

TYPO Talks Berlin — A Short Summary DESIGN | TYPEFACES



TYPO Talks happened a couple of weeks ago in Berlin, and as usual there was no shortage of epic talks about design, creative thinking, and of course, the typographical life. Over the course of three days there were plenty of talks and workshops to attend, some of which happened simultaneously and therefore making it impossible to attend them all (I'm still struggling with FoMO on this one).



However, the folks at TYPO are slowly writing about a few of the talks on their blog, which I'll quote in this section and link up the references.

Viktoriya Grabowska: New life for a forgotten typeface and tactile alphabet for the blind. On one of my favourite talks, Viktoriya talked about her attempt to bring back an alternative tactile typeface to life for blind people. Based on standardised letter forms, her typeface enables sighted people to read it, while doing the research at the same time of its effectiveness. "Since there is an internationally established writing system for blind people, it begs the question what the need of this typeface is. Viktoriya pointed out that this typeface is not only readable by blind people but also by sighted people which would create a shared platform for both parties to communicate.



Although this typeface uses the advantages of being readable for sighted people, it is not meant to be a substitution for Braille. It’s merely used as an educational tool to teach the standardised letter forms to the blind. The main reader audience consists of blind and sightless children. As of right now it is tested in different institutions for blind children in Poland. It can also be useful for adults, as letterforms are forgotten over time without using them." This image shows an attempt at solving the problem with diacritics in Braille:

Read the full article here. Now moving on to another favourite and super interesting talk, we had Sofia talking about the pains of diacritics, and how most commercial typefaces actually get them wrong:

Sofia Oslilo: The way out from the diacritical misery Polish designer Zofia Oslislo began her presentation with a portrait of the father of diacritic characters – Czech reformist Jan Hus. Hus dealt with reform of written Slavonic language for several years of his professional life. The date of his death, 1415, hints at the solutions being quite outdated.



She presented the Insects Project, an incredibly detailed study and analysis of diacritics history, rules and evolution. And the best of all, this is condensed in a free e-book that you can and should download and study for your own nerdy, typographic delight!





Government of Dubai and Monotype: The Dubai Font Project This talk was fascinating, and I believe it will be online very soon, but Nadine Chahini talked us through the process of developing a type design system for the city of Dubai. City branding is one of my subject topics, so I'm partially biased towards these insights, but these thoughts were quite interesting: Creating a type design for the city of Dubai means one thing only — giving a voice to a culture through its own typography. It seems to be the ultimate way of expressing culture, this is about creating an identity as its finest.

The bottom line is, whether or not you are a fan of guidelines within your branding campaign, branding evolved big time.

To echo the theme from the morning talk, brands should be seen like a system. They need to work from the bottom up. They need to work from the bottom source. They need to work from people and customer perspective not the other way around.

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