As an easy exercise, that is not really to do with typography, I want to ask people of Walthamstow to complete the following sentence (in one word)…
“Walthamstow is …”
I think that as it is a neutral question, it would elicit some interesting responses
After the riots throughout London, an art project in Peckham , asked people to write love letters to their area.
“Dr Martin Farr, a contemporary historian at Newcastle university, says it is not the first time Post-it notes have been used in this way, pointing to their use after 9/11 and the 2004 tsunami.
“New media seemed to facilitate or characterise the rioting, what struck me is writing notes is very old media, it’s as if it’s a restatement of community identity.
“It’s also an old-fashioned, a human way of seeing handwriting – with smileys and exclamation marks – so is different to new media which is technically consistent. Post-it notes are also very photogenic, they are appealing – from a distance they are almost like an impressionist painting of a garden – so they are an engaging way of communicating,” he says.”
In a similar vein, I am asking the people of Walthamstow to reflect on the area. Slightly differently, I don’t want everything to be positive. Maybe people feel like the area is becoming too gentrified, or too unfriendly. By restricting it to one word (and knowing that some people might write more) it asks people to consider their word rather than writing a letter.
Be encouraging people to write them, they are engaging with a pen and paper, something we as a society we are doing less of, especially over the last year. The participants will be making shapes with their pens to imbue meaning in their lines.
The activity will become a tapestry on the wall of the exhibition to create a fluttering canvas and something from which I can reflect on what people have written and what it says about Walthamstow.
At the end of the exhibition, I will collect all the post it notes and scan them in (a labour of love) to create a new artwork. The words can be extracted and analysed, and the notes shown on the website.
I’ve previously talked about the events I’d run in a launch and how I would set up the exhibition. Here’s a quick recap of the events, and the layout of the exhibition:
Events for the launch have a dedicated booking page
The Launch is intended to be a marketing event so that the project gets as many people involved in the activities as possible. More submissions give me the chance to tinker with activities and methodologies to achieve my aims of investigating what people think of typography in Walthamstow. Everything so far has been an experiment and test, and the launch is the start of announcing the project
As I said in my critical report, I had hoped to receive more submissions in the first testing part so that I could tinker with them further so that at this point I would have the weight of tried and tested methodologies.
Later
To keep people engaged with the project later in the summer, I would like to have another smaller event so that people could see what submissions there are, and to perpetuate submissions. Like the drain covers I was inspired by, I want to have people screen printing glyphs mashed together from the online tool.
Walthamstow Garden Party at the end of August seems like the best opportunity to do this. Hosted in Lloyd’s Park, the Garden Party is a community showcase of art, performance and music and encourages everyone in the area to gather together. This year, it is still pandemic pending, but, let’s plan for optimism.
Walthamstow Garden Party
I can’t get people to print typography on location as it will be too stretched out, and I don’t want to replicate what is already there, I want to shoe what the community have already created using the online tool. Portable Print Studio have a setup that allows them to screen print on location and lets people pull their own prints.
Here, using photos with permission of the Portable Print Studio, I’ve created some mockups for what a screen printing session could look like. The screens are pre-exposed with letters that have been created using the online tool, either as a positive or as a negative. The screens can then be mono-printed with a selection of colours that participants can choose for themselves, either on a tote or a print.
I hope that people will want to get involved in a hands on way and that it will mean people will engage further with the project and screen printing. Its applicable for all ages!
This typeface is at the start of its development, and has a long way to go before being released. The glyph set will be extended and suitability for screen and print assessed before discussing with people from the area to get feedback on the initial typeface.
The feedback and refinement process will continue before branching into other languages spoken in the Walthamstow area. The University of Reading has a renowned typography programme, and the experts will be consulted to build appropriate and sensitive versions for everyone in the area.
The final outcome for the typeface will be a release for free personal use or paid-for commercial license by the local community.
Stowe Framework developed from a project in the Studio & Entrepreneurship module of this course and was originally conceived as a typeface design project to embody the area of Walthamstow.
Stowe derives from Old/Middle English as a word to describe a holy or meeting place, and ‘stow’ appears in ‘Walthamstow’. As the location is known as a welcoming place, it is suitable to retain this part of the name to ground the project, whilst removing it from the locale enough to make it applicable in other areas in the future.
Typeface
I am using the typefaces Archia (san serif) and Calendas (serif) from the Atipo Foundry – I like pairing the typefaces from the same foundry as it gives a more cohesive feel. Both have a few different styles in the font families, but not so many to be overwhelming. Calendas Plus is a serif font with a pleasing stroke contrast and is suitable for long stretches of text. It also has some interesting discretionary ligatures as extra glyphs (see the as and us above) that give it a special feel without being too distracting for the reader.
