October 31- November 1, 2015. bacc, Bangkok.
These are live blog notes from the lectures at the ATypI 2015 in Sao Paulo.
Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by me, Dave Crossland, at the event, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke on these topics. This is probably FULL of errors. What do you want for free? :) If something here is incorrect it is probably because I mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, just should tweet me – @davelab6 - or file an issue. Thanks!
I would like to tell you a story about my career, why I work on typography, what I have done, and what you can do.
First I want to show you this video of a cat riding a roomba, scaring a duck. I want to explain why this is funny to me. We'll return to this later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of2HU3LGdbo
So, I worked with Gogle Fonts as a consultant. I should make a disclaimer that this is all my own personal views, not the views of any consulting client, such as Google.
Here is Google Fonts, with 100s of fonts that are fast, easy and free. They are available to everyone to use on any website.
Hhere is the most popular video on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0
2.4B views, total.
As you can see on the Google Fonts analytics page, the most popular font, open sans, does 21B views per week. 3 per day!
https://www.google.com/fonts#Analytics:total
Here is a demo of how easy it is:
I grab some English and Thai text from Google Translate
http://jsbin.com/fiwuven/edit?html,output
So, why am I involved in this?
When I was a kid, I loved learning what I wanted to learn. I was kind of a bad kid. I didn't study too hard, so I could learn my own interests. I found Debian, a libre software project. I loved computers, and I loved Debian as I could learn everything, it was totally transparent.
Later I studied Graphic Design, and I learned about Multiple Master fonts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_master_fonts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io6CF7TJWe4
But I became angry when I learned Adobe was removing support for this advanced feature. I thought back to the Debian software I used as a teenager, and what it means for tools to be transparent.
https://www.google.co.th/search?q=what+is+free+software?
The free software foundation promotes the idea of software freedom as a principle, that users of tools ought to be able to see how the tools work and change them to meet their needs.
http://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software
Is it important to have this freedom? It doesn't matter, until it does.
In the news recently is a scandal about the software in Volkswagen's cars, that was lying. If the software was libre, this would never happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
Tools can be broken in 2 ways. There is the obvious bugs, the crashes that go unfixed longer than we would like. But there is a more subtle and more profound way things are broken: They can be missing things.
Consider the wikipedia, which is the biggest encyclopedia ever made. A traditional encyclopedia can't have a page on this small topic. But wikipedia can, because it is libre; its potential is unlimited.
So, as I got more into typography, and then type design, I realised that it was important to me that the fonts I use are libre licensed, so if they are broken I can fix them, or if they are missing things, I can add them.
I found others were already working on this. SIL is a organiziation that made the Open Font License
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL_web
This license combines the needs of libre software develoeprs and type designers.
To amke type, or to execerise the freedom in libre fonts, I thought I would need 3 things. Tools, Knowledge of how to use the tools, and a 3rd important ingredient.
At the time there was 1 libre font editor, FontForge.
http://fontforge.github.io/en-US/
It has a lot of features, but some problems. But if you want ot play with fonts and type design, it is available and you can learn with it.
There are new editors today.
Glyphr Studio is web based, so you can get started immediately, you don't even need to install it:
There are also more advanced tools, like Metaoplator, a project I have been invovled in. This homepage shows the power of web based tools; like the old Multiple Master, you can adjust the typeface to the exact typography requirements.
And there is a new editor, started by a fontforge developer, TruFont. I am very excited about this, and I recommend it. Here is a quick preview of it in action. It runs on Windows, Mac and GNU.
So there are tools available. I also needed to learn how to use them, and I was influenced by this small book, Mastery. It says to master something, you must seek out good teachers.
https://www.google.co.th/search?q=mastery+book
So I studied a Masters in Typeface Design, in England, close to where I grew up.
There are now web resources to learn, such as Design With FontForge.
http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/index.html
The 3rd thing is a business model, so you can pay your rent to put the tools and knowledge into practice.
