Typo International Design Talks Berlin, 2017
My adventure had started searching about typography conferences around the world and at the end i found out the TYPO International Design Talks Berlin in May 2017. And very happy about the result : )
Conference took place at the House of the Cultures of the world (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin), which is located in Tiergarten by the Spree river. Built in 1957, the building itself has an amazing A & B ants and butterflies shape,and it was the USA’s contribution to the INTERBAU 1957 building exhibition. At the first time, I was surprised how a modern building like this could be built in 1950s.
I was accommodated 25 minutes walking distance to the conference area. May was the great session to feel the first spring affects, so everyday I preferred the walking and re-freshed by the Berlin spring weather.
Typo 2017 is a very well organized 3 days conference and it was fully programmed in every hour. You could follow the branding, typography, design talks&shows and join the workshops about calligraphy, typography, lettering, sketching and many more. The language was in both English and German. The translator was available all the time. Coffee breaks and lunch time was included in the fee, was awesome!
Through the typo programme catalogue, I selected my interest talks and workshops before and followed it accordingly in the next 3 days. So there are a lot of designers speeches I had joined, but I would like to write about the ones which attracted me the most.
Peter Bil’ak
.The best thing about design.
Peter Biľak works in the field of editorial, graphic, and type design and teaches at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. He has pointed on his ambition; which is ‘to not become the expert at what we do, to do work which we’ve never done before’.
He has been working on the dance&theatre choreography for the last 10–15 years. Design dance pieces that he worked with colors&patterns on costumes was creative enough. In the two performances which I like, the colors&patterns are overlapped together. He mentioned; the video can tell something which otherwise can not be done in the real performance. When you work on ink you have the experience and you know what will happen, but it is really different to present the video like this, it has difficulties to record it because of two separate tracks connected. The video that he worked for a film festival in Amsterdam was with black&white patterns overlapped and it is worth to watch.
Birgit Palma
.Modular Lettering: Type & Illustration.
Birgit Palma is an illustration & lettering artist based in Barcelona.
The way that she worked on geometrical shapes was wonderful. She follows some characteristics, such as; systems, movement, expression, diverse, colours, imagination, and expression. She believes there’s a connection between these. Palma has an amazing creative knowledge. She also creates typefaces, the one that she presented in her presentation was Oxy Mora typeface. First, she created a triangle shape, which looks nearly like an ‘A’ letter. Then she found out a system, dividing this ‘A’ into half. After that she worked on the other 26 letters according to her system. (Please see below.)
She designed numbers for a Spanish magazine, Yorokobu. The number idea came from 99 number, she believes it’s the age that you kill yourself. 99 sketch which includes stairs was a really funny example. And then again, she found a system between stairs and ages. She pointed the age; ‘You just go up and you can’t go back.’ In the end, from her stairs sketches, she created the other numbers in the same perspective.
Birgit worked on ‘the Modular Type System Project’ with a designer, Daniel Triendi. He’s based in Vienna, so mostly they collaborate online. They liked the idea that everyone can create their own shapes, put them together and form a letter. This formed an ice cream shape below, they worked on together. Every geometrical shape is created out of different styles.
I joined their ‘modular lettering’ workshop, the goal was to create an alphabet. Each person created a style in a geometric shape, then after saving it under the same adobe creative cloud name, you could able to see the design in the letter. Please see the examples which I have done at their workshop. I really enjoyed it:)
Short impressions:
Gerd Fleischmann
.What on Earth is ‘Bauhaus Typography’.
It really attracted me how the typography matters on the architecture surface. Here are the screenshots from the presentation.
The combination of ‘au’ in Bauhaus and the placement of the letters according to the window is incredible. Also the shadow of the letter changes in every hour.
Debbie Millman
Debbie Millman is a designer, author, educator and brand strategist.
She worked on Burger King and 7up identities. She didn’t has a website at the beginning. She host of the award-winning podcast “Design Matters,” the world’s first podcast on design.
She wanted to take attention on that we expect things to happen really fast. The pressure on young people in 20s is really hard. By the time when they are 30, if nothing happens, they think something is wrong with them. She mentioned that she got started ‘Design Matters’ at the age of 44. This is the phrase that I kept from her speech ‘Everything worth while it takes time.’
Oh also, I attended a Calligraphy workshop (from gothic to graphic) by Drury Brennan, which was really fun! We worked on gothic letters using nib. Some pictures are below.
It was a busy 3 days typography conference and I’m really satisfied and happy. I would like to go and meet again with the typography and design lovers:)
Thank you TYPO17!
Cheers,
Funda Yahya
