What were they? dConstruct and the Brighton digital festival, London Design Festival, the Over the Air Conference at Bletchley Park, my wordpress web site design and learning to customise it, type design, the Ampersand web fonts conference and getting my hands onto the @font-face rule and the beauty of CSS. Cryptology at Bletchley Park, the Colossus, the magnificent Turing Bombe and Enigma. Utilitarian design aspects, from clothing to interior and product design. Of course also my sewing and all that enjoyable bike-riding and swimming training. The highlights of the last two months and my daily activities all shook out and settled on my watercolour.

A couple of days ago a long-time-no-see architect friend of mine from Turkey happened to be in London. Oddly, she mentioned how she still remembered my delicate watercolours from 15 years ago. It was the wake up call I’d been expecting.

So it just came back to me, how I loved watercolour when I was a teenager, how fond I was of its quick, expressive quality and its vibrant pigments, contrasting with its transparency.

So my brush and I will add colours and lines from now on when I have a story to tell you on my blog. Writing makes you alone, as drawing does, but I can draw a story on one paper whereas a story might take a couple of thousand words on many pages. So enjoy your own stories, and live your life creatively!

The TYPOBerlin 09 “Space” conference was where I met and made this interview with Nick Shinn – a famous type designer and the founder of the Shinntype foundry. He is a regular contributor to the well known typographic community and forum typophile. I love typophile, it is a marvellous place in cyberspace which reminds me of my university lecture halls. Where I used to drop in and listen to the discourses on visual perception and the lectures on the history of art. It’s sometimes mundane, sometimes very technical, but whenever I visit there I always find something to satisfy my curiosity.

I’ve done some Turkish support in a few typefaces. The biggest technical challenge for type designers is how to encode the ‘fi’ ligatures so that they don’t work in Turkish! And the other thing that’s difficult is to make sure that you keep your dots on the small caps ‘I’.

Beaufort Pro
Duffy Script
Figgins Sans
Oneleigh Pro
Paradigm Pro
Pratt Pro
Scotch Modern
Softmachine

are the designers’ fonts which have Turkish language support. Azerbaijani, Uzbek and few other Turkic countries use Turkish letters extended with some of their own characters.

What inspires you to create a new typeface?

I would say a collision of ideas. And then working out how this collision can resolve itself – that’s the typeface. I just try to come up with a different idea for each typeface. Like, I’d never done an exact historical revival in all my typefaces until the Modern Suite. So I thought, I haven’t done that yet, so I should give it a go. I always try to do something different. For intellectual reasons and also for marketing reasons. Because my theory of marketing is that if you want to survive as a type designer and as an independent foundry, you have to have products that fit the Long Tail theory of marketing, which says that there’s a lot of people in the world, there’s a lot of people online, you can have a lot of products, and that way, as long as the products are unique, no matter how crazy they are, there will always be someone somewhere in the world who’ll find a use for them. Not necessarily the use which the designer intended, but if you design something which has its own raison d’être, then it’s got a reason to exist and a personality, qualities that people find useful – somewhere.

Do you work within preset constraints, or do you prefer just a blank sheet of paper?

Well, the constraints are the idea which drives the typeface. Pick a typeface which I designed and I’ll tell you what the constraints were.

Figgins and Scotch Modern?

The constraint was to create a typeface to compete with Adobe products because it seems to me that Adobe typefaces are the de facto standard of the digital era. If most professional graphic designers use the Creative Suite then they will be familiar with the Adobe fonts that are bundled with it. These are fonts such as Arno Pro, and the other Pro fonts. And those fonts have a lot of OpenType features, they have a lot of language support, and they are presented in very nicely designed printed specimens. So, that’s what I set out to do with the Modern Suite – on the one hand to design typefaces which could in theory compete with Adobe typefaces in terms of OpenType features and language support, and secondly to create an accurate historical facsimile. And the third constraint was to create a superfamily of sans serifs and serifs that worked together. Because that’s the way that most designers work, they use a sans with a serif. So those were some of the constraints that I set up and observed from the beginning of the design process.

What makes a typeface modern/contemporary?

