After nine years of failed attempts at his typeface Nave, Jamie Clarke did something counterintuitive: he threw out the files and started drawing from memory.

Jamie Clarke, writing for I Love Typography:

I began again from scratch, drawing from memory rather than reworking the old outlines (a great tip from Gerry Leonidas), and the results were instantly better.

Memory is a taste filter. When you draw from memory, you keep only the ideas that have lodged deep enough to matter. The cruft—the half-committed decisions, the accumulated compromises—falls away. Clarke’s breakthrough came not from refining what he had, but from forgetting most of it.

The second breakthrough was lateral. While flipping through specimen books, he landed on something unrelated to his project:

One day, while flicking through some specimen books, I came across a specimen of Futura Black. It had little in common with what I was trying to do, but it sparked an idea for the capitals. Paul Renner’s stencil forms look as if they were carved out of solid blocks, which puts all the emphasis on the negative shapes. Thinking this way allowed me to keep the outer shapes formal while letting the internal cuts be more playful. That balance finally gave me the capital forms I had been searching for and brought the design back in line with my original aim.

That recognition only works after enough reps. Clarke spent a decade shipping other typefaces—Brim Narrow, Rig Shaded, Span—before he had the vocabulary to see what Futura Black was telling him.