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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Akaya is now part of Google Fonts catalog. It has been a long way since we started the project in 2015, but it is now available under the Open Font License.
In its website you (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Akaya) you will be able to type your own text in different sizes and check how it looks in Akaya as well as to try combinations and pairings with other fonts in the same catalogue. ...
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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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The "Qandus team" on stage at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. On screen Qandus Tifinagh dark. Image: Mariko Takagi.
Few days after the presentation in Amsterdam Kristyan Sarkis, Laura Meseguer and myself came to the ATypI conference in Warsaw to talk about our experience designing Qandus, one of the type families developed during the Typographic Matchmaking in the Maghrib project. We called the talk "A Typographic Maghribi Trialogue" as a way to underline the intense and continuous exchange among the three cultures and writing traditions –Arabic, Latin and Tifinagh– that this project has called for, but also to recall the necessary respect for each one's peculiarities and specific features. In my view, our's was one of the projects that best ...
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This was one of the nicest surprises of last month. While I was in Marrakech taking part in the TMM3 project, I got an email from Pablo Gámez (Chulotype / Typomad) inviting me to give a talk in Typomad 2015 about multiscript design, focusing on the project I developed during my Master's Degree at the University of Reading, and more specifically on the Tifinagh script. I gladly accepted the invitation. It will be a pleasure to share stage and experiences with Jean Baptiste Levée, Toshi Omagari, Sol Matas, Raul García, Ismael González, Julia Kahl, Jesús Morentín, Diego Dier and Damià Rotger among others.
You will find all the information about the conferences, workshops, exhibitions and tickets here: http://www.typomad.com/home-eng/
See you at Typomad ...
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