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pixel in each letter into a DNA that actually contains all the information about that letter. All you need to see is a pixel, just one pixel. How did you come to work on this typeface?

Glen: I was exploring all the methods and ideas associated with one device, the scanner. Paul Elliman asked me to contribute a reprocessed version of Helvetica, made with my scanner, to a set of mediated Helveticas he was initiating and collecting. To make the font family, I scanned Helvetica moving across the scan bed at different speeds. Speed and direction determine regular, condensed and extended. I was having a hard time scanning all the letters straight. I began wondering, is it important that they are straight? When forms get translated from physical things into digital things by the scanner, they get absorbed through an invisible grid. Nothing in the world is oriented that way. Things don’t line up on a grid, things don’t share a point of reference. Why do these letterforms need to share a grid? What if they each have their own grid? It’s a slight demonstration of a good idea.

Gelman: How have other people reacted to this? This experiment on the surface is so obvious and funny, but I don’t know of anybody ever trying that. There are an enormous number of pixelized typefaces. There are clean typefaces and dirty typefaces but nobody ever thought of challenging that perpendicular world.

Glen: Well it’s only interesting to a point. I made a protest poster: “Down with the typographic system.”

Gelman: And there was another one?

Glen: [laughs] “Go Fuck Your Grid.” Yeah, you’re right. You remember it better than I do.

Gelman: It’s interesting, in this typeface the absurdity of this exercise re-veals a lot of things about certain conventions and it makes you think about all those issues of digital and analog and print and style...

Glen: I’ve had pretty good luck finding places to work out ideas. I did maybe five or six typefaces that I constantly try to find uses for. Another font I designed with a CAD plotter process I’ve managed to use for several things. It also works well cut on a laser cutter because it is built with linear, not shaped, parts.

Gelman: Did you actually use a laser cutting machine to demonstrate this font?

Glen: Yes, but it also has been printed and stenciled.

Gelman: What’s next?

Glen: I've been working on larger projects and trying to bridge the gap between these experiments and how a visual idea translates into a structural or organizational idea.

Gelman: How’s it working out so far?

Glen: Well, I have an interest in how things are made. If it is a book I find interest in how the pages are bound together, and how the content is dispersed. I try to deal with the core level of how things get made. Sometimes you have to forefront the structure by avoiding where design usually sits, on the surface. So, that’s my interest at the moment. I might have a different answer next week.

Gelman: That’s great! Let’s go inside.

Glen: It’s freezing.