The greatest part of this new Master is that a group of students will visit New York between the 20 and 25 February 2013. For them, I have built a strong program with the help of many friends in New York and elsewhere…
Last Tuesday 20 July 2012 was the last day, after 19 days of intense typeface design courses (4 days by week), Fridays dedicated to Libraries visits and study weekends, our group 2 presented the result of their typeface project.
— CooperType 2012: First exercise
— CooperType 2012: First exercise, final
— CooperType 2012: Personal project
— CooperType 2012: Personal project 2
— CooperType 2012: Final
— CooperType Condensed program 2012
A week after, a lot of happened. On Monday 9th July 2012, they received the visit of Erik van Blokland for two days of type crits. It was big push for them as any other further external type crits. On our side, Stéphane Elbaz and myself, what was really appreciable is to see how what we try to explain for the last few days are just confirmed in a different tone from an external voice.
The personal project started on 25th June 2012. The groups spent long hours to built and confirm the style of their typefaces. First thing was to set the contrast and relation with basic serifs. Then, they worked on how the endings will relate or not to basic serifs. All key letters have been created on tracing paper to avoid to mix two very different steps: conceptualisation and production.
Last week, the group 2 have to design their first set of letters. Designed by hand (no rulers) on tracing paper, here after the results. As we will spend 4 more weeks, together, perhaps its time to present the students along their current project?
The CooperType Condensed program 2012 started now 3 days ago, and together with Stéphane Elbaz we were in charge of the group 2. First day was dedicated to the introduction and few hours praticising writing in order to understand relationship between proportions, widths, rhythm, position of various endings, counters and so on. At the end of the day, they started to select the best letters they produced, and enlarged them next morning to start to design a set of few lowercases…
In few hours will start the 5-week intensive program in typeface design at Cooper Union’s New York City campus. Two classes have been set up this year by Cara di Edwardo. The first class will be taught by Just van Rossum and Hannes Famira, when Stéphane Elbaz and myself teaches in the second class. Our group include 14 people from various places of the world who have to design typefaces step by step from first days focusing on writing exercises to fine tuning letterforms in few weeks. I hope to report the progress here in the following weeks!
In 2009, when we’ve discussed the idea of this workshop planned middle for February 2012 with Karen Cheng, I never figured it out how this week in Seattle will be a great, from the first to the last minute. Organizing such thing is complex and take time. Karen accomplished a very good job!
In February 2012, 21 students have worked hard to design five typefaces. Here after images from the workshop that I have conducted.
Typeface designed during a 5 days typeface design workshop in Seattle, at the University of Washington.