My name is Hubert Jocham, born 1965
after school I started my apprenticeship in typesetting. In my class I was the last who did leadsetting. All the others worked on those massive workstations from Berthold or Linotype. With the age of 16 I felt like a dinosaur. Later on during my graphic-design studies in Augsburg (Germany) and Preston (England) I realized, that the experience with lead type was more than lucky.
My degree project dealt with the history of the italic type of the renaissance, which was a very good basis for the type-design later on. Because the relationship between roman and italic is very essential for the understanding of the stroke.
Only after I graduated I started to realy design typefaces while at daytime I was working for design- and advertising-agencies. When I look back the font families I did in the first few years where not very good. You need a few projects to get a certain security in handling proportion, counter, spacing and style.
In 1996 I spent a month in London trying to get in contact with famous designers to see if there is work for me. I had some interviews but most of the people I met only once. Accept Martin Farran Lee, who later was the art director of Arena magazine. He wanted to have an extralight version of a typeface for a magazine he was working on. So I took my old cheap powerbook out of my bag and started to do a few scatches. He was impressed how fast he could see something and the next few days I spent finishing the font. Basically all the contact I made in the magazine business later came throu Martin. I often think, without that meeting nothing would have happend.
The year after my wife left me and I did not want to talk about it all the time. So I decided to try my luck in London again. Günther Gerhard Lange who I met in that summer told me to apply for a job at Henrion Ludlow and Schmidt in London. And the name GGL opend me the door to the Branding business. I worked at Henrions for a year doing big corporate branding projects and manuals. They found out that I was good in developing logotypes, symbols and pictograms. That saved me from the bookkeeping job of doing implementation and manuals.
After that year I went back to Memmingen, my hometown in the south of Bavaria to work as a freelancer, because I did not like London anyway.
Since that I work for magazines, designing text- and headline fonts, for branding agencies designing logotypes for corporate and product branding and still designing typeface after typeface just because I like it.
