Tag Archives: Public Speaking

Looking back over an exciting 2017, part 3

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.

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Looking back over an exciting 2017, part 2

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.

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Looking back over an exciting 2017, part 1

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.

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Nicer Tuesdays, the audience was the star of this talk

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I was delighted to be invited to speak at Nicer Tuesdays recently. This is 12 minutes of audience participation including Typography Karaoke (in two teams), the Price is Right and the Type Dating Game. The audience is the star of this talk, you were absolutely brilliant, thank you. “A simple, but very effective demonstration of how type design affects the way we read, the way we respond to commands and even our moods from Sarah Hyndman.” It’s Nice That.

Watch the talk.

Industry talk at Shillington

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Are we really that influenced by typography? Type specialist Sarah Hyndman seems to think so! And it looks like she made converts out of our students following her talk at Shillington. We had the unique opportunity of being part of Sarah’s ongoing psychological research for Oxford University, and through a series of sensory experiments we all learned a little bit more about both typography and ourselves.

The best experiments involve jellybeans, a lesson Sarah Hyndman was about to reveal. We were privileged to be a part of Sarah’s type tasting experiment, tasting chocolate, jellybeans and smelling fragrances while looking at different fonts to see if they affected our experiences. Our results will become part of the data for the Cross-modal Research Laboratory at Oxford University who are studying how different senses interact.

Read Kate Allen’s full review of Sarah’s talk here.

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Sunday Brunch

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I was delighted to be invited on to Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch yesterday (Sunday 7th February) to talk about my new book Why Fonts Matter and play some classic Type Tasting games. It was a fast-paced and fun 9 minutes. The aim had been to show that typography can be fun and accessible; that it doesn’t always have to be an intellectual discussion, and from the feedback on Twitter we achieved this. I demonstrated how type tells us how expensive or calorific a product might be. I talked about Simon choosing a typeface for his restaurant menus to convey that the chef is skilful (and discovered that he has an aversion to italics). We had a quick look at the Type Dating Game, before Tim and Simon both chose a typeface card and read out their own personality analysis. We ended with font sniffing: pairing the smells to the shapes of typefaces, and I explained why most people give very similar answers.

Click here to play the Font Fortune personality analysis game yourself.

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The Type Tasting props posing nicely with the Channel 4 logo in the background.

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Talking fonts live on BBC Radio 4

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Yesterday I was invited to be one of the guests on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live to talk about how we respond to typefaces. I took along some of the games that had gone down so well at the Pop-up Type Tasting at the V&A for the London Design Festival the previous weekend. Above is actor Sophie Thompson playing the ‘Feel Me’ game matching what she can feel to one of the fonts shown, if you came along to the event last weekend you know exactly which font she’s feeling from the expression on her face!

It was such an interesting programme to be on. Sophie is delightful and a pleasure to listen to, and I was excited to meet Peter Bleksley who is one of the hunters on ‘Hunted’ with the most amazing voice. It seems that we would all love the challenge of being on the next series and going on the run in an attempt to evade capture for 28 days. Third guest Trevor Lyttleton founded a charity which works with the elderly and we had a great chat afterwards about the power of typefaces on packaging to trigger nostalgia and bring back memories.

Scroll down for links to listen to the show.

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Typefaces from the TEDx talk

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Typefaces from Sarah Hyndman‘s TEDx talk ‘Wake Up and Smell the Fonts’ (in order of appearance)
VAG rounded, Clarendon bold condensed, Tekton, Trajan, Impact, Engravers Gothic, Agincourt, Didot, Aesthetique, Times New Roman, Klute.
Star Wars in 15 fonts: Blackmoor, Orbit, Klute, Pneuma, Data Seventy, Chromium One, Bertram, Buffalo Gal, Slipstream, Shatter, Black Boton, Helvetica bold compressed, Forest Shaded, Klute, Creepy, F2FShpeetz, BangCom.
Thank you to Monotype.

Watch the talk here:

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“Sarah Hyndman’s talk was a game changer”

Sarah hyndman of type tasting at TYPO san francisco

Sarah Hyndman’s talk was a game-changer. In a tech-focused city, such as SF, designers are often asked to produce analytics for aesthetics they create. Clients will say, “You chose to use this typeface but what’s the data to back up the decision? Does type matter?” Sarah believes, and is proving quantitatively, that typeface choices do indeed matter and are largely influential in consumer behavior. She explores a lot of synesthesic topics in her research and workshops — presenting visual content to evoke an auditory or gustatory response. She builds on the work of cognitive neuroscientists and brings their questions and insights into a real-world lab of designer attendees.

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