Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm very-very glad to start this series of lectures with you two. So I've introduced the assignment already and the project to the students, it's a question revolving around the term neutrality in the field of graphic design, which I believe is a term that can be put in perspective, questioned, or criticized.

I'm gonna read a biography of you and your practice and what I propose is that either we exchange on a question-answer mode or you present and then we ask questions.

Yes.

Which mode do you prefer?

Yeah, we were going to ask you the same.

We're really interested to have a discussion with you but also we could give you a kind of quick and dense presentation of our work. It's either or, I mean, you know, we can go straight in questions also.

We think, like we have a presentation that we can give that is between 20 minutes to half an hour, something like that.

Maybe it's shorter. Yeah, 20, I think.

Yeah.

Sounds perfect! Then I will read your bio and then maybe start with the first question, which will then I'm sure evolve into your presentation, right?.

Yeah. Perfect.

So correct me if I'm wrong with the bio, I copied it from somewhere. You let me know if there are some updates in between.

So, graphic designers Elizabeth Rafstedt and Johanna Ehde form Rietlanden Women's Office. Their practice is interested in current and historical issues connected to reproductive work and collaborative graphic design. The basis of their work is a printed publication series called MsHeresies that we have here that the students looked at already. Inquiry into collaborative graphic design practices and the ornament as a form of work critique and the ornament sits at the center of their practice, where they consider ornaments not simply as added decoration but as traces of the specific conditions under which a work was made. They look at the traces of reproductive work, such as lines of alteration and correction, flashing elements, improvise type, manifestations of urgency, become the ornaments which makes social relations legible. The search for ornaments, disruptive, diffuse and aesthetic qualities, and sketch the ornament as a point where aesthetics and politics intertwine.

For sure.

Yeah.

Maybe we can start this presentation by you presenting yourselves, maybe, and now we had a bit of a glimpse into your practice, but what we're curious to hear is well, firstly who you are, how your collaboration works and maybe you can start talking about MsHeresies.

Yeah, thank you!

Great, now I'll turn this [camera] around.

Also, I am Johanna, and this is Elizabeth. We're really happy to see that you're in a space together and not just on your own laptop. It’s very nice

Yeah, and it's so nice also when you have this online lecture that you actually see someone and at the same time, so that's super nice.

Can we show you a slide show actually?

Yeah, of course.

Okay, share.

We are in our studio now in Amsterdam and here is a picture also from our studio a couple of weeks ago.

Do you see the slideshow now?

Yes, we do.

Great. We thought of this- By the way, do you see us as well at the same time or?

Yeah, we can see both.

Okay, so we thought of this, when you came with this topic of the neutral and the connection to neutrality and graphic design. We also wanted to start here in our studio because it was sharing space together that made us form a group after our studies.

I mean, I think we were very intrigued by this. The word neutral is very key right now to us also like, what is happening with our work at the moment.

Basically, maybe this introduction to our work, we can start with the work and then we can speak a little bit more about why we have chosen to have a collective practice. But what you can see on the screen now is a poster that was supposed to be shown in Leipzig at the modern Museum of Art there at this very moment, in connection to the book, the Buchmesse, the book fair in Leipzig that they have there yearly. And it is a republishing of a Palestinian poet and her name is Hila Abunnada and she was murdered, she was killed during the bombings of her home in Gaza. The text comes from a publishing platform that you should really look up—gazapassages.com—and it's a publishing project called Passages Through Genocide. And they asked for everyone to republish and distribute the work from these Palestinian poets. On this poster it reads from the 8th of October last year. It reads, and this is Hila Abunnada, the writer, she wrote "Our news feeds of funeral homes, memorial services, obituary pages, we move from page to page as if walking through a square full of funerals packed side-by-side. God, the weight of these days." And this poster is not shown in Leipzig now because it is not neutral.

Yeah, that word is the specific motivation for it being censored in this exhibition. But we thought to move on to quickly speak about our practice and our work with MsHeresies. It's gonna be a bit of a dense ride, so please bear with us.

But maybe we can also say that we both studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. I'm sure you know about it. And when we finished our studies, together with some friends also who work together with Julie in Paris. We had this like shared ongoing discussion at the Academy about feminism and feminism's role in graphic design. And when we all finished our studies, we just became this perfect like entities of workers under the neoliberal society, which we disagreed with. And we sat there with our laptops and instead of still being friends we also became competitors with one another, which was a very lonely and sad kind of reality to be put in. So that's why we started Rietlanden Women's Office and Rietlanden comes from an area not far away from here where our first studio was. So that is a little bit the background of why we started working together.

OK, we'll dive into it.

So here on the left you see a poster by the London based South Asian feminist collective Mukti. They were active between 1983 and 1987. And Mukti, their publication, they had 6 languages in which they translated the publication into, and they are all represented on this poster. And then the ornament, that detail on the poster to the right, it's actually a fold of a poster that we made made for an Amsterdam initiative called Palace of Typographic Masonry and the ornaments come from the publication Triple Jeopardy that was made in New York by the Third World Women's Alliance between 1971 and 1975. And both of these publications have been part of our research in the publication series MsHeresies.

So together, we make the publication series, MsHeresies, and our research often emerges from feminist publications of the so-called print activist movement of the 1960s to the late 80s, and concerns an overlap of collaborative graphic design and feminist graphic design history. By conducting research in both theory and practice, we experiment with and look at the typography, ornamentation and printmaking of collaboratively designed printed matter made within these movements. We're interested in furthering the field of graphic design by elaborating on graphic design's messy history, and its link to feminist print activist movements. And with this expression, messy history, we refer to the essay toward an expanded view of women in graphic design, Messy History versus Neat History by Martha Scotford. And it's from 1994.

The feminist intersectional issue of what is and isn't represented in graphic design's history is important to our work, and we ask what graphic design has been and could potentially be by questioning dominant ways of thinking, seeing, making and organizing.

And when working on with MsHeresies, we engage them with selected archival material and do a practical research, we call it. And that is research by designing. So our visual and theoretical interests include overlaps of subjects such as history, writing and representation, feminism and work critique and self-publishing and graphic design. And by seeking out and amplifying existing knowledge through conversations and interviews with other makers and researchers within these subjects, as well as actually writing together, we developed methods to do this.

We can start by, so these are all spreads from the MsHeresies' series.

I'll read the quote from the Iowa City Women's press, who also published in "Ain't I a woman" and it's from all women are welcome to read their poetry from 1973.

Umm, but yeah, they write, and typical to society is the attitude that all labor done by women is crude. Many women will run minimum machines, sometimes in their lives, for their bosses, or even for political lovers. Hardly any women will be allowed near a more sophisticated press. We want to break that cycle by acquiring our own press but first, we wanted to break it by respecting people's labor within the limitation of the only machine allowed to us. We’re writing about these realizations to encourage other women to see the tools available to them as what they are. A mimeo is a small press, regardless of its degree of sophistication. So this is 1973 and, of course, this is when people took over the means of production to make this publication.

This messy history as a concept, the theorist and design researcher Martha Scotford she described the work on messy history as seeking to discover, study, and include a variety of the alternative approaches and activities that are often part of Women designers’ professional lives. We are very interested in this concept of messy history, and we’re taking this further to being especially interested in the designs made by those who perhaps didn't call themselves designers. yet produced beautiful objects of graphic design. This is often the case with these collectives of the print activist movement.

