Jean François Porchez will conduct a typedesign workshop called Letterforms design open to everyone interested in typography, typefaces, lettering, calligraphy. It’s a join effort with ParaType.
Why?
The ambition of this day is not to design a complete character but to provide you with the necessary tools to better understand the typographic letterforms and make you discover a working method to draw your own alphabets and your own letters.
How?
Our approach is organized around the humanist alphabet and is based on handwriting as a means of understanding typographic forms. This method is based on proven techniques during the five intensive weeks of the TypeParis program.
We will start with a little practice of calligraphy, to better visualize the skeleton of the minuscule letters as well as letter shapes contrast. Calligraphy outcome will be the basis of the typographic drawings on tracing paper. You will learn to stabilize shapes from your calligraphic practice in order to understand the relationships between shapes and counterforms.
Starting from these drawings, you will work on various “systems”, serifs and terminals, weight, contrast in order to define a coherent typographic style that can be declined on all the glyphs of an alphabet.
We will then explore several typographic variables from your drawings, such as creating a bold, light, high-contrast, condensed or sans serif.
In the late afternoon, we will address digitization issues such as point placement or sapcing concepts. Nevertheless, to preserve the time of design, learning and friendly exchanges we did not plan to use a computer. The ambition is first of all to address the issues of letterform design in general, not the techniques related to specific software.
Supplied material
– Letterforms and calligraphy models
– 3 mm broad nib, pen holder, ink, goblets
– Pencils in HB, 3H
– Pigma Micron Graphic 1 mm and Sharpie markers
– Adhesive
– Uncoated tabloid paper 90gr
– Tracing paper 90gr
Who?
Limited to 15 attendees:
– This workshop is intended for all graphic designers, designers, students or teachers who wish to discover letterforms drawing technics
– If you are not a designer but you have a strong desire to try to draw letters, and you already draw a little, you can also join us.
– This is a good overview of the working methods implemented at TypeParis. This is the ideal way to test your motivation before engaging in further training in letterform design.
