Typeradio Podcast

We continue the interview with Ed Fella discussing the differences between art and design. Ed explains how we don’t have any problems with distinguishing art. But the general public does have a more difficult time telling the difference between a kind of ordinary conventional graphic design and stuff that’s special or that’s on a higher end. We wonder what Ed thinks about the 21st century graphic design, with a new global esthetic already emerging. We end this part talking on post-modernism versus modernism. In particular about his big debate with Massimo Vignelli back in the 1990s. Born and raised in Detroit we ask Ed about his feelings on the decline of the city. We also discuss the change in the usage of certain tools in the history of the profession, where we use more and more smart tools in stead of so called ‘dumb’ tools. Because Ed never used any digital means in his work, he feels he can’t compare a digital piece of work with an analog piece of work. We end the interview with Ed explaining why he would like to be a bodysnatcher… Recorded at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California.

Edward Fella (1938) is an artist, graphic designer and educator whose work has had an important influence on contemporary typography. He practiced professionally as a commercial artist in Detroit for 30 years before receiving an MFA in Design from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1987. He has since devoted his time to teaching and his own unique self-published work. Since Ed already knew about our signature first question we’re curious about the answer he prepared for it. We also hear more about his family background, upbringing and education. Ed tells us how he started working at a commercial art studio at 18 years old. In 1985, after been in advertising for 30 years, Ed went to Cranbrook to get a master’s degree. We wonder if he thinks his work, if he would have taken the step earlier, would have developed in the same way? Recorded at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California.

In this second part of the interview we talk about April’s photography project, a series of low-res digital images named Drive-by Shooting. She treats these images like paintings and works on them for endless hours and days. Futhermore we talk about the Miracle Manor Retreat. April tells us why she started this B&B spa-motel 17 years ago in Desert Hot Springs, California. We end the interview with the question how she would liked to be remembered. Recorded at Made in Space studio in Los Angeles, California.

April Greiman is a thinker, designer and artist. Originally from New York, April studied design and painting in Basel, Switzerland and the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri. In 1976 she moved to Los Angeles where she established her multi-disciplinary practice Made in Space. Greiman has been instrumental in the acceptance and use of advanced technology in the arts and the design process since the early 1980s. We talk with April Greiman about her family background and how she ended up studying in the Midwest. April explains why the Macintosh computer and software played such a significant role in her work. We also talk about her unpleasant introduction to the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), about the period she was chair of the Visual Communications program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and her short involvement with Pentagram. Recorded at Made In Space studio in Los Angeles, California.

Graphic Designer Felix Pfäffli was born in 1986 in Lucerne, Switzerland, where he graduated in 2010 at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts to start his own studio Feixen. Since 2011 he’s a teacher at the Lucerne School of Graphic Design and teaches in the fields of typography, narrative design, and poster design. We ask Felix Pfäffli if he always wanted to be a graphic designer. And because he started teaching at a relatively young age we wonder if it has any influence on his way of teaching. Felix also designs typefaces. We’re curious if he always designs them for a specific project or purpose. And of course we hear more about the poster series he did for Südpol in Lucerne. Recorded at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California.

Willem Henri Lucas studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and post graduate at the Sandberg institute in Amsterdam. From 1990 to 2002 he served as a professor and chair of the Utrecht School of the Arts’ Graphic Design department. Currently he is the chair of the department of Design Media Arts at UCLA in Los Angeles. Willem was a young student when going to art school. At the age of 26 he started teaching at the HKU in Utrecht. We wonder why he moved to LA in 2004, and we talk about the many differences in design culture between the Netherlands and the US. As a designer Willem works for clients mostly based in the field of culture and art. He also did a small detour in advertisement, because he felt that he needed to see what that was like. Recorded at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California.

Originally from Southern California, David Jonathan Ross started drawing type at Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts. He joined The Font Bureau in 2007, where he draws letters of all shapes and sizes for custom and retail typeface designs. After a decade of living in New England, David recently relocated to sunny Venice, California. We talk with David about the difficulties of font naming and the importance of having a good name for a typeface. David also speaks about his reversed stress Wild West font Manicotti and the process behind it. Like to what extend he does research for such a project. We wonder what David enjoys more, working on general or more specific orientated projects. We end the interview with an early typographic memory. Recorded at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California.

