Bernd Kolb | Opportunities resulting from consequent thinking and acting
Deutsch

Daniel van der Velden | Memes, Jokes, and Jesters –
Political Design In An Age Of Turmoil
English

Kirsten Dietz | The future belongs to the brave.
Seven hypotheses concerning sustainably successful design
Deutsch

Nat Hunter | How did that happen?
English

Matthew Butterick | Reversing the Tide of Declining Expectations
English

An overview of the exhibitions of this past year:

Capital: Berliner Buchstaben

Capital: Berliner Buchstaben celebrated the diversity of Berlin’s surprisingly large type community. Mota Italic paired the typefaces of 27 Berlin-based type designers with the work of 27 local illustrators/designers/artists. This relatively small collection featured the work of a wide variety of individuals – from life-long designers to recent graduates and from design “celebrities” to students. Most participants are employed full time as type/graphic designers or illustrators, but for some, their work represented was more of a passionate side project. Through these images, one could easily appreciate the diversity of the local design scene and get a taste of the current visual gestalt.

Was on display May 19th – July 22nd, 2011.

Type Masters

Type Masters gave a sneak peek at 24 new typefaces from the 2011 graduating master classes at the University of Reading (UK) and the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (NL).

Was on display July 26 – September 08, 2011.

Photo-Lettering

Photo-Lettering had the audience marvel at the magnificent creations of House Industries’ Photo-Lettering collection. These anal-retentively produced prints, by master screen printer David Dodde, were a true wonder to behold in person. 22 beautiful designs illustrated the pinnacle of what is possible when the right people combine fantastic letters, clever ideas, and luminous inks with the perfect paper. Limited quantities of the prints were also available for purchase.

Was on display October 4th – October 29th, 2011.

Blacklecker: Tasty Fraktur

Blacklecker: Tasty Fraktur comprised of 22 unique, modern typefaces that interpret the blackletter style in new and exciting ways. Through these designs, common stereotypes and connotations often associated with traditional blackletter types were severed, allowing this genre to advance with the times and serve new and interesting roles in contemporary design.

Was on display November 5th – December 23rd, 2011.

Rotation, Reflection, Repetition, Repetition.

Rotation, Reflection, Repetition, Repetition appropriately started off the year with some of the basic concepts of visual design. Using the foundational ideas of rotation, reflection, and repetition, students in the Visual Communications program at the Universität der Künste Berlin created beautiful patterns and textures using a selection of blackletter typefaces. The students were participants of Simone von Eldik’s typography seminar (assisted by Tanja Kapahnke), inspired by Judith Schalansky’s book Fraktur mon Amour. In contrast with the ever-present stereotype of blackletters as being symbols for Germanism and patriotism, a multitude of patterns emerged with surprisingly modern, contemporary aesthetics.

Was on display January 4th – 29th, 2012.

New Vintage Digital Vernacular Letters

Thanks to digital cameras, smart phones, nearly unlimited storage space, and online social sharing it is easier than ever to capture, collect, and share images. Particularly exciting is the now relatively mainstream pursuit of photographing interesting found type and lettering. Whether it is encountered in one’s neighbourhood or stumbled upon while travelling, there is seemingly no end to unique letters to be collected. This phenomenon is illustrated through dozens of blogs dedicated to found letters, to Flickr’s countless tagged images of type, and by sites like we love typography – currently with 12,000+ curated images.

New Vintage Digital Vernacular Letters was modestly comprised of just under 600 images* from 120 participants from all over the world. These photos depicted the letters as shiny and new, dilapidated and old, incredibly beautiful, incredibly ugly, mundane, idiosyncratic, everyday, unimaginable, local, and exotic. The images were shot in more than 40 countries and the variety of letter forms indicated just how special letters and typography can be.

Was on display February 1st – April 7th.

{It’s a Font!}

The current exhibition {It’s a Font!} showcases Mota Italic’s latest type family “Gemma”.

On display since April 24th.

Tina Roth Eisenberg | The Power of Side Projects and Eccentric Aunts

Joshua Davis | Work & Play

Mike Monteiro | What Clients Don’t Know (… And Why It’s Your Fault)

Here’s a number of examples of what I a looking for. However I would like to also have some extreme close-ups of overhangs and kerns.

24pt Civilité with 6pt floating accent (Stempel) cut in by hand. Photo © Justin Knopp

72pt Reiner Script capitals with overhang. Detail from photo © Interrobang Letterpress

24pt Berthold Boulevard with fractions. Photo © Interrobang Letterpress

:: UPDATE ::

Thomas Gravemaker sent me images of English-style copperplate scripts; a series on rectangular body and a series on slanted body.

