Tricking the eye with warping typography

Ultimately, I’m trying to capture things that physically can’t be captured in
camera. I usually try to work photorealistically, that is, to create detailed
textures and lighting conditions. In the best case, the viewer should be
amazed and wonder how something like this can be visualized at all. With an
oil painting I appreciate the technique, but also have an idea of how it all came
together. I will continue to work on disguising the traces of my techniques.

Sylexiad

Dr. Robert Hillier designed and developed the Sylexiad range of typefaces for adult dyslexic readers, as part of his doctoral research, producing a PhD called A Typeface for the Adult Dyslexic Reader (2006). Hillier has presented his research findings at numerous design institutions and conferences, including the Design Principles and Practices Conferences at the University of California in Los Angeles (2012) and the University Center in Chicago (2015), and also at the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) typography and typeface design conference in Reykjavík (2011).

Dr. Hillier’s research involved the design and testing of a new typeface developed and informed from a dyslexic perspective against other typefaces recommended by dyslexia organizations. For the majority of those adult dyslexic readers tested, the evidence indicated a clear preference for the Sylexiad typefaces. The font is available to download free of charge from the recently re-designed Sylexiad website.

Sylexiad

Designer: Robert Hillier
Styles: Sylexiad Serif and Sans

Download typeface

Questions that heal.

I’m not sure how to ask, what to ask. I’m filled with questions rather than with answers. On my path to recovery, this is really crucial. I’ve tried different doctors, therapists, and counselors. The most valuable resource I’ve found so far has been this book, Questions That Heal. It gives a person a tool to look at their thoughts about their pain. I’d heard about this book, but it’s actually not until I started using it that I felt the shift. Now I’m Empowered patient.

Steal That Type

The poster aims to acknowledge in a cheeky way how these days, in the social networks era, creatives and designers ‘get inspiration’ from each others’ work. Sometimes the line between ‘inspiration’ and ‘copying’ is really thin, but it’s something we learnt to live with and, sometimes, put up with.

Poster for the play The Red Tree

The poster was created for the performance The Red Tree in the space of the Boyar Chambers.

The main typography is based on the metaphor of frightening shadows that appear from the moonlight outside the window. The color and shape of the letters combines at the same time the cold, dim light of the night moon and the winding shapes of tree branches.

“The production is built as a journey through the fragments of memories” – this short description of the performance is embodied in service typography, which is divided into its component parts.

VELA

The “Vela”, as it is called by the locals, was designed in 2005 by Santiago Calatrava and was destined to host the 2009 world swimming championships in Rome. Due to the increase in costs, it has never been finished. According to sociologists, a place unfinished and in ruins generates a mixture of fear and nostalgia, but also a thrill of excitement, and reminds us of the inexorable passage of time.
The project aims to give value and remember a piece of our heritage that has been forgotten and unused, and also generate the same emotions caused by the abandoned building. The letters are modular: the base is the shape of the “sail”, which takes up the structure of the reference architecture.

Poster for the play Demons

The poster was made for the play Demons based on the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Magic hand-made typography, emphasizing the “sinfulness” of the work. Just as The Possessed became a warning novel, the poster becomes a herald of radicalism and a qualitatively exciting mood.

The color scheme, as it were, warns of something forbidden and provocative.

Service typography pretentiously steals attention, breaking the smoothness of the main composition to create a feeling of inconsistency.

Diorama

I’ve been looking for a long time for an event to make homage to the marvellous poster «Frederik» by Erich Brechbuhl, when I found out that Diorama is performing in their hometown soon. The sound of this poster reminds me of earlier Diorama songs. The more surprised I was when the musicians decided to use my design.

Large letters «Diorama» are made from Fractal font by Tibor Lantos.

Other type: for March event I used Muller by Fontfabric, for April — Teko by Indian Type Foundry (Diorama asked me to change it to Teko as it was their official type).

Dahlgren Blockletter

I first met Jacob Dahlgren when we worked together on his exhibition “Quality Through Quantity” at Museum Ritter in 2017. One of the exhibits was part of Jacob’s series “Subject of Art”—blocks of pencils of various lengths, forming sculptures with distinctly shaped surfaces.

At the vernissage, I overheard someone ask Jacob if the shapes were supposed to depict letters—one of them could easily be read as an N—which he negated. This was enough motivation for me to get to work.

