Serebro Nabora Type Conference 17 – 23.09.15

17-18 September

• 11.00-18.30

  John Downer

  Introduction to Brush Lettering. Workshop

  Veteran sign painter John Downer will show how to form single stroke "block" capitals with a flat brush, and teach students various lettering techniques that were practiced commercially in 20th-century America. Using the best exemplars, workshop participants will learn the 12 foundation strokes needed to form sans serif majuscules. In addition, students will be afforded an opportunity to draw their own control characters, and render them with a brush, for potential use in an original typeface.

19 September

• 10:00

  Registration

• 11:00

  Gayaneh Bagdasaryan, Vasily Tsygankov

  Introduction

• 11:05

  Alexandra Korolkova

  Emotions and Archetypes in Russian Cyrillic

  Novadays, the problem "We have no Cyrillic fonts at all" is more or less solved. So another problem comes to the front row: what extra information do we tell our reader by choosing one or another typeface?
  That's what the presentation is about. What details in Cyrillic are most important for creating certain effect? How does the classification and history of type influence on the perception of typefaces today? How can we bring some more emotions into Cyrillic without moving far away from traditional letterforms? A working hypothesis and some recent experiments devoted to that.

• 12:00

  Ramiro Espinoza

  The curly letter of Amsterdam (De Amsterdamse Krulletter)

  What is the origin of the beautiful swash letters on many cafés windows across Amsterdam? Who painted them? How old is the style in which they were painted? Do they belong an existing Amsterdam graphic tradition? And what are the links with the writing masters from the Dutch Golden Age?
  Ramiro Espinoza interviewed sign painters and their families, investigated photo collections at the Amsterdam City Archives and gathered investigated to answer the key questions surrounding this relatively unknown part of the Dutch popular graphic culture and to stimulate awareness of its cultural relevance.

• 13:00

  Yana Kutyina, Andrey Belonogov

  Soviet lettering. Physics and lyrics

  Banners, headings and titles of periodicals, book covers and title-pages, packing and labels, logos of manufactured goods, movie subtitles, signboards and facade designs... About unique inscriptions created by the hands of numerous designers of the last century; about modern interpretations of that original and almost forgotten style — with examples from personal experience.

• 13:45

  Lunch-break

• 15:30

  Ivan Velichko

  Working with typefaces in the era of an endless font variety

  Media are the best place to try out any ideas: one can print a magazine and see what came out, then print something a bit different and check the result one more time. The insignificance of the final result (“issue”, “number”, “note”) is always made up for the continuity of these result’s production. We will speculate on the media as a productive field for a typographer’s and a type designer’s common work, on making type produce the desired effect and, finally, on returning the use of typography when working with type.

• 16:00

  TypeJournal

  Solomon Telingater: the Art of Type Design. Presentation of the new book

• 16:30

  Christian Schwartz

  Credibility, legibility, and style in typefaces for news

  Christian Schwartz will discuss how previous technologies shaped the most common news text faces of the 19th and 20th centuries, and how contemporary designers can use readers' feelings about the aesthetic imposed by these limitations to our advantage. He'll also discuss how the unique qualities of the Finnish language, newsroom consolidation, and British vs. American taste have shaped some of the newspaper headline types he and his team have worked on.

• 17:30

  Liza Enebeis

  Everything

  A talk about collecting, writing, books, radio, mistakes, love, fear, friends, type, the universe, the netherlands, being foreign, the studio, money, obsession, color, memory, control, poetry and design.

• 18:30

  Exibition opening

  Cyrillic Printing Types, 15th to 19th Centuries

  The exhibition is based on materials from The Museum of Books (The Book Museum?) of Russian State Library and shows development of Cyrillic typesetting. In particular it depicts the wide set of characters in the 15th-19th century editions.

