Q&A Sarah Hyndman
the ideas I introduced in Why Fonts Matter, and immerse themselves in investigating and hacking them. The book invites readers to get creative and learn about tpefaces by exploring their shapes using pen and pencil, and to do this in a personal stle so the book becomes uniquely the reader’s own. Think of it as life-drawing—with fonts.
Was that the reasoning behind its more interactive, almost workbook approach? It’s one thing to read a description of a tpe- face, it’s an entirely different experience to pick up a pencil and explore the intri- cate shapes that make each font unique. In the Type Tasting workshops I run, I find that drawing is an extremely effective way for people to learn about tpe stles—as I discovered when I was sketching sweet wrappers as a child. This is backed up by research that shows that drawing on paper triggers more of our senses, which improves our abilit to remember.
The language of typography... communicates on an emotional level. We can
make positive changes, such as encouraging healthier
eating by communicating the ‘deliciousness’ of healthy food
There’s also a rich tradition of hand- drawing tpe. In the past, graphic designers would carefully draw tpographic layouts for tpeseters to recreate and print. This gave [designers] an in-depth understanding of the subtle differences between tpefaces, and the confidence to work with a range of different stles.
You use a vast number of typefaces in the book—if you had to pick a favourite, what would it be, and what does it reveal about you? My favourite in this book is called Black Comic, a letering composition. Letering is a one-off, whereas a tpeface is a prefab- ricated alphabet that can be repeated on screen or in print. The leters of Black Comic could be digitised and made into a font, however. The leterforms are created from two extremely different fonts: Comic Sans and the gothic Fete Fraktur. I like it because it’s a seemingly impossible combination of two extremes that combine to create a voice that is both researched and knowledgeable, but doesn’t take itself too seriously.
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How to Draw Type and Influence People will be published by Laurence King on 2nd May
Typography is evolving fast to adapt to new interfaces, displays and platforms, but do you see the developments as positive, or is something lost along the way?
Type development has gone hand in hand with technology and is a continuing process of evolution that leads to new and excit- ing tpe stles. For example, the first books printed in Germany used very ornate, gothic tpefaces that were based on the handwrit- ing of the era. But these proved difficult to print with, so more print-friendly tpefaces were developed very quickly. There are exciting developments in terms
4,138
copies sold through Nielsen Bookscan UK since publication, for a value of £59,378
of technology right now, such as responsive tpefaces that adjust themselves to differ- ent screen sizes, or variable fonts that have an entire tpe family built into a single font. At the moment, the focus seems to be on technology over stle, so there is a big trend towards minimalist tpefaces. However, I fully expect there will be a return to more ornate stles, which we are seeing with the resurgence in sign-painting, hand-letering and leterpress printing. ×
16th March 2017
Hyndman is pictured in her studio in Dalston, east London, from which she operates Type Safaris of the local area
Photography: Ivan Jones
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