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: 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!
