Swiss font designer reveals the fashion of words

Where does a typeface designer find inspiration to create a new font? How is life in Brooklyn? SWI swissinfo.ch spoke to Nina Stoessinger, a Swiss typeface designer and lecturer in New York. SWI swissinfo.ch: You design new fonts, like one of the contenders for the new standard typeface for Microsoft. What inspired you to get into typeface design? Nina Stoessinger: I had a very circuitous path to typeface design. For a long time, I didn't know that this was a profession. I actually wanted to be a journalist at first. Text was always the thing I was interested in. My dad is a stage actor and my mom is a writer, editor and journalist. So growing up, texts and books were always important in my family. I always wanted to live in New York. At some point, I realised how much I like design, so I went to study multimedia design in Germany. And then in my first semester there, we had an introduction to the proportion of Roman capital letters and we drew them on paper. And I just fell...