Sorry for the Radio silence, everybody, we had a busy past couple of weeks followed by a relaxing week of vacation. I’ll start from the beginning:
We finally finished our Paul van der Laan revival projects. I was extremely proud of everyone in our class on the high quality of all our revivals. Many added a bold, an italic/oblique, or both to the assignment. I struggled a little bit in the beginning to decide what direction to take so I don’t have such amazing things, but I am grateful for the experience never the less.
Here is an issuu version of the specimen/report.
It’s named Planegg after the original book that I found it in. Planegg is a small German town, and the book is a very Art Nouveau play about the town and nature (as far as I can tell). The entire book is typeset in a typeface by Peter Behrens named Behrens-Schrift, who designed his typeface in 1902 to be a sort of organic amalgam between Fraktur and Antiqua scripts. Paul asked me kindly not to set my entire book in Planegg, so the text is one of my favorite sans serifs, Whitney by H&FJ.
After that, we had a very exciting event with Typeradio and Indra’s Saarbrücken students. The Saarbrücken students were given 12 typefaces designed by 12 Dutch typeface designers (most of them being our teachers) to create sound pieces of, and the sound pieces in turn were given to us for us to create typefaces from, not knowing the original typeface. Some of them were very hard to pin down. Thankfully, Marina brought her camera to the event, so head on over to the Flickr group to get a good look.
Immediately afterward, Katie and I left for Paris and London (4 days in each) and we had a wonderful time. (We unfortunately don’t have so many together because as it often goes, one of us would be taking a photo of the other).
After we returned to Holland we made a small afternoon trip to Utrecht to see the Dick Bruna Huis and the Rietveld Schröderhuis, both taken care of by the Centraal Museum of Utrecht. Dick Bruna is the creator of Miffy (Nijntje in The Netherlands) and friends, as well as a very nice graphic designer. The Rietveld Schröderhuis, as you might remember from your Art History textbooks, is (probably) the world’s only pure example of De Stijl architecture.
From here on out, class-wise, it is all in for our thesis. I’m building a blog to to take care of only thesis research, so I will share a link to that when it is ready. We’re all going to be terribly busy until July; I believe there is only around 116 more days left.
