‘Schrift in Form’ – a review on the Type Symposium in the Klingspor Museum Offenbach am Main, Germany on the 06/07 September 2008

On a recent weekend I was fortunate to attend a type symposium in Offenbach am Main, held at the Klingspor Museum. The museum’s name derived from a type foundry that was held by the brothers Klingspor from 1904 to 1956, which was eventually taken over by the Stempel AG. The town of Offenbach and the foundry’s supporters founded in 1953 the Klingspor Museum to host international type and book design exhibits. These honourable motivations came partially from the extraordinary type foundry’s work and archive that holds work from Otto Eckmann, Peter Behrens and Rudolf Koch, who influenced the German type development considerably in the beginning of the 20th century.

To celebrate its anniversary, the museum and its supporters organized an exhibit (including the symposium) about type in form. Its aim: to place a current exhibit in a traditional historic context with a future outlook.

The symposium was a two-day event with nine panellists, among them Paul van der Laan and Akira Kobayaschi, presenting a range of current topics concerning type.

Akira Kobayaschi opened the symposium talking about quality in font design. His work includes redesigns of Adrian Frutiger’s Avenir Next and Herman Zapf’s Optima Nova, etc. The anecdote of a salad, sitting slightly slanted on the plate, which was consciously prepared that way, to make the salad appear perfectly set in the middle, accomplished a very poetic reference to the optical illusions type designers deal with. The designer needs to comprehend illusive obstacles in order to achieve a typographic balanced impression.

An unusual font called Olga, presented by Christina Bee, a former student of the KABK – Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague, includes two cuts: Olga lino and Olga regular. Both are based on a modern Renaissance Antiqua. The typical Olga lino look, meaning little irregularities and cuts into the stems, is derived from the expressive media of linocut. More information on her and her workshops here: http://krizbi.de










Stefan Claudius from Cape Arcona lectured on the autodidact type designer – the position of the self-taught, that many typophilics might find themselves. He reviewed his experience starting as a young designer who was passionate about type and drew a lot of display letters. Later in his process he developed his fonts further to advanced typographic sophistication, and now pursues complexities and seriousness in his designs. Another young designer, Lucas Schneider, shared his development in type design that resulted in FF Utility. His work, early influenced by Émigré and Crunch, now promises further fresh creations.

Jürgen Weltin demonstrated a profound knowledge of legibility behaviour and the influence of printing techniques. Obviously the outcome of his successful designs is built on profound theoretical research. He follows the so-called Aldus-principle that implies a sans serif font based on humanistic letter shapes. Herein the construction of a single letter shape gets a dynamic sub-layer that results in a pleasing readability. Weltin presented his very refined font family called Agilita, referring to his inspiration by the historical Johannes Michael Fleischmann, a type cutter who was well known for extremely small cut types. His Agilita is definitely as thin and small as possible. www.typematters.de










The lector (KABK), type and graphic designer Paul van der Laan spoke about ‘From pixels to vectors and back again’. He displayed his like of computer system developments and their respective system-based pixel fonts. With this topic (meaning the tracing and applying of pixel grids on vector fonts, and vice versa) he has succeeded in approaching type playfully in various international workshops. To the question, ‘have we not exhausted the possibilities of pixel font shapes?’ Paul van der Laan demonstrated reliable maths: the 8 x 8 pixel grid leads to the equation 2^64 equals 1.84467440719 eventual shapes. Depending on the grid and its partition, the eventual pixel font shapes inevitably vary. Closing, Van der Laan showed an exhilarating type animation. www.type-invaders.com

Font marketing was addressed by Ottmar Hoefer from Linotype. He pointed out the differences in presentations of a font family, depending on availabilities of different weights and foreign scripts/glyphs/specialties. Hoefer referred to the many type samples on the exhibit hall walls, which displayed the sentence ‘fonts don’t grow on trees’. With that he emphasised the importance of royalty payments in order to protect and value the font designer. Here Hoefer brought up the typographical journal, the Linotype Matrix, as an opportunity to focus on individual type designers. The journal offers background information on the designers, as well as the various Linotype fonts in their applications.










Hans Andree from Hamburg gave a talk about the usage of book design-fonts. In his research he found an apparent traditionalism when it comes to picking a readable, reliable and serious typeface for literature. A chart with figures from the Clausen & Bosse cooperation illustrated the extensive use of classical fonts, such as all the diverse Garamonds, Caslon, Jensons, Times’, Baskervilles, and also Palatino and Sabon. But the modern, regularly developed book fonts were missing. Is this a question of editorial conformity and typographic education, asked Hans Andree. These circumstances drove Andree to an extensive project portraying printing types, leading to an abundant archive of the various cuts. He offers examples of the textflow, the sizes and actual x-heights in comparison and books where to find the individual fonts. Contributions are welcome. His intention to extend this project strongly calls for scholarly research on that matter. More information (only in German): http://www.museum-der-arbeit.de/Service/Schrift+Typografie/

Jörg Petri, a PhD candidate from HBK Braunschweig, spoke about his research on the classification of type and the ‘impossibilities’ of doing so. His project aimed to set up a base for theoretical references. He contrasted mono-hierarchic systems (the classical way to classify fonts, that lacks the categorizing of hybrids or cross-overs), with poly-hierarchic systems. The latter system enables cross-over classifications through the accumulation of attributes following a logical categorizing; hence a classification through facets. There are similarities to a tag system of a website, yet in detail Petri pointed out differences. His work, which he wants to conclude at the end of this year, will surly be of interest to all that are dealing with the necessity to name type attributes and origins. http://www.hbk-bs.de/home/en/University_of_Art.html

Lastly, the exhibit- and symposium’s organizers held the postscript. Tanja Huckenbeck and Peter Reichard are the people behind a vivid type scene around the Rhein-Main area. Their Spatium Magazin addresses type matters and includes reports on their regulars’ type table that makes a casual get-together in the name of type obviously fun. The two of them reviewed the graphic designer’s need to deal with fonts and the important typographic knowledge the designer has to show in front of the client. Here, little anecdotes to type history usually help to reason for the usage of one typeface over the other. Plus, at the same time these stories emphasize the type designer’s work. Therefore the graphic designer bridges type valuation and education from the type designer’s side towards the end user.










In the end the director of the museum adverted to the interest in new font samples and printouts by current individual designers. Then the occasion was given to talk individually and explore the exhibition that showed, amongst others, works by Veronika Burian (www.type-together.com), Underware (www.underware.nl), House Industries (www.houseind.com), Nadine Chanine (www.arabictype.com), and Dan Reynolds (www.typeoff.de). The exhibit will be running until the 26th of September and whoever feels the prickle to travel to Offenbach should make sure not to miss out a visit to the worthwhile archive of the museum (a phone call in advance helps).