Well, the simple answer is, all new typefaces are modern because they are brought into being in the present day. Obviously a typeface which is a revival is still a modern typeface because the way in which the revival is carried out says a lot about the present era. A typeface of mine like Panoptica is modern because nobody else has designed a typeface which is both monowidth and unicase. It’s a new idea, so therefore it’s a modern idea. But on the other hand the Modern Suite revivals are also modern. Not just because they come from the era which first used the term “modern” to describe Didot styles, but also because of certain present-day design techniques I used. For instance, I decided to draw the characters, draw the glyphs directly into Fontlab with its vector drawing tools, without using scans. I would look at my book that was printed in 1869, and I’d look at the 10 point type through a magnifying glass, through a loupe, and then I’d draw it using a Wacom stylus, which is my tool of preference. So I very much went for the old fashioned life drawing: you put the object in front of you and you draw it—but paradoxically to me that’s a modern idea because today when most designers do revivals they use scans. And I wanted to avoid that. Maybe you could say that my idea was old fashioned… I think that if I had drawn from life just because I had traditionally done it that way, that would not be modern, but because that decision is informed by my attitude to modern practice, my decision makes the design modern.

Is type design today still too conservative?

I don’t think it’s possible to generalise because the field is so diverse. There is a huge amount of conservatism in the bundled fonts that most computer users use. So if you look at the ClearType typefaces that were recently done for Microsoft, those are very conservative, there’s not a lot of experimenting going on. If you look at some of the popular foundries in North America, their work is quite conservative. A lot of that is because they are commissioned by publications to do conservative designs and I know that when I get commissions, my clients generally want something that’s conservative rather than experimental. But at the same time I think there’s a lot of design work going on, more in the retail field, that is still fairly experimental. Not as experimental perhaps as 10 or 15 years ago, but it still has new ideas in it, particularly things which exploit OpenType. It may not be so wildly experimental as the classic new typefaces like Dead History or Matrix were, but it’s still experimental in its own way.

Is there anything in your opinion which is holding back type designers or restricting their creativity?

It depends how you make your living. My income is really split down the middle between commissions and retail work. Most of my commissions want something which is conservative, but nonetheless I do get some where I have more free range to come up with new ideas, and so a lot depends on the client. In retail work, if you think, “oh scripts or grunge are popular so I’m going to do a 1950s-style fancy script with lots of swashes”, could that be considered holding you back, because you’re turning lettering styles of the past into fonts? And is it retro in that sense or is it progressive in the sense that it gives new kinds of tools to graphic designers in the form of OpenType fonts which enable them to mimic the kind of extravagant forms which were previously only available to lettering artists…?

Alejandro Paul’s work well…

Yes, he’s the prime example. So is Patrick Griffin, with his Memoriam typeface, that’s another strange example of the old and the new.

How important are ethical considerations to your work as a designer?

Well, as I said, I hadn’t done an exact revival before Scotch Modern but on the other hand some of my typefaces are very much in standard genres. I follow the principle that one should create original fonts, and if one’s working in a genre that has been well-mined, I don’t think that’s a problem if it’s an historical genre. So a typeface like my Worldwide for instance looks like dozens of other Century kind of typefaces that have been designed in the past, so it’s not very original, but I don’t think being unoriginal is unethical.

What do you say to young designers starting out today?

Well, I do a bit of teaching, and when I first started teaching I set projects which were more open-ended for my students. So they were free to express themselves more experimentally in the design solutions they came up with. But the most recent project I had students do was very narrow. There’s a typeface in Toronto which was designed in the 1950s for the transit system, and it’s Art Deco capitals in a bold weight – that’s the traditional form that’s been used since the 1950s. So the project I set my students was first to digitise the upper case drawings, because they were never originally created as a font. They were created as drawings that were made into signage, so they were never used for printing. The first part was strictly technical – it was to digitise from scans of old drawings. And the second part was to create a matching lowercase face to go with it. So in some ways it’s similar to the Gotham typeface by Tobias Frere-Jones, where he looked at the traditional signage lettering in New York and did a digital version of it and then invented a lower case to match it stylistically. But the purpose of the excercise was to get my students to look closely at a genre and with not much room to be “creative”. Typographers put a great store on choosing – “I’m going to use Helvetica”, or “I’m going to use Akzidenz Grotesk” or “I’m going to use Folio” or this version of Garamond as against that version of Garamond, or “I’m only going to use Helvetica and Arial sucks”, and, really, they don’t look too much different. And with these subtle distinctions, what kind of exercise of taste do professional typographers exercise, and how do you teach that subtlety to students? So I thought that I would give them narrow parameters to work within so that they would become more aware of subtle distinctions by doing tight work, such as deciding how big to make the x-height, rather than trying to express some outrageous idea that might be beyond their technical abilities at the beginning.

