Next up in our ‘Berlin snapshots’ series is Apfel Zet, a design studio who pride themselves in their ‘ornamented, eclectic, anti-modern approach’.
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Time for a roundup of TypoBerlin 09, the fourteenth edition of Europe’s largest yearly conference on type, graphic design and related matters,
reports Jan Middendorp. In fact, it is not quite correct to call the event a conference. At a conference, all delegates are equal, though
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TypoBerlin Day Two
As TypoBerlin 2009 is getting ready for its third and last day, your correspondent reviews day two and marvels at the sheer diversity of what was has been on offer so far. Friday was a day of extremes, writes Jan Middendorp.
While speakers from exotic places such as Buenos Aires and Iowa City encouraged audiences to drool over the tiniest and sexiest More »
The venue is fantastic. Dubbed ‘the pregnant oyster’, the Kongresshalle was a gift from the Americans to (West) Berlin, built in 1956 under the direction of architect Hugh Stubbins. Having collapsed under the optimism of its construction in 1980, it was rebuilt in subsequent years and became the ‘Haus der Kulturen der Welt’, the House of World Cultures.
This year marks the twelfth time this splendid building has been home to TypoBerlin, a conference about graphic design and More »
Only a few decades ago, a conference about new developments in typographic technology would have been attended by men in suits and ties discussing hardware with six-digit prices,
writes Jan Middendorp. Typefaces back then were expensive, platform-dependent machine parts. At Robothon, a two-day meeting about the technicalities of type design in The Hague last month, the uniform for both organisers and participants was a black T-shirt printed with a toy flying saucer (in reference to a font file format called UFO), and the speakers presented software that can be downloaded for 99 or 149 euros, or even free.
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‘A typically moral and conscientious Englishman’, Eric Gill once said, finds himself inclined to think that ‘an “R” ought to have a bow more or less semicircular and of a diameter about half the length of the stem’, even though in reality ‘any old shape will do to make a letter with’. But moralisation about type is not limited to the people with the stiff upper lips,
writes Jan Middendorp. There is a global category of type designers who shiver at the thought of a letterform not made ‘as it should’. And there are many traditionally minded typographers who will despise the kind of work collected in
Playful Type: Ephemeral Lettering and Illustrative Fonts, the latest typographic compendium from Gestalten.
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Yesterday at the Royal Academy in The Hague, Wim Crouwel received the Gerrit Noordzij Prize for type design from the hands of the previous winner, Tobias Frere-Jones. This afternoon,
writes Jan Middendorp, the same school is hosting a symposium on typography. Thanks to the Academy’s excellent video streaming system the event can be followed live
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