Tag Archives: immersive

Immerse yourself in the emotional impact of fonts, an experience for all the senses

Join me to explore Mood 1 from the Adobe MAX immersive installation.

Put your headphones on and play this while you look at the photos*
Click here to play the sound.

How does it make you feel? What smells and flavours would you pair with this mood?

**

I first came across this weird looking type style in Rob Roy Kelly’s book of American Wood Type 1828–1900. It’s a crazy mashup of three styles: a gothic (sans serif) + tuscan (fancy bifurcated serifs) + Italienne (reverse contrast).

This is Cottonwood, designed by Barbara Lind, Joy Redick, and Kim Buker Chansler. From Adobe Originals.

These photos are from the large-scale multisensory installation I created at the last in-person Adobe MAX at the L.A. Convention Centre in Los Angeles.

Visitors were immersed in the mood of different typefaces through all of their senses. At each station they were invited to put on headphones, to smell a scent in a jar or by flipping the pages of a book, to eat a small taster and to feel a texture. Each set of stimuli was designed to bring a mood to life in the participant’s imagination. There was curiosity and intrigue as the first visitors arrived and they were soon returning with groups of friends saying “you have to try this”.

“The experience that Type Tasting designed for the Adobe Fonts booth at Adobe MAX was such a fun, intriguing way for people to explore how their reactions to fonts relate to other sensations” Dan Rhatigan, Adobe Fonts

Sound designer Rob Taliesin Owen created bespoke sounds and a bespoke scent was created by 4160 Tuesdays. The installation was produced and run with the wonderful Adobe Fonts team.

“Font ‘tasting’, it was awesome! You could smell, hear and taste the fonts”, “F!ing genius!”.

*If the link doesn’t work listen to Suite Punta Del Este by Astor Piazzolla.

“F!ing genius!” Visitors experienced the emotional impact of fonts with an immersive, multisensory installation in L.A.


I’ve been creating immersive and multisensory installations for a number of years now. They’ve been on hold during Covid but plans are now underway for the future. This is the large-scale multisensory installation I created at Adobe MAX at the L.A. Convention Centre in Los Angeles.

Visitors were immersed in the mood of different typefaces through all of their senses. At each station they were invited to put on headphones, to smell a scent in a jar or by flipping the pages of a book, to eat a small taster and to feel a texture. Each set of stimuli was designed to bring a mood to life in the participant’s imagination. There was curiosity and intrigue as the first visitors arrived and they were soon returning with groups of friends saying “you have to try this”.

“The experience that Type Tasting designed for the Adobe Fonts booth at Adobe MAX was such a fun, intriguing way for people to explore how their reactions to fonts relate to other sensations” Dan Rhatigan, Adobe Fonts

Sound designer Rob Taliesin Owen created bespoke sounds and a bespoke scent was created by 4160 Tuesdays. The installation was produced and run with the wonderful Adobe Fonts team.

“Font ‘tasting’, it was awesome! You could smell, hear and taste the fonts”

  • Type Tasting installation at Adobe MAX in Los Angeles

Typographic synaesthesia experience session

Typographic synaesthesia experience session

A fantastical multisensory online event designed to stimulate all your senses

As featured in Design Week’s Picks of the Month.

Take part in a fun session with games and find out about some of Sarah’s research as you discover first-hand how the appearance of the words you read interacts with all of your senses.

Suitable for all, no experience needed and you can join this virtual session from anywhere in the world.

This is not just a font, it’s also an idea, a smell, a song, a memory, a feeling, a personality, a warning, a taste…

Discover for yourself how the different shapes and styles of the typefaces that you read every day trigger responses in your brain that link to all of your senses.

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Experience the emotional impact of type: Mood at MAX multisensory installation

Type Tasting installation at Adobe MAX in Los Angeles

Type Tasting created a large-scale multisensory installation for Adobe Fonts at the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles from 2nd to 6th November 2019.

“F*!*ing genius!”

Visitors were immersed in the mood of different typefaces through all of their senses. At each station they were invited to put on headphones, to smell a scent in a jar or by flipping the pages of a book, to eat a small taster and to feel a texture. Each set of stimuli was designed to bring a mood to life in the participant’s imagination. There was curiosity and intrigue as the first visitors arrived and they were soon returning with groups of friends saying “you have to try this”.

This is a multisensory installation featuring a selection of booths designed for participants to experience the emotional impact of type. Each booth immerses you in the mood of a typeface with sound, smell, texture and taste.

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“A roaring success”, “so unexpected but in all the right ways!”

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”.

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Pop-up Typography Lab at the V&A for the London Design Festival

TypeTasting_LDF_logos

Have you ever wondered what a font might smell like? Whether it can make a product appear more expensive? Or what your choice of font says about your personality?

Join innovative type expert Sarah Hyndman as she invites you to join in with the research by taking part in a series of entertaining games and perception experiments with type. Profile the personalities of typefaces; judge whether a font can make a product more expensive and therefore more enjoyable, and explore whether it could even alter the taste of what you eat. Find out which typefaces you would date, ditch or be ‘just good friends’ with and how they reflect your own personality. Sarah is the founder of Type Tasting, author of ‘The Type Taster: How Fonts Influence You’.

You are invited into a ‘typographic wonderland’ of interactive games and experiments involving fonts which are designed to surprise and intrigue. These explore our role as type consumers and show how type is woven into the rituals of our everyday lives. Each font/typeface has a personality that influences our interpretation of the words we read by evoking our emotions and setting the scene. Come along and you can be a part of this innovative research and be the first to find out the results.

• Try on ‘font goggles’ to reveal what some fonts are really communicating to you.
• Try your hand at font sniffing: can you match the smells to the typefaces?
• Witness fonts altering the meanings of words right before your very eyes.
• Be amazed that a font could have the power to alter the taste of your food.
• See what personalities fonts have, and what they reveal about YOUR personality.

Questions being explored:
• Can a font make a product appear more expensive?
• Do fonts have recognisable personalities?
• Can a typeface alter the taste of what you eat?
• Can a font alter the mood of what you read?
• When is a Serif a better choice than a Sans Serif typeface, why?

“You’ll never look at fonts in the same way again.” Hannah Stewart

TypeTasting_LDF2014

Print

“As bizarre as it sounds, my job is to match up the bottles and fonts using only my sense of smell.” Jake Wallis Simons, CNN

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