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: 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.