Some libre fonts have been funded this way.
http://fundwebfonts.appspot.com/
The most successful has been Montserrat, which sought $5,000 but raised nerly $10,000 after 100s of poeple each contributed a small amount.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/julietaulanovsky/the-montserrat-typeface?ref=card
There are other models for such funding, that use the power of a work being libre and freely available to everyone to power the funding process.
So, I have been lucky that when I graduated, web fonts was starting, and Google Fonts has been commissioning new fonts. But if you would like to make a libre font, you can raise money to pay for the work without Google, if you need to.
This returns us to the cat riding the roomba.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of2HU3LGdbo
Some people are worried that by making libre fonts, it may become impossible for others to make restricted licensed fonts. They see me as a scary shark, riding this big robot.
But it is not true. When a font is available freely to everyone, that is not desirable for the people who pay for fonts. THey want fonts that not many other people have.
The robot is going its own way, not really chasing the duck.
In the same way, Google is seeking to make the web platform great. Great Android phones are now around US$100, and everyone in the world gets online with a smart phone, they will need good typography in their own script.
This year a dozen Thai font families have been commissioned by Google from Cadson Demak, and there are 2 already available in the Google Fonts directory
https://www.google.com/fonts#ChoosePlace:select/Script:thai
All the fonts are available with sources on Github, and you are invited to study them and give feedback and participate in the development:
https://github.com/cadsondemak/
All the fonts in Googel Fonts are available in this way
https://github.com/google/fonts/
As more reading is done on smart phones, where often all you can see on a screen is text, the importance of typography is increasing.
XXX
[ Was great, but in Thai ]
https://twitter.com/davelab6/status/660321631449968640
## Seok Geumho: “Structure and features in Hangul and fonts development”
First, I present a video about the structure of Hangeul.
Used everyday. Here is a glyph for heaven, earth, and humankind. THey come together to form vowels, that is what is beautiful about the script. Voels are symmvetrical, bright sounds, contrasting with the dark consonants. Here is a grid showing the variations from the 5 basic forms. Here is 'Bear', 'Door'. Here is a number pad input system, for H and Latin. Here is a comparison to Japanese and Chinese. Hangul is recognised as a great intellectual achievement and a cultural hertiage of the Korean people.
KS 5601 standard has 2,350 characters, 96 latin basic. Unicode 4.0 had X,000 glyphs!
Latin is a linear system. Hangul is a non linear system. You can say T is one letter, but in Hangul, the first element is not a letter. When the elements combine, it creates 1 syllable, that is then a letter. So Thailand is 4 letters in Hangul. Cadson Demak is also 4 letters. The vowel and consonant can combine, horizontally or vertically, or be mixed. Cadson Demak has 4 letters, the first is horzontal, the 2nd is vertical, the other 2 are mixed.
This maeans that type design is tricky; how to share white space properly? How to make the size the same among letters? How to find a baseline? How to make word space equal?
In hangul, the letters are often asymmetrical. In Chinese, the glyph for East is symmetrical. But in Hangul, it is not.
How to overcome these difficulties?
Noto Sans CJK.
I'd like to talk about my experience with Noto Sans. Last year it was annoucned by Google and Adobe: It has a 65,535 glyph set, in 7 weights. A total of 457,845 glyphs. 17k in Japnese, 34k in Chinese, 13k in Korean. Companies in China, Japan and Korea came together and collaborated. Here is a IUC14 slides from Ken Lunde, with a breakdown.
It is a sans Serif CJK style. You can easily identify a Latin sans serif. But if you look at it in detail, there is complications for a 'unified design' font. The thickness of stems and bars are totally different in Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Latin. The Curve Style is not the same. The baseline is not the same.
So a challenge to develop a multiscript CJK family is harmonising these things.
We did an analysis for Hangul in the Noto project.
Here is a Mincho CJK, a 'serif' like style of CJK. Is this a unified design? The bar and stem in Korean and Chinese are totally different. The terminals of a stem are absolutely different. So it is hard to make a design consistent among CJK scripts. That is the challenge.
