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: Salmiak by Erik van Blokland 2) Sound piece by Hannah Scherber 3) Chinese whispered typeface by Jan Gerner In the sound piece Jan got he heard parts of ‘The Entertainer’ by Scott Joplin. Jan’s interpretation of the sound was of a pianist sitting in a boring environment trying to have some fun by drinking and playing the piano. And therefore getting more drunk by the minute. Jan thought of certain typefaces he thinks are quite boring. For him these are typefaces in the Bodoni and Didot styles. Jan’s idea was to put some fun into these classicist typefaces. He did this by adding balls. Balls that try desperately to be funny and are put in strange places, so that some characters become completely out of shape. These balls are for example sticking out at the top and bottom of the M. This illustrates the drunkenness of the pianist. In the end Jan added a layer by connecting the letters through lines. Even across multiple letters. left: Salmiak by Erik van Blokland, right: Chinese Whispered Salmiak by Jan Gerner
