Appearances

16 MAY 2013

Paul Barnes speaking at TypoBerlin 2013: Touch

16-18 May 2013
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures), John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, Berlin
Tickets from €550 (€279 for students)

Paul will be speaking at this year's TypoBerlin, the beloved international design conference. This year's theme is Touch, and more information is available at the conference website.

21 MARCH 2013

Christian Schwartz speaking at Typocracia 10

Workshop Details TBA.
Conference 21-23 March 2013
Mackenzie University, São Paulo
Tickets from R$ 330. ($280 for students and members)

Christian will be speaking at Typocracia 10 in São Paulo, Brazil, and will also be teaching a one-day workshop on magazine logotypes. More information is available on the conference site (Portuguese only for now).

07 MARCH 2013

Paul speaking in Plymouth

Closed to the public.

Paul Barnes will be speaking to Graphic Design Students at the Faculty of Arts, Plymouth University on 7 March at 4PM. He will talking about his graphic design work, type design and the Commercial Type.

05 MARCH 2013

Paul Barnes lecturing in Copenhagen

5 March at 17:30 at HK grafisk kommunikation Hovedstaden, Svend Aukens Plads 11.
6 March at 18:00 at Kontrapunkt, Nikolaj Plads 2. Open to the public

On 5 March, 2013, Paul will be speaking about his general design work and Commercial Type in Copenhagen at the HK Grafisk Kommunication. More information can be found at the school's website.

Then on 6 March 2013, Paul will speak at Danish Faces with Trine Rask of Kontrapunkt. More information can be found at a facebook page that has been set up for the event.

23 FEBRUARY 2013

Paul Barnes lecturing at "Tell me about editorial design!"

23-24 February 2013
"Tell me about editorial design!"
Literaturhaus München, Salvatorplatz 1, München

Paul will be lecturing on making typefaces for newspapers and magazines at a conference on editorial design in Munich, fittingly called "Tell me about editorial design!". More information can be found on the conference site.

20 FEBRUARY 2013

Paul Barnes in Lyon for a workshop and lecture

20-21 February 2013.
École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon

Paul will be teaching a workshop at Ecole Nationale Superieure Des Beaux Arts Will deliver “You can’t repeat the past”. More information can be found on a facebook page for the lecture series.

Updates

17 FEBRUARY 2013 | CUSTOM TYPEFACES | PUBLICATIONS

Schnyder for T, the New York Times Style Magazine

Berton Hasebe and Christian Schwartz have designed Schnyder, a new serif display typeface, for the 2013 top-to-bottom redesign of T, the New York Times Style Magazine under new editor in chief Deborah Needleman and creative director Patrick Li and his team of Shawn Carney, Aurelie Pellissier, and Natalie Do. Between Hasebe and Schwartz, this is their sixth custom typeface project for T, but the first they've co-designed.

The initial jumping off point for the design was a piece of pointed pen lettering from Switzerland, recently acquired by Li, which was quite precise in its thick and thin strokes, but had organic and unusual structures for invidvidual letters and great variations in character widths from line to line. Schnyder features two weights, a Light and a Bold, in 3 widths. The stem weights in each weight are identical across the widths, an unusual feature that allows the widths to be mixed freely in headlines, even within single words. Certain characters were given a large number of alternates, allowing the headlines to feel even more like lettering rather than set type. The lowercase draws from German typefaces popular in the the early 1900s. This typeface tests the limits of gravure printing, and has four optical sizes to ensure that its thin strokes can be thin as possible at each size without falling apart.

The type palette is rounded out by Graphik in its regular width and a couple of styles from the X Condensed width. Lyon Text has been replaced as the text face with Imperial, the text face used in the newspaper's main news sections. We found this to be a bold and inspired choice that accentuates the elegance and quirkiness of Schnyder.

21 JANUARY 2013 | PUBLICATIONS | LETTERING

Custom lettering for Bon Appétit

Christian Schwartz drew a Fellini-esque 7 and handful of ornaments for the cover story on 7 great pasta dishes from brilliant New York chef Sara Jenkins (chef and owner of one of the studio's favorite restaurants, Porsena), for the February issue of Bon Appetit. Art director Elizabeth Spiridakis used xlyene transfers to give a warm and organic quality to all of the display type in the story.

08 JANUARY 2013 | NEWSPAPERS | CUSTOM TYPEFACES | PUBLICATIONS

3 new families for Helsingin Sanomat

Helsingin Sanomat is Finland's major daily newspaper, with a circulation of around 400,000 on weekdays. A broadsheet since its founding in 1905, the paper made the switch to tabloid format on 8 January 2013. We provided all of the type for the new design: Sanomat, a serif family for headlines in 8 weights, designed by Paul Barnes with Berton Hasebe; Helsingin, a sans family for display use in 9 weights, designed by Christian Schwartz and Vincent Chan; Helsingin Text in 6 weights, for captions, sidebars, info graphics, maps, and listings; and text is in a custom grade of Publico Text which has been fine-tuned for the Helsingin Sanomat's presses. The redesign was conceptualized and executed internally, headed up by group creative director Sami Valtere along with art directors Hannu Pulkkinen and Ari Kinnari.

The tabloid layouts are built on a strong grid of square elements. Sanomat is designed to play against this, with organic forms that warm up the coldness and precision of the underlying page structure. Sanomat is an unusual hybrid: a serif face with flared sans terminals, influenced by 'serifless romans' like Optima and Albertus. The sans influence is even more visible in the italics, which lose almost all of their serifs in the lowercase. This almost inscriptional quality helps the typeface look serious and decidedly upscale—very important traits in maintaining the feel of a quality broadsheet in the tabloid format. The serifs are quite short, particularly on the diagonal characters, because of the preponderance of 'vv' and 'yy' pairs in Finnish. The word for 'goodness', hyvyys, is a good example of diagonal-diagonal combinations. The debut issue of the redesign featured a section explaining the new format, with all of the Sanomat headlines painstaking recreated in felt-tipped marker by the creative director.

Helsingin is a fairly straighforward geometric sans serif, tempering the quirkiness of Sanomat. The pointy terminals reference the iconic geometric architectural lettering in Helsinki's main square, close to the Helsingin Sanomat's offices. To counter the potentially monotonous texture caused by the many repeating letters in Finnish words, we made the bowls a little asymmetrical, more like a humanist sans than a typical geometric. In addition to the newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat has two very popular additional publications: a monthly magazine called Kuukausiliite and a weekly entertainment and nightlife magazine called Nyt. The design of these had evolved in very different directions from the daily paper and from one another. One aim of the redesign effort is to coordinate the design of all of the print products more closely, while still allowing each to keep its individual personality. The wide range of weights in the Helsingin family grew directly out of this aim: punchy bold weights for the younger readership of Nyt and elegant thin weights for the more literary flavor of Kuukausiliite. Additionally, a set of alternates allows the family to be even more flexible.

The new typefaces have debuted in the 8 January edition of Helsingin Sanomat, and will make their way into the magazines, mobile apps, and website soon.

While we did discuss redrawing the nameplate, it was ultimately deemed to be untouchable. There's no other newspaper nameplate like it in the world, and we wouldn't have wanted to ruin it.

02 JANUARY 2013 | CUSTOM TYPEFACES | PUBLICATIONS

A rounded sans revival for Bloomberg Businessweek

Paul Barnes's revival of a rounded sans serif originally produced by the Caslon foundry around 1839 provides levity in a special issue on investing, the final edition of Bloomberg Businessweek for 2012.