20 September

• 11:00

  Innokentii Keleinikov

  Freedom of Typography: Fight Against its Pretended Absolute Laws

  Exploring the rules accepted by most designers as inviolable laws of typography, one can know whether they are really inviolable or are due only to the technologies of the past and can be considered now but as mere typographical tradition. The lecturer will cast some doubts upon the typometric system as well as upon the classical idea of book margins and will protest against the decreasing of neutrality in newly designed typefaces.

• 12:00

  Indra Kupferschmid

  Down with “web typography”, long live “typography on the web”

  It’s time to retire the notion of “web typography” as a special case with its own rules. To me, it’s all typography, just with different aspects to keep in mind depending on the task and production method. The screen is just another medium with its inherent circumstances to be taken into account, in the same way we do when designing for silkscreen printed exhibition banners, or digitally printed books. In this talk, I want to shift the attention to the specifics of typography for different kinds of reading and different content, as well as the main typographic pitfalls and specific to type on screen, like resolution, rendering, or reading distance.

• 13:00

  Yury Yarmola

  A tale about rapid pen, balanced curves and power guides

  Type design consists of drawing, spacing and production. Drawing is a task shared by all graphic professionals who have a basic box of tools at their disposal: Bézier nodes, handles and segments. Illustrators and architects also have additional tools, dedicated to the way they draw: colors, gradients, arcs, angles. FontLab VI introduces many new drawing tools that are dedicated specifically to type design, and that allow you to focus on drawing better type faster.

• 13:45

  Lunch-break

• 15:30

  Jean François Porchez

  Adding value to the invisibility of typefaces

  In the beginning was the word. Then came the writing, almost universal way to convey a message in a sustainable way, a thought, an emotion. There is nothing better that writing to visualize something abstract. Designers use writing as a tool to bring the imaginary to the real world. Even as typography has long been understood as the heart of graphic design, it perfectly emphasizes the adage that good design is a design that is not seen. For most readers, typefaces are neither understood nor effectively analyzed but only interpreted (often instinctively) as a tool that supports the reading, despite its omnipresence around us and constantly renewed use. Yet that design work remains transparent to the public. So how does one develop something that is invisible?

• 16:30

  Samuel Bänziger, Olivier Hug

  A hybrid floorplan

  How to present architecture in book-form. How to present architecture on a website. A website as a book with variable page width. Playful analogies and value.
  Presented Projects (among others): Das Fremde is nur in der Fremde fremd, Forrer Stieger, A-Typical Plan, Barão-Hutter.Atelier, All you (n)ever wanted, Labics, Saiten, Mara Züst, Mind the Gap, Kunsthof, Science & Fiction, Christian Kerez.

• 17:30

  John Downer

  20th-Century American Sign Painting

  A retrospective look at the history of American lettering for commercial purposes, especially outdoors, will be presented by Master Sign Painter, John Downer. The images will document important developments and changes in the trade, decade by decade.

• 19:30

  Exibition opening

  33

  Due to the increased interest in type culture in Russia several new type foundries and independent designers emerged during the last year. The exhibition will feature the latest works of the best type designers and foundries in Russia. You will have a chance to acquaint yourself with their creativity and the latest trends in type design.
  Curator Olga Pankova

21-23 September

• 11.00-18.30

  Alexandra Korolkova, Gayaneh Bagdasaryan

  Designing Cyrillic. Workshop

  Day 1st
  The brief history of Cyrillic.
  Writing Cyrillic with the broad-nib and pointed pen.
  Day 2nd
  The pecularities of Cyrillic. The common and the differences between Cyrillic and Latin. Glyph shapes and their variations. The principles of determining the width of characters. Uppercase and lowercase, upright and italic faces in Cyrillic.
  Overview of fine and poor solutions in Cyrillic, focused on most complicated characters.
  City walk and analysis of the street typography, both professional and vernacular.
  Day 3rd
  Designing one’s own Cyrillic (either for existing one’s typeface or from scratch).
  The participants may send samples of their Cyrillic in advance to get comments at the workshop.