On Friday 8 November 2019 we’re gonna complete our Berlin Triptych, with a lecture at Creative Mornings in Berlin. In the past 2 years we gave a lecture once a year in Berlin which was part of a triptych. What started in 2017 with the first lecture “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”, was followed by the second lecture in 2018 titled “Export Future”. The triptych will now be completed with the third and last lecture in this series titled “Into the Void”.

Three lectures filled with developments, ideas, concepts, approaches, sketches, thoughts, perspectives, and mostly questions, in this case focused on letters, but they apply to other subjects too. During the first 2 lectures of this Berlin Triptych various typographic ideas – for example Font Fiction, Higher Order Interpolation or the SuperFont™ – were introduced. Next week Friday we gonna see where this journey will end up.

If you missed out on the first 2 lectures, don’t worry. You can either still do your homework and watch them online before you attend (see links above), or completely surprise yourself and attend the third lecture without any previous knowledge. We’ll leave that up to you.

Into the Void
Underware’s Berlin Triptych III

Venue: Creative Mornings Berlin
Date: 8 November; 08:30 o’clock
Location: Native Instruments, Schlesische Str. 29-30, Berlin

Tickets will be on sale from Monday 4 November 10:00 o’clock at the Creative Mornings website: Register.

If you’re in the mood to join us on our typographic trip, we would enjoy seeing you in Berlin next week. (And we would like to thank Jürgen Siebert for enabling Underware’s Berlin Triptych)

We’ve just returned from our Right To Write Tour in Japan. Besides of an exhibition at Print Gallery in Tokyo, and a workshop at the Temple University in Tokyo, we gave 4 lectures in Tokyo and Osaka in which we presented grammatography, and introduced Grammato.com. Instant updates during the tour don’t happen on this blog, but on our Twitter or Instagram account. So follow those in case you want to see more snippets. However, for those who are curious to know more about grammatography, the video of our talk titled Grammatography at the ATypI conference in Tokyo is now online. Featuring live writing, as future is written. Enjoy! (ps. At the interpreter’s request we tried to speak slowly…)

Get ready for grammatography in our Right To Write Tour. Next week we’ll have 4 lectures, a workshop and an exhibition in Japan. We don’t give workshops that often anymore these days, and an exhibition of our work is definitely rare. So feel free to drop by if you’re around Tokyo or Osaka.

We would like to thank Gerry Leonidas & Ian Lynam, who enabled the events in Tokyo, and Duncan Brotherton & Tetsuya Goto, who enabled the lecture in Osaka.

The end of peninsularity – typeworkshop in Barcelona

The first week of July brings the opportunity to expand your skills and brains with a type design workshop in Barcelona. Type designers are masters of the black and white 2D universe. But what is that 2-dimensional Cartesian world actually? Can 2D be approached in another way? And if you do that, what are the consequences for your (type) design process? This subject is gonna be explored coming July in Barcelona (Spain) during a 5-day in-depth type workshop, where the fundament of designing letters will be questioned and investigated. This workshop is suitable for aspiring type designers who already have a little bit of experience, already made a font themselves in the past, and who are ready to open their mind and expand their skills within an enthusiastic group of people. They will leave the workshop not only with more knowledge, but also with an expanded view on their own type design process.

Only recently it has become clear that from now on type designers aren’t any longer just designing outlines of fonts, but are mostly designing relations between outlines of fonts. Therefore interpolation will become increasingly relevant in the future of type design, and will logically be an essential aspect within this workshop. During this workshop we’re not only going to explore the design of letters (hands-on), but also explore the space in which those letters relate to each other (brains-on). Designing the design, as well as designing the design space these designs live in. And that – well… if everything works out – leads to another, innovative way of looking at your design.

Improve your type design skills in Barcelona this summer

Organisation: Elisava, Barcelona School of Design and Engineering
Date: 1-5 July 2019
Instructors: Joancarles Casasín (TypeTogether) & Bas Jacobs (Underware)

Limited amount of seats available. Registration is now open: type.elisava.net

Tomorrow the 2-day conference Printemps de la typographie will take off in Paris. This is the 10th edition, organised by École Estienne, featuring 14 lectures in just 2 days. Our most recent lecture “The end of self-evidence” has evolved, and so has the accompanying publication (which will be free for all attendants). Both will be presented in Paris coming Friday, so we hope to see you there. You can find more information about the conference on the website of École Estienne: ecole-estienne.paris

After presenting the basics of HOI (Higher Order Interpolation) earlier this year at the TYPO Labs conference in Berlin, we’re making a tour this summer to spread HOI around the world. Come and say HOI.

HOI Portland, 4th of August
HOI for beginners. In a very condensed session at TypeCon in Portland, we’ll show the basics of HOI, what HOI can mean for you, and why your text isn’t HOI enough. typecon.com

HOI Los Angeles, 7th of August
We’re gonna HOI the Otis College of Art and Design in this lecture. Also: ask us anything, we’ll HOI it out together. otis.edu

HOI San Francisco, 9th of August
Live at the Letterform Archive in San Francisco, we’ll answer questions but we’ll also have questions in return; if variable fonts are very able fonts; if new techniques require new ideas; if fonts really need all those letters; and of course: how HOI can you be? letterformarchive.org

HOI Antwerp, 11-15 September
At ATypI 2018 we’re gonna clarify once and for all misconceptions on HOI, and show what HOI really is. Say a Flemish HOI and join us in Antwerp, Belgium. atypi.org

Next week all eyes will be on type in Rotterdam. A 2-day festival on calligraphy & typography will host many workshops & lectures. We’ll give a lecture on Sunday 13 May at 10:30 o’clock. But with a beefy line-up (Martin Majoor, Maria Doreuli, Luca Barcellona, Job Wouters, Bernd Volmer, Peter Winkel, Bruce Tsai-Meu-Chong, Hans Schuttenbeld, Guido & Vincent De Boer, Analphabetics, Jeroen Erosie & Just van Rossum) we had to bring in cerberus-power: for this occassion all 3 Underware heads will be present, a rare moment. Sami, Bas & Akiem will talk as a three-headed monster. And to top all pleasure: Typeradio will be present in Rotterdam as well. Type lovers know where to go next week.

Tomorrow we’ll present and be present at Brekend beeld in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Nine inspiring thinkers and makers share their views on the current state of journalistic design. Brekend beeld promises to be an evening full of zeal, discussion and calls for action for the audience.

Participants are NRC, ACED, Grrr, Underware, PersgroepUX, de Correspondent, Cyanne van den Houten and Ted Struwer.

Date: 18 Januari 2018; 19:30 – 22:00
Location: Kapitaal, Utrecht, the Netherlands
Free entrance

Because it takes 2 to tango, we’ll have 2 presentations in our upcoming trip to Brazil, in 2 different cities, and 2 workshops to complete the fun.

08 December
Workshop Variable Wonder No.1 at DiaTipo São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.

09 December
Lecture Duos Carnival at DiaTipo São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.

11 December
Workshop Variable Wonder No.2 at Miami Ad School, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

11 December
Lecture Duos Carnival at Miami Ad School, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

For an expanded notion of type, we’ve got two presentations in Germany this week:

23 November 2017; 14:00 o’clock
Lecture AENOT L at Exquisite Complexity, a seminar by Baruch Gottlieb at the UDK Berlin, Berlin, Germany. (Hardenbergerstr. 33, Room 110)

24 November 2017, 14:00 o’clock
Lecture AENOT S at Design-Zoom – Let’s talk about artificial intelligence!, HAWK Hildesheim, Germany. #DZ17