainee in drawing and producing final artwork for typefaces. The studio supported a typesetting and dry transfer lettering company and only consisted of two people. I left school at 18 with no formal training in art and design, but managed to find a job in a design studio in London. At that stage I did not realize there was any such thing as a typeface designer, I thought that typefaces were just there and it did not occur to me that someone had to design them. My father had the most beautiful handwriting and although he was a bookkeeper his accounts books were beautifully written and laid out so I suspect my interest in typography grew from there. Certainly at school I was the kid in class who was good at art so it seemed quite natural that one day I would have a career in art or design. Like many people, I feel that I fell into my career rather than chose it. You must have decided to study lettering at a very young age. You started out as a type designer in pre-digital times. He’s been an independent type designer since 2008, and has just set up his own label. His contributions to Letraset’s pre-digital typeface collection were substantial, and many of his typefaces got a second life as part of the ITC, Letraset and Linotype digital libraries. He was one of a select group of designers trained to make type using a unique hand-cutting method. He was then hired by Letraset, and helped build a huge type library designed for dry transfer sheets, a democratic pre-personal-computer system that allowed everyone to set display type by rubbing single letters onto paper. He is a trained lettering artist, a craftsman who used to make letter shapes strictly by hand. If he calls himself “a bit of a dinosaur”, it’s because type designers like Alan Meeks are indeed becoming rare. My: Creative Characters interview with Alan Meeks, July 2015 FontsĬreative Characters Interview with Alan Meeks

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