Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave's On the Ground Battle Creek series.
 
BATTLE CREEK, MI — The typeface that features prominently in the city’s new tagline and logo was created by Battle Creek native Jeff Keedy.

Known as Keedy Sans OT Regular,  it was designed in 1989 and distributed through Émigré Fonts in 1991 and would take another two to three years to gain a foothold says Keedy, who has been an Instructor at the California Institute of the Arts/ for 40 years.

In 2011 the Keedy Sans was acquired in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art In New York City.

In the mid to late 1980s, Keedy says it was a “brand new thing that a designer could design a typeface without having to go through a company. I started it and it was just terrible. Having done something terrible, that’s what kept me at it. I realized there was simply a lot I didn’t know.”
 
Jeff Keedy, a Battle Creek native, designed the font used in the new Battle Creek tagline.He was drawn to create a new typeface because there wasn’t one that existed for what he wanted to do. He describes it as “very legible, bold, fun and playful and easy to read but doesn’t look junky.”
 
The typeface that bears his name is now being used by a garage in Tokyo and on Colgate and Cadbury products, among others.
 
“It was surprising at the time because I was only thinking of the current moment. I never thought about selling this type. I kind of relented and said ‘OK, let’s finish and you can sell it,' he says of his collaboration with Émigré. “At the 10-year period, it started doing well again because it was no longer considered weird. It continued to do well after the shock of the newness wore off.”
 
On the Ground Battle Creek caught up with Keedy in late July while he was in Battle Creek to attend his Lakeview High School Class Reunion. He graduated from Lakeview in 1975 and went on to Kellogg Community College and then to Western Michigan University where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Design with a major in Graphic Design and Photography and a minor in Philosophy. In 1985 he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Cranbrook Academy of Arts.
 
When he graduated from Cranbrook he had his sights set on New York City, but a friend contacted him to say that other Cranbrook grads were headed to the California Institute of the Arts. The year was 1985 and the school was starting a program that fit with Keedy’s background and interests in graphic design.
 
The graphic design program he developed with Lorraine Wild and Edward Fella and directed from 1991-95 is widely perceived as one of the most progressive and conceptually challenging in the United States and for the students Keedy’s high profile helps to attract. Keedy is a demanding and inspirational figure, according to an article in Eye Magazine.
 
Battle Creek's new tagline featuring Jeff Keedy's font, Keedy Sans. “We quickly got a reputation for being a new program that was pushing things with technology and being much more in the post-modern camp,” Keedy says. “That was really what the reputation was and it drew people that were like-minded. We quickly became known for doing a lot of crazy design work.”
 
He credits his mother, now living in the Detroit area, with igniting his creative passion.
 
“When I was a little kid, her and I would make angels for Christmas decorations made with fabric and glue. Just this week I went to Hobby Lobby with her to get art supplies. I said you know we’ve done this before. I did it with her when I was 9 and 10 and I’m now doing it again at the age of 66.”
 
These days his mom is making “really funny” portraits of old people such as men wearing ties that are actual ties complemented by watercolor paints.
 
“It’s just fun things she does for herself. She’s much more limited as to what she can do, but it was like we were back to where we started.”
 
Seeing the impact of cuts to the arts on American students
 
Keedy recognizes that he was fortunate to have the encouragement to express his creativity early on from both his mom and in school. He says this is not the case now for the majority of students.
 
“It’s had a massive impact,” says Keedy of cuts to the arts in America’s schools.
 
After teaching for a total of 45 years in private arts schools, Keedy says he can see that American high school students who have never had a single art class are competing with their counterparts from Europe and Asia who have arts in high school and outside of school.
 
American students, he says, can’t compete with that. So, consideration is given to these students who take the initiative to study art.
 
“Imagine being a high school kid who’s never had an art class competing globally with kids who have had two years of art classes and afterschool classes. You can’t compete. COVID only made it worse with virtual learning. I feel like the damage is done and we need to start from scratch and have a new notion of what’s important in education.”
 
Keedy has gained a reputation in the design world as “an educator with attitude, a critic of waspish insight, and an apologist for the uncertainties of post-modernism who publicly chastises the faint-hearted with unflagging conviction and zeal. Where most in his tenured position would proceed with some caution, Keedy has chosen time after time to “stick my neck out”, naming names, telling it like he sees it, and enraging the opposition,” according to Eye Magazine. 
 
More than half of the students attending the California Institute of the Arts are international students, Keedy says, with China and Seoul, Korea, well-represented.
 
“They end up paying more money so the school makes more money from them. At some point, Americans will have to decide that education is not a privilege, but an investment that needs to be made to make sure American students have equal opportunity with students from other countries.”
 
Graduates of the California Institute of the Arts are employed with high-profile companies including Apple, Netflix, and Nike.
 
“For their first job some shoot for big corporate houses or marketing and advertising agencies and smaller studios and some of them want to freelance,” Keedy says. “One is a filmmaker now. He’s made several major motion pictures. Design is a skill set and then it’s really a matter of how you want to apply your skills.”
 
The jobs, he says, are out there, but there is also plenty of competition leading some to make a career out of three different side hustles.
 
He often hears from students who see his typeface somewhere and say, “Look how crazy your typeface looks.”
 
“I find that it has both a playful and erratic quality. It can be used to connote a cutting-edge kind of weirdness but also playfulness,” Keedy says. “As a graphic designer, I wanted to create a typeface that has legs. Because there are a lot of type designers who rely on history, they’re beautifully done but not relevant.”