Archia has a modern geometric feel that contrasts to the traditional feel of Calendas. The ‘a’ has a single storey, like Calendas, and some letters like the lowercase ‘l’ have slab serifs to make reading easier. The descender of the ‘g’ has a flattened base, and the ampersand has a flattened top loop, which gives it some distinction. It can be used for very heavy text, for captions in small sizes, or in lightweight spaced capitals for headings.
Palette
The colour theme uses a two-colour palette of black and neon red (Pantone 805C) so that the high-contrast between paper and text is easily readable and the unusual bright colour is eye-catching. The palette utilises tints of the colours.
At the beginning of the project, I designed the website using Wix, a web development server. The advantage of doing this is that the UI gives a clean easy way to build a website without too many issues. The only issue is that the UI gets in the way of coding and true design. This is the issue I’ve had with the maps. The first one looks like this:
This map was exported through QGIS, a map building programme, using a third-party plugin that allows the map to be hosted in HTML. However, the code seems somewhat unstable because I can’t get the dots to expand into popups to give the viewer more information.
I’ve also tried with Mapbox:
I think this looks a lot better, because unlike the QGIS map which is completely designer-controlled, the underlay of the map is controlled by Mapbox in a more sustainable way. It just works. The issue that I am having is that I can’t get the HTML, CSS and Javascript to work in the way I want for a demonstration for the hand-in. I have a developer friend working on it for launch.
In the meantime I have decided to work on the rest of the website using Adobe XD. This will give an overview for my friend to work from and show the appearance of all the elements.
The map plugin available doesn’t really do working interactive maps, and this prevents be from building a full website on it, and giving a detailed demonstration anywhere, but it will give a greater gist.
I think a map with fun-pop outs and hovers and filterable features will be good:
Online Tool
Using XD has also given me the chance to work on the tool and how it can be shown online:
Anne-Maria Geals says that: “I feel the online tool for local people to design their own letters is a fantastic idea and would be a lot of fun for the contributors. I’d certainly like to have a try of it, but I’m not from Walthamstow! It’s a pity that this idea was explored late on in the project.”
Yay! It feels nice to get some good feedback, and a little like I should have done this before, but I’ve developed it now.
The online tool gives me an opportunity to include generative art in the project again. I had been a bit lost on how to include it before, but now I can take glyphs made by participants and combine them with data and then remix with participant help:
Glyphs are split up using data from TfL – the more passengers travelling into Walthamstow, the more squares in the grid. The glyphs get mixes up.Mixed up glyph!
Glyphs of the same letter can be drawn up and then distorted further:
Once a threshold for number of letters has been reached, participants can choose to remix letters and distort them. The colour of the letter is decided by the current outside temperature. This tool and function shows how data and community can be merged for satisfying results.
This can then be used as part of the launch with the public …
Anne-Marie Geals, a typeface designer, advised that “the typeface family (or variable font) will be lengthy to complete […], especially as you have expressed you want to include […]other scripts in addition to the variety of styles […] you will be in it for the long-haul!” She suggested that a short project description for the typeface would help enormously, and it follows below:
A new variable typeface inspired by the architecture of Walthamstow to embody the innovation powered by the community. Its aesthetics will be geometric to represent the community’s burgeoning awareness of typographic style. It will shift its appearance on weight, width and roundness axes and include the full set of glyphs in Latin and European scripts. It will be designed for eye-catching display type in both print and screen-based media and for free personal use by the community.
