Hasta La Ideas

My local coffeeshops are all filled with people, none of them talking to each
other; they’re all staring into individual smartphones, tablets or laptop
screens. Screens are items for individuals, not groups.

However, recent industrial design grad Benjamin Sowa has a radically different idea:

For his graduate thesis at the University of Wuppertal, Sowa—who spent seven
months (presumably interning) at Nintendo of Europe for two
semesters—envisioned a huge, half-meter-square tablet meant to be laid flat on
a table surrounded by people. And crucially, his Big Table Top would not have
internet connectivity.

Instead of being a web-surfing device, the tablet is meant to take the place of traditional board games played by
groups of family members or friends.

Games would be inserted old-school style—via media, in this case SD cards rather than bulky cartridges. “For many people it is important to physically hold and feel what we care about,” Sowa writes. “The digital distribution of gaming content…leads to a situation where people don’t appreciate it the way [they used to].”

The device’s lack of connectivity not only precludes downloadable games, but is
also meant to increase human interaction and give parents peace of mind.
“This gaming platform is about a social gathering as well as for children.
It’s about shutting internet devices off and putting phones aside. Further,
parents should have a good feeling when they leave their kids playing on this
tablet without having to be afraid that they might go online and do something
stupid or carry out some in-app purchases or micropayments.”

As for the screen itself, it would feature the expected multitouch as well as
sensors to detect physical objects—game pieces, for instance—placed atop the
tablet. As additional input devices, Sowa has designed individual controllers
whose stark simplicity is meant to lower the barrier to entry for the
tech-averse older generation.

Here’s what the BTT would look like in action, by the way:

Now we get to the sad part: It is just a concept, a thesis project, with no
apparent plans for production (although Sowa has gone to a lot of trouble to
lay out what the technical aspects would be). But there’s a chance Sowa might
have something planned for the future: In the section of the device’s website
titled “Prospect,” it features the line “Content coming
soon.” Assuming he could undertake the massive task of finding
manufacturers and game developers, I’m guessing this one would be a successful
Kickstart project.

Essay Text is an anachronism and an antidote. It provides an excellent counter­argument to the speculative superfamilies that overwhelm specimens these days: it is unapologetic about doing a few things well (rather than many, in an above-average way at best). It also serves as a reminder that informed, controlled contrast in documents does not require nine equidistant weight variants — and, by implication, questions how strongly typography features in the deliber­ations of many contemporary type designers.

This enforced lack of typographic complication can be transformative for the text. Eschewing the Bold makes using this typeface more than a typographic decision: it becomes an integral element of the editorial process, placing restrictions on authorship. (This is not as heavy-handed as it sounds: text editors today are increasingly channeling typewriters, through plain interfaces with a single typeface and no styling.)

It reminds of pre-digital times, when typefaces for continuous reading offered just two options other than the regular, and typeface choice assumed a full understanding (and some degree of control) of the final output environment. To drive the point home, Essay Text renders absolutely terribly on low-resolution printing, and all screens other than retina-class devices. Give it high resolution, though, and the clunky blobs coalesce into graceful extrusions of tense, organic forms; the subtle deviations from rectilinear angles counteract the overdue allure of Cartesian point alignments, and show a whole class of explorations in typeface design that — I am willing to wager — we will witness much more of in the coming half-decade.

In this way, Essay Text takes complexity and explor­ation of forms away from the level of the family comp­osition to the level of the line of text, with panache: the ampersands, section marks, and fleurons are little sparkles of typographic fun. A minus point? It could do without the outdated affectations of ligatures, and certainly the twee ‘c’- and ‘s’- combinations.

Since the release of FF ThreeSix in 2011, Hamish Muir and Paul McNeil have been busy digging more deeply into the world of parametric type design. The studio published an updated and greatly expanded version of (Muir’s old studio gig) 8vo’s Interact (1984) in 2013, along with three further experimental display fonts: Intersect, Panopticon, and Nine (the last in both a Metric and a Mono version). Like ThreeSix, the 2013 releases won MuirMcNeil the International Society of Typographic Designers’s Premier Award for that year.

Last November, the duo released another set of fonts: TwoPoint, ThreePoint, FourPoint, and TenPoint. All four, like their predecessors, are geometric display designs that rely on strict grids and sets of rules — rules that enlarge, puncture, offset, multiply, and rotate the shapes that make up the glyphs — to create variations on an initial design, and weights within each variation. There is some continuity between the new fonts and MuirMcNeil’s previous work in the relationship between ThreePoint and Panopticon; Panopticon imagined the strokes of letterforms made out of isometrically projected planes, seen from four different viewpoints; ThreePoint represents those planes with dots. But the other faces are completely new, though obviously informed in approach by the team’s experience with their last release.