So print activism boomed between the 1960s and 90s in Europe and the US, and socially engaged collectives and organizations who wanted to increase awareness about their costs got together, made publications, and developed their own methods for spreading the words through printed matter. These methods in turn spurred writing and an array of manifestos and consciousness raising texts and their critical perspective on technologies, impact on social issues and visual communication, left visible traces in their graphic design.

And the publications also became formative for the political movements at the time, and they visually embody an overlap between reader, writer, editor, designer and printer. We were very interested in that aspect of it. Also in terms of the ornaments. So the print activist movement critically questioned who had the means, access and knowledge to print and in turn, the power to distribute and produce knowledge. And this same question in relation to the definition of messy history is fundamental to our practice.

Then we will speak a bit about the ornament and specifically the broken ornament.

So you see here the cover of Mukti Magazine from 1987, the issue on housing And then a spread from Ms Heresies 5, where we published text by Lola Olufemi called, We're going to lose. Which is then paired with the visual essay from the Mukti Archive. So as an extension of the research we already conducted within our practice as the feminist graphic design collective, a practice situated between typography, print and image making and self publishing, we focus on ornamentation, where we consider ornaments as traces of work made under certain conditions.

We're interested in the blurry and these small aspects of ornamentation. A messy and mostly unmapped legacy of unauthored graphic design made collaboratively and urgently. Evoking rage, curing maladies, expressing lust, or mocking those in power. We see the ornament as closely linked to graphic designs' role in the distributional knowledge and as a point where aesthetics and politics intertwine.

The ornament in our idea of it isn't only an add-on value, but also a trace of reproductive work, or in a utopian sense, a trace of unalienated labor. The ornaments we collect in the archives are often traces of reproductive work, where their brokenness signifies their way of becoming ornaments, not made as only decorative, but often showing the pressing issues and conditions of the moment under which they were made.

And by the broken ornament, we also mean lines of alterations and corrections, clashing elements, improvised type, and manifestations of urgency.

They are ornaments that make social relations legible and together with our ideas of the ornament and historical material, we discuss and question the digital interfaces and platforms of our current time with the curiosity, joy, and from a feminist perspective of work critique.

Being a graphic design collective, our motivation lies in finding ways of designing collaboratively and to critically engage with this topic of collaborative graphic design. And for us, this has to do with the lustful in making and in building a lifelong practice. It also has to do with an optimism about what graphic design can do and look like when considered a socially engaged practice. It then becomes necessary to build on and learn from a richer, more extensive graphic design history and to allow more space for underrepresented design practices, current as well as historic ones. This is not an altruistic mission, but a deep desire as feminist designers, it motivates us deeply. We are driven by a truly collaborative spirit and conviction that our practice of graphic design allows us to deeply engage with subjects. We tried to go into conversation with the material we give form to. And as we seek out the makers of feminist publications and ask them how they work together, we learn about the difference and similarities between different generations of makers. When it comes to working conditions, design methods and political struggles.

An important part of our work includes interviews and conversations. We prepare, conduct, transcribe, and edit these interviews and conversations as part of the Ms Heresies series too. Here is the spread of an example of that. It's with the editors of triple jeopardy in the third issue of Ms Heresies.

So we photograph and document overviews and details of the material and by scanning we capture, select the details of ornaments, typography and paper structures as well as images, layouts and text. The selected archival material is then clearly marked with sources and dates. Through our engagement with these documents of collaboration, their relationships and their ideas about form come to illuminate our ways of working. So this archival research lays the foundation of our practical research.

So each element in our archival collection is thoroughly captioned, and no matter what treatment or distortion it has undergone. And this act of captioning has been something we have developed throughout our practice, and we play with ways of collaboratively writing and typesetting these captions and often make them quite lengthy, sometimes humoristic, but always with an attempt for any reader to be able to trace back from where and in what context the specific details, detail, ornament, or part of the collection it originated.

So an important method in our project is writing, and more specifically, writing together. By using online softwares we have a practice of sketching sentences and editing each other's writing already. We're taking this practice further by trying to write about graphic design together as well outside of Ms Heresies.

I think it's quite nice to end somewhere here and maybe also just to say one last thing about the form that we work in, which is also the visual essay. That is that we're trying to find ways in which the visual essaying and to like use this image material and ornaments and part of the archive and weaving that through painting and clashing etcetera together with and writing and republishing of texts.

First, I wanted to say thank you so much for joining us. It’s great to have you as part of this program which is called ‘So-called Neutral’. It’s a typography and critical research assignment that we are doing with the students of the third bachelor of graphic design at KASK, and it questions the concept of neutrality or so-called ‘neutrality’ in typography. I thought it was more than relevant to have you as a speaker, as I guess you’re quite critical towards this term.

Thanks!

So we’re welcoming Marie-Mam Sai Bellier (1994), a graphic and type designer, art director and editor. Her practice revolves around typography, its history, and its relationship with publications both within traditional and avant-garde. She invokes typography within visual arts and writing, through various research projects where History and Zeitgeist are naturally intertwined. She obtained a MA in Graphic Design with honors at the School of Fine Arts of Lyon in 2017; whereupon she won the Renaud Foundation Price the same year. Since, she co-directs the publishing house Diorama Publishing alongside Guillaume Sbalchiero and publishes the typographic magazine Revue Diorama, which introduced in 2020 the distribution of its fonts within Diorama Type Foundry. She considers the text as an image, as a subject, but also as a historical witness of its time. Her practice as a type designer and researcher is vividly present within her commissioned projects of graphic design. By conceiving visual identities for fashion, music, gaming, cinema, art, and more, her work witnesses a singular and tailor-made aesthetic, in which the text is always seen as an essence carrying the story and sculpting the silhouette of a word, empowering its meaning.

Marie-Mam Sai, the floor is yours.

Thank you so much. This is quite an old biography, because now I’m actually part of Bye Bye Binary, which is also type foundry. I will speak about it. Also I’m teaching at École des Arts des Décoratifs in Paris. It’s not decorative art, but it’s like applied art, and it’s quite like beaux-arts, but there is quite a difference. I like the approach of the school because it’s based on the notion of crossing media and crossing approaches and I love this idea. You will see it in my work, it’s very important to cross different kinds of languages to create a new language. I’m teaching graphic design (École des Arts des Décoratifs) for object design. I like the notion of having graphic design as an object and not just on paper. Thank you so much for the invitation. I’m very glad to present you this little document and I will try to think about the notion of neutrality because it’s very interesting actually.

OK, so to neutralize identity… when I think about neutrality in graphic design, I have a lot of “bad souvenirs” because I think it’s very violent. When they wanted me to look for an image to speak about the Swiss style, I just typed in Helvetica on Google. I thought this was very funny because for me it’s completely the modernist idea of creating a style which can be universal or/and neutral. It’s very violent because it’s like the abstraction of identity. By using these kinds of fonts, it feels like everything should be on the same level.

I was thinking about how I approached graphic design when I was a student at the School of Fine Arts and I found my first project and this was an invention of the sport “Ward”. “Ward” was a mix between the words “hard”, “words” and “war”, and this was the beginning of a group we formed with my friends; Roxanne Maillet, and many others. It was our first workshop of graphic design and at the time we mixed this workshop with another subject revolving the notion of genre. We just invented this word, but I don’t know if you know this text by Beatrice Warde, called “The Crystal Goblet”. It’s about the idea that typography needs to be transparent to elevate the meaning of a text., which was absolutely not what we wanted to do.

