Michael Doret, a lettering artist, illustrator and designer whose work has shaped the visual language of contemporary letterforms, graduated from The Cooper Union in 1967. But long before he arrived at Cooper, his Brooklyn boyhood—jaunts to Coney Island’s Luna Park; subway ads; the hand-painted signs of neighborhood stores; movie marquees; trips to Broadway—had provided a rich survey of the ways lettering can evoke emotion and tell stories. These early impressions laid the groundwork for a lifelong fascination with letterforms and visual communication. As a child, he had considered a career in astronomy or art. “Geometry is the common thread,” he says.

With a career spanning over five decades, Doret is renowned for his ability to blend classic letterform aesthetics with bold, modern design, work that is at once nostalgic and fresh. What sets Doret apart is his unique integration of letterforms and illustration. 

At The Cooper Union, he studied under legendary figures in book design, calligraphy, and typography such as George Salter, Paul Standard, and Robert Haas. After graduating his early jobs included designing promotional materials for sewing pattern companies, Butterick and Vogue; at Photo-Lettering, Inc. assisting the legendary type designer Ed Benguiat, who taught Doret how to make letterforms from scratch while learning what was then the new technology of photo typesetting. In a 2009 interview, he recounted his work with Benguiat: “We would take the typographic film output, and he showed me how to customize it, whether it was drawing with ink on top of the film, scraping away the emulsion on certain letters and filling in other areas, cutting it apart and moving it, or all of the above. It was all very primitive compared to what we do now on the computer.”

He went on to work at other firms, most notably Charles White III’s Fluid Drive where Doret really began to merge his love of letterforms with illustration. The freewheeling environment was encouraging. In his richly illustrated autobiography Growing Up in Alphabet City, he wrote, “I suddenly felt free to access all those memories of signage, graphics, billboards, games, and books—all the things that I had fixated on as a youngster, but which would now start to inform my work.”  With White’s encouragement, he began his life as a freelance designer in New York, making his name in the 1970s and 1980s with album covers, book covers (including the New York City Yellow Pages), editorial illustrations, and advertising. One of his most iconic early works was the cover for KISS: Rock and Roll Over, a vibrant, symmetrical design that captured the essence of the band’s glam-rock image. 

For New Yorkers, his best-known design is his 1992 redesign of the New York Knicks logo. Over a six-month period, Doret came up with multiple iterations. The Knicks gave Doret only one directive: include a New York landmark.  He chose the Empire State Building surrounded by the team’s name, but in the end, the building was jettisoned:  Doret’s lettering itself had sufficient monumentality to carry the team’s logo on its own.

In the early 2000s, Doret expanded his practice to include font design through his foundry Alphabet Soup Type Founders. These fonts reflect his love of retro Americana—evoking everything from neon diner signs to mid-century baseball graphics to the glamorous lettering of movie posters—while translating his intricate lettering into functional typefaces. There’s Dynascript, which quickly converts from a connected script to a non-connecting italic. “Grafika,” is Doret’s homage to Art Deco lettering. His Deliscript and Deliscript Slant were inspired by the sign over Canter’s Delicatessen in Los Angeles on what was once a movie theater marquis. The Deliscript fonts, made up of almost 800 glyphs for each of the two, won the Type Director’s Club competition for type design in 2010. Almost as gratifying to Doret was a call he got from a great granddaughter of the founder of Canter’s: she wondered if he’d design signage for their new food truck using Deliscipt. She’d had no idea the font was a nod to her family’s business.

Doret’s work, which has been exhibited in numerous design retrospectives and is part of the permanent collection at The Smithsonian Institution, can be found at The Cooper Union’s Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography. In 2018, he donated many samples of his work that demonstrate his thought process while working out a design, a collection of use to students and design scholars alike. His album covers, stamps, logos, and typefaces, many of which have been honored with accolades from organizations such as the Type Directors Club and Communication Arts, have influenced younger designers who embrace expressive, custom lettering. He continues to work, sometimes collaborating with his wife, illustrator Laura Smith, from his home studio, fittingly a mid-century architectural gem in Pasadena, CA.