After a fifteen-year break, I returned to academia to start my doctoral studies at the University of Industrial Arts and Design. I was annoyed when in the middle of my studies its name changed to Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture.

My subject, Finnish typeface projects of the 20th century, felt obvious to me. It was wholly uncharted territory, despite font design being fashionable and popular today.

I had started collecting everything on the subject in the 1980s, so I had a vague notion of what I was about to do. I also knew my research material would never be very large and that all the data would have to be ferreted out from various archives and people's storage boxes. The dissertation would not be a massive tome.

Even within the branch, people were wont to state that there were no Finnish typeface projects of previous decades other than the unfinished Kalevala typeface project of Akseli and Jorma Gallen-Kallela in the early 1930s. Quite true, if all you count is traditional metal type. But typefaces have also been designed for use in many other machines and many reproduction technologies: phototypesetting, transfer letter sheets, adhesive letter cutters, license plate stamping machines. All in all I discovered about a dozen highly varied projects and executions. I expected that after my dissertation (2012) one or two more would turn up, but so far nothing has.

In the end, the major stumbling block for my dissertation was that both the pre-examiners and the opponent had to be PhDs and at least somewhat familiar with the field, and graphic design and academia seemed to be like oil and water. There had been some previous dissertations on newspapers that had also touched on typographical issues, but as far as I know I was the first in Finland to write a dissertation on typography as such.