Tag Archives: perception

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

The surprising story of the ampersand & its multiple personalities

An ampersand is an invitation to imagine what will come next. It is a continuation of a conversation or story, but without the context of knowing what went before you can choose where you would like it to go. When the symbol stands alone it is still communicating a huge amount of information from its form and its shapes; is it hand-written, is it old-fashioned and traditional, is it minimalist and modern? Every typeface tells a story independently of the words it spells out.

The ampersand is sometimes considered to be the 27th letter of the Latin alphabet. It comes from the letters ‘et’, Latin for ‘and’. It’s a character that there is wide affection for and it gives a glimpse of the personality of a typeface without committing to be a particular letter. The ampersand takes a wide range of shapes and forms, and it is the skill of the human brain that enables us to recognise that each of these still says ‘and’.

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Sarah Hyndman: “Typography can be a tool for positive change”

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.

By

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.

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Using Typography to Hack Your Brain

The psychology of deliberately making a font hard to read

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?

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Take part in the Typographic Interventions project

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.

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Pop Up Type Tasting Typography Lab

Pop Up Type Tasting Typography Lab
Stoke Newington Literary Festival
2nd & 3rd June, 11am to 8pm, free.
Venue – Locations around the Town Hall

*** NEWS ***
One of the experiments we ran at this event has now been published: The role of typeface curvilinearity on taste expectations and perception by Carlos Velasco, Sarah Hyndman (Type Tasting), Charles Spence (University of Oxford), International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, January 2018.
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Wine & Type Tasting evening

Wine & Type Tasting evening

By Sarah Hyndman

Do you Judge a Wine by its Label?
Wine & Type Tasting, 8th December, 7:30pm to 9:30pm (sold out)
A sellout success at the London Design Festival this year

“Frankly brilliant idea of combining a type workshop with a wine tasting” It’s Nice That

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