Understanding and Experiencing the Designspace
with
Hannes Famira
In this course we will examine type design from a viewpoint that offers an alternative to the historical model of categorization. Inspired by Gerrit Noordzij’s teachings we will explore the design space in closely guided sketching sessions. At the end of this hands-on workshop the students will have created a number of possible starting points for personal typeface design projects and understand the choices available to them. In order to confidently engage the design process a type designer has to be aware of the entire theoretical room of possible letterforms she is navigating. Only a profound understanding of the multi-dimensional design space as a concept and the most important extrema therin will enable the type designer to make design choices that go beyond elaborating on historical letterforms and instead create truly unique typefaces. On the journey through the certificate program this course is located at the end of basic training and offers an entry into a personal typeface design. Basic experience in writing with the pointed nib as well as the broad nib pen is required.
About Hannes Famira
Hannes Famira is founding principal of FamiraFonts. He is a graphic designer, a type designer and a teacher of both disciplines. After 20 years in the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland he now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
His library of retail typefaces is available from Adobe Fonts, Type Network and I Love Typography. You can see work in progress at Dribbble. Companies like Céline, Helmut Lang, GoDaddy, Mansur Gavriel and Theory have commissioned custom tailored logo and corporate typeface solutions. Most recently Hannes drew a typeface for the opening titles of the AMC television show Interview With The Vampire.
Hannes’ understanding of type comes mostly out of his Dutch design education at the Royal Academy in The Hague (KABK). With a painter for a mother and neo-modernist architect for a father his earliest influences are based in a love for Scandinavian and traditional Japanese design. Combining the freedom of painting with the structured thinking of architecture seems to have quite naturally led him to type design at the center of his creative work.
After having worked at Meta Design, at the Buro Petr van Blokland and at House Industries Hannes started his own design studio Das Kombinat in 1999. He added Kombinat-Typefounders in 2001 and renamed it FamiraFonts in 2016.
An ongoing practice of teaching type has been the most formative influence on Hannes’ thinking since his years as a student at KABK. He has been teaching in the Type@Cooper Extended and Condensed programs at the The Cooper Union since January 2011. Currently holds the Stuckeman Professorship in Interdisciplinary Design at Penn State University. Hannes also taught various typography and type design classes at the Basel School for Design in Switzerland, at The Cooper Union New York City, SVA the School of Visual Arts, the UArts in Philadelphia, the New Jersey City University, the Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaft und Kunst Hildesheim/Holzminden/Göttingen, the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Rutgers University and the City University of New York.