Helvetica, stereotype and society

A video.

Meek FM - Type as Sound

Meek FM is an interpretation of type as sound. Using new software and the M.E.E.K. typographic synthesizer, the musician/designer develops sounds and typographic visuals in parallel. Meek FM will be premiering as an interactive installation at the Typo2007. The Meek FM team will also perform live at the Festival event.

Wim Crouwel Interview

Interview with Dutch graphic designer and typographer Wim Crouwel at Galerie Anatome in Paris, 02/2007, from Etapes.

Plus - International Design Festival 2007

Plus is a unique design-led festival showcasing all that is innovative, pioneering, and novel in the world of international typo/graphic design.
The festival provides a platform for contemporary professional designers; serves as an arena for experimental work; and a meeting point for the international design community. Plus also offers a forum for informed academic debate on typo / graphic design.
Download the Plus '07 international design festival information pack

Source: O design e a ergonomia.

Adrian Shaughnessy speaks at ESAD

Adrian Shaughnessy (This is Real Art) will be the next speaker, at the series Personal Views by ESAD school, in Matosinhos, Portugal, 23 February 2007. The entrance is free for everybody.
Adrian Shaugnessy wrote the very well known How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul. Here´s a nice review of the book at Eye Magazine.

Read the interview at Speakup.

The picture above is from the Andre, very worth checking out set of images at flickr!

Sweet Talk NYC

RENB | MICHAEL GILLETTE | TIMOTHY SACCENTI | ELISABETH ARKIPHOFF | MICHAEL C. PLACE / BUILD | DALEK | GLEN E. FRIEDMAN and more to be announced...

CANDY in association with VEER present SweetTalkNYC.
Saturday March 17th 2007.
St. Patrick's Day in NYC. 12pm to 9pm.
Venue : Centre for Architecture, NYC.
Admission: $20 (Strictly limited capacity).

Source: ComputerLove

Type is my candy

Atelier Carvalho Bernau’s is launching a new workshop to be held at FBAUL in March 2007, Lisbon - Portugal. During 4 days, students or professionals will have the task to draw typefaces inspired on Portuguese vintage and vernacular packaging lettering.
You can follow the progress of the workshop and others news at Typography needs you! Weblog.

Atelier Carvalho Bernau is also responsable for the series Type the City!

Alan Kitching

Talk: Tuesday 13 February 2007 at 7pm; exhibition preview 5.30pm
Exhibition: Wednesday 14 February to Thursday 8 March 2007
Where: At the world's foremost printing and graphic arts library, the St. Bride Library, in London.

Graphic designer, typographer, letterpress printmaker and teacher, Alan Kitching is internationally renowned for his expressive use of letterpress type, process and materials in creating typographic designs for publishing, advertising and his own limited edition prints and ‘Broadside’ publications.

Born in Darlington, County Durham in 1940, Alan left school aged 14 to become an apprentice compositor with a local printer. In 1961 he moved south to pursue a career in design. New directions were inspired by working as typography instructor under Anthony Froshaug in the Experimental Printing Workshop at the School of Art in Watford College of Technology.

Alan subsequently established his own design practice, taught at the Central School of Art, and was invited by Derek Birdsall to join the Omnific Design Partnership. He became visiting lecturer in typography at the Royal College of Art in 1988 and established his workshops there for students of all disciplines.

In 1989 Kitching decided to return to his letterpress roots and launched The Typography Workshop in Clerkenwell London with the first of his A1 ‘Broadside’ sheets – ‘an occasional publication devoted to the typographic arts’. As well as compositions for corporate identities, magazine and book covers and illustrations, Alan’s work has also featured on postage stamps, theatre posters, shop windows, billboards, signage and a 30 x 15ft typographic mural for the Guardian Newspaper’s London office.

Source: St. Bride Library
Continue reading...

5 minutes for the planet... today!

