Joshua Darden

Joshua Darden (born 1979 in Northridge, Los Angeles, California) Darden is the earliest known African-American typeface designer, having published his first typeface at the age of just 15.

Career

In 1993, Darden and his high school friend Timothy Glaser co-founded The Scanjam Design Company, a studio for interactive, identity, and type design. Scanjam's retail type families included Diva, Interact, Locus, Out, Profundis, and the Macromedia-award-winning Index. These were distributed by David Carson's GarageFonts foundry.

Darden joined The Hoefler Type Foundry in 2000 as a freelancer, and in 2001 as a full-time employee. In 2004–2005, after a lengthy court battle, he established his own foundry, Darden Studio, in Brooklyn. Soon after, he published the font superfamily Freight, 120 fonts in five families (Big, Display, Micro, Sans, and Text). It was inspired by the "Dutch taste" school of typeface design, including the work of Kis, Caslon and Fleischman, and was named a "Favorite Typeface of 2005" by Typographica. It became one of his most widely seen designs, used by art directors such as Abbott Miller, Mark Porter, and Rick Valicenti, and employed by editorial platforms such as W magazine and Medium. Its popularity was perhaps matched by Omnes, as of 2020 Darden Studio's best-selling typeface; Darden's other releases for his foundry include Birra Stout, Corundum Text, Dapifer, Halyard, and TDC award-winner, Jubilat the logo typeface of Bernie Sanders' 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. In 2006, Darden was named one of Print magazine's "New Visual Artists", an annual award given to 20 designers under the age of 30, and he juried the prize in 2010.

In 2019, Darden sold Darden Studio to Joyce Ketterer, who had been working at the company for 13 years. The company retained his name and continues to expand and release Darden's type designs.

Typefaces Joshua Darden's typefaces include the following:

1995 Diva 1997 Index (with Timothy Glaser) 2004 Bosch (with Christian Acker, Christian Schwartz, and Erik Spiekermann) 2005 Freight (additional styles released later, not all by Darden) 2006 Corundum Text (based on the work of Simon-Pierre Fournier) 2007 Argent (unreleased) Jubilat