Stéphane De Schrevel sent me these superb combos, showing both the type and the back side of the body, of two English-style copperplate scripts – one on rectangular and one on slanted body – and one wood type script on slanted body.

Sander Pinkse sent me these images of letterpress Mistral.

Header image: 30pt unidentified English copperplate script. Photo © Humberto Aste

With only ten days to go the conference is almost sold out. Only 60 Pro Tickets are still available at full price. However there is a unique opportunity for students. From Monday, May 7th, 10 am CEST an additional block of 20 Student Tickets at more than 40% off the full price will become available for 24 hours.

:: END OF POST ::

Morning rush at the TYPO SF registration desks.
Photo by Amber Gregory

To say the inaugural edition of TYPO SF was a success is somewhat of an understatement. Attendance of the conference met and eventually exceeded by a whopping third the most optimistic projections of the organisation. Fortunately the San Francisco weather decided to cooperate. Two warm, sunny days put conference-goers, speakers, staff and volunteers in a summery mood. Meeting unexpected success can however also have its downsides. While the 755-seat state-of-the-art Novellus Theater had the perfect size to accommodate the audience, the intimate 94-seat Screening Room which hosted the second track proved to be too small, with a potential audience often more than double the number of the available seats. Even though these growing pains were impossible to predict, some attendees were disgruntled that they couldn’t attend the lunch break sessions at noon on Thursday and Friday whilst there was nothing on in the Novellus Theater. FontShop will need to look for a bigger venue for next year’s edition.

Erik Spiekermann introduces co-facilitators Kali Nikitas and Jan Abrams to the TYPO SF audience.
Photo by Amber Gregory

The first talk on the first day of the first TYPO SF was by influential designer/blogger/creative entrepreneur Tina Roth Eisenberg a.k.a. swissmiss.
Photo by Amber Gregory

I have lauded TYPO programming on previous occasions, and the San Francisco event was no exception. The conference kicked off in style with The Power of Side Projects and Eccentric Aunts by influential designer/blogger/creative entrepreneur Tina Roth Eisenberg a.k.a. swissmiss. Using her personal experiences over the past decade or so Tina guided us through a list of recommendations for our professional and artistic endeavours, which could easily be applied to our personal lives too. Each item in her list was tied to a real life event in her career, adding a personal perspective to her story. Hearing her talk reminded me of a remark Oliver Reichenstein made at SXSW Interactive 2012. Instead of telling the audience that she was awesome, Tina let us discover this for ourselves by showing the great things she does. This was the perfect opening talk, full of inspirational and quotable moments. Upon the request of facilitator Erik Spiekermann Tina revealed the condensed grotesque used in her slides was Suitcase’s Atrament.

Sketchnote artist Eva-Lotta Lamm acting out her amusing talk on stage.
Photo by Amber Gregory

From the day I met sketchnote artist Eva-Lotta Lamm at TYPO Berlin 2011 “Shift” I loved her creativity and her joyous and bubbly personality. Since I got to know her better at TYPO London I was eager to see her give a presentation. Also because I had already seen Kutlu Çanlıoğlu’s fascinating talk BBC’s Global Experience Language in 27 languages and 9 scripts in London, I relocated to the Screening Room for Sketchnotes: Note Taking for Visual Thinkers. Eva-Lotta covered all aspects of sketchnoting, ranging from its history, psychology, practitioners to different styles, techniques, materials and so on. Both interesting and entertaining, her presentation mixed neurological science and visual mnemonics with humor and insight, listed hand lettering styles, and included a walkthrough of how to construct a sketchnote using the story of Romeo & Juliet with different iterations. To conclude Eva-Lotta announced her second collection Sketchnotes 2011.

This room was facilitated by Kali Nikitas in her very own non-conformist style. Instead of doing straight-up introductions, the members of the audience were asked to write down questions for the speaker. The only restriction was that the questions should not be related to the speaker’s topic. This was a wonderful idea, helping connect the audience with the speaker and creating a relaxed and familiar atmosphere.

Carolina de Bartolo giving her workshop Explorations in Typography in the Youth Lounge.
Photo by Amber Gregory

Before breaking for lunch I briefly visited Carolina de Bartolo’s workshop Explorations in Typography based on the publication, website and app of the same name. The workshop was a great success – the Youth Lounge was filled to capacity with mostly students, honing their skills in typography with hands-on exercises in the finer points of typesetting.

After the lunch break I decided to stick with the second track in the Screening Room. I was not particularly interested in Khoi Vinh’s Mixel which I expected to be the main subject of his presentation The Creativity Opportunity. As for Michael Bierut’s Learning The Hard Way; although I thoroughly enjoyed his superb presentation at TYPO London last fall, I was quite intrigued by the alternative: a panel discussion on music posters.