Further feedback from Anne-Marie Geals
I’ve been looking at your blog so I can get my head around your project as a whole, not just the typeface. I understand now that the typeface is supplementary, that you would like to continue with the typeface after your final MA hand-in and that my feedback may give you some direction to continue on with it after the MA is done. I was a bit concerned, as you would only have a few days left to finish a whole typeface! But, now I know it is just the start, you are in an ideal position and can get it how you want, at your leisure. I think the typeface family (or variable font) will be lengthy to complete (possibly more than you realise yet!), especially as you have expressed you want to include Devanagari and other Indic scripts in addition to the variety of styles. So I think you will be in it for the long-haul! TBH, I’ve only had an afternoon’s training in Devanagari, and that was enough for me to decide that if I should want to incorporate it, I’d prefer to collaborate with an expert in the script to get it right. Reading Uni is certainly the best place to find out about collaborations in language scripts. Bruno Maag once told me that type design is like a ‘divine calling’ rather than a job, and he is right, it commands 100% of your attention! It’s very easy to spend the whole MA on a typeface alone – trust me I know! So, I think it is a good decision to put the typeface on ice and focus on completing the other parts of your project. You certainly have thrown the net wide, and have clearly worked very hard! The workshops and walks must have taken a lot of organisation, and quite tough to analyse what you’ve got and what is useful or can be used. I found with my MA that I had researched so much, it was hard to cut through all the information and get to the heart of what I wanted to communicate. I feel the online tool for local people to design their own letters is a fantastic idea and would be a lot of fun for the contributors. I’d certainly like to have a try of it, but I’m not from Walthamstow! It’s a pity that this idea was explored late on in the project. If the online tool yields plenty of responses from your audience, potentially this could provide valuable visual clues from the local community which could also have an impact on the design direction of your typeface. Some of their responses might come ‘from the heart’, and not necessarily something visible, such as landmarks or visual themes of Walthamstow, but something felt. I found with my Welsh typeface that my response to sounds was equally important, if not more important than anything I’d seen. What clinched it for me was the relationship between the sounds of the spoken Welsh language and the landscape. It’s very helpful to do mark-making exercises in response to sounds, such as music, people’s accents when talking etc. It’s quite difficult to give a physical shape to unseen things! But, it does help imbue a typeface with an emotion. My feeling is that the Saw shapes which you have seen everywhere in Walthamstow is interesting and certainly a valuable angle, but only one aspect. The letters you have shown me have a clean, industrial and slightly geometric feel, and the typeface ultimately will communicate this. Is this what you intend to communicate about Walthamstow? I think it is also important to test it out on the target audience to see if they agree it is representative of their home-town. I think there are other unseen and more emotive aspects that you may have not yet explored, probably because you had your work cut out with the other aspects of the project. Potentially, the community responses to the online tool may feed into your ideas. Different cultures may also have something visual to bring to the type, not just a different script and language, but a flavour of other cultures. At this early stage of the typeface design (with only caps part-done), it would be fine for it to metamorphosis according to new research and influences. Quite often I will end up far away from where I started – when rationalising, experimenting and targeting the design to what you intend to communicate, typefaces often evolve and that’s perfectly OK – as long as the design’s intended message is crystal clear to the audience/users! That’s where the mini brief comes in! 🙂 Being a relative newcomer to type design, it does take a while to ‘get your eye in’ and notice discrepancies, such as letter to letter proportions, stokes looking a little darker or lighter than the others (see K diagonal strokes), ink traps (see extra bold weight M & N). You did the right thing by referring to Karen Cheng’s excellent book “Designing Type’. I would also recommend you follow on Instagram 2 accounts – Grilli Type and also OHNO Type Co. Also follow Oldschoolnewschool account. They have recently posted some excellent resources for getting proportions right, allowing for ink traps and many other great tips. I am also very willing to give you feedback and critiques as your typeface progresses after the MA. Message me when you’ve had a bit of a well-deserved break after hand-in! It’s important to test the letters out in actual words and strings in sentences – this should be done as early as possible. Pangrams such as ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs’ really helps reveal anything that leaps out and interrupts reading. It must always be remembered that ultimately, typefaces are a tool to facilitate reading. You have begun with the M, but I would usually recommend getting the H & O correct first. This will give you the treatment of the rounds against the straights, which will influence the whole typeface and help get proportions and weight right. I tend to sandwich all the other letters between the H & O… such as typing….. HHOHOOHOAOHAH. It also helps get the inter-character spacing correct. Actually, I mostly start with lower case n & o, as l/c is far more used than the upper case, and then I later design the caps to fit in with the l/c. Dalton Maag also do this. But, the Grilli Type posts cover that very well, with nice animations! If it is to be used for both print and screen, at some point you will need to research what makes a good screen font. And what makes good legibility in print. The design will need to be tailored according to your findings and tested.
This is all so helpful. The length of the reply!
I always knew that the typeface wasn’t going to be the full end result of the project, but when I felt a bit lost it was something that I worked on to re-centre myself. Given the lack of submissions, I knew I would find it hard to get a suitable lack of feedback from the community about the typeface so I didn’t really try! But it is essential to make it work and to represent. I hope the other activities awaken a typographic interest in some people in the community that means they want to and feel able to give an opinion on it.
