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: Schulschrift by Just van Rossum 2) Sound piece by Noemi Merkle and Julia Scheid 3) Chinese whispered typeface by Florian Schick His sound piece confused Florian a bit, so he wrote down everything he heard. What really got him was the sound of a person writing on a chalkboard. He pictured a teacher arriving at school, opening the window and preparing the lesson by writing something on the blackboard. He tried to visualize how this chalkboard writing could look; a mix of round and edgy strokes which sounded really controlled. Florian tried various scripts and writing styles. Eventually his eyes set on an old German script called Sütterlin. For Florian this embodied a typical school script. He made a quite condensed upright Sütterlin, with long ascenders and descenders. left: Schulschrift by Just van Rossum, right: Chinese Whispered Schulschrift by Florian Schick