It’s more about the celebration of identities. This part was very fun, because we were also working on the notion of identity in typography. It was our first work as a graphic designer. We had the idea of using graphic design to generate shapes for events, like this was a sport-event. We wanted to go for T-shirts or costumes, and we wanted to incorporate it in our style of presentation. We worked with typography and sometimes we tried to integrate a grid. It was very weird. We wanted to perform this grid with our body, we didn’t know what we wanted to do.

The thing that I loved the most at school were my friends and we still are friends ‘til this day, which was a very important link. What you can see here are posters. This was the first graphic design that we did. We see Clara Pasteau and Auriane Preud’homme who are also graphic designers and artists. This was our first approach of typography; It was this kind of collage or kind of American graphic design. There was always this notion of legitimacy beyond the question of legibility because we wanted to do something very strong visually by using typography. But we were questioning if it was what we wanted to get out of it. We had the feeling that our teacher wanted us to learn how to do straight, neutral graphic design, like Beatrice Warde, But we wanted to do camp graphic design. It wasn’t common at this time.

This is my first poster I made about typography and it helped me to find my way. my legitimacy in this question of legibility. It’s a poster about legibility. You have something very camp on the left side and something very straight on the other. Basically, what I love on the camp side and what the teachers wanted me to do on the straight side. It’s kind of the opposite. It’s a sentence by Fernand Baudin that I sent by post in this envelope. This was the beginning of my project called Diorama that I made with the Guillaume Sbalchiero and Clara Pasteau in the early days of Diorama, which is a type foundry now.

It was about me wanted to do typography. I was like, I love it, but I don’t know if I have the rights to do it. I just send it to multiple sorts of people like designers, artists, …

This is us in the beginning with the first envelope of Diorama. That moment we loved these references, these type specimens from the 70s where you can find display fonts with a very nice layout and artist content. So, I was like, I love fantasy, I love these kinds of shapes and in the classification of typography, every font, every fantasy font or advertising font is displayed in one trash can, called fantasy. There is this noble history of typefaces and fantasy is almost like the trash where you can find lot of shapes. So for me, fantasy can be considered queer because in the definition of queer it says it is something beyond limits and without limits. Fantasy can be a space where there are a lot of different shapes.

This is the first book where a girl called Nicolette Gray in the 19th century made this kind of classification of the first display fonts from the 19th century and this is a wonderful book where you can find a lot of shapes. It’s very, very interesting. I made my dissertation about it when I was a student. It was about how to make something memorable by typography. I wanted to make a parallel to the book from the 19th century and also the display fonts from 70s to see how you can have a golden age in typography by using fantasy. I studied Nicolete Gray’s vision and these two figures called Herb Lubalin and Jurriaan Schrofer. Jurriaan Schrofer for the geometric, mathematical, structural approach. It was made before the computer, so it was very hard to draw this kind of composition, but it’s an approach which was very avant-garde. Not with the intension that something geometric should be something neutral. It’s something very optical, it’s very material and you can see everyone is included by a kind of resurrection of all shapes from the 19th century.

It may look like something very new. It is a double approach, resurrection versus a new technology or a new approach of typography, and I think it’s always about a technological revolution, but it is also an approach on how you can use technology to create new shapes.

During this moment when I was a student, I discovered the work of journalist, Jean Alessandrini who tried to make a new classification of fantasy fonts. He made the Codex 80 to try to give a name, to try to find a story for these shapes which were in this famous trash bin of fantasy classification. He made his own classification and it’s a very poetic and open project. I thought it was very nice and inspiring.

So, this is Diorama #1 with all the contribution which we added. The thematic was legibility and visibility. It was very important for us to start with understanding our love for letters and this is a book about it. It is a type specimen with fonts that we drew for this theme, about this quote of Fernand Baudin. He said: “Whatever the taste that one has for legibility, clearness and transparency. It isn’t always sufficient, and not always for everyone. The eye isn’t only nourished by legibility but by all of the letter’s beauty. It could not be clearer. beauty”.

We wanted to display the question of food, gluttony fonts because there was also lettering in chocolate. There were also some serif fonts, but more magazine fonts, more art nouveau. There were a lot of different styles and we enjoyed this project very much.

This is my first font and an homage to the first advertising fonts in America. It is a wood type font with ornaments. I love ornaments and you will see that I prefer to design symbols instead of letters, but I will speak about that later.

These are some screenshot of our type foundry and this was a big job because we made Diorama #1 when we were students, then we finished school and we were like: “OK, let’s go! What can we do?”. We didn’t have any plans. We didn’t have any money, and we just wanted to publish this book because we thought it was very cool and it was our dream to start a type foundry where these magazines would be like the birth of new fonts. It would be a collection of fonts and it would contain an editorial overview of the themes. We found a way to start a type foundry and we worked to get some money to start it up. Since a few months it has been published, so it’s very new. It was an adventure to be able to do it with our own money but… We did it! The digital side will be important for the issues of Diorama because it would be very interesting to do some events in our studio in Paris and to have a sort of shop where we can distribute other books from other people and also other fonts.

This is a revival we made with Jean Alessandrini which was used for Klima magazine by Julie Héneault *laughs*. It’s a wonderful use of this font. The font was a kind of love story about science fiction fonts in the 70s made by Jean Alessandrini, which is a type designer. He is 80 years old now and he’s a friend and sometimes I go and see him in Strasbourg. He doesn’t have any internet, but he is actually still working at the idea of future in typography in the Latin alphabet.

Here you see his research where he tried to find a new way to bring abstraction into the Latin alphabet and to make it evolve. He tried to erase some part of the letters that aren’t essential to make this “ultra-insulin”. It’s very interesting because it’s kind of a new vision on the letter, which will be a kind of ‘logotype alphabet’ where every word would be a logotype.

I was like, “Oh my God. It looks like our research by Bye Bye Binary about the idea of bringing neutrality in the binary system of the French language. We try to find a typographic way to bring neutrality to the alphabet. This is very old. It’s from the first workshop we made with my friend Roxanne Maillet and it was about, how to find a way to make Jean Paul Gaultier. But again, this is also binary. It’s masculine—feminine, boys—girls. We wanted to go beyond the notion of binarity. This was not enough, we wanted more and so we tried to find solutions in typography with ligatures.

This was the first research and now Bye Bye Binary is a collective of type designers from Belgium and France which are working on finding a way to bring neutrality to French language with the medium of typography. It fits in with the times we live in now, but in a queer way. This, “La Typographie post-binaire”, is an amazing book that I presented regarding this post-binary idea. We were with Camille Circlude in Centre Pompidou in December to present this book. You can see the first research on the table. This is about neutrality, and you can see the kind of shapes that my friend made. You see some solutions to make it more neutral. It’s not about finding a way to a new norm for a new glyph or for a new system. Bringing neutrality in the French language in this way is open. It is very open and very free, so there’s space for everybody to bring a new idea, new solution. It is also about technology. Typography is technology because each new glyph has a unique code and to create new glyph, you have to find a space into this normative system. This is Jean Alessandrini’s new work, and you see that it’s looking quite the same within the idea of evolution of the Latin alphabet by the ligature. A few days ago, I was at the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique with him. It’s a research area in the School of Fine Arts in Nancy with type and graphic designers. There we did a workshop and a conference about the future of typography, and we made this little atelier where we tried in a few hours to make a new kind of alphabet. There is a 50-year difference between this old guy, Jean and me, but we have common ideas and links due to the same interest in the future of typography. It was very interesting.

