The success story of a Turkish font designer
I am grateful to my valuable colleague Nedim Atilla for introducing me to Cem Eskinazi. Cem is a designer, who gave me hope for the future and led me to realize once more what Turkish youth can achieve when there are enough opportunities.
Cem designs fonts, which are everywhere we look.
He is only 28-years-old, but has already attracted considerable attention for what he has designed so far as part of a world-renowned group.
Now, he is considered as one of the most prominent font designers in the world.
Working as a graphic designer and an independent creator in the field of typography and font design in the United States since 2013, Cem Eskinazi came into prominence when he worked at “This Is Our Work,” a graphic design studio based in New York that has prepared the catalogue for the Oslo Architecture Triennale.
“As a Turkish designer, I felt proud to serve on the design team for a triennale,” Cem said
As part of the triennale project, he had textile products made in the textile company owned by his family in the western province of İzmir.
“I took on this project benefiting from my family’s connection with the textile industry in Turkey. We worked together with manufacturers and textile suppliers in Turkey to design products for the triennale. I saw thousands of visitors in Oslo leave the triennale with the bag that was designed by me and produced in Turkey. Our catalogue and bag design received an award from the Chicago Society of Typographic Arts,” he said.
Cem also participated in the “These Posters are Fireworks” exhibition, which involves award-winning poster designers in New York.
Following his success, last year Cem was admitted to the design office of Morisawa, a well-known Japanese typography company in the U.S. The company is considered the most prominent typeface design company in the world.
Eskinazi said the company specializes in Japanese and other Asian typesetting and fonts, and they are now working on Latin characters.
“We also work on the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. Certainly, it was an advantage to have lived in Turkey for a long time, to speak Turkish as my mother tongue and to have lived close to countries that use different alphabets, such as Russia, Armenia and Greece,” he said.
I don’t think there are many people working in the field of typeface design around the world. It is a niche area and it must be a privilege to be able to design fonts.
“Fonts are one of the most widely used design products in the world. They are everywhere. All products, including street signs, smart phones or the numbers on an oven, have to use a font. Unfortunately, there are not many Turks who do this job professionally,” Cem said.
What an amazing story about a Turkish youth. Another success story we are proud of.
