XYZ DESIGN FESTIVAL BERLIN POSTPONED

It is our priority to ensure the health and safety of all our participants. Therefore we abide the public measures to help prevent the spread of Covid-19. We are very sad that XYZ cannot take place this March but are looking forward to still make this Festival happen together with you in the future.

XYZ is a new design fest­iv­al in Ber­lin tak­ing place on March 23–28. With our first edi­tion, we are focus­ing on the top­ic of Con­tem­por­ary Type. We have invited excit­ing prot­ag­on­ists from the field of typo­graphy to enable an inspir­ing dia­logue through vari­ous lec­tures, two work­shop bundles and a pub­lic exhib­i­tion. XYZ cre­ates a space for pro­gress­ive think­ing and exper­i­ment­al approaches, which provides you the oppor­tun­ity to devel­op your skills and broaden your hori­zons. Come and join us for a great week focus­ing on cur­rent approaches in type design!

Programme

Lectures, 23.3.2020

To start off the fest­iv­al, we have invited vari­ous design­ers from all over Europe to give insights into their work and share their views on cur­rent tend­en­cies in type design. The lec­tures will take place on Monday, March 23, at BAM Ber­lin, Ritter­straße 8. The admis­sion is free. Tick­ets avail­able here:

Tickets

17:00

Entry (free)

 

18:00

Panel 1:

 

Laura Csocsán

About my first typeface – Through­out her talk, Laura Csoc­sán will intro­duce her back­ground in graph­ic design with an emphas­is on type-heavy work, focus­ing on her shift towards type design and how this peri­od dir­ec­ted her to learn about it – mainly in an auto­di­dact man­ner. Laura Csoc­sán will share the pro­cess, insights and think­ing behind her latest typeface, Ambi­ant, while talk­ing about her exper­i­ence with find­ing mis­takes, inspir­a­tion, and learn­ing materials.

Vera van de Seyp

Pro­gram­ming typo­graphy – Vera van de Seyp’s talk is about using code that cre­ates and employs typo­graphy: kin­et­ic, exper­i­ment­al or entirely para­met­ric. A few examples from her prac­tice are demon­strated, start­ing from the code as well as dis­cuss­ing the work from the per­spect­ive of the design concept.

19:00

Break

 

19:30

Panel 2:

 

Charlotte Rohde

Skin­care for Unruly Bod­ies – Char­lotte will give a brief over­view over her body of work in the field of type design and present her research and craft in pro­gress as they revolve around hydro­fem­in­ism, emo­tion­al­ity, skin care and (visu­al) language.

Matthieu Salvaggio (BLAZE TYPE)

Jour­ney in Type Design – In his talk, type design­er Mat­thieu Sal­vag­gio will describe his per­son­al jour­ney to type design and will give insights into the estab­lish­ment of his own type foundry – BLAZE TYPE. Mat­thieu will provide insights into the found­ing of a type foundry and wants to present altern­at­ive paths in the occu­pa­tion­al world of design.

Johannes Breyer (DINAMO)

All Fontz are Bastards –
Din­amo will talk about their vari­able way of work­ing and the use of in-house design tools as a meth­od to explore new aes­thet­ics and the ges­tur­al poten­tial of typefaces. As an example of Dinamo’s search for formats out­side of type design itself, a small batch of cur­rently being developed face fil­ters will get premiered; masks on! For the busi­ness people amongst us we’ll take a glimpse into 1 year of col­lec­ted sales stat­ist­ics, share nev­er-spoken-about industry gos­sip and try to for­tune-tell where all of this might be going.

Workshops, 24.–28.3.2020

This year we offer you two Work­shop Bundles. In the first stage, we have organ­ized two 3‑day work­shops, which will take place sim­ul­tan­eously and from which you can choose: BLAZE TYPE and DINAMO. After that, both work­shops will be merged so that you can devel­op a concept for the pub­lic exhib­i­tion togeth­er in cooper­a­tion with STUDIO BENS.

BUNDLE 1: BLAZE TYPE

Type Revival

3‑day work­shop (24.3.– 26.3.), Mat­thieu Sal­vag­gio (BLAZE TYPE)

Becom­ing a type design­er can be very demand­ing, how­ever the tech­nic­al know­ledge can be quite easy obtained. Blaze Types Work­shop intends to teach some basic skills by work­ing on a clas­sic of the learn­ing pro­cess: (re)designing a font. By dis­cuss­ing the very concept of reviv­al font design, learn­ing how to get around glyphs.app, ingest­ing some type design rules and ques­tion­ing how and why we need to break them, this work­shop will give an intro­duc­tion to the world of type design.

Bigger is Better

2‑day work­shop (27.3.–28.3.), Jens Ludewig (STUDIO BENS)

What’s a Typeface if it’s not used and abused?
In a 2‑day fol­low up work­shop STUDIO BENS will push you through a mix of poster and exhib­i­tion work­shop. Mak­ing the best out of a real nice store win­dow, a great white cube and whatever you’ve cre­ated in one of the earli­er work­shops. The work­shop will guide you through the basics of mak­ing an exhib­i­tion with noth­ing but some raw fonts and nearly no time. 

