On 31 May 2025, the Now25 conference will take place in Paris. Join us, to listen a mix of inspiring speakers evoking topics as broad as graphic design, web design, motion design, publishing, visual identity, communication and type design. If not already done, register now to take advantage of the best rates.
It seemed interesting to us to make you discover the profiles of our guests. Discover Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer & Georg Seifert's interview.
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer was born in Vienna, and studied photography, philosophy and Dutch. Today, he creates and produces typefaces, teaches type design, gives type design workshops, translates Dutch books on typography into German, and writes articles and Python scripts. Rainer joined the Glyphs team in 2012, and has been writing tutorials and the handbook.
Georg Seifert is a type designer and a software developer. His typeface families Graublau Sans and Graublau Slab have become international bestsellers. He co-developed the typeface for the new Berlin Airport. He is most well known, however, for the font editor Glyphs, first released in 2011. Seifert lives and works in Berlin.
Interview
What is your favorite way to start the morning?
Georg Seifert Wake up at 7:50, freshen up, have my bowl of müsli and a nice cappuccino. If the weather permits I have the coffee on the balcony.
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer In Paris café of course, with a café au lait and a croissant, before heading to meet the TypeParis crew.
Describe your typical day.
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer That is a funny question in my case. There is little consistency in my days. But I guess I start like everyone by desperately trying to catch up on my e-mails.
Georg Seifert First checking e-mail and the forum. The rest of the day is checking e-mail and the forum and responding to request and fixing bugs. Or a deep dive into a new feature or a nasty bug. In that case I check e-mail and the forum when I should go to bed. And then I respond and am late for bed.
What is your workspace like?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer A proper desk is something wonderful. Since I am on the road a lot, I often work from hotel rooms, other people’s studios, or I rent a desk for a day. Getting work done in cafés is not as easy as one might imagine.
Georg Seifert I have always worked from home. Tried an office once and canceled it after a month after I wasn’t there once. Occasionally, I work in cafés, or in the train.
Do you listen to music while working?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer Silence is best, I even use noise-canceling headphones.
Georg Seifert That is for sure different. When answering e-mails, I love listening to baroque music. Right now, I listen to "Wassermusik" by Telemann. For very repetitive work, I have youtube or a TV on the side. But if I need to concentrate, I also need silence.
Do you consult any forms of social media?
Georg Seifert Social medial is mostly a distraction. Sometimes a welcome to relax, but often a waste of time.
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer I agree. Though it was painful to see Twitter getting destroyed. With a heavy heart, we abandoned it last year. Personally, you will find me on BlueSky and Instagram these days. Instagram has been vital in advertising classes and workshops, and since it is so focused on visuals, it has become a great way to stay in touch with other designers and to see what they are up to. But Georg is right, you end up doom scrolling, and then it is just a waste of time.
What do you think drives people to create new typefaces?
Georg Seifert Who knows what drives people?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer Can’t look into other people’s minds, can you. But I suppose it is the special challenge of typefaces, where you have to make a whole system of letter images work harmoniously. But I digress.
How much can a software and its fixed rules determine a type project?
Georg Seifert Hopefully the tools allow the designer to implement their imagination. But there are certainly some things that are easier to do than others. So can that shift the designer in one direction or the other?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer I see that a little differently. The fixed rules are rather the limitations of the digital font formats we have nowadays, and those span the realm of possibilities wider than ever before in the history of type. More is possible than can actually be used.
Do you think AI will change the way we approach typeface design?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer I don’t know what role exactly AI will play. Right now, it does already play a role in coding. So far, the attempts at generating shapes have been feeble at best. The vectors used for describing shapes in a digital font have an abstraction level that goes beyond what language models could grasp. I do think it could be useful for spacing and kerning, two tasks that could be broken down to rasterized images, which LLMs can handle much better. For those two tasks, however, we already have great non-AI solutions. What I would like to see, is that in a few years, we will be able to give it a regular-weight typeface, and AI will give you a decent first version of a bold for it, or a condensed version, perhaps not perfect, but good enough as a start. But that scenario is still some time away.