Juliette Bellocq presenting in the Screening Room.
Photo by Amber Gregory

Occasionally people lament the fact that women are under-represented at conferences, but TYPO SF was doing a pretty good job up to that point. Becoming a Microscope was the third consecutive presentation by a female presenter, and the quality was consistently good. The first part of Juliette Bellocq’s talk introduced us to the design and teaching of Sister Corita, who was a major influence on her. She then proceeded to show us her own amazing and idiosyncratic work, expanding on background and process. I really liked her typographic palette, with surprising choices like P22 Bifur and H&FJ Mercury for a Pae White catalogue, or Vendöme for the Otis Graduate Graphic Design brochure. Juliette’s soft personality and unassuming attitude in combination with the vibrancy of her work made for a delightful presentation.

SFMOMA’s Joseph Becker (left) in conversation with Parra (middle) and Jason Munn (right).
Photo by Amber Gregory

After seeing the movie poster panel at SXSW Interactive/Film 2012 I was curious if I would enjoy a panel on music posters as much. Joseph Becker, Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design at SFMOMA, moderated a conversation with poster designers Parra and Jason Munn. After an introduction of both artists and a concise overview of their art, the panel discussion touched on various aspects of music poster design and the work of both designers. Just like Parra’s fascinating freeform lettering and illustrations provided a striking contrast with the restrained concept-driven music and film posters by Jason Munn, so did Parra’s laid-back and relaxed conversation style with Jason’s quiet and thoughtful delivery. The audience was rewarded with a rare peek into the inspiration and creative process of two remarkable artists.

Oliver Reichenstein ponders about designing for continuity.
Photo by Amber Gregory

After coffee break I was confronted with a serious dilemma. My compatriot Hugo Puttaert – artist & designer, editor, professor & researcher and organiser of the Integrated international design conferences in Antwerp – would discuss his myriad activities in Playing the Five-Armed Guitar on the second track. At the same moment Typekit’s Sean McBride who I saw at SXSW Interactive 2012 would talk about A Renaissance in Web Typography in the Youth Lounge.

I eventually decided to sit in on Oliver Reichenstein’s Designing for Continuity on the main stage. He is always invigorating and inspiring, and he says it like it is. Yet my main reason this time was a pre-TYPO SF dinner I was going to have with Cheshire Dave on Wednesday. Chesh has been one of my Typophile pals for almost a decade, yet we had never met. Due a series of coincidences we were joined by Oliver, type designer Mark Simonson, and designer/typographer and current president of ATypI John D. Berry. Our burger meal turned into a very interesting and invigorating conversation about type design and screen typography. As I expected Oliver’s presentation was a continuation on that conversation, a freeform monologue on nostalgia in design, the five canons of rhetoric applied to (web) design, the crucial factor in adaptive design being typography and not changing lay-outs, the need for graded screenfonts and why Nitti can look too light on screen in specific cases, his custom-designed Sabon for screen, design for digital media and so on. Just like when I saw Oliver talk about priests and hackers at TYPO Berlin 2011 Shift, his concepts and associations were like seeds planted in your brain, waiting to germinate and challenge your preconceptions.

Joshua Davis spiced up his story with a relentless stream of F-bombs.
Photo by Amber Gregory

The creative whirlwind that is Joshua Davis was the perfect end for this first day. Amidst a torrent of F-bombs he expounded on the importance of “play” in our daily lives. The concepts “work” and “play” are commonly perceived as opposites. By explaining his philosophy and showing his amazing generative work Joshua however proved that they are words used to describe the same thing under different conditions, as Mark Twain once said. Being a designer with a background in skateboarding he drew parallels to point out the importance of failing and using accidental inspiration. To quote Sean McBride: “Wow, Joshua Davis is the Jack Black of design. Which is pretty amazing.” By far the most energetic presenter on stage, his exuberance and humour were infectious and had the whole audience in high spirits for the first conference night.

Dalton Maag comments:

To say that we were surprised to be the category winners was something of an understatement. We just didn’t expect that a font would be given such acknowledgement by the design community. Font design is often regarded as a bit uninteresting or not really thought about at all. Not only that but we were up against some very strong competition, including Blackpool’s Comedy Carpet.

Bruno Maag’s reaction to the announcement of the win was one of delighted shock. His words when he got up on the stage focused on the courage that Nokia has shown, and its vision to invest in a typeface as the bedrock of their identity. The company has put intelligent design at the heart of everything they do, across languages and cultures. The award for Nokia Pure is a testament to the people at Nokia who understand that good design has value beyond pounds and pence.