To come at geometry, what I love in geometry is the notion of ‘social geometry’. It is something that we approach in the second issue of Diorama. The second issue is about the future and about ‘The new geometric city’. And because I love gaming, I wanted to make a geometric alphabet, but as a scripture that you can build cities or to draw stuff with this alphabet only. I wanted to use the sentence of Vasarely, which is a quote from this issue:

“THE FUTURE IS EMERGING WITH THE NEW GEOMETRIC CITY, POLYCHROME AND SOLAR. PLASTIC ART WILL BE KINETIC, MULTIDIMENSIONAL AND COMMUNITY. ABSTRACT FOR SURE AND CLOSE TO SCIENCE.” Victor Vasarely, 1953

It’s from 54’, post second war and he thinks geometry will save the world. future is for sure a notion of sterilization of abstraction. It’s not about history, it’s about how everybody can feel something when looking at optical art.

It’s hypotonic geometry, color and form. He wanted to bring a solution with this philosophy of geometry as a social geometry, because it’s for everybody. And brings also the notion of “grands ensemble”, The blocks, like in the ghetto, the idea of geometry where everybody can live. The philosophy at the time sounded beautiful, but we know today that it doesn’t work at all, and it only gets used by minority groups and it’s bad, it’s bad. But it was a nice idea that geometry would be for everybody, kind of like a universal language.

What I love about the geometry of this time is the pop-approach and the colors, it was also used in fashion. Everybody used Vasarely works to make patterns, clothes, clocks, chairs. It was like a language, like a pattern, but yeah, it was also just philosophic.

“The shadow of glyph a body”, is kind of my idea of what I want to do in my practice now. It’s about going beyond the Latin alphabet because it’s a result of colonial history. The Latin alphabet is spread all over the world, but it’s also violent for a lot of people to use. So sometimes I’m feel better in using just symbols which are not in Latin.

This is my first artwork I made with the idea of creating a symbol which can be a sculpture, but it also can be a logo. This is the word ‘monochrome’ and it’s a sculpture, it’s painted wood in black. I think this is the first time I tried to use text beyond the page and it was the beginning of what I love to do nowadays.

I also work a lot with fashion, and these are symbols that I made for bags or shoes. This is a picture of my favorite museum in France. I love this idea that ornaments in architecture can be very inspiring. This is also a work i did for fashion, about getting inspiration for patterns from historical things. This is a first project I made in this kind of way of incarnation/incantation of typography. This was an identity I made, a font identity for a festival for graphic design. I loved the stairs, so I used it like a grid to make this font. In the space of the letters, you can see a little phantom, a little ghost of characters, I love to use the space to design things or to materialize this kind of ghost of the space. And this is my logo, you could say. I love hearts and I love this kind of shape that you can find a lot in French, in a lot of buildings. Also, it’s an ideogram in Ghana, for which it has a signification. I love the idea that a symbol can exist in different parts of the world with different significations, but the heart is the most universal symbol that everybody knows and understands, and it’s about love and I love it.

So, I started to make my own alphabet. This is a pic of a sculpture that I made during my residency in Lorainne. Where I’m a resident in the glass art research center. So, this is a series where I want to design sculptures with symbols like hearts for example, and this is one of the first sculptures in progress. I wanted to make a heart which looks like a flower called “l’amour en cage”, love in a cage in French. These will be my first sculptures. I love it because for me, it’s kind of like finding a new language but without words, without the latin alphabet, and to find a way to speak with a symbol which is material. With a a ideogram that I invented.

This is another ideogram that I made for Bye Bye Binary, about non-binary, it’s a non-binary symbol. It was in this poster that we made in Centre Pompidou. The concept was a typographic battle. We made a series of posters about French academic words, the evolution of post-binary fonts and normativity. There’s lots of little workshops by Bye Bye Binary in different art centers. In these workshops I also love to go further in designing ideograms. This is a cryptic alphabet used for an artist called Erwan Sene. It’s again a way to twist the Latin alphabet. It’s kind trying to neutralize the Latin alphabet, but in my way. This is a monogram for Simon Lextrait, which is a brand. You can see it in this patch, the little patch. I also love fashion because of the material side it gives to text. This is a symbol for a gallery in Marseille called Sissi club.

This is a poster where i used 3D to bring materiality to my symbols. For this gallery I will also do stained glass, like real stained glass. Because I wanted to change my order of graphic designer to glass designer. So, I will do some hearts in stained glass for their exhibition. Also, a new symbol without words, it’s an illustration, it’s kind of a weird pictogram for a performance company called Angels Front.

I was also in a residency with Flora Bouteille and Sabine Teyssonneyre last week. It’s the Angel’s Front company. We’re doing a comic, all the things about this company are about language. For me, this comic needed to find materiality in the text, to have identities based on how characters are using language. For me this was impossible to use just one font, it wasn’t possible to just use Helvetica. I really wanted to find a new pleasure as a type designer to work on comics, to make it more visual, to make it more connected with the drawing.

This is an alien alphabet for a photographer called Romain Lenancker. He wanted an identity for his exhibitions called “Une autre origine du monde”, or “Another origin of the world”. He didn’t want to use a science fiction typeface because it would be too caricatural, so we wanted to go beyond that. Because the client was very openminded, we made this alien alphabet. Then he just took photos for his identity with this font in use, you can see the catalog here. The idea was just to use the little ideogram to make footnotes of each photo, like each object. Each page was on a big map where you can see all the symbols, like an alien map as a summary. Finding a new way to use these non-Latin alphabet letters, and to make it work into an editorial project. So it was very nice.

Here you can see an identity for Phylactère, which is a magazine of my friends, Roxanne Maillet and Auriane Preud’homme. It’s a revival of an old font from the 70’s called carnival. I’ve redrawn the alphabet, it took very long because there are a lot of curves in this font, but it is very beautiful. This kind of reborn letters in ribbons to speak about the “Phylactère” which is the name of the little bubble of text in comics or in medieval drawings.

Here is a lettering alphabet I’ve drawn for the Centre d’Art Passage in Troyes. So I was in a residency to find a way to make an identity for this Centre d’Art with my friend Clara Pasteau, who also makes websites. And we were like okay, let’s find the “voice” of this place to bring a visual identity to represent this house. here You can see pictures of the house. It’s very beautiful and we’re like okay let’s make an identity, that speaks about this notion of passage, that speaks about time, the notion of questioning wat an art Centre is. It’s a place where artists come and go, so the notion of time is very important. Also, the concept of fine arts, like glass is very important in this region of France. So, we made this kind of alphabet to represent the Centre d’Art, and this is the website.

This is the project we’re working on with the director of the art center to make a version of materiality, it’s not like a basic signaletic where you just write something on a plastic thing, it’s terrible. We wanted to bring value and a mix of people because we wanted to make artworks in glass, in metal, in colors and work with locals from the town. Also to work with new people who can bring stories.

And to finish i want to show you this project. It was my first residency with children. The idea was to teach what graphic design is to children. It’s about the idea of characters, personage, type characters, to incarnate their own identity. Each child made this kind of mask and the persona is the reference, it’s also a game called persona. I love this game. We made the costume with my friend Simon from cyanotypes. I had a big house where my friends came, and we went to school every day with new people, someone in fashion, someone in gaming, someone in text. My students were so happy. We made this book about the notion of time, and I also participated with my assistant. The treasure is the time we have together, it’s not money. It was very nice to incarnate and show what creative jobs are or can be and to make work around identities. Each little guy thought about what his own culture looks like, as a child, as a person. There was always a little presentation about their end results, they were so happy. Afterwards we made this book about it, it was so nice.

