Our Tour Du Champagne is coming to a city near you soon. Coming months we’ll leave our caves for a couple of public appearances. Some workshops and lectures. Dates, locations and times might change, so keep an eye on this spot for the latest info.

01 April — Tokyo
The Type Directors Club of Tokyo will take it to the max this day with 6 hours of typographic lectures. Be prepared. Hosted by the Joshibi University of Art and Design, Suginami Campus. More info at the website of TDC Tokyo.

21 May — Hong Kong
On our way to Bangkok we will do a short stop at A122 Courtyard, School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. This event is made possible with the local support of Keith Tam.

21 May — Stockholm
The Swedish design magazine Cap&Design organizes a one-day journey in the contemporary typographic landscape. Let’s talk type for one loooong afternoon. Check Cap&Design Live for more details.

22 May — Göteborg
The Swedish design magazine Cap&Design organizes a one-day journey in the contemporary typographic landscape. Let’s talk type for one loooong afternoon. Check Cap&Design Live for more details.

26 May — Bangkok
Presentation ‘Everything that can happen in a day’ at BITSMM, 1:00 PM at Alliance Française de Bangkok. Because of the floods the event had to be cancelled at the last moment some months ago. But nothing is gonna stop us now.

02 June — West Michigan
A one day type workshop, followed by a lecture on Saturday evening. No love. No happy. Survive like Robinson Crusoe at the streets of Grand Rapids, just by using your typographic skills. While not being allowed to talk, you have to collect as much kisses or smiles as possible. Use your creative skills to collect your surface and writing tools for your text, and make the most appropriate lettering. Most kisses/smiles = win win win. More details at the website of the AIGA West Michigan.

05 June — New York
18:30 Lecture ‘Keep dreaming’ at the Type Directors Club of New York. Just imagine…

06 June — New York
Type workshop ‘Keep it straight’. If you think you’ve got enough energy to be part of this internet-free ants’ nest for one day, you’ll experience that type design can be a thrilling experience if everybody kicks the same ass. We’re gonna make 1 font, and that can be as electrifying as Sylvester Stallone in a B-movie. Especially when there are 20 captains on board and when the real KISS principle will be executed: Keep It Straight, Stupid.

08 June — New Orleans
One-day workshop ‘I give you my word for it’, exploring unknown typographic territories in cooperation with Nicholls State University, which is in Thibodaux, just outside of New Orleans. Subject: Altered meanings through typographic interference. Give an object or location a different function or meaning, by creating your lettering on it. The lettering needs to have an appropriate shape, which fits to the object/location and its new meaning. Leave your laptop at home, get ready for dirty hands. While you are making your brilliant new creation, the basics of type design will be discussed.

Nice way to waste our time: spotting our fonts in the parallel world of Google’s Streetview. Where fonts live somewhere between eternal and ephemeral. Already gone in the real world, still alive in this period piece. Or sometimes the other way around.

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Wanna impress your friends at the next party with this proto shirt? Helsinki is World Design Capital 2012. Sami made them a shirt.

We gonna give away some shirts. 100% free. 100% XXXXXL. If you wanna have this shirt, let us know why by mail (before 31 Dec). Best answers win.

Hello theeere! :)

I’ve just received my brand new 8 faces magazine, and im very pleasant to announce that i got the best possible combination for the “Je t’aime” in Liza.

I believe I need to send you guys my flyer, right?

Will it be delivery anywhere? Even in Brazil? :O

I couldn’t tell you guys how excited i’m. :D

Juliana

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The 3rd issue of 8Faces included a typographic lottery. Two-bloody-thousand different Je t’aime cards have been spread, only one is perfect. Win, win win. Since then the Twitters was on the go. But despite all twitpics, instagrams, flickrs, yfrogs and picless tweets, the winner hasn’t reported himself yet.

There seem to have been some distribution problems with the magazine, maybe the golden ticket is firmly lost at the office of a Brazilian postman? Caramba. Does that man actually know the golden ticket yields a bottle of champagne?

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Fairly regular an example of our fonts in real life situations ends up in our mailbox, which we really appreciate. Keep sending us those photos! Most likely such an example ends up at our fonts in use section. But with this one we had some internal controversy. ‘Come on guys, this is just too silly’. ‘Don’t think so, it’s a real-life example with an extra, subtle layer for connoisseurs’. ‘No, we would make a fool or ourselves by adding this as a fonts in use example. How low can we go?’ So we killed the discussion and decided not to add this nice use of Sauna as a fonts in use example.

But hey, we didn’t discuss the blog, did we?

Being European, we will never understand Halloween, that stupid party. Although it remains an – inescapable – American event, we wouldn’t consider a book printed with blood a true Halloween-like publication.

Probably dressed up dogs are much more suitable for Halloween, right? But our favourite typographic Halloween creation is made by André Mora, who spend some hours with his pumpkin to cut the Yes/No oscillator out.

Unfortunately you can’t even eat this, so we’ll skip Halloween and wait for typographic Sinterklaas creations instead. Yummie.

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The latest issue of Publish magazine does not only contain a main article about Underware, we also made a new oscillator for their cover. After creating an oscillator in the past which can be read as Yes and/or No, we created another oscillator for this special typographic issue with the same words in Dutch, Ja and/or Nee. Kun jij dit lezen?

Next step is of course French: Oui/Non. Spanish: Sí/No. Or  worse, Finnish: Kyllä/Ei. Now that’s a challenge!

Hubba-hubba, today it’s exactly 10 years since we released our first typeface. Our website was pre-1.0, we still had a fax, we played music on CD’s, were super happy with our 4GB mega-sized external hard disk, none of us was balding.

Dolly. Introduced with a party-hardy, she steadily grows to become a stayer in the world of book typography. Instead of giving Dolly her own Twitter-account for her birthday, we promised her some extra weights and styles. Makes her much happier. Still some patience needed before her makeover is finished though…

For hardcore Dolly-lovers: here are some Dolly illustrations from our grubby archives.

Some months ago we offered our mailing list five free rings (worth 200 Euro each). Because we’d just hooked up with Typerings, anybody could win a free ‘alles geben’ ring. The only thing you had to do was telling us what ‘alles geben’ truly means to you. Simple.

 
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