Indra Kupferschmid is a German typographer, writer and teacher based in Bonn and Saarbrücken. After studying visual communication in Weimar, she founded her own studio. Since 1997 she has been teaching typography and type design, since 2006 as Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Saarbrücken. We ask Indra how she got interested in typography and graphic design. We talk about some interesting projects she has been involved in. Like her writings related to Helvetica. We wonder if her opinion on the typeface has changed now she knows so much about its background story. Because of Indra’s strong interest in typeface classification we like to hear more on the subject. And we also discuss the Fonts In Use website, the online archive of typography usage, and it’s added value. Recorded at the HBK Saar – Workshop Typographic Chinese Whispers II – in Saarbrücken Germany.

Deirdre Lawrence has been the Principal Librarian at the Brooklyn Museum since late 1983. Before coming to the Brooklyn Museum, she was Associate Librarian at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She received her M.L.S. from Pratt Institute and studied art history on the graduate level. Deirdre tells us how she became a librarian at the Brooklyn Museum and why the profession appealed to her so much in the first place. We talk about the Museum’s collection. How the collection is built and how they acquire their artist books. We also wonder if Deirdre has a personal favourite within the collection. And because she is working with and around books all day, we’re curious what her personal collection consists of. Recorded at the Klingspor Museum – Symposium on the occasion of their 60th birthday – in Offenbach Germany.

Gottfried Pott is a German typographer, calligrapher, author and teacher. He studied graphic design at the Werkkunstschule in Wiesbaden, under Professor Friedrich Poppl. With an emphasis on lettering art, he also studied painting and music. From 1988 to 2003 he was a professor in calligraphy, design and history of lettering at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. In this interview with Gottfried Pott we talk about his passion for teaching and calligraphy. And how he’s inspired by other subjects of interest, like his love for music and interest in art, politics and literature. He explains how all these subjects are related to each other. We wonder if his handwriting has changed over the years. And if he for instance can see what kind of personality someone has, just by looking at a piece of calligraphy or handwriting. But of course this is top secret! Recorded at the Klingspor Museum Symposium – on the occasion of their 60th birthday – in Offenbach Germany.

Jovica Veljović, born in Serbia in 1954, has been designing typefaces for URW, ITC, Adobe and Linotype since 1980. He received his master’s degree in calligraphy and lettering at the Art Academy in Belgrade, where he also taught Typography until 1992. Since 1992 he lives in Germany and has been a Professor in Type Design and Typography at Hamburg University. Jovica Veljović talks about how he got interested in typography and type design by encountering a marvelous book about alphabets by Hermann Zapf. He also refers to his first awareness of letterforms as a small kid looking at the beautiful handwriting of his grandfather, who was always showing him his special letter ‘k’. We wonder how Jovica started working for ITC were he met Herb Lubalin, just two weeks before his death. Looking back Jovica is aware that he had the chance to meet the right people. People who really cared about what they’re doing. And this mentality or way of living is exactly what he would like to pass on to the younger generation. Recorded at the Klingspor Museum Symposium – on the occasion of their 60th birthday – in Offenbach Germany.

December 2013, Typeradio held a two day workshop in cooperation with Indra Kupferschmid and 10 students of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (HBK Saar) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Each student was assigned a typeface, designed by a Dutch designer, along with the assignment: ‘translate the typeface into a one minute sound piece’.
The resulting 10 sound pieces were the starting point of another workshop, in collaboration with Jan Willem Stas and the students of the Type]Media 2014 typography master coarse in The Hague, The Netherlands. Each T]M student was handed an (anonymously labelled) sound piece and their challenge was to ‘create a typeface concept inspired by the sound’. The results were quite surprising! 1) Original typeface: Decoder by Gerard Unger 2) Sound piece by Carina Schwake 3) Chinese whispered typeface by Nina Christine Stössinger What Nina heard was a trained singing voice, possibly digitally sampled; so she imagined the type to look like something a trained hand might write, digitally cleaned. It is fluid – letters are usually made of a single stroke and don’t feature sharp corners –, but somewhat minimal and deliberate. Nina ‘translated’ the equal length of the tones to a monospaced design; the slowness of the singing to a generous width; and the swelling of the volume within each tone to a swelling stroke that usually starts and ends in a thin point. And then, of course, the layering of voices to the layering of font styles: “The piece soon combines two voices, and towards the end introduces rhythm changes and ligations that make the voices differ. So I drew two related layers that overlay and intertwine, with the second one offering a set of discretionary ligatures. – This was seriously fun to draw!”

