Now we are talking
The Scheveningen beach, 10 minutes ride from my house and one of the hardest words to say in Dutch. There is a small surf culture there and one of the most popular places to stay is FAST. This was the location of the Now We Are Talking Festival. The festival essentially being a bunch of nerds getting together in one spot and talking about design and type. It was a free event but you could pay 50 Euros to get a sweet box set and entry to one of the workshops. For my experience of the day keep reading. For a complete review of the whole day in a much more attractive and well written way go to font feed.
I arrived slightly late but saw the end of Wim Crouwel's introduction. If you don't know who he is, he's an important guy in the history of design. A Dutchman responsible for breaking stacks of new ground in type and the use of grids in graphic design. Needless to say, a bit of a hero in my books. I plan to see his exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam soon. I was stoked to meet Wim, albeit short lived. He signed the box set for me.
The weather was freakishly good considering this is the wettest Summer since 1906 (apparently). I even got a bit sun burnt. I didn't realise that was possible here. We waited around for the workshop to begin. Yomar was late, typically Brazilian but explained on his arrival the reason for his delay as he walked in with his granny bag in tow. He told us how he'd had an altercation with a guy who had an exotic parrot on his shoulder, an endangered species that is illegal to own. Yomar is a funny guy, but the euro-crowd was a bit tough until everyone had relaxed a bit. He also explained how he'd recently had an operation and had to walk slowly. I'm learning more than type here, the fine art of the excuse is also a life-long endeavour. If it makes a difference, I believed him, but that's one I plan on reusing later.
Yomar is type & media alumni but his love of calligraphy preceeded him attending. He gave some demonstrations at the beginning. Then we were given cups and ink plus balsa wood to use as writing instruments and shown some exercises to do while he walked around, slowly, and gave out advice and encouragement. The skill level of the group varied tremendously. It was a great vibe, with people helping each other and introducing themselves. A love of type united us all. We were outside throughout the workshop and the wind started to pick up around an hour into it all. Paper cups full of black ink and loose pieces of paper in high winds is numerous distasters waiting to happen. Scene's like this were common. I came out of it unscathed but many didn't. Again, the vibe was good, so even though the guy next to me had Coke spilt all over his laptop bag, it was ok.
As the initial thrill of exotic parrots, fancy writing and random ink spills began to wear off for some people, the group shrunk throughout the roughly 2.5 hours. As people filtered away through out the workshop until there were a few of us left. Yomar took special care to answer any questions we had and started taking requests on whether people would like certain words written.
It was great to see someone in real life who actually knows what they're talking about. To see whether the ways I'd been doing it were correct. Yomar is hardly traditional, and he admits that, but the stroke orders seemed logical and the same as what I'd been practicing. After Yomar's workshop, that ran for about 2 hours, we all regrouped and went to get some food. This is a pic of my type & media class mates who were there. Noe Blanco, Miguel Reyes, Hrvoje Zivcic, Joe Chang and Alexander Roth. Svennie, Pradnya and Christine were off causing trouble somewhere.
I had only had hagelslag all day so I ordered a pizza. Joe joined me. 30 minutes later, something that resembled a pizza was presented to us. We watched Super City play and that soothed the disapointment. Later on Erik van Blokland, one of the teachers from type & media, gave a lecture on the same stage about having ideas and making the right tools. It was short but sweet and it made me look forward to starting even more. He stressed how we need to listen carefully for new ideas and treat them nicely when they arrive, no matter how inconvenient they can often be. Then came Lust Labs which spoke about the connections that will be present in the future between objects when they all have computers in them and their relationship to us. They brought up many ideas but the one that was particularly relevant was that reading was once considered a new technology, which is true. This lead to talking about how new technologies slowly seep into our lifestyles until they aren't there anymore. They had some really great experiments and ideas to share but I just thought they took too long to get their point across for the majority of the audience.
From Yomar's custom made balsa wood calligraphy brushes to Erik's suggestions on learning python, and lust lab's approach to innovating new objects I have a feeling this year will be focused around using, but also creating the right tools for the job at hand. The day was rounded off at a few beeries at Schlemmers cafe with the class.