So as a conclusion, I think neutrality is a very interesting concept, because when we twist the notion of geometry, binarity and everything else, it can be very exciting to explore. What can a queer neutrality mean? It can just be the possibility of having a lot of different identities, where fantasy is neutrality.

I had a question about your very experimental display fonts, for example the Diorama fonts. How do you feel about experimenting with body text or running text? Does it always have to be legible and readable, and how do you look at treating that? (Hana)

I think that body text is not my field, I think I prefer to work on symbols and title fonts and anything like that. But I think my way to treat the body text would be displayed more in the layout. How to play with it, it can be with columns without any white, kind of a scriptural layout. Looking at how you can do something that can still be read easily but displayed.

Why is the format and the binding of the Diorama magazine always changing? (Karin)

I think I love the way that you can use a system that is not systematic. I think there’s a system behind Diorama; each cover has the title Diorama on the book, but a different cover, format, way of binding, etc. but the title is never changing. And also there’s a system that in the book, you always have the definition of diorama as a specimen, a type specimen for the logo. Because each time you have a new logo with a completely different font. This little booklet of specimen can be at the beginning, sometimes in the middle. But yeah, it’s very nice to imagine a system that’s not systematic and be playful with it.

I was wondering if there is one font that you think resembles you as a person? (Antonia)

Oh, oh my god! That’s a very hard question, but I think maybe the font that I’m making now. I’m working with Bye Bye Binary on a new variable font, and the title will be ‘love and rage’. We will design two kinds of styles: love and rage, and I’m working on love. I try to do what I think love can be as a Latin alphabet. My first idea was to do something not systematic. Because typography is a system, it’s always like A-B-C-D and you can type it. But how do you make a font which is not systematic, based on freedom, based on emotion? I’m working with a kind of ribbon or something that can look like a drawing but also looks like an object. Trying to be everywhere but nowhere at the same time *laughs*.

It will be very fun because you will have the two polar opposites ‘love and rage’, and something that will happen in the middle and we don’t know what that will be, but it will be very nice I think. The font is not yet accessible right now, but it will be open source.

Actually we are now working on a queer font, but also an ultra-legible post-binary font. It will be a font for text. It’s very interesting to think about how after Helvetica, Swiss-fonts and everything, you can imagine a very legible font which will not be sans-serif or Swiss. They are also working on how to make each letter very recognizable for dyslexic people. A lot of people that don’t like post-binary fonts say it’s not completely inclusive, because people with difficulties to read cannot read this kind of shapes. So we are working on a font for dyslexic people which will be post-binary. It’s a very interesting approach, each letter needs to be different, to be recognizable, and this is not what we normally learn about sans-serif and modular fonts. It needs to be different to easily read it. So yes, it’s a nice concept and philosophy to find the perfect legible font.

It’s a parenthesis, but indeed I’ve noticed in my projects that a few friends of mine who have dyslexia, whenever I ask them to read things that are set up in sans-serif fonts, they have difficulties with it. And especially reading and writing emails is really tricky, because it’s almost only like Arial or other standardized sans-serif fonts. And I was curious, do you base this work on certain studies? Or do you ask certain people? How is the research going to work?

There will be some tests before, between, during, etc. so we’ll test “scientifically”, because it’s not conceptual, it’s based on research and it is a scientific approach in a way. Legible but queer.

What’s the status of the new Diorama publication? And do you know what the theme is going to be about?

This will be about ‘incarnation’, to give a body to letters, to give them life. I have known the term for a lot of years and I try by doing research of scriptures, to look for different ways of approaching ‘incarnation’. But not only printing, also in 3D etc.

It’s also very nice to not be behind the computer all the time. I hope this conversation will make clear what neutrality is for me.

I was intrigued that you decided to still use the word neutrality, it’s like reappropriating the word.

Yeah, I think it’s like a new definition.

I have another question. Because you were talking about like the digital side of designing a font. How do you start? Do you start manually for instance, and then go to work on the computer? (Karin)

Actually, sometimes it’s a little draft and then I’ll translate it to my computer. But I need to think on a paper beforehand. I’m not a very good drawer. There are people like Jean Alessandrini who has never used a computer in their life, it was always cutting letters by hand. I think it’s very nice to try to cross a practice with another and finding this own way to make a typeface. And I also think that you don’t need to be a type designer to make a font.

Because in Bye Bye Binary, there are also people who are not type designers and they’re drawing letters, but that is what we want. It’s okay, you don’t need to make the perfect grid. It’s about what it’s looks like or what emotion we feel when looking at this text. And I think the Helvetica style is cheap, but identities are not, it’s so much more complex. It’s our job to translate identity by using graphic design and it’s very fun to try to make it legible. Because you see, this trend in the fashion industry of making every logo in a sans-serif, but after a while they will start to change it because no one has an own individual identity anymore.

So they’ll start longing for a monogram or something different to make their brand more legible and recognizable. To represent the history of their house, so I think it’s important.

It is the other way in corporate design, because Coca Cola, Google and Apple look like they’re using more ornamental serif fonts in comparison to the first Coca Cola logo, it’s looks like it’s going the other way. It’s funny. (Karin)

It’s like waves almost, like trends or I don’t like to call them trends but movements that are paradoxical one after the other. Now we’re in this phase where we’re trying to bring back history into letters when there was a time when as you said the “universal” was the neutral, the geometrical, the letters that would apply to everything and everyone. And now we’re going in another direction.

Yeah, it’s very nice to see it. And for example, I was with Jean Alessandrini the last few days, and it’s crazy because he’s a fool, in this way, to think that he’s making like futuristic fonts. But for him, it’s not fantasy, it’s like he’s working for the world.

And I think it’s almost always a guy behind this way of thinking. Like the Swiss style, these universal fonts and wanting that everybody can read it, that it will work for everybody behind these pseudo-neutral fonts. It’s always men speaking about this vision, very masculine and very crazy in thinking that they’ll make it for everybody.

It’s not possible. It doesn’t exist, because using these fonts is also political. Choosing to do something a 100% neutral by using the Swiss style is political, it’s a choice. I don’t say that I don’t like Helvetica, I like sans-serif fonts, I use it and I’m also drawing sans-serif fonts. I always try to twist it with something, you can use a sans-serif font but with a color. The lettering I made for Simone Lextrait for example is a sans-serif but with a touch of art-nouveau. There’s always a way to not be neutral.

I just have a last question and it’s about the frame of school. When we had the first conversation, you talked about how your work was perceived in school, and now that you’re a teacher, I’m curious to know how you teach and how you tackle these questions in school.

Yes, me and my friend were considered the black sheeps. We weren’t considered good students because we weren’t into the Swiss style and nice grid. My teachers were only men. There were ten, and it was nine men. It was very sexist, because the atmosphere of the class was like “if you’re a girl you didn’t exist”. And my work was too close to art and not enough graphic design to be judged as design. For my first diploma, the jury said thank you so much for making it very singular, but we don’t know if we if we can give you a diploma because it’s not graphic design, it’s art, so we can’t judge it. So there was a certain definition about graphic design. That guy was Spassky Fisher, his studio is about neutralizing identities.

I was like okay, let’s find a way to make my art legible, so I made typography to please everybody. And now I make structures because I think that I prefer it. But it was a long way. My friend Roxanne Maillet was the same. It was too messy to be “good” graphic design, because graphic design was always about using a grid. So it also wasn’t a good use of the tools of the software. We weren’t good at micro-typography or typesetting. But we continued to do the same until today and we are happy. We learned how to be ourselves. The teachers weren’t happy at that time, but we stayed the same and it’s very nice to see the results now.

