procrastination

daily drawings on black board, enamel marker, 30 x 40 cm

squash typeface

My task is quite simple: Get a tool and use it for a graphic purpose. 

In a thrift shop nearby I found that old wooden squash racket which is already a beauty by itself. The strings form an interesting grid where its' interspace can be seen as pixels, perfectly convenient to create images or animations. As my focus is on typography for this semester I chose to create a typeface and name it squash.

squash has two versions which differ in the scatter of the pixels. Version one uses every possible pixel, version two skips one pixel and more or less forms a package of four rectangles and treats it as one.

The second version came up before the first one, which is smoother and more elegant. In between I made a stop motion animation consisting of about 2000 frames which are manually edited. The sound comes from an extract of a squash game recording where I filtered out the ball hits and adjusted them to fit the movement of the letters.

The typeface will be available to download as a ttf file on my blog by the end of the semester.

BERLIN

Last week I was on a trip to Berlin with a few friends, visited some great exhibitions (among others Ai Weiweis' "Evidence") and just enjoyed the time together; a great place to dive away from every-day-life. Finally I really didn't want to leave, which inspired me to make a poster. The background is made from copies of the last train ticket I bought in Berlin - and as you always need to stamp the ticket before taking the train, I made the letters with a stamp, enlarged them and finally rasterized everything for the silk screen.

The text is a quote from the childrens book "Pünktchen und Anton", written in 1930 by Erich Kästner. The story takes place in Berlin and the citation means something like "Pünktchen, Come on! - But I can't! - Why not? - Beacause I'm so happy right now!"

silkscreen print, 50 x 70 cm

data place // aan de slag

In my project Data Place I focussed on the typography on Arnhem's weekly market. To get myself into it I improved my hand lettering and redesigned a market sign. After going through every single market stand and analyzing its signs I came to know that there is basically one guy walking around the market every now and then to write signs for the sellers on the spot, Henry van der Horst. His idea of working seems to be perfectly adjusted to the markets conditions. People don't need to order the plates and wait for them - instead they tell him directly what their offers are and within minutes they got their signs ready. 
But I have another idea how this could be simplified. Why not letting people make their signs on their own with a generally customized, market orientated stencil kit? 
My job for the upcoming weeks is to analyze the markets corporate identity, think about a solution how I can summarize all 'typefaces' that are given into a single one - and finally translate it to a stencil version that will be laser cut from plastic, wood or metal.

acrylic paint on wood, 30 x 30 cm