Typeradio Podcast

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: Rijksmuseum by Paul van der Laan 2) Sound piece by Jill Els 3) Chinese whispered typeface by Mark Frömberg Mark’s projection of the sound piece was a guy cycling along a beach promenade in great haste, full of joy. He’s on his way to pick up his love, who he hasn’t seen for ages, from the train station. A happy, transparent atmosphere, sunshine falling through leafs, embroidered with daydream music. Suddenly he’s waiting tensed midst an anonymous crowd, receiving the message that she will never come back. Broken heart, intensely dazed, he is unable to cope with the situation, losing a love is like losing senses, tunnel vision, pain. Mark raised this to an abstract level into two key words: Expectation and Disappointment. Which means: Joy & liveliness, irrational & cursive, jumping rhythm, transparency, decorated, multi-dimensional, exaggeration. Put against: Disturbing & negative, pain, dull & hollow, cold & spiky, confusion. Since the two audio parts overlap in the middle, it leads to: clutter & tension, nervous dissonance & intersection. The third part of the sound is very electronic, precise and fading out. Having these attributes collected, Mark just added them all up (1+1+1) and finished his design.

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: Macula by Jacques le Bailly 2) Sound piece by Aileen Dietrich & Laura Müller 3) Chinese whispered typeface by T]M group This looping sound, featuring a palindrome played forwards and backwards, conjured ideas of letters that could be read forwards and backwards, as well as the concept of infinity. The Type]Media group set out to draw letters that contained two versions of themselves conjoined on top, one rotated 180 degrees. Text set in this typeface can thus be read from both sides — a unique feature specifically designed for settings of palindromic text. To emphasize the theme of infinity, endlessness or continuous motion, we constructed each letter out of a single continuous line. This solution was truly a group effort: The initial ideas and sketches were developed together and the file was passed around allowing communal contributions and editing.

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: Eames by Erik van Blokland / House Industries 2) Sound piece by Camille Gergen & Carlotta Weisert 3) Chinese whispered typeface by Mark Yehan De Winne Over a backdrop of John Coltrane playing ‘My Favourite Things’ on the saxophone, an assortment of other audio snippets (sniffs, scratches and other quaint sounds) were thrown in for good measure. Mark envisioned a jazz club in the 1960s, full of people having a little too much fun. His concept, named Coltreijn, is a high contrast fat face with ball terminals, similar to type found on old BlueNote records, but drawn to mimic the broken structure of neon lettering. The heady mix of weird sounds inspired a series of oddball alternate characters that feature prominently in the Stylistic sets and Contextual Alternate feature, where the placement of the swash alternate comes in at the second and sixth character, mimicking the time signature found in ‘My Favourite Things’.

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: Brokken by Donald Beekman 2) Sound piece by Tumaj Talimy 3) Chinese whispered typeface by Sláva Jevčinová Sláva: “Who else got to watch cartoons for research? Lucky ME! The first seconds of Tumaj’s sound reminded me of this splendid genre. It inspired me to design a very simple cartoon typeface with handwriting flavour and specific features that resemble cartoon characters (big counters=big heads, thin weight=tiny body, long thin serifs=long feet). Nevertheless, The second part is a bit disruptive and carries a negative impression with it. The sound interprets a dwarf’s hard work of digging in the mines, therefore I decided to include certain OpenType features. Despite the disturbing part, the main goal was preserving playfulness for the project. That’s all Folks!”

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: Laundry by René Knip 2) Sound piece by Merle Sommer 3) Chinese whispered typeface by David Chmela As David first listened to the soundtrack, it seemed just a bunch of strange sounds. So he did a little sketch of the whole track and realised that the individual sounds represented the letters of the alphabet. The sounds reminded him of hardware stuff from workshops, analog machines, intermittent by clicking and a crowd in the background. David: “My idea was to create a kind of analog machine that makes type, so I made set of stamps that I used to create individual letters. The final design of the alphabet is influenced by typewriter, one of my associations related to the sound.”

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: Neutral by Kai Bernau 2) Sound piece by Maria Sieradzki 3) Chinese whispered typeface by James Taylor Edmondson At first James thought the audio piece sounded like a combination of water, air, and electricity. Initially, his sketches focussed on combining those three elements. Eventually, he distilled these sounds into one object: the microwave. “The audio sounded like a running microwave, but recorded from the inside. My idea focussed on taking a standard style, and calling it ‘Frozen’. It was a condensed style with room to grow in all directions. From there the type got progressively warmer in the microwave. The next styles added were ‘Warm’, and ‘Hot’. As the shapes loosened up, they melted into each other and then burned to a crisp with the styles ‘Scorching’ and ‘Burned’. The most exciting thing that can happen in the microwave is the explosion. Put into type here as the ‘Exploded’ style, it has the same metrics as Burned, so interesting effects are made possible. This was an insanely fun project.”