What have you learned about the business side of design?

Well, I have my own marketing strategy, which is to have a lot of distributors. I know some foundries have a different strategy, they just distribute directly. With the internet and online sales if you publish your own fonts you make a large percentage, so I decided to set up my own foundry and publish my own fonts through many distributors. And I felt I was in a position to do that because I had a background in marketing and advertising and would be able to market my fonts myself, and I also decided to sell myself as the foundry, so that’s why I named it after myself – because I think we live in a celebrity driven culture. It’s ironic in a way because I went into graphic design and type design because I like the anonymity, the idea that what I created, people would choose on its own merits and not because they thought I was cool or because there was anything meaningful in my personality which informed the design. But by the same token I don’t think you can avoid the fact that to be successful you have to market your fonts personally. And I do believe that typefaces are personal or individual designs. I know it’s possible to split up the design process and have different parts of it done by different people, but ultimately I think a font is successful if it has very strong direction from a single person. You could say the same about other forms of art like music or writing. So it does help to promote myself as the brand, and that’s one of the reasons why I like to speak at conferences, not because I’m vain or want to make a name for myself, but because I think that you do need a reputation in order to be taken seriously. I mean, you could sit back and wait for your reputation to accumulate and be somewhat reclusive, but I don’t mind being opinionated about things and putting my name to statements, and I don’t think that hurts business either. Because it’s publicity.

What inspires you right now?

I use type design as a way of learning and of finding out about meaning. In design and in general. The Modern Suite involved trying to discover why those typefaces looked the way they did, and so I studied the history, and that was one way of learning, by reading books and looking at old specimens. And I also sought out not just specimen books but actual magazines and ephemera from the past because I think that gives a better impression of the reality of typefaces, to see the way they were used rather than the way they were promoted in catalogues and specimen books. My motivation was to explore an area of history that I found interesting and which had been ignored. And it was based on my observations of the way design history focuses on 20th century modernism, which to me, as someone who worked in commercial advertising and has a collection of old ephemera from commercial advertising, none of which is modernist – to me the main story of the 20th century was not modernism, it was historicism. With that perspective I wanted to investigate type designs called modern typefaces that were designed in the 19th century. So my interest in the modernity of the 19th century was driven by my disillusionment with a design history which focuses on modernism in the 20th century. That was the intellectual history side of it. And then there was the idea that I could learn about the past not by just looking at it but by trying to recreate it in a typeface. Those were some of the ideas which inspired me. The inspiration was to try to learn more about, to realise my ideas about design history and cultural history and cultural reality, and do it through the process of critical design.

Which project of yours do you feel has been the most successful so far?

It depends what you count as success. I think the Globe and Mail fonts, which I recently designed, such as Pratt Pro, are some of the most successful because their development was intimately involved with the development and major redesign of a newspaper from the ground up. So the design of the typefaces emerged from the design process of the publication as a whole. While typefaces which are designed without any particular use in mind can turn out very well, a typeface which fulfills a particular need has the opportunity to be quite different because if you have the privilege of working with a client in an environment where there’s synergy, then things happen which bring you out of yourself and make new possibilities happen. So I like to think that working with David Pratt on those fonts was very successful, because we had no idea how the typefaces would turn out before we began work on the project.

© Portrait of Nick Shinn, Marc Eckardt
© Ayşe Kongur. This interview was translated into Turkish and printed in Grafik Tasarim magazine.

I was lucky to talk and interview the creative designer Chip Kidd at TYPOBerlin 2009. He shared his mischievous outlook on creativity with the audience and his talk was genuinely rocking – thanks to his musical as well as his graphic talents! It was a pleasure to talk with him and his portrait photo is one of the best editorial ones I took.

Is it possible books will become all electronic format, and would this make good design possibilities, or would you hate the idea?

