TYPO Labs gathering is getting closer, and everything is starting to line up for those intense and exciting type days. While we wait, let’s warm up with a small talk. This year’s motto is “How far can we go” and the corresponding branding delivers a foretaste of how far an identity can stretch. Our corporate designers this year are Bernd Volmer and Olli Meier, both Font Engineers, type specialists and designers at Monotype Berlin.

Pablo Gámez, TYPO Labs facilitator for 2018, asked Bernd and Olli about their new look for TYPO Labs and how far they plan to go – technically and visually – with this CI project.

Pablo: Bernd, Olli, first of all we want to know: Which typeface did you use for the event’s identity? Is it an orchestrated gif bluff or an honest variable typeface?

Bernd: Obviously we needed some language support, taking into account that the conference visitors come from all over the world. The title typeface was planned to perform animations in the header of newsletters and on the website, rather than being a nice headline face for postcards. As a contrasting element to the lively aesthetics of the title typeface, we picked a text font that references coding in its design. So we’ve chosen Viktor Nübel's FF Attribute as a perfect communicator for a type tech conference. Its clean, monospace and techy appeal make it ideal for this context.

Pablo: Usually, you start a type design from a zero point and then develop the extremes. Here you seem to have gone the other way around?

Bernd: Absolutely. The design space was defined while creating the layout for a portrait and a landscape flyer. We wanted to fill the maximum space of each version, resulting in a ridiculously compressed as well as a condensed version. If we were planning for a static family there would be a need for at least one more master in the middle.

Pablo: So far we’ve seen your animated banners on the website, newsletters, Twitter and Instagram. As the variable font support is not supported by most of those channels, which technology did you use for your TYPO labs fake news?

Olli (smiles): We used Drawbot, an application for writing and executing Python code, in which we wrote a script for generating the interpolation animations in the various formats. The advantage of Drawbot is that it supports variable fonts and exports mov and gif files. Everything went hand-in-hand: type design, scripts and the layouts were all developed simultaneously.

If you want to know the designer’s favourite piece of the identity and the technology behind keep reading here …

Created for developers by developers, the third TYPO Labs (April 12–14, 2018) will cover the full stack of font developments, including OpenType Variation, CJK deployment and type challenges in the field of VR and AR.

For more details on the overall program, the growing speaker line up, workshops, etc., please visit the TYPO Labs website: www.typotalks.com/labs

Early Bird Tickets available until December 31, 2017!

Professional: 249 €*
Group (min 3): 233 €*
Student Tickets on request

(*All prices are subject to 19% German VAT.)