Ok, this may be a little off-theme, but...it´s important.
From France, "L’ Alliance pour la Planete" ("Alliance for the Earth"), an association of environmental and social justice groups has a simple message for everyone: sacrifice 5 minutes for the planet. You're asked to join others to switch off all electrical appliances between 19:55 and 20:00 CET on Thursday the 1st of February. (Please do the adjustment for your timezone).
It's not just about saving 5 minutes' worth of electricity, but a symbolic gesture to draw attention to our vast consumption of energy and the urgent need to reduce, reuse and recycle.
Why this date you may ask? Well, because tomorrow the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due to release what is expected will be the strongest and most grave assessment to date of global warming by the world’s experts.

If the Eiffel Tower can do it...so can we!

Werkplaats Typografie

Karel Martens, Paul Elliman and Armand Mevis.
Found via SSerrato:

The WT programme stimulates and practices critical reflection on the basis of a broad cultural perspective, with theory playing a supporting role.
Participants engage in artistic research involving content and form, text and image, theory and practice, in relation to professional practice and supervised by leading designers. Alongside more theoretical research, participants work on real assignments for external clients.
With these assignments participants learn to take on a leading role in the process of designing and realizing a final product.
The WT programme roughly consists of three components:
1) Presentations, individual and group critiques, workshops;
2) Practical assignments and
3) theoretical orientation in the form of research, excursions and a final thesis.

Assignments can be initiated by the WT, external clients, or by the participants themselves.

The Art of Type

At Manage this:

This year at the Macworld Conference and Expo, we hosted a number of expert font panel discussions at our booth on the show floor. The discussions turned out quite well, and for those of you who were unable to make it to the show, we’re happy to report that we recorded everything! This first panel titled “The Art of Type” focused on type, and more specifically type design. Extensis Product Marketing Manager Halstead York hosted Adobe product manager Thomas Phinney and FontShop font evangelist Stephen Coles for this panel discussion. We asked these experts a number of questions that were posed by our readers, right here on the Extensis blog. The discussion is broken up into a number of smaller audio files so that you can easily skip to sections that are of interest to you. If you’d rather listen to the discussion in it’s unedited form, scroll down to the bottom of this post. Be sure to stop back by the blog, as we will soon be presenting the audio from our other panel discussion that focused on working with type in design applications.

Towards a non linear typography?

EXP - a non profit research team, has a very interesting blog.
They discuss in this article the Aztec writing system:
When we think to writing and printing as visual forms, we always accept the linguistic and alphabetical model of linearity as the basis for organizing syntactically coherent and effective messages. However, this is perhaps the relic of a misconception about what a graphic notation really is – and what can do –, grounded on the idea of a parallel between verbal syntax (which is necessarily unilinear since it follows the flow of time, although no performed speech act is literally linear nor monodimensional) and visual entaxis (which is the distribution in a synoptic space of inscription of features, characters and groups of notational units as tokens, assumed as identical with syntax while in no way has to coincide with it).
Continue reading...

They were at Lisbon’s ATypI (pics here) and will be talking at the "Trianalle de Milano", starting January 20 until April 25.

The radical architecture of little magazines 196X-197X

If you´re a fan of magazine covers like I am, you´ll love this resource.
Clip/Stamp/Fold is an amazing researh and collect work by a team of Ph.D. candidates at the School of Architecture at Princeton University:
An explosion of architectural little magazines in the 1960s and 1970s instigated a radical transformation in architectural culture with the architecture of the magazines acting as the site of innovation and debate. Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X – 197X takes stock of seventy little magazines from this period, which were published in over a dozen cities. Coined in the early twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, the term “little magazine” was remobilized during the 1960s to grapple with the contemporary proliferation of independent architectural periodicals. The terms “little” and “magazine” are not taken at face value. In addition to short-lived radical magazines, Clip/Stamp/Fold includes pamphlets and building instruction manuals along with professional magazines that experienced “moments of littleness,” influenced by the graphics and intellectual concerns of their self-published contemporaries.