I hate the idea. People have been trying to make this a reality for over ten years, and it hasn’t happened yet. Certainly with the music industry it happened almost overnight, and that says to me that people still want to read physical books. But at the same time what I worry about is that if it gets to the point where people don’t have a choice anymore, if you don’t give people a choice they can only choose one thing. So I don’t want that to happen! I think as long as people are free to choose which format they want, the book will be fine, the book will still exist.

How deeply do you have to know a book before you can design a succesful cover?

You have to feel like you have a deep, good understanding of it. Whether you have to spend a lot of time with it in order for that to happen depends on what the book is and depends on what your knowledge about the subject matter is or whatever the book is about. Usually I have to read the manuscript in order to get a good idea of what to do. I think one of the benefits of having done this for almost 24 years now is that if you’re still passionate about it you bring a lot of experience to the process, so decisions that it would have taken you a couple of days to figure out when you were in your 20s… Now I’m in my 40s and I feel like I know what’s going to work and what’s not going to work, and yet I still have to be aware of doing something that is new and hopefully original and that is exciting.

Do you like to discuss the book with the author beforehand?

Absolutely. I think it’s the best way to work. Some publishers don’t want you to do that. They want to very much control the process – they want to literally come between you and the author, and I can sort of understand that because they’re the publisher, they’re paying the money and they want to make sure that they have control of the process. But as a designer, when you do a book jacket you have several clients – the publisher, the author, you may also have the author’s agent and then you have an art director, so you’ve got all these different people to please. And then you have the reader – and that’s very important. But it all starts with the author. The author sat and wrote this book, and having written several novels myself, it helps me understand how much emotionally they have invested in what they’re doing. Some authors are very visually astute, a lot of them are not, they can only react to what you’re showing them, but I at least like to have a discussion with the author, just about what they’re expecting and what they were thinking when they wrote it. It’s often very, very helpful. It never hurts to know more about it.

Can a great design add a deeper layer of meaning to the book?

It can certainly add a deeper layer of meaning to the cover! There’s only so much a cover can do. It can imply that there’s a deeper layer of meaning, as in not trying to literally depict what’s in the book. I think the best covers do have a certain air of mystery to them, there should be a puzzle that the reader needs to solve. It’s hard to do that every time but I do try! But in terms of bringing a deeper level to the book itself, not really. There’s only so much a cover can do.

Is it important for you as a designer to work ethically? Are there books or writers you would refuse to work with?

Yes, there are plenty of authors I would refuse to work with, mostly the sort of political pundit types who are trying to get people to think a certain way, people I truly hate like Bill O’Reilly or Ann Coulter, neo-conservative hate-mongers, but, for whatever reason I don’t get asked to do books like that! Because, I think, people know better than to ask me to do something like that! Do I think graphic designers should work ethically? Yes, I do, although I sympathise with people who have to do work because they need the money – that’s a very real consideration. Somebody is going to take on that package to design cigarettes, because someone has to do it and they get paid – maybe they even smoke, you know. I feel very lucky as a designer that I don’t get put in that position. I mean, they’re books. It’s one thing to design a cover for a novel that’s not very good, it’s another thing to design a cover for a book that’s trying to teach people to think in a bad way. So I feel very privileged that I don’t have to do that.

What books or authors would you like most to design for?

This fall I will be designing – well, I’ve designed it already, but this fall, one of my great dreams has come true and I’ve designed a first edition by Vladimir Nabokov, and it’s the last thing that he was working on when he died. It’s not really a novel, it’s notes for a novel, and these notes were on note-cards, 138 note cards, and it’s a really controversial project, because he had asked his son on his deathbed to burn it, and the son did not, and it sat in a safe in Switzerland for about 30 years, and it was finally decided to let the world see them. So technically it’s the first edition, it’s the last first edition of Nabokov. It’s very exciting for me.

What have you learned about the business side of design?

Frankly I’m really the worst business person in the world. On the one hand I feel that I do well enough, that I do just fine, I feel that I get well compensated for what I do, I love what I do, I own my own home in Manhattan, but I just make it up as I go along. I’m not saying that other people should do that, but that’s just what works for me. I hate dealing with money, I hate negotiating about it. Some people thrive on it, I don’t. I would rather just get to the work and do the work because the work is what interests me. The one thing that I do feel very strongly about – and most graphic designers won’t be able to do much about this – but one thing that I recognised very early on when designing book covers is to get personal credit for everything I did. That’s really the only reason I’m sitting here and you’re sitting there. It’s that my name goes on everything I do, and I’m very lucky that way. Most graphic designers are anonymous. So my advice business-wise, is that if it’s at all conceiveably possible, get credit for what you do. Because that’s how you build up a reputation, and that’s how you get people to seek you out for work, as opposed to the other way round.

