Tapeface : How to [Not] Design a Typeface

Every unruly typeface starts with a little chaos. TAPEFACE was never about me alone, but about seeing what happens when authorship is shared. Each participant was given one alphabet and one colour of tape, passing the sheet every 30 seconds to the next person. Layer by layer, responses replaced plans. Every colour stays visible as a trace of presence. If a typeface can be used by thousands, why not created by many? Tapceface holds the memory of play, collision, and shared time.

creating aura

Design begins where smoothness ends. Through resistance and texture materials shape emotional experience and presence. As part of a series of material experiments this work consists of construction foam and 3D-printed typography. The series explores friction within the process and the relationship between humans and materials. Through the chemical reaction the materials interact and develop a life of their own. The design unfolds through the way its surface is touched and perceived.

Project 12:40

Project 12:40 began as a typeface, but it has always been more than just a font. At its heart, it’s about holding a mirror to our histories of language and technology. It’s about asking: what if the tools that shaped typography in India weren’t always playing catch-up to the West? The typeface itself is monolinear, stripped down to its essence, built on a grid that unites Latin, Devanagari and Urdu without erasing their individuality.

Berg Bilder

Berg Bilder is a collection of symbols and asemic traces derived from mountain paths. Through the digital lens, these natural forms have been altered and reduced to ruins of their former identity. What remains is a semi-systematic writing system that lies between lost meaning and newly emerging interpretation.

Solanum Tuberosum

This work is an excerpt from my bachelor thesis. It features the term Solanum tuberosum, the Latin name of the potato, used as a typographic motif. The lettering is based on the typeface New Kansas and incorporates contours extracted from a 3D-scanned potato to create an effect of rootedness.

Autark

A typeface born out of a sense of independence, a state of mind that has always been important to me. Its first strokes arose intuitively, inspired by this feeling, and later formed the foundation for everything else. Autark can be used as a headline font, or on its own thanks to its almost ornamental character.

Sammelmappe Design & KI

AI-generated works are visualized through distorted reflective typography, created analogously using various glass forms, highlighting the contrast between physical experimentation and digital intelligence. This work is an excerpt from a compilation portfolio for Media Production at TH OWL which explores the interplay between human-made and AI-reflected design.

Waxy

Which design intervention can ensue during the melting down of wax candles? How can this material residue be turned into a narrative object? Waxy is first and foremost the result of a collective production: the three designers of this typeface gathered around a table, lighting candles, and letting wax drip onto sheets of paper. Letters were formed one by one, each multiple times. The melted residues were scanned, digitized, and eventually turned into a typographic system.

Not Designed

This work examines how contemporary type design treats minority languages within the Cyrillic script. While thousands of fonts fully support dominant characters, a specific Belarusian letter is often missing. By repeating existing forms and translating them into 3D, the poster shows how absence in typography can lead to languages becoming unseen over time.

Uncanny Type

Developed in a workshop by KITeGG researchers Francesco Scheffczyk and Paul Esser.
I wanted to express humanness through the eye – as a symbol of introspection and observation.
If you only prompt “human,” there are mostly human body parts. Furthermore, I wanted to express the flow of working together (human + AI) and the mimicking, which is what AI does for me.
This process was part of my project “Human Types” on AI and typography, which appeared in Re:Vision by Monotype.

Cross Stitch Type Faces

Inspired by old monograms stitched on house linens, these typefaces merge the rigidity of the cross-stitch grid with the imperfectness of hand-stitching. Each typeface is first designed on a pixel grid, then stitched onto fabric, and finally scanned. From this slow and laborious process, an organic typeface emerges, transferring tactility and ancient hand-crafted processes to the digital realm.

Segmentor

Segmentor: a typeface you can drum
Segmentor is an exploration of what playing drums and designing typefaces have in common, and what links could be brought forward. During his year at Type and Media in The Hague, Mălin Neamțu wanted to combine his practices as a musician and designer to build a real time visual tool that rendered powerful and experimental typographic animations for any live shows he would have in the future.

Process Type

Process Type is a conceptual typeface representing the vital feelings experienced within the design/creative process.

It consists of 6 fonts that each embody a particular feeling (emotional and physical) that I found brings the most impact on the process for me.

Together these fonts form a journey and a typographic visualisation of the human aspect of the design process, from the beginning to the end.

Disinformation

The poster bestows several questions regarding the truth, lies, disinformation and the version of reality we choose to believe. Type is distorted and blurred which furthermore underlines the very nature of disinformation.