Three days India, three days typography

2015/03/30
Findings / Teaching
mariko

A personal report: Typography Day 2015 Mumbai, March 7 – 9, 2015

After a break of one year, I have attended the Typography Day in Mumbai. Typography day is a conference for typeface design and typography, an annual event initialised by leading Indian institutions for design. This year’s event was conducted by the Industrial Design Centre IDC at the Indian Institute of Technology IIT Bombay from March 7 to 9, 2015. The first day (March 7) was designated to ten workshops, conducted by national and international educators, practitioners from the type-industry as well as scholars in the field of typography and calligraphy, mainly addressing students. The remaining two days were focused on presentations more or less dedicated to the theme “Typography, Sensitivity and Finesse”.

Reflecting on the theme of the conference, I have presented a paper with the title “Word – image – imagination: visualising thoughts and emotions by Japanese typography”. One of my focal research interest is the Japanese/Chinese writing system and it’s typographic interpretation. My paper talks about an aspect of ‘a typeset text’ that goes beyond the pure task of typography as transcription. During my previous research on Japanese typographic culture, I came across several statements by graphic designers, mentioning their typographic work as a visualisation of thoughts and emotion. An investigation into this idea has shown that this is a relatively common practice conducted through several methods. Still this finesse of visual communication is almost only accessible for an audience with the ability to read Japanese, combined with an insight to the Japanese culture. According to my intention to communicate about cultural aspects of typography, I dedicated my paper to typographic designs which are visualising ideas that originally are not visible in the physical sense.

Despite the paper presentation, the three days were precious to be inspired by the workshops, meeting old and new friends, and gaining insights to other peoples researches and thoughts.