About Pangram Pangram
Founded in 2018 by designer Mat Desjardins, the Pangram Pangram Foundry has become one of the world-leading type foundries. After just a few years, international clients such as Nike, FIFA, Pepsi and Apple have used some of the foundries trend-conscious typefaces.
We feel that our fonts should be shared, used and viewed by as many people as possible. We want the typefaces we create to amplify ideas and help unleash the full potential of your designs and because mastery stems from practice, all our fonts are free to try so you can find the perfect fit for your project.
About Off Type
At Off Type, we offer silly / playful / charming / wonderful / fun fonts that are really really well made, so that wherever you use them, they’ll work hard and look dashing / great / perfect / amazing / just-how-you-imagined-them. The typefaces themselves are a vibrant/ecstatic/electric/charming hodge-podge of inspirations, legacies and letterforms – from royalty and rockets to the silver screen and b-sides.
Seriously off-beat fonts.
About Workshop Leader
Valerio Monopoli: “I started my career as a designer in Rome, where I worked on branding and video mapping projects. At the age of 24 I moved to Barcelona to study Editorial Design at ELISAVA and Type Design at EINA. Shortly after I joined the team of Extra! with whom I designed custom fonts for clients such as Mnactec, Club de Creativos and Zara Home. In 2020 I started my solo adventure in the world of typography.
I publish typefaces under the moniker Morula Type, a name that represents my vision of typefaces as an organism in constant growth. Over the last two years, I have collaborated with foundries such as Pangram Pangram, Type01, BlazeType, OffType and Cast Foundry, publishing fonts used by clients such as Nike, Leica, Riot Games, Victionary, Taschen, Museu Picasso, and many others.”
Workshop Information
The latest advancements in technology, namely the diffusion and adoption of AI-based tools, are reshaping our understanding of design and creativity altogether: in this rapidly-evolving context, where the creative effort gradually loses its relevance, critical approaches once neglected are becoming dominant again and creative industries start favouring directive roles over executive ones. Although type design seems to have resisted automation better than most domains so far, the universal connotation of this evolution suggests it will soon be impacted as well.
In this course, we will try to understand how to react to this paradigm shift by developing crucial competences through an exercise of textual description akin to the one required to direct an AI. Instead of an AI though, this time the visual interpreter of the prompts will be a human: the participant. Through this practice, we aim to unlock new creative patterns, rooted in intentionality and fuelled by human ingenuity.
Workshop Phases
1. Prompt Generation
You will be asked to generate a series of prompts that describe formally, contextually and abstractly a typeface. One of these prompts will then be assigned to a different participant and kept secret until the last phase. In this preliminary part, we will discuss how to generate typographic identities by mixing already acquired deontological glossary and unconventional abstract descriptors.
2. Sketching and digitisation
In this phase, you will focus on creating several typographical sketches based on the prompt you were assigned. We will discuss the principles of iteration and alteration, explore the concept of “typographic continuum”, and finally identify promising formal features in one of the proposed sketches, which you will start digitising.
3. Critique
On the last day of our workshop, we will reveal the prompts and show the outputs they led to. This exercise of collective critique will help you determine whether your design matched the expectations of the prompt creator and / or the ones of your peers. You will be asked to motivate your creative choices, carefully addressing your methodology and references.
