A Font Designer's Growth Curve
Buffalo’s own Richard Kegler, of p22 Type Foundry, featured in The Wall Street Journal.
Richard Kegler started out with a typeface inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s handwriting.
-Ben
This was the second year I got to work on my alma mater’s annual student fashion show, Runway. This year was even more rewarding as Block Club hosted two Buffalo State Communication Design students, Cody and Laura, who came to the office and worked with us to design a poster, the event program and a lookbook showcasing the fashion students’ collections.
They did an awesome job developing a concept for this year’s theme, City Bits / City Bytes, using deconstructed concentric circles in bold colors in contrast to the stark white, statuesque photos Luke Copping shot for us of two dresses from last year’s Cotton Inc. challenge. Great work guys!
Runway is next Saturday, April 27. Ticket information here.
- Julie
TYPO SAN FRANCISCO
I just returned from the TYPO conference in San Francisco and I am beyond energized.
Over the course of the two-day conference, I had the pleasure of seeing a super impressive lineup of talks by some extraordinary designers, illustrators, typographers and tech founders.
I’m still digesting everything. I learned a lot and I came home with a ton of energy, but the one thing I took from this conference more than anything else is validation. Here are some highlights:
Jessi Arrington opened up the conference with a talk about being honest with yourself and making the most of your strengths. Her story is very inspiring. You can watch her talk at the link above.
When Jeff Veen, a VP at Adobe and founder of Typekit; and Erik Spiekermann, who needs no introduction, offered advice on company processes and culture, they essentially walked the audience through what we already do at Block Club. It was extremely validating.
I really connected with and learned a lot from Peter Bil’ak, a typographer, publisher, graphic and choreographic designer, and editor (among other things) who made the case that working in a variety of disciplines and exploring the unknown makes for better, stronger work. I couldn’t agree more.
I already know that we have an incredible thing going here at Block Club, but to be validated by some of the biggest people in your business is an absolutely wonderful thing.
I’m so looking forward to sharing what I’ve learned with my team.
You can see some of the talks here.
-Brandon
From “We Don’t Work - We Play,” a recent German typography exhibition. See more here.
- Maggie
A student of Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany, Yusuf Algan evolved an assignment for an original type font into a typographic exploration of language. Each letter built by the alphabet of one distinct language, Algan’s typography puts a thousand minuscule spins on the classic latin alphabet structure it employs. His “World Font” includes commonly spoken languages, religious languages, and rarer dialects spoken by only several hundred thousand people. See Algan’s complete type font here.
- Maggie
Since we’ve already got books on the brain: Imprint has reviewed ”The Lustig’s: A Cover Story,” currently showing at the College of Visual Arts Gallery in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Marking the first time both Lustigs’ work can be viewed side by side, the collection includes over 500 covers designed and illustrated by the modernist heavyweights, graphic designers Alvin and Elaine Lustig.
It’s well worth taking a peek at the Alvin and Elaine Lustig Design group over on Flickr for a larger sample of the Lustigs’ astonishingly enormous body of work, well-worn covers and all.
- Maggie
Chicago designer Thomas Quinn explores the endless illusions of reality with his work in anamorphic typography. As Quinn employed a simple light projector to guide his painting across the uneven wall canvas, his words may only be clearly read from one single sweet spot of perspective - all other positions distort his words. While one may generally still get the gist of it, his message falls into place only when one faces it head on from the point of view of its projector origin. Awesome! Plus, on a slanty-walled-rooms-that-are-tough-to-decorate note, what a cool method to add some personality when conventional art can’t do the job.
- Maggie
The walk back from a lunch meeting.
-Ben
Sideshow Sign Co. specializes in giant vintage prints and light up marquee letters, inspired by old school entertainment industry venues. Based out of Nashville, Sideshow Sign Co. is run by Australian native Luke Stockdale, who seems to have perfectly channelled the southern city’s vintage musical charm into his design.
