Cover of the presentation "Basque Lettering Style: Letters for self-assertion". 2020-11-17
Watch the video here (https://vimeo.com/511290721)
TRANSCRIPTION:
I'm pleased to now introduce our speaker today, Juan Luis Blanco. Juan Luis Blanco is joining us live from the Basque Country. It may be lunchtime in California, but in Euskadi, it's time for dinner pintxos washed down with a Rioja alavesa.
Juan Luis Blanco is a graphic designer, a type designer, and a calligrapher based in Zumaia in the Iberian Peninsula, otherwise sometimes called Spain. I don't want to step on any Basque toes here. In 2013, Juan Luis studied at the University of Reading and earned his MA in typeface design, and it was there that he developed Amaikha, a multi-script font family ...
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There is something about the visual landscape of the Basque Country that will not go unnoticed to the eyes of its visitors regardless of their knowledge of typography: the peculiar lettering style spread all over the region on street plates, signs, posters and fascias. They display extremely heavy letters in a sort of overemphasised glyphic style with characteristic concave stems that produce very sharp terminals and awkward letter forms. Those shapes look certainly rough, unrefined and overdone, conveying a sort of primitiveness rooted way back in time. This seems to make it a convenient choice for food shops, restaurants, cider houses and other cases in which projecting the idea of authenticity, tradition and "Basqueness" is intended.
Harri, as ...
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(Basque version) (Spanish version)
As a follow up of the interview held in September 2018, I have been invited to collaborate weekly in the public Basque radio to talk about typography in the afternoon show “Baipasa”. It is both an honour and a challenge to have the opportunity to talk about my passion and to spread the interest and knowlegde about type in my community.
Every Thursday around 5:15 – 5:30 PM we will discuss differents aspects of typography. We started on March 12th with a talk about Times New Roman. Three more programs have been broadcasted since then in which we discovered uses, details and anecdotes around well known typefaces: Comic Sans, Helvetica and Trajan. If you are interested and ...
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