About a year ago our dear friend and then studio-mate Natalya Hughes asked if I (Colin) would like to do some collaborations with her. She wanted to do some text-based works and asked if I would like to basically provide her with outlines (like that first image) which she would then pain over/within. Seeing as I have been enraptured, delighted, repulsed, amused and generally in awe of Natalya’s work since first laying eyes on it, I lept at the opportunity! We’ve done several works since these first few (shown here) and it is always an honour to work with someone so prolific and talented.
If you’re curious as to where these sentences come from (you are, right?) then allow me to direct you to this (possibly NSFW). Basically there is a Singapore-based website that Natalya discovered during a residency there, where people take photos of things they find…. compelling (?) and upload it to this site with headlines. Some of it is pretty raunchy, something neither of us has shied away from in our work… or daily lives.
A sneak peak at what we’ve been working on for the upcoming Ketel One exhibition at the Compound Interest. A series of homages to some of our favourite pens. The tributes primarily come in the form of hand-rendered typographic drawings. That big feller in front is one of five short raps/rhymes I’ve written for my favourite wands.
The show runs from May 25th — May 28th At the Compound Interest. Come check it out and pop upstairs to say hello to us!
It has taken us a few days (10, to be exact) to get this blog post up and therefore, chances are, most anyone who reads this will already be well aware that we are 1/3rd of the way into our funding pledge drive for the typeface you all selected here on Kickstarter. That typeface is now getting around under the name “Sauerkraut”
If you have missed the opportunity to bask in the glory that is our video, and have about 90 seconds to learn about our project and have a little chuckle at our expense, please click play!
Lastly, if you felt so inclined to post this project to any of your social networking/media sites we would be endlessly appreciative.
Stay tuned! Fingers crossed for a successfully pledged project come May 15th!
Retelling Exploits: Documentation
We’ve been pretty much non-stop since the new year, so forgive us for taking a while to get things up to these here inninits. I had a moment to document our recent PLATFORM exhibition the other week and have uploaded all of the images to our flickr. Please forgive the image quality, I may have made a slight oversight on the camera’s setting!
The Show will be up until the end of this week (Friday February 25th is the last day) so if you’re in the city and interested in some homographic drawings, collages, installations, sculptures etc… make your way down under Flinders St. soon!
Stay tuned for updates (happening shortly) including (but not limited to) Kickstarter! New Work! Upcoming excitement!
Retelling Exploits
A series of linguistic explorations by People Collective. On display at PLATFORM from 4-28 February 2011. Opening this Friday 4th February at 6pm. PLATFORM is located in the Degraves Street Subway, under Flinders St. in the Melbourne CBD.
Kickstarter Update
Just an update on the little type experiment from last year. As you may be aware, the third typeface was chosen by you to be our Kickstarter project. It’s since been named Sauerkraut, and the Kickstarter funding will begin from April 1st! We’re currently working on prizes and projects details, but watch this space for more info or follow us on twitter at @folkgroup.
Kickstarter Typeface Poll
Poll time! Let us know which of the three concepts you’d most like to see as a Kickstarter project (Typeface 01, Typeface 02, Typeface 03)!
Kickstarter Typeface 03
Below is a typeface that we have drafted especially for our little experiment here. We had been talking about making an “alternate-heavy, super tall sans” for a while and thought that this would be the perfect forum to try it out. As is the case with both the other typefaces we’ve posted the past few weeks, this one is in a very early draft stage. There are x-height issues, as well as character continuity that we would be looking at should this be the face to move forward.
One thing we’ve really been leaning towards with many of the faces we’re designing (both for this project and others) is the opportunity for customization. We’ve been exploring this primarily through a bevy of alternates for each letter, sometimes the variations are drastically different, and other examples see only a cross-bar height change. With this typeface (currently operating under the alias “tall-type”) we’d really like to explore variations for as many typographic scenarios one can think of. This is the benefit of working on a face that is A) all upper-case B) a display and C) probably limited to one or two weights and perhaps an oblique.
Kickstarter Typeface 02
Beagle is a typeface that we’ve been playing with for some time now. The initial sketches for it were done about 2 years ago, and while we made a start on it at the time, it has since sat unattended.
We currently have a rough character base traced up in illustrator which we recently used in Voiceworks as the display type for poetry headings. Although legible, this showed that the typeface still requires some development, as we feel that the thick to thin relationships are a little extreme, and overall the characters feels a little square.
Kickstarter Typeface 01
Here are some scans from the project titles that Aaron & I created for the 2010 Next Wave Festival. Our first proposed typeface is derived from these styles and would utilize a bevy of alternates & glyphs as well as room for OpenType options. The proposed typeface would be an all-caps display face, with alternate styles, weights & italics. The final output would not have the obvious hand-rendered look, but still hearken back to its predecessors through the use of a character’s special variations.