- Maggie
The city of Chattanooga, Tennessee is in the midst of a creative renaissance, and typeface designers D.J. Trischler and Jeremy Dooley would like to help show it. They’ve created a font called Chatype:
The goal is to help the city and its businesses forge a distinct and cohesive identity through custom typeface, sending a visual message to the world that Chattanooga—a rapidly growing city in the midst of a creative renaissance—is “more than just your average Southern town.” …
The idea may sound strange from an American perspective, but it’s actually the norm throughout Europe, where even small cities employ unique typefaces to distinguish themselves.
While inspired by the city’s industrial past, Chatype’s geometric edge adds a feeling of optimism as it looks to Chattanooga’s future. On the heels of a successful Kickstarter campaign, the designers expect to soon see the font utilized on signage, business cards, emails, and websites published under the city government.
Longterm, Trischler and Dooley anticipate the font as a visual identity mark of the city, spanning from street signs and police cars to small local businesses. It’s an exciting idea to imagine the use of unique type as a large-scale expression of a city’s identity, and Chatype hopes to act as a stepping stone towards a true reflection of Chattanooga’s creative revival.
- Maggie
If h is a chair…
While Block Club brainstorms upcoming editorial themes, stories, and features for the magazine, our graphic designers Tim and Julie begin to explore the potential visual language of each page.
As a writer, I am awed by the power of words. When used well, they translate through language, culture, age, and experience with an effortless weight of meaning. A finished story is similar to a thoughtful piece of art; each word is a vehicle of the story’s inherent meaning, breathing with purposefulness both on its own and as a function of the whole.
Typography, then - like the structures of storytelling - is a powerful vehicle in evoking a further, more abstract experience of meaning. Perhaps in a visual juxtaposition to a word’s typical connotations, or the way its design seems to breathe life into the very bones of an idea, typography allows for a creative assault from all angles. It is a layer of expression woven into the visual fabric of the word itself.
Above, Andrew Byrom, a UCLA faculty member and graphic designer, explores the typography of everyday objects in this TEDxUCLA talk: if letterforms are imagined as actual physical objects, how does this change how we view them, how we interact with them, and ultimately how we allow the message they convey to communicate with us? “If h is a chair, then what do the other 25 characters look like?”
- Maggie
The Book Cover Archive: Quietly wonderful. Appropriately named.
- Maggie
A good man menu is hard to find, but when done right, a well designed menu serves as the perfect visual compliment to its heralded food and drink. An offshoot of Under Consideration, Art of the Menu defines a great menu as an intersection of typography, data and information design, and, ultimately, the knowledge of simply how to make a patron hungry, all managed in an effortlessly cool-looking way.
I loved so many of the site’s featured menus, but one that really stuck out for its quirkiness was that of a temporary NYC pop-up restaurant, Exquisite Corpse. I’m certainly predisposed to love this premise, as it’s based on the old Surrealist parlor game I’ve had a ton of fun with myself, but the menu brings this premise to life. Its cover features a Frankenstein-ish amalgamation of the thirteen chefs behind this pop-up super-restaurant, an “uber chef” sum of its parts.
Even looking past its amazingly superchef-crafted cuisine, the menu brings to mind Mrs. Doubtfire’s most epicurean cousin, so in my book: five stars.
- Maggie
Following 2010’s Stockholm and 2011’s Copenhagen editions, the designers of Sweden’s jollygoodfellow are back with another beautiful edition of UrbnCal. With each month focused on one specific area of the city, 2012 documents their number study of Helsinki as they explored by bicycle; interested in every day details, each calendar date is a snapshot of the daily typography of numbers found within the Finnish capital. An appendix details the exact location of each photograph is included by month.
From designers Esa and Lisa Tanttu:
The idea from the beginning was to photograph many cities and compare the graphic impression of the numbers plates in different countries. … For us, the number plate is a marriage between architecture and typography, not always happy but always interesting.
Calendars are available for sale here, and be sure to check out the urbncal blog for their lovely daily photo posts.
[ Photo credit: Lisa & Esa Tanttu, jollygoodfellow ]
- Maggie
