Stories variable typeface

This variable font Stories challenges the manner in which type styles should function. With the dynamic nature of the web and digital tools available, it questions why digital type should still be limited by the rules of the mechanical typeset. Type was designed considering moment of transition as an inherent part of the typeface. With a move of a toggle the letters transform from contemporary and structured form into a dynamic and rule bending shape.

Human touch

Poster – Human Touch
The poster examines human presence and imperfection through type drawn with a glue gun.
Its raw, tactile texture emphasizes the physical act of making and the tension between control and spontaneity.
The composition centers on unrefined human gestures, showing type as both medium and expression, embodying presence, vulnerability, and the delicate boundary between approachability and distance.

x_3

X_3 depicts a distorted X-ray of human knees, grotesquely bent beyond natural form. The work reflects human self-denial: questioning myths can fragment mind, body, and spirit. The bent X-ray embodies the toll of consistent negation. Typographic form and human vulnerability intersect, visualizing denial as both concept and condition.

ON

This typeface functions like a minimalistic modular light system built from dots and glowing segments. Letters are formed through signals rather than outlines, creating a rhythmic, almost kinetic presence. It reads as technology in motion — less about text, more about attention, pulse, and state.

Volume(s): the Essence of Form

“Volume(s): the Essence of Form” examines sculptural language through typography and image-making, inspired by Constantin Brâncuși. The project layers photograms, prints, and frames to explore how images can become sculptural. Typographic explorations use an ovoid as each letter’s “counter” (a motif from Brâncuși’s work), sculpting around it while preserving anatomical integrity (as much as possible). It is a question of volume, form, and the intersection of visual disciplines.

x_2

X_2 is reimagined as a scissor, highlighting its bold, characterful form. By nature, the scissor divides, mirrored in the letter’s pixellated design, referencing the digital world. The work reflects social media’s fragmenting effect, separating communities under false sparkle. The X merges letter, tool, and concept, visualizing division in a digital age.

In Tune With Type

These experimental posters are part of a larger collection of my work titled “Tuned In With Type”. This is a project that explores the expressive typography in the world of music, in particular mirroring the melody, themes, tone of voice and lyrics of a few songs that all differ between each other in those characteristics. I particular, here you can see posters for “Dreamer” by Lucifer and “Antagonist” by Nova Twins. The type was modelled in air-dry clay for texture, then digitally manipulated.

x_1

X_1 is a typographic study of the placeholder state in digital design software. This pale blue X represents absence and negation before meaning appears. Built on a strict perpendicular system, it asserts itself without illustration, embodying pride and autonomy. The work captures the tension between presence and absence, showing negation in its most reduced typographic form.

Ruins, Fragments and Volumes

This series of drawings and paintings explores playful typographic form as spatial structure, investigating the intersection of art, design, and architecture. Inspired by architectural fragments, ruins, and sites, the works examine cross-sections, form and counterform, and scene complexity. The drawings allow narrative to emerge through form rather than words.

Optical Illusion Calendar 2025

For the year 2025, I have created a calendar that shows a different optical illusion poster every month. Some of these experiments play with typography. In addition, you could tear the poster out of the calendar every month, resulting in a small poster collection at the end of the year.

No Cure For Curiosity (Photogram Poster)

To create this poster, Hester combines new and “dead” technologies. Each letterform is made in the darkroom using photo-sensitive paper and physical objects (glass, 3D prints, cellophane, and gelatins). The photogram process is very delicate and experimental. Small changes can produce radically different photogram prints.

The photograms are scanned, lightly edited in Photoshop to remove things like dust and fingerprints, and composed in InDesign.

Caltrop

Caltrop explores typography as a defensive form. Built natively in 3D modeling software, the typeface draws from natural and man-made defense mechanism—sea urchins, plant burrs, and caltrops—to produce letterforms that repel, snag, and resist. Across digital and physical contexts, the forms shift from animated and material-driven objects on screen to spatial elements that respond to their environment. The project includes a 3D-printed model measuring 8″H × 10″W × 4″D.

Rottura

Rottura is a broken, dramatic typeface that instantly captures attention through its distinctive form and strong visual impact. Its sharp angles, abrupt lines, and unconventional contours create a sense of tension and movement, making the text feel vivid, expressive, and emotionally charged.

Mindpuzzling

The Mindpuzzling typeface was created to capture the feeling of having thousands of thoughts at once, intertwining into one larger picture, like a puzzle coming together. Built on a grid, it is a monospace font designed for layering, overlapping words and sentences to create new shapes through their interaction.

liquid form study

This is a work in progress in which oil in a frying pan was photographed over a period of more than a year while cooking. This image material now serves as a graphic element to examine the extent to which everyday liquid forms can be used in typographic design.

No Reward Without Risk (Photogram Poster)

To create this poster, Hester combines new and “dead” technologies. Each letterform is made in the darkroom using photo-sensitive paper and physical objects (vinyl, plexi, glass, and gelatins). The photogram process is very delicate and experimental. Small changes can produce radically different photogram prints.

The photograms are scanned, lightly edited in Photoshop to remove things like dust and fingerprints, and composed in InDesign.

Living Typography

The project explores living typography found on gravestones where carved letters are gradually overtaken by moss. Originally rigid, human-made forms are transformed by organic growth into irregular, unpredictable shapes. Treating moss as a co-author of the letterform, the work documents typographic decay and regeneration, proposing these evolving structures as a starting point for experimental processes, from photography to potential digitisation and new type systems shaped by nature and design.

Blob

This work showcases “Blob”, a typeface I designed for my typography class last year. The concept behind Blob is rooted in the idea that everything can be typography, and that typography itself is a form of language. It is constructed entirely from interconnected circles, symbolizing the way language and typography are inherently linked, not only to one another, but also to the people who create and use it.

Waxperiments

“Waxperients” focuses on abstract wax forms created through accidental processes during candle destruction. The material develops flat, bubbly and broken structures that result in new interpretations, balancing distortion, structure and flexibility.

HVYColumn Slice

HvyColumn Slice draws inspiration from unearthed archaeological architecture. Derived from a cross-section of a 20-fluted Roman Doric column, the typeface follows a radial grid that echoes the play of light and shadow found in stone. Designed as an experimental, concept-driven system, it explores legibility, form, and designing type for 2D, 3D software, interaction, and environments. Letters are carved through negative space and can stack, collapse, or tumble like architectural ruins.

Experiment 1.8

Experiment 1.8 focuses on curatorial generation of a typographic composition in Midjourney.
Earlier personal generations were used as stylistic anchors via the –sref parameter. A neutral phrase allowed attention to shift toward form, rhythm, and plasticity. Downgrading to –v 6.0 preserved irregularity and expressive freedom. The final image was selected curatorially, based on compositional balance and typographic expressiveness rather than formal correctness.

Alphabet of Programmed Error

The project explores typography created by an educational toy robot that draws using simple programmed commands: up, down, left, right. The restricted movement system defines the structure of each letter, reducing them to basic trajectories and angles. Mechanical imprecision and drawing errors cause every character to differ slightly. The machine becomes a co-author of the alphabet, while error and limitation shape the typographic form.