In the past 5 years we have written and published some small booklets of the same size (11,5 x 19 cm). Mostly such a booklet accompanies a certain lecture. The booklet is an extension of that lecture, or telling the story of the lecture in a different way, and is distributed after the lecture to the audience. The booklets are easier to understand by those who have attended the lecture, but are certainly not limited to just this audience.

The pandemic threw a spanner in the works for the publication of these booklets. For some years, there were hardly any in-person lectures, so no corresponding printed materials either. But last year we produced another publication in the same series again (From Typography to Grammatography, PMS 309) for our lecture Homo Scriptus at the Printemps de la Typographie conference in Paris. (We did make other printed material outside this series during that period, like the Manicule specimen or the Plakato stencil set)

Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me anything?
This year saw the publication of the 10th volume in this series. The publication ‘Why doesn’t anybody ever tell me anything’ is aimed at type design students, and was published on the occasion of some of the educational activities we are undertaking this year. These include Sami teaching a type design workshop in Barcelona this summer (Signature moves, registration has just opened!), and Bas being an external jury at L’École supérieure d’art et de design in Amiens, or giving a type crit at Type Paris. We thought this would be a great opportunity to touch on some aspects of the practice of type design that are not always the first to be addressed, by writing a letter to aspiring type design students that contains lots of questions. This publication was published in collaboration with Uitgeverij de Buitenkant, and is therefore not limited to type design students of our workshops, but also available in regular bookshops.

▶ Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me anything?

Overview of 10 booklets, from left top to right bottom:
Font Fiction (Berlin, 2018)
The Tail of the Cat (Berlin, 2018)
The end of self-evidence, black (Paris, 2019)
26 (Amsterdam, 2019)
The end of self-evidence, purple (Münich, 2018)
Into the Void (Berlin, 2019)
From Typography to Grammatography, PMS 306 (Patras, 2019)
From Typography to Grammatography, PMS 307 (Tokyo, 2019)
From Typography to Grammatography, PMS 309 (Paris, 2022)
Why doesn’t anybody ever tell me anything (Den Haag, 2023)