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The winter issue no. 46 starts with an overview of the results of ATypI’s second international typography contest Letter.2.

An interview with the Dutch environmental designer René Knip who looks at why Dutch society offers talented designers unparalleled freedom of expression.

A Berlin-based typographer and enthusiastic user of the new Glyphs font editor, Verena Gerlach, interviews the man who created the software, Georg Seifert.

European Design Awards juror Filip Blažek presents the best work submitted in the Signs & Displays category.

Read an interview with Lizá Defossez Ramalho and Artur Rebelo, members of the Portuguese studio R2, about typographic installations in public space, collaboration with architects and designs their clients had not expected.

Typo contributor Eva Kašáková looks back at the second annual AGI Open congress held in Barcelona.

Typo Magazine closes with Martin Pecina’s review of the font superfamily Tabac created by Czech type designer Tomáš Brousil of Suitcase Type Foundry.

Design Education

Educators shaping the direction of design in a period of fundamental change in the publishing industry

Palo Bálik, Marcel Benčík, Tomasz Bierkowski, Peter Biľak, Min Choi, Patrick Doan, Richard Doubleday, Will Hill, Gerry Leonidas, Loîc Le Gall, Kristjan Mändmaa, Jacek Mrowczyk, Titus Nemeth, Ivar Sakk, Ewa Satalecka, Silvia Sfligiotti, Martin Tiefenthaler, Gerard Unger

The direction graphic design will take in the coming decades depends a lot on the educational institutions that teach the subject, and especially on the people there who teach design. As the editors of TYPO, we constantly encounter this issue as most of us—and the majority of our contributors—are regular or featured lecturers or workshop leaders at various schools around the world. We have decided to bring the education debate from our editorial meetings to the pages of our magazine so as to foster discussion about education today, and hence the future of the industry.

Gerard Unger, Rietveld Academy, Leiden University, University of Reading

What motivated you to decide to teach design and/or typography?

The great thing about teaching is that you learn so much yourself.

Can you estimate about how many graphic designers your country graduates each year? Are there job opportunities in their field?

In the Netherlands it must be something like 40 to 50 graduates each year. Many end up in different lines of work – which is also the case for lawyers, for example.

Coranto 2 by Gerard Ungerd. Published by TypeTogether

Does your school find that there is a certain gap between “the real world” and what students learn at school? If so, how do you deal with this issue?

No matter how hard you try to close this gap, it will always be there. A school is a very protective environment. When I graduated 44 years ago, I had to adapt to the real world as well – three weeks to design a poster in school, three hours in the advertising agency.

Should schools provide a universal education in graphic design, or is it important these days to specialise in specific areas and tasks?

I think a universal education is much more useful than specialization. In the real world, specializations are learned quickly.

Do you think it is a good idea for students to work on actual commercial contracts while they are still in school? Should the school and the instructors at the school support this?

I think a practical year or half year is a good supplement to an education. An outright commercial contract is something else.

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The impartial observer / with David Tartakover

Interview with an Israeli designer whose poster art has charted the Middle East peace process and Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Type]Media 2010–2011 / Type]Media

Gallery of the results of the Type]Media course at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, in which twelve students scribbled, chiselled, sketched, revived, live-traced, wrote, fontlabbed, doodled, interpolated, coded and pixelled for nearly a year.

Typographic categories / Víctor García

Contemplations on typographic categories called dingbats, pi fonts, symbol fonts and non-alphabetics.

Forgotten kerning / Filip Blažek

Overview of important kerning pairs that are often lacking in fonts, making it difficult for designers to use specific fonts without running into problems.

The ghost signs of Brooklyn & Manhattan / Molly Woodward

Essay on vernacular typography in New York City, where the first sign painter used brick buildings as their canvases.

Whales and puffins. ATypI 2011 / Filip Blažek

A report on this year‘s ATypI conference held in Reykjavík, Iceland. The conference theme was the Icelandic letter eth, ð.

The playful handling of tools, forms and concept is a popular procedure to broaden the consciousness in typography. It seems to be (regarding the huge amount of entries for this issue) a widespread phenomenon, very popular at design schools and universities. This is not a surprising fact – especially in interaction with a model, experimental results are the foundation of a theory. We placed a special experimental type section with 48 pages in this issue to be able to present a large collection of typographical experiments.

Inaccuracies sometimes lead to new precision – as in this issue’s text font. The typeface Korpus has been designed by Michael Mischler and Nik Thoenen of Swiss fontlabel Binnenland. It is based on a careful analysis of inaccuracy occuring in the print image of early 20th century fonts.

This issue’s cover is realized in an oldfashioned, experimental procedure, too: Its print sheet has been produced in rainbow printing using HKS colors.