Another aspect is alignment. You can see baseline, upperline, and center line. Each is always different in all 3 scripts.
There are other problems, it is perhaps NOT POSSIBLE to make a mega-multi-script typeface. Baseline, letterspace, word space, direction of reading, contrast of strokes - these are typographic issues. There are also cultural issues; these may be more challenging. There are social customers differing and this extends to form: standards of beauty. What is a circle, what is a stroke.
How can we match visual balance in an internaional, multiscript typesetting? Can you give up your cultural habit? No. If you can not, it is impossible to make design unity. This is a very important issue for developing multiscript font design.
We have an unusual tool, for combining the core elements to the 13,000 glyphs. We separate the glyphs into core shapes. [ Not sure I understood this correctly ]
Here is a SinoType slide showing the Noto Sans Chinese and Japanese variations for the same ideographs. They have the same meaning, but each nation has its own form. There is some logic in the font to supply the correct glyph for the language in use.
Here is the full 7 weights and 4 scripts. here are the Sandoll designers. Here is the group of all east asian type companies and Adobe meeting at the Sandoll office.
Sandoll has worked with global partners, and have some experience with multi script type design. Microsoft, Samsung, Hyundai, [ many others ]
Daumkakao, approached us for a type design, and we parterned with Dalton Maag.
here are my questions for you:
-
Is it possible to make design unifiying beween multiscripts? I think it is impossible.
-
Does it need to be compromised between cultural and design unity? We have cultural gaps, no one can give up their cultural habit, so we must respect each other, and discuss and collaborate.
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How can we overcome the cultural gaps?
-
What is your solution and answer?
It is a hard problem. We must discuss about it, to develop together a practice of multiscript type design.
Next subject, the font service business model: Sandoll Cloud. We launched in April last year. It is a font subscription service. Morisawa started 5 years ago, and Adobe, and other USA companies. Our could service set the culture; our fonts are updated MONTHLY. Users can use all 470++ fonts, and the price starts at USD $9/month.
The business model is expensive, though; we have 4 kinds of products. THe basic structure for a long time was a font database in the company, that is packaged into a package on disk or CD, and physically delivered. We evolved a digital delivery platform. WE now use a Font Cloud, with GPL, 3rd party and our own fonts, that can be browsed in www.fontclub.co.kr There are 4 distribution channels, PC applications, Mobile applications (android, iOS) web fonts (type square) game platforms (unity asset store) and service platforms (Kakao Talk).
We have CloudBridge so our users can simply check which font they want to use and activate. There is no memory problem or long font list, using this tool. It is a simple, easy to use tool.
SandollCloud Camera for Android: Users can use many Sandoll fonts, freely, to experience many great fonts on their phones when sharing images with text overlaid.
Recently we added new fonts, and we add more each month.
Here is Sandoll Gothic Neo1, we collaborated with Christian Schwartz on this.
Microsot, in 2005 for Windows Vista, we made this for them.
This is our Mincho, we won the grand prize at the Granshan competition.
Next, Brand Font Examples.
This is a Samsung group font, we worked for 7 years on this. A long time! They publish a critical report and history book, a special publication. You know text type is all similar, so its hard to find a way to maesure the impact. But they did; fthey found 18%+ readability, _9.4% legibility, adnd +14% sensitivity satisfaction.
HyundaiCard is the most famous credit card company in Korea. Innovation in Art, was developed by Total Identity in Netherlands. Their company was a poor one before they started brand marketing. THey were -$500M. With marketing, after 4 years, they were +$250M. A very successful case. A strong influence to all kinds of Korean companies, so many companies now want their own brand fonts. The success factors were distinctive brands, with typo-branding.
Questions
Dave Crossland; Do you think there are technical problems with the OpenType format, c
A: No, OpenType and TTF is okay.