Dalton Maag was asked by Nokia to design a typeface primarily for use in digital media (mobile devices and the web), which would also be versatile enough to be the cornerstone for all of Nokia’s communications worldwide. In their own words, the new font family had to reflect the traditions of Finnish design: simplicity, clarity, functionality and beauty of form – in short, Pure. The clean lines of the letter forms make this a font that is easy to read with no unnecessary frills to distract from its message. As Dalton Maag have added script systems to the font, they have carried through the essential character of the font and kept the ethos that this is a font about legibility and purity of design.

Developing Nokia Pure Indic scripts.

Beyond that Nokia Pure is, quite simply, a very special typeface because of its impressive reach. It currently supports 15 different script systems, covering the languages of about 4 billion people around the world. Work continues on the project, with Tamil and Khmer being the latest scripts systems to be completed. It is providing a unified visual expression to the Nokia brand that can be translated across continents and borders, but it is also helping people to communicate by providing them with mobile phones that actually use their own languages and script systems.

Developing Nokia Pure Tamil.

Checking curves for Nokia Pure Tamil.

Nokia Pure is a huge project, both for everyone in the studio at Dalton Maag and our colleagues at Nokia, seeing it acknowledged with such a prestigious award is truly amazing for all of us at Dalton Maag. We’re very proud to have been able to turn Nokia’s vision into a real font that is designed and engineered to the highest specifications.

Developing Nokia Pure Thai.

Nokia Pure Devanagari test pages.

Product Award · Design of the Year 2012

London 2012 Olympic Torch | Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby
Commissioned by the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG)

Architecture Award

London 2012 Velodrome, UK | Hopkins Architects

Digital Award

Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 and Kinect SDK | Microsoft Games

Fashion Award

132 5. Issey Miyake | Issey Miyake Design Studio Tokyo, Japan

Furniture Award

1.3 Chair | Kihyun Kim

Graphics Award

Nokia Pure | Dalton Maag

Transport Award

Redesign for the Emergency Ambulance | Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and Vehicle Design Department Royal College of Art

How did you come up with the concept of doing a typographic Scrabble?

Andrew Capener | “The idea actually began for me as a school project, that I didn’t finish before the class ended. Excited about the idea, I continued to develop and grow the concept. It soon grew into something much larger than I originally planned when the internet world caught hold of the set and I began to receive an unbelievably positive response. My intention all along was to give the beloved game of Scrabble a bit of a twist. Having a love for typography made me gravitate to the idea of offering Scrabble sets with custom typefaces. Months later Hasbro teamed me up with one of their high-end licensees: Winning Solutions and soon after The Scrabble Typography Edition was born!”

Can you share something about the production process?

Andrew Capener | “The great thing throughout this whole process has been how much the “people” have really outspoken and made this a possibility. I thought in my wildest of wild dreams someone would see this and think it was cool. I never thought in a million years that it would actually go into production. With such a high number of requests to purchase the set, Hasbro had no choice I think but to say yes. It’s just been so amazing for me to stand back and see a product like this taken to market simply because people spoke out about it. That’s how this whole process has even been made a possibility.

The other wonderful thing about the actual production process, has been the fact that I have had nearly a year to look at, think about, and revise the original prototype that I created. With that being said, the actual set that people are purchasing is in a sense a second, more perfected version of my original. We have made some minor adjustments that will make the set all that more easily used and more visually pleasing.”

Is there a certain system to what typefaces were used for which letters?

Andrew Capener | “There was a definite process in selecting the characters we wanted to use for each letter. I spent weeks looking through forums, galleries, on Typophile and anywhere else I could find a list of designers’ favourite characters. In the end we went with a blend of classic and modern characters, which I think works well together. We went through many revisions to finally select the characters we did. The hardest part was ensuring that each possible letter combination looked great together.

At this point I can’t tell you exactly which typefaces we have used, although this information will be released in the coming weeks. The faces will most likely be announced with the final product images. Also the hope is that there is enough demand for people who want to order a set of tiles in the font of their choice. We want to provide that option for people if there are those who would like to customize their typographic Scrabble experience.”

So the “standard” version has a mix of typefaces on the tiles, but customers can request a version with all tiles in one single typeface?

Andrew Capener | “Exactly. The Limited Edition set comes with an assortment of typefaces. There will be the option to order tiles in your favourite typeface down the road as well.”

The set will be available in the typeface of your choice or with an assorted font pack. Additional font packs (including your favourite typeface) could be ordered through Scrabble’s website. The scrabble board and interior box are made out of solid walnut, and the exterior box is made from birch. Each of the 6 board pieces is magnetized to fit together perfectly and each piece slides nicely into its respective slot in the box and is secured by interior magnets as well. The interior of the exterior box as well as the bottoms of the 6 board pieces are lined with cork, to protect them while in use.