Thanks to the angled perspective, the surfaces creating the letterforms create shapes similar to brushstrokes. The result is a modern take on the classic blackletter — hence the name “Dahlgren Blockletter”.

449.5 °F

449.5 °F was commissioned by Fonderie Darling, a visual-arts venue located in a former foundry in Montreal. At the occasion of their 20 years, I have worked on an original typographic design created through a series of experiments with tin. I have reproduced the letters F and D in melted, severed and deformed metal. The two glyphs reveal irregular lines eaten away by heat, forming sinus surfaces with honed angles. The alternation between solid and smooth form, with sometimes abrupt ruptures, generates asymmetrical stems. This semblance of irregularity pervades the entirety of each letter up to their incision points, contrasting with the supple curves that underline them.

Typeface Remix & Remakes

Der Inhalt zweier Original-Letraset-Folien wurde analog von Hand dekonstruiert und neu kombiniert. So entstand ein analoger Remix, welcher sodann digitalisiert und in diversen Remake-Bildern zur individuelle Anwendung kam; hier repräsentativ als populäres „Keep calm and…“ Poster sowie als kurzes Video.

Dog Ears

Grammy-nominated independent design studio Public-Library is proud to announce the release of the publication, titled Dog Ears, on the occasion of the studio’s tenth anniversary.

Published as a collection of iterative design explorations, this work examines the deconstruction of a single sentence typeset in a single typeface in an attempt to understand the commitment between content and form. Dog Ears features an introduction by poet, essayist, cultural critic, and MacArthur Fellow Hanif Abdurraqib.

Public-Library is a cross-disciplinary design studio in Los Angeles led by co­founders Ramón Coronado and Marshall Rake. The studio’s philosophy centers on the work of reduction, to deduce meaning while experimenting with space, form, and narrative to bring out nuance. They believe honesty in collaboration paves the way for meaningful design solutions and persisting partnerships.

Over the design duo’s ten-year practice, they have worked on major campaigns with marquee brands including A24, Airbnb, Annapurna, Beats by Dre, Converse, Jordan, The New York Times, Nike, October’s Very Own, Playboy, Red Bull Music, and Vogue. Public-Library’s creative vision has been employed throughout the music industry by The Grammy Museum, The Recording Academy, Sony Music, and Warner Brothers Records and recording artists Drake, Local Natives, Mac Miller, Snail Mail, Vampire Weekend, and The WEEKND. In November 2021, Public-Library’s design for Mac Miller’s Swimming In Circles received a GRAMMY nomination in the Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package category. Learn more here.

Dog Ears

Publisher: Public-Library
Editor: Public-Library
Release: February 2022
Bookbinding: black and white, softcover
Language: English
Volume: 108 p.
Format: 7 × 9 inches

Price: $ 55.–
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Giacomo Spray Lettering

I made simple stencils from film and sprayed the same shapes into the lettering and the portrait, using triangles, circles and squares alternately as shapes, counter-forms. The final result is an interesting dynamic composition in which shape and background work together to form the word Giacomo, the name of my classmate in the font design course. Made at the Nejc Prah workshop

Latin square kufic

Latin Square Kufic is a typographic experimentation I started designing a CD cover for IRAN, an electronic music band. The design exploits the Square Kufic, an ancient Arabic writing technique: letters and glyphs are drawn with orthogonal lines in a square inscribed grid according to a typesetting rule: no double space between strokes.
The research investigates aspects concerning type designing. How many shapes can a “squared” letter take on an orthogonal grid? And to what extent is it possible to vary the shape of a letter so that it remains recognizable, and a sentence legible?
The pixel-drawn letters result in an optical effect, a kind of maze where seeking a meaning.

FUSE

When a typeface is unreadable, it has no audience, so there is no communication. Based on this assumption, we can can then give a new meaning to it through a process of disrupting/demodulating, getting back a new form of communication.

FUSE aims to be a live generative typeface.

Tools: arduino, modul8

Digital Revolution

Digital Revolution is a typographic layout piece that is inspired by the chaotic state induced by being attached to digital gods in a sense.

The ease of everything being right at your fingertips – no more than an instant away, the desire to consume more, new content being reduced to but a fleeting novelty the moment it’s posted online.

This piece stands as a brief comment into that mindset and ideology – framing it in the sense of this digital cult that has encircled our lives.