Typographic designer and researcher Karin von Ompteda is the subject of our next Handmade Type Workshop contributor Q&A. Read on to find out what inspires her work and what the future holds..
What led you to making ‘handmade type’?
I think at the time there was something in the air – a certain zeitgeist had begun. As well I was early on in design school and had that ever so common epiphany: type is everywhere! I began to see letters in everything and it was only a matter of time until I designed my first font.
What are your favourite materials to use?
Anything! That’s the joy of found type. The only constants are my camera and scanner. That being said I suppose I am drawn toward the repulsive — there is a certain satisfaction in transforming something off-putting into something that people want to look at, and might even find aesthetic pleasure in.
What (or who) inspires your work?
I am inspired by the complexities of legibility. When one engages in found type projects, one invariably has to ask themselves over and over again: what is it about an ‘a’ that makes it an ‘a,’ etc. The designer is challenged to intuitively discern the features necessary for their audience to recognize a letter as the one intended. This kind of work is invariably analytical as well it requires a good deal of mental flexibility. When I am in pursuit of a letter, there is a lot of rotate/reflect/crop going on in my mind — I may come across the perfect ‘a’ but it might be upside down and backwards! One also learns quickly that the legibility of a letterform is context-dependent, in that as long as most of the letters in a word are legible, the designer can often get away with highly illegible forms. Personally, I have found the desire to complete an alphabet all consuming — depending on the material chosen, there will always be a few characters that pose a serious challenge, and finding them is exceptionally satisfying. Overall the work is propelled by pure obsession as well as the desire to create some marriage between rigor and absurdity.
There seems to be a trend for all things handmade in design at the moment, why do you think this is?
I think the values of craft will always run alongside the development of new technologies, sometimes coming to the forefront as they are now, but always a part of the landscape. Why now? Maybe it’s because everything we do becomes pixels at some point — no matter how we make what we make. So many of us experience projects for the first time on a blog or website, and even books and magazines are prints of digital images. I think people have a desire to know that definitely, 100%, no doubt about it, someone’s hands physically played a role in the creation of this image. I think people are looking for a mark of something we identify as humanness.
What projects are you working on now and what does the future hold?
I’m currently a PhD researcher at the Royal College of Art and my work is focused on integrating scientific and design approaches to typeface legibility. In fact it was my early engagement with found type that first got me interested in legibility research. I’ve just completed a project that investigates the diversity of forms across some of the most important text typefaces — this work is being published in the next issue of Grafik. Also, I’ll be giving a talk on my research at TYPO London this coming October.
Get inspired with Karin’s tutorial in Handmade Type Workshop and discover more at karinvonompteda.com.
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