BUNDLE 2: DINAMO

Variable Font Mystery Trip

3‑day work­shop (24.3.– 26.3.), Johannes Brey­er, DINAMO

In a series of exer­cises (ran­ging from abstract or purely visu­al to con­crete and con­cep­tu­al – in both ana­logue and digit­al set­tings) our work­shop, will invest­ig­ate the poten­tial of storytelling and con­text spe­cif­ic typo­graph­ic treat­ments in Vari­able Font designs from 2 to many axes. Lots of exper­i­ment­ing. Even­tu­ally, all par­ti­cipants will design their own Vari­able Fonts while keep­ing in mind how they can be imple­men­ted into lar­ger design pro­jects both for print and Web. Doing so, get to know a hand­ful of Dinamo’s pub­lic (Font Gaunt­let) and in-house pro­duc­tion tools.

Bigger is Better

2‑day work­shop (27.3.–28.3.), Jens Ludewig (STUDIO BENS)

What’s a Typeface if it’s not used and abused?
In a 2‑day fol­low up work­shop STUDIO BENS will push you through a mix of poster and exhib­i­tion work­shop. Mak­ing the best out of a real nice store win­dow, a great white cube and whatever you’ve cre­ated in one of the earli­er work­shops. The work­shop will guide you through the basics of mak­ing an exhib­i­tion with noth­ing but some raw fonts and nearly no time. 

Exhibition, 28.3.2020

On the last day of the fest­iv­al, March 28, there will be a pub­lic exhib­i­tion where the res­ults of the work­shops will be shown and cel­eb­rated. It takes places at BAM Ber­lin, Ritter­straße 8. Admis­sion is free.

19:00

Entry (free)

 

Experts

Laura Csocsán

Laura Csoc­sán is an inde­pend­ent graph­ic and type design­er based in Bud­apest, Hun­gary. She finds her interest in pro­jects where graph­ic and type design inter­sect, cre­at­ing works that involve cus­tom typo­graph­ic­al solu­tions for cli­ents in the field of music, cul­ture, and art. Besides her focus on prin­ted mat­ter, magazines, books and iden­tit­ies, she’s pro­du­cing and dis­trib­ut­ing retail typefaces through Laura Csoc­sán Typefaces.

Johannes Breyer

Johannes Brey­er is a Ger­man / Chilean graph­ic design­er based in Ber­lin. Se habla Español. He stud­ied in Zurich and worked for design stu­dio NORM before gradu­at­ing from the Ger­rit Rietveld Academie in Ams­ter­dam. Togeth­er with Fabi­an Harb, he is run­ning the Swiss type design prac­tice Din­amo. Their font cata­logue includes Favor­it, Whyte, Monu­ment Grotesk, Ginto & Laica, and a couple of still unpub­lished typefaces. Din­amo won the Swiss Design Awards 2017 and both founders are mem­bers of the AGI Alli­ance Graph­ique Inter­na­tionale as of 2018.

Charlotte Rohde

Char­lotte Rohde is a (type-⁠)⁠designer and artist, cur­rently based in Ams­ter­dam. As part of the Sand­berg Design Depart­ment, she is research­ing on how type as a form of magic can be used to embody and shape fem­in­ist dis­courses with­in our soci­ety. Her work reaches from design­ing posters, books and her own typefaces to ceram­ic sculp­tures and spa­cial install­a­tions. She also writes poetry, teaches work­shops and hosts vari­ous events.

Matthieu Salvaggio

Mat­thieu Sal­vag­gio is the founder of Blaze Type and head of the nation­al depart­ment of design of Ynov School. His work in poster design and type design has been awar­ded and shown across vari­ous exhib­i­tions (Golden Bee, Graph­ic Design Scot­land, etc.). For the past years his atten­tion has been essen­tially focused on design­ing & devel­op­ing new retail fonts for his foundry and find­ing new tal­ents to pro­mote on his platform.

Vera van de Seyp

Vera van de Seyp is a design­er and cre­at­ive coder. She likes cre­at­ing gen­er­at­ive design tools, lan­guages, and explor­ing the poten­tial of new tech­no­lo­gies such as machine learn­ing for the design field. Liv­ing and work­ing in Ams­ter­dam and Ant­werp, she runs a design prac­tice, is part of vari­ous cre­at­ive cod­ing com­munit­ies and teaches Digit­al Media at the graph­ic design depart­ment of ArtEZ, Arnhem.

Jens Ludewig

Jens Ludewig is a graph­ic design­er from Ber­lin, co-founder of STUDIO BENS and UdK Ber­lin Alumni. His work is focused on trans­lat­ing all kinds of con­tent for all kinds of media into clas­sic­al graph­ic design – mostly through heavy use of typo­graphy. Work­ing with cli­ents from vari­ous back­grounds, he aims at cre­at­ing strong visu­al con­cepts by using con­tem­por­ary type. 

ABOUT

XYZ is a new design fest­iv­al in Ber­lin, organ­ized and intro­duced by Sally Paschmann, Mar­ina Engel­hardt and Jens Ludewig. The fest­iv­al cre­ates a new plat­form for curi­ous and keen design­ers to exchange their ideas, learn from each oth­er and fur­ther their education. 

This year, we are ded­ic­at­ing the fest­iv­al entirely to the top­ic of Con­tem­por­ary Type. We want to give space to dis­cuss cur­rent trends in Type Design and exchange inform­a­tions about the mod­ern devel­op­ment. We hope you enjoy the very first edi­tion of XYZ! 

Application

Applic­a­tion is closed. Based on the sub­mis­sions we will determ­ine the can­did­ates who can par­ti­cip­ate in one of the bundles. We will let you know until the 24.2.2020 if you are one of them. 

Partners