And now I’m also teaching graphic design. But what I like is to speak with my students who will never be graphic designers. I like to teach them how to love graphic design, but not by using software or explaining them how to do a good layout or how to use InDesign. I don’t teach InDesign, I teach to love graphic design.

In my class you start by writing a letter to someone, but from another planet. You imagine a world that could be in the future, in the past or present, maybe in fantasy, game or film. You write a letter to someone to explain where you are and that you found some interesting stuff in this special world. It’s an object containing text. During the three first classes they just have to write. They must imagine where they are, in what style this world would presents itself, the political surroundings, maybe even any resistance? It’s a very creative process. In the next step they start to design the object that they found. They have to be very precise with the fonts, etc. that they choose because it has to represent this world. Which color? Which material? Which objects?

They can choose to use Photoshop or InDesign or any other way of working, it’s very free. It makes the teaching very individual. I want them to feel confident with the idea of translation by graphic design. I want them to feel free and love it in how they use it. Instead of designing in a way which is very boring. If I would choose to give a class purely focused on using the program InDesign, they would be bored and probably hate me.

The last class is just a big performance. Where the students read their letters and show their object. Sometimes there’s people who are doing a song or a costume. Everybody activates their objects and its always a nice time to talk about the things you love.

And they are also doing a self-evaluation about what they thought they wanted to do and what they actually did what they would do different,… This year I invited my friend, Théo Casciani, a writer and not a graphic designer, to judge their work.

We made like, a presentation of our common work at the beginning of the process so they would know who we are and what we did together. It makes everything more comfortable for everybody because it’s not nice to have a judge that you don’t know.

My classes are usually very funny, and I have a nice relationship with my students. They know that graphic design is a free space of fun, identities, etc. Now they’re all very close and even want to have an exhibition together. They sent me a message thanking me and saying how they enjoyed their time and now we want to do a big dinner where everybody makes an object. Like someone can make a chandelier, someone else can make a table, … I’m happy that this notion of identity can reflect in the shape of an event, an objects or other types of work.

Can we see this last presentation? Is it public or …?

I would love to make it a public in my space in Paris or in a gallery. Also making a big dinner can be very cool. I think we will work on this next year to make like an exhibition.

Well, thank you so much for your time, we give you a last round of applause. It was truly inspiring. I think we need a bit of time to digest like it was extremely rich.

Thank you so much for the research and sharing. Bye-bye, take care!

Bye-bye!

Thank you for being here! You're here with us today as two members of the Velvetyne Type Foundry, a collective that's interested in typography and especially free to use typography and open source. I wanted to invite you because a lot of our students use your tools and your fonts. The topic of the assignment is about questioning the term neutrality which is often used in typography. The title of the assignment is “so-called neutral” and it's a series of lectures online. You are about to conclude the cycle of lectures; we welcomed Rietlanden Women's Office for the first lecture and the second one was Marie Mam Sai Bellier. You will be giving us the last presentation. Quentin Juhel is a graphic designer, a teacher and a developer. He is fascinated by the close relationship between technique and form and uses free or open source tools and programming to design hybrid graphic forms between paper and digital. He is interested in looking at new ways to create, whether for publishing, web design or communication projects. He spent some time in the ENSAD Research Laboratory developing his research about open-source tools and design. Today, he regularly organizes collaborative explorations in informal research groups, workshops and discussions such as PrePostPrint or Relearn and teaching is an essential part of his work. He's also part of the publishing project, Atelier TÉMÉRAIRE and since 2021 he has been part of the team of Velvetyne Type Foundry. On the right you have Raphaël Bastide. Who creates convivial instruments, pedagogic strategies, performances, sometimes objects and installations. He develops a particular interest in graphic, algorithmic and sound sequences through the creation of tools, programs, languages. He is a free software culture enthusiast and extends those values through experimental practices developed in collectives, such as valuating type something and PrePostPrint, experimental publishing. He lives and works in …Montreuil and teaches at Beaux-Arts de Paris and École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris. Tell us if there is more to add and what you think of so called neutrality.

Thank you for the introduction and the invitation as well. We are happy to be able to talk and discuss with you. More or less we will be going through the introduction of the collective “Velvetyne”, then we will talk a little bit about what it is that we want to release, and how do we do that. We will show you what our strategies are when we want to release something. (What are the criteria? Etc.) Then we will go through a couple of examples of fonts that are already on our font list and the website and how they kind of relate to the subject of neutrality, and maybe more specifically about readability. At the end we will try to speak about a workshop we didn't attend to *laughs* made by Océane Juvin and Jérémy, members that could not be here today.

Velvetyne is an association and collective dedicated to researching and disseminating typography and typeface creation, our effort manifests through collective creation, workshop, public engagements and the promotion of open, playful tools that embrace an inhibited approach to typography. Our editorial practice revolves around building a politically and artistically supported typographic universe, collaborating with diverse and engaged authors. Together, we give life to fonts and graphical objects under open license, allowing user modification and redistribution. Additionally, we explore unconventional paths, fostering transparency and inclusivity to make typeface creation more open and dynamic. We call ourselves Velvetyne Type since a few months because we tried to open a more global orientation.

We are used to releasing fonts only and we try to release some other non-font objects too. These can be articles, text, music, licenses, tools... We didn't want to get trapped into the font format for many reasons, so right now it's still an ongoing experimental project, but we really want to work on it more. This is the about page and we can see the four rules that show what you can do with this liberal software or open-source software, it is kind of the same. You can use it, modify it, redistribute it, and redistribute the modification of it. So as a font is half software, let's say, it applies to font format as well. So all the fonts that you can find on our website are free and have open source licenses, meaning you can use it for free, modify it for free and redistribute it for free. The collective exists for almost 12 years now, but we didn't invent the open-source license, that exists for almost 30 years now. The license that we use for the fonts is problematic. We don't like it, but we don't have the choice to change it (yet). It's problematic because it allows too much and especially it allows companies we don’t align with to use, share and distribute our fonts. And also the root of this license is an evangelistic association. So it's not really something we want to support, because it's not inclusive enough for us. Here you can see our catalog and there is not so much left actually. We released a lot more fonts, but recently we made a new website and did a “cleaning” of our list.

Yeah, we had a discussion about how big the catalog was and how it was not representing Velvetyne anymore, the political orientation or vision we have and we voted within the collective to see who wanted some fonts to retire and which fonts it would be. Some of them we took away because they were too cliché or too old, in the way that they didn’t represent our aesthetics anymore. I think we removed about 39 fonts or maybe a little bit more. We also did not want it to be a big collection of free fonts like Google Fonts or Dafont, open font library.

We think the position of having an editorial statement means also being able to remove things from the façade of Velvetyne, which for us is mainly the website, it was a bit hard and it was a bit tricky to tell our invited designers that their font, that stayed on the front page for over 10 years got removed. But I think that it’s for the best and we are happy to have a small but cool list of fonts representing the collective as it is. And when I think about neutrality, it's a really non-neutral move to do this. It was not that fluid and easy for us. It was really about discussions, voting, and argumenting, but we managed and I think everybody's happy with the results. Some of us did this workshop last August to work and discuss new licenses because of the issues we have with the current free software license we use on the website. And also to discuss the collective itself. It's kind of hard to discuss in real life because members are spread through Europe. Germany, Brussels, Paris, The Alps,… It helps a lot to gather and to discuss in real time, to spend time together, eating, preparing food.