Dan Reynolds is a type designer and typographic researcher. Born in Baltimore, he studied graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design, visual communication at the HfG Offenbach, and typeface design at the University of Reading (UK). After several years with the marketing and font development teams at Linotype GmbH, he founded his own design practice in Berlin, Germany. We talk with Dan about his first typographic memory. What got him interested in design and typography and how he ended up living in Germany. Although Dan comes from a family of academics, he prefers a more esthetic approach of type design. He would rather doodle letterforms and then worry about how they’re going to be used. Because Dan – while studying, teaching and working at a typefoundry as well as a freelance type designer and researcher – has seen almost every single aspect of the profession we wonder how all that knowledge on these different fields come together in his daily practice. Recorded at the Klingspor Museum Symposium – on the occasion of their 60th birthday – in Offenbach Germany.

HORT is a Berlin-based graphic design studio made up of a mixed bag of uniquely selected, creative and spirited people. When away from his Humble HORT Hub, founder (and head creative) Eike König takes on the role of mentor. He is currently the Professor of Graphic Design and Illustration at the University of Arts in Offenbach, Germany. In this interview with Eike König we talk about the international character of the design studio. How the team is carefully put together over the years. His relation to each individual and the dynamics within the group. Eike also explains how the hiring of interns is a big thing at HORT. Next to that he gives us his thoughts on ‘future thinking’ and explains that there are more important things in life that we can achieve than perfection in itself. Recorded at the Integrated 2013 Conference in Antwerp, Belgium. NB: At the beginning of 2014, after the recording of this interview, Eike’s father passed away. We are sorry for his loss.

Morag Myerscough’s Studio Myerscough is one of the UK’s more prolific studios, with a consistent stream of work for exhibitions, schools, installations, wayfinding projects and advertising, largely but not exclusively 3D and with a strong graphic signature driven by a feeling for (big) type and lettering. Obviously we want to hear all about Morag’s fantastic family background story and wonder how this bohemian upbringing influenced her work. And how does she deal with possible disappointment while creating spaces that seem more permanent and are not easily changed. Is it always what she imagined beforehand? We’re also curious about her relationship with colour. And what about her twitteraccount…? Recorded at the Integrated 2013 Conference in Antwerp, Belgium.

This is a historic recording of a radio interview with Beatrice Warde. Beatrice Warde (1900–1969) was an American typographic expert, working at the American Type Founders Company, The Fleuron magazine, and for most of her career at Monotype Corporation. Warde was also a prolific writer, researcher and public speaker. She wrote and designed the famous Monotype broadsheet ‘This is a printing office’ (1932). ‘The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on Typography’ (1955) is an anthology of her writings. She spent much of her life in type, her first husband was type designer Frederic Warde and she was associating with great typographers of her time like Stanley Morrison and Erc Gill. This interview was recorded in 1959 in Adelaide, Australia. Designer Sara De Bondt discovered the recording in the Beatrice Warde collection at St. Bride Library, while preparing for the ‘Out of the Box’ archive event. Republished with kind permission of the St Bride Foundation.

Sara de Bondt runs a London-based, graphic design studio and co-directs non-profit publishing house Occasional Papers. Sara also has been a tutor at Central Saint Martins (London), Royal College of Art (London) and KASK (Ghent). Because Sara studied at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and has been teaching at the Royal College of Art in London we wonder what the differences in philosophies are between the two master studies. And how did she experience the three countries she has lived and worked in so far? Are there very big cultural differences between England, Belgium and The Netherlands and is there an equal respect for the profession? Recorded at the Integrated 2013 conference in Antwerp, Belgium.

Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist and engineer. Since 1990 he builds walking kinetic sculptures that he calls a new form of life. Plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. His ‘Strandbeests’ walk Holland’s coastline, feeding on wind and fleeing from water. Because the work of Theo Jansen is a mixture of art and science we ask him if he ever had to choose between the two. We’re also curious why they are called ‘beest’ (animal). And does he have a favorite one? We end the interview with the question how Theo would like to be remembered and if he thinks it’s possible that his work is continued by somebody else. Recorded at the Integrated 2013 Conference in Antwerp, Belgium.

In the second part of the interview with Rick Poynor we focus more on the subject of graphic design writing and the function of good critical journalism. Because Rick is a known and respected person in the design field, we wonder if people criticize his work. He encourages us to look for places where the critical discourse still exists. Especially for the Typeradio listeners he gives some recommendations of worthwhile design journalism. Recorded at the Integrated 2013 Conference in Antwerp, Belgium.

Rick Poynor is a British writer, critic, lecturer and curator, specialising in design, media, photography and visual culture. He founded Eye magazine, co-founded Design Observer, and contributes columns to Eye and Print magazines. Rick gives us an insight into his daily freelance writing practice. We ask him if he’s very selective in the work he takes on and if he often says no to a commission. We also want to know more about his strong interest in graphic design and he explains why he started writing about it. Recorded at the Integrated 2013 Conference in Antwerp, Belgium.

We begin the second part of the interview a few years later, after having lived and worked a period in the US. Bruno talks about his renewed contact with Antonio Boggeri and his contribution to a Pirelli design competition. He also tells us about his initial idea to become a photo journalist and his doubts on having a serious relationship while working in this profession. We end the interview with the question how Bruno ended up marrying Anna, Boggeri’s daughter. Recorded at Tÿpo St.Gallen 2011, Switzerland.