Now that all personal projects have solid pillars, it’s time to expend attendees’ typefaces into a fully fledged family and to fine tune their main weight. In the course of this third stage, the students focused on designing a complete set of lowercase, uppercase, numerals and punctuation for their basic weight so as to get a functional digital font with the existing glyphs. Further, they sought for potential family extensions such as the italic, bold or titling. Despite being one of the shortest phase of the programme in terms of days, the evolution of all designs during this third phase is amazingly exponential!
Visit to BnF Tolbiac
Due to the current covid-19 situation, the usual visit to the François Mitterrand Bibliothèque nationale de France had to be postponed until the beginning of the fifth week of the programme. This appointment at the Livres Rares department completed the set of visits and gave to the attendees more historical tools to guide them in developing their personal projects.
Back to the classroom
Time for the students to be back to the school and work on multiple aspects of their projects: first, on the roman weight completion, already taking into account the required character set to obtain the TypeParis diploma; and second, on their family extensions –weight variants and styles depending on each briefing. And all that, using specific printed tests to get more detailed corrections from the instructors and guest critics.
Guest critics
During the fifth week of the programme, we had the pleasure of receiving Martin Majoor from Arnhem. His experienced voice relieved most of the students after looking in detail all their designs. One by one, he gave them another point of view of what they could improve. And as usual, right afterwards, Martin gave also a lecture open to the public.
The Glyphs team visit
Yet another TypeParis tradition is inviting for several days both Georg Seifertand Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer from the Glyphs team. At this point of the programme, they are extremely useful to assist personally the students so that they can all manage properly the font software. Specially thanks to Rainer and Georg, the attendees acquired an advanced level of digital workflow in Glyphs, being able to use the composite-component system and deepen into interpolation, multiple masters and variable fonts.
Moreover, a new edition of the Glyphs workshop run by Seifert and Scheichelbauer took place on the weekend of the 2nd and 3rd of July.
TPTalks
For the fifth and last pair of lectures of this TypeParis edition, we received Martin Majoor and Sascha Lobe.
Martin offered us a very didactic tour along the history of the western alphabet and showed also the creative process of some of his designs: Scala, Questa and the more recent, Comma. Both the students and the public listened to Majoor with absorbed attention.
Sascha Lobe followed Majoor on the stage when his talk was over. Lobe showed us several cases that he and his team designed during the last 4-5 years. It was specifically stimulating to discover the accurate research hidden behind the corporate image of the Bauhaus, “a quite difficult commission” according to Sascha.
That’s all for now. Stay tuned to know how the students solve their projects in the last stage of TypeParis22 edition!
See you for Phase #4!
– By Gina Serret.
Learn more about TypeParis courses and conferences!
➼ Reports
➼ Type & graphic designers interviews
➼ Attendees feedback series
➼ Summer23 programme
➼ Now23 conference
Apply to TypeParis Summer course!
The deadline for applications is 14 March, every year.
SPONSORS
