Sarah Hyndman took Type Tasting to the Ecole Intuit Lab, a design college in Mumbai, India, where she spent a week teaching typography to sixty second and third year students. This is the experience of the week in the words of the students: Neha Godambe, Ruchi Mehta, Shruti Vidyanand, Tvesha Shah and Zahra Dhuliawala.
“The entire week was full of experiences that exposed us to the instinctive nature of humans to judge letterforms. We had an incredibly marvellous time, while actually learning so much more about type. My outlook towards type has changed. I have realised type has something more to say, and now I have started to use a lot more different typefaces.”
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What did you expect of the typography week?
ZD: ‘Type Tasting’ isn’t exactly a term you hear very often. The uncommonness of the term, however, was most definitely reflected in the week. Until the workshop I think, as a designer, I had seriously underestimated the power of type.
NG: I have always been intrigued by the mysterious ways in which type works. We thought learning about type by trial and error was a mammoth task as we didn’t really connect with it, but as the week passed by this misconception slowly changed.
NG: It turned out that I know a lot about type just based on my intuition and common sense. Even though the games we played were quick and based purely on our instincts, I found I subconsciously created a rationale that supported my answers. In the end it was all about tapping into the psychology of people.
What is unique about Sarah’s approach?
NG: What fascinated me was Sarah’s way of understanding and explaining type. It isn’t just about what type looks like; it is about how it makes you feel. We looked at type in ways that we had never considered before, and we felt it through all our senses.
TS: The week was filled with surprises. There were experiments done in class to see how much type talks to us, the results made it clear that type speaks to us in ways we do not consciously imagine.
ZD: We took part in a series of activities and games, relating to how type affects us psychologically—from associating it with different emotions, to smells and even food.
RM: Through design we learnt psychology and the way our brain and heart react with basic instincts to everything around us, and how every tiny detail influences all the decisions we make.
SV: The history of type was made, for the first time ever, interesting to a class of teenagers.
NG: Sarah has a unique and fun way of putting her point across, which is often through playing games.
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