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: Feisar by Paul van der Laan 2) Sound piece by Manuel Wesely 3) Chinese whispered typeface by Colin Ford Colin found his sound very abstract. He put it back into a sound program and analyzed the sound waves and beat, which created a regularly, steady, vertical movement. Collin took that formal element and combined it with the overall feeling he got by listening to the given sound. He described this feeling somewhat spacey, stretching sounds. So he put some Sci-Fi into his typeface and ended up with a SF display typeface which comes in three weights. Something a Martian would like to put on his spaceship! left: Feisar by Paul van der Laan, right: Chinese Whispered Feisar by Colin Ford
