As a student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Roeland Otten had this idea about “communicative furniture in public spaces”. Ten years later, his idea was realized with the cooperation of Fonds BKVB and Materiaalfonds. This sitting alphabet contains the 26 letters of the latin alphabet in a siting form. “As a graphic designer it was a challenge to design these series of chairs that also had to form a consistent font (typeset),” as Otten explains. The prototypes are made from lacquered MDF but the designer hopes that in the future a manufacturer will produce them from a recycled material so it could be used in open spaces, with a smaller version made for kids.
From time to time we publish a number of inspiring typographic images from our popular Flickr Group. Here is ten of them.
By patrycja
By f!int
By dadoqueiroz
By mil3n
By durandrud
By extraverage™
By 86era
Mary Huang is from California, USA. She studied at UCLA design/media arts and Interaction Design at CIID. One of the resent project she has been working on for a while is the Typeface. Typeface is an application that produces a unique typeface based on the user’s face characteristics. Typeface translates the facial dimensions of the user and at the same time it creates a natural handwriting typeface. Not only does this contrast with the geometric qualities generative type experiments tend to take, but also challenges the conventions of typing versus writing. During the whole process you can write in a text field and view the changing of the type. The project is currently under development so there is no downloadable version. We hope for one in the near future.
TYPEFACE from Mary Huang on Vimeo.
Katerina Orlikova is a young graphic designer from the Czech Republic, who enjoys a playful mind with sentiment and childish spontaneity. She always wanted to create something very personal which would let people reminisce about their peaceful childhood years, when nothing was important and the world appeared to be so colorful and gorgeous. After attending a seminar at the university on ”Light and Typography” she decided to create five typographic kaleidoscopes (a combination of the Greek words: kalos - meaning beautiful; eidos - form; and skopeo - I see). Some magical pictures appear before your eyes as light goes through the glittering glass. Katerina used characters made from transparent colored material and converted them into abstract pictures so that people wouldn’t be able to recognize the letters. Using an appropriate type of letters and a printed cover she made the kaleidoscopes with each one representing a type of typeface (serif typefaces, sans serif typefaces, ornamental typefaces …). She admits, “I have not been able to make the bodies of the kaleidoscopes by myself so my handy granddad helped me out! As it turned out, this has been family work that I enjoyed very much!’’.
Artist Stephen Powers is leading a forty-painter team on an ambitious project called “Love Letter”. The project includes 50 rooftops in West Philadelphia PA, between 63rd and 45th street on Market Street. Stephen Powers is a well known graffiti artist who goes by the tag name ESPO. As he says, people do not like graffiti, they prefer advertising signs. So he made a move into sign painting. “The materials were essentially the same, (enamel on metal), the colors were similar,( bold and garish are best) but the effect was totally different.” His main inspiration was the traditional signs of Philadelphia. Love letters express a love letter from a guy to a girl.
The plan involves a documentary film with scripted elements, a sign school and shop that will provide training for area youth, free signage for businesses on the market street corridor and 2 books documenting the project. One of the books will be a small paperback which will be distributed to area businesses free of charge. The other book will be a larger hardcover that will document not only the artwork, but the neighborhood and the inspirations of the Love Letter Project. There is a website created for this project where you can follow it as it unfolds.