Geals also points out that I started at the wrong point – the M rather than the H and the O. This is appropriate given the source inspiration built in terms of type design eeeek! I think everyone has to start somewhere, and go on to refine it.
For a first typeface, I’m pretty proud. there is SO MUCH work to be done, and I don’t underestimate it, but i have enjoyed having a project that I can channel when times have been tough.
To keep people engaged with the project later in the summer, I would like to have another smaller event so that people could see what submissions there are, and to perpetuate submissions. Like the drain covers I was inspired by, I want to have people screen printing glyphs mashed together from the online tool.
Walthamstow Garden Party at the end of August seems like the best opportunity to do this. Hosted in Lloyd’s Park, the Garden Party is a community showcase of art, performance and music and encourages everyone in the area to gather together. This year, it is still pandemic pending, but, let’s plan for optimism.
Walthamstow Garden Party
I can’t get people to print typography on location as it will be too stretched out, and I don’t want to replicate what is already there, I want to shoe what the community have already created using the online tool. Portable Print Studio have a setup that allows them to screen print on location and lets people pull their own prints.
Here, using photos with permission of the Portable Print Studio, I’ve created some mockups for what a screen printing session could look like. The screens are pre-exposed with letters that have been created using the online tool, either as a positive or as a negative. The screens can then be mono-printed with a selection of colours that participants can choose for themselves, either on a tote or a print.
I hope that people will want to get involved in a hands on way and that it will mean people will engage further with the project and screen printing. Its applicable for all ages!
Stuart has mentioned this to me time and time again, and I had fun playing with the tool at the time (and at Pick Me Up!) but I didn’t think that it fitted into my project, until now. The last few months have been me trying to get people involved in the project and receiving nothing back. It has been frustrating.
Now we are coming out of lockdown, it seems like a better time to launch the project. This is going to take efforts on multiple fronts, and one of them is web. Getting people to contribute in a simple way using a tool similar to Paint could be a way to do that. Over the lockdown, I’ve given people the opportunity to report pieces of lettering that they have seen in the area that fits a brief: for example, it looks like a stencil or looks 3D. This tool would allow people to create their own.
Using a tutorial and the p5.js library, I managed to create this simple web paint application:
It’s very simple, and I began to make it more to spec by adding options to draw circles and squares. This is all well and good, but I found myself out of my coding depth very quickly. Instead, I am going to build an example interface to show the examiners that I would commission a developer to make (or learn how to do outside the stress of course deadlines.)
Here is an annotated page of what I would do:
The annotations do show the process pretty clearly, but basically: a participant clicks to take part and then is taken through a tutorial explaining the following: they are given a prompt to follow, for example, they can only use straight lines. They are also given a glyph, such as a capital H, and also a feature, such as it being tall. They can interpret this how they like. If they are unhappy with the prompts they can re-roll, or if they are unsure, they can ask for a tool tip that thoroughly explains the task again.
The canvas has dotted grey lines in the background that can be snapped to so as to provide the participant guidance. The tools on the left of the canvas will differ according to the prompt, for example a curvy line and circle won’t be available for the prompt “can only straight lines”.
Before launch, an example database will be populated to give the participant an idea of what others make of the option combinations. They won’t be the same: the example will show, in this instance, glyphs that are also tall, or an H, or drawn using straight lines, but not all or a combination of these. When sufficient glyphs are drawn, the examples will be from those available. I wonder if the glyphs will become self referential from the first submitted.
The participant can enter their name, and then also submit their letter. the letter will be then human checked so that it doesn’t show anything inappropriate. It seems a little censoring to do this, but given that the tool is open to everyone, and that participants have little restriction about what they draw, it seems prudent to check that drawings of swear words or rude images are not posted.
Here is a workflow showing the process, and a list of prompts I have so far thought of:
The glyphs submitted with be wonky and crude and maybe not make sense, but I want to give free range. The tool will be available on tablets and smart phones so that participants can use fingers if they want to.
When the glyphs are submitted, I’d like to bring them out into the open for people to see and to advertise the project. It might be something similar to the letter grid, or maybe on a presentation stage such as the Sketch Aquarium.
In Week 25 I will figure out how to present this …
Something I think I have mentioned before, but it is worth repeating, because I really like the concept and the style. The map is the focal point of the website and easily links. The cool tones of the website are interesting, and that you can filter different types of the attraction. Each dot has a thorough description of the event/installation and photos, and occasionally multimedia too. The UI is slick and the curved corners (which I think is naff, usually) are cool. A great example of datafed and 3 column design. I wish I could design this well!
