In the print edition of The Eastern Echo, the article you are currently reading is displayed in a typeface called Times New Roman. It is likely also the font requested by professors for academic essays.
Times New Roman has remained a household name in publishing for decades, but when The Echo asked James Edmondson for his thoughts on it on Sept. 17, 2026, he smiled and said, "I think you could branch out a little bit. It's perhaps had its time in the sun."
If anyone has the authority to make that critique, Edmondson might be in the running. Throughout his career, he has pushed the envelope on typeface design and created a font business with a client list that includes some of the biggest corporations in the world.
On Sept. 17, 2026, Edmondson was standing in the Eastern Michigan University gallery located in the Student Center. In a white-walled room covered 10 feet high with typeface sketches and designs, he flipped through slides on a TV for an audience that stayed largely silent and unmoved through the duration of his hour-long presentation except for occasional bursts of laughter at his jokes.
Audience members at the Eastern Michigan University gallery titled OH no! The Type Design of James Edmondson & OH no Type Co. listen to Edmondson's lecture on Sept. 17, 2026.
"Whenever I start talking to someone about what I do for a living, the most common question I get is, how did you get into that?" Edmondson said. "First of all, I want to say, it's not that weird. There are maybe not that many type designers in the world, but every time you've ever read anything that was printed or typeset, you've been looking at the work of type designers."
This moment in Edmondson's career was the latest culmination of a higher education from the California College of the Arts, which he said that he paid for by selling his first font, and from graduate school in The Hague, Netherlands. When Edmondson held his launch party for the OH no Type Co. in 2015, he only had two commercially available fonts. Over a decade later, he said that his goal was to have at least 100 by the end of his career.
Aya Bazzi, a recent EMU graphic design graduate, was one of the reception's attendees. As someone who has worked with type design in her own graphics work, she said that typefaces are everything.
"I think typeface design, especially James' work, which stems from a more traditional standpoint – he starts in all these sketches and things like that and traditional penmanship – is so important in a time where, first of all, AI is over-generating a lot," Bazzi said.
Looking at a nearby display that gallery director Danny Baskin described as being like a sketchbook sneezed out onto the wall, Bazzi said that the playfulness of Edmondson's typefaces is what has always stood out to her.
A close-up of one of the walls displayed at the OH no! type design gallery on Sept. 17, 2026. Gallery director Danny Baskin said that the gallery was designed to have three different sections showing different aspects of James Edmondson and the OH no Type Co.'s work.
"I think that he's not afraid to make a really out-there display type," Bazzi said, "and his simple fonts are super effective in their readability."
The commercial success of Edmondson's relatively understated Degular font has helped his growing family sustain financial demands, but it was an effort of reservation for a designer who has made a career out of creating eccentric, sometimes intentionally illegible fonts. At one point during his post-lecture Q&A, an audience member referred to a typeface behind Edmondson and asked, "What does that one on the left in the middle say?"
There is no job too big, and no task too small for Edmondson and his California-based type company. OH no has created fonts for titans like Starbucks, Meta and Major League Baseball, but Edmondson has still taken the time for side quests like creating a free banner for his mother's church parishioners club.
During his lecture, Edmondson spoke in detail about how his family and childhood came to shape his work. Baskin said that, to him, this was one of the signs of a well-done reception presentation.
"Artists can just say, this is my work and I do this stroke of paint because of that," Baskin said. "But when somebody is willing to open up and share with students and give them a perspective that maybe they can relate to more, maybe they can see that path a bit more for themselves."
Baskin, who unpacked and arranged the boxes of Edmondson's work when they arrived from California, said that Edmondson's Hobeaux Rococeaux font was his personal favorite.
"I just think it's so whimsical and goofy and beautiful," Baskin said.
Edmondson has been working to get his new book off the ground, but said that a shorter book he previously wrote about type design, "Some Tips on Drawing Type from A to Z," sold out of 1,000 copies in a single day.
A previous book by OH no Type Co. founder James Edmondson that he said sold out of 1,000 copies in one day, along with a copy of Anxy Magazine that OH no did design work for. This book was displayed at Edmondson's gallery reception at the Eastern Michigan University Student Center on Sept. 17, 2026.
The success of Edmondson's new work, "The Ohno Book: A Serious Guide to Irreverent Type Design," has yet to be determined, but when an audience member asked, "Are you at the point where you want to be at in your career?" Edmondson, surrounded by his life's work, replied, "Absolutely, but I've been content for a minute."
The exhibit OH no! The Type Design of James Edmondson & OH no Type Co. is open in the University Gallery on the second floor of the Student Center until Oct. 9, 2026.