Here you see some of us during Format in Strasbourg, which is a publishing fest. The second year we were invited and we got plenty of goodies *laughs*. We really love to use our font to create t-shirts, books, napkins and really funny stuff. You can also see a flag with the old typefaces which are not on the website anymore since a long time ago.

So we do events and workshops. This was the release of the new website in Montreuil close by and it was really fun. It was really nice to meet some of our users and fans. There are lots of younger and motivated members who love doing workshops here and there. This was one of them that resulted in pancakes and napkins.

It's for the release of the ‘PicNic’ font by Mariel Nils. She’s really into doing workshops and meeting people, which is really nice because we want Velvetyne to be close to people and fans.

‘PicNic’ is also really inclusive, because of the use of ligatures to represent everyone.

Mariel works together with Bye Bye Binary which is currently working on this idea of creating a new glyph to include all people; male, female and also nonbinary people. And there is a lot of fonts in the Velvetyne library that are inclusive. It’s a fight with the conservative people who are saying that it’s not readable for people. I think it's an interesting question about legibility and readability. There is no scientific proof that says it is legible for people to read these kinds of glyphs, but some people in the Académie Française find it “very difficult to read.”

What you can see here in this demo is a font we made for the website which is the Velvetyne font called Velveline. It is not released yet, but it will be, so stay connected *laughs*. We can maybe make a subtle bridge here to what and how we release within Velvetyne? We made some rules for ourselves to be able to pick what we are going to release and what not. Because usually what happens is that people come to us through mail, for instance, and say: “Hey, I have this project and I would like to collaborate with you and to have it released as a Velvetyne font.” We receive mails like that on a regular basis, maybe one or two, maybe three or five a month, sometimes one a week. But it's kind of rare that we would say yes, because it depends on our current state of releases. It has to be something that doesn't exist yet, like for instance we have a lot of submissions with pixel fonts, but we already have a couple of those fonts and we don't feel like we want to focus on that anymore.

We can’t say no just because it doesn't fit with the current mood of the collection. There are also three other aspects we want to focus on. Firstly the font should have a strong concept, meaning not just a visual. It can be unstable visually or it can not fit into what is seen as qualitative in the industry. We don't really care about that, because then it can lead to a collaboration between us as a collective and the person who is asking. We have lots of knowledge in the collective, especially font engineering, so we are able to help in the development of a project. Of course, the project should have been developed in the first place, but we can help to finish it and to focus on things we think are interesting.

Second; a challenge for the user. We don't want to have soft typography and we would like it to be a bit challenging. It can be conceptually formal, it can be fun as well, it can be humorous. It can also be a pretext to talk about something else, like, for instance, political things, cultural niche, or subcultures. JGS Font is a good way to illustrate it. It’s a font made for ASCII art, everything is connected, centered and made to make drawings. So you can see that the glyphs connect pretty well. GJS was made by Adel Faure and released two years ago.

This font is also a tribute to the artist Joan G. Stark. As you can see, I am scrolling through an article that Adel wrote. It briefly goes through the history of ASCII art and I think that's the way we want to release fonts. Here you can see that the design itself is made to be perfectly compatible with the drawing grid.

So that was the 2nd rule and the third is a good story, and I think it's connected to what I said. GJS, has a story, but the font itself can also tell a good story, for example, “resistance” is a font which was made during a workshop organized by Velvetyne together with the students of the école National des Arts Décoratifs. The “I” is really weird because due to the very specific constraints of the collaborative work. We used a tool, that was really incomplete at the time, but we did that on purpose, called “glypher”. It's a free online software tool that still exist and now it's much more complete. It was really fun to collaborate on the font together, but obviously the collaboration aspect had huge impact on the final. We loved it so much, we were pretty proud of the final results.

It was really, really fun and also really political, because at the time, in 2016, it was a huge year for political fights like Nuit Debout: the occupation of République Place in Paris. I think it’s closely related to the idea of Velvetyne promoting or questioning fonts and collective works for supporting or for archiving these political fights.

To finish the last rule, the good story, as you may know making a font is very hard and takes a long time. So making a font with 10 or 20 hands, it's definitely more difficult than designing and making the decisions on your own, especially if you want to finish in five days. This is kind of a statement as well and that's the good-story-aspect of it.

Just to finish with the ‘in use’, there is this ‘in use’ tab on the website showing all the things people made with our fonts. You can also upload your own work, if you design something with our fonts, you can just submit your image here.

Yeah, we curate the ‘in use’, just to avoid it being spammed. You can see we are used by a lot of different people, which can be very institutional like a Parisian mayor or political groups, students, but also companies that sell shoes or perfumes for example. Velvetyne is also used by a famous artist, like Beyoncé who used one of our fonts once for her French tour.

So this next font is ‘Kaeru Kaeru’, which was made by Isabel Motz during a workshop with Jérémy Landes in HfG Karlsruhe. The workshop was led by Jérémy, who is a member of Velvetyne since the beginning of the collective. Jérémy decided to make the student work with inspiring illustrations and make a font face out of it. I think the origin of Kaeru Kaeru was inspired by a frog named Kaeru Kaeru. So this is another example of a workshop that leads to a point that we decide to release the font. With the help of the designer of course. It's kind of legible to me, but it flirts with the non-legible, especially in a bigger size.

Also in a longer text, it's more difficult to see actual words and it can be a good challenge for the user to use it.

We have within the collection different shades of legibility, and this is one of it. Half legible? Depending on the font size or title fonts which can be used as body text fonts. There are other projects like ‘mess’, which may be the most unreadable font we have on the website. You cannot see if the words are written right, but if you copy and paste the text in another font, you can read it.

The first time you’ll look at it, you can't see or imagine what it says. It's a way of working with hiding of a message to people. It's really interesting because it's really organic and it has a lot of gestures, almost calligraphic works.

Maybe we can talk a bit about Fungal. When the user makes a modification, which is not part of the main idea of the project, let's say a software or a font, it's called a fork. So it's like a derivation from the main branch and we love forks at Velvetyne because it's a way to embody the free software.

A fork, in my opinion, is also very historical. I think behind the idea of forking fonts it's not only fun, but also very deeply rooted in the history of type creation. You can see a fork of the Linux distribution for example. We are really interested in these new typefaces and we want to promote it in the new generation of Velvetyne.

So back to fungal. Fungal is a fork of ‘DejaVu sans’. DejaVu sans looks like that one, more or less. It’s a Linux system font which is kind of boring, but it's really functional. It was supposed to be used on LibreOffice at the time it was Openoffice, I think, but also for interfaces like the Windows system. It's a design that is optimized for the large audience and efficiency in terms of legibility. We decided to take font as a base, ‘we’ as in myself and Jeremy. I asked Jeremy to help me with the technical details and we went through a really quick process of collaboration to achieve this variable font design. So this is Fungals’ variability; there is 2 axis, the thickness and the growth the legible aspect of it enters when the font is fully covered by this organic biomorphic ornament, which was a wish from the beginning. I wanted to make a really ornamental font with something a bit brutalists. Because the origin of this project was a Wikipedia-article-project. It's a web art project that led to a zine as well. The font was made especially for this project and we knew from the beginning, that it would be released on Velvetyne later. So here you can see the spread of the font, but also the figures. The longer you stay on this website, the more you can see that figures, fonts and also the Wikipedia logo are spreading. In the end, the article is not legible anymore. When I scroll to the bottom of this project, you can see that there is small description and a pretext about Wikipedia, it was a tribute So sometimes we collaborate as core members, but it's we try to leave the space for let's say non-core members, people who want to collaborate with us.

