The documentary showed Jim Rimmer, who dedicated his life to designing typefaces. It highlighted his traditional hand-drawing process, where he could quickly and confidently sketch out letters, refining their curves and tails. Though technology now allows faster typeface creation, seeing Jim combine manual and digital methods was fascinating. The documentary provided a glimpse into not just Jim's typeface design skills, but his passion for the craft that he pursued for his entire life, patiently creating each letter, then each typeface. It served as a reminder of the people who dedicate themselves to this important artistic tradition.

1. Making Faces
My experience of that talk was more of an enlightenment, in terms of
understanding how type was made, the documentary that was shown was about
Jim Rimmer who had dedicated his life in designing typeface.
For me personally designing font style on a piece of paper takes very long in
getting all the letter size to match and all of them dead straight. As I find great
difficulties in doing curve letters. So seeing Jim free handily draw out letters in
matters of seconds is amazing, and you could see it has taken many centuries of
practice to become so confident in drawing free handed.
But it’s the freedom in Jim’s creation that is fascinating, how he is able to decide
oh this looks good and I will refine that letters point to curve and that g’s tail to
sweep higher or lower to match the other letters. He is very direct on letters
styles and getting it to work as a word.
‘Making Faces’ is a legacy of Jim Rimmer’s work, not many people use traditional
method anymore as advance technology has made things so much faster and
easier to produce, but seeing metal and digital being worked together is amazing.

2. Documentary
Whist watching the documentary, my understanding of typeface had deepened, as we use
type so often we tend to forget it actually took time for someone to create the type. And I
think this documentary reminded me of the people out there who create text styles and
fonts, but what was even more interesting is that there are people who still like creating
things by hand and traditional tools, the tools which he heavy rely on and had invested in.
Many may view this documentary as a ‘how to’ design guide in creating typeface but in
reality we are viewing only an aspect of Jim’s lifestyle and why he has such passion for type
face making.
Looking at the extent of the process of this project, a person who is designing type face
must be very patience considering there are 26 letters in an alphabet and Jim has been
creating ‘RTF Stern’ typeface in capitals and lower case letters. Each letter could take as
long to make as a day to create, from drawing, to scanning, to precisely make an outline on
the computer, then print it out to cut around on a piece of card then transfer to cut into a
piece of silver steel then into a block steel on machines. To repeat this process over 52
times for one typeface font style that really would take up a lot of time in his life, this
documentary was completed after Jim passed away.
Karen Pang

3. History
Transplanting a Pie Tree to the Okanagan
January 2010 marked the passing of a Canadian master in the world of
type design and letterpress. Jim Rimmer, proprietor of the Pie Tree
Press and Type foundry in New Westminster, BC, was one of the last
practitioners creating custom typefaces in metal for hand-set and
composition casting. In his basement shop, Jim drew, cut, engraved
and cast original designs used in the printing of his fine press
editions, including his magnum opus and final work, The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer, for which Jim also did the linocuts (many in up to 10
colours) and the binding. Far more than his considerable achievements
at the Pie Tree, however, Jim was also a vital and important member of
the letterpress community, and one of the most gracious and generous
men one could ever meet.
http://www.greenboathouse.com/news.html

4. His creation