What do you say to young designers starting out today?

Good luck! I have a couple of stock answers… I would recommend learning to write. It surprises me constantly, but I see a lot of different graphic design programmes all over the world and almost none of them have any kind of concentration on writing. And I feel that it can only help you by learning how to articulate your thoughts in a coherent manner, on paper. You need to know how to say, cogently, what you want to say. And that’s what graphic design is, it’s sending a message. Whether that means taking a writing course, or self-teaching it, which is sort of what I did, I really think it’s important. Learning to write will help your graphic design, because it’s communicating.

What inspires you right now?

I’m inspired by what ever I’m working on. I’m working on anything between 10 and 20 projects at a time. So that’s what my brain is working on. There’s a certain amount of anxiety about having too much to work on, but it’s not nearly as bad as not having enough. So, for example, I have to design a cover for a factual book Hostage Nation about kidnappings in Colombia related to the drug trade. It will come out in about a year. So I’m trying to learn as much about that as I can, because I haven’t really worked on a project that dealt with that before. So what does that mean, how do you depict it, in what way, with what kind of tone…? So, I’m inspired by what I have to work on.

At the end of our brief conversation he also surprised me with his witty response when I asked him for his contact details.

His smashing song “Asymmetrical girl” performed with his niece mashes up the bass and the serifs together nicely. Tune in!

© Ayşe Kongur. This interview was translated into Turkish and printed in Grafik Tasarim magazine.

Under the theme of “Places” it will promote a wide-ranging discussion on the ever-changing places/spaces/planes that designers use as their sources of creative input. TYPOLondon, with its confirmed eclectic blend of speakers promises a highly stimulating conference. From the virtual environment to the real world every dimension will be covered: typography, branding, book design, films, data visualisation, information design and much more.

“The 16 years of TYPOBerlin” film is directed by Robert Schatton with photography by Gerhard Kassner, Marc Eckardt, Alexander Blumhoff, Jürgen Siebert and music by Brigitte Bijoux (Coquille), Pirata (Sinus Rhythm), Apes on Tapes (Da Try Bute), Soundroll (A Way To The Top) & Urbob (Panneborn).

The facilitators of the event are the typomaniac and managing partner of Edenspiekermann legendary type designer Erik Spiekermann, critic and founder of Unit Editions and Shaughnessyworks Adrian Shaughnessy, founder of Type*s and resident presenter of TYPOBerlin Simone Wolf and the design writer and independent consultant Lynda Relph-Knight.

From brand creators to the information designers, from critics to design consultants, and from film directors to creative directors – some of the well known speakers at the event are the partner of Pentagram and graphic designer Michael Bierut, associate art director of Alfred A. Knopf Chip Kidd, the director of Helvetica, Objectified and Urbanized films Gary Hustwit, world famous British graphic designer and founder of Research Studios Neville Brody, UX designer Eva-Lotta Lamm, creative director of Wolff Olins Marina Willer, creative director of Google and Youtube in Europe Tom Uglow alongside other creative names in the industry.

Photography by ©Gerhard Kassner.

Indeed there are two lesser known speakers who may perhaps be the most interesting – The King of Hohoe Ghana, Togbe Ngoryifia Céphas Kosi Bansah and the founder of Deutsche & Japaner Julian Zimmerman, who designed a creative identity for the king and made branding projects for the king’s beverage.

Zimmerman interprets for the expatriate African royal a refined and an elegant design removed from the banality of exoticism.

The photographs from the Kings’ identity are shot by Mirka Laura Severa and taken Julian Zimmerman‘s own website

The pair were one of the most well-liked speakers of TYPOBerlin 2010 and will be among the most interesting ones to hear in London as well.