We can also talk about ouvrières, which is a good example of someone who proposed a fonts with a simple idea at the beginning. It’s an ant-inspired typeface. Laure Azizi came to us with this idea of a variable font, where you can see a very organized ants create a glyph and you can play with the variables to make it messier. We proposed her to work on it for a bit longer, to come closer to the actual nature of ants, which include different sizes, a queen, fighters, workers, etc. When I comes to transporting food, searching food or building constructions, the colonies organize themselves and get every ant to work in line. It’s almost an illustration of their way of working, it’s funny. It was as we explained at the beginning, a proposal of a font which isn’t fully stable. Laure came with this idea almost a year ago and we began to help her technically to make this font and the idea usable. Especially for variable fonts it can be tricky to make it usable for every website. And this is a good representation of the idea of a mixing legible and illegible fonts. Before there were in the history of typefaces different weights and different styles like Italics, bolds, lights,.. and now with the concept of variable front you can really change the way you draw and use these fonts. You’re able to make hybrid and free typeface, which is interesting. This font is a perfect example of it, yes.

That's our last release.

At Velvetyne we received some questions about if the typefaces are accessible in underrepresented scripts like Cyrillic. Here you can see a font drawn by Walid Bouchouchi, who is a Algerian, and in Algeria you use the script called Tifinagh. Tifinagh is a combination between the glyphs which are accessible on your computer, and French and Arabic words. There is no existing typeface which gives the possibility to use Tifinagh. But since few years there are type designers trying to write or draw fonts that can use this script language. It's now beginning to be indexed in the Unicode and in Velvetyne we really want to make our fonts accessible and legible in different languages. We've got the Tifinagh, Cyrillic and, I don't know if it's still published already, but there is a Vietnamese typedesigner working on the Vietnamese glyph support. I think it's also a good way to talk about legibility or being a neutral or non-neutral type foundry. It’s not about selling our fonts or distributing and becoming famous, but to have fonts accessible to minorities, we want to give them a place in Velvetyne. Here you can see the Tifinagh grotesk version. Grotesk is a typeface created by Frank Adebiaye, the founder of Velvetyne. It can be used by Algerian people.

It’s important to say that we also update our font catalogue. For instance, this project has been updated at least two times. So there is this small, network for each font that has been updated showing the previous versions and this one is linear, but it’s often not. At the beginning of the project no lower case, only an upper case. And in the next version of it includes the glyphs we talked about. For instance, Ariel Martin Perez, who is a member of Velvetyne, made a lot of updates like that for his own fonts, but also for font designs from other people. And that's really something super nice I think to have a font that is able to evolve and having it's identity getting changed through time. Accepting multiple languages and writing systems. We can maybe talk quickly about this last project. ‘unstable signs’ was a workshop led by Jérémy ‘and Ocean, so that's not us *laughs*. It was in 2020 at the Basel Art School. It talks about the stabilization of the current language we use in Latin countries and how to go back to unstable signs. That was the goal for this workshop. “unstable signs as radical tools” by Anja Kaiser and Garrett Nelson was the base-resource. It was during the pandemic, so it was online and they asked the students to come with objects that brought them peace. So, as you can see there are multiple different objects or matters. From that object they started designing fonts. They went through wild graphic decisions, and it was apparently super rich. It was raising the question of the problematics of the sign and legibility, recognizability. They explored the gray zone between abstraction and representation, novelty and habits, meaningfulness and meaninglessness. A last word about communication, We are present on Mastodon, which is a free, decentralized social network. We are quite active there and there is a whole community following us already, so do not hesitate to create an account because it's a nontoxic place to communicate. For people who don't want to use Mastodon, we are not anymore on Instagram.

I have tons of questions and remarks. In this last workshop that you showed, there's this idea of coming back to how fonts design was less canonic or was less made of rules, and the shapes themselves become more organic and I wanted you to come back a bit on the question of the unicode table, which I believe is also something that is restraining in a way. Could you maybe explain to the students what this Unicode table exactly is and how it's kind of framing the making and distributing of fonts.

To use a font, the computer has the know where the font is registered in the code and to do this we use what we call a Unicode table. It’s an organization which exists of glyphs organized into a big table. Each glyph has it’s code, referencing all the scripting languages. As you know, they are critical about who decides where these fonts are located in this table. I know there are a lot of complaints from the people from Africa and Asia saying that it’s missing some glyphs for their languages. It’s a huge discussion, but it's also questioning the standardization of the language. It's really tricky.

Isn't it kind of paradoxical? Wanting everyone to be able to spread fonts language and talk, but still within a certain set of rules, with the question of who made those rules and who were they made for in the 1st place? Do you have a specific rule for the tools which are used to make your fonts?

No, we don't and we don't want to. Since the beginning we have been really interested in free software tools like FontForge for example, which was one of the only professional graded good character design tool. Now it's not anymore really. I personally use that one to make fonts because I choose to work only with free software, but I think it's really important to leave the door of the tools open to have different, graphic signatures for every project. People come with their own tools and as long as the font itself is free I think it's nice to have a diversity of tools, even if they are not free software. In a pedagogic context it is a really bad thing to constraint the tools because the 3-4-5 years after school is an intense, technical and conceptual research time. We really want to be open to young designers, people who are still in school and also people who are not part of the design academic system. We can totally accept fonts made by amateurs and we don't want the tool choice to be a constraint. In the context of workshops, we like to invent our own tools or to take tools that are really weird but suited for the workshop thematics.

Yes, we've got an ongoing discussion; since the last two or three months there is the question of wether paying for the Glyphs program for two members of Velvetyne. I know there is no correct answer or solution for this question because some of us are not OK with paying for some proprietary software.

There is something we didn't say when we talked about the criteria for new fonts and that's quite important in my opinion, we try to release fonts that are not commercially compatible. We had some bangers on Velvetyne and we don't want to do that anymore because if it works too well and it's used by big advertising companies, it's not a good sign for us. We want to make stuff that can't exist in a commercial context, because we want to leave the space for other projects. It’s a bit the same for tools, I think our foundry crystallized lots of different tools used for fontmaking. It can be algorithmic, it can be a self made tool, it can be glyphs, fontlab or fontforge, it can be weird online tools,… We have a page on the website with tools.

That sounds like you've answered everything.

Can I add something really quick?

Of course.

Recently we made this page, it’s an article written by Quentin called ‘Velvetyne Libre Friends’. Velvetyne is used a lot in context, especially art school context and we wanted to take the opportunity of the visibility that we have, to showcase other interesting foundries or font collections. So on Velvetyne Libre Friend, you can have access to a list with really cool other projects like the bye bye binary foundry, Badass Libre Fonts by Womxn,…

I wanted to thank you to show us that fonts are also vessels. Of course, there are vessels for texts, but they're also vessels and pretexts for conversations or events that kind of support communities and they are also bags carrying a lot of other things with them. I think it's really important that foundries like yours continue the work of keeping this side of the fonts making, fonts using and font distributing, because there is this tendency and a pressure of making things and tools that should be efficient, and I think sometimes no low-efficiency is also a fruitful and interesting and maybe slower or maybe it works less well, but it can be poetic and beautiful. So thank you so much for the time, energy and content.

Thank you for listening to us, it was a pleasure.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Thanks.