This workshop offers participants an opportunity to spend a day learning from and creating under the guidance of award-winning Barcelona typeface designer Laura Meseguer.

Goals

• To help participants to understand and practice the principles underlying the design of typefaces.
• Set the basis for creating a full alphabet in the future.
• Reflect on the role of typography in the field of identity and experience and the design of custom types, which all together can be understood as “type design as a tool for designers.”

Required Materials

• Drawing materials: pencil, white pencil and rubber
• Supports: white paper, graph paper, onion paper, acetate semi-rigid, black cardboard.
• Tools: Scalpel cutters, scissors, rulers, cutting surfaces.
• Other: Laptop (in case you want to go digital), photocopy machine, laser cut printer.

Exercise

We will design typographic characters to label a word, a message, or a logo that will serve to cut out stencils in a resistant material and paint or print them lately, as a poster or in a totebag. It can be solved manually and based on photocopies or with digital drawing.

Methodology

All participants will be expected to do preliminary research about stencil sentences or words found in the streets or in articles or catalogs. It will be important to have good frontal photos and bring the prints to the classroom. These will serve as starting point for the day’s project. From this material, we will extract the alphabets to work on and define the modules or parts, adapting the work process to each style.

Schedule (8 hours)

8:30 am – 9:00 am: Introduction
9:00 am – 12:30 pm: Drawing work
12:30 pm – 1:30 pm: Lunch break
1:30 pm:-4:00 pm: Drawing work and composition
4:00 pm – 4:30 pm: Presentation and exhibition

Participants

Participants will work in groups of 2 people, and do projects just by hand and photocopies, or by hand and computer – if so, the attendees need to be skilled in vector drawing design.

About Laura Meseguer

Laura Meseguer is an acclaimed freelance graphic and type designer based in Barcelona, who is part of the judging panel for our typeface design competition (TDC66). Her studio works for international and domestic clients, but she also works on self-initiated projects. As a typographer and type designer, she is an expert in carrying out custom lettering and type design for branding and publishing.

Laura designs and produce typefaces distributed through her own digital type foundry Type-Ø-Tones.  She is the author of TypoMag. Typography in Magazines, published by IndexBook. She is also involved with Alphabettes.org, a showcase for work and research on lettering, typography, and type design by women and has served a board member of the ATypI since 2017. Premio Gràffica 2018.

Laura often runs creative workshops (like this one) and teaches typography at the Master’s Degree in Editorial Design at Elisava and type design and lettering at Tipo.g, Typography School of Barcelona, which she founded.

Instagram: @laurameseguer

Twitter: @laurameseguer