Bandiera – Type Design

Bandiera is an experimental typeface, inspired by flags and their shadows in the streets of Faenza, Italy.
To promote a local event, the streets of Faenza were decorated with flags and banners. The wind would move the fabric, casting abstract shadows onto the streets. These shapes inspired a type system with twisted outlines and fluid weight distribution. Bandiera is the result of an experimental approach to designing a typeface, focusing on form finding rather than a potential application. The project is also about taking inspiration from objects in our immediate environment and translating them into a working display design.

The weather

“The weather” follows the experimental approach of a font through which the weather can be read. The writing is arranged in a certain order and can then be read as a small diagram that shows the weather conditions of individual days. With the help of ligatures, the individual components are put together to form a letter.

Michigan the Sea

This is an artist book I created during 2020-2021, to collect my experimental poetry writing and playful typography sketches. There are 6 poems in the books, and I created 6 original typefaces as their visual interpretation. The cover, also serves as the catalogue, is the specimen of all font faces that are in use.

Unknown Letters

Peter Saville’s iconic cover for the band Joy Division’s album “Unknown Pleasures” is a source of endless inspirations for remixes. Unknown Letters takes the original’s stacked plot of radio waves from a pulsar and creates line based typography for pencil plotters. The tool, written in Processing’s p5js, translates letters into horizontal bezier curves and the plotter’s pencils are drawing them on postcards. A set of sliders enables a lot of variations in font size, line height, depth, blur and noise.

Codename Helsinki

Inspired by a narrow pixel font I saw on a train in Helsinki, I wanted to give it more utility by spacing and kerning it, as if it were a usual sans. The character shapes themselves adhere to the pixel grid, but the spacing and kerning has a different, finer division, which eliminates the undesirable gaps typical for traditional pixel fonts.

The weight is implemented by scaling the individual pixels, which gives interesting effect especially in bolder styles.

Pixel fonts had always fascinated me, maybe because when I was a kid, that was what digital typography looked like. They break down the traditional letter structure made of strokes of the pen, to more granular units. These units

Zewa Just-1

«Zewa Just-1»

Toilet Paper Font, 2020.

This font was inspired by the fantastic increase in demand for certain consumer products due to the anticipation of a long-lasting quarantine. In Russia, toilet paper sales went up by 47% in March 16th – 19th, 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. This font is a reference to the idea of a hype around the most mundane items.


Tanzparty

Es begann tatsächlich als Experiment und mit einem simplen A bestehend aus einfachsten Linien, worauf alles andere aufbaut und ursprünglich die Einfachheit der Dinge widerspiegeln sollte. Trotz dieses simplen, klaren und naiven Konzepts entstand am Ende etwas, das trotz aller minimalistischen Bestrebungen mich unweigerlich an eine Art opulenten Gatsby-Style (20er Jahre) erinnert.

Family Portraits

This is a series of Risograph print I made, with experimental typographic graphics, to explore my identity as part of the Chinese diaspora, my personal memories and how the family issue can project onto a queer body. The texts are sound of the words in Chinese: mama(mom), shushu(step father), baba(father), laolao(grandmother), and were interpreted through a exploratory method of typeface making and texture manipulation.

Recodic

Recodic is typeface created with Processing. Seven vector drawings of records form the building blocks of each letter. The code randomly selects the amount and positions of records to formulate a character, producing a unique look in each iteration. By taking advantage of the mathematical randomness, it creates a different result every time executing the code. Thus, the letterform is every changing yet constant. This headline typeface exists in regular and italic.

Mixer

This bespoke lettering has been created for a calendar cover originally. In a fun and playful way, these letterforms with their flowing lines strive to represent the dynamics of an upcoming year and invite the viewer to take a closer look into the calendar and what’s coming up.

The language in Flatland

The typeface is inspired by Flatland, a science fiction novel written in 1884 by Edwin Abbott Abbott. In Flatland is a world of two dimensions, in which everything looks like lines. The typeface is designed with concerns of speculative graphic design and tries to tell a science fiction story with abstract graphics, symbols and colors.

«Chancho va» collaborative design game.

ChanCho va! Is a collaborative game for designers inspired in the nature of Type design: a lonely craft. The game explores how a group can create together, coming from different backgrounds (cultural, skills, language). The most experimental part of the process is playing the game. Players know where they are starting from but not how it will end.
It all begins when each player is assigned a file that contains a few glyphs that serve as hints to keep on drawing and completing sets. Players should simultaneously push the file to the next player while shouting “Chancho Va!”. We do this over a few rounds or until sets are completed, and collaborative alphabets are born.