Roger Black: With all the cultlurs, to make a unified design, its hard; people see thigns idfferently, wiht our own cultureal view. The brand fonts, they try to make design unity above all other considerations. What if you said no, we wont make a unified design, but we want to amek the same FEELING from readers in teh different culutrs. Say you have a latin typeface that is ELEGANT. We don't say, draw the same shapes. We say, make an ELEGANT Hangul font. Then let the forms fall where they may.
A: Yes, we should respect the cultural habit. For design unity in brand fonts, we sometimes give up their cultural habit. I have seen this in my expereince. But in most cases its impossible to totally give up a cultural habit.
Q: In the last case study, you said that using a font can improve sales. How can you evaluate using a font, and improving the marketing?
A: ...
https://twitter.com/davelab6/status/660365447011766272
Here is a modern office in the old days; typewriter emeant a new way of working. Also new literature. It was a key part of law and order, police work. Typewriters gave way to computers. Typewriters were made to make typeset documents quickly; also for fast data input, and making copies of documents.
Arluck is a style of thair handwiriting, used before typewriters for consistency in record keeping. Her eis slanted thai script before hot metal type made Thai more commonly seen upright, causing thai handwriting to also go vertical.
Typewriters were used in gov docs and perosnal letters, and they had an 'originality' and authenticity. However, documents from typewriters still required a personal touch, the ink signature.
Postcards seem to be a survivor for handwriting.
...
We dont' use Thai punctuation or currency because we don't know where they are on the keyboard
Originally typewriters had a grid key layout, but this changed to a carriage distribution optimsed layout. QWERTY was used in Latin, but each script needs its own standard. Pressing a latin letter is simple, but a hard press needed. Electric typewriters with soft keyboards help, increasing type speed. The combination keys helped go beyond latin. The next generation might soon only know on screen keyboards. Or even not that, only voice input.
...
While THailand is not a powerhouse of hardware or software, we have a right to set a stndard for data input to those who make hw and sw.
We care about output, but never work togehter on input. Lack of common ground is a problem. From early typewriters to numeral keypad input, we are haunted by the same hghost. We always let new hardware change the way we write Thai.
...
[ http://www.bangkokpost.com/lifestyle/social-and-lifestyle/706056/he-is-just-your-type is an interview with Panuwat ]
[ Parinya Rojarayanond is the founder of the pioneering Thai type foundry, started in the 1980s, www.dbfonts.biz ]
https://twitter.com/davelab6/status/660369244064866304
...
Thai Vertical Display Font. DB Angkana is like this, here it is with +500 tracking. The 'vertical lock' means the floating vowels keep their position.
If the glyphs are rotated, the lock still works. so we can have even spacing between letters.
...
DB SantiPab was an experiemntal font with square glyphs. DB GeoTypewriter was a similar design, using circles, squares and diagonals in a grid to make letterforms.
Verena Gerlach: I'm not familiar with Thai, so, how often do you typeset it vertically?
A: It will be more common after today! [ lulz ]
Q: I don't agree that it will become common. We see it written vertically in Chinese martial art movies of Chinese context. If I designed a type for vertical use, I would design it for that context of use.
A: Yes, I agree. I already prepared a typeface for brush script that I didn't show yet, for that usage. I can show you afterwards.
Q:
So I'm here to talk about Font Bureau's work to push frontiers in an ever overcrwoding Latin type market.
I like to draw! That is what attracted me to type design; solving problems by drawing. Drawing in a pure way, solving puzzles in black and white, form and counterform.
Lucky for me, a font is a bunch of drawings. There is metadatdata, hintin,g but its just a list of drawings really. When you look at a font, that is what you see. But the drawings are dumb; there is no udnerstanding of a stem or a hairline. Nor how 1 letter related to others, or how 1 font relates to another in the family.
My first typeface, Manicotti, is a cowboy style; spagetti western, but thicker and tasiter. Because its so extreme I learned a lot. It is so disroted, it lost the hand written stroke. It has a system of shapes. The horzional parts get thick, the vertical get thin. White psace is hard to grasp for beignners, but so important. But I would look at this H and see a hamburger ;) Now you see it?
