“I’m merely cosplaying as a type designer”: Raoul Gottschling on chasing ridiculous ‘what if’ questions

When we last caught up with German-born designer Raoul Gottschling (eight whole years ago!), he was based in New York City, where he formally worked for Pentagram and 2X4, among a handful of agencies and studios. Now living in Berlin, the designer has been “back in Germany for just as long as I had been overseas”, he tells us. “My current work spans collaborations with studios like Something Special Studio and Collins on projects for Nike and Microsoft, alongside my own clients such as Refuge Worldwide, a cultural space in Neukölln. Every now and then I teach classes and workshops at different design schools across Germany… And then, there’s designing type,” he says. Arguably, this is the thing that the designer has become most known for over the past decade – the imaginative, playful and robust family of typefaces available on his site sit as proof of his success. But Raoul is very open about being completely self taught, “I’m blessed to have learned many valuable things from lovely people such as Erkin Karamemet or Sascha Bente-Loranzi, however.”

All of Raoul’s typefaces have come from one of two places over the years. The first from taking those creative ‘what if’ questions we all ask ourselves seriously enough to become fuel for a project: “What if there was a typeface that has an axis to precisely dial in flavour to nail the right spot between text and display font for any application? That typeface is Ciron,” he says. “What would a geometric font with ridiculously rigid rules (mono case, no descenders, no ascenders) look like? The answer to this question was Quasar and its rounded sibling.” The other place comes from his “surroundings and a bit of luck”, he says. You can spend weeks with your head down in old specimens and books, but in the end “all the inspiration can come from elsewhere”. It’s important for Raoul that he leaves enough room for chance encounters to intersect his work, like coming across a road sign you might pass in the street or all kinds of printed things people tend to discard.

His typeface Kleber, for example, is the evolution of a font that his girlfriend discovered “in an ad for industrial adhesives from the 60s”, Raoul says. Plätze can be seen as an extension of “the few characters found on the Nollendorfplatz Berlin subway sign”, the designer tells us. One of Raoul’s most recent typefaces, Gaueko, that he created alongside designer Julien Simon, took its influence from Basque typography that the pair distilled into a typeface for modern day use.

The process looked a little something like this: “After analysing 500+ pages of tombstone engravings that were documented by hand drawings in the 1920s, we began by sketching several concepts as a foundation,” shares Julien. “Basque lettering is typically extremely expressive, so we aimed to find a middle ground that still captured Basque energy without being too overwhelming when the font is used for more than just a headline.” From there, it was a continuous cycle of hand sketching to digitisation, to discussing the results which were pinned up on the designer’s studio “wall of fonts”, he says.

For Raoul, carving your own way into any practice or discipline has of course come with its challenges: “On a good day I’m lightheartedly designing characters, embracing the happy accidents that ‘properly’ taught type designers might not have made, and cherishing the visually captivating results of these mistakes,” he ends. “On other days, I feel like I’m merely cosplaying as a type designer. Strangely enough, this feeling has grown stronger over the past few years, which makes me miss the days in which I did the dumbest shit in Glyphs, yet felt the most fulfilled.”