Update: Also check out Colophon2007 and Magculture

TYPO Berlin Video Podcast

You can watch online or subscribe with iTunes.
They will update this at regular intervals :) Stay tuned!
Now online:
Ralf Grauel/TYPO 2005/Change
Jill Bell/TYPO 2005/Change
Neville Brody/TYPO 2005/Change
Chip Kidd/TYPO 2006/Play
Kalle Lasn/TYPO 2006 Keynote/Play

TDC2 2006 - Winning Entries

It´s now online the result of the Type Directors Club 2006 Contest.
In the picture: Frutiger Next Greek by Adrian Frutiger and Eva Masoura.

Update: This is very old news, i´m sorry for posting this with such a bad timing.
If you are interested in participating in the 2007 TDC2 competition, the deadline is January 12 2007.

Saul Bass - The Hollywood Connection

SAUL BASS
The Hollywood Connection
January 4–April 1
Ruby and Hurd Galleries
Free Entrance.

For anyone who has the luck to be in Los Angeles, here´s a nice event.
On view are movie posters, soundtrack-album covers, Bass's storyboard of the famous shower scene in Psycho (1960), and more.
During his distinguished career, graphic designer Saul Bass (1920–1996) became a legend for conceiving the now-iconic logos of such companies as AT&T and United Airlines. Bass is also recognized for transforming motion-picture title sequences from static typography into an art form. This exhibition focuses on Bass's work for the American film industry. On view are posters, soundtrack-album covers, Bass's storyboard of the famous shower scene in Psycho (1960), and continuous screenings of a montage of selected film titles edited by Bass and his wife, Elaine. The documentary Why Man Creates (1968), for which Bass won an Academy Award, will also be screened in the exhibition.

It was award-winning filmmaker Otto Preminger who offered Bass his first opportunity to design a title sequence—for the film Carmen Jones (1954). From this groundbreaking early experience, Bass would come to work with such illustrious filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorcese, all of whom valued Bass's creative use of animation, live action, and dynamic typography. Bass—who, beginning with Spartacus (1960), collaborated with his wife, Elaine—produced more than fifty title sequences for such celebrated films as The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Vertigo (1958), Exodus (1960), Grand Prix (1966), and Cape Fear (1991).

Source: Skirball

Brazilian Type Forum

A photo set on Flickr.
Images from the lecture presented at AtypI Lisbon 2006.

TYPO Berlin 2007

12th Internacional Design Conference
17 to 19 May
Issue: Music

TYPO is not a meeting of experts, a congress of crazy typographers, but TYPO has developed itself into becoming the largest designer event in Europe. It is interdisciplinary, open-minded, and outward looking. It offers an annual focus, and a combination of presentations, lectures, and panel discussions. It is a showcase for graphic, motion, web, game, typography, sound, corporate and boundless design, from all over the world, compacted and condensed into a 3-day programme, in three parallel series of discussion themes. As David Carson said in 2006: "The best conference in the world."

Some names already confirmed but more to be added: Clive Bruton, Lutz Hackenberg, Markus Hanzer, Kim Hiorthøy, House Industries, Richard Kegler, YangLiu, Horst Moser, Sander Neijnens, Hans Reichel, Moritz “mo.” Sauer,Piet Schreuders, Henry Steinhau, Niklaus Troxler, Frank Westermann,Werner J. Wolff

If you register until the end of the year, you will benefit from the special early-bird registration rate. Tickets are 445,- € for professionals and 200,- € for students (incl. VAT).
Two days left, hurry up! :)

Type the City! 03

Ok, it´s a bit old news, but i thought i´d published it since it wasn´t mencioned yet on this blog.

In this 4 day workshop for students and professionals alike, designed lettering and signage that is based on Lisbon’s great variety of vernacular and vintage shop signs.These beautiful but sadly endangered pieces were used as inspiration and as the base for the sketches.

Type the City! is one of a series of workshops iniciated by Atelier Carvalho Bernau.


Source.


Sketches.


Final Result.

Is this example D. Emília by Catarina Lopes.