The Typo Berlin 2012-friendly showcase of Letters Are My Friends: Due to the extensive distribution of new mobile media such as iPad, iPhone and a growing amount of larger displays in our living environment, we have to question the changing conditions of design(ing), and therefore, notions of visual habits.

What makes a typeface a typeface? Which laws are subjecting a font? Which techniques and displays define their body? Which influences are af fecting the design through the use of special tools? Is a font generally perceived as being flat and static? More than ever, the combinations of new technologies allow us to create, display and use type in fundamentally dif ferent ways.

As we compare this to architecture, the construction and the design adapts to the new technical possibilities. On the occasion of the Typo Berlin 2012, members of the studio collective Frida Fraktur, Gerrit Grotesk, Mino Light, Ingo Italic and Bärbel Bold will drop a showcase featuring interconnecting, correlating and back-to-back works: “Upper Case & Lower Space – parametric typography and other sensory delights”.

The showcase displays typedesign as a versatile, ductile element, typified by print, installation, software and animation. Letters are developed, newly-arranged, generated from different angles, deconstructed by code in their component parts – or get a mission order within the moving image. Disciplines are fluid, moving between print, motion and interaction design: Type is language – language is alive. Nowhere is this revealed more distinctively.

Frida Fraktur’s 26 Steps is an experiment in creating letterforms out of the most basic components of typography; the line and the curve. Using a default setting of 26 steps with the blend tool, recognisable letterforms appear. The variations create at times elegant forms, and at other times awkward, yet legible characters. Based on the same principle of repeating a singular unit 26 times, the experiment will be taken from the digital world of vector graphics, to the analog world of materials and objects.

Based on the idea that the most interesting part of an animation is always the transition from a to b, Ingo Italic developed “Buchstabengewitter extended” a generative typography kit using the toolkit vvvv. This dynamic framework transforms three-dimensional linear structures into all the letters of the alphabet, fluidly morphing from one to another. In this explicit shown multitoucinstallation each letter is animated anyway and controlled by touch. Each letter can be modified by changing parameters like pivot and positioning and morphed into any glyph of the alphabet using the interface on the multitouch table.

Bärbel Bold is looking for the proof of case of „Buchstabengewitter“, and shows in a bunch of test series called „weatherproof“ the flexibility and applicability in experimental type in motion cases.

Mino Light’s „Cocoon“ approaches an experimental demonstration made in Nodebox. Lines start to grow randomly, filling the body of a font. At first, only inside the path, and step by step, they end up wrapping the letters like a cocoon in which new types and combinations come to life. With only a few lines of code it is possible to create almost infinite interactions between
graphic elements and type. The video created for the event will illustrate one of these unlimited combination.

Flickr gallery of the event