Week 04 — Sundowner

October 10, 2015

My last week in Vairano I’ve spent slightly melancholic, knowing I will have to leave soon. Reality caught up and I was busy doing ‘daily business’, writing a lot of emails and discussing rather surreal appearing topics via phone while overlooking Lago Maggiore.

On one of my last strolls around I’ve seen a beautiful old geometric sans serif painted on a garage, somewhere on the way to Bellinzona.

Lately, it seems like most designers, when attempting to draw their first typeface eventually, chose to draw a geometric sans. Somehow apprehensible, since the simpleness of the geometric form is offering orientation and it also seems to be approachable.

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Due the reduction of basic forms and the implementation of geometry, details become more relevant and disharmonies reveal distinctively. The attempt to establish a dogmatic, mathematical system to help executing typefaces have never worked too well.

Getting lost in drawing a single letter seems also quite common, even along professionals. Endless possibilities are making one forget about the bigger picture, the language, a system when written, expressed through many variations of glyphs, the typeface.

A system of which by establishing formal analogies, it start to become much more then the form it self…

…

I will miss this. Thanks for having me.