»Type & Tools« - New publication from the Professorship »Typography and Type Design« published

»In times when designers' everyday work is largely characterised by pixels and vectors, the aim of the project was to question common design tools used by predominant software companies and to consciously direct attention to other, more unconventional design methods,« explains Stefanie Schwarz, under whose direction the project started in the summer semester of 2020.

In the first phase of the project, the students researched which materials and tools are useful for generating (typographic) graphic forms and to what extent type forms can be read out of them. Various utensils were converted into writing, forming and printing tools, such as a hand mixer, a comb, margarine applied thickly with a knife and fork or the perforated tear-off edge of a stamp. The spaces between soap bubbles and the lines created by a spectrogram were also examined for their typographic potential and used as the basis for new type forms.

In the further design process, the students analysed the forms characteristic of the respective tools and asked themselves to what extent these flow into the digital type design – very subtly and only in detail or expressively and obviously. In addition, the designers developed posters and brochures to present the background and potential applications of their fonts.

The variety of tools chosen, the playful approach to the results and the openness to reinterpret everything possible and impossible typographically clearly showed the students that it is worthwhile to consciously go in search of new, alternative tools to create independent, individual type designs that move beyond the visual mainstream.

The wide range of results was transferred into this publication in the following semester by a group of students, also under the direction of Stefanie Schwarz. The students Eva Richter, Anouk Felscher, Lynn Rosa Haag, Finn Röhmer-Litzmann and Amelie Knoblich were responsible for the design and realisation. The medium of the toolbox served as the leitmotif. The publication comprises 16 individual booklets, 12 pages each, on which the concept, experiments, details, an overview of the character set, as well as the designed posters for the respective typeface can be seen. The ring mechanism in combination with the ring-eye stitching allows the individual booklets to be removed. This is similar to taking tools out of a toolbox and represents a further reference to the work of designers, who also select and use typefaces as tools in their everyday work.

The almost 200-page publication was reproduced in two printing processes, »risography« and »offset«, each in two colours, with the support of Jörg von Stuckrad in the printing workshop of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.