Articles
Interview: Phil Martin
Born in Dallas, Texas in 1923 and a bombardier in World War II, Phil Martin spent a number of years as
a cartoonist before moving into commercial art and lettering. He also spent some time as a radio comedian.
In 1969, Martin founded Alphabet Innovations and, in 1974, TypeSpectra. These companies designed and
produced over 400 film fonts for use in the VGC Photo Typositor, a machine for setting headline type.
Later, some of these typefaces were licensed for use with text setting machines, and many of them are
seeing new life as digital fonts through the efforts of Steve Jackaman of Red Rooster and
others (including me).
Martin, now eighty-one, lives in Florida where he runs an eclectic personal website, publishes an electronic
newsletter, and sometimes performs as a lounge singer. He recently started writing an autobiography, the current draft
of which can be found on his website.
I first learned about Phil Martin's work when I was in high school in the early seventies. A friend of my father's
was the in-house commercial artist at the company in which they both worked. My father's friend knew of my
interest in the graphic arts. One of the things he gave me was a specimen booklet for Alphabet Innovations. It made a
big impression on me and is one of the things that got me interested in type design.
Alphabet Innovations specimen booklet (1972)
Over the years I learned more about AI. In my first job as a graphic designer, my boss had a complete collection of
Alphabet Innovations and TypeSpectra sample books. At the time, I was only dimly aware of the person behind the faces.
I became aware of Phil himself from his regular column in The Typographer, the now-defunct journal of the TIA
(Typographers International Association).
A few years ago, I discovered that Phil was alive and well and had an internet account. He started to pop up regularly on
the Typo-L mailing list. Recently, I agreed to digitize some of Phil's old fonts, including his most recent-a redesign of
Century Schoolbook called Grad he did for Re:Language, a newsletter he published in the early 1990s.
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