Keep Tha Kerning Tight – The Book
Category: Portfolio
What is ‘Keep Tha Kerning Tight’? ‘Keep Tha Kerning Tight’ is a compendium book by and about Letters Are My Friends and its extensions. Since its opening 2011 till now, Letters Are My Friends is not only Berlin’s first and only typographic concept store where type meets tech, rather than a interdisciplinary design & prototyping studio, production label, research lab, event venue, showroom and running ecosystem itself. Letters Are My Friends is the last three years an independant place where people from many different backgrounds worked together on new things in the belief that real innovation happens at the edge and in the gaps between disciplines on one spot. It includes a vibrant mix of missionstatements, portfolio projects, product & typedesign cases, a complete events documentary with all external artists featured, short profiles of the designing “Letterheads”, an essay, interviews and press reviews. Questions like “Why does typography combined with new technology matter?” gonna be considered, aswell. This book as an extensive assortment which will give readers an access to the world of type ‘n’ tech, and exemplarily how to deal within this field. In the meanwhile catch some work in progress impressions.
Bootrapped from nowhere, we’ve come a long way, enough reason to collate and track in a book. In the book we share our approach on Type ‘n’ Tech and present a complete overview of what happened in the last years at this place.
– And hopefully in the future.
It is not about the A or the B, it is about what the A and the B connects: It is never just the type, and never just the technology. Letters Are My Friends dedicating their concept, work and developments to the field of Type ‘n’ Tech – a term they defined, but lot of design works these days fit in. It is about the combination, the overlaps, the synergies, the methods and the inbetween of both.
The book will be available approximately summer 2014!
We work on it. Stay tuned.
“Ever since I punched my first HELLO WORLD! into a computer keyboard digital letters have come a long way. While type and tech have been bound forever, it’s only now that the two are really “close”. Welcome to the age of “ubiquitous computing” where you can grow your alphabet out of research data, have letters respond to touch or 3D print some the size of a paperback book. Never before was type so ‘alive’ and more powerful tools available to anyone. Yet much of the tinkering remains confined to design geek circles and behind closed studio doors. Enter Letters Are My Friends (LAMF), Bärbel Bold and Ingo Italic’s quirky type’n’tech laboratory in Berlin – a creative hub with opening hours and a storefront window. Here visitors can browse a curious inventory of prototypes in the making: do some letter press on iPads, mingle under a laser cut letter mobile or leave a morphing onscreen message via a typewriter from the 1920s. As the two happily bundle tradition, craft and innovation, their platform grows and offers footholds. Illustrators, programmers, designers, musicians – the list of LAMF collaborators, guest artists and participants is long. Within only two years of operation, Bärbel and Ingo have cultivated a neighborhood hotspot that, thanks to stellar programming, is now known by letter friends around the world.”
Alexander Scholz — Creative Director of HOLO Magazine
