Serebro Nabora is an annual international type conference held in Moscow. Today’s graphic designers are clamoring for typographic knowledge. Serebro Nabora came to address this problem.
The first annual Serebro Nabora conference was attended by participants from every part of Russia and the neighbouring countries.It proved a resounding success and became one of the most significant events for the local design community. The need for a setting for typographic learning combined with social interaction among graphic design professionals was so palpable that the idea immediately took hold.
The venue quickly became the social centre for the graphic design professionals of Russia and other countries of the former USSR. Type designers, graphic designers, calligraphers, and anyone interested in typography found an avenue of professional exchange and a memorable occasion to get together at the conference. In 2013, the Conference became international in scope, with speakers and audience hailing from around the world.
Veteran sign painter John Downer will show how to form single stroke “block” capitals with a flat brush, and teach students various lettering techniques that were practiced commercially in 20th-century America. Using the best exemplars, workshop participants will learn the 12 foundation strokes needed to form sans serif majuscules. In addition, students will be afforded an opportunity to draw their own control characters, and render them with a brush, for potential use in an original typeface.
Novadays, the problem “We have no Cyrillic fonts at all” is more or less solved. So another problem comes to the front row: what extra information do we tell our reader by choosing one or another typeface?
That’s what the presentation is about. What details in Cyrillic are most important for creating certain effect? How does the classification and history of type influence on the perception of typefaces today? How can we bring some more emotions into Cyrillic without moving far away from traditional letterforms? A working hypothesis and some recent experiments devoted to that.
What is the origin of the beautiful swash letters on many cafés windows across Amsterdam? Who painted them? How old is the style in which they were painted? Do they belong an existing Amsterdam graphic tradition? And what are the links with the writing masters from the Dutch Golden Age?
Ramiro Espinoza interviewed sign painters and their families, investigated photo collections at the Amsterdam City Archives and gathered investigated to answer the key questions surrounding this relatively unknown part of the Dutch popular graphic culture and to stimulate awareness of its cultural relevance.
Banners, headings and titles of periodicals, book covers and title-pages, packing and labels, logos of manufactured goods, movie subtitles, signboards and facade designs… About unique inscriptions created by the hands of numerous designers of the last century; about modern interpretations of that original and almost forgotten style — with examples from personal experience.
The talk is devoted to the ways of how should be arranged the transfer of the rights to fonts and how it shouldn’t be done. It will disclose the known types of agreements on intellectual property rights to fonts and problematic aspects of the relationship of authors with their employers about the created fonts.
Christian Schwartz will discuss how previous technologies shaped the most common news text faces of the 19th and 20th centuries, and how contemporary designers can use readers’ feelings about the aesthetic imposed by these limitations to our advantage. He’ll also discuss how the unique qualities of the Finnish language, newsroom consolidation, and British vs. American taste have shaped some of the newspaper headline types he and his team have worked on.
A talk about collecting, writing, books, radio, mistakes, love, fear, friends, type, the universe, the netherlands, being foreign, the studio, money, obsession, color, memory, control, poetry and design.
Exploring the rules accepted by most designers as inviolable laws of typography, one can know whether they are really inviolable or are due only to the technologies of the past and can be considered now but as mere typographical tradition. The lecturer will cast some doubts upon the typometric system as well as upon the classical idea of book margins and will protest against the decreasing of neutrality in newly designed typefaces.
It’s time to retire the notion of “web typography” as a special case with its own rules. To me, it’s all typography, just with different aspects to keep in mind depending on the task and production method. The screen is just another medium with its inherent circumstances to be taken into account, in the same way we do when designing for silkscreen printed exhibition banners, or digitally printed books. In this talk, I want to shift the attention to the specifics of typography for different kinds of reading and different content, as well as the main typographic pitfalls and specific to type on screen, like resolution, rendering, or reading distance.
Type design consists of drawing, spacing and production. Drawing is a task shared by all graphic professionals who have a basic box of tools at their disposal: Bézier nodes, handles and segments. Illustrators and architects also have additional tools, dedicated to the way they draw: colors, gradients, arcs, angles. FontLab VI introduces many new drawing tools that are dedicated specifically to type design, and that allow you to focus on drawing better type faster.
In the beginning was the word. Then came the writing, almost universal way to convey a message in a sustainable way, a thought, an emotion. There is nothing better that writing to visualize something abstract. Designers use writing as a tool to bring the imaginary to the real world. Even as typography has long been understood as the heart of graphic design, it perfectly emphasizes the adage that good design is a design that is not seen. For most readers, typefaces are neither understood nor effectively analyzed but only interpreted (often instinctively) as a tool that supports the reading, despite its omnipresence around us and constantly renewed use. Yet that design work remains transparent to the public. So how does one develop something that is invisible?
How to present architecture in book-form. How to present architecture on a website. A website as a book with variable page width. Playful analogies and value.
Presented Projects (among others): Kerez, Miller & Maranta, Trans magazine, A-Typical Plan, Space of Production, Barao Hutter.
A retrospective look at the history of American lettering for commercial purposes, especially outdoors, will be presented by Master Sign Painter, John Downer. The images will document important developments and changes in the trade, decade by decade.
Due to the increased interest in type culture in Russia several new type foundries and independent designers emerged during the last year. The exhibition will feature the latest works of the best type designers and foundries in Russia. You will have a chance to acquaint yourself with their creativity and the latest trends in type design.
Curator Olga Pankova
Day 1st
The brief history of Cyrillic.
Writing Cyrillic with the broad-nib and pointed pen.
Day 2nd
The pecularities of Cyrillic. The common and the differences between Cyrillic and Latin. Glyph shapes and their variations. The principles of determining the width of characters. Uppercase and lowercase, upright and italic faces in Cyrillic.
Overview of fine and poor solutions in Cyrillic, focused on most complicated characters.
City walk and analysis of the street typography, both professional and vernacular.
Day 3rd
Designing one’s own Cyrillic (either for existing one’s typeface or from scratch).
The participants may send samples of their Cyrillic in advance to get comments at the workshop.