The experimental issue presents the photo series of Matthias Hubert (Dortmund), who photographed fans of the current German soccer champion, and of Ken Rosenthal (Tucson, AZ), who opens the darkroom to the experiment. The type essays of Christine Hartmann (Leipzig), Will Hill (Cambridge) and Shelley Gruendler (Galiano Island) deal with strategies of the experiment in typography. Read interviews with Peter Bi’lak (The Hague), Michael Mischler and Nik Thoenen (Berne), Martin and Thomas Poschauko (Au near Bad Aibling), Oded Ezer (Givatayim), Donald Beekman and Liza Enebis (Amster­dam) and Neville Brody (London) as well as an essay about Japanese Modernism, the 5th part of the Tokyo Report, both by Ian Lynam (Tokyo), and the next sonic travelogue by Frank Wiedemann (Berlin).

www.slanted.de

Slanted Magazine #15 – Experimental (Autumn 2011), 180 pages

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TYPO #44 presents and comments on the winning entries in the European Design Awards 2011 competition.

Richard B. Doubleday looks back at Jan Tschichold’s 1935 book Typographische Gestaltung (Typographic Design), a follow up on Tschichold’s acclaimed publication Die neue Typographie (The New Typography).

Read an interview with a major figure in contemporary graphic design, Fons Hickmann, about kitsch, his approach to students and his studio, m23.

Are new fonts still needed? We asked three successful typographers from three culturally and geographically diverse environments who spoke at this year’s Typo Berlin conference: Peter Biľak from the Netherlands, Kris Sowersby from New Zealand and Pascal Zoghbi from Lebanon.

In the end section, learn about the background behind Škoda Auto’s new corporate font or read Jan Solpera’s thought-provoking essay on posters.

contents

Design Education

Educators shaping the direction of design in a period of fundamental change in the publishing industry

Palo Bálik, Marcel Benčík, Tomasz Bierkowski, Peter Biľak, Min Choi, Patrick Doan, Richard Doubleday, Will Hill, Gerry Leonidas, Loîc Le Gall, Kristjan Mändmaa, Jacek Mrowczyk, Titus Nemeth, Ivar Sakk, Ewa Satalecka, Silvia Sfligiotti, Martin Tiefenthaler, Gerard Unger

The direction graphic design will take in the coming decades depends a lot on the educational institutions that teach the subject, and especially on the people there who teach design. As the editors of TYPO, we constantly encounter this issue as most of us—and the majority of our contributors—are regular or featured lecturers or workshop leaders at various schools around the world. We have decided to bring the education debate from our editorial meetings to the pages of our magazine so as to foster discussion about education today, and hence the future of the industry.

Titus Nemeth, ESAD / ESAV, France / Morocco

What motivated you to decide to teach design and/or typography?

When I first taught, I was merely giving it a shot, I didn’t know what to expect. Soon enough, however, I discovered that teaching did appeal to me for a number of reasons. Discovering in practice what it meant to articulate one’s thoughts, processes and routines to a student was probably the most rewarding experience. The reflection and learning that has to go into teaching is what retains the biggest challenge and interest. The more obvious motivation of passing on knowledge and “savoir-faire” is particularly pertinent in my teaching in Morocco, where my interests, work and skills are most immediately applicable.

Can you estimate about how many graphic designers your country graduates each year? Are there job opportunities in their field?

In France there must be many hundreds if one considers all the different art schools and fine art departments. Yet I would assume that their skills and job opportunities vary quite widely, for French design education still struggles to overcome an inferiority complex toward the fine arts. Design as a discipline in its own right that does not aspire to be fine art is not yet fully embraced in the field. This is reflected in the curious notion of “infographie” (to my knowledge only existing in the francophone world), which denotes a discipline and profession whose only competence are software skills. This misunderstood notion of design and the lack of design culture with clients and agency directors alike make for an environment in which freelancers regularly provide unpaid work (in so-called “appels d’offre”) and/or work full-time hours without proper employment for salaries sometimes as little as €8/hour. In view of these circumstances, design education that provides (1) unique skills, (2) self-confidence and (3) a more international perspective are crucial for the advancement of the field in France and Morocco alike (the situation is more complex in the latter case).

Titus Nemeth’s class, Lettering excercises for the Atélier experimental Arabic type, ESAV, Marrakech, 2010

Does your school find that there is a certain gap between “the real world” and what students learn at school? If so, how do you deal with this issue?

The gap between education and professional practice is certainly there. Yet it is not always a bad thing to have a safe haven of experimentation and freedom in the context of design education that would not be tenable in the “real world”. Having said that, I feel that the policy of engaging professionals from the field as part-time lecturers, rather than having full-time teachers, is a valid and pragmatic way of overcoming this gap (though it has its specific problems too). Both schools that I lecture at emphasise this approach.

Should schools provide a universal education in graphic design, or is it important these days to specialise in specific areas and tasks?

