Summary: November 2010 Typeradio held a two day workshop in cooperation with Indra Kupferschmid and 12 students of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (HBK Saar) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Each student was assigned a typeface designed by a Dutch designer with the question ‘How do you interpret the typeface into a one minute sound piece?’ The resulting 12 sound pieces were the starting point of a new workshop in collaboration with Jan Willem Stas and 12 students of the Type and Media master coarse, The Hague, The Netherlands. Each student was allocated an (anonymously labelled) sound piece and their challenge was to ‘create a typeface inspired by the sound’. The results were quite a surprise! 1) Original typeface: Sardines by Jac Le Bailly 2) Sound piece by Corinna Schneider 3) Chinese whispered typeface by Emma Laiho The sound piece that Emma got was full of visual clues, like sounds of the sea, the waves, boats and seagulls. It sounded like a carnival at the sea; the repeating sound reminded her of a ferris wheel. She started looking at carnival wood type, but she missed the complexity which was in her sound. She came up with a three layered type system, which actually didn’t quiet work out for her. She still had to include the sea part and the feeling of it should be more sad, like a carnival in the winter. Thus Emma ended up with a wood type, which can be dressed up for the summertime. left: Sardines by Jac Le Bailly, right: Chinese Whispered Sardines by Emma Laiho