Are you more passionate regarding self-initiated projects, or for clients?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer Typefaces for clients pay the bills. Library fonts are more for the fun.
What can you tell us about the state of the font market today?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer That is the million dollar question, right? I wish I knew. I think you better ask Jean François.
What are your thoughts on free (or open source) fonts?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer ‘Free’ doesn’t exist, they say. Someone pays for it, always. The question for the type designer is, do you get your investment back or not? What is not true anymore is that freely available fonts are bad fonts. There are some very good ones.
“Hopefully the tools allow the designer to implement their imagination. But there are certainly some things that are easier to do than others. So can that shift the designer in one direction or the other?”
– Georg Seifert
With Glyphs being such a vital cornerstone of modern digital typography, have you observed any unexpected ways in which the program has influenced the type industry today?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer In reality, the development of Glyphs is an ongoing conversation with our users. Because, in the end, seeing what users are up to informs our next steps.
Georg Seifert The number of people around the world working non-latin type has grown a lot.
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer Yes. Many more Arabic, South Asian and Thai designs, the vast majority of which done in Glyphs. I’ll give you another example. There are a lot more complex and large multi-axis families we have today that simply were impossible to achieve a decade ago. You need a high amount of efficiency in your workflow to manage, let's say 48 font masters, and you need to be able to delegate repetitive tasks to the software to get the job done. And I think you can see that back in the improvements in Glyphs over the years.
In 5—10 years' time, do you predict any major changes in the field of type design?
Georg Seifert There will always be changes. Probably AI will play a role.
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer The question is, will AI help us create better typefaces with less effort? As soon as it can, it is going to be a factor. I also see other things: water-tight QA, for instance. You want software to help you spot mistakes you made. With Latin typeface families reaching thousands of glyphs, and dozens of styles, that is impossible to do consistently for a human being alone
What is the most personally rewarding aspect of being both software developers, as well as contributing to the field of type design in your own ways?
Georg Seifert The personal feedback from users. One common response is "it is fun again to work on type". Is there any better acknowledgement than this?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer What warms my heart is when I see designers do things with our tools that we did not envision at all. And that serves as proof to me that all the talk about how tools are limiting the designer is nonsense. The opposite is true, really. New tools liberate, in the sense that they help solve actual problems that designers face.
In an era where the type market is becoming quite saturated with new typefaces, where do you see the most innovation occurring?
Georg Seifert I don’t think there is over-saturation. At least not on the design side. There are so many great and unexpected designs coming out each year.
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer In a second-hand bookstore, I recently stumbled across Typologia by Frederic Goudy. In this book, he says exactly the same thing. Such an abundance of typefaces must equal the imminent end of type design, right? Well, Goudy wrote that in the late thirties, and I think it is safe to say it did not quite happen that way.
“What warms my heart is when I see designers do things with our tools that we did not envision at all. And that serves as proof to me that all the talk about how tools are limiting the designer is nonsense. The opposite is true, really.“
– Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer
Do you remember when you decided to pursue your career in design?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer I was young and needed the money.
Georg Seifert I was very much interested in computers and design as a teenager. I started programming to build an app for memorizing fonts, and one for building magic-eye 3D images. I knew design was made on the computer so decided to study design instead of computer sciences.
When you started, who were the teachers, mentors or professionals who had the most impact on you?
Georg Seifert I got to know Friedrich Forssman before studying. His strong sense of aesthetics deeply impressed me.
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer Frankly, I learned a lot from design books, among which also some by Forssman.
Georg Seifert While studying in Weimar, I met Alex Branczyk and we started working together. And then I had my internship at FontShop International.
Do you have any pieces of advice for someone who wants to get involved with software development for typeface design programs?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer Yes. Give us a call, please.
What other speaker would you not want to miss at Now25?
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer I’ll finally get to meet Lucas Sharp. I somehow always managed to miss him. Don’t know why.
Thank you very much Rainer and Georg!
– Interview by Burke Smithers
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