I suppose a good case can be made for both scenarios and I would hesitate to exclude either one. The specificity of a design education very much depends on the level you are teaching at, with a post-graduate course offering more opportunities for specialisation than an undergraduate course. Generally speaking, designers today will often require a vast range of skills to be able to cater for different media — one could therefore favour a multi-disciplinary education. In the same vein, the exact opposite stance is just as valid: the field is becoming so heterogeneous that more specialised designers collaborating in loose networks might be more sustainable and realistic: you just can’t be good at everything.

Do you think it is a good idea for students to work on actual commercial contracts while they are still in school? Should the school and the instructors at the school support this?

Again, this depends very much on the case and context. Whilst it might provide a valuable learning experience, it might be pedagogically disastrous when the clients’ interference into student projects and concepts creates disillusioned and cynical middle-down-the-road-designers, rather than ingenious and unexpected design graduates. If one introduces commercial work into  education, I suppose it must be directed by a teacher who stands up to his pedagogy rather than one who easily bows before the client.

Design Education

Educators shaping the direction of design in a period of fundamental change in the publishing industry

Palo Bálik, Marcel Benčík, Tomasz Bierkowski, Peter Biľak, Min Choi, Patrick Doan, Richard Doubleday, Will Hill, Gerry Leonidas, Loîc Le Gall, Kristjan Mändmaa, Jacek Mrowczyk, Titus Nemeth, Ivar Sakk, Ewa Satalecka, Silvia Sfligiotti, Martin Tiefenthaler, Gerard Unger

The direction graphic design will take in the coming decades depends a lot on the educational institutions that teach the subject, and especially on the people there who teach design. As the editors of TYPO, we constantly encounter this issue as most of us—and the majority of our contributors—are regular or featured lecturers or workshop leaders at various schools around the world. We have decided to bring the education debate from our editorial meetings to the pages of our magazine so as to foster discussion about education today, and hence the future of the industry.

Gerry Leonidas, University of Reading, UK

What motivated you to decide to teach design and/or typography?

Teaching is the ideal profession for the perpetually curious! The challenge of explaining things and responding to other peoples’ curiosity is the best way to keep your mind sharp and your perspective clear and well-informed. As for the domain: typography and typeface design attract me because their development combines a wide social context with an individual viewpoint, and their practice is defined by the constraints of usability and the striving for originality.

Can you estimate about how many graphic designers your country graduates each year? Are there job opportunities in their field?

Several thousand! But keep in mind that there are over 230,000 designers in the UK, and most are active in communication and digital design. In addition, the UK is the hub for design services not only for Europe, but for many other regions as well. There is always demand for the best graduates, but the competition is fierce.

Does your school find that there is a certain gap between “the real world” and what students learn at school? If so, how do you deal with this issue?

The “real world” is very much part of the school. We have many visiting professionals running projects or presenting to the students, and some full-time staff are consultant designers at a fairly high level. We also run professional projects for commercial clients through our unique “Real jobs” scheme of client engagement, and are co-located with the University’s Design & Print Studio, a substantial pre-press and print unit (two offset, two digital presses, large-format printers, plus finishing). So a good student can graduate with several commercial items in their portfolio. Beyond this, we offer the possibility of paid Studio Assistant jobs in the summer of the second year. For our more motivated graduates there is no gap with the “real world”.

Should schools provide a universal education in graphic design, or is it important these days to specialise in specific areas and tasks?

It may be better to ask “how can schools respond to the demands of students and employers while fostering a deeper understanding of how design happens and promoting innovation and inter-disciplinary research?” Students and employers are by definition conservative and targeted, because they respond to precedent and the current situation. Innovation is by definition open-ended and unpredictable, and therefore difficult to constrain within a modularised programme of study. The answer lies in building robust but flexible methodologies for practice which appreciate the context in which design happens, include in all steps the perspective of the user, and reward research and exploration.

Do you think it is a good idea for students to work on actual commercial contracts while they are still in school? Should the school and the instructors at the school support this?

Our students work on real projects for real clients in a supervised environment, within the Department: the clients come to us. They don’t get paid, since this is assessed work, but the clients contribute to a fund that feeds back to support for students (e.g. paying for research trips). Our programme combines this scheme with conventional projects, so it offers students the best of both worlds. Bringing in real jobs in has the benefit of ensuring that students work on actual design problems, rather than cover the photocopier on a short-term internship.