It’s hard to give a comprehensive overview of the new work, because there’s so much of it. Fortunately, on their website, the designers provide not just thorough specimens of all of the designs, but beautiful images of silkscreened posters they made using them.

Here is what I can say about the new fonts, and about the studio’s work in general: while ThreeSix, in most of its weights and styles, was (surprisingly) not only legible, but also readable in text sizes, the later fonts aren’t so much. But that’s hardly their point.

Rather, Muir and McNeil are letting the logic of the rules they have constructed push the designs far past the boundaries of the legible. Their process and method are on full display in the letterforms. Some of the variations even verge on parody — TenPoint’s 01 series, for example, where every glyph is a single disc. The effect overall is to make text into texture, into gesture, into suggestion, into image, into idea.

These fonts could keep designers busy at play for weeks, should they be willing to indulge themselves. Members within each family of faces can be layered, knocked out of one another, offset, overlaid in various sizes; TwoPoint even comes with grids of dots to layer over or behind the glyphs. The posters the designers have made only begin to capture the possibilities of their designs.

But MuirMcNeil’s new fonts, like their older siblings, are not just elaborate versions of amateur “techno” display designs. They demand to be taken seriously, and not just because of the obvious care with which Muir and McNeil have prepared and presented them. The more time I spend with them, following the process of their construction and investigating their formal logic, the more I think they can teach a patient and thoughtful designer about the possibilities of experimental type.

When you abstract the shapes of letters, break them into their components, and start to build them with something other than simulated pen strokes, you begin to see relationships between them you would not have found otherwise. You start, as well, to think about context: how two nearly identical glyphs could read differently when surrounded by different glyphs; how little it takes to suggest an ascender or descender, an aperture, a stem, a handle, an ear. If people read not letters, but shapes of words and clusters of wordshapes, these fonts can help us learn not to be surprised to find that we can make at least some sense of even the vaguest of forms. Looking at these fonts, I am sometimes reminded of accounts I’ve read of the aural patterns of West African talking drums: so much can be conveyed with rhythm and color, even in the absence of detailed articulation.

One more comparison: think of these typefaces like Legos; you can play with them and learn from them at the same time. Is it just because I’m wrapping up an MFA thesis that this seems like a big deal to me? Maybe; but try them yourself and I think you’ll agree that Muir and McNeil are onto something. I hope they keep investigating.

Woodkit is a toy disguised as a typeface. And like any toy, it takes me back to my formative years.

Woodkit’s Letterpress style, a mishmash of eccentric forms, takes me back to my college days when I first worked with wood type. Armed only with a haphazard mix of styles, incomplete alphabets, and damaged letters, the game was to piece together designs from what I had on hand. I joyfully arranged and rearranged the wooden blocks, experiencing the thrill of the hunt as I searched for the right fit. The letterpress workshop became my playground.

That sense of play is what Woodkit is all about. It is certainly not a revival in the traditional sense, but Ondrej Jób breathes new life into the otherwise mundane act of setting type on a computer. Woodkit encapsulates all that is fun about building up words and images out of prefabricated blocks (toypography?).

Woodkit’s positive and negative Alphabet styles take me back even further; after all, I was playing with wooden blocks long before I first set type. These styles are reminiscent of the ABC blocks of my youth, but rendered in a slick, round sans that makes them so much cooler, and so much more appropriate for titles and drop caps.

The Ornaments style takes me back to my mom’s office, where I would bang rubber stamps into ink pads and then all over the papers on her desk. Ondrej’s 500-piece ornaments set is a lively take on midcentury designs, complete with standalone dingbats and repeatable patterns.

And let’s not forget the Figures style, which contains a variety of heads, arms, legs, and bodies that can be swapped and stacked in different combinations to form nearly 400,000 modular little people. Take that, Mr. Potato Head!

But it’s my favorite style, Blocks, that takes me back the furthest. I’m sure I stuck many of its shapes into my mouth in my early days. This toddler-meets-Bauhaus design features three chunky geometric alphabets, each imaginatively constructed from the soft, primitive shapes of toy blocks.

Woodkit is playful, but it transcends novelty or nostalgia. It is a unique and elaborate system, complete with Latin/Greek/Cyrillic and three levels of distress. It is a system not unified by a single typographic style, but by a simple idea: each glyph is drawn to fill a square or half-square block, so everything is stackable, rearrangeable, and interchangeable. And this rigid, typographic structure is what gives us the freedom to play.

At this year’s Baselworld watch and jewelry fair, we got hands-on with Bulgari’s new smartwatch concept pieces. And while it’s just a concept now (with a superb functional demo model already in existence), the luxury brand plans on taking it to market……

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