Jens Gehlharr

Jens Gehlhaar is creative director at Brand New School ? a production company based in Los Angeles and New York. The prolific and talented type-designer's typefaces may be visually exciting, impactful, and a bit oddball, but few of his fonts are available commercially.



They are nonetheless ubiquitous, popping up in his on-air identity work for VH1 Classic, Fuel TV, and IMF. Before Brand New School, he worked as an Art Director at Wieden+Kennedy, ReVerb, Imaginary Forces and Dreamworks. He has taught typography at both CalArts and Art Center College of Design and received a myriad of awards: from an Emmy for television graphics, an ADC Gold award for directing, a TDC award for type design to an MVPA award for Best Effects.



Gehlhaar's typefaces echo one of Eric Gill's sentiments about letterforms: "Letters are things, not pictures of things." His often rough-hewn alphabets reflect their purpose ? they are tools designed to communicate. Gehlhaar's encyclopedic exploration into the form of the sans serif Roman letter in his MFA thesis at CalArts stands as a milestone in contemporary type design and is a testament to his work ethic.