INTERVIEW WITH RENE KNIP

As a part of my education at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague I interviewed the Dutch designer René Knip, specialising in three-dimensional typography and lettering.

All the interviews of the class are collected in the book 158 answers which is for sale at the Typotheque books

The interview is also published online at: Interview with René Knip

REVIVAL OF JAN VAN KRIMPENS ROMULUS

Work Procedure

I started my project by looking in antique-book stores for a book that would be suitable. There were three things that were very important in my choice of typeface for this revival project. First I wanted to base my revival on a typeface with the classic proportions, as this was a good opportunity to learn about them. Secondly, and in connection with the first requirement of the classic proportions, I wanted and ‘o’ with a slanted angle, meaning a renaissance design based on the broad-nibpen. I simply wanted to learn about the technique to make it look right using the Bézier curves, as I have no earlier experience in this. The third requirement is a very personal one. For me, the shapes of the lower-case ‘a’ and ‘g’ are very central in a typeface, as they show a big part of the personality of the whole type. So it was a central thing in my choice of type that especially these two must have a strong appeal to me. I bought several books, but there was always something that did not appeal to me about the ‘a’ and ‘g’ or some of the other characters, and I was not entirely satisfied with any of them. Minutes before ‘deadline’ I luckily found a book in the Type and Media closet, left by other students before me. For me it was gold: it had the classic proportions with very large capitals, a slanted ‘o’ and a lower-case ‘a’ and ‘g’ with lots of personality, and it also had something else that I find appealing in type — a strict skeleton, which gives it a strong character, yet with a lot of human softness in the round parts. The type I had found was Romulus by Jan van Krimpen, one of the best known of the historic type designers in Holland. My first reaction was enthusiasm: as Jan van Krimpen was such a great type designer I could learn a lot by studying his work. My second reaction was respect; I was touching a national symbol, this makes careful work even more necessary. And when I found out that the Dutch Type Library had already made a good revival of the Romulus family, I started to doubt the choice of type for this assignment. However, Romulus was just exactly what I had been looking for, so I decided to work on it anyway.

Work process

First in the process I digitalized the type by scanning pages into Photoshop, working it with the magic wand in Photoshop and pasting it into Fontlab. This gave me a rough version of Romulus that I could write with, which in 10 pt. was looking very close to the version in the book. I did this to find the right weight of my final version. Yet, in the end I concluded that it did not help me much because the version from Photoshop was simply too rough and the result not satisfactory enough for it to be used for refining it into a smooth version. Next step was to cut out six to ten versions of every character in lower-case letters from the scans of the book. After placing all the ‘a’s on top of each other, then the ‘b’s, I did the same to all the other letters and used the blending mode in Photoshop on each layer, trying to find the right shape. But in the end this only resulted in a blurred image of the characters and it did not bring me any closer to the “true” shapes of the types.

At the same time I was working on bringing the shapes back by making blow-up prints of the book, which I worked with Tippex and black ink, very carefully removing scratches and building up the letters to their true form. This gave a clearer image of the structure and shape of the characters and led to the first usable digitalised version of some of the shapes and letters. By putting the first “rough” digital version in the background of every glyph in Fontlab, using this as a frame with the right size, and by finding the shapes in the big prints that had been worked with Tippex and ink, I found my way into the re-designing process.

Designed as a project at KABK

KURT FURRER

Torben Glarbo Film
Logo and web-design for movie instructor and photographer Torben Glarbo

COMEFLY
Comefly is a travel agency specialized in Florida. The flight destination is from Scandinavia to Florida which was important in the communication.
We therefore came up with a logo in Scandinavian type and of  bird shape taking you to the warm Florida.

Designed at: Scandinavian Branding 2011

Sketches