December 2013, Typeradio held a two day workshop in cooperation with Indra Kupferschmid and 10 students of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (HBK Saar) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Each student was assigned a typeface, designed by a Dutch designer, along with the assignment: ‘translate the typeface into a one minute sound piece’.
The resulting 10 sound pieces were the starting point of another workshop, in collaboration with Jan Willem Stas and the students of the Type]Media 2014 typography master coarse in The Hague, The Netherlands. Each T]M student was handed an (anonymously labelled) sound piece and their challenge was to ‘create a typeface concept inspired by the sound’. The results were quite surprising! 1) Original typeface: Nitti by Pieter van Rosmalen 2) Sound piece by Sebastian Knöbber 3) Chinese whispered typeface by Jasper Terra Jasper’s first impressions of the sound piece where: Apple (start up), clock, time, typing, typewriter, deadline, copy writer. The sound was rhythmic in a mechanical or systematic way (clock) but human and a-rhythmic at the same time (typing). The initial sketches focussed on the systematic rhythm (the ticking could be the distance between stems), and led toward a monospaced letter that could be used on screen or a typewriter. Perhaps by someone working in a cubicle or office environment, who has a deadline but at the same time aspirations of being a writer. The combination of the systematic and human led to the final idea; a small family of two fonts; the first a sans that fits obediently into a cubicle (monospaced) and is used on screen at the office, the other breaking out of the cubicle with more organic forms and serifs (based on the leaf of the Apple logo) for use on the book cover of an aspiring writer.

December 2013, Typeradio held a two day workshop in cooperation with Indra Kupferschmid and 10 students of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (HBK Saar) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Each student was assigned a typeface, designed by a Dutch designer, along with the assignment: ‘translate the typeface into a one minute sound piece’.
The resulting 10 sound pieces were the starting point of another workshop, in collaboration with Jan Willem Stas and the students of the Type]Media 2014 typography master coarse in The Hague, The Netherlands. Each T]M student was handed an (anonymously labelled) sound piece and their challenge was to ‘create a typeface concept inspired by the sound’. The results were quite surprising! 1) Original typeface: Bint by Donald Roos 2) Sound piece by Nina Kronenberger, Barbara Hinz & Jennifer Graf 3) Chinese whispered typeface by Alexandre Saumier Demers Making a typeface from sausages was the obvious solution for Alexandre’s sound piece: festive sounds of Bavarian music, accompanied by obnoxious burping, followed by loud crunching and munching. The main part of the process was to develop a script that generates sausages from a string (skeleton). This helped Alexandre enormously to draw the 508 sausages needed for his project. The second element was to find a style that would carry the spirit of German folklore, so he combined his new ‘sausage’ tool with Fraktur letters. It was a perfect match, the recipe was ready and the end result very tasty!

December 2013, Typeradio held a two day workshop in cooperation with Indra Kupferschmid and 10 students of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (HBK Saar) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Each student was assigned a typeface, designed by a Dutch designer, along with the assignment: ‘translate the typeface into a one minute sound piece’.
The resulting 10 sound pieces were the starting point of another workshop, in collaboration with Jan Willem Stas and the students of the Type]Media 2014 typography master coarse in The Hague, The Netherlands. Each T]M student was handed an (anonymously labelled) sound piece and their challenge was to ‘create a typeface concept inspired by the sound’. The results were quite surprising! 1) Original typeface: New Alphabet by Wim Crouwel 2) Sound piece by Jennifer Graf & Barbara Hinz 3) Chinese whispered typeface by Hugo Timothée Marucco Hugo based his type concept mostly on the structure of the sound which was composed of two distinct parts. Indeed, the first one is a fast loop of digital sounds evoking the old video game universe, like early Pong or Tetris. The second part is completely different. The rhythm is a lot slower and almost silent, we only hear some traditional Chinese instruments. This two layer-structure became the main concept of Hugo’s typeface; Digital and Zen. He wanted to mix these different feelings without losing the particularities of each part. “That is why I came up with this idea of drawing a monospaced font with two widths and weights. I only drew caps to keep the blocky aesthetic of a pixel games. It was important to visually express the atmosphere of the music. Mixing the two styles you get a really noisy or quiet feeling, the more you mix them the less legible it gets. Like in a game: it gets harder and harder!”