If you would like to book a ticket for the conference don’t forget to take advantage of cheaper ticket prices until the 31 of August. Full price from then on! http://www.typolondon.com/index.php/Tickets;10/1

Also if you are adventurous and would like to compete in the most unusual and bizarre road signs contest, you may win a free ticket to the conference. Every week there will be one lucky winner. Check out how to submit from http://www.typolondon.com/index.php/Contest;12/1

For the whole list of the speakers go on to http://www.typolondon.com/index.php/Speakers;7/1

Additionally;

http://www.typolondon.com
http://typolondon.com/blog
http://facebook.com/TYPO.London
http://twitter.com/typoconf

© Ayşe Kongur 2011 UK

I had a great fun with the über futuristic letters of "Neu Alphabet" by Wim Crouwel

When I visited the Design Museum in London to listen to GraphicDesign&’s talk in Mid April, I had the chance to poke my nose around the museum. The retrospective exhibition of the legendary Dutch designer Wim Crouwel was on. In the foyer they had a sample of the Neu Alphabet rug on display. It was irresistible! I pointed out and lip synced each letter of my name. The idea of making a .gif animation came to my mind as soon as I started moving around. That was fun!

Was it my tired eyes, or the funny little joke of Vincent Connare’s about the Euro sign still hiding somewhere in the font file? The ghost of the wicked snake was, strangely enough, visible in a couple of screen versions of the font. I wonder why?

I was very curious about the story after I heard Vincent’s talk at the Ampersand Conference and I tried looking at the Comic Sans € in various sizes last night. I looked at it in outline mode on Adobe Illustrator. While refreshing and zooming in-out, in a few particular measures it rendered exactly like the image he showed in his speech. It is a spooky effect but I like it! I do like Comic Sans – in fact I am totally converted! It makes me laugh. It is a marvellous font for the masses and for the common people, like me.

]]> http://kongur.co.uk/blog/2011/07/i-tawt-i-taw-a-tnake-in-comic-sans-euro/feed/ 0 http://kongur.co.uk/blog/2011/07/angus-hylands-lecture-on-symbols/ http://kongur.co.uk/blog/2011/07/angus-hylands-lecture-on-symbols/#comments Thu, 30 Jun 2011 23:29:43 +0000 Kongur http://kongur.co.uk/?p=163

Pentagram partner and graphic designer Angus Hyland gave a brilliant short talk on symbols. He picked some well known trademarks and logos from the collective archives of our everyday life and compared the associations as well as the implications we attach to these trademarks. He also discussed how they developed and were transformed from their starting point into their currently recognised forms.

He used an entertaining approach and his sense of humour gave extra charm to his lecture. For his talk he showed twelve strong visual examples. They were all sharply abstract with a unique simplicity. He described a good symbol as a bucket which doesn’t leak but holds values, associations and affiliations inside it. It was remarkable to discover how simple some of the trademarks were – for instance the Deutsche Bank logo: a border of seven by seven square units enclosing a diagonal at a 45 degree tilt, leading the viewer to subconsciously associate banking with profit making and high value percentages. I did the diagram below myself as an example of DB anatomy.

Or take the Woolmark, a symbol which belongs in the optical illusion category with its perfect curves (thanks to the mathematician Möbius) and we end up having an iconic symbol to represent wool.

And from there stem ubiquitous recycle arrows – a continuous recycling action summarised by three arrows in a simple form of Möbius geometry.

The Shell symbol also fell under the microscope. It started as a clam and was then developed into solid structural rays with high contrasting colours – the thick contours help convey the corporate power implications.

Another example used in his talk was the Apple logo:

We were shown the very early narrative logo which we should perhaps call an illustration. It did not represent the product and in 1977 Rob Janoff’s design, the colourful stripy bitten apple, took its place.

The abstraction of a bite from the knowledge tree was the perfect match for Apple. The product found its ideal representation: an iconic simplicity. Now we see it everywhere and without a word we know what it means. Symbols are very strong visual codes; those codes signify the precise attributes we associate with the product or the service. Welcome to the iconology of our time.

The event was held at Pentagram’s London office and was organised by Creative Review and sponsored by SaaS provider Sohnar Live Traffic. Angus has also recently published with Steven Bateman a hefty collection of symbols via Laurence King publishing. Symbol is an excellent encyclopaedic visual reference book for symbols and trademarks. The designs are explained in simple contexts and classified by their structural elements. You can obtain it here

The rest of the photos can be seen in my flickr

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