Typographic Chinese Whispers II - New Alphabet 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: New Alphabet by Wim Crouwel 2) Sound piece by Jennifer Graf & Barbara Hinz 3) Chinese whispered typeface by Hugo Timothée Marucco Hugo based his type concept mostly on the structure of the sound which was composed of two distinct parts. Indeed, the first one is a fast loop of digital sounds evoking the old video game universe, like early Pong or Tetris. The second part is completely different. The rhythm is a lot slower and almost silent, we only hear some traditional Chinese instruments. This two layer-structure became the main concept of Hugo’s typeface; Digital and Zen. He wanted to mix these different feelings without losing the particularities of each part. “That is why I came up with this idea of drawing a monospaced font with two widths and weights. I only drew caps to keep the blocky aesthetic of a pixel games. It was important to visually express the atmosphere of the music. Mixing the two styles you get a really noisy or quiet feeling, the more you mix them the less legible it gets. Like in a game: it gets harder and harder!”