Summary: 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’.