THis informed the hwole typeface. You see hamburger buns all over the place. If you focus on the middle of the type, you see all the counters working together, hodling the typeface together.
Typeface design is abou thte black and white, and each effects the other. They work together in a unified suystem. When i started working at FB, I frealised it was more than 1 alphabet. Here is Titing Gothic, made for editorial use. It shows shapes in many widths and weights, so you can get narrower, lighter, and wider, bolders, and so on. Iss a huge fmaily. FB is known for the huge families. This is great, a lot of flexibility. But a sense of design and tone of voice that a brand can use. A font is a bunch of drawings, a family is a bunch of fonts, it becmes a mess.
When I started, my screen was the glyph window. But now its more shape management. I have no formal Computer SCience, but programming is now a huge part of my work; to take an idae and blow it up into a big sustem.
In metal type days, each size was drawn to work best at that scale. large sizes were narrower, more delicate; small sizes were wider and more strudy, to stand up to the physical medium of printing. Digital is normally one size fits all.
So for FB devleoping optical sizes is improtant, to honor that tradition. So type responds to size that htey are used for. So, this is 1 type family, with a high contrast, more flavor, in headline, and a text font with omore space, set wider. If I swap them it becomes more obioucy, the title is loose, the text is harder to read.
Its like an old medieval paiting, as children were drawn as adults. Its like a woman holding a little old man. Something to avoid [ lulz ]
So, Frutiger popularised a design system as more than a family. He thought through the family as a design space. This is how I think of things today, not as individual fonts, but as systems that work togther. I can navigate that design space due to interpolation.
If I have a drawning and a matching drawing with the same points, a cmputer can make the intermediate ones. I can use Superpolator to visualse the design across the axes of variation possible with this. Optical size. Roman to italic (not always interpolatable.) How shapes carry weight. How to get more square and elongated as they get condnesed. These things I htink about as I make afa mily. AS i do this as a susyem, I distirute many individual fonts. This means tehy lost some of the individual character of old metal type.
In my Schadow by Georg Trump, you see these differences; in my reivial-remake you see the way I brought some details like this back.
We looked at many currency symbols today, and you see in this dollar that when the letter is too bold or too narrow for th ebar to run all the wya though, it is removed.
The problem with big families is that they create cohices; but what i want is variety, not a huge number of choices. That is inefficient for using type.
Instead of givin users fonts, we try to give them a design space. The first example is my family Input. I designed this for programming; what i reliased is that everyone has their favourite. Coders look at their coding font 24/7. Bitstream Vera Mono is too mono, this has a g i dont like, etc etc. So a coding type is about comfort, getting the type that is right for you. You might like it lighter, or narrower, depdning on your text context. So we built this interface to navigate the input design space to see what suits their prference. Different widths, weights, alternate forms. Evne the dfault linespacing.
We are also looking at how text should respond when text content is unknown. Another example, led by Erik and Petr van Blokland, si Shirtwriter. THe client wanted to put slogans on jerseys, but htey didn't know what the team name would be. So the font is interpolated on the fly, so if team names change, the font will interpolate to make a new version that fits the text string to the space available.
the http://input.fontbureau.com is responsive, and uses a wider font on wider displays, and a narrower font on narrow mobile. A few more letter per line, to make reading more comfortable.
The Leading Edge series, a project led by David Berlow, is looking to make fonts more flexible for paragraph widths. As CSS supports multi cols, its becoming more common. Reading Edge fonts are meant for short cols, like lcassic newspaper layouts. Just by changing the asc and descenders, you can see as you increase linespace, you can fill up the spaces, until the font is no longer dense and newsy but open and lyrical. This is just 1 change.
This is just a start. Where type is fluid, the letters can not be static. I see not just 1 letter but al the variations behind it. I think we need type that is a fluid design space. I don't mind that less time is spent drawing. I think the interesting thing in type design is the relationships.
Thank you!
November 1, 2015. Morning session 10.00 am. – 12.00 pm.