Design Education

Educators shaping the direction of design in a period of fundamental change in the publishing industry

Palo Bálik, Marcel Benčík, Tomasz Bierkowski, Peter Biľak, Min Choi, Patrick Doan, Richard Doubleday, Will Hill, Gerry Leonidas, Loîc Le Gall, Kristjan Mändmaa, Jacek Mrowczyk, Titus Nemeth, Ivar Sakk, Ewa Satalecka, Silvia Sfligiotti, Martin Tiefenthaler, Gerard Unger

The direction graphic design will take in the coming decades depends a lot on the educational institutions that teach the subject, and especially on the people there who teach design. As the editors of TYPO, we constantly encounter this issue as most of us—and the majority of our contributors—are regular or featured lecturers or workshop leaders at various schools around the world. We have decided to bring the education debate from our editorial meetings to the pages of our magazine so as to foster discussion about education today, and hence the future of the industry.

Peter Biľak, KABK, Netherlands

What motivated you to decide to teach design and/or typography?

It is a good addition to my daily design work. Since I mainly work by myself, having weekly lessons combines well with my schedule. It also means constant learning – something I probably would not force myself to do if I didn’t teach.

Can you estimate about how many graphic designers your country graduates each year? Are there job opportunities in their field?

I don’t have precise numbers, but my rough estimate would be 500–800 graduates. Most of them find job opportunities in their selected fields.

Does your school find that there is a certain gap between “the real world” and what students learn at school? If so, how do you deal with this issue?

I think this happens everywhere – it is in fact desired that schools differ from the ‘real world’ experience. Schools should be safe havens where one can experiment with little risk involved and not feel constrained by future limitations. Of course, students are exposed to professional life too – they go on internships and undertake small projects as well.

Should schools provide a universal education in graphic design, or is it important these days to specialise in specific areas and tasks?

Schools have different traditions and it is not bad to build on those foundations. It would probably be hard to transfer certain educational methodologies to places with different conditions and traditions.

Do you think it is a good idea for students to work on actual commercial contracts while they are still in school? Should the school and the instructors at the school support this?

As mentioned earlier, it is desirable that there be a clear distinction between school and professional practice. It is not wrong to have professional experience in final years of the curriculum, but it is not healthy to simulate a commercial environment within schools.

Many (MA) students return back to school after working professionally – so they explicitly seek a place which is different than their previous daily practice.

Peter Biľak, Eroica, dance performance scene design for the Göteborg Opera, 2010

Peter Biľak, Fedra Sans World, font for Decode Unicode book, 2001–2011

TYPO is donning a new look for 2011: The beloved yet despised Helvetica font is replaced by Graphik, a sans serif that comes from the workshop of world-renowned typographer Christian Schwartz. Since the beginning of the year the magazine has also been posting design and typography news several times per week on its Facebook page and on Twitter. Come “like” us and follow us!

And there is more good news: Everyone who takes out a 2011 subscription will receive 10 credits for purchasing photographs and illustration at Pixmac. For more information, visit www.typo.cz/subscribe. Back issues of the magazine are also still available.

Number 43 opens with an overview of selected thesis projects created by recent graduates of art academies in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia who took part in the Graduation Projects – Central European Review of Design competition co-organised by Typo (Czech Republic), 2+3D (Poland) and Designum (Slovakia) magazines.

This is followed by our Design education poll, in which well-known international design instructors answer questions about job opportunities for design graduates, the differences between academic theory and real-world practice, specialisations and their own motivations to teach design.

In the next section of the magazine you can read a short biography of a forgotten punch cutter of the Dutch Golden age, Nicolaes Briot. Entitled Notes from the archive: Twists of fate and the fame of Nicolaes Briot, the article was written by Feike de Jong. Martin Pecina’s essay Electronic reading: The future is now considers the current state of e-books and reading from the screen, with an emphasis on typographic quality – or the lack thereof.

The end section as always offers design and typography news briefs, when you can read about a workshop led by TypeTogether or Suitcase Type Foundry’s Type Specimen app for the iPad.

In the end, the word symposium refers to drinking party or convivial discussions held in ancient Greece. The two days will include workshop, exhibitions, an evening full of short type presentations (aka TypeShorts), party, and of course a day full of excellent lectures.

The Poznań TypeTalks is organized in collaboration with the University of Arts in Poznań and Association “Na Rzecz”.

Day 1, Saturday (ca. 12:00–21:30)

Exhibition opening

TypeShorts – an evening full shorts type presentations. Type designers and typographers will present their works as brief 5-minute ignite talks.

Day 2, Sunday (9:30–22:30)

Indra Kupferschmid (DE)
Georg Trump’s less-known typefaces

Jacek Mrowczyk (PL)
Who is who in Polish type design

Martin Tiefenthaler (AT)
On the affective implications of good and bad typography

Jasso Lamberg (FI)
Transformer with a daily deadline

Lucas de Groot (DE/NL)
Designing large type families

Adam Twardoch (PL/DE)
Automated high-end typography: a field report

Akiem Helmling, Underware (DE/NL)
Carry-on

Exhibition opening

Party

Information

For information about accommodation, venue or registration fees please visit TypeTalks website.