With the release of her two new books, Design Week speaks to the graphic designer about our annotated world, crossing over into science and why she wants everyone to have the confidence to talk about type.
When Design Week catches up with Sarah Hyndman, she’s just coming to the end of a week’s stint at this year’s Adobe Max in LA. There, she has designed a multisensory installation in which she asks participants to associate the smell, sound, taste and feel of five different typefaces.
A central intention of design today is to reduce cognitive load, the amount of effort the brain needs to understand something, so that communication and comprehension are quick and easy. So it was a bit surprising when a typeface specifically designed to be hard to read recently made headlines in the design world. Why would anyone purposefully make a font difficult to read, you might ask, when developments in printing technology and type design have strived for centuries to make words more, not less readable?
We ran an exciting preview of the brand new Wine & Type Tasting event for 30 ambassadors from the Bankside Design District. We had a brilliant time and the evening was pronounced “a roaring success”. Favourite quotes included “so unexpected but in all the right ways!” and “lots of sublime and crazy tall tales from the past”.
What is a typographic intervention? What if it’s not what it says on the tin? Can typography alter your experiences, or nudge you to change your behaviour?
This year we are exploring the potential for creating typographic interventions that initiate positive behaviour change. You are invited to take part in typographic research. Some of the experiments you will take part in are in their early proof of concept stages, for others data is being gathered potentially to be published as a future collaborative study.
This is the third and final instalment reviewing Type Tasting in 2017: judging, the Type Tasting pop-up lab, publications and interviews.
Type Tasting founder Sarah Hyndman has continued her mission to make typography relevant and engaging beyond the world of design, and continues to work on proof-of-concept ideas to show that design can create positive change. She has judged design awards, the Type Tasting pop-up lab has continued to gather data, both her latest book and a new collaborative study have been published and she has appeared in interviews from The Times to Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch.
This is the second instalment reviewing Type Tasting in 2017: corporate workshops, sponsored workshops and drop-in events (read part 3 here).
This year Type Tasting founder Sarah Hyndman has created workshops and events for a range of dynamic and innovative clients. Workshops have taken place at adidas HQ in Germany, for Design Thinkers in Toronto and at Tate Modern. Sessions have been created to launch the new BumbleBizz app with a workshop for entrepreneurs, as a teambuilding ‘Fight Club’ evening at WGSN, at the Wellcome Collection and for the D&AD.
This is the first instalment of a review of 2017—a busy and exciting year in which Type Tasting has popped up in prestigious locations both in the UK and abroad (read part 2 here).
Type Tasting founder Sarah Hyndman is on a mission to make typography relevant and engaging for all, she also believes that design can create positive change. Sarah specialises in making a complex topic accessible with originality, humour, a dash of theatre and lashings of audience participation. This year she has spoken at the launch of a new watch, a fragrance conference, she has been interviewed by The Times and on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch. She has created an immersive exhibition for the British Academy, and run workshops for adidas, BumbleBizz, Wellcome and WGSN. The Type Tasting pop-up lab also gathered data for the latest collaborative study with the team from the University of Oxford, and her latest book was published.
Design student typographic survival kit
Here is some advice for students starting a new term on how fonts can help your studies, from Sarah Hyndman’s book Why Fonts Matter.
Do you Judge a Wine by its Label?
Arrange a Wine & Type Tasting evening for your team and clients
By Sarah Hyndman
We will bring this innovative type and wine tasting, based on the sell-out success at the London Design Festival, to you for your team and clients. Take part in a series of activities and games that will delight and inform, in a relaxed and social setting.
Type Tasting Blog 