From Monday 28 May 2018 to Tuesday 29 May 2018, in Sofia. Jean François Porchez and Mathieu Réguer will conduct a typedesign workshop called Letterforms design open to everyone interested in typography, typefaces, lettering or calligraphy. This is a join effort with Typofest.
Why?
The ambition of this 2 days workshop is not to design a complete typeface 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. Tangible to digital world.
How?
Our approach is organised around the humanist alphabet, it relies on handwriting and calligraphy as means of understanding typographic forms. This method is based on proven techniques used during the five intensive weeks of the TypeParis program.
The workshop will start with the practice of calligraphy in order to better visualise the skeleton of the minuscule letters as well as letter shapes contrast. The outcome of this calligraphy practice will be the basis of typographic drawings on tracing paper. You will learn how to stabilize the shapes from your calligraphic samples in order to understand the relationships between forms and counterforms.
Starting from these drawings, you will work on various parameters -serifs and terminals, weight and 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 starting from your drawings, such as creating a bold, a light, a high-contrast version, a condensed or a sans serif.
Day two will be dedicated to the digitisation of your glyphs drawing.
We will cover Bezier curves best practices, explain our methods and strategies and how careful point placement will impact your design in a positive way.
We will explain the core principles of glyph spacing for several style of typefaces. You will learn how to set up sidebarings for the glyphs you are drawing, shifting focus from individual letters to word images and lines of text.
During the final stage of the session you will draw stylistic variants from the previous day as digital outlines and experiment with interpolation is order to explore variations between all your different design.
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
– Glyphs complimentary license
Bring our usual graphic design material
– Favorite set of pens, pencils…
– Your MacOs laptop
– Your phone (to import your paper drawings on the computer)
Who?
Limited to 18 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.