[ arf missed it ]
[ 10 mins late ]
The problem was that in Unicode there was only 1 collection of 5 tone marks.
In early fonts, we used a LIGATURE feature for tone marks on top of voewls. This makes tone marks safely fit in any situation.
Today we use "marks" to control the position of the tone marks.
Here is some FEA code. thai_comb { script thai; [ glyph-thai glyph2-thai ] by [ glyph-thai.short glyph2-thai.short ] }
Here you see the top tone marks on 4 different lower tone marks, all aligned vertically in the same position.
Marks are useful for other scripts that are based on Thai script, even twith the double position of tone marks such as Kuy.
...
4th, letters which have upperback stems and voewls, tone marks are set on the left to avoid overlap.
Thanks!
To explain, Suppakit proposed a solution to the classical problem of tone marks being misplaced. With mk2mk positioning the problem can be solved. There is a type designers duty to develop new fonts and fix existing fonts using the latest correct techniques.
[ lunch ]
This is my first conference presentation!
This talk is a work in progress.
I'm Mark de Winne, I'm singaporean and belgian; I studied T&Media and now work as UX Designer at RelayRoom, a large firm in Singapore. ONG and ONG work on Type Events.
As some of you may know, this is Singapore's 50th year. The little red dot's silver jubilee. Our patwa, English, our food, and
Here's Temple Station sign for the London Underground, its part of the identity of the city. The singapore subway uses Ocean Sans, that has bits cut away. I'm not a fan.
What about Singapore? Somthing typogrpahic we can call our own?
I looked at the national archives. This is a 60s or 70s shop signage, everything I show is 50s to 80s.
Here is more. You see a lot of variety, before acryilic signage that is machine cut with Arial.
I see pawn shops using a lot of languages, this has the 4 official and jawi (writte in an Arabic)
So this year I stepped up taking images of today's shop signage. There was some blocky stuff, but also scripts. "Friendship Motor Co." is paired with a 2 toned effect on chinese letters. I can't read it though. But having the latin in a totally different genre to the Chinese is a theme.
Here is a fish market, and a dry cleaner. Here is an old instagram snap of mine, of Wah Chang; its now lost, replaced.
"Chin Leong Bicycle Co", which no longer sells bikes.
"Jit Sin" beauty parlour.
"Ley Wah", and "Yong Wah". "Love Confectionary" with hearts, even in the chinese.
Serif examples.
This shop has an amazing collection of stickers on the doors. I usually go photographing on Sunday, and they are closed. This is usually good idea as Chinese business people don't like unauthorised photos of their businesses ;)
"Steadfast", "Sin Huat Eating House". Serif type is often ALL CAPS and doens't work well.
"Ching Yoon Wool Kwoon" is 3D letters, cut out and mounted on the fascade.
Here is a wide latin wood type; the A and W are mounted flipped.
"Yi Kwang Sign Crafts" in a western slab
"Unique"
Some exuberant reverse contrast types like "Pek Kay Lee"
"Rochor Medical Center"
"No Parking" - the best one ever.
"People's Dental Surgery" - a wide round unicase, smooth, but the Chinese is totally different. Too much coffee like type.
"Lee Geok Woo" is a really interesting design. Love that W! But the Chinese is again quite ordinary.
But the most common style of type today is the engineered Sans.
Eric Gill talked about the D and O [ ? ] being very similar. They are on all kinds of shops; a hardware shop, a herb shop, auto shop, medical clinics, flower shops, betting shops, grocery shops, wood companies, stationary companies, trinket companies, a bird shop.
This bet shop is hand painted, professionally.
They have different widths, different constructions, but they have a familial feeling.
This medical hall had its name on 3 signs.
I went over the whole country, even though it is small there are many areas I don't go to, like the red light district.
My wife asked me, "so what?"
I was going to make a type family. 50 years, so 5 weights?
I settled for 5 widths instead. I did numerals, here are 8 examples. Christian Schwartz suggested doing alternate numbers, I did this 5 for fun.
