Typographic Chinese Whispers II - Neutral 1/1

December 2013, Typeradio held a two day workshop in cooperation with Indra Kupferschmid and 10 students of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (HBK Saar) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Each student was assigned a typeface, designed by a Dutch designer, along with the assignment: ‘translate the typeface into a one minute sound piece’.
 The resulting 10 sound pieces were the starting point of another workshop, in collaboration with Jan Willem Stas and the students of the Type]Media 2014 typography master coarse in The Hague, The Netherlands. Each T]M student was handed an (anonymously labelled) sound piece and their challenge was to ‘create a typeface concept inspired by the sound’. The results were quite surprising! 1) Original typeface: Neutral by Kai Bernau 2) Sound piece by Maria Sieradzki 3) Chinese whispered typeface by James Taylor Edmondson At first James thought the audio piece sounded like a combination of water, air, and electricity. Initially, his sketches focussed on combining those three elements. Eventually, he distilled these sounds into one object: the microwave. “The audio sounded like a running microwave, but recorded from the inside. My idea focussed on taking a standard style, and calling it ‘Frozen’. It was a condensed style with room to grow in all directions. From there the type got progressively warmer in the microwave. The next styles added were ‘Warm’, and ‘Hot’. As the shapes loosened up, they melted into each other and then burned to a crisp with the styles ‘Scorching’ and ‘Burned’. The most exciting thing that can happen in the microwave is the explosion. Put into type here as the ‘Exploded’ style, it has the same metrics as Burned, so interesting effects are made possible. This was an insanely fun project.”