Interview with Céline Hurka. 26/10/2021
Designer in question( https://2020.typemedia.org/celine-hurka/ )
S:
I am interested in the ability to animate and illustrate within a font development software like Glyphs, and In your project Version at typemedia, you’ve written about animation being an import factor in process of developing your typeface. Was animation something that was a part of the process from the beginning or was it something you discovered and incorporated while working on your typeface; and did the process of animating itself affect how you designed the typeface?
CH: Yea yea yea for sure. becasue also like. I mean. For instance, I dont know how familiar you are with all the typefaces I have made, but there is this one wavy version that moves up and down; i wouldnt have designed it this way if i wouldnt have started animating it, the shapes would have been very different; yeah thats one thing and there is another version that gets bolder and overlaps, and for that i had to keep redrawing the shapes just to make sure the overlap in a certain way so I would always look at the inbetween instances produced in the animation.
S.
Animation as a form exits mainly on the digital platform now, and even variable typefaces can perform best on websites for example, But typefaces also majorly exist as print, so did you have any ideas of how your typeface would materalise outside of a digital surface?
CH:
Yea. For me it was just this idea that if you have a variable fonts that you have endless inbetweens as well that you can design with if you just select a different instances, i mean its not really animation but you can create a lot of different patterns and textures using that, so may be it’s not abot animation but about animated typography.
S:
There is age-old question of legibility vs Aesthetics in Architecture, but i think that can very well be transferred to typography as well, but I also know that the logical approach in designing type is to make it as legible as possible, but also I know that legibility is something that is difficult to measure as it is subject to change with time and familiarity. So. What role do you think that there is any value in playing around with this idea of legibility?
CH:
Yea, for sure. Yeah I think you are right in terms of that you can pick it up as you start read and the more people look at my typeface the more they are able to read. Umm. The other thing is also like legibility come is context like for instance, one of my typeface in versions, it doesn’t look like it but it is extremely legible even down to 3 points, for example if you print text at 3 points its super small it doesn’t really matter what the shapes look like, if there is a serif or not, the thing is spacing, that can also be something, its comes down to the context, because there is another typeface in versions that can only be read when you move it up and down. In type design there have been all these conventions that have been there for five hundred years and you need them for legibility but not really in some cases; there are normal serif typefaces that are harder to read. In typemedia, we have all these exercise that we do to increase legibility, for example add ink traps and so on, but sometimes in the end it doesn’t even do anything
S:
Typedesign is a performance of the languge and it exists to store the idea of a language, so it ends up borrowing from it, and on the other hand typefaces lend a visual aspect to languages. Typedesign seems to be born out of this functional need, so do you think they can exist outside of this primary function?
CH:
I think i know what you mean. Typefaces out of context; you dont need to necessarily read them; First of all. I guess. What do you define as a typeface. Because there are all these other letters, like you can also have ornaments in a typeface. But again sometimes if you’re in another country and you don’t really read the script there, and there is this very nice big lettering on a building and you cant read what is written, but it has all this nice bold shapes, but you can still look at it and appreciate it, may be it becomes a cultural signifier or a decoration.
Even though the interview was quite insightful, I realised (post Matthew’s Feedback) that the questions were designed only to accept affirmations from the interviewee(as if I had answered my own question in the question), and could have been made more engaging.