Typographic Chinese Whispers - Documenta 1/1

Typeradio Podcast

November 2010 Typeradio held a two day workshop in cooperation with Indra Kupferschmid and 12 students of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (HBK Saar) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Each student was assigned a typeface designed by a Dutch designer with the question ‘How do you interpret the typeface into a one minute sound piece?’
The resulting 12 sound pieces were the starting point of a new workshop in collaboration with Jan Willem Stas and 12 students of the Type and Media master coarse, The Hague, The Netherlands. Each student was allocated an (anonymously labelled) sound piece and their challenge was to ‘create a typeface inspired by the sound’. The results were quite a surprise!

1) Original typeface: Documenta by Frank Blokland
2) Sound piece by Whitney Williams
3) Chinese whispered typeface by Kunihiko Okano

Kunihiko was struggling to find an idea, so he tried the double pencil technique. This technique he uses more often to analyze the origin of the letter. He drew the double lines and improved these lines into finer sketches. This resulted in an one stroke typeface that looks as if it were double lined. This calligraphic typeface he ended up with is just the beginning. He’s planning to make a extensive typeface family out of it.

left: Documenta by Frank Blokland, right: Chinese Whispered Documenta by Kunihiko Okano

• HBK Saar - Kommunikationsdesign ::
• TypeMedia ::

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