Columbus Monthly / June 2010 / What's your type?

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What's your type?

The first thing I notice when lingering over Michael Trajan Todoran’s eponymously named typeface—Todoran—is that it appears to be alive. The letters are like mini creatures, hand-drawn to create an immediate response.

Take the “B.” There’s an element of Old English and hand movement that you would get in graffiti art. The “&” looks like something out of Celtic mythology or even cuneiform, the remote ancestor of all writing. Or consider the crucial “L.” The joints of the letter come together like bones and suggest some ancient artifact—some deep, long ago connection reestablished.

“ ‘L’ was the character that helped me extrapolate this whole typography,” Todoran says. “I looked at the way wind moved and I looked at the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical algorithm found in nature over and over again. It’s also called the golden number or the golden mean. It shows proportions. And though I didn’t exclusively follow it, I referenced it when designing Todoran.”

Typefaces reflect their time. Helvetica, a creature of modernism, is nearly ubiquitous because it answered a need in worldwide communication for a bold script that could broadcast messages at any size or in any format. But typefaces also unlock a social regard or disregard. A corporate billboard is something altogether different from a graphic novel or a highway overpass tagged with graffiti.

Todoran is not meant to compete with Helvetica. Nor is it meant to go head-to-head with, say, Times New Roman or other classic typographies used in books and printed media. Instead, it’s pitched at future audiences.

“The beauty of Todoran is that aesthetically it has fine art and lowbrow influences while being technically sound,” says Todoran. “This allows the typeface flexibility in usage that I will leave up to future designers.”

Half Serbian and half Romanian, Todoran, 34, grew up in West Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s and started to tag while in junior high school. “All my friends were graffiti artists and a lot of my peers were in gangs, crews and clubs. I dabbled a little bit in junior high. But I wasn’t a serious graffiti artist until after high school,” says Todoran, who sports eight knuckle tattoos spelling “HARD WORK.”

“I was in limbo back then, so I put all of my energies into graffiti. I developed a style and started learning characters. I was writing all the time. I had a backpack filled with spray paint cans and Lunchables and I worked all day for the rush and the fame.”

With tagging, however, came a crazy life. Todoran was surrounded by violence. He wouldn’t leave his house unless a friend was packing a gun. Eventually, he came to the realization that he needed to move on.

In 1999, he joined the Coast Guard and did a four-year stint—two years of heavy weather search and rescue off Oregon and two years on a buoy tender in Hawaii. The Coast Guard made him grow up in a hurry. “I was this punk kid from L.A. with a big chip on my shoulder—unwarranted, but it was there,” he says.

Following his passion for design, Todoran went to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and majored in fine arts. That’s where he developed Todoran. It was an attempt to create a completely original typeface that reflected the times.

These days, he’s a grad student at Ohio State, where he studies landscape architecture. It’s a field that first came into focus in Las Vegas when Todoran realized his ability to design social solutions for complex problems. It fits well with his passion for typography, for both are concerned with creating beauty amid challenges and constraints.

But the typeface is still a consuming passion and Todoran has a vision for it. He wants to digitize the characters already developed and then market and adapt them into the Cyrillic alphabet and, after that, into Arabic. So far, Todoran has drawn 81 characters, but he needs twice that number to accommodate italic letters, numbers and symbols.

“If I choose to put the characters at a 15-degree angle, what parts do I need to remove or accentuate? That’s when it becomes interesting,” he says with a slight smile. “It poses a whole new design problem.”