How black should I go? I found this example, "Choon Hung". The counter on the final G is so lovely; its a wide shop front so its pulled to fit.
Simmilarly, narrow examples.
Here is the 5 weights. I did some alternates, like the S with a flat, corner'd spine.
I found some nice ampersands. I made 5 variations of it.
Some things I did not keep. This is a pawn shop in the red light district.
Next step?
More research! I have no lowercase as I haven't found enough to start. I want to have forms reasonably correct rather than smoked up.
There are so many places to go in singapore, and the state has a private archive of streets; a civil servant went around and took pictures of every house. No tripod was used. Getting into this archive was hard, they only open on weekdays, but I want to try to get in there.
Thank you for your time!
Q: You are interested in Latin characters? The chinese designs have interesting ideas, like the shaky/caffeinated one.
A: I don't have a Chinese name, I can't read Chinese, although I studied for 6 years. I see them as shapes; its interesting but I can't read them or judge them as more than form. I am happy to chat to any reader about them.
Christian Schwartz: This a truly local type. How do you feel about this being used in other places?
A: I see the similar type in Malaysia and even here in Bangkok. Engineered sans like these are a straighforward to make for signage. In Singapore, we say we are unique, but we are also part of a region. Holland has a type for its government, or a monospace made for Sweden; you can post-rationalise that the type is like Singapore, not adventurous, all engineered in a way, and there is a place and time to keep the past and make it modern. So I have no problem with people using it for a disco or something I can not imagine; I like that aspect of doing type design. It needs a lowercase and italics to become useful though, so it will happen in time.
Q: This is singapore's 50 years logo. I see type designers use inspiration from existing type. Would you look at architectural forms, or other sources, to inspire a type?
A: I haven't looked at architecture so deeply. The buildings are town down very often and rebuilt. So this old signage is often at risk of disappearing soon. So the project was intended to document what is there at 50, and in the future there could be influences from other things... but the architecture is already like the type. Straight, tall, blocky.
Pracha Suveeranont: “Klang: Thai typefaces in the 1950s (on my 2015 travel to the Monotype archives in Salfords)”
[ Monotype Salfords archives have many of the types from the 50s, and Thailand ought to have its own typography archive ]
My first time in Bangkok and great to be here. I'm a graphic designer, not a type deisgner. Here's me as a kid. I loved music as a kid. This is the Human League album I loved the most, early electronic music.
When I started, I was given a Letraset catalog. All the fonts you needed! An ancient system, rub down letters. Super old fashioned. I'm from an analog time. In the 80s, this is how GD was done.
As well as the fonts, there were pictograms. Line drawing clip art, here's the people section - young people dancing, getting married, getting old. A bit sad, actually.
The album art has this clip art of the young people dancing! And this is Eurostile from the catalog, and the album.
So my first idea of graphic design, hasn't changed in 25+ years.
Here is the work I did at the RCA. Early 90s. Found type. Clip art. Fan zines, photocopier stuff. Handmade.
I stripped things down. I like simple design. "The world is a giant sweet shop". Words become important. The type choice and words. "Eat up" "Fast lane / slow lane", "Ping pong".
After college, I worked on "The worst hotel in the world" in Amsterdam. Here is the presidential suite; bunk beds. Hans Brinker. http://www.hands-brinker.nl
I made these posters saying that it was awful. "Free key with your room", "Now with more noise", "Now a door in every room".
It worked really well, so the next year I did another, showing each thing in the hotel was a unique, 1-off piece. Eg, plastic forks with missing prongs, cups missing handles.
Later I tried to make it the most liked hotel on facebook in the world.
It never had a brand identity, so the idea here was to make a logo for it. So I used as many awful fonts in the Letraset catalog.
It opened a new hostel in Lisbon; I used these awful fonts, to make it look like it was made by someone with no idea about graphic design. They asked me :)
So, this is part of my professional work. In parallel to the commercial work, I also do self-initiated projects. This is Adams of Rye, a letterpress printers near my home in England.
