The Type@Cooper class took a break from our typeface projects this past weekend for a workshop with Sumner Stone. He gave talks on the historical context of roman capitals that included quite a few historical-gap-filling-insights by Sumner that were really quite fascinating. We also went through many sketching techniques that differed from previous workshop instructors, which gave the class a fresh view of how to approach a problem from a different angle.
While talking amongst ourselves, it was interesting to see, after going through many workshops with different instructors and their differing techniques, how many of my peers have found a style here of there that they feel more comfortable with. It's also interesting having these techniques at your disposal, so that you have an alternate route of approaching when a particular letter starts giving you trouble.
Anyway, for the main driving force of the workshop, we sketched a small set of letter forms, worked and reworked them into usable pieces that could be modularized and reset into a strict(ish) system (which kind of tied into the historical context of how some styles of the original body copy roman capitals were created). In one weekend, we each hashed out a complete title set, digitized & spaced it, and printed off proofs for a final critique at the end of Sunday.
We joke about the workshop being a 'break', but while quite the whirlwind experience, it was a nice release of energy to play with these new faces and have a little fun with the limitations in both time & construction.