In a similar vein, this is an interactive map of cultural and foody places in Bucharest. Again, I like this (not as much as the line) and it shows information concisely and cleanly. I wonder how to present the information I have, where sometimes there are lots of dots concentrated in a small place. I have around 400 photos on my current map, but I haven’t written descriptions of them all. But I could categorise them, and perhaps make some walks based on a certain theme, in the style of Filo’type.
Alice Neve and Stuart directed me to this lovely exhibition in Tokyo: a created exhibition! Visitors decorate sea creature templates, have it scanned in and then see the image on the project walls. The website describes the project as so:
Color in a fish on the paper provided. See the picture you have drawn come to life in the massive aquarium in front of you, swimming together with the fish drawn by other people. If you touch the swimming fish, they will swim away. If you touch the food bags, you can also feed the fish. The tuna you draw will transcend the boundaries of the artwork and swim out into the Sketch Aquariums and Sketch Oceans of exhibitions around the world. And the tuna drawn in other parts of the world may appear and swim in the Sketch Aquarium right in front of you.
How amazing! The bridge between low-tech drawing and hi-tech projection is well thought out and worked really well. The scanner looks hi-tech, but I’ve seen notebooks that you can scan in your notes without lines being scanned in too, and have made a DIY version myself. I’m not saying it would be easy to implement, but it is very effective. That your artwork can become part of something bigger, and be around the world is magic and a real draw, whether adult or child.
How could I make this work with letters? I could use the drawn letters and project them in the gallery, scanning them in one at a time, and also using LED screens.
Over the weeks I have been working on the glyphs for the saw tooth typeface:
These are super rough, and it’s my first typeface! I transported them into the Glyphs app:
And here is a Zoom in:
At this stage, I decided to contact Anne-Marie Geals, who I had a conversation with earlier in the module. She has kindly agreed to give me feedback on my typeface. While I did this, she suggested that I:
What I think will be important for you to do is a ‘Short Project Description’ for the typeface aspect. It will help you enormously. I think that it is vital in terms of assessment that you show conclusively (evidenced) that you have thought about the typeface in terms of; • What do you wish to convey with it – e.g.. emotions, feelings, a message, and does the end product communicate what you intended?• Who is it for – target audience. Have you tested it in the target audience?• How do you intend/envision it will it be used – e.g. headlines, body text, editorial, printed, online. To give you an example, I had to write one for my MA, and it was so useful. I referred back to it every day;
A new typeface inspired by, and designed for, Wales and the Welsh to help facilitate the use of the declining language. Its aesthetics will be culturally expressive, yet practical and include the full set of glyphs required for bilingual typesetting. It will be designed for long, immersive reading in both print and screen-based media.
You can see the description clearly states what I was aiming for, who it is for, what it is for, and how it is intended to be used. I had to evidence that I had considered the needs of screen and print based media in my designs, and whether my typeface functioned as well as I hoped in these environments (evidence of testing). I also had to evidence how my Celtic visual theme/style had been inspired by my research. I also evidenced that I had tested the working font on Welsh people and had received feedback.
Nadine Chahine, whose Font li Beirut project I have previously covered, describes a typeface brief as such:
Type design is equal parts suffering and euphoria. It is a walk along a winding road that goes on for many weeks and months before it’s done. A type design brief is like a charter path: It asks you questions, and the answers will guide you to where you want to be.
So, what do I want this typeface to be/do? Here’s an unstructured list of my thoughts:
Personal response to the area of Walthamstow
Embody the history of varied industry in the area
The saw tooth roofs and the Warner house arches used to inspire the shapes represent everyday people
Variable typeface with axes on width, weight and roundness
Display typeface rather than for long passages of text
Showcase the ethnic diversity of the area
San-serif font
There is also a difference between what the typeface is now and what it could be. At the moment it is just an uppercase, and doesn’t have a full set of glyphs. It only caters for the Latin font, and doesn’t include characters needed for European languages. To make it truly represent Walthamstow it needs to cater for Tamil, Bengali and Devanagari scripts too. I haven’t tested it either, or considered the difference between print or screen.
I’m going to copy Geal’s statement directly, pasting in my details in order to construct something myself.
A new variable typeface inspired by the architecture of Walthamstow to embody the innovation powered by the community. Its aesthetics will be geometric to represent the community’s burgeoning awareness of typographic style. Its will shift its appearance on weight, width and roundness axes and include the full set of glyphs in Latin and European scripts. It will be designed for eye-catching display type in both print and screen-based media and for free personal use by the community.
Anna Robinette 