I saw posters around town that were letterpressed and found out this is where they were from. It is the kind of printers every town had until the 1960s when this stuff was gotten rid of. But Rye is a bit old fashioned, and all the wood and metal type was kept.
Here's a poster I made with the wood type, "Word hard & be nice to people". This was about 10 years ago.
I made it as a series. Posters that say,
"I like it. What is it?"
"Think of your own ideas"
The words are as important as the type and the production process. THe posters wouldn't have the importance they do, without those processes. As graphic designers, we have power to put messages into the world. All these are provocations to make you think.
"Don't say nothing"
I made a book, showing the best posters from the series.
I have been invited here, and I've enjoyed visiting other regions to see new places and learn the work going on there. I heard about this group in Sao Paulo, using old fashioned print methods, similar to Adams of Rye.
Their type was from the 1920s, so it was worn, rounded edges.
We translated it to Portguese, and it literally says "Work hard and be cool with the people"
This is Colby, a poster printer in LA. I heard of them, I commissioned posters from them and made an exhibition in London. Floresent color backgrounds, a west coast feeling.
"I can see you from here"
"Give the joy back"
"Ask questions, get more"
I was playing with hippy idealism.
I am lucky to have a screen printer nearby. I love going there, seeing the inks. I use a computer to start but I am dissatisfied with screen based work, it lacks the heart and soul that I like.
We experiment with different materials.
Recently, I worked for the band The Jam. A punk band in the 70s, important in that era. 1977 to 1982. Paul Weller still puts music out.
Their album "About The Young Idea" was exhibited. I made this poster, to feel fanzine like and hand made. The show had demo reels, original artefacts, that had to be presented beautifully but with an edge too.
"The best band in the fucking world"
"Pow! Pow! Pow!" and "Shake it up! Break it up!" were flourescent backgrounds and narrow grot sans.
Then, this work was about gun crime in the UK. Its British, and odd topic to pick. A friend lived in Portland and LA, and taleking about gun crime with him and its effect on innocent people, we made this gun range targets, using regular people photographed.
We got feedback from Americans outraged about Europeans talking about a USA problem. But its a global world and if you aheva comment on something, it is valid.
The last project is back in 2010 the deepwater horizon disaseer in the gulf of mexico, made headlines around the world
I wanted to comment on this. to respond. how to do that as a graphic designer?
I worked with a friend, Tom, on the idea to print a poster from oil in the spill. He went to the gulf, got oil from the beach, and I designed the poster. It happened fast, to respond.
It was printed in New Orleans.
"OIL & WATER | DO NOT MIX"
Its printed with that oil, it had this in a way horrid golden color.
Here is a video of the project.
It spread quickly across the internet, and NBC called us. "Can you speak on this?" I said, well, when? "10 minutes". I said yes.
Here's the video of me on the NBC news.
So, that's an overview of what I do.
Thank you.
To encourage questions, I have a copy of my book, I will award it to the best questioner.
Dave Crossland: Do you consider yourself an artist or a graphic designer?
A: I think its not a relevant distinction. I want to communicate, and some work is in streets, some in galleries, some self initiated and some commissioned.
Q: You used clip art earlier, but your recent work is now type based.
A: I strip away what is not needed to communicate the message. The balance of imagery and type has shifted to type. I am intersted in writing, more and more.
Q: ...
A: ... I am evolving and my work is playful. I don't say this is how other should do things, but this is how I do them. We all see things differently.
Q: Do you think of putting these messages in other mediums?
A: I am resistant to that. Other people put my work on T shirts and mugs without my permission. That waters the message down. Its a thin line, between cliche and truth. In the wrong context it can look throw away. by printing it as a letterpress poster, it becomes a more solid, real thing.
Q: Your work is analog. If you went to digital, would that change?
A: The digital is why we are here. People are always on their phones. You have to embrace that. I